Mass Effect Andromeda: Shitstorm Edition - RIP Biowear

I remember reading something from a Bioware employee that leaked stuff about how the company worked around the time of ME3. They said upper management usually just kept throwing money at them, and the marketing team, thinking it would make the game come out faster or would just improve it more. It's why ME2 and ME3 had professional CGI promotional materials, and hired Hollywood actors to fill out the VA cast. Because paying a modeller and programmer 50k more doesn't make the game come out any faster. And the marketing team and Middle Management want to have something to show the top brass when they ask where the money is going.

If their were problems, Middle Management would simply blame the grunts and fire them to save face with the Upper Management. Game Developers don't have many protections in the Gaming industry, and I'm fairly sure the big companies would like it to stay that way.
 
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Ponderous Pillock said:
The problem is when you let the writers lead at all costs rather than having them work hand in glove with the rest of the studio. This is where Bioware is dying on its arse as EA's designated "Story driven" studio. On top of that, the writers are frankly not that good. And strike me more as English-Lit failures and fanfic tier plebs than passionate people. It doesn't surprise me at all when you have management who don't give a fuck because of all the dangerhairs who get offended and dramatic over the drop of a fucking hat. This is what's happened to ME:A because all the old writers have already been given the boot or moved on to better studios or made their killing and moved on.
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I haven't posted it in a while, but there was a major contrast between the old writers Bioware had and their current crop. There was an image for a while showing Jennifer Hepler alongside the writer she replaced, Ree Soeshee.

Soeshee is a life-long RPG nut who wrote for several tabletop publications and worked on everything from Shadowrun to Vampire: The Masquerade. She also was the primary writer for the Guild Wars games, and has a PHD in literature and myth. She is also an avid gamer and has longposted about her exploits in Skyrim and the like.

Hepler, meanwhile, wrote a fantasy visual novel that was an outright failure, known as MITH (Magical Intelligence Tactical Headquarters), and it comes across as something Jace would write. Aside from this, her only writing credits are writing short stories for Dragon Age 2. She has an English degree. She has gone on about how games need a fast-forward option to skip that enfuriating "gameplay" part.

Basically, all the actual quality writers have been rotated out, and, over time, replaced with much-less-talented hacks.
 
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Jaimas said:
So, it got a bit worse: The game will have microtransactions.

And.... Yes, it will be basically ME3's multiplayer all over again.
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Right, I'm definitely not buying it, ever. Not even once. Fucking microtransactions. People already pay £40 for the game and then to have to buy their way to victory in multiplayer is just profiteering for its own sake and betrays a total lack of respect for the players and for the fandom.

If it is bribing one's way to victory as it looks like (eighty cunting quid for 12,000 Andromeda Good Boy Points!!!!) then hopefully the game's fandom will go up in flames like a burst canister of dimethylzinc.

This is how a franchise ends, not with a bang, but with the swwssh-swwssh-swwssh of milking a past it old cow.
 
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Jaimas said:
I haven't posted it in a while, but there was a major contrast between the old writers Bioware had and their current crop. There was an image for a while showing Jennifer Hepler alongside the writer she replaced, Ree Soeshee.

Soeshee is a life-long RPG nut who wrote for several tabletop publications and worked on everything from Shadowrun to Vampire: The Masquerade. She also was the primary writer for the Guild Wars games, and has a PHD in literature and myth. She is also an avid gamer and has longposted about her exploits in Skyrim and the like.

Hepler, meanwhile, wrote a fantasy visual novel that was an outright failure, known as MITH (Magical Intelligence Tactical Headquarters), and it comes across as something Jace would write. Aside from this, her only writing credits are writing short stories for Dragon Age 2. She has an English degree. She has gone on about how games need a fast-forward option to skip that enfuriating "gameplay" part.

Basically, all the actual quality writers have been rotated out, and, over time, replaced with much-less-talented hacks.
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Soeshee also spoke of the problem of burnout when writing and working in the game industry because she nearly wound up hating her own hobby because she'd spend 8-10 hours at work, before coming home to play Skyrim for four.

One of the biggest problems facing the games industry right now is the costs, especially the top flight/AAA games. The reality is games should be easily retailing at about £60+ (and Nintendo is doing just that now with the Switch) if we're to consider inflation and all that but instead costs are held rather artificially at £35-40 and have been like that since I was a teenager.

Games costs staying static for all this time means that pressure grows to cut costs or squeeze more money out of people's pockets and in this industry writers are a dime a dozen. The issue is people like Shoeshee can command a high price because of who she is and would basically price herself out the current market as a result. Especially at a company as notoriously stingy and money hungry as EA.

EA is always a terrible company which doesn't realise it needs to step back slightly, it can hammer out battlefields and maddens and Fifas and make money that way, so has assumed it will work for all franchises and games.

