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A huge point of consternation for all 12 people who played Alpha Protocol.
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Aug 22, 2023 06:04
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exquisite tea posted:A huge point of consternation for all 12 people who played Alpha Protocol. I’m choosing “aggressive response” and in 3 seconds I’m going to watch myself say something insane
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Aug 22, 2023 06:27
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I liked Alpha Protocol, though I did only play it once. I should try it again some time.
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Aug 22, 2023 08:35
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It's crazy how active the thread has been in the last few days, almost entirely due to BG3. The demand for this "classic Bioware" style of RPGs is still there, and I just can't wrap my head around the fact that Bioware are just not capitalizing on it.Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Bethesda also discovered that people will pay 5-10% of the list price for incidental cosmetics and in-game items and did you know Horse Armor is still Bethesda’s most profitable piece of software? Capitalism is also at fault. When game execs can calculate that they're likely to make a lot more money catering to a smaller section of whales instead of "normal" fans/customers/players, this creates perverse incentives that make everything worse.
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Aug 22, 2023 08:52
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Torrannor posted:It's crazy how active the thread has been in the last few days, almost entirely due to BG3. The demand for this "classic Bioware" style of RPGs is still there, and I just can't wrap my head around the fact that Bioware are just not capitalizing on it. Why can’t you? The fate of Bioware is no great secret. The hell sprint of development between Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 hemorrhaged a ton of their talent and they’ve lost even more since. They are, for all intents and purposes, a completely different dev studio that gets to call itself Bioware.
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Aug 22, 2023 09:14
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It's going to be devastating when Bioware finally churns out DA:4 and it's a mess
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Aug 22, 2023 09:25
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Honestly if DA4 is playable it would be a success already considering how low expectations are for it. And it's pretty much a given that everyone will be nitpicking it to death in the first two weeks anyway.
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Aug 22, 2023 09:36
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DA4 will probably get rebooted again to "return to its roots" after the success of BG3, then rebooted once more in 2026 when the Base Wars (1991) remaster causes Bioware to seriously consider implementing combat sports in their dark fantasy RPG.
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Aug 22, 2023 09:48
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Torrannor posted:It's crazy how active the thread has been in the last few days, almost entirely due to BG3. The demand for this "classic Bioware" style of RPGs is still there, and I just can't wrap my head around the fact that Bioware are just not capitalizing on it. This comes up in the thread about every six months, and the answer is always the same. Bioware wasn't content making mid-range, successful titles with a devoted fanbase. They, like every other studio in the early to mid twenty-teens, wanted to do CoD numbers. If you weren't moving tens of millions of units, then you were failing. Bioware, as it exists today, can't go backward and start making good games again. By all accounts, they're a dysfunctional hallowed out husk of a studio.
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Aug 22, 2023 10:19
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Part of me wonder if it's a Western game company culture. Like the big Japanese game companies like Square-Enix and Cygames and Nintendo are perfectly happy to trout out a few mid-performing games or gachas that aren't expected to last forever.
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Aug 22, 2023 10:21
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I mean, it's corporate culture, in general. Resulting from the incentives of capitalism. Some Japanese companies manage to get by, just like some western companies, but they also have stuff like Konami burning their IP to the ground to go all in on pachinko machines.
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Aug 22, 2023 10:24
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The downfall of Bioware started more or less because EA thought they could use them like the Madden of RPGs and trot out a AAA sequel every 22 months. That led to a ton of burnout and a talent exodus, which further led to Bioware stumbling from DA2 onwards, which led to massively decreased output as leadership changed hands and became less confident in themselves.
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Aug 22, 2023 10:30
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EA isn't Bioware problem. DA2 was their own decision for one. It's the "bioware magic". As a company they've always had poo poo project management that they've compensated for with a fuckton of crunch. And it was only a matter of time before it stopped working for them.
Raygereio fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Aug 22, 2023 |
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Aug 22, 2023 10:56
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I don't think we know enough about what went on behind closed doors to assign the correct amounts of blame, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that both EA and Bioware hosed up badly in their own ways.
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Aug 22, 2023 11:40
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EA grossly mismanaged Bioware, Bioware consistently exercised poor judgment in response. Neither statement is particularly controversial, I think.
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Aug 22, 2023 11:44
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A wonderful story of Everybody Sucks. Maybe in ten-to-fifteen years, when the next nostalgia wave hits, and the IPs are scattered to the winds we'll get another decent DA or ME game. Cause hey, it worked for Baldur's Gate!
