One of the most historic studios is closing down. Unfortunately it was dead long ago. Fuck EA
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Fun fact: same-sex sexual activity, both male and female, is not only illegal in Saudi Arabia, it is a capital offense punishable by death.
Fun fact: Bioware’s parent company, Electronic Arts, is now owned by Saudis.
I am still kind of interested how long the sims will still exist in its current form under the new leadership
They just won’t make The Sims.
The Saudis won’t touch it or anything like it. They have the death penalty for adultery, The Sims is unacceptable (at least, the sims that we know).
They might have a Sharia Law version where the fully-covered women juggle raising children and making meals to please their husband.
They will make games for their market (and China).
Sims is a US-market-game that is against Islamic law.
Instead, they can make FIFA and other sports games and shooters. I doubt they’ll even make RPGs as we know them, Baldur’s Gate 3 for example would not be made in a Saudi studio.
More micro transactions probably
I’m not sure we got the same definition for fun. You seem to have the Saudi version.
Leak the source code on the way out. Fuck EA.
Memes from the Anthem days were prophetic.
For real. At this point it’s like, what’s the common denominator here? It’s also nuts because they keep doing the same bullshit and wonder why they keep losing money and getting bad PR. They are so out of touch with reality.
BioWare died 11 October 2007. We’ve been holding an open-casket wake ever since.
See I believe in reincarnation I saw BioWare just the other day they go by Larian now. 😁
😎 real gamer detected
Ew no.
DA:O and the Mass Effect trilogy are quite good games, both story and gameplay-wise.
Man I miss when the “pick your color” ending for ME3 was controversial because the trilogy was so beloved that anything but a momunental ending wouldn’t feel like enough.
The trilogy still was awesome and I still like the debates about the choices in that game!
Veilguaed made me really sad. Dragon age was my favorite franchise. I really wish I didn’t play veilguard, it was such trash.
Bold of them to put Anthem on that list. They built an interesting world then told a boring story in it.
IIRC there were numerous articles after launch talking about how it was EA that actually made them add the flying mechanics, easily the best part of the gameplay, after it got stuck in development limbo for years.
Whether that was truly accurate or not, it does fit the extended development timeline, the lackluster story in the end product, and the failure to revamp the game after launch like the developers very publicly said they were trying to do. If they couldn’t do it the first time, and couldn’t do it the second time… it seems they were the problem, not EA (for once).
I do not believe it for the simple reason that the levels are very vertically based, iirc. If core verticality was a mandate from shitheads after production started rolling, it would’ve come out in an even worse state.
Are you looking at the same game? The world was vertical in the sense that you had to fly anywhere… but none of the combat or gameplay used it in any way beyond going from one place to another. That’s exactly what would happen if verticality and a new map was added later in development. They just put clearings in to place the flat missions.
Eh, that doesn’t necessarily define where the source of pressure came from. Making unique games is an entirely different level of skill/time/commitment than what they were given.
IMO, it’s nigh equally likely that they started with the verticality design as part of it and didn’t have the time to cook the idea into something neat, vs it being a later mandate after some core designs had development. The only thing that really leads me to believe that the ideas were in early is in the character designs: They were clearly meant to fly in some way, even if it might’ve been in a Halo jetpack sort of way early on. (which has less evidence)
This is one of 94747252795 reasons to NEVER give these big corporations a single ounce of control over anything.
IMO, it’s nigh equally likely that they started with the verticality design as part of it and didn’t have the time to cook the idea into something neat, vs it being a later mandate after some core designs had development.
Well it’s a good thing that we have commentary directly related to this then, alongside basically ever major development decision… Because that’s apparently what happened…
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
As development progressed, it became clear that some of the Anthem team’s original ideas either wouldn’t work or weren’t quite solidified enough to be implemented. Take traversal, for example. The mandate was that Anthem’s world would be massive and seamless, but how would you get around? The team played around with prototypes, exploring different ways in which your exosuit could move vertically across the world. For a long time they thought it’d be climbing up the sides of mountains and ledges, but they couldn’t get that quite right. Early iterations of flying—which, developers say, was removed from and re-added to Anthem several times—were more like gliding, and members of the Anthem team say it was tough to get the system feeling all that fun. Every time they changed the traversal, it meant changing the world design accordingly, flattening and stretching terrain to accommodate the latest movement style.
