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It always suprised me that all the worst decsions from bioware over the last ten years (open world DAI/Andromeda, Anthem) were coming from inside the studio.
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Feb 25, 2021 01:02
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Vagabong posted:It always suprised me that all the worst decsions from bioware over the last ten years (open world DAI/Andromeda, Anthem) were coming from inside the studio. There's an article that talks about putting the blame on EA for making Bioware use Frostbite but that doesn't address the fact that Bioware put a ton of work in on Frostbite for DAI, then the Andromeda threw it all out and started fresh.
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Feb 25, 2021 01:06
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im glad that anthem is officially dead, gently caress loot shooters i always feared that it would be successful and that ea would never let bioware make RPGs again now if they can just avoid forcing them to make me4 openworld which is clearly not compatible with the bioware formula we might get something good
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Feb 25, 2021 01:27
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I have confidence that bioware will go back to basics and give the players what they really want: a game that's just peebee doing sudoku rune puzzles and scanning for minerals
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Feb 25, 2021 01:28
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Best Bi Geek Squid posted:I have confidence that bioware will go back to basics and give the players what they really want: a game that's just peebee doing sudoku rune puzzles and scanning for minerals Can I...can I romance the puzzles?
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Feb 25, 2021 01:33
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kai leng is back! and he's god a bunch of procedurally generated fetch quests for you to solve!
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Feb 25, 2021 01:33
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ShakeZula posted:Can I...can I romance the puzzles? yes! but they're all voiced by peebee
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Feb 25, 2021 01:34
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Best Bi Geek Squid posted:I have confidence that bioware will go back to basics and give the players what they really want: a game that's just peebee doing sudoku rune puzzles and scanning for minerals i just remembered a thing that annoyed me about ME:A. the different ammo types do jack poo poo. like i loved inferno ammo in the other games but it doesnt do anything in ME:A, like you dont even see dudes get turned to ash and poo poo.
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Feb 25, 2021 01:38
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i just remembered a thing that annoyed me about ME:A. the different ammo types do jack poo poo. like i loved inferno ammo in the other games but it doesnt do anything in ME:A, like you dont even see dudes get turned to ash and poo poo. And that poo poo was a goddamned consumable! Like, ME2/3 had it as powers, which I didn't like very much either, but it was workable. Ammo types were mods in ME1 and should have stayed that way imo. And the MEA consumables only lasted for like, a clip before you had to reapply them. like I had loving time to open a context menu in the middle of a fight
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Feb 25, 2021 01:59
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Error 404 posted:And that poo poo was a goddamned consumable! 3 clips, but yeah. Also the remnant 3 round burst assault rifle just melted loving everything anyways, ammo or no.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:00
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Kurieg posted:3 clips, but yeah. My point is, you put disruptor on a pistol to pop shields, drop a singularity, then switch to an AR with inferno rounds to burn those assholes down! Like God and Zaeed intended! Error 404 fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 02:04
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i am also confident the game isnt gonna be pushed out with only a year of work on it like ME:A or DA2. Mass Effect Andromeda has way more than a years of work. This is from a 2014 that already showed the end of Drack's loyalty mission in polish mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opOdFKObpeM Maybe the final design of the open worlds took 18 months after they farted through 3 years of procedural planets but not the potentially good parts which are the linear levels.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:29
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Error 404 posted:My point is, you put disruptor on a pistol to pop shields, drop a singularity, then switch to an AR with inferno rounds to burn those assholes down! You could still do that with Mass Effect 2's system since powers attached to the gun not the player. It's just only combat classes got the ammo powers so you had to use squadmates ammo powers if you weren't.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:35
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I still think of the "what if" game of Garrus building a crew and running around Omega as Archangel. So many possibilities and chances.....
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Feb 25, 2021 04:32
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kilus aof posted:You could still do that with Mass Effect 2's system since powers attached to the gun not the player. It's just only combat classes got the ammo powers so you had to use squadmates ammo powers if you weren't. Oh I know, I was just trying to be funny.
