Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on May 24, 2020 23:45:13 GMT
To me its looking at what is already working and then having to start over, which is what the move to Frostbite was. All the years of tools, assets, and modules were gone and they had to start over. Yes bare bones engine it was made for what Dice wanted because it was the Dice engine that moved to other studios. What I am trying to say is I doubt BioWare would have the exact same issues getting everything setup on Unreal 4/5 for they would have to go back and remake the majority of their tools, assets, and modules to work there as well. My guess is you would see technical issues there as well just like the problems that we have seen with Unreal 4 and games like Fallen Order where the engine didn't seem to be designed for loading a large amount of assets at once. So there are specific faults for what Frostbite has, but I just don't see BioWare not having any issues if they were going somewhere else either. The problem I have with a lot of these articles as well is like that "soul-crushing crunch" article from Jason Schreier as well. I was going through AskAGameDev archives and he made an interesting point. The crunch for Anthem wasn't any worse then the typical BioWare crunch period and he said that from what he was told it followed the trend of every BioWare game which means it could go all the way back to Baldur's Gate era BioWare. So yes there were these employees that burned out of disappointed in the crunch, but what BioWare did was typical of the studio and probably the industry as a whole, but the way it was reported on focused on that one aspect only and made it sound like it was completely abnormal for what BioWare has done and that just wasn't true. I do think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but I don't think Frostbite is the be all and end all issue for a lot of these problems. Especially when the way people are talking it wasn't that they couldn't get it to work, its that they didn't have the time to do it properly which ties into the reasoning why BioWare needs to go to crunch or delay their games so often they are unable to properly judge how much time they need. Even when reading the articles about FIFA and its problems there are people blaming Frostbite for it, but then there are people talking about how its bad game design that people are blaming on Frostbite which means it would have transitioned over to Ignite as well because that is what they wanted to do and those issues with have happened anywhere. Edit: AskAGameDev's Post if interested
The problem with crunch is that people like Schreier and Jim Sterling makes seem it like the entire development of several AAA game studios (which FTR also includes CDPR, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, WB Interactive, Square, BioWare, Capcom, Ubisoft, EA, and every other major developer/publisher out there) that from the start it's all crunch and maybe it's that case but if that is true then how are any of these companies keep their all of their employees from writers, concept artists, to programmers, to animators, to the janitors and so on and also what am I, the player who buys the games from these companies, can do about the abuses of crunch? Other than not buying the games and if I don't buy the games from these companies then I wouldn't be buying any video games.
I agree and crunch is a common thing in the game industry, but it is also common in nearly every other industry out there. I have worked on IT contracts and during major hardware turnovers there are many more then 40 hour work weeks for a month or two which sounds like what happens at BioWare. I worked at a call center and they had "mandatory overtime" which meany 59.5 hour weeks for 18 months. That is what bothers me about the people that call themselves "gaming journalists" for it just seems they report the issues in a way that isn't neutral. Heck a friend of mine sent me a Jim Sterling video where he targeted EA because players were demanding that they continue to develop paid content for Battlefront 2 to make it EA's fault that people were doing that. Then you have place after place use Jason Schreier being the only evidence of something going wrong at a studio. So there wasn't anyone else doing a journalists job they just made an article about an article and convinced themselves that the source was accurate.
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Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on May 24, 2020 23:46:13 GMT
The problem with crunch is that people like Schreier and Jim Sterling makes seem it like the entire development of several AAA game studios (which FTR also includes CDPR, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, WB Interactive, Square, BioWare, Capcom, Ubisoft, EA, and every other major developer/publisher out there) that from the start it's all crunch and maybe it's that case but if that is true then how are any of these companies keep their all of their employees from writers, concept artists, to programmers, to animators, to the janitors and so on and also what am I, the player who buys the games from these companies, can do about the abuses of crunch? Other than not buying the games and if I don't buy the games from these companies then I wouldn't be buying any video games.
Because Bioware is the scapegoat for everything that's wrong in gaming by clickbait Youtubers and gamers: www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=49332Check out this piece, how passive aggressive he is towards Bioware's crunch and his double standards are displayed. Yep. BioWare is held to a standard much higher then any other developer probably because tearing them down brings those precious clicks. I remember vividly Polygon writing a new piece on Andromeda every day for multiple weeks and then one opinion piece was about how "it wasn't any better then an early access game at full price".
