Working Under EA

There's another thread with a link to a similar sentiment from Patrick Weekes, Karin Weekes and David Gaider at Havencon.

bsn.boards.net/thread/14624/bioware-ea-da2-rushed

So I'm inclined to believe it, on account of it coming from actual people who work(ed) under EA in Bioware.

I think people like to have a big bad boogeyman they can pin everything they don't like on, and something as big and faceless as EA is easier to point the finger at than the previously indie Bioware where you know the names and faces of the devs. If you don't like the direction Bioware has taken then it's on them, and there are plenty more devs in the sea.

Mostly I'm surprised that this seems surprising to people.

People want to do that (and I can sometimes be guilty of it) because we've watched companies bought by EA simply cease to exist. Once it's happened a couple of times you have to look at the common denominator: EA.

I've listened the actual podcast with him. Flynn didn't really said anything concrete. Which is not surprising, giving how nuch he doesn't wan't to brake any relations with the higher eshelons of EA. the only new thing that i learned is that he was the guy who made an installer for NWN in 2002.

I guess you can say that he perfected teh art of saying a lot without saying anything meaningful.

The better question is, what do they make of their purchase. EA is striclty mainstream with the goal to milk as much money as possible. That's corporate life, ater all, since the higher ups have less interest in satisfying their customers than they have in satisfying their shareholders. They pay the bonusses after all.

EA is just a symptom of a quickly spreading disease. Corporations have no souls. And that's probably a bigger problem with gaming than it is with selling toilet papers. It made me steer clear of so called AAA games for the most part. They're shiny, they're polished, but they lack heart. I gave it a last try with MEA, since I loved the ME series. If, and that's a big if, there is another Dragon Age, I certainly won't buy it on release. Better to wait an see what pans out.

My guess is they see a studio that is failing and see potential profit and if the profit isn't there they get the IP.  I also think the studio/publisher dynamic has changed in more recent years that publishers are creating developers to make a specific franchise and when that franchise is done they close the studio for that is what they were built for, which is what I see with Motive Studios with EA.

Honestly, for money reasons, I was out of the loop with gaming for many years. The first thing I bought was TS3 (having enjoyed the prior two games), which I later had to use Origin to play. I skipped ME completely because, to me, it just sounded like a shooting game and I was an RPG fan. (Little did I know...) So, moving along, I discover Maxis was closed down even though TS1 and TS2 were superior games to TS3 and TS4 (that latter two of which were under EA, while the former were under Maxis). Maxis was shut down following TS2 and then games dropped in quality. I wasn't even really aware of this stuff going on, because I didn't pay much attention, only finding this out later. What I did see was a shift in quality.

The only reason I even picked up Mass Effect was because I heard it was, in fact, and RPG and that my BroShep could romance another dude in the third game. Honestly, I was playing the first two games just to get to the third and used to hate the second because of the absence of Kaidan. Over time, I've taken a hard look at what I liked about each game and concluded that ME1 was the best of the three. That one, and that one alone, was entirely a BioWare game. ME2 was under EA. It also seemed to go off-plot. Shepard was preparing for the arrival of the Reapers but then all of a sudden s/he is chasing geth, the Reaper threat is ignored by EVERYONE and a tenuous link is made between the Reapers and the Collectors that was poorly explained. (*We* didn't really even know Harbinger was a Reaper until the Arrival DLC, which, hello, was a *DLC*!) Anyway, it got off-plot and even people who love ME2 most of the trilogy have been known to call ME2 "ME1, part 2" because they know that we lost sight of what was going on. Then we get to MEA and the ball was really dropped. Rather than use the AAA team to develop it, they instead choose a BioWare studio whose claim to fame is the Citadel DLC. While that was a fun DLC, it would have been pointless at any other time in the game since it was the send-off of Shepard and Co. Those people didn't know how to develop a full-on game (given the blunders they made, which are evident even if you liked the game, which I did) but were put in charge of something that was meant to carry the Mass Effect torch. That makes no sense unless you're choosing not to put a game out that fans will love but instead appease someone else...like shareholders. EA has other bridges to burn, like producing more lucrative projects the try to make people buy loot crates in order to realistically be able to play a game. Even if DA4 does see the light of day, the were planning to add "live gaming" elements (I don't even know what that is but it sounds MP-related which, hey, happens to be where things like loot crates come in).