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Feb 25, 2021 05:00
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pentyne posted:ME Legendary better move a lot of units actually kind of insane that ea (lol) is making more sense than what's left of bioware. they haven't put anything good out in how many years now? at this point, i wouldn't even trust them if they somehow got the old me team back together and tried again.
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Feb 25, 2021 05:17
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Hey you know this epic failure of a game? We want 2x as many people as we currently have to keep fixing it
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Last King posted:actually kind of insane that ea (lol) is making more sense than what's left of bioware. Maybe the old ME team just got lucky. Me1 had a lot of jank badness in it tbh, and in fact it was on track to be Andromeda levels of bad until they decided it would be ok to just half rear end the procedurally generated worlds that no one would care about. They should grow the universe with some smaller games before diving back into some big games IMO. Like how Star Wars Squadrons is an inexpensive, bite size piece of fun. Give us some side stories that dont involve saving the whole god drat galaxy
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Feb 25, 2021 05:23
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Error 404 posted:And that poo poo was a goddamned consumable! yeah, they seriously took every bad idea from DA:I(crappy open world, lovely quest setups, lots of mandatory lovely filler to do any of the good quests, weird mechanic restrictions, lovely pacing ) but none of the good stuff. Last King posted:actually kind of insane that ea (lol) is making more sense than what's left of bioware. i suspect this is the "last chance". if they gently caress up DA 4 and ME4 and somehow somehow the remaster is a piece of poo poo, than Papa EA will start loading his gun. i am also pretty sure their a jade empire remaster/remake in the pipeline too.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:05
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i suspect this is the "last chance". if they gently caress up DA 4 and ME4 and somehow somehow the remaster is a piece of poo poo, than Papa EA will start loading his gun. i am also pretty sure their a jade empire remaster/remake in the pipeline too. Legendary Edition, ME4 and DA4 all have a very strong air of "being made on the edge of the grave, peering down worryingly at the pile of corpses that were EA's previous kills while EA paces hungrily around in the background, axe in hand and just... waiting" to them.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:08
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nine-gear crow posted:Legendary Edition, ME4 and DA4 all have a very strong air of "being made on the edge of the grave, peering down worryingly at the pile of corpses that were EA's previous kills while EA paces hungrily around in the background, axe in hand and just... waiting" to them. yeah. that being said as much as i dislike EA, they are kinda not really in the wrong here. Bioware got lucky with DA:I and took the wrong messages from it and than poo poo out two games that were crappy enough that they had to basicaly let die in a dumpster. i am assuming EA is trying to bring back some of the smarter folks from biowares past or at least people who can keep them from making another MMO lite.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:16
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Folks, folks, folks. Oh ye of little faith. Of course Bioware will deliver nothing but excellence moving forwards for ME4, DA4, etc etc. I mean it's not like they've now spent the latter 50% of their entire existence pooing out burning filth. Preorder all their stuff today, if not sooner. There are no red flags, other than "speed up, track clear!". Take it from me, previous buyer of Star Citizen and Shroud of the Avatar and let my wise purchase advice guide you towards talent & excellence.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:30
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MEA was made by a completely different studio though, it got the BioWare name slapped on at some point. In fact EA had to bring in at least a few guys from the actual BioWare to finish it because the other studio had done things such as spend 5 years trying to make procedurally generated planets work and not getting anything finished. Anthem is all on the original though.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:33
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Kibayasu posted:MEA was made by a completely different studio though, it got the BioWare name slapped on at some point. In fact EA had to bring in at least a few guys from the actual BioWare to finish it because the other studio had done things such as spend 5 years trying to make procedurally generated planets work and not getting anything finished. true. anthem also felt like bioware trying to "branch out" and be bungie or gearbox or some poo poo and than they just flew into the loving ground at mach 10.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:36
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Anthem? Next!