The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”
Certainly sounds like the developers had no idea how to make the game.
One longstanding BioWare tradition is for their teams to build demos that the staff could all take home during Christmas break, and it was Anthem’s turn during Christmas of 2016. By this point, BioWare’s leadership had decided to remove flying from the game —they just couldn’t figure out how to make it feel good—so the Christmas build took place on flat terrain.
Around the same time, Electronic Arts executive Patrick Söderlund, to whom BioWare’s leadership reported, played the Anthem Christmas demo. According to three people familiar with what happened, he told BioWare that it was unacceptable.
Now it was time for a new build. “What began was six weeks of pretty significant crunch to do a demo specifically for Patrick Söderlund,” said one member of the team. They overhauled the art, knowing that the best way to impress Söderlund would be to make a demo that looked as pretty as possible. And, after some heated arguments, the Anthem team decided to put flying back in.
So they removed flight entirely by Christmas of 2016, that would mean the entire map design had to lose the verticality. If you can’t fly, then you have to flatten the world do accommodate for ground movement instead.
And it was an EA executive that got them to put flying back in as a focus, flying that the team had removed entirely by that point. Even if they weren’t specifically told to do so by EA. And then designed the entire game’s map and movement based around that flight by the launch just over 2 years later in Feb 2019.
They were clearly meant to fly in some way, even if it might’ve been in a Halo jetpack sort of way early on. (which has less evidence)
I love that you try to hedge your comment and try to say that jetpack jumps and gliding are somehow even remotely in the same ballpark as flying around like Iron Man. You’re honestly trying to say that Link or Aloy on a glider is similar to Anthem’s flight? That’s a ridiculous thing to try to compare as similar.
So then, that really begs the question: Why were they not allowed to take it back to the design board when the design fundamentally changed?
Again, this is not a “developer” problem, but a fucko owner problem.
Why were they not allowed to take it back to the design board when the design fundamentally changed?
I feel like they were, effectively. There is no reason for them to not reuse assets they created from before flying was added back in after X-mas 2016, that was still 2 years before launch. 2 years is enough to develop a game, especially if the assets already exist.
That’s where the other development issues at the studio come in.
The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”
That’s not a publisher/owner issue, that’s a developer issue.
I wish people would get less emotionally attached to these corporate game studios. Like, it’s not the same people. Not the same leadership. Not the same artists. And so on.
It’s just a collection of IP’s, that’s about it. Bioware from 2000 is not the same bioware from 2015 or 2026.
Same can be said for the vast majority of game studios except a handful of indie shops, but do they really count as indie if they’ve been nurturing one IP for 15 years?
Why do you assume it the studios they’re attached to and not the IPs? I for one am devistated that a) people are losing their jobs and b) I’m losing beloved future games I was hoping for.
Maybe try a little empathy. Your comments constantly lack it.
Because the IPs fuckin suck under the studio. Nobody cares about Anthem. Andromeda was a mid cashout of Mass Effect. Lord knows wtf they were going to do with Dragon Age. Few, if any people, like these IPs as they are; you like the promise they once held, because you forgot the one rule to responsibly engage with fiction: Good stories get to end. The games still exist. They’ll always exist, or at least as long as you or I are alive. Thus the IP always exists. What goes away is the studio, which, OK, bye
The IPs were created in a specific environment, with a specific set of people coming together to make them. Sure, others can join and create things of the same quality if the same environment is still present. But after so many years the minds these the IPs spawned from have almost all long since moved on or fill other roles. So if the current owners of the IP have no respect for it, dont care, etc. There’s zero reason to still remain invested after its shown they cant live up to the quality and promise of the original creators.
So glad you feel entitled to tell me how to feel about my own opinions 🤣
Game companies really smarted up when they made gamers care more about the company behind the games than of the creative and technical people that actually create the games.
And most of these legendary devs worked so hard for so long for such a small paycheck and zero benefits just to get layed off when it conveniences the studio
Electronic Arts in the 1980s was amazing.
EA was a good game company. I don’t like them as a law firm.
Isn’t it a shame that a tiny handful of rich old assholes get to make unilateral decisions that affect all of us?
May EA burn.
Anthem but not Jade Empire?
Also Jade Empire! An under appreciated gem of a game. This is truly a shame, Bioware were one of the last big ones that actually gave a shit about making good games.
