SWTOR is now 3th Party and Bioware focus on ME & DA or Bioware Austin no more?

As both a SWTOR and Dragon Age player, this actually strikes me as good news. BW gets more support for their projects while SWTOR gets handed to a company that's handling an MMO more than 25 years old and still going. Layoffs suck, though. Hopefully the staff that's not being retained, will be able to find other opportunities and hopefully moving to do so won't cause them too much grief (me, personally, having a job potentially offer to move out of Texas and Austin, that actually sounds like a pretty great deal...but some people have circumstances that might not allow that).

I don't either. To be honest, I'd never even heard of 'em before this news came out. But the way I see it, the fact that they manage Ultima Online, which came around since 16 years before SWTOR(!), and which Broadsword, specifically, has been running for almost as long as SWTOR has been out, makes me think they're generally pretty solid hands to put on the game.

I could be wrong. I could hate their design choices (admittedly part of what I like about SWTOR is that it works so well in its non-multiplayer parts). I never played any of their games. But this at least makes me think they're planning on keeping it around for a while.

The fact that EA is handing off SWTOR to another developer confirms my belief that the next Dragon Age is make-or-break for BioWare.

That is how I see it as well.  My opinion is that The Old Republic was no longer profitable enough for EA to keep and decided to off-load it to another developer instead of just shutting it down.

I think he has valid points. I feel for him - I really do. But while this may indeed be a loss for BioWare, Mass Effect and Dragon Age are original IP’s that are growing, not only in their own field, but across different types of media - books, comics, and TV shows. Which brings this point up:

“As far as BW, it would have certainly be in their best interest as a business to maximize exposure and support for SWTOR publicly over the years, since the SWTOR revenue has allowed for the…unusually long…dev cycles to continue for the last several games.”

It wouldn’t have been in BioWare’s best interest to maximize exposure and support publicly, because if they did, their IP’s may not have even grown to what it is today. Exposure and support is intended to expect results - that being more players. More players, more attention to the game. More attention to the game, less attention to their original IPs. These are all juggernauts, and BioWare is a small studio. Any attention to one will take a lot of attention from the other. BioWare learned this the hard way. One of their IP’s failed, which affected both Dragon Age and Mass Effect’s future installments tremendously.

SWTOR SWTOR and BioWare were never meant to be, which he points out. And again, I truly feel for him. There are millions of layers of hell in Game development and this sounds like one of them. I’m glad the game is living on and will get the support it needs, but I don’t share his sentiment regarding anything else BioWare related. BioWare will continue to grow and they’ll be just fine. In time.

Mass Effect hasn't been growing for a while now. Bioware may be trying to push more media about it but until the next Mass Effect launches they'll be trying to grow the amount of media around an IP most gamers are over. Especially after Andromeda. In fact Mass Effect caused the leaving of quite a few people from Bioware including Casey Hudson. The only real growing IP Bioware has is Dragon Age. His points are extremely valid.

Looking forward to how SWTOR develops under a studio that doesn't treat it like the ugly duckling of their catalog.

BioWare Austin is gone, obviously.

Frankly I'm surprised that EA kept BioWare around at all after the Anthem disaster (and the glaring incompetence discovered in its aftermath) - they paid a big studio like BioWare for 7 years worth of game development but only got 18 months worth of rather awful results out of it in return. That's a massive waste of time and resources and BioWare's products have never been big crowd pleasers anyway.

In that context the fact that DA4 is being developed at all by BioWare (and not farmed out to some new other studio) looks like a last chance act of mercy to me.

Not sure how fair of an assessment this is and it goes to a rather common argument that I see in other situations that amounts to 'just the work I see is them working'. An anology over in the sports world many people make the claim that people who play sports get paid way too much money because all they do is throw balls around for 3 hours every Sunday. But that is just not the case considering sports players are on the clock for things like practice, team events, events to the public, etc etc. 


Similarly to game development a game being in 'production' is not the only time a game is being worked on given both pre and post production. And if Anthem really was in development for 7 years that would've encompassed at least some of the dev time behind Mass 3 and all of the time of Dragon Age Inquision as well as all the time for Mass Effect Andromeda. Much like in the current situation with Dreadwolf they couldn't have just dropped everything on those three games just to work on Anthem, they've never had the people to pull off working on four games at once. And the fact that EA hasn't closed BioWare down and really there is no real threat of it for reasons I've already discussed demonstrates that they and BioWare finally understand this. That you can't just meander through game dev for years and then have a final shortened period of rush, these games need that time to grow and get going...and the fact that Dreadwolf wasn't released in say 2022 is a pretty big indication of this...and closing down a game that has been live for over a decade now doesen't really change that.

what you have is a profound misunderstanding of Schreier's commentary. Granted I'm not going to claim they didn't make mistakes in the project and indeed there is a chance they are being repeated with Dreadwolf (though with more time to fix it), but again the production phases of the game aren't the only work that happens on a game. And Schrier basically says that in the comments when talking about the big narrative and design changes. Again could be a problem, could be indicative of the industry, but it is work.

Which does serve to illistrate the point I was trying to make in the first place, though probably unsucessfully. If BioWare did that then it is very likely that they would've been closed down because that sounds downright...corrupt to their relationship. But then since they weren't closed down then logic suggests that they didn't and EA and BioWare now understand this, if nothing else that seems to be one of the legacies from both Anthem and Jedi Fallen Order that A. you need time to develop your games and B. SP games can still work. Prework is a thing and preparing the wheels. In short that time wasn't wasted, they might've had mission creep and other issues, but they did learn from it, and then they were forced to speed through the final production phases likely because EA was pressuring them to meet some deadline.

In my opinion responsibilty for the the slower than molasses development of DAI, MEA, Anthem and DAD points primarily toward a former chief design officer, and the current CEO of EA. EA insisted on the razor-bladed Frostbite engine, multiplayer, and easy money microtransactions, while having minimal understanding of single player RPGS. All this likely contributed to the the stunted development of these four Bioware games while most EA resources were directed at sports games.  In my opinion, the dysfunction started at the top with EA, and cascaded downhill into Bioware.