It killed off the Deadspace Franchise by placing an absurdly high number of units needing to be sold (5 million) for Deadspace 3 obstensibly on costs grounds despite them still using their own proprietary engine that had been kicking around since the first game. It now rams the Frostbite Engine into absolutely everything while often only using about a third of its features. All on grounds of "cost".
 
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Ponderous Pillock said:
It killed off the Deadspace Franchise by placing an absurdly high number of units needing to be sold (5 million) for Deadspace 3 obstensibly on costs grounds despite them still using their own proprietary engine that had been kicking around since the first game. It now rams the Frostbite Engine into absolutely everything while often only using about a third of its features. All on grounds of "cost".
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Developers EA Has Wrecked

- Origin, creator of Ultima, Wing Commander, and Crusader: No Remorse. Cause of death - being set up to fail by EA placing impossible deadlines for Ultima IX and then being closed down after it bombed.
- Bullfrog, creator of Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet, Syndicate, and Populous. Cause of death - executive meddling out the wazoo following Dungeon Keeper 2.
- Westwood, creator of Command & Comquer, Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, etc. Cause of death - plundered for its IPs.
- Maxis, creator of SimCity et al - plundered for its IPs.
- Bioware, creator of Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect, Dragon Age. Cause of impending death - all competent staff constructively dismissed by EA-imposed and sanctioned careerists and greasy-pole climbers, replaced with idiots and virtue signallers.
 
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Jaimas said:
Hepler, meanwhile, wrote a fantasy visual novel that was an outright failure, known as MITH (Magical Intelligence Tactical Headquarters), and it comes across as something Jace would write. Aside from this, her only writing credits are writing short stories for Dragon Age 2. She has an English degree. She has gone on about how games need a fast-forward option to skip that enfuriating "gameplay" part.
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It kinda boils my mind, to be honest. Why are they getting into video game industry if they hate video games? I'm sure there are plenty of writers, accomplished writers even who have passion for video games and know how to work with this medium and make the narrative compliment the gameplay, not making it a millstone.
 
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Mater Lachrymarum said:
It kinda boils my mind, to be honest. Why are they getting into video game industry if they hate video games? I'm sure there are plenty of writers, accomplished writers even who have passion for video games and know how to work with this medium and make the narrative compliment the gameplay, not making it a millstone.
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In their mind they don't hate video games. They just think it's time to change what video games are.
 
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Ginger Piglet said:
Developers EA Has Wrecked

- Origin, creator of Ultima, Wing Commander, and Crusader: No Remorse. Cause of death - being set up to fail by EA placing impossible deadlines for Ultima IX and then being closed down after it bombed.
- Bullfrog, creator of Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet, Syndicate, and Populous. Cause of death - executive meddling out the wazoo following Dungeon Keeper 2.
- Westwood, creator of Command & Comquer, Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, etc. Cause of death - plundered for its IPs.
- Maxis, creator of SimCity et al - plundered for its IPs.
- Bioware, creator of Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect, Dragon Age. Cause of impending death - all competent staff constructively dismissed by EA-imposed and sanctioned careerists and greasy-pole climbers, replaced with idiots and virtue signallers.
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Of course, it's not quite the fault of EA per se.

Each of these companies were at one time smaller concerns owned outright by the people who sold them.

Money talks, and it spoke to Braun, Wright, The Garriott brothers et al.

They watched all their IPs burn so they could afford a nice house and a yacht, and in Richard Garriott's case he's only ever made abject shit since.


The only person I can think of who chased the money dragon, got screwed and then worked hard to fix that would be Brian Fargo and fuck me if he isn't going to defend the IP's he's still got hold of to the death after watching the horrors around him.

Mater Lachrymarum said:
It kinda boils my mind, to be honest. Why are they getting into video game industry if they hate video games? I'm sure there are plenty of writers, accomplished writers even who have passion for video games and know how to work with this medium and make the narrative compliment the gameplay, not making it a millstone.
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The bar's lower and demand is higher. That's it. See also the cost saving measure and a PHD wielding person with enough mythology books to kill a man is going to expect a higher price. Yet some weirdo who can string the words together will be as good in some cases.

Indeed, while the PHD person is a likely and higher bet, you may come across someone as talented without all the formal qualifications and a lot of the first generation of game writers largely fall into that category. The problem is the explosion of the games industry means quality control is garbage.

Replicant Sasquatch said:
In their mind they don't hate video games. They just think it's time to change what video games are.
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It doesn't help that, if we're honest "deep" plots haven't really been a thing in games since... probably about 2005 or so? We're still in the infancy of gaming and storytelling which means people are experimenting.

The great thing about gaming is that we can have such wide genres that you can find very narrative driven games. There's a few fantastic Walking Simulators out there that are deep on story and pretty good to look at (Ether One, Ethan Is Missing and Everyone's Gone to the Rapture leap to mind) and who'd have thought that would be a genre in gaming?
 