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Feb 25, 2021 07:39
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exquisite tea posted:Anthem? Next! Everquest Next Anthem Next The warnings were given in plain text.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:42
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ShakeZula posted:FWIW I think a bunch of the OG creative team has announced that they're back and working on ME4 I had not heard that, and I hope it's true. As much as Bioware has become a laughingstock under EA, Mass Effect was a genuinely inspired setting and another competent game in that setting would rule.
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Feb 25, 2021 08:14
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Sydin posted:I had not heard that, and I hope it's true. As much as Bioware has become a laughingstock under EA, Mass Effect was a genuinely inspired setting and another competent game in that setting would rule. Don't do this to yourself. Yes it would be great but that's not what's going to happen.
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Feb 25, 2021 08:22
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Games that have to be restarted multiple times and major staff keep leaving are not going to be successful enough to justify the cost put in. I really want to know wtf happened with Anthem and if EA demanded it or what because it is such a huge loving mess from day 1.
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Feb 25, 2021 09:11
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pentyne posted:Games that have to be restarted multiple times and major staff keep leaving are not going to be successful enough to justify the cost put in. https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
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Feb 25, 2021 09:25
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Jason Schrier published a whole postmortem on Anthem's development last year. Long story short -- overly ambitious project scope, lack of clear direction leading to multiple overhauls in the game systems, employee attrition and rushed development in the final 18 months. Stop me if you've heard this one before.
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Feb 25, 2021 09:27
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exquisite tea posted:Jason Schrier published a whole postmortem on Anthem's development last year. Long story short -- overly ambitious project scope, lack of clear direction leading to multiple overhauls in the game systems, employee attrition and rushed development in the final 18 months. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Also known as "that Bioware magic".
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Feb 25, 2021 09:30
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Funky See Funky Do posted:Don't do this to yourself. Yes it would be great but that's not what's going to happen. Oh I'm fully aware - like I said ME:A was a trainwreck and Bioware hasn't been able to put out anything beyond "Eh, it's okay I guess*" in over a decade so I don't expect anything brilliant. If anything, it's just really sad to see one of the best new sci-fi settings in recent memory get squandered so badly. exquisite tea posted:Jason Schrier published a whole postmortem on Anthem's development last year. Long story short -- overly ambitious project scope, lack of clear direction leading to multiple overhauls in the game systems, employee attrition and rushed development in the final 18 months. Stop me if you've heard this one before. "You sir! You are a blight!" except instead of Shepard I'm pointing at AAA games and their publishers.
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Feb 25, 2021 09:47
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exquisite tea posted:Jason Schrier published a whole postmortem on Anthem's development last year. Long story short -- overly ambitious project scope, lack of clear direction leading to multiple overhauls in the game systems, employee attrition and rushed development in the final 18 months. Stop me if you've heard this one before. if it had a photo mode, a guy shouting AY CHINGADA MADRE every twenty seconds and a truly banging soundtrack i'd still have given it 9/10
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Feb 25, 2021 10:02
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Only bad games Bioware has made in recent years are ME:A and Anthem. Both of those were extremely flawed, but people lumping DAI and ME3 in with them because they weren't to their taste is a misclassification of type. DAI ruled, and there's a difference between "the open world stuff wasn't to my taste" and "the open world stuff was bad". There were lots of well designed areas, side activities, and things to discover - it was a world away from ME:A's big empty deserts and snowfields. ME3 had issues but also a lot of high points, and its issues were of a different order of magnitude from ME:A's issues.
