Very true. I love dumping on EA as much as anyone. But shockingly enough, they kept Bioware funded WAY longer than I thought they had any right to ask.
You can't push flop after flop for over a decade and somehow get another more hundreds of millions to fund the next likely flop.
I recall during the Anthem deep-dives that suggested the guys from EA had to encourage the devs to leave/implement flying into the game, so the only good thing about that game was a result of EA’s intervention lmao
Really? That's crazy. I thought it was Bioware's idea lol. It's a no brainer for that game tbh. They literally made Ironman the game. How do you not include flying?
Bioware is such a strange beast. They used to have incredible ideas. Their Bioware formula was peerless back in the day. But after DA Inquisition, they lost any connection to the original vision outside of the name.
Yeah, EA for sure is a shit company. But lets not act like none of these wasn't party Biowares fault.
The fact is the quality of the games have been shit for years and the people who actually made all those amazing games back then, for the most part already left that sinking ship years ago.
They could have changed leadership? Hell they could have rebuilt the whole studio, they own them.
You do realize you're admitting here that BioWare was incompetent, suggest that EA should treat them like toddlers and do their work for them?
EA greenlights projects, gives funding, checks their progress and manages deadlines, etc. Actual game design and implementation is the responsibility of the studio, not the publisher.
And rebuilding the studio is no different from closing it. If you do that, you're essentially closing the studio and using its name later, but those are two completely different studios.
I'm treating them like a group company where C*O position get switched all the time. And it's a lot different to replace incompetent management than building something new from the ground up.
Stop dick riding bioware, awful studio that are indeed directly responsible for their own demise due to insane management decisions (not EA's fault) and terrible games. They didn't release anything that wasn't flaming garbage for 15 years. Good riddance.
With any luck, the IPs for Dragon Age and Mass Effect, might get sold off to a good team and we get both back to the good days quality. That or we get some good spiritual successors for them. Not holding my breath, but....
I've been waiting for EA to sell Medal of Honor, Command and Conquer or SimCity longer than the average Fortnite fan has been alive... Maybe Saudis are greedy enough to let go of an IP, let's hope
EA contributed. My understanding is Dragon Age 2 was rushed out the door because of pressure from EA to get another game out, fast. So EA is partly to blame but people are underplaying how much BioWare shot itself in the foot.
No. That is the last time you can blame EA for a Bioware problem. After that they stepped back. Anthem was entirely Bioware's idea. Andromeda was entirely Bioware's failure. And Veilguard's stop start dev cycle was Bioware again....if anything EA was asleep at the wheel and let them putter around for years wasting millions and producing nothing.
Didn't EA make them use the the frostbite engine. I mean I've not played a single good game outside of battlefield and battlefront , that's based on the frostbite engine. Even if Andromedas or Inquisitions writing and gameplay design were better, they'd still be on my worst buys list, dze to the winky ass engine.
Both Anthem and The Veilguard were very expensive, mega failures, nearly entirely on Bioware and not EA. In this industry, getting a decade of not only one, but two pricey AF failures, will pretty much kill you, especially since one of those (DA: The Veilguard) had a full blown lucrative IP behind it. The weird part was that EA actually had relatively low expectations for player engagement, and the Veilguard met like half of that. The studio was borderline suicidal.
iirc there were interviews and EA showed up after like 5 years of letting bioware do their thing for anthem to discover they hadnt even picked what the game should be.
As fun as it is to hate on EA, 'bioware magic' was just doing nothing and to many cooks in the kitchen until the publisher told them to get off their ass and and bioware forced 70+ hour work weeks of crunch to get a product out from anthem on.
Im pretty sure reason why we havent gotten much good since is because all the good creators and devs left for less extreme work cycles and the new folks couldnt work in such conditions.
It's been years snice it happened, but wasn't the CEO of bioware, or someone higher up bragging about how Anthem was two years in development and making great progress when the team hadn't even started on the damn thing?
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u/Gassyking 7h ago
If you read the behind the scenes accounts of what was going on at Bioware, all their problems were their own, not EA's.
Anthem for example, was all Bioware and their atrocious managements fault. This not an EA thing, Bioware just gravely lost their way