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Inside the 'Dragon Age' Debacle That Gutted EA's BioWare Studio (www.bloomberg.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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A lot of it is almost exactly what you'd expect.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

How do you figure? That's not what I got out of this article.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Search for the story of Anthem and David Gaider opinions about how they handle their writers, they fucked that up on their own.

And reading this article is basically: The DA team blames the ME team for diverting them to Andromeda. Then they blame Anthem. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the pandemic. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the ME team again.

The only moment that they actually put some blame on the DA team is with the tone of dialogue and they quickly blame EA for saying "you guys doesn't have time to make changes". The ME team made changes, it's because of favouritism from EA or the ME team just has better management and know how to negotiate?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they're granted though. I'm not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. "Knowing how to negotiate" can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn't really something the developers are responsible for.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I could believe that if they didn't have a history of poor management and lack of leadership and unified vision as demonstrated during the Anthem development.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn't usually make; etc.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I could argue in favour of EA's decision regarding the engine. Their previous engine was also a mess, but they mishandled the change. They didn't give the studios the necessary time or support to implement it properly. But at the time of Veilguard they already had plenty of experience, the game performs really well and they release the game practically bug free.

The part of EA forcing them to build a type of game that they didn't usually make I'm particularly not inclining to believe it's was a problem. Bioware developed and maintain Star Wars Old Republic, an MMO, MMOs have many similarities to live services(it's a type of live service), they already had experience with that. They also released Anthem, and looks like the idea of a multiplayer for Anthem came from Bioware.

The idea of a multiplayer Dragon age to finish the story is completely stupid but Bioware had the expertise to work on it. It's a different case for Fallout 76 as Bethesda has never developed a multiplayer game before, TESO is a completely different studio with its own team, SWTOR is from a team within Bioware.

this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
53 points (100.0% liked)

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