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Feb 25, 2021 10:41
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exquisite tea posted:Jason Schrier published a whole postmortem on Anthem's development last year. Long story short -- overly ambitious project scope, lack of clear direction leading to multiple overhauls in the game systems, employee attrition and rushed development in the final 18 months. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Jesus it's just line after line of lovely decision making quote:Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to go with a different title: Beyond. They’d even printed out Beyond T-shirts for the staff. Who's decision was that? Bioware? Because it seems like the EA suits were "yeah, we'll try" when a major AAA title called Beyond Two Souls had come out a few years prior so it seems like a longshot. quote:Many features weren’t finalized or implemented until the very final months, and to some who worked on the project, it wasn’t even clear what kind of game Anthem even was until that E3 demo in June of 2017, less than two years before it actually came out. So, terrible project management? I doubt EA was calling Bioware in every quarter and going "yeah, never-mind last year's plan, now we want it more like Destiny" quote:This account of Anthem’s development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem’s development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It’s a story of technical failings, as EA’s Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare’s developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team’s needs. The frostbite engine always comes up, but by this point they had been working with it since...2011? Had nothing been worked out or developed for making their trademark 3rd person rpgs? quote:In late 2012 and 2013, while finishing up the Mass Effect trilogy, BioWare director Casey Hudson and a small team of longtime Mass Effect developers started work on a project that they hoped would be the Bob Dylan of video games, meaning something that would be referenced by video game fans for years to come. Jesus the loving ego of these people. quote:The story started changing drastically, too. In early 2015, veteran Dragon Age writer David Gaider moved over to Anthem, and his version of the story looked a lot different than the ideas with which they’d been experimenting for the past few years. Gaider’s style was traditional BioWare—big, complicated villains; ancient alien artifacts; and so on—which rankled some of the developers who were hoping for something more subtle. Bringing a retired all star back hoping for an easy win and then he just fucks off after a single lovely season. quote:The job of steering Anthem now fell to the creative leadership team, a group that included game director Jon Warner, design director Preston Watamaniuk, art director Derek Watts, animation director Parrish Ley, and a handful of other Mass Effect veterans who had been on Anthem since the beginning. So, like no one replaced the main director? Was that some cost saving thing or what? quote:The explanation for this lag can be summed up in one word, a word that has plagued many of EA’s studios for years now, most notably BioWare and the now-defunct Visceral Games, a word that can still evoke a mocking smile or sad grimace from anyone who’s spent any time with it. It always comes back to Frostbite, is it really so completely broken they can't make games with it? quote:From the beginning, Anthem’s senior leadership had made the decision to start from scratch for a large part of the game’s technology rather than using all of the systems the company had built for Inquisition and Andromeda. Part of this may have been a desire to stand out from those other teams Well that should've just been met with a massive "gently caress you" from all the people working on the project quote:One former BioWare developer said that they and some of their co-workers would bring up these concerns to directors, only to be ignored. “You’d come to management saying, ‘Look, we’re seeing the same problems on Inquisition and Andromeda, where design wasn’t figuring things out. It’s getting really late in the project and the core of the game isn’t defined.’ Basically saying, ‘Hey, the same mistakes are happening again, did you guys see this the last time? Can you stop this?’” said the developer. “They’d be quite dismissive about it.” Pretty solid condemnation about directors on staff. quote: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. (Söderlund did not respond to a request for comment.) He was particularly disappointed by the graphics. “He said, ‘This is not what you had promised to me as a game,’” More bad Bioware management showing its colors. quote:For years, the Anthem team had gone back and forth about the flying mechanic. It had been cut and re-added several times in different forms. Some iterations were more of a glide, and for a while, the idea was that only one exosuit class would be able to fly. On one hand, the mechanic was undeniably cool—what better way to feel like Iron Man than to zip around the world in a giant robot suit? On the other hand, it kept breaking everything. Few open-world games allowed for that kind of vertical freedom, for good reason; if you could fly everywhere, then the entire world needed to accommodate that. The artists wouldn’t be able to throw up mountains or walls to prevent players from jumping off the boundaries of the planet. Plus, the Anthem team worried that if you could fly, you’d blaze past