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Aug 22, 2023 11:47
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exquisite tea posted:EA grossly mismanaged Bioware, Bioware consistently exercised poor judgment in response. Neither statement is particularly controversial, I think. From what I remember of the Schreier article, it really didn't seem like EA managed Bioware at all. They let them do their own thing with shockingly little oversight and Bioware hosed everything up by themselves. From what I recall, EA didn't even tell them to use Frostbite. Bioware just assumed they had to on their own.
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Aug 22, 2023 12:35
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That was for Anthem. By that point EA had already run Bioware into the ground by churning through their experienced staff with two-year development timelines for DA2 and ME3. Bioware made plenty of mistakes on their own, no doubt.
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Aug 22, 2023 12:36
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exquisite tea posted:That was for Anthem. By that point EA had already run Bioware into the ground by churning through their experienced staff with two-year development timelines for DA2 and ME3. Bioware made plenty of mistakes on their own, no doubt. The deadline for DA2 was, according to the people involved, Bioware's own decision. EA was hands-off with Bioware. What likely influenced things was the development of the Old Republic MMO and how that was turning into a money black hole. If you read between the lines, it's clear that Bioware's management thought that in order to keep EA hands-off they had to bring in some money fast. It's anyone guess how real those concerns were. Considering EA allowed the development of TOR, Anthem & Andromeda to turn to clusterfucks.
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Aug 22, 2023 14:23
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ApplesandOranges posted:Part of me wonder if it's a Western game company culture. Like the big Japanese game companies like Square-Enix and Cygames and Nintendo are perfectly happy to trout out a few mid-performing games or gachas that aren't expected to last forever. This is pretty funny to say about Square-Enix considering they chaos dunk everything that isn't a CoD size hit and literally just sold off a ton of their IP earlier this year because they were only moderately successful
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Aug 22, 2023 16:00
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Zore posted:This is pretty funny to say about Square-Enix considering they chaos dunk everything that isn't a CoD size hit and literally just sold off a ton of their IP earlier this year because they were only moderately successful I love Octopath, the gacha is still going, Octopath II came out this year, and it would not be anything approaching CoD levels.
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Aug 22, 2023 16:03
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Raygereio posted:They made the same decision for Inquisition. this contradicts what the bioware devs themselves were saying a decade ago - the reason why goons are paraphrasing that 'EA wanted to do CoD numbers' was because that's pretty much the gist of what EA said to the staff during DA2's development, according to the writers who posted about it contemporaneously during the disastrous hype-up-to-DA2 PR cycle, that CoD games get churned out every year and still make millions so why can't the dragon age franchise do the same (given that da:origin just came off a long cycle) j hepler, after leaving the company called DA2 a 'budget title' given how little time and resources the team was given during its cycle and that the game obviously became a product of those factors to say that the deadline for DA2 was really bioware's decision invokes some kind of legalese argument where agreeing to do what the boss asks means you consented to the decision and therefore it's really your doing; i've seen the same line used for EA mandating the use of their frostbite engine (according to bioware devs who spoke anonymously to games journos re:the failure of andromeda); this was the engine that almost killed da:i and supposedly killed me:a because of its incompatibility with RPG mechanics neither one of these decisions is one bioware would've made had it still been an independent studio imho now in all fairness, the toxicity of this relationship goes both ways, bioware sold EA some insane pipe dreams for me:a and anthem and EA lapped it up, generously giving bioware years and years of un-micromanaged time to produce what they claimed they could, and the spectacular, and mostly internal, managerial errors of those games are both well-known to this thread
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Aug 22, 2023 16:43
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Zore posted:This is pretty funny to say about Square-Enix considering they chaos dunk everything that isn't a CoD size hit and literally just sold off a ton of their IP earlier this year because they were only moderately successful So they could concentrate on the notoriously successful NFT gaming sector no less.
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Aug 23, 2023 02:42
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hard counter posted:to say that the deadline for DA2 was really bioware's decision invokes some kind of legalese argument where agreeing to do what the boss asks means you consented to the decision and therefore it's really your doing; i've seen the same line used for EA mandating the use of their frostbite engine (according to bioware devs who spoke anonymously to games journos re:the failure of andromeda); this was the engine that almost killed da:i and supposedly killed me:a because of its incompatibility with RPG mechanics Both of those decisions were made by Aaryn Flynn. Bioware had a general manager that loved chasing trends. And after leaving Bioware he is still doing it with a open world base building game. EA never had to sell Bioware's designers on trend chasing, they just had to sell Aaryn Flynn.
