What an utter waste of a studio. Bioware bad no business getting into live service looter shooters, and the decision to attempt one absolutely destroyed them. It's really frustrating that EA and...
What an utter waste of a studio. Bioware bad no business getting into live service looter shooters, and the decision to attempt one absolutely destroyed them.
It's really frustrating that EA and Bkoware undervalued DA relative to ME since, as the article says, DAI was their best selling title. I can't even trust the MBAs at the company to follow the money.
I'm incredibly bitter about how all of this has turned out.
Eh, DA:I sold well but it relied largely on franchise affinity. The gameplay loop itself was getting a bit creaky and you can definitely see the evidence of poor scope management and badly thought...
Eh, DA:I sold well but it relied largely on franchise affinity. The gameplay loop itself was getting a bit creaky and you can definitely see the evidence of poor scope management and badly thought out design choices that would doom every game after. It’s pretty clear that the studio’s culture was not suited to working with such large teams and budgets. When money constraints can’t force you to make editing choices you need serious project management discipline to keep you focused or you will flounder and that looks like just what happened with Bioware with both Andromeda and DA:I and now Veilguard. I never played Anthem, but I assume that went the same way.
When you’re putting money into a creative team you’re basically making a bet on them to succeed. It sounds like the Mass Effect team was run more professionally and simply did a better job of persuading people that they were a good bet.
In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously.
As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings.
“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.”
When I look at that quote the decision to value the ME team more makes perfect sense. I’m going to be more willing to bet on Captain Picard than I would on Jack Sparrow, especially when it seems like they were able to actually create parts of the game that people loved. The DA team can say they could have made great stuff too if they had the same resources but it seems like they got a lot of rope to try before the ME folks came on and they kept stumbling.
I can't possibly see how you'd come to this conclusion from reading the article. It read more to me like the team had their ability to make the game repeatedly neutered by absurd requirements that...
but it seems like they got a lot of rope to try
I can't possibly see how you'd come to this conclusion from reading the article. It read more to me like the team had their ability to make the game repeatedly neutered by absurd requirements that are a poor match for the franchise and later being forced to retool the work for the ridiculous multiplayer version into a half-decent Dragon Age game due to time constraints that they had no control over.
Firstly the Mass Effect team came in and said the work was often shoddy and the reputation of the team is that they’re a listless pirate ship that floats around. That has nothing to do with the...
Firstly the Mass Effect team came in and said the work was often shoddy and the reputation of the team is that they’re a listless pirate ship that floats around. That has nothing to do with the requirements put on them. The ME team is subject to the same shitty management as the DA team is, so presumably they understand the constraints as well. It’s not like they weren’t also kneecapped by dumb constraints when they did Andromeda.
Having managed product development in large enterprise, including ones that have gone pear shaped in part due to my own strategic errors, I can tell you that chaotic and poorly managed teams tend to have a lot of trouble pushing back on absurd or contradictory management demands. As a matter of fact, that is actually a core project management skill and an attribute of effective engineering teams to save business stakeholders from themselves. What usually happens is people have dumb demands and nobody on the team knows enough about what anyone else is doing to explain specifically why it’s a dumb idea. They just vaguely gesture at it being hard in ways that just sound like whining and end up getting steamrolled.
Bear in mind, Schrier’s sources here are all disgruntled BioWare people. Of course it just so happens to be that all the fault lies outside their team! I find it hard to believe that Veilguard sputtering due to many of the same issues that Inquisition had means the blame is solely on a late pivot. This game didn’t just underperform, it was a commercial bomb. And evidently it bombed despite being a perfectly average game. That speaks to a failure on multiple fronts, from marketing to gameplay that matched the player base’s expectations. This is including an unwillingness to just can the project when it turned out their live service model idea wasn’t working. Instead they threw good money after bad and tried to polish up the turd rather than resetting.
I just can't bring myself to blame a team for not pushing back hard enough or effectively enough against idiotic C-suite decisions. One team may be better at that than another, but the failure...
...chaotic and poorly managed teams tend to have a lot of trouble pushing back on absurd or contradictory management demands. As a matter of fact, that is actually a core project management skill and an attribute of effective engineering teams to save business stakeholders from themselves.
I just can't bring myself to blame a team for not pushing back hard enough or effectively enough against idiotic C-suite decisions. One team may be better at that than another, but the failure really lies at the feet of the C-suite. Not only is it the C-suite's job to understand the business they're in and make sensible decisions, but it's also their job to put these teams together in the first place.
If they build a team that they trust so little that they won't listen to its feedback, that is a problem of the C-suite's creation, not the team's creation.
