BioWare Reshuffles Staff - Dragon Age: The Veilguard Team Dispersed Across EA Studio Network

[T0@st]

Hello Everyone. We are turning towards the future and preparing for the next chapter in BioWare's story. As we announced in August 2023, we are changing how we build games to meet the needs of our upcoming projects and hold ourselves to the highest quality standards. Now that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been released, a core team at BioWare is developing the next Mass Effect game under the leadership of veterans from the original trilogy, including Mike Gamble, Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts, Parrish Ley, and others.

In keeping with our fierce commitment to innovating during the development and delivery of Mass Effect, we have challenged ourselves to think deeply about delivering the best experience to our fans. We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare. Given this stage of development, we don't require support from the full studio. We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit. Today's news will see BioWare become a more agile, focused studio that produces unforgettable RPGs. We appreciate your support as we build a new future for BioWare. Gary McKay—General Manager, BioWare



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[lilhasselhoffer]

So....not happy that the studio is dying. That said, you make garbage games and you have garbage sales figures.

I'm almost interested in seeing how gender identity exists within the reapers, who by nature are composed of insanely huge amounts of people turned into a slurry and built into a warship...but then I know I'm joking. Modern Bioware might actually spend a huge amount of time exploring that.


This was the company that had the chutzpah to actually explore the near sterilization of a "problem" species...that now has large sections about misgendering someone. I...god, it sucks living long enough to see everything I love die.

 

[AsRock]

We'll see, i have no faith, not going to upto date with it as i am expecting it to be nothing special so will not be holding my breath for sure.

And if DA was there high standards god help us.

focused studio that produces unforgettable RPGs

So far for the wrong reasons.

 

[GenericUsername2001]

I'm almost interested in seeing how gender identity exists within the reapers, who by nature are composed of insanely huge amounts of people turned into a slurry and built into a warship...but then I know I'm joking. Modern Bioware might actually spend a huge amount of time exploring that.

You know, that could actually be a pretty interesting part of the game's storyline, exploring how the people getting turned into reapers impacts how the reaper views itself, but would require a really good writer who knows how to address the issue subtly & groks the mindset of the actual potential customers of the game and how they will react to the writing. Obviously I don't think Veilguard writers would be anywhere up to this task. That is something that should come up with any sort of creative work being produced for sale - the people writing it need to know who the actual customers are, and need to understand what the customers think and why they think that way. The writers don't necessarily have to agree with the customers on everything mind you, but they need to put the customers wants & desires ahead of their own if they want the work to actually sell. Heck, even if you are writing outright propaganda you need to have a pretty good knowledge of why people oppose whatever you are trying to change their minds on before you can attempt to influence them.

 

[Bruno Vieira]

They should have sent all those people home to make an example. What a disappointing game

 

[ZoneDymo]

I mean....how meaningless is that, what you think this is the first time and the people working there are the same from 10+ years ago?

 

[Icon Charlie]

They should have sent all those people home to make an example. What a disappointing game

This is a result of a problem that started over 30 years ago. People started to see the noticable changes in various sectors of industry starting around 2010. This is during the time of "The Age of Free Money".

This is one game out of many that has flopped because of DEV's/ corporate mangagement putting themselves and their ideology into what they are creating.

People just want to play games. They will play games and pay money. Lots of money... just to escape the stressful reality of what is going on in everyday living.

And I'm very much aware of that. I have to so I can keep abreast of the changes in the industry I invest into. As well as to make money in those changes that do happen.

This MindVirus affected my bottom line on several occassions. Pissed me off in others.

The only happy thing about all of this... Is enough people are voting with their wallets and I hope it continues because...

A lot of good DEV's got black listed, frozen out, been silenced our of fear of losing their jobs in the industry because of their differences that was not with the mantra of the MindVirus of Abject Stupity.

A lot of creativity got shafted because of the gatekeepers that want to bestode. "Their Truths on to you and only their message are allowed to enter the Gates of Creativity".

If you want this industry to flourish, keep voting with your wallet and invest your time into independent companies that have the vision of putting out great content without the politics.

As an investor in this sector of the industry, IMHO... You don't need AAA companies anymore. They are too bloated. Both top end managment as well as the overall quality of product being done by developers affected by the MindVirus.

And if they continue to down this road of wasting money. It will hurt their bottom line.

Companies like UbiSoft went all in on forgetting their customer base and forcing their ideology into their games.
They are almost bankrupt.

EA and their spindoctoring announcement, well I speak MarketCopium, so I'll translate what they have said and remove the word salad and market speak for the masses to read.

Dragon Age: The VeilGuard lost hundreds of millions of dollars in their attempt of forcing "The Narrative" to their customer base. We will take those failures what worked on that content... Chose the ones that still retain value and layoff (fire) the rest. We will save money by the layoffs as well as cut out many from our lousy workforce that did not make it by merit. The results will be an increase in profit to show our shareholders that we are doing better than the previous quarter earnings.

