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Bioware Closing Down
- Thread starter Richie
- Start date
At this rate, 'The Coalition' Gears of War creators will be next!
Really bummed out by this news.
I only went back and watched the ME5 teaser trailer a few weeks back and was seeing if I could find any news about it. Gutted. I wasn't a die hard Bioware fan but man the original Mass Effect trilogy is easily in my top 5 or 10 games of all time.
I only went back and watched the ME5 teaser trailer a few weeks back and was seeing if I could find any news about it. Gutted. I wasn't a die hard Bioware fan but man the original Mass Effect trilogy is easily in my top 5 or 10 games of all time.
Maybe the fundamental problem is simply that games get exponentially harder to produce as the team size increases? That's certainly my view as someone that has actually been there and done that.
DEI/woke/whatever it is the ragebaiters convince you is the root of all evil....it's just noise round the edges. The underlying issue is how few organisations are actually able to make 1000+ game dev teams work. It's absolutely monumentally challenging in a way that people who haven't worked in the specific field of game dev will not understand.
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And is that also related to how graphically intense the games have to look nowadays? As the consoles get more powerful, the games have to look better and hence more people are needed to achieve it.
Glad that you've said that with some experience IRL. I have no experience in game dev, but I've gone into plenty of companies to try to fix things, and scale / structure is the key problem in the vast majority of cases.
Companies get bigger and bigger as the demands and expectations grow, and creating the right structures to actually control and direct all of the disparate teams is unbelievably tricky.
I can only imagine how much harder that is in the world of gaming where you're not just trying to create a technological product, but also create a coherent piece of art and storytelling.
This. Games are very technically ambitious these days and frankly, the ambition is massively outpacing the time, money and skill available to deliver it. The audience is no better, they expect more and more and more and expect to pay less for it with every release.
Rock Star seems to be the only exception to this trend. Even then, their games are buggy on release and perform poorly on moderate hardware a lot of the time. GTA 5 was a bit of a pig at launch but they got the fundamentals right which carried it through that initial release cycle and into the critically acclaimed status it has now.
They also have not released a game in years and the hype around GTA6 is insane. It’s inevitable it will disappoint at this rate.
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Basically, yes, the colossal amount of assets required for AAA games these days. Needs a LOT of artist, designers, and support staff.
I will say this on the whole woke nonsense stuff....I think there is a fundamental problem here, again related to scale, not 'woke', but in general, diversity in it's most objective definition.
When you are a massive studio with 1000 people working on your latest fantasy RPG....there is absolutely no way on gods earth that you can physically populate that dev team with 100% people who are fantasy RPG nerds...and this goes for all kinds of projects. You naturally, because there is a finite supply of game developers, will end up with a broad variety of developers with their own favourites genres and styles of game. This is good in some ways as it can broaden the appeal of your games, but it can also dilute the creative vision, make decisions more drawn out, and make herding the 1000s of people into one producing a coherent gameplay experience a lot more challenging. Perhaps exacerbated by there being very few leaders who are capable of stamping their authority on a team that large and bringing people into line effectively. There's a handful of larger studios that manage it but they are few and far between and it has taken them a LONG time to get there.
It's not a DEI problem. It's a scale problem. There is plenty of room for all kinds of developers to make all kinds of game, but smooshing everyone together in one team is always going to create difficulties.
The industry is going to realign around smaller teams that are more focused, instead of these gigantic game factories like MS/EA/Ubisoft. Bulkhead is good example of the future. I don't agree with everying their CEO says but he's spot on with this approach of smaller budget, but a small, focused team that are all laser-focused on the genre of game they're making. It's simply impossible to have that kind of focus once teams go over a certain size.
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Size of the team?
The main writing team for the last Dragon Age game. Look who was leading the team. Guy with the blue hair.
The main writing team for the last Dragon Age game. Look who was leading the team. Guy with the blue hair.