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Ponderous Pillock said:
Each of these companies were at one time smaller concerns owned outright by the people who sold them.

Money talks, and it spoke to Braun, Wright, The Garriott brothers et al.

They watched all their IPs burn so they could afford a nice house and a yacht, and in Richard Garriott's case he's only ever made abject shit since.
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Well... Peter Molyneux is a massive pseud if every there was one (threadworthy maybe, what with the constant loss of shit over Godus, a.k.a. Populous with microtransactions on mobile) and after he cashed out from the Bullfrog sale to EA he was responsible for the pretention-fest that was Black and White so there is that.

Richard Garriott did do Tabula Rasa which was meant to be a rather good MMO though I never played it (and to be fair Ultima Online which was in the early days of Origin's EA ownership was genuinely ground breaking and he had been thinking about making an MMO ever since then) but NCSoft plundered him of his shares and I think he kind of lost interest in gaming and the industry after that and the inevitable legal battle.

I have little sympathy for Chris Roberts, the other half of Origin, to be fair. Wing Commander I bought on GOG a while back having totally missed it but keep forgetting to get round to playing it. Strike Commander was rather good though - think Mass Effect meets Top Gun (and if that doesn't take your breath away, I dread to think what will.) However, Wing Commander Prophecy was reportedly all rather limp and then the Wing Commander film (because he allowed his ego to think he was a proper screenwriter and director) was absolute shite (and I have seen it when it was shown on the telly late at night during my student days.) Star Citizen is the very model of modern vapourware and I have little confidence it'll ever see the light of day - Elite Dangerous, for all its faults upon first release (and there were quite a few), with its frequent new expansions every few months, will probably be within spitting distance of it or even surpass it when it does finally materialise. Given that Season 3 of E:D is suspected to be space legs, walking in stations and ships, and EVAs, this will bring E:D up to where SC is supposed to be on release, and in the near future with ED 2.3 being multicrewing and faces, and 2.4 being (well, speculated to be) atmospheric planetary landings... yeah.

I've no idea what happened to Chris Castle and Brett Sperry of Westwood though.

Anyhow. Back to Andromeda. I still have a tiny sliver of hope it'll defy expectations and be the worthy successor to Star Control that I figured it might be, but alas, the more I see about it, the more I fear that there may be insufficient Juffo-Wup available for this *happy camper*.
 
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Ginger Piglet said:
Anyhow. Back to Andromeda. I still have a tiny sliver of hope it'll defy expectations and be the worthy successor to Star Control that I figured it might be, but alas, the more I see about it, the more I fear that there may be insufficient Juffo-Wup available for this *happy camper*.
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Hey, another Star Control fan. Don't forget to *enjoy the sauce.*

But Star Control is exactly why I dread ME:A. If you'll recall, moving the game to a new galaxy after the original creative team departed didn't work out so well for that franchise.
 
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Mola Ram said:
Hey, another Star Control fan. Don't forget to *enjoy the sauce.*

But Star Control is exactly why I dread ME:A. If you'll recall, moving the game to a new galaxy after the original creative team departed didn't work out so well for that franchise.
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Those silly cows....

Ponderous Pillock said:
It doesn't help that, if we're honest "deep" plots haven't really been a thing in games since... probably about 2005 or so? We're still in the infancy of gaming and storytelling which means people are experimenting.

The great thing about gaming is that we can have such wide genres that you can find very narrative driven games. There's a few fantastic Walking Simulators out there that are deep on story and pretty good to look at (Ether One, Ethan Is Missing and Everyone's Gone to the Rapture leap to mind) and who'd have thought that would be a genre in gaming?
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Except that's just it, Pillock - they don't like the fact that we have choice.

One of the biggest things that led to that-which-must-not-be-named was a study put up by one Adrienne Shaw. Shaw was trying actively to prove that gaming as a whole had an endemic problem with sexism and representation, but the evidence proved exactly the opposite. Shaw would then go on to to declare that her point was proven anyway and thus representation was mandatory. It's this second one that's much more relevant given how Bioware rolls these days (emphasis mine):

Adrienne Shaw said:
Looking for alternative truths to the construction of the gamer audience is reactionary and promotes a plurality of gamer markets, not diversity in gaming more broadly. In contrast, this article looks critically at how and if interviewees who are members of marginalized groups self-identify as gamers, rather than labeling them as gamers simply because they play video games.
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This is one of the big articles that was cited in the "gamers are over" barrage, and makes very clear that the DIVERSITY IS MANDATORY crowd don't want people being able to buy what they want.
 
Jaimas said:
Those silly cows....
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Until this moment I had managed to completely forget how horribly SC3 blew the Precursors. Thanks for that. And you thought the ME3 ending was a letdown.
 
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