the game’s environments rather than stopping to explore and check out the scenery. "Yeah its cool, also a gently caress ton of reasons other games don't do this" quote:“One of our QA people had been playing it over and over again so they could get the flow and timing down perfectly,” said one person who was involved. “Within 30 seconds or so the exo jumps off and glides off this precipice and lands.” One of the absolute worst things you can do is try to show off to the boss something extremely difficult and cutting edge to do, because then they want that in everything. quote:BioWare Austin developers recall offering feedback only to get dismissed or ignored by BioWare Edmonton’s senior leadership team, a process that was particularly frustrating for those who had already shipped a big online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and learned from its mistakes. One developer described it as a culture clash between a group of developers in Edmonton who were used to making single-player box product games and a group of developers in Austin who knew how to make online service games. Again back to ego, the head studio guys demanding all the serfs bow and scrape and do what they're told. quote:When Mark Darrah joined the project in the fall of 2017, he began pushing the Anthem team toward one goal: Ship the game. Crunch time, but it's literally someone finally saying "get the gently caress to work and make this, no more distractions" quote:One mandate from Anthem’s directors had been to make the game “unmemeable,” a reaction to Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s jittery facial animations, which became an internet joke in the days leading up to that game’s release. For Anthem, the team used high-end performance capture in order to ensure that the characters couldn’t be turned into embarrassing GIFs and plastered all over Reddit. Since the bulk of the game’s story-telling would be told from a first-person perspective in the hub city Fort Tarsis, players would spend a lot of time staring at characters’ faces. The characters had to look good. Make it so boring and stale no one can possibly make fun of it. Good plan! quote:As it turned out, this February 15 build was a few weeks old, a devastating mistake for BioWare that likely led to far more negative reviews than they might have received otherwise. A patch a few days later fixed some of the bugs, such as audio drops and sluggish loading screens, that were highlighted in reviews, but it was too late. By the time the Metacritic score had settled, it was a 55. More self inflicted wounds. quote:One big change that’s already been enacted at BioWare is a new technology strategy. Developers still at the studio say that under Casey Hudson, rather than start from scratch yet again, the next Dragon Age will be built on Anthem’s codebase HMMM NOW WHY WOULD THAT BE A SMART IDEA?? All in all, it makes the Frostbite engine look like the slightly burnt crust of the poo poo sandwich that was Bioware's management strategies. Even all that games as service poo poo doesn't excuse literal years of going back and forth over constantly changing design ideas. The whole flying thing seems like one of the biggest issues back and forth as people kept changing their minds only for them to finally force it back in all for the sake of trying to impress a EA exec. That it actually worked out seems more like luck then anything else.
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Feb 25, 2021 10:41
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Every game Bioware has made since ME2 was fatally flawed. ME3 had a good multiplayer mode that barely salvaged the purchase, DA2 was barebones trash, DAI was a single player MMO, MEA was a barely cooked development failure, Anthem was an even more raw. They aren't popping out anything objectively good any time soon. Forget it.
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Feb 25, 2021 10:58
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Android Blues posted:Only bad games Bioware has made in recent years are ME:A and Anthem. Another way to put this is that Bioware has only made bad games in recent years.
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Feb 25, 2021 10:58
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DancingShade posted:Every game Bioware has made since ME2 was fatally flawed. This is only true if you have a really skewed view of the quality of these releases. Sorting ME:A and ME3 into the same basket is silly. Calling DAI a single player MMO is just nonsensical.
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Feb 25, 2021 11:01
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Like, the most MMO-y of the Dragon Age games is probably DA:O, which was specifically inspired by World of Warcraft and has Herbalism/Alchemy gathering and crafting that is nearly a carbon copy of WoW. It turns out this doesn't matter at all and the game is still recognisably a narrative RPG, though?
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Feb 25, 2021 11:21
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nine-gear crow posted:Legendary Edition, ME4 and DA4 all have a very strong air of "being made on the edge of the grave, peering down worryingly at the pile of corpses that were EA's previous kills while EA paces hungrily around in the background, axe in hand and just... waiting" to them. i've had this image saved since like, 2014 
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Feb 25, 2021 11:56
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