What I don't understand is why after what almost 10 years of Bioware working with the DICE engine they are still straggling? They have already released 2 full games using it yet every time it's used as an excuse.
Jason Schreier, the investigative journalist who only publishes inside sources that pushes the narrative he wants to push. Objectivity be damned. I can't believe every single BioWare employee feels the same.
D
dark10x
Sorry to hear about what you are going through. All I can say is stay close to your family and take one day at a time. You produce great work
I imagine the Dice Engine doesn't come with a whole lot of stuff that Anthem needed. So you their engine might be good, but if you need to build new rigs and rendering engines and these workflow tools from the ground up to suit the needs of your game, then suddenly everything gets a whole lot more complicated.
They are making a Triple AAA games so it has to have all the bells of whistles. Publishers demands it has everything, because if it ticks all the boxes, consumers are more likely to buy. "It has multiplayer and COOP! WOW!". Publishers are less concerned about quality, because obviously trying to do all these things water down your game and suddenly you are developing at a snails pace.
Look at DMC5. Game is verrryyy simple. But that game probably works because they stayed in their niche. They stayed at what they were good at. They didnt turn it into a GaaS Shooter subscription shooter with RTS elements and space battles. When you focus all your efforts on fewer things you tend to get higher quality.
Anthem bites off more than it can chew, and I imagine that the team structuring of a company like Bioware had reached a point where project planners are coming in, and a lot of the real development talent gets pushed out. Bioware grows and grows and grows. Budgets is bigger because scope is bigger. So you need more people on the team, and that means more beucracy and more non-gaming people who come in to help smooth out a much larger company. You need a lot more people for HR, Legal and all these other functions that are more about managing big teams than anything else. That changes company culture, and it wouldnt be surprising to me if this is how talented developers got pushed away.
You look at financial companies how people become managers- and you look at how many people don't know how to manage at all. It happens in almost every company. Company culture today assumes that if you are a good worker you will be promoted (eventually), but the problem is that many good workers wont make good managers or good leaders. When you have bad managers and leaders, everything turns to shit. Bioware can be masters of the dice engine, but a couple of teams mismanaged is enough to slow all other teams down. If the animation department is 3 weeks behind schedule it fucks up many other teams who need shit to be done. And if this company culture is compromised across the company, then its only taking off from there.
We don't know the inner details of why many Bioware employees have left, but before Andromeda was even announced we started seeing high profile talent leave. Sometimes people leave companies because of no work culture problems, but just because of life, moving or needing a career change. However there was something about Andromeda, and the people who left that raised eyebrows. One would have thought that EA would have done an investigation within their own company culture and start to examine what is it that they are doing that are destroying their owned studios to have commercial and critical failures? Bioware is only the latest example of this.
Of course it is not like things EA touch instantly become bad. Many great Bioware games were published by EA. But something has got to give...