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Aug 23, 2023 06:29
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Raygereio posted:EA isn't Bioware problem. DA2 was their own decision for one. It's the "bioware magic". As a company they've always had poo poo project management that they've compensated for with a fuckton of crunch. And it was only a matter of time before it stopped working for them. Not sure how much you can trust them but Mark Darrah stated on youtube that DA2 happened because they were delayed on SWTOR so much that they feared of getting budget cuts / shuttered if they don't put out a full game soon so DA2 was switched from being an Expansion for DA:O to its own full fledged game and crunched out in 18 months.
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Aug 23, 2023 13:23
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kilus aof posted:Both of those decisions were made by Aaryn Flynn. Bioware had a general manager that loved chasing trends. And after leaving Bioware he is still doing it with a open world base building game. EA never had to sell Bioware's designers on trend chasing, they just had to sell Aaryn Flynn. tbf for frostbite, flynn described his reasoning for it as embracing an eventuality sooner rather than later, and, funny enough, he also anticipated a lot more EA technical support re: the use of their own engine; famously, the opposite happened later with EA actually moving experienced frostbite programmers, who cut their teeth on the engine in da:i's insane crunch, off bioware to their FIFA games i don't know of any of his da2 claims tho, but fernando melo (someone who left da4 in ~2019 incidentally) was the chief source for these internal commentaries back in ~2011
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Aug 23, 2023 16:24
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kilus aof posted:Both of those decisions were made by Aaryn Flynn. Bioware had a general manager that loved chasing trends. And after leaving Bioware he is still doing it with a open world base building game. EA never had to sell Bioware's designers on trend chasing, they just had to sell Aaryn Flynn. And Aaryn Flynn's new studio is making Nightingale using Unreal Engine. Let's be clear about what choice there was in regards to Frosbite: The company that held the purse strings gave a budget for a release and then Bioware management had to decide whether to use Frostbite for 'free' or had to figure out which team members to fire in order to license Unreal Engine.
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Aug 23, 2023 16:29
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FrickenMoron posted:Not sure how much you can trust them but Mark Darrah stated on youtube that DA2 happened because they were delayed on SWTOR so much that they feared of getting budget cuts / shuttered if they don't put out a full game soon so DA2 was switched from being an Expansion for DA:O to its own full fledged game and crunched out in 18 months. If I'm remembering the right video it was basically that they believed EA would be mad at them for not having a release, any release, so they went for it but there was no specific mandate to churn Dragon Age games out on a super short timescale like we believed
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Aug 23, 2023 16:30
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i should clarify, it's perfectly possible that EA sold frostbite to aaryn flynn, for being trendy, who then sold it to bioware, i just recall there being more to this situation than that dynamic alone
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Aug 23, 2023 16:49
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https://twitter.com/bioware/status/1694392978205233572BioWare posted:Hello again,
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Aug 23, 2023 18:15
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Dreadwolf is going to be an utter disaster, isn’t it?
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Aug 23, 2023 18:26
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Our vision for the future is to cut a sixth of our staff! I admit, I don't read a lot of layoff announcements. Are they usually framed as "outlining our vision"? CottonWolf posted:Dreadwolf is going to be an utter disaster, isn’t it? It already is, but if we're lucky it'll never come out. The sooner the shambling corpse called Bioware turns to dust, the sooner a company that still cares about making games might have a chance to use one of their IPs. Skippy McPants fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Aug 23, 2023 |
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Aug 23, 2023 18:29
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Ok, even if they weren't bull making GBS threads about massive layoffs, buoware wanting to go agile with their comically large projects is hilarious.
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Aug 23, 2023 19:01
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Skippy McPants posted:Our vision for the future is to cut a sixth of our staff! Yeah, pretty typical for a publicly traded company. Layoffs means things are bad: the shareholders need an explanation for why they shouldn’t be dumping everything they still hold…
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Aug 23, 2023 19:03
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https://twitter.com/PatStaresAt/status/1694406199402471567
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Aug 23, 2023 19:35
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CottonWolf posted:Dreadwolf is going to be an utter disaster, isn’t it? dreadwolf will be dire
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Aug 23, 2023 19:38
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It's crazy that Inquisition came out 9 years ago now and we're still not close to a DA:4 and the one we will get will likely be bad
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Aug 23, 2023 19:42
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they call it dreadwolf because i dread seeing what it ends up being
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Aug 23, 2023 19:44
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Also, barring some missteps (the MMOification, mainly), DA:I was an actual good game, with a memorable villain (Solas, not Cory-dude, although I thought he was allright, too) and an actual, honest to god, decent ending that neatly concluded the story (shame you had to pay extra for it cause I obviously mean Trespasser).
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Aug 23, 2023 19:46
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This game is never coming out.
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