Good Article About BioWare

[Rune Lai]

It's a long read, but highly informative, and might point to how things will turn out in Dragon Age 4, which I suspect a number of us will be playing.

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

Kotaku is very popular among my coworkers, because it covers a lot of the industry stuff, rather than just the games, and this article specifically addresses the veteran hemorrhage at BioWare and what went wrong with BioWare's latest game, Anthem. I haven't played Anthem, but I knew they had a messy launch and I knew that a lot of people had left Bioware. (In particular, a RL friend and the former lead writer of the DA series moved over to Beamdog, and from my understanding a number of their former coworkers came along as well.)

Specific points that are worth noting in regards in Dragon Age 4:

• Dragon Age 4 was temporarily canned because Anthem was in so much trouble that they needed to move the DA4 team over to help
• Dragon Age 4 is going to be built on the Anthem codebase (yikes)
• Dragon Age 4 still using the same Frostbite engine (which was not designed for RPGs!) that the devs have been complaining about since DAI

As for the rest of it, it seems like BioWare has a senior leadership problem and EA doesn't support the team while also forcing them to adopt their tech (Frostbite). The guy who was (and probably is again) the executive producer for Dragon Age 4 was sort of able to right the ship for Anthem at the last minute, and the game shipped before deadline because of him, but considering the toll on the development team, I'm hoping they don't try to repeat this again with DA4. I've never heard of "stress leave" before, but something is seriously broken if team members are taking weeks/months off from work under a doctor's orders.

[Roas]

ugh

I have to finish a paper today, but I'll try and get to this soon so I can see the details of what you are talking about.

I continue to cringe over what may become of one of my favorite franchises.

[Rune Lai]

If you're short on time, the article is 99% about Anthem. I picked out the DA4-specific material. But since it's going to be the same studio, and likely the same senior leadership, BioWare is likely going to be in a similar position while working on Dragon Age 4, so we could see the same style of (non-)decision making and similar mandates/lack of support from EA.

[Rune Lai]

New article went up, focusing on Dragon Age 4:

kotaku.com/the-past-and-present-of-dragon-age-4-1833913351

The game's obviously a long way out still, but the article talks about where the project was in the past, its temp cancellations, and where it is now in terms of development. If you haven't read the first one yet, this one might be better. It makes references to the Anthem article, but is more DA focused.