The project’s owner is the one responsible for its success. The c-suite is there to decide if they can succeed and allocate the resources where they need to go. If the team can’t advocate for...
One team may be better at that than another, but the failure really lies at the feet of the C-suite. Not only is it the C-suite's job to understand the business they're in and make sensible decisions. . .
The project’s owner is the one responsible for its success. The c-suite is there to decide if they can succeed and allocate the resources where they need to go. If the team can’t advocate for itself that’s as much their own problem as anyone else’s.
EA also bought the studio, they didn’t create it. The studio’s culture had evident problems scaling up that you can see the seeds of from ME2 and DA:O onwards. They just got to be more and more of an albatross as their budgets and ambitions grew. EA made a bad bet expect BioWare to be able to increase the scope and scale of its projects as they did. The studio’s culture and processes and team evidently just weren’t up for it.
This, along with the vast majority of the issues you describe, is a failure of upper management, not of the Dragon Age devs working on making the game. The devs in question did not have the power...
This is including an unwillingness to just can the project when it turned out their live service model idea wasn’t working.
This, along with the vast majority of the issues you describe, is a failure of upper management, not of the Dragon Age devs working on making the game. The devs in question did not have the power to cancel the project or determine its direction and deadlines. Their only real choices were to work on the game under the parameters they were given or to resign (as some did). The bad decisions that resulted in the game underperforming seem pretty much all squarely the fault of the upper management, so blaming the devs who did not have the power to change those bad decisions seems pretty absurd to me. You insist that these devs must've failed to communicate that these were dumb ideas without any evidence that this is the case beyond the fact that upper management didn't listen to them and abandon their dumb ideas earlier, despite the fact that people resigned over those bad ideas being forced ahead.
Nah it’s top-to-bottom. It’s not even clear what “upper management” even means here since we’re talking about people across the company and at varying levels. Most of what EA is doing is providing...
Exemplary
This, along with the vast majority of the issues you describe, is a failure of upper management not of the Dragon Age devs working on making the game.
Nah it’s top-to-bottom. It’s not even clear what “upper management” even means here since we’re talking about people across the company and at varying levels. Most of what EA is doing is providing money and setting expectations, it’s not like BioWare’s own studio heads don’t get a say in what’s happening and aren’t advising about how things are going. They’re not helpless little babies here, they’re managers with decades of experience in the industry who should know how it works. How resources are allocated within the studio, the team culture, how the game is marketed, what the team works on are all choices made at varying degrees within BioWare or with input from the studio not exclusively EA. The choice to make the fantasy RPG live service game a Dragon Age game rather than a new IP too is probably more BioWare than EA.
And I know we don’t like live service junk, but the fact is if they set out to make a live service game they could have simply made a good live service game. They’re not my cup of tea but they exist. BioWare already has an MMORPG that’s well regarded under their belt even. They were inadequate to that task as well. You have to see a through line between a cultural inability to edit their own work and an inability to cancel a project that’s not working or trying to pursue failing ideas long past the point where it’s reasonable. The same thing happened with Andromeda where they got so fixated on a procedural world generator that did not work that it set the whole project back by like a year. They like the shiny things but they miss every big swing they take.
EA has other studios that do interesting stuff. Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzara were both under EA, they managed to do something cool and artistic without stumbling over themselves. This is the studio’s THIRD major bomb. They haven’t shipped a hit in a decade and even the hits they had before were marred by huge critical and/or commercial problems including DA2 and ME3. You can’t tell me every single one was hamstrung by commands from above and simply couldn’t succeed. Someone is telling their senior managers that this time will be different and we can do it to get their budgets greenlit and they’re blowing a lot of smoke up a lot of asses to do it.
We have to admit they just aren’t a well functioning studio and they can’t handle projects of the scale they’ve been trying to tackle. It’s looking like EA’s biggest mistake was thinking BioWare had what it took to make into a flagship studio.
They were, it's just that the money they were following dwarfs all the profits of ME or DA when you start looking at microtransaction farming nonsense. The simple issue is that many of these...
I can't even trust the MBAs at the company to follow the money.
They were, it's just that the money they were following dwarfs all the profits of ME or DA when you start looking at microtransaction farming nonsense.
The simple issue is that many of these studios WANT to be in the garbage mobile game market selling lootboxes, and are just trying to figure out what game will convert their audience to it.
As a Bioware fan since 2010, I had already realized some years ago that recent Bioware was not the same one as before. I've followed David Gaider for a bit (original DA series lead writer and a...
