Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

Well maybe it will have information to make us excited and give positivity to equal out this other article. It could happen. It won’t, but it could.

I suspect I have questions.

Is joke, Hanako.

www.businessinsider.com/why-video-games-are-released-on-tuesdays-2014-11

Joshua Stiksma @joshstiksma
This part speaks to me: my exact feelings after I finished up Inquisition.
Proud of how people were receiving the game
Yet extremely exhausted and humiliated by how many people were burnt to get there. Plus, that permanent damage to mental health and personal relationships



After my third negative employee health survey (in a row), I decided it was time to move on.
Obviously I want it to be better for everyone that is still there -- but I couldn't take it any longer for myself.

FYI: I'm in a much better place right now, and loving it.
And that makes it harder and harder to accept that studios are doing this to friends and ex-coworkers that I care about.
I rarely post stuff like this, but this article makes me SO MAD. We can do so much better.

Yea - Schreier did write that article about the situation in Rockstar and it was immediately swept under the rug as praise for the game began trickling in. I mean gawd - he himself has hand-waved a troubled development of the Last Of Us only because things 'clicked' in the end  I think it's not just the gaming industry that has to do some reevaluation of the idea that the end justifies the means...

And it's not like I don't know that this isn't so simple, especially in creative fields, when what one works on also serves as something to express oneself. I don't want to dismiss the hard work or passion of people across different industries, but there are oftentimes deep emotions involved around creating content that fuels the drive and sadly is also very easily exploited (and commonly undervalued) - and if things go bad or meh the burnout/anxiety/depression can hit a person really badly, to a point that it can cripple someone for years. Heck, I know something about it, and I didn't work on anything as expensive or involving as a game 

After seeing all the responses, now I feel bad promoting and supporting the games I liked.

Ok while this is *bad* and while changes should be made i think people need to realize that gaming isn't special.

In fact i can't think of a single job that isn't emotionally draining or that requires you to sacrifice your personal time, relatuonships, or have crunch. I have it at my job and i have heard plenty of stories from a wide variety of careers to think that it's universal.

So yes while improvements can and should be made the game industry is struggling with something that may not have a *solution*.

The only guess I could make is that:

1) DA:I had the engine designed to work on last-gen consoles. While Trespasser was a current-gen only release, I imagine the engine's architecture was too dissimilar to modern day (and future) consoles for DA:I's template to be usable.

2) There may be technologies in Anthem that have some suitable benefits in DA4's singleplayer (like weather effects, inventory, animation/modeling toolsets, and environmental tech), and the online aspects are likely beneficial for its supposed multiplayer component. It may also be due to the degree at which live service changes can be applied to the game (things like hotfixes, balancing, new content, etc).

3) They scrapped DA:I's template (my god that'd be fucking terrible if this was the true reason)



My guess is that, the higher the profile a game has, the more money is needed to license a different engine. It may also only be a mandate on EA's end that the engine be used for the flagship titles (Battlefront, FIFA, Madden, Dragon Age, etc). As for why Respawn isn't using it when it comes to Titanfall and Apex Legends, Respawn only partnered with EA to publish those games; they weren't owned by EA. As a result, the mandate doesn't effect them. However, with Respawn now being an EA-owned company, its very likely that Star Wars: Fallen Order will have to use the Frostbite engine; and any subsequent titles they make.



While I agree that working on Unreal would likely make developing a game for them much easier, this doesn't address the problems of project mismanagement going on at BioWare. The fact that assets from previous Frostbite-made games under BioWare weren't being used in succession, to keep building on a base, shows a level of incompetence; to some degree. The standout for me from Jasons article, was that - apparently - the next Dragon Age was going to start from scratch again; which makes no sense if you already have DA:I as a template.

Because Anthem's code is one that's is regularly updated and most recently expanded, I guess?
I don't presume that DAI's code is useless, given that we know that it's a basis for expansion of Frostbite's RPG and cinematic tools, but I guess there are enough differences to either move to or update to what Anthem has. I mean, you can see from the quality of animations/mocap the vast differences between subsequent games, and if there are things that an epic sRPG would have a good use of it's cinematic tools and dialogue tools that are more robust than they were in DAI (remember the bug?), aside from maybe the dynamic weather or day-night cycle that so far were only present in last BW game and not the previous ones in FB. Online integration probably also looks better from Anthem's codebase, despite issues that emerged once everybody started logging in.
This is of course entirely amateur guesswork, but AFAIK if they stop developing on Frostbite the problems won't just go away, in fact you can run into more of them, especially if you're doing so when the project is already underway. One of the things we heard were some of the biggest roadblocks for MEA was that they switched 3D software at some point - so can you imagine what would happen if they switched the whole engine? (also: Respawn was bought by EA at the end of 2017 - so at the time Respawn's work on Titanfall 3/Apex was well underway, hence the same issue would apply to it if EA mandated engine switch mid-production).
Licensing and thus cost increase on engine alone aside, they'd have to re-train the devs and lose probably most of the assets, modules and overall progress they've made over years for a specific engine, thus forcing them to basically start from the scratch and spend exorbitant amount of time building new pipelines and modules for a given project, which means less time for designing gameplay, writing, etc...

Also - how problematic Frostbite is remains a contested issue and it's unclear now whether the problem lied in the engine itself, or the fact that Bioware's Frostbite experts were assigned to work on FIFA and oftentimes didn't receive support when they've had problems with the engine, which can be an issue with external engines as well.