Vote with your wallet. As an invester, I do.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

I mean....how meaningless is that, what you think this is the first time and the people working there are the same from 10+ years ago?

You have an excellent point. Now the counter. "If nobody was there from the old days, why does the publisher still act as though unreasonable deadlines and insane asks are just going to become a good game?" This is why multiple reports suggest "The Bioware Magic" was something EA counted on.

Let me then finish squaring the circle. I poked fun because the expectation that the same Bioware who had you potentially capping Wrex is not the same Bioware that tiptoes around gender identities. They were the people who could write a decent game about exploring the reapers as something that might be understandable, not the Bioware that delivered us a three color ending choice or the abomination that was Andromeda.


I don't like people losing their job...but if you're dangerously incompetent then maybe you should. If I ordered a cheeseburger and received a mass of needles wrapped in a used birthday balloon, covered in raw sewage, I'd basically tell the people who handed it to me that they were getting a call from the health board, not keeping them around. That would influence the person who dutifully went out and procured sewage, but at some point everyone has to see what their contributions mean. Heck, that's why so many of the old guard left.


For this exact reason I:
1) Don't want another World of Warcraft.
2) Don't want an Obsidian Fallout New Vegas 2
3) Don't want a Bungie Marathon.
4) Don't want anything touched by Bioware


It's not really fair to expect past successes to mean future successes when post game layoffs basically restart studios each time...but that's more reason to be apathetic to new releases until they are reviewed by someone not in the access media... That's a lot of apathy.

 

[AusWolf]

Who didn't see this coming? Anyone?

 

[Aquilino]

Why don't they try to fix it up like No Man's Sky devs have done instead of leaving the hot pile and losing the trust of their customers?
But of course excuses are cheaper.

 

[Baccala]

They should have sent all those people home to make an example. What a disappointing game

Unfortunately if you hire somebody just because theyre different, youre essentially admitting to discrimination in many layoff situations. I am not saying everybody on that team was hired just to fulfil a quota. I'm not saying there arent any great people on that team. In all likelihood there are people on that team that were both hired to fulfil a quota and were also great. We know thats not the case across the board though. So, instead of getting rid of the poison, youre forced to insert small amounts of poison in parts of your organization that may have been perfectly healthy yesterday.

 

[Onasi]

Why don't they try to fix it up like No Man's Sky devs have done instead of leaving the hot pile and losing the trust of their customers?
But of course excuses are cheaper.

Because it’s not a freeform sandbox lacking features, like NMS was. And it doesn’t really have technical issues worth noting. It’s a narrative based linear RPG (barely one, but still). The issues with the game are fundamental, they are in the very bedrock, the premise established by the studio for the project itself is deeply fucked. Everything, from the narrative and dialogue to a lot of systems, like the fact that in this “party-based RPG” your party members don’t actually exist as separate entities and are just awesome buttons for you to push during combat. In short, it’s unfixable. The “fix” is nuking everything post Origins (narratively too) and returning to that model of game, but I strongly suspect that the shambling corpse that is modern day BioWare is incapable of that.

 

[Wasteland]

October, 2024: Bioware's selling a new RPG for $70!

January 2025: EA's selling Bioware for $70!

(both are overpriced)

 

[dirtyferret]

EA hates computer games. That's nothing new. Activision hated computer games and Ubisoft hates computer games. Everything needs to be console friendly and played with a controller for these guys. I have nothing against console games but when you take cRPG and RTS games and dumb them down they suck. Elden Ring and Assassins Creed are great games, great action games, they are not RPGs. They have a flavor of an RPG to them but that's all. EA wanted Dragon Age to be a similar style game it's just the classic square peg into a round hole situation.

BioWare veterans confirm they were laid off by EA, including senior Dragon Age and Mass Effect devs

EA refused to acknowledge layoffs in yesterday's announcement about BioWare's downsizing, but they're happening.

www.pcgamer.com

I'm also reminded of comments made by former BioWare writer and designer David Gaider, who said in 2023 that attitudes about writers at the studio had soured prior to his departure in 2016. "Even BioWare, which built its success on a reputation for good stories and characters, slowly turned from a company that vocally valued its writers to one where we were... quietly resented, with a reliance on expensive narrative seen as the 'albatross' holding the company back," Gaider wrote at the time.

"Maybe that sounds like a heavy charge, but it's what I distinctly felt up until I left in 2016. Suddenly all anyone in charge was asking was 'how do we have LESS writing?' A good story would simply happen, via magic wand, rather than be something that needed support and priority."

 

[AusWolf]

EA hates computer games. That's nothing new. Activision hated computer games and Ubisoft hates computer games. Everything needs to be console friendly and played with a controller for these guys. I have nothing against console games but when you take cRPG and RTS games and dumb them down they suck. Elden Ring and Assassins Creed are great games, great action games, they are not RPGs. They have a flavor of an RPG to them but that's all. EA wanted Dragon Age to be a similar style game it's just the classic square peg into a round hole situation.