As a Bioware fan since 2010, I had already realized some years ago that recent Bioware was not the same one as before. I've followed David Gaider for a bit (original DA series lead writer and a Bioware OG) and between what he said, and people leaving the studio, it was sadly clear that the only thing left in the studio was the name. Every talent that delivered the fan favorites had already left.
At the risk of tying the proverbial onion to my belt, my favourites were definitely their oldest games: Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 + Throne of Bhaal are among my favourite games of all time. Huge...
At the risk of tying the proverbial onion to my belt, my favourites were definitely their oldest games:
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 + Throne of Bhaal are among my favourite games of all time. Huge beautifully rendered maps (filled with traps, secret passages, treasures with their own handwritten descriptions and gimmicks and monster encounters which would frequently tear your party apart on the initial try and challenge you to find ways to cheese them back), loads of easily missed companions and backstories (including some real genuinely "evil alignment" assholes!) and a story that just kept escalating the stakes. I have played many CRPGs since then (including Baldur's Gate 3 and the Pillars of Eternity series) but never found another game that hit quite like these. Dragon Age is fine for what it is, but does not feel remotely close to capturing the experience I had with Baldur's Gate.
Neverwinter Nights - Visually pretty janky even at the time of release with a pretty mediocre story to boot, but the robust D&D system they built in and the massive modability and support for campaign modules meant that fans released some true banger custom campaigns, many of which I can still remember today. The Hordes of the Underdark expansion also expanded the classes even further and was a fun campaign in its own right.
I don't dislike what they put out after that (KOTOR 1 and Jade Empire in particular I also like), but I have never felt as strongly about any of their games since.
What about Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood!! lol Those are great games. I always wanted to put together a Neverwinter Nights story module. The Aurora engine creation tool didn't seem too...
What about Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood!! lol
Those are great games. I always wanted to put together a Neverwinter Nights story module. The Aurora engine creation tool didn't seem too overwhelming to learn. I'm looking to the new NWN2 release, maybe I'll put effort into learning that creation tool instead.
I did not beat Jade Empire, but played enough for some first impressions. I just remember thinking the game felt very stiff, but that was a common problem for games of that generation I think. I just didn't think it quite met it's potential and could've knocked a sequel out of the park.
I've been a fan for a long time, since the original Baldur's Gate, and my love of the studio only grew after I learned that it sprang out of my hometown, and even further when my brother in law...
I've been a fan for a long time, since the original Baldur's Gate, and my love of the studio only grew after I learned that it sprang out of my hometown, and even further when my brother in law worked there for a number of years.
It's been quite frustrating to see their games crumble under EA's direction. I was even really excited for Anthem to keep growing! It's just that I finished the story after maybe a week, and then there were only a couple of worthwhile endgame activities, and the rest just fizzled. I really thought it had potential though.
A great video from Mr btongue from more than a decade ago, exploring how EA was destined to ruin BioWare. A video both insightful and entertaining in equal measure,
A great video from Mr btongue from more than a decade ago, exploring how EA was destined to ruin BioWare. A video both insightful and entertaining in equal measure,
Further down the MyBTongue line of successors, Noah Gervais recently published his revised and expanded Dragon Age series retrospective that now includes Veilguard. It's nearly 7 hours long so...
While I haven't played Veilguard none of this sounds surprising in the least, though certainly some interesting tidbits throughout. At this stage I would love to see the studio given a kind of...
While I haven't played Veilguard none of this sounds surprising in the least, though certainly some interesting tidbits throughout. At this stage I would love to see the studio given a kind of 'reset' opportunity, let each of the main DA and ME teams work on a smaller scale passion project with an original IP, much as Larian is planning to do with their next project. Who knows, we could get another Hi-Fi Rush or Pentiment - or Jade Empire, even - out of it along with a creatively recharged Bioware after years of turmoil. Could be a smart low risk, high reward investment for EA.
What an utter waste of a studio. Bioware bad no business getting into live service looter shooters, and the decision to attempt one absolutely destroyed them.
It's really frustrating that EA and Bkoware undervalued DA relative to ME since, as the article says, DAI was their best selling title. I can't even trust the MBAs at the company to follow the money.
I'm incredibly bitter about how all of this has turned out.
Eh, DA:I sold well but it relied largely on franchise affinity. The gameplay loop itself was getting a bit creaky and you can definitely see the evidence of poor scope management and badly thought out design choices that would doom every game after. It’s pretty clear that the studio’s culture was not suited to working with such large teams and budgets. When money constraints can’t force you to make editing choices you need serious project management discipline to keep you focused or you will flounder and that looks like just what happened with Bioware with both Andromeda and DA:I and now Veilguard. I never played Anthem, but I assume that went the same way.
When you’re putting money into a creative team you’re basically making a bet on them to succeed. It sounds like the Mass Effect team was run more professionally and simply did a better job of persuading people that they were a good bet.
When I look at that quote the decision to value the ME team more makes perfect sense. I’m going to be more willing to bet on Captain Picard than I would on Jack Sparrow, especially when it seems like they were able to actually create parts of the game that people loved. The DA team can say they could have made great stuff too if they had the same resources but it seems like they got a lot of rope to try before the ME folks came on and they kept stumbling.
I can't possibly see how you'd come to this conclusion from reading the article. It read more to me like the team had their ability to make the game repeatedly neutered by absurd requirements that are a poor match for the franchise and later being forced to retool the work for the ridiculous multiplayer version into a half-decent Dragon Age game due to time constraints that they had no control over.
Firstly the Mass Effect team came in and said the work was often shoddy and the reputation of the team is that they’re a listless pirate ship that floats around. That has nothing to do with the requirements put on them. The ME team is subject to the same shitty management as the DA team is, so presumably they understand the constraints as well. It’s not like they weren’t also kneecapped by dumb constraints when they did Andromeda.
Having managed product development in large enterprise, including ones that have gone pear shaped in part due to my own strategic errors, I can tell you that chaotic and poorly managed teams tend to have a lot of trouble pushing back on absurd or contradictory management demands. As a matter of fact, that is actually a core project management skill and an attribute of effective engineering teams to save business stakeholders from themselves. What usually happens is people have dumb demands and nobody on the team knows enough about what anyone else is doing to explain specifically why it’s a dumb idea. They just vaguely gesture at it being hard in ways that just sound like whining and end up getting steamrolled.
Bear in mind, Schrier’s sources here are all disgruntled BioWare people. Of course it just so happens to be that all the fault lies outside their team! I find it hard to believe that Veilguard sputtering due to many of the same issues that Inquisition had means the blame is solely on a late pivot. This game didn’t just underperform, it was a commercial bomb. And evidently it bombed despite being a perfectly average game. That speaks to a failure on multiple fronts, from marketing to gameplay that matched the player base’s expectations. This is including an unwillingness to just can the project when it turned out their live service model idea wasn’t working. Instead they threw good money after bad and tried to polish up the turd rather than resetting.
I just can't bring myself to blame a team for not pushing back hard enough or effectively enough against idiotic C-suite decisions. One team may be better at that than another, but the failure really lies at the feet of the C-suite. Not only is it the C-suite's job to understand the business they're in and make sensible decisions, but it's also their job to put these teams together in the first place.
If they build a team that they trust so little that they won't listen to its feedback, that is a problem of the C-suite's creation, not the team's creation.
The project’s owner is the one responsible for its success. The c-suite is there to decide if they can succeed and allocate the resources where they need to go. If the team can’t advocate for itself that’s as much their own problem as anyone else’s.
EA also bought the studio, they didn’t create it. The studio’s culture had evident problems scaling up that you can see the seeds of from ME2 and DA:O onwards. They just got to be more and more of an albatross as their budgets and ambitions grew. EA made a bad bet expect BioWare to be able to increase the scope and scale of its projects as they did. The studio’s culture and processes and team evidently just weren’t up for it.
This, along with the vast majority of the issues you describe, is a failure of upper management, not of the Dragon Age devs working on making the game. The devs in question did not have the power to cancel the project or determine its direction and deadlines. Their only real choices were to work on the game under the parameters they were given or to resign (as some did). The bad decisions that resulted in the game underperforming seem pretty much all squarely the fault of the upper management, so blaming the devs who did not have the power to change those bad decisions seems pretty absurd to me. You insist that these devs must've failed to communicate that these were dumb ideas without any evidence that this is the case beyond the fact that upper management didn't listen to them and abandon their dumb ideas earlier, despite the fact that people resigned over those bad ideas being forced ahead.
Nah it’s top-to-bottom. It’s not even clear what “upper management” even means here since we’re talking about people across the company and at varying levels. Most of what EA is doing is providing money and setting expectations, it’s not like BioWare’s own studio heads don’t get a say in what’s happening and aren’t advising about how things are going. They’re not helpless little babies here, they’re managers with decades of experience in the industry who should know how it works. How resources are allocated within the studio, the team culture, how the game is marketed, what the team works on are all choices made at varying degrees within BioWare or with input from the studio not exclusively EA. The choice to make the fantasy RPG live service game a Dragon Age game rather than a new IP too is probably more BioWare than EA.