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Cyberstrike
N4
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Post by Cyberstrike on May 25, 2020 0:03:48 GMT
The problem with crunch is that people like Schreier and Jim Sterling makes seem it like the entire development of several AAA game studios (which FTR also includes CDPR, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, WB Interactive, Square, BioWare, Capcom, Ubisoft, EA, and every other major developer/publisher out there) that from the start it's all crunch and maybe it's that case but if that is true then how are any of these companies keep their all of their employees from writers, concept artists, to programmers, to animators, to the janitors and so on and also what am I, the player who buys the games from these companies, can do about the abuses of crunch? Other than not buying the games and if I don't buy the games from these companies then I wouldn't be buying any video games.
Because Bioware is the scapegoat for everything that's wrong in gaming by clickbait Youtubers and gamers: www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=49332Check out this piece, how passive aggressive he is towards Bioware's crunch and his double standards are displayed.
When you consider some of the horror stories coming out companies like Rockstar, Naughty Dog, and everybody else's favorite "can't do no wrong darling" CDPR that make BioWare's crunch abuses seem tame in comparison (again crunch shouldn't be used to abuse your devs). Yeah BioWare has abused crunch time but my God have you heard about the insane amount hours devs put into RDR2, or the insane stuff that devs had to do for Uncharted 4 and The Last of US 2, or on the grueling work hours and allegedly poor working condition for The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 during crunch?
I think some of it is overblown and few devs are working insane hours and/or doing stupid things during crunch time, because they have to get the game out the door sometime.
Then they get on their high horse and demand that conditions be changed to lessen the amount of crunch, but I have never heard anything but vague concepts that devs should unionize. OK I come from an Union family and I support that but until the devs themselves decide to unionize there isn't a damn thing I can do. I can't force devs to unionize and given the sheer amount power of multimedia companies have it would be next to impossible for BioWare Austin to unionize due to Texas being a strong anti-union state and I don't know about the rules in Canada.
If I don't buy the games that interest me from either Double A or AAA companies then I'm not buying video games. If said video games doesn't sell and the studio closes and people lose their jobs and they're out of work, and how does that help devs?
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Post by KaiserShep on May 25, 2020 11:18:12 GMT
And apparently, the people at Rockstar are massive dicks. But, RDR2 is supposed to be good, so....good I guess?
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Highwayman667
N3
"In uncertainty, find infinite possibility"
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Post by Highwayman667 on May 25, 2020 15:15:15 GMT
And apparently, the people at Rockstar are massive dicks. But, RDR2 is supposed to be good, so....good I guess? Not in my book at least. I love the Mortal Kombat franchise but I won't be buying a single game if Ed Boon keeps being a dick to his employees. Then again, videogame developers are making a mistake by not unionizing.
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Post by SirSourpuss on May 25, 2020 15:54:11 GMT
I have not supported any of the games that included crunch.
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Post by cloud9 on May 31, 2020 7:01:54 GMT
I cannot imagine anything more then what we are getting with Frostbite, just because the engine might be more complicated it doesn't mean that somehow switching game engines will magically fix the problems BioWare has. Unless you think Unreal will somehow populate a big open world game with procedural generated content or fix a story that was stretched too thin to fix all the content that was created. Looking at all the other games that can use Frostbite just fine and without the problems BioWare did I don't see why BioWare isn't getting the blame instead of the game engine. For if you can make FIFA or Need for Speed and create the code needed for those things RPG elements shouldn't be that hard. Especially with a game like Mass Effect and building upon the foundation of Inquisition where the problems in the end seemed to have been more world design then anything else. Even the Aaryn Flynn article wasn't that critical of the engine, to me it was more critical of BioWare and how they unprepared for the design challenges of using the engine. This is no issue Frostbyte:
Seriously though: Read this -it explains the trouble that Frostbyte gives RPG developers.
And people will still ignore the facts.
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The Hype Himself
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hawkeyegod
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Post by The Hype Himself on May 31, 2020 12:54:32 GMT
BioWare Magic. Fix it and we'll bang BioWare. 30 minutes of Pity Sex.
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Highwayman667
N3
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Post by Highwayman667 on Jun 17, 2020 2:05:22 GMT
I have not supported any of the games that included crunch. This is the right attitude. Though I don't know if it would be enough. This type of stuff will keep happening for as long as developers remain guildless.
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