Matt Goldman Quits Bioware

I read over that yesterday, and it just read like corporate gobbilty gook. It looks as though it was done by committee. 'Cause, ya know, corporations can't do anything on their own. Especially these snowflakes.

I'll be the first to say eat the rich. But I won't say eat the creatives. That's what you've got going on here. They're eating the creatives over at BioWare.

Get ready for a bland, comprising, conformist, project.

What is the right thing to do today in law may not be the right thing tomorrow. The people you praise today are the ones you shame tomorrow.

Losing senior devs before the last couple launches seems to be a tradition.  I remember many people saying the game(s) will be fine nothing to worry about...

Errr, that's not it.

At my current job, my last manager was horrid. He was just like, "You do this, you're gonna be fired. You do that, you're gonna be fired." So, fear was his big motivator. Fear me so much, and that'll keep you in line. Might be the nicest guy outside of work, but man.. During those work hours, he was a tyrant.

When it finally came down to us that he was "quitting" (I still think he was told to pack his shit and leave, we'll just tell everyone that you're quitting...), it was actually him that delivered the news to us on Thursday that Friday (of the same week) would be his last day.

If you think that someone as high up as Matt Goldman had to have a committee write that letter for him, you're fucking insane.

You would have to think that the "tone" of the game has long been decided at this point. If it hasn't, that alone is concerning, as they are way far behind on the development of this game than we would hope it would be after seven years of production.

Btw, I don't think Laidlaw was talking about "tone" in regards to the Witcher 3 comparison, I think he was mostly talking about the structure, how the story and gameplay and open world aspects were structured compared to Inquisition, etc. I don't think he was advocating for a darker tone necessarily (although I don't mind a dark tone if the story warrants it).

True, he could have been talking about making the game mechanically more like witcher 3, which every company has seemingly done ad nauseum since the game's release. But I don't it would have stopped at that, personally. It's bad enough all the base building features and such got cut due to last gen support, but DAI honestly had no business being open world at all. 

While I am angry at how Bioware abandoned the patches for the MELE leaving PC gamers to get help from modders, unpaid employees, I liked it. But weand just pray that enough people forgot about that to get their money with DA4 and ME:N even though I am looking forwards it. They don't seem to care much since DA:O for post launch technical support.

Lol! If your crying about that, never play anything by Bethesda! 

Anyway, if I remember right, bioware did not have much to do with the legendary edition outside of promotion? Fairly sure it was outsourced.

Their post launch support was almost always pretty mediocre to outright poor. They mostly only fix real showstopper bugs, and it takes them a lot of time for very little. It got really bad once they started to use Frostbite, when most of their patches (probably fumbled together by a skeleton crew) often broke as much they fixed. Anthem was their low point, where you could tell from the nature of the bugs that they either barely understood the code they were messing with or the spaghetti level of said code was truly a thing of legend.

I'm curious about their next games and hope that they will manage some kind of turn around and produce something fun and playable. I'm happy with a shorter story as long as I get interesting characters that I can care about and not another bore fest like DAI or MEA. To be fair, DAI had some good characters in it, but its dozen or so hours of story were spread over way, WAY too much mind numbing busy work. But maybe they can capture their old magic again. I sure hope so.

Sadly, my cousin is in this position. He's a particle physicist. He worked for CERN, on the Large Hadron Collider, for several years. Now lately he's fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and is now apparently on the verge of quitting his job because he refuses to get a covid vaccine (because they contain mind-control chips, or adrenaline extract from human trafficked/cannibalized children, or whatever crazy nonsense he believes at the moment)... while having a child with EXTREME medical needs, I should add. 

Just goes to show you this sort of lunacy isn't necessarily related to intelligence, because he's as smart as they come (hard to become a particle physicist if you're a dummy). Very sad situation.

And in any case a plausible possible explanation for Goldman's departure (though obviously still completely speculative).