People who enjoyed ME may have liked to do MP, but not as a requirement. It's pretty clear things had to be rolled back with linking MP with "galactic readiness" because not enough people were interested in that being necessary for an SP game. Yet, here EA is, pushing MP as the go-to thing. Then they did a half-assed job on MEA, which was SP but could have boosts from MP. There's some dots not being connected. If ME fans were turned off by MP as a requirement, why is EA pushing so hard to have it? And, sorry, but putting the B team on a AAA title suggests someone is looking for an excuse to shut them down and BioWare doesn't seem all that far away from that happening.

For the record, EA has shut down *thirteen* studios. Did they all suck? Is BioWare known for sucking? Yet, BioWare is in danger and that can't be a coincidence.

Going to an AskAGameDev article Here

They list 10 closures, but doesn't list BioWare Montreal and Visceral.  Even if they do close those studios, the question I ask you were did the people go? The BioWare Montreal and Visceral people were reported to move to other EA Studios, but mostly Motive Studios also in Montreal.  So they were moved to active projects, in those two cases it really seems like EA moved people to active projects instead of firing them when the projects they were scheduled on were abandoned.

So if you make those arguments what is the reasoning for Activision for closing 10 studios and studios like Raven just making off-year Call of Duty games.  Take-Two has a listing for closing 24 studios.  So again why is EA the only one that people constantly complain about closing studios?

Great you dislike EA for that, but that pretty much ignores my point of why people have all these grievances against EA, but are loving to publishers that have done the same thing.  Even Blizzard closed studios for they closed Blizzard North and there are a few people that are upset that the original Diablo studio is gone, but the majority from what I am seeing aren't "I will boycott all future Blizzard titles because they closed the studio I liked and fundamentally changed Diablo".  They hold the sins of Diablo 3 against Diablo 3, but not the history of the franchise.

Some of the statements he makes is obviously skimpy and him looking out for former colleagues, not burning bridges with a company he used to contribute greatly to.

Yes, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Nobody is there just to be assholes, the biggest issues stem from complacency, going as far as you think you can underestimating your consumer-base's intelligence, and thinking in art vs money-cows. There's room for some of both but too often EA seems to go the complacent, conservative route, which isn't totally strange considering they are trying to be competitive financially and also trying not to decline as a company... but at times they definitely could be run smarter and think better long-term. It's human to err though. It's also human to be dumb and only think of money and fast cars, but I hope there are people at the top at EA that just want to see games push the envelope in quality and ideas instead of just profit. It gets harder and harder to do really good the more hundreds of people you involve though.

I just hope EA gets better in the future and I hope they don't kill BioWare ever.

He pretty much stated what any of us would have stated in his situation. We may talk trash about that shi**y first job we had at some fast food joint, but when you are working in a career established professional industry such as gaming or any other career, IT, Marketing, Engineering...etc. You are taught at a very early age never to say anything negative about your previous employers.


That can kill your chances of ever getting employed anywhere...nobody wants to hire a former employee that sounds like a disgruntled or upset worker....

I'm ready to believe that EA isn't that bad (most of the time). But I keep coming back to the From Ashes DLC issue. Was it really BioWare's idea to rip Javik out of the game (necessitating plot re-structuring) to be sold as Day 1 DLC? I doubt that EA specifically told them to do that to Javik, but I wouldn't be surprised if Day 1 DLC was the order from EA, and From Ashes was how BioWare decided to handle it (they had DLC characters in ME2 after all). 

Javik was Day 1 DLC. As in, release day. He was ready to be included with the game when it was first released - and in fact was included with all downloads of the game (on PC, anyway). Whether he was unlocked or not depended on whether you had purchased the Collector's Edition. So the argument that making him DLC somehow delayed his development and / or gave BioWare time to "work on other, more important things" doesn't work. This isn't even touching the changes BioWare had to make to Mass Effect 3's story to make all of this possible (they were fairly major). That's why I find it hard to believe that BioWare did this to themselves. This would mean there was some interference from EA (so customers would have a reason to purchase the Collector's Edition of Mass Effect 3, which included content that was "already on the disc").