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[Polygon] The press is not your enemy, BioWare
- Thread starter Deleted member 44371
- Start date
A lot of developers I know don't think of the press as their enemy...unless the press hates their game with excessively. A lot of them silenty agree with us. It's a fucking shame they can't speak out without fear of being canned or blacklisted.
Edit: I bet a lot of bioware devs don't agree with the PR bullshit, just gonna throw that out there.
Edit: I bet a lot of bioware devs don't agree with the PR bullshit, just gonna throw that out there.
I wouldn't expect any other response by Bioware. Certain members of the team were called out in the article. Any company worth a crap would distance itself from such a report lest alienating current and potential future talent. It doesn't mean what was reported was untrue, irresponsible or unprofessional by Jason. He has his business interests in publishing the story and Bioware has theirs in admitting in general that there were problems but not cooperating.
Shame on no one as far as this latest development in Anthem history is concerned.
Shame on no one as far as this latest development in Anthem history is concerned.
I think in general the engine is not versatile and shouldn't be used on anything but BF games. I think we have seen enough testimony that the engine has unnecessary roadblocks that simply confound most devs. I don't think it's a matter of "git good" at using it. Both EA and Bioware are responsible for the issues. EA literally pulled devs from Anthem to work on Fifa because of Frostbite. Not to mention releasing unfinished products at EA is not just a Bioware problem. Dice has those problems just as bad. EA has plenty of responsibility in half games getting released. It seems to be an epidemic at the company.
That's a weird thread considering how much of the article is basically about dumping on "Jon Warner, design director Preston Watamaniuk, art director Derek Watts, animation director Parrish Ley, and a handful of other Mass Effect veterans".
I have not played Anthem due to all of the issues, but I love their past work so I have been staying positive on Biowares future and assumed they would get this game fixed and great.
Apparently, that is not happening and now we have them acting like man babies on Twitter. Deflecting perceived attacks on them, providing no solutions, continuing to break their game with patches, when it despatatdky needs to be turned around. This is sad to watch. They really do seem like a husk of a studio with the magic that's had in the past apparently gone.
Have they lost a lot of the team that made their great games? Seems like it. I won't be surprised if this kills them in the end. It's not what I want but there may be no other way forward :/
Apparently, that is not happening and now we have them acting like man babies on Twitter. Deflecting perceived attacks on them, providing no solutions, continuing to break their game with patches, when it despatatdky needs to be turned around. This is sad to watch. They really do seem like a husk of a studio with the magic that's had in the past apparently gone.
Have they lost a lot of the team that made their great games? Seems like it. I won't be surprised if this kills them in the end. It's not what I want but there may be no other way forward :/
It also singled out Patrick Söderlund for making "full of razor blades" Frostbite mandatory and for changing the entire direction of the game based on a whim after sitting down with a brief demo that was totally faked.
I don't believe that's inaccurate but cmon what do you want them to say?
So sad to see the developers of my favorite franchise in this sad state. I hope all the best for the developers who are caught in this management mess.
I get the desired to always blame EA but Bioware isn't the same Bioware that released Jade Empire, KOTOR or Mass Effect. Sure , Casey is there, but he left and came back and it's not better. The leadership of Bioware is Bioware for better or worse. We can wax glowingly about the "old days" but that is over. The individual devs can do nothing if their leadership is bad. This is Bioware now.
I Remember posts in the one anthem thread a month ago stating it was BioWare a fault that they couldn't use frostbite correctly. Yet here we are, the engine sucks to work with.....all the good software engineers get pulled for FIFA and other shit. It's simple, the frostbite engine as a mandate is garbage.
I have no faith in them using anthems engine for DA4 when the word frostbite is still going to be all over that shit.
I have no faith in them using anthems engine for DA4 when the word frostbite is still going to be all over that shit.
Did you read the article? EA is a major reason Anthem is the shitshow it is now.
