JUST AN OPINION AND SPECULATION: BioWare employees, polish your resumes.

I've been quiet for a few months because of my job (which is thankfully over) and now home for the holidays. 2017 has been a very bad year (almost as bad as 1982) for the AAA industry and in my honest opinion: it's self-inflicted. Anthem is coming a full year after Destiny 2 and while Bungie is getting caught red-handed being an EA clone, it's safe to say that micro transactions and loot boxes have become toxic. While we don't know what Anthem is going to be like (except be a Destiny 2 clone with Fallout Power Armor) I'm fully expecting this game to be scrutinized and hated way before it's release. YouTube is already waiting for it's second buffet of click-bait videos to appear once EA rolls out more footage on Anthem. Mainstream media (yeah, the dummies at CNN, Fox, NBC and CBS are following all of this closely, except ABC... it's owned by Disney.) has found another promising target that isn't Donald Trump and yes... it will have way more bite and credibility than the witch hunt that was aimed at Dungeons & Dragons, death metal rock and gangsta rap. It's all very bad and the warning signs given by the thinking adult customer base and some reporters are telling me that this is it for BioWare.


BioWare, I love you, but you've brought me down. You were master storytellers and master craftsmen of your art. Whether its music, backgrounds, cutscenes or just expert narration... BioWare had all the ingredients to stay as the best studio for western RPGs. Inquistion was a good attempt with the Frostbite canvas. Andromeda was like a horribly deformed child at birth and plenty of surgeries later looked okay to resume a "normal" life. So... with each passing title losing something that wasn't part of Origins or Neverwinter Nights originally is now focused on some sort of follow up monetization. It will be there. It has to be there if it's a 10 year plan. By the way, I did all the content on Destiny 2 without purchasing squat in about three months playing along side my friend Paul. Anthem, better be big and polished at launch, otherwise... the consumer base will likely do what they did to Battlefront 2... ignore it. Wall Street, a consortium of wealth and greed, immediately punished EA for not being like them. It took Disney's Mickey Mouse using his oversized white-gloved hands to slap some sense into EA's leadership.


This isn't a slap to any developer's face in BioWare. It's just my opinion and how I look at the AAA industry. Frostbite is a beautiful canvas, but I bet those young developers could craft a better Andromeda and Inquisition using the Unreal engine in a much shorter time and have less QA issues down the road. It's a shame. I want to see BioWare succeed, but if they embrace the same path as Bungie, Ubisoft, Bethesda and a few other "AAA" developers (which EA will do... if they see a quick cash scheme, they're all over it like ants at a picnic) 2018 will be the year we see the core of BioWare dissolve as employees look to distance themselves from the company.


It's just an opinion and I'm basically a nobody in the industry. I'm just a connoisseur of well-written video games and I haven't had a good one since the Witcher 3, the Last of Us and Uncharted. I don't even like these games too much because the protagonists are fixed unlike the masterpieces that were the Infinity Engine games, Origins and Neverwinter Nights. Those toolsets made the games into 10 year love affairs. Anthem, I doubt... will ever make it beyond one year much less a decade. Speaking of toolsets, Bethesda embraced it and yeah... Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 STILL keep getting mods and updates. That's longevity and that's love for the canvas.


Well... I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a happy, profitable and healthy new year. God bless you all and let's hope for a way better 2018. To all of you in Edmonton, I hope things change. I hope you look back at your predecessor's works of art and see what made it great... not just profitable. I hope you all get raises. I hope all of you never have to work through another "crunch" or "finalizing" or whatever bullshit they call it now. I hope you feel proud of your work not because of some weenie PR crap that sounds good to a few executives, but because what you did was polished and expressed your love for the canvas (not the masses. Yeah, they have the money...). 

Uncle Cyan