One of the most historic studios is closing down.
Unfortunately it was dead long ago.
Fuck EA

Leak the source code on the way out. Fuck EA.

Bold of them to put Anthem on that list. They built an interesting world then told a boring story in it.

sadge

Anthem but not Jade Empire?

i use sadge too. we fwends now.

BioWare died 11 October 2007. We've been holding an open-casket wake ever since.

They've been zombies for at least, what, 10 years now? It's also amazing how ME:Andromeda, Anthem and DA Veilguard all sold over 1 million copies, yet were still "failures"

IIRC there were numerous articles after launch talking about how it was EA that actually made them add the flying mechanics, easily the best part of the gameplay, after it got stuck in development limbo for years.

Whether that was truly accurate or not, it does fit the extended development timeline, the lackluster story in the end product, and the failure to revamp the game after launch like the developers very publicly said they were trying to do. If they couldn't do it the first time, and couldn't do it the second time... it seems they were the problem, not EA (for once).

I do not believe it for the simple reason that the levels are very vertically based, iirc. If core verticality was a mandate from shitheads after production started rolling, it would've come out in an even worse state.

See I believe in reincarnation I saw BioWare just the other day they go by Larian now. 😁

Have thousands of employees, don't make games, oh no we have to close down

Are you looking at the same game? The world was vertical in the sense that you had to fly anywhere... but none of the combat or gameplay used it in any way beyond going from one place to another. That's exactly what would happen if verticality and a new map was added later in development. They just put clearings in to place the flat missions.

This and microsoft bleeding ID Tech are the greatest insults than the Computer Video Game eccosystem have ever testified.

I fucking hate those big videogames comglomerates, i hope every single shareholders from those giant piles of shit die on the gutter drowning in their own piss

Eh, that doesn't necessarily define where the source of pressure came from. Making unique games is an entirely different level of skill/time/commitment than what they were given.

IMO, it's nigh equally likely that they started with the verticality design as part of it and didn't have the time to cook the idea into something neat, vs it being a later mandate after some core designs had development. The only thing that really leads me to believe that the ideas were in early is in the character designs: They were clearly meant to fly in some way, even if it might've been in a Halo jetpack sort of way early on. (which has less evidence)

This is one of 94747252795 reasons to NEVER give these big corporations a single ounce of control over anything.

Also Sony buying Nixxes... then deciding they don't want to do PC ports anymore. These companies are clueless.

Sad for the hundreds of people without a job, but seeing a company owned by blood money leaking it away is, unfortunately for everyone involved, a net good in the big scheme of things.

May EA burn.

Was any developer who contributed to Baulders Gate 1 present for Anthem? I highly doubt it. The bioware I cared about stopped existing decades ago.

Anthem. LOL.

I may be the only person alive who enjoyed Andromeda, but I do agree that Veilguard was completely unforgivable and also...inexplicable?

You know, maybe it’s not all that bad. Go indie and release directly on Steam. EA can burn in Saudi Arabia.

EA: Ruin everything!

Ban corporate ownership of other companies. It has no positive effects on the economy or the world.

o7

You're not alone, Andromeda's take on combat was so much fun - the skill synergies and the mobility was properly thrilling. Though definitely lacked on the story side, however, it was still quite enjoyable.

Not clueless... the need to control the market is the determinator there :/

IMO, it’s nigh equally likely that they started with the verticality design as part of it and didn’t have the time to cook the idea into something neat, vs it being a later mandate after some core designs had development.

Well it's a good thing that we have commentary directly related to this then, alongside basically ever major development decision... Because that's apparently what happened...

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

As development progressed, it became clear that some of the Anthem team’s original ideas either wouldn’t work or weren’t quite solidified enough to be implemented. Take traversal, for example. The mandate was that Anthem’s world would be massive and seamless, but how would you get around? The team played around with prototypes, exploring different ways in which your exosuit could move vertically across the world. For a long time they thought it’d be climbing up the sides of mountains and ledges, but they couldn’t get that quite right. Early iterations of flying—which, developers say, was removed from and re-added to Anthem several times—were more like gliding, and members of the Anthem team say it was tough to get the system feeling all that fun. Every time they changed the traversal, it meant changing the world design accordingly, flattening and stretching terrain to accommodate the latest movement style.

The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”

Certainly sounds like the developers had no idea how to make the game.

One longstanding BioWare tradition is for their teams to build demos that the staff could all take home during Christmas break, and it was Anthem’s turn during Christmas of 2016. By this point, BioWare’s leadership had decided to remove flying from the game —they just couldn’t figure out how to make it feel good—so the Christmas build took place on flat terrain.

Around the same time, Electronic Arts executive Patrick Söderlund, to whom BioWare’s leadership reported, played the Anthem Christmas demo. According to three people familiar with what happened, he told BioWare that it was unacceptable.

Now it was time for a new build. “What began was six weeks of pretty significant crunch to do a demo specifically for Patrick Söderlund,” said one member of the team. They overhauled the art, knowing that the best way to impress Söderlund would be to make a demo that looked as pretty as possible. And, after some heated arguments, the Anthem team decided to put flying back in.

So they removed flight entirely by Christmas of 2016, that would mean the entire map design had to lose the verticality. If you can't fly, then you have to flatten the world do accommodate for ground movement instead.