- Lead Writer: Trick (Patrick) Weekes managed the team and oversaw the overarching plot (having previously taken over the franchise lead from series creator David Gaider during Inquisition). [1, 2, 3]
- The Main Writing Staff: Brianne Battye, John Dombrow, Sylvia Feketekuty, Mary Kirby, Lukas Kristjanson, Sheryl Chee, Courtney Woods, and Jo Berry. [1]
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Soldato
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Patrick Weekes? This guy who has now deleted all his historic tweets?
Seems like this wasn't a size of team issue.
Patrick Weekes? This guy who has now deleted all his historic tweets?
Seems like this wasn't a size of team issue.
Blue hair? Check
Soy face? Check
Neck beard/ no chin? Check
I don't know who this individual is, but these walking cliche activists make games for the 0.1% and it turns out 0.1% of the 0.1% buy them. Oh dear. Oh no. How awful. Oh well.
Let the gaming Reconquista commence, it's coming boys.
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Something that has been blatantly obvious for a long time, but sadly went unspoken for a multitude of reasons.
I do agree with earlier statements that studio bloat is a problem for a lot of AA/AAA releases, but you need to consider why things became so bloated. Executives were listening to the wrong people, and then hiring practises acted in a cascade manner as a result to hire the worst possible candidates enmasse relating to weird real world biases.
Said bloat is also not relevant when the biggest problems for a game relates to the writing quality, being the case for Veilguard which had a fairly small overall team for that specific area of development. While there was a certain (poor) measure of competence to the overarching storyline, the overall depth, understanding of lore, and character interactions were horrendous. The leads and no doubt other hires were all extremely politically driven with agendas. They were not interested in making a good game so much as pandering (or desperately playing it safe due to the cancel anyone brigade) and the end result was what I would expect from a dodgy tween fanfiction, it was hot garbage if I'm to stop being polite about it all.
Technically speaking the game looked good and ran well, I disliked the art direction but again that isn't a complaint you can put down to bloat.
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Nah I’m good and im actually going to have a very good day of Hobby’s and a little bit of work around the house and family time.
You also shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people are getting a kick out of this as it’s all right there.
One of the major negatives was that the game was preachy and moved away from the dark and more gritty feel to Disney marvel slop.
The main lead writer happens to have the elusive blue hair. The studio hired on political beliefs.
The game sold like crap and now people who were very brash on socials are having to deal with consequences of their actions and choices.
That’s accountability.
You also shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people are getting a kick out of this as it’s all right there.
One of the major negatives was that the game was preachy and moved away from the dark and more gritty feel to Disney marvel slop.
The main lead writer happens to have the elusive blue hair. The studio hired on political beliefs.
The game sold like crap and now people who were very brash on socials are having to deal with consequences of their actions and choices.
That’s accountability.
Oh I’m not surprised. I’m just surprised people focus so much time on such a trivial issue. Each to their own, I know I won’t be on my death bed wishing I’d spent more time being angry about video game employees.
Didn’t see the same uproar about the current MI5 recruitment* practices but then I guess that’s not as important to some as computer games lol.
received an email about this and then I saw it was restricted initially to minorities and women. If that’s a positive or a negative depends on the individual.
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People can multitask
People can multitask
No evidence of that from what I’ve seen on here. Aside from being wrong about multiple things, guess that counts.
I can’t even hobby and listen to audio book lol, concentrate too much on not messing up and then don’t listen.
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I've seen folks on twitter echo similar thought, and also say well bioware has always had gay characters, yes true but the 2 are entirely different.
Old Bioware: here's character A, who happens to be gay. Focused on story 1st.
New Bioware: here's Gay character A, they are Gay, yes you heard us, they're Gay, yup Gay aren't we amazing. GAAAAAAAAAY. Focused on character sexuality 1st with story a distant 2nd.
Old Bioware: play our game, its good!
New Bioware: we don't like your political and social views so don't play our game, in fact you deserve to die for said politcal and social views.
So yeah, it's not really that surprising the 'chuds' are taking victory laps and dunking on these clowns that have infested video games. As i said before I've no issue with studio's whose employees tell 80% of their potential player base to not buy their product go down the *******.
Maybe one day they'll start concentrating on just making games instead of activism with a slice of gaming. If people disagree with that general sentiment, well then they are probably one of the handful that thought DA:V was a good game