Between them being forced to make design choices they didn't want to make in order to make an "acceptable" demo for that EA executive, EA then pulling away Biowares best Frostbite engineers for fucking FIFA of all things, and then add onto that EAs apparent practice of giving Frostbite help more readily to games that make more money? They butchered Anthem just as bad as Bioware did.
Complete and total change in leadership is required, along with significant effort towards reforming how they operate and treat employees.
BioWare and EA would be wise to take a good hard look, as well as bring in some management consulting firms to evaluate, and really reassess their reporting and management structure in order to better empower their workforce to actually get their concerns and ideas heard and taken seriously. Along with ensuring the right people are promoted into positions of management. Especially before starting in earnest on any new projects like DA4. Their response is to be expected, though rather shitty all the same, but however boilerplate a response it may be I hope that doesn't mean they're ignoring the issue entirely. At the very least that's just really stupid and bad business practice to allow your workforce to go to pieces, you know along with just doing right by your workers and being decent people.
Bioware is EA and EA is Bioware. They are the same. While the response was posted under Bioware, you can bet that it was cosigned and coauthored by higher ups at Bioware, EA, and whatever PR or legal team assigned to check it.
I don't really have an affinity to bioware I haven't really played any of their games... I just know that development studios usually have little control over what ends up happening when they're partnered with a publisher like EA.
Well based off of the Kotaku article it's a bit of both. EA forced Bioware into doing things they didn't wanna do and hindered their progress substantially. But at the same time Bioware made plenty of egregious errors and mistakes on their own.
Did you read the article? Bioware had no idea where they wanted the game to go, and internally found the build they had taken home to test boring.
"Fucking Fifa of all things"
Yeah, why would EA want the best people working on one of the most successful and popular games in the world as it migrated to a new engine?
Biowares inability to lock down a direction they wanted the game to go in is why the game is a shit show. All those years wasted going back and forth with no clear directive.
If EA had have been more heavy handed before 2017 we wouldn't have been served up shit.
It's very clear from that story, and from the way Jason's internal sources talked about the issues, that this is almost purely a managerial and higher-up issue within BioWare.
I said the fault lies with both sides. I know Bioware made numerous unforced errors on it's own, but EA did nothing to help the matter by taking away their best engineers and forcing them to make design decisions they didn't wanna make.
I understand. While all publishers have close studios, EA has probably closed the most (no source.)
Seeing how you even post your own Twitter thread in this thread, I need to talk about this: Journalists who have information they trust but decide to only openly tease just enough to start the rumour mill but without giving any information of note are not doing a good job. Either you trust your sources and are able to dig deeper into the story or you don't and it's not worth reporting on. This "Ooooh, I know something you don't, hehe!" shit is just going to fuel unfounded speculation, leading to people blaming any singular person they want to attach to your thread.
Report on it or don't report on it. But this weird flexing helps no one but your own ego. Sorry for the harsh words, but I've seen this a little to often in this industry and it's just not a good look.
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I disagree. It feels like a 80/20 situation against Bioware at best. EA didn't pay the bills for Bioware to fuck around in preproduction with no direction for 4 years. The leads at Bioware chose the direction of the game, then slowly fell apart as they realized they had neither the skills or tools to build that game and wasted time they could have used to get there. From the tone of the article, EA was fairly hands off until that disasterous demo on holiday 2016, when the president of the company finally called them out on delivering something that was a pale joke of what they said they were making. EA demanding the game come out before the end of their FY is their biggest error, imo. More than frostbyte, because according to the articles sources the game was absolutely coming together those final 6 months. But after being in development for 6 fucking years, I can't blame them for wanting to ship a game.
Bioware is now an irrelevant shell of it's former self, churning out broken, half-hearted trash under the guise of AAA games. The fact that they would rather make these statements instead of making meaningful changes and improvements to their company, employees, and products is a failure of company leadership and indicative of their culture and values.
