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Laidlaw: Dragon Age 4's dev team was reduced to "a very small skeleton crew” [UP: ominous tweet]
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
...Is there? I wanna say the first few pages are a mix of "Who cares, Bioware sux now!!11" and "They'll staff up after Anthem."
When I read it I certainly didn't think DA4 would get to completion with just a handful of people, just that much of their devs had been switched to Anthem for now.
If Anthem takes off, I could see SWTOR being slowly spun down (especially if Disney wants to give other publishers a shot with the Star Wars license) and the staff that worked on it being put on Dragon Age. I'm not sure how much money they make off SWTOR, but I imagine a console GaaS title like Anthem would make them significantly more.
I really hope for Biowares sake that Anthem is worth all the trouble they are pouring a ton of resources into it.
Even if DAI wasn't what ppl wanted I still blame EA. I blame EA for mismanaging BioWare by imposing EA hires, making way too big plans for BioWare over 3 studios and migrate other shuttered teams like Mythic and BigHuge with BioWare the same way the Montreal people have been migrated to Motive.
You cannot retain a consistent company culture or mentality to developing the type of games you trademarked yourselves with if someone is constantly messing up your structure, and furthermore as MrBTongue argued in his BioWave & EA video, the mentality of a company seeps in from up high and in this case it was EA's corporate culture that started seeping into BioWare including their former CEOs, Greg and Ray.
It's the same thing kinda happening over at Bungie right now but maybe to a lesser extent since they made sure to retain their own rights to their currently active IP and once their deal with Activision is done so are they with Activision but man if they don't already have the same kinds of battle scars as BioWare had around the time ME2 released, where the all-important lead writers and other notable artists simply up and leave or mysteriously step down. Harold Ryan, the Bungie CEO stepped down and didn't give his own goodbye message as the next Bungie employee took his place and that was right after Destiny 2 had been delayed, and similarly Aaryn Flynn, the former GM of BioWare got replaced by Casey Hudson who likely dropped everything he had to save a ship from sinking and that was right after Anthem had been presented at EA Play/E3 last year, possibly to much less hype and interest than what EA had in mind.
I cannot say either dude were fired but it sure looks like it. Are they and their respective companies to blame for not hitting the hype-meter? Maybe, but it sure as hell seems like a different work culture to have these ultimatums hanging over your head as you try to create passion projects (which don't really seem that passionate compared to their good old games).
It's really as if EA cannot read between the lines. They simultaneously enforce huge pressure on every company they aquire only to see them collapse under it. It's their own damn fault because all they think about it short-term profit.
You cannot retain a consistent company culture or mentality to developing the type of games you trademarked yourselves with if someone is constantly messing up your structure, and furthermore as MrBTongue argued in his BioWave & EA video, the mentality of a company seeps in from up high and in this case it was EA's corporate culture that started seeping into BioWare including their former CEOs, Greg and Ray.
It's the same thing kinda happening over at Bungie right now but maybe to a lesser extent since they made sure to retain their own rights to their currently active IP and once their deal with Activision is done so are they with Activision but man if they don't already have the same kinds of battle scars as BioWare had around the time ME2 released, where the all-important lead writers and other notable artists simply up and leave or mysteriously step down. Harold Ryan, the Bungie CEO stepped down and didn't give his own goodbye message as the next Bungie employee took his place and that was right after Destiny 2 had been delayed, and similarly Aaryn Flynn, the former GM of BioWare got replaced by Casey Hudson who likely dropped everything he had to save a ship from sinking and that was right after Anthem had been presented at EA Play/E3 last year, possibly to much less hype and interest than what EA had in mind.
I cannot say either dude were fired but it sure looks like it. Are they and their respective companies to blame for not hitting the hype-meter? Maybe, but it sure as hell seems like a different work culture to have these ultimatums hanging over your head as you try to create passion projects (which don't really seem that passionate compared to their good old games).
It's really as if EA cannot read between the lines. They simultaneously enforce huge pressure on every company they aquire only to see them collapse under it. It's their own damn fault because all they think about it short-term profit.
Kotaku reported recently that DA4 was rebooted around the time of Laidlaw's departure. The original plan was Anthem in 2018 and (probably) DA4 in 2019, but at this point who knows what happens. Part of me worries that DA4 may never materialize.
Anthem looked hardly interesting and after how disappointing and almost entirely dead Destiny 2 is, I'm fairly certain Anthem will be Bioware's final drop.
I hope Anthem's successful (I also hope it's good) but it's weird to have a Destiny killer when Destiny isn't doing so hot these days.
Dragon Age Inquisition didn't do it for me, so I honestly can't bring myself to care either way anymore. The original game is still the best in my mind. With EA's track record I can't see things ending well if Anthem fails.
That's a shame. I love DA:O and liked DA:I. But the series is getting worse and i don't see them going back to their roots. I'm getting WRPG fix from titles such as PoE2 (coming to PS4 this fall woho!) and D:OS.