God, they listed Anthem and not Jade Empire - look how they massacred my boy.
Yeah I’m really not sure why they’ve decided to put anthem on the end of that list.
Considering they hamstrung Anthem with no support and killed it shortly after release, I was surprised to see it on the list.
Man that was a great game with incredible potential but they (EA) shit the bed by forcing a release before it was ready and then pulling the plug just as the game was getting in a really good place after a roxky start.
Anthem had some of the most innovative and fun core gameplay of any AAA in the last 2 decades. The issue was there was nothing else, it was essentially a prologue that just suddenly ended. It’s also an interesting case because the good part of that game (flight) was an idea forced by a CEO or some useless fuck like that.
Ban corporate ownership of other companies. It has no positive effects on the economy or the world.
We have to just vote soulless corposuits out with our wallets. Too many business majors telling devs what to do.
Vote with your wallet is mostly a scam. You can’t buy what isn’t there. Devs are too reliant on the business freaks to turn their art into money. I don’t have a good solution. All I can think of is maybe something like a registered not-for-profit version of steam/GOG/itch. No investors expecting a return allowed. No for-profit company that owns the not-for-profit as a bypass. Just a system devs can use to turn art into money with no BS about ensuring profits for someone else. I don’t have the devops/software engineering knowledge to make that happen, but I hope someone does.
That would solve nothing.
For Bioware, no. It’s too late for them. For the future, it’d prevent companies like EA buying up every half-successful dev company and feeding their IP into the machine to milk our nostalgia for profit.
But it wouldn’t prevent them from buying the IP. The only thing that solves the problem is preventing ip from changing hands, but that would definitely cause problems
It would reduce it, at least. Part of what makes those deals appealing to devs is the idea that the umbrella corporation will handle the business so the devs can do the dev work they love. Many of them would be much more reluctant to sell off ownership of their concepts and work entirely, and the ubrella corps would find it harder to milk nostalgia when they’ve only bought the name and not any of the creative team that made it real. Not impossible, but harder.
If buying a company is illegal, there’s still no (practical) way to prevent the buying company say, “we’ll put you in your own separate Bioware team, no management changes for at least a year, we’ll hire anyone who wants to come over” etc. Basically, you’d have the exact same situation practically, just the legal bollocks would be different and it’d be slightly less convenient.
Good. So much of adjusting people’s behaviour is just making it more convenient to do the right thing and less convenient to do the wrong thing. It’s impossible to get people to behave perfectly all the time, but the more inconvenient you make it to do the wrong thing, the more the human tendency toward laziness will keep them passively on the right path. There are no desire paths in a hedge maze.
But it will also make legit things slightly less convenient.
Was any developer who contributed to Baulders Gate 1 present for Anthem? I highly doubt it. The bioware I cared about stopped existing decades ago.
They’ve been zombies for at least, what, 10 years now? It’s also amazing how ME:Andromeda, Anthem and DA Veilguard all sold over 1 million copies, yet were still “failures”
I may be the only person alive who enjoyed Andromeda, but I do agree that Veilguard was completely unforgivable and also…inexplicable?
I remember vagualy enjoying playing ME:A but I, for the life of me, do not remember what it was about. I can how ever debate decisions I made in ME:1 lol
It had good bones just didn’t get fleshed out in the writing to me. Neither the characters nor the lore grabbed me enough. I think I even beat it, but again i couldn’t really tell you if that’s true or not
You’re not alone, Andromeda’s take on combat was so much fun - the skill synergies and the mobility was properly thrilling. Though definitely lacked on the story side, however, it was still quite enjoyable.
Thank you, I feel like its an unpopular thing to say but I actually really had fun and played through it twice. To each their own, I guess.
Yeah, exactly what we expected to happen when Saudis bought it.
Saudis are Islamic, there are no pride parades in Saudi Arabia. There will be no more “secular” games from Electronic Arts, so somehow EA has found a way to suck even more.
The Saudis are an embarrassing US ally, not even getting into the royal family. They’re no better than Iran in my opinion.
I can understand doing business with them, I think trade is the best way to open doors and find common ground. But an ally?
It’s against my religion.
Honestly hope the good devs just join the growing trend of worker owned game studios and start up anew without all the baggage.
