BioWare and EA are not two different companies. They aren’t even two different groups. BioWare was established in 1995. It was sold in 2005, NOT to EA, but to some weird investor group which included Bono from U2 (I can’t make this shit up.) Then in 2007 it was sold to EA. That means BioWare has been part of EA for 14 years, longer than it was an independent studio. And independent studio, btw, that produced the hellaracist Jade Empire, so they were hardly free of sin BEFOREEA wrote that fat check, which they were perfectly willing to cash.
I can tell you from personal experience that EA wanted to give them everything they wanted and needed to succeed. (I started working for EA about two months after DAO was released) BioWare was absolutely the EA golden child. I promise you, people in upper management at BioWare were in on the decision to develop Anthem.
The truth is, the phone call is coming from inside the house. Y'all love to blame EA, but BioWare IS EA. Same company, same management, same people. They were your corporate overlords all along.
@kispesan I’m sure a lot of the people at EA now don’t really know how BioWare could do absolutely no wrong in EA’s eyes. They got sooooo much leeway it drove me nuts. (I worked in recruiting and we did a lot of scheduling - with BioWare it was always 10 times harder.) I don’t blame people for not knowing that stuff, but I’m frustrated that EA has owned BioWare for well over a decade and people still think of the BioWare employees as some kind of scrappy band of indie developers who are being bullied by Big Gaming.
@bunabi but BioWare-chan is such a good boi, uwu!!
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Also, because I’m still bothered by the total lack of critical thinking done by BioWare stans: there’s almost no chance you’d HAVE the DA franchise if EA hadn’t bought BioWare. People are so convinced that EA is the devil that destroys studios, but they totally forget, or maybe have never thought about the fact that studios rise and fall ALL THE TIME. Keeping a game company going is hard work that takes a lot of specialized skills and equipment, particularly console games. (Devkits anyone?) Studios fail, sometimes spectacularly, but BioWare has held on for 26 years now. Why? Because they’ve had big influxes of cash from being purchased and supported by EA.
I distinctly remember the day ME3 came out and people lost their minds over how much they hated it. I was working at EA then and Dear God it was bad. The only day I remember that much hubub was the cursed launch of the Sim City reboot. *Makes sign of the cross to ward off evil* I don’t know if an independent studio could have weathered that, OR put out an updated ending after the initial publication.
And then of course there’s a little project that most DA/ME fans don’t seem to ever think about: SWTOR.
Sit down loves and let Auntie Anansi tell you the tale of the most expensive video game in the world.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is BioWare’s MMORPG and it took 6 years to develop, and at the time of launch was estimated to be the single most expensive game ever made, with a total cost of over 200 million dollars. It came out to HUGE acclaim, huge buzz, that shit was WILD. We had fucking stormtroopers walking around campus on launch day. Cupcakes with little Yodas. People wore cosplay. It was a BIG deal.
And then in under a year it was bleeding players so fast it was hemorrhaging. Why? Because it had taken BioWare six years to make a game with content that even a casual MMO player could finish in a few months, and basically zero endgame. The ultimate MMO with the ultimate franchise and a HUGE fanbase waiting for the game flopped, and it flopped hard. (Relatively speaking, of course. In reality it’s more complicated… But not that much more, honestly.)
I personally doubt anything could have saved BioWare at that point EXCEPT for those fat EA checks.
As for Dragon Age? It began development and was published while BioWare was working on a game that required 800 employees and $200 million dollars to create - you really think that BioWare would have been able to make anything but SWTOR at that time without being acquired by EA?
I get loving BioWare games, and feeling fondly toward the developers, but this tendency the fandom has to personify BioWare and treat it like their precious baby uwu is just too much. Especially when they obviously are kind of sketchy on the history of BioWare to begin with.
Anyway all this is not to say that EA is GOOD. Far from it! What I’m saying is that BioWare stans need to stop giving BioWare a get out of jail free card by blaming EA for hurting their devs and giving you shitty games. I know you want to think that you don’t suck at the corporate teet of EA or whatever, but the fact is you do, and you have since you picked up your first Dragon Age game.
I honestly don’t think people really know or understand how culpable BioWare is with regards to some of the things they claim EA is responsible for.
Like one thing I see every now and then is that EA forced BioWare to use the Frostbite engine, which is widely lauded as being the main source of difficulty that plagued DA:I and ME:A (and I think Anthem’s) production. Frostbite wasn’t designed for RPGs; it was designed for FPS games like Battlefield. Meaning a lot of the functions to keep track of companions on the field, player inventory, and being able to animate something like, uh, the characters wasn’t apart of the development kit. Which resulted in Bioware’s coders having to literally design the tools they needed to make the game while they were literally trying to make the game.
So when you read about this, you can’t possibly consider that it was BioWare that wanted to use Frostbite; they must’ve been forced to use it because of EA. But no, it was actually BioWare. And as a result of this switch, they ended up cutting the exhalted march DLC for DA2.
More recently, folks have been celebrating the fact that DA4 won’t have ~live services~ (ie multiplayer with micro transactions) because they think that MP took away valuable resources from the single player campaign in DAI and MEA, which is just a straight up myth because that’s not how budgeting works when it comes to video game production. The only situation in which it would affect the SP experience is if it was added well into production, which isn’t at all the case with DA:I because not only did Mark Darrah literally admit that they were interested in making DA:I a multiplayer game, DA:I actually started out as a multiplayer game.
That isn’t to say EA didn’t have a hand in wanting MP live services, but the fact that Darrah admitted all this in addition to how EA has no problem with DA4 being exclusively a single player campaign (which probably has more to do with all devs working from home right now due to the pandemic and not the fact that live services is a dealbreaker for gamers) it honestly doesn’t sound like EA at all has a hand in regulating BioWare in any way outside of where their money goes into production.
Really a lot of the issues that plague Bioware seem to stem from poor management (i.e. how ME:A was really worked on in the last 18 months of production because the higher ups were so preoccupied with “high concept” game designs) and the choice to work with an engine that wasn’t designed for RPGs.
Perhaps that’s too broad of a statement, considering I haven’t kept up closely with EA outside of all of this. But in the last couple years it honestly seems like the source of all Bioware’s problems is actually Bioware. I mean, they had “stess casualties” while working on ME:A and Anthem, and one person admitted they would lock themselves in an empty office just to cry.
This kind of stuff honestly makes it difficult to support them. Like, besides how the workers are treated, as a consumer I do not want to preorder any of their games because the last 2 launches were riddled with issues. I seriously hope that management has gotten their shit together or that working from home has been a reprieve from the toxic work environment.