A huge number of people in this thread are all saying the same thing - namely 'that's a shame'?
What's a shame?
People are responding as though the series was cancelled, or as though (and this is the misleading part of the thread) that only a skeleton crew will ever work on Dragon Age. Some people have even said that 'smaller teams work better together'.
Clearly people in this thread have been mislead. They don't understand what Mike Laidlaw actually said.
Bioware is a disaster. They're lucky that Destiny 2 is currently a mess because Anthem could potentially pick up those disgruntled former D2 players...as long as they don't fuck it up again.
Agreed, in my humble opinion they haven't made anything worthy of old glory since Dragon Age Origins, and I doubt they ever will now.
I, for one, will not mourn a franchise with one good game by the shadow of a formerly great developer. Especially when there are an increasingly great number of crpgs being released.
A small crew is what you want for prototyping and preproduction work and by all accounts seems to be pretty obvious standard practice from what we know. I don't get all of the misplaced doom and gloom.
Origins felt archaic even at the time of release, 2 had great ideas but ultimately suffered due to a shortened dev time, and Inquisition was a bloated mess. Nothing of value is really lost if we don't get another Dragon Age since they already ran it into the ground.
The potential was always there but they never nailed it, and I seriously doubt 4 would be any better.
The potential was always there but they never nailed it, and I seriously doubt 4 would be any better.
It's a shame because Dragon Age: Inquisition did well. Dragon Age 4 should've been out this year, or the latest by next. It's a shame because Bioware has to make Anthem work or risk being turned into branches of Motive. It's a shame because of a lot of things honestly lmao.
Maybe some people have been mislead, but people brought more than enough of their own misconceptions into the thread to not need OP's help lol.
SWTOR has actually been very successful for them (not as much as WoW of course), they went past the $1 billion revenue mark in 2015 and have had their 2 most sucessful expansions by far since then. Of course SWTOR is not on the frostbyte engine as well as only being PC, so long term they may want to move on from it, though it seems like they are setting up BioWare Austin as the place to do Anthem Development as they have been heavily hiring for Anthem for a long time now there (and of course using their own IP with Anthem, they wouldn't have to give a cut to Disney). They are also planning to expand Edmonton studios, and their skeleton crew is still there, so I'm not sure they are planning to move Dragon Age development from Edmonton.
DA1 was a great start but they pissed away any promise of greatness chasing money and trends. There have been so many better RPGs that have come out recently that do what DA was trying to do and they do it so much better. Bioware is not, and never will be, what they once were.
Anthem was supposed to be released this year, which would put DA4 for next year. The latter has been in development since at least 2015.
However, after these reorganizations and changes, we may not see DA4 for a few more years, if at all.
They'll never dispose of them, even if the studio closes. Those people would be working in other of their studios, just like what happened with Bioware Montreal.
I think OP is just assuming that everyone saw my report a couple months ago: https://kotaku.com/bioware-doubles-down-on-anthem-as-pressure-mounts-1822380989
Notably:
The past year has been tumultuous for BioWare and involved some major changes to the studio. One was to reboot the fourth Dragon Age, which at the time was code-named Joplin, according to two sources. (There's a running theme here—Anthem's codename was Dylan.) The goal, those sources said, was to implement more "live" elements into the game, although two of those sources stressed that this next Dragon Age will still have a heavy focus on characters and story, whenever it does come out. It's not clear what a "live" version of Dragon Age might look like, but EA has been public about its embrace of games as a service, and its lack of interest in releasing $60 games that do not have any sort of revenue tail, whether that means paid extra content, microtransactions, or something else.
DA4 was in early development from mid-2015 through 2017 and then rebooted. The majority of that team moved to Anthem, including Mark Darrah, who is executive producer of the entire Dragon Age franchise. A tiny, tiny team remained to work on the new DA4, as Laidlaw has now confirmed, but it's safe to say that game is years away.
Haha!
Also
Damn, homie. In high school you was the man, homie. The fuck happened to you?
Yeah about that
A lot of key people left during Anthem's development.
you think so? i dunno man, on my side, i have absolutely no hype regarding anthem. it just looked good graphics wise, other than that i am very very cautious. I am way more hyped about dragon age 4.
Heh i'll be honest. Never really got into Dragon Age. The world just doesn't appeal to me. I tried 3 times to finish Origins but the furthest i got was Denerim until i had enough. And the second one did even less for me. Loved Mass Effect but even that series lost me now.
I wonder if Bioware will eventually be pared down into being a Telltale-style 'episodic game' studio for EA. At least, if Anthem doesn't work out.
Or maybe EA will just flat out have Telltale do a ME/DA series.
Or maybe EA will just flat out have Telltale do a ME/DA series.
It's more likely Bioware will just be resorbed into EA and their name is dropped completely since it doesn't mean jack anymore.
There is very little chance anthems gonna bomb hard enough to kill bioware. Not just because the giant marketing campaign behind it, but because bioware is still a very talented developer, even though they are not the same studio that made multiple masterpieces last two gens.