BioWare veterans confirm they were laid off by EA, including senior Dragon Age and Mass Effect devs

EA refused to acknowledge layoffs in yesterday's announcement about BioWare's downsizing, but they're happening.

www.pcgamer.com

I'm also reminded of comments made by former BioWare writer and designer David Gaider, who said in 2023 that attitudes about writers at the studio had soured prior to his departure in 2016. "Even BioWare, which built its success on a reputation for good stories and characters, slowly turned from a company that vocally valued its writers to one where we were... quietly resented, with a reliance on expensive narrative seen as the 'albatross' holding the company back," Gaider wrote at the time.

"Maybe that sounds like a heavy charge, but it's what I distinctly felt up until I left in 2016. Suddenly all anyone in charge was asking was 'how do we have LESS writing?' A good story would simply happen, via magic wand, rather than be something that needed support and priority."

There's no more story at EA and Ubisoft. Only endless, repetitive fetch quests. Oh, and ray tracing. Because you can't have a game without ray tracing, obviously.

 

[dirtyferret]

Because you can't have a game without ray tracing, obviously.

Skyrim with RT is like playing an entirely new game, no more arrows in the knee

 

[KLMR]

Thats all those SUITs are able to do. When people forgot that most people learn from their mistakes?
How EA, UBISOFT, ACTIVISION, SQUARE, etc. will learn if they blow up a studio every time they flop?
Who is going to ask, what we did wrong? what was good? where did we fail? what can we improve?

Bussiness schools are a cancer of our society: they only teach swot, pareto, "agile" and the most important subject: "how to get bonusses for incompetence, hide and run".

 

[AusWolf]

Thats all those SUITs are able to do. When people forgot that most people learn from their mistakes?
How EA, UBISOFT, ACTIVISION, SQUARE, etc. will learn if they blow up a studio every time they flop?
Who is going to ask, what we did wrong? what was good? where did we fail? what can we improve?

Bussiness schools are a cancer of our society: they only teach swot, pareto, "agile" and the most important subject: "how to get bonusses for incompetence, hide and run".

And the idea of lean: doing twice the work with half the staff by overworking everyone until they get exhausted enough to achieve under targets so you can fire them.

 

[KLMR]

And the idea of lean: doing twice the work with half the staff by overworking everyone until they get exhausted enough to achieve under targets so you can fire them.

Well they took enginering terms from quality, from production, from statistics, from programing and made their own salad for ignorants.
lean?
agile?
six sigma?

I want to add another new branch: the "artists". Like if games were made by monkeys up to 2020. Now games are full of "artists". Didn't kings quest had artists? Prince or persia? Day of the tentacle? KOTOR, WOW, diablo? theme hospital? populous? broken sword? mass effect? overwatch? tomb raider? not to mention in nintendo's games or sega's games (but those are asians, they write in art.. said the MBA after his 5-star hotel trip to India WTF!?!)
I'm tired of seeing thumbnails of texture-maker's interviews as game devs with 0 knowledge of the game.
Maybe the problem is caused by the industry of game engines, another problem for the gamer: homongenous content, generic games, full of polygons, textures and shaders no PC can handle.
Example: Indiana Jones and the Nth Generic Adventure. The mechanics, the combat, omg...

 

[AusWolf]

Well they took enginering terms from quality, from production, from statistics, from programing and made their own salad for ignorants.
lean?
agile?
six sigma?

I want to add another new branch: the "artists". Like if games were made by monkeys up to 2020. Now games are full of "artists". Didn't kings quest had artists? Prince or persia? Day of the tentacle? KOTOR, WOW, diablo? theme hospital? populous? broken sword? mass effect? overwatch? tomb raider? not to mention in nintendo's games or sega's games (but those are asians, they write in art.. said the MBA after his 5-star hotel trip to India WTF!?!)
I'm tired of seeing thumbnails of texture-maker's interviews as game devs with 0 knowledge of the game.
Maybe the problem is caused by the industry of game engines, another problem for the gamer: homongenous content, generic games, full of polygons, textures and shaders no PC can handle.
Example: Indiana Jones and the Nth Generic Adventure. The mechanics, the combat, omg...

The problem lies in the word "industry". AAA gaming isn't art anymore. It's an industry. Applying the formula. Every single time. There's no more art in it than in your Nth iteration of the BMW whatever series.

 

[KLMR]

It is true that now "industry" incorporates the concept of soul-less. But that hasn't been historically. Most bussines owners and instrustry chiefs had sould and vision not so long ago, in tech (HP, xerox, IBM even Apple), car manufacturers (long list), gadgets: sony, fuji, b&o, jvc. In furniture. You mention it. Most companies grew and stablish because of iconic high-quality distinguisable products. Even dupond invented great things. Its when "administration in bussiness experts" copped the executive positions when industry became what it is now: soul-less. a brand, a hollow shell of beautiful bad-written meaningless press releases.