Casey Hudson? Dude left Bioware right as Anthem was hitting a brick wall and then came back to force out a game that didn't meet expectations. Did his sabbatical cause him to develop an ego that said only he knew best?
OP
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Exactly what I was thinking. Seriously, whats up with the teasing and rumorspreading. Just tell us the info or keep it to yourself.
Now that BioWare is dead can please someone competent work on another Mass Effect?
The response from them is so basic PR it has no meaning except for they don't seem to care. Which is sad. BioWare delivered some great games but in the end it's just the name of studio, not the developers that stick around. Old BioWare is long gone.
The response from them is so basic PR it has no meaning except for they don't seem to care. Which is sad. BioWare delivered some great games but in the end it's just the name of studio, not the developers that stick around. Old BioWare is long gone.
Well, it does truly seem that Bioware of old is no more. I have absolutely no expectations of the studio. If DOA4 turns out not to be a disaster, I will be surprised.
I believe you that some devs are that way
However -- surely you realize that in other different fields of big business, employees also cannot publically talk shit about their own company?
Boy.
This spiraled quickly. I've felt this whole time that BioWare has been doing far too much public speaking for the state that the game launched in and is still currently in.
Heads down, nose to the grindstone. At this point, people want to be shown, not told. Honestly, I'm sure a lot of people were frustrated with this approach when Hello Games applied it as they worked their asses off to turn the ship around on No Man's Sky... but by not constantly putting out statements and tweets, people's disappointment and anger faded to the back until that studio had an updated product to show to the public, not to tell them about.
Show us, BioWare. Jesus.
EDIT: To be fair, I don't recall if No Man's Sky went dark fairly quickly or not, but that was the strategy that ended up working for them, nonetheless.
This spiraled quickly. I've felt this whole time that BioWare has been doing far too much public speaking for the state that the game launched in and is still currently in.
Heads down, nose to the grindstone. At this point, people want to be shown, not told. Honestly, I'm sure a lot of people were frustrated with this approach when Hello Games applied it as they worked their asses off to turn the ship around on No Man's Sky... but by not constantly putting out statements and tweets, people's disappointment and anger faded to the back until that studio had an updated product to show to the public, not to tell them about.
Show us, BioWare. Jesus.
EDIT: To be fair, I don't recall if No Man's Sky went dark fairly quickly or not, but that was the strategy that ended up working for them, nonetheless.
I mean, you'd think they'd then take advantage of a lot of the work done on The Old Republic, but the article makes it seem like they didn't do much of that, either.
as far as I can recall, they went dark almost immediately
It's classic "Not Invented Here Syndrome." They probably could have taken the inventory system from ME:A or DA:I and fixed it, but it is always tempting to start over with a perfect custom in house solution. Every software company struggles with it.
https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/not_invented_here_syndrome.html
Agree with the show, don't tell sentiment. But after a PR shitshow, going dark can be a double-edged sword as the devs at Hello Games can tell you after receiving multiple death threads, etc...
But damn did they turn that fucking ship around in a tremendous fashion after all them free updates/patches & full VR support!
Well, they should've certainly listened to the people who had worked on it seeing as they were much more experienced with developing a big online game. I'm not sure how much actual tech they could've used from that, though, as KOTOR wasn't built with Frostbite.
from what I recall, he was the Bioware guy who gets angry and hates on white people a lot?
Basically. Ruffles the easily riled up feathers.
Man, after a I had some time to think about the Bioware statement..... I'm not sure if I want to purchase a Bioware game for awhile. Or an EA game.
Just.... I mean, will this get to the point were we need "crunch free" stickers on game ads/boxes? Like the "Rainforest Safe" coco and "free trade" stuff?
i personally put it all on Bioware. They've dealt with the constraints that EA has put on them for a decade... why the sudden change? its no wonder that the execs that did anthem and andromeda are different form the previous teams that we are used to.
exactly. there's nothing surprising about what's happened here at all.