And I know we don’t like live service junk, but the fact is if they set out to make a live service game they could have simply made a good live service game. They’re not my cup of tea but they exist. BioWare already has an MMORPG that’s well regarded under their belt even. They were inadequate to that task as well. You have to see a through line between a cultural inability to edit their own work and an inability to cancel a project that’s not working or trying to pursue failing ideas long past the point where it’s reasonable. The same thing happened with Andromeda where they got so fixated on a procedural world generator that did not work that it set the whole project back by like a year. They like the shiny things but they miss every big swing they take.
EA has other studios that do interesting stuff. Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzara were both under EA, they managed to do something cool and artistic without stumbling over themselves. This is the studio’s THIRD major bomb. They haven’t shipped a hit in a decade and even the hits they had before were marred by huge critical and/or commercial problems including DA2 and ME3. You can’t tell me every single one was hamstrung by commands from above and simply couldn’t succeed. Someone is telling their senior managers that this time will be different and we can do it to get their budgets greenlit and they’re blowing a lot of smoke up a lot of asses to do it.
We have to admit they just aren’t a well functioning studio and they can’t handle projects of the scale they’ve been trying to tackle. It’s looking like EA’s biggest mistake was thinking BioWare had what it took to make into a flagship studio.
They were, it's just that the money they were following dwarfs all the profits of ME or DA when you start looking at microtransaction farming nonsense.
The simple issue is that many of these studios WANT to be in the garbage mobile game market selling lootboxes, and are just trying to figure out what game will convert their audience to it.
As a Bioware fan since 2010, I had already realized some years ago that recent Bioware was not the same one as before. I've followed David Gaider for a bit (original DA series lead writer and a Bioware OG) and between what he said, and people leaving the studio, it was sadly clear that the only thing left in the studio was the name. Every talent that delivered the fan favorites had already left.
At the risk of tying the proverbial onion to my belt, my favourites were definitely their oldest games:
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 + Throne of Bhaal are among my favourite games of all time. Huge beautifully rendered maps (filled with traps, secret passages, treasures with their own handwritten descriptions and gimmicks and monster encounters which would frequently tear your party apart on the initial try and challenge you to find ways to cheese them back), loads of easily missed companions and backstories (including some real genuinely "evil alignment" assholes!) and a story that just kept escalating the stakes. I have played many CRPGs since then (including Baldur's Gate 3 and the Pillars of Eternity series) but never found another game that hit quite like these. Dragon Age is fine for what it is, but does not feel remotely close to capturing the experience I had with Baldur's Gate.
Neverwinter Nights - Visually pretty janky even at the time of release with a pretty mediocre story to boot, but the robust D&D system they built in and the massive modability and support for campaign modules meant that fans released some true banger custom campaigns, many of which I can still remember today. The Hordes of the Underdark expansion also expanded the classes even further and was a fun campaign in its own right.
I don't dislike what they put out after that (KOTOR 1 and Jade Empire in particular I also like), but I have never felt as strongly about any of their games since.
What about Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood!! lol
Those are great games. I always wanted to put together a Neverwinter Nights story module. The Aurora engine creation tool didn't seem too overwhelming to learn. I'm looking to the new NWN2 release, maybe I'll put effort into learning that creation tool instead.
I did not beat Jade Empire, but played enough for some first impressions. I just remember thinking the game felt very stiff, but that was a common problem for games of that generation I think. I just didn't think it quite met it's potential and could've knocked a sequel out of the park.
Add Westwood to the EA studio graveyard too.
Let’s go way back to Origin (OSI).
I've been a fan for a long time, since the original Baldur's Gate, and my love of the studio only grew after I learned that it sprang out of my hometown, and even further when my brother in law worked there for a number of years.
It's been quite frustrating to see their games crumble under EA's direction. I was even really excited for Anthem to keep growing! It's just that I finished the story after maybe a week, and then there were only a couple of worthwhile endgame activities, and the rest just fizzled. I really thought it had potential though.
A great video from Mr btongue from more than a decade ago, exploring how EA was destined to ruin BioWare. A video both insightful and entertaining in equal measure,
Further down the MyBTongue line of successors, Noah Gervais recently published his revised and expanded Dragon Age series retrospective that now includes Veilguard.
It's nearly 7 hours long so take it chapter at a time.
While I haven't played Veilguard none of this sounds surprising in the least, though certainly some interesting tidbits throughout. At this stage I would love to see the studio given a kind of 'reset' opportunity, let each of the main DA and ME teams work on a smaller scale passion project with an original IP, much as Larian is planning to do with their next project. Who knows, we could get another Hi-Fi Rush or Pentiment - or Jade Empire, even - out of it along with a creatively recharged Bioware after years of turmoil. Could be a smart low risk, high reward investment for EA.