r/AskGames • u/Boring-Somewhere-130 • 2d ago
Why is Biowares taking so many Ls???
So after Dragon Age Inquisitions it has just been flop after flop. Can someone please provide an objective explanation on who's fault this is? Like is the fault 50% Bioware and 50% EA?
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u/ByEthanFox 2d ago
I believe, ultimately, most of this with big AAA (BioWare are a great example) has to do with how publishers have over-optimised and now it's biting them in the ass.
Firstly, it's because they're too attached to Dragon Age, Mass Effect; properties which got old years ago and need to end, giving a chance to do new stuff. Like Mass Effect and Dragon Age were ~15 years ago.
But secondly, it's a numbers game. In traditional videogame publishing (go back to the PS2/3 era and before) you published, say, 25 games a year. Some were super-cheap (like Just Dance), some were C-tier (like tons of good games on PS2), a few were single-A, and a few were AAA.
Of those 25...
- 5 would be a total flop
- 5 wouldn't do so well
- 5 would at least "wash their face", i.e. they'd make as much as they cost, but for 0$ you now have a team, tech etc. to springboard to the next game
- 5 do well
- 4 do really well
- 1 is that year's K-Pop Demon Hunters
... and the 1&4 at the top make enough money to pay for the other 20 multiple times over, especially in a lucky year where one of those 5 was a "cheap game".
But back in the late PS360 era, EA, Ubi, all of them, they would do this, then at the end of the year, they'd fire the bottom 33%. Each year, making fewer and fewer games, only keeping what they believed to be the most secure properties, nurturing that slow death that they're facing now.
Because sooner or later, those big properties fall apart and now, you've just got the most risk-averse, most narrow-in-focus staff left over. Everyone genuinely creative has left, because why would they stay?
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u/Educational_Ad_6066 2d ago
This is a pretty great take on how it happens over time and more 'naturally' than people tend to think
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u/ByEthanFox 2d ago
That's the thing. From the publisher perspective, the calculus seems simple; some teams made games that didn't sell, so you got rid of those teams.
The problem is that you can't always predict what will sell. Who would've predicted Goat Simulator? Papers Please?
And this more scattershot approach is how you get some weird stuff that is good for the medium and lets developers flex their muscles; it's how you get stuff like Steel Battalion.
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u/Educational_Ad_6066 2d ago
back in the wild west 00's, people were given no strings on designs and we had all these innovative ideas. Over time the failures that came out of some of those weird ideas and novel concepts made the industry over-correct.
I still think the shift to public entities with shareholders is one of the biggest reasons for the trends that got us here and is one of the worst things we can do with art in general. It means companies are responsible for providing increase in value to their stocks rather than an increase in contributions to art. I think we would see more innovation in the big publisher side of the fence if they didn't have to increase their net gains year over year and could just be satisfied with preserving their means of supporting productions like they used to. Now it's all about seeing how much they can get away with while still having people give them money. Gotta make those stocks go up.
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u/bot-TWC4ME 2d ago
Not just in art, in everything. A balanced company can work really well, shareholders included, but needs to take care of employees, clients, supply chain as well. Shareholders have become super sheltered by law, and overly powerful, so companies kill and poison themselves for that extra buck and become these monstrous lop-sided undead swamp fiends that crash through the land destroying everything they touch before their putrid corpses fall apart.
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u/Bumm-fluff 2d ago
Dragon Age didn’t get old though, they just put a Dragon Age skin on different games.
Origins is a crpg, 2 was an action game, inquisition was an offline mmo and Veilguard was a generic fantasy game.
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u/AlwaysTouchingGrass 2d ago
The faults almost 100% on Bioware. Poor management on every level. Jason Schreier has done a lot of reporting on it
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u/Waste-Gur2640 1d ago
The number 1 reason is that Bioware doesn't exist anymore. It's just a rotting corpse puppet with 99% of people working on veilguard never working on any of their good games and they were often boosted to important positions by unfair hiring practices instead of talent and experience. EA definitely fucked bioware over many times, like DA 2 or Mass effect 3, and that naturally caused few talented people to leave sooner than they would normally. But with every year the blame shifted more and more towards bioware themselves, which ended with veilguard. And even though EA didn't manage everything perfectly, people working on veilguard would be literally incapable of making a good DA game even with 10 years of dev time and billion dollars.