And it was an EA executive that got them to put flying back in as a focus, flying that the team had removed entirely by that point. Even if they weren't specifically told to do so by EA. And then designed the entire game's map and movement based around that flight by the launch just over 2 years later in Feb 2019.

They were clearly meant to fly in some way, even if it might’ve been in a Halo jetpack sort of way early on. (which has less evidence)

I love that you try to hedge your comment and try to say that jetpack jumps and gliding are somehow even remotely in the same ballpark as flying around like Iron Man. You're honestly trying to say that Link or Aloy on a glider is similar to Anthem's flight? That's a ridiculous thing to try to compare as similar.

Thank you, I feel like its an unpopular thing to say but I actually really had fun and played through it twice. To each their own, I guess.

So then, that really begs the question: Why were they not allowed to take it back to the design board when the design fundamentally changed?

Again, this is not a "developer" problem, but a fucko owner problem.

Why were they not allowed to take it back to the design board when the design fundamentally changed?

I feel like they were, effectively. There is no reason for them to not reuse assets they created from before flying was added back in after X-mas 2016, that was still 2 years before launch. 2 years is enough to develop a game, especially if the assets already exist.

That's where the other development issues at the studio come in.

The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”

That's not a publisher/owner issue, that's a developer issue.

Ohgod... that still SCREAMS interference to me... Nobody could be confident in their stance because dissent from corporate mandate meant firing, not a hearing out and debate...

Otherwise, lead devs have many ways to force progress in a certain direction. Only fuckhead exec "direction" comes with such constant blueballing of actual progress.

Isn't it a shame that a tiny handful of rich old assholes get to make unilateral decisions that affect all of us?

Also Jade Empire! An under appreciated gem of a game. This is truly a shame, Bioware were one of the last big ones that actually gave a shit about making good games.

God, they listed Anthem and not Jade Empire - look how they massacred my boy.

It's still a developer management lack of decision making. They don't get off scot free because they don't want to make a decision that EA might not like. The result of that... was a piece of shit EA didn't like. That's still on the developer.

Unless EA is telling them to change something, decisions are still on them. Like EA saying the demo is terrible and developer management deciding to add flying back in to try and fix. That comes from an EA decision/request rather than the developer being indecisive.

Are you trying to separate the Bioware team between developers and management, and lumping Bioware mangement into the EA side? Because that's not the discussion here. Bioware management being indecisive is still a developer issue, not an EA issue.

It’s hard to believe that titles like Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem and Dragon Age: The Veilguard couldn’t save them.

It sucks to see them die, but they did played an hand in their downfall.

I mean... After the buyout, you BET YOUR FUCKING ASS "EA" made every dumbass inept call against them that's physically possible.

Bioware management doesn't get a pass for mismanagement of Anthem development just because EA is involved. EA bought Bioware in October 2007.

In that time before Anthem they released:
Mass Effect - 2007
Dragon Age: Origins - 2009
Mass Effect 2 - 2010
Dragon Age II - 2011
Star Wars: The Old Republic - 2011
Mass Effect 3 - 2012
Dragon Age: Inquisition - 2014
Mass Effect: Andromeda - 2017

Are you trying to claim that EA didn't interfere until we got to Anthem? Or even that it didn't interfere until the last few years before? Because that doesn't seem likely. If they were going to, they would have from the beginning.

Veilguaed made me really sad. Dragon age was my favorite franchise. I really wish I didn't play veilguard, it was such trash.

DA:O and the Mass Effect trilogy are quite good games, both story and gameplay-wise.

Civvie11 on the YouTubes often lists some of the fine Studios the EA has voraciously consumed only to spit out when their bones are dry.
Raven Software (via Activision merger) comes to mind. Also Neversoft... and MAXIS...

Who cares about a brand?

Did they make any notable game past mass effect? Honestly the last game I played from them that I thought was awesome was Jade Empire and that was when it first came out.

Never had an opportunity to play mass effect when it was new but had no interest when I finally did have it on offer.

Guess my point is Studio/publisher names mean nothing—it’s the actual people creating at the time that make the good stuff. Sorry for the seat warmers getting canned but anyone who made anything of note at that ~brand ~ had probably long since stopped making anything of note or moved on.

Nope. That they interfered as soon as they could. Only DA1 and ME1 are nigh universally heralded as great.

I wonder why that might be...

Who shit in your milk?

Ew no.

I wish people would get less emotionally attached to these corporate game studios. Like, it's not the same people. Not the same leadership. Not the same artists. And so on.

It's just a collection of IP's, that's about it. Bioware from 2000 is not the same bioware from 2015 or 2026.

Same can be said for the vast majority of game studios except a handful of indie shops, but do they really count as indie if they've been nurturing one IP for 15 years?

Why do you assume it the studios they’re attached to and not the IPs? I for one am devistated that a) people are losing their jobs and b) I’m losing beloved future games I was hoping for.

Maybe try a little empathy. Your comments constantly lack it.

Yeah I'm really not sure why they've decided to put anthem on the end of that list.

Fun fact: same-sex sexual activity, both male and female, is not only illegal in Saudi Arabia, it is a capital offense punishable by death.

Fun fact: Bioware's parent company, Electronic Arts, is now owned by Saudis.

I'm not sure we got the same definition for fun. You seem to have the Saudi version.