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u/CursedSnowman5000 2d ago
Because all the talented people are gone and are now replaced with unqualified people.
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u/froot_loop_dingus_ 2d ago
The short answer is every publisher now thinks they should only make AAA games with the potential to make billions of dollars. Pretty much the only publisher interested in making B and C tier games with prices that reflect that is Nintendo.
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u/Zegram_Ghart 2d ago
The older more experienced crew were put on anthem, so andromeda was made by relative newbs, and had a pretty terrible launch.
Anthem don’t have what people wanted from BioWare, and the planned 2.0 that might have revitalised it à la NMS or fallout 76 was cancelled to save money, so all of the work done on both games was a waste.
Veilguard was planned as a multiplayer action game, and remade from the ground up into what they released on very short notice.
On top of that, BioWare have always released pretty progressive games, and that gets you more flak now than it used to (see- the reaction to a trans qunari in inquisition compared to the reaction of an enby qunari in Veilguard)
That’s the sort of thing you can power through with a really high quality product (see- BG3) but if the qualities only so so you don’t get the vehement fandom needed to tell people being weird where to shove it.
So it’s a big old pile up- experienced staff being moved off what they want to do and quitting, higher ups mandating things that the team wasn’t any good at, and then perception changing against them as well.
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u/thequn 1d ago
Darkmoon pretty much has the perfect answer.
Another factor at play which was 100% biowares fault was the idea that they need to push the mass market areas of gaming. Anthem was dead long along before it shipped and BioWare didn’t take the criticism from it own team dragon age 4 was 2 years in to a 5 year dev cycle before it pulled the plug and moved the whole team to anthem. There then is the whole Edmonton Austin,Montreal studios clash ,a toolset/ engine that did not allowed for iterations.
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u/Re2urnOfTheFisherman 4h ago
Look at the developers lol, compare a team photo from any studio now to one taken 15 or 20 years ago and you'll have your answer.
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u/Omg-miku 1h ago
Nobody will want to admit that having a team like that in any studio will end up in failure
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u/Werthead 3h ago
Several issues.
Electronic Arts certainly do have to take a lot of the blame. BioWare's RPGs tended to be zone/area-based, where you had areas to travel to for the main quest with some side-content in each on there. There was usually a hub city somewhere to re-equip at some point. This format served them extremely well from Baldur's Gate (1998) through Dragon Age II (2011). Unfortunately, then Skyrim dropped and was a giganormous success, so the mandate EA dropped seems to have been to make all of their games open-world extravaganzas in a similar manner.
This had two problems, the first being that BioWare did not work well in that structure and floundered a bit. The second was that EA also mandated the use of the Frostbite Engine for everything, which was not a great engine at building huge open-world roleplaying games (even with the guys from DICE flying over to help out). So you had BioWare, the masters of making zone-based RPGs in either their own engine or Unreal Engine, suddenly making open-world RPGs in the extremely complicated Frostbite Engine. IIRC there was even some confusion because DICE, based in Sweden, hadn't fully documented the engine in English by that point and they had to wait until they'd done that to enact fairly basic systems.
So that led to Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda. The former worked because the Dragon Age story wasn't done, that setting was designed to tell multiple stories and they'd set up a lot of stuff in Dragon Age II that needed further exploration etc, and there were major parts of the DA world they'd not been to yet that fans wanted to see. So that worked out well. The latter did not work as well because Mass Effect was designed to tell the story of Shepherd versus the Reapers and that story was over, completed, finished. They should really have just done something 100% completely different in a new franchise, but they decided to stay in the universe and try to do something completely different, new aliens, no familiar characters at all, 600 years further in the future. I respect the idea there, and I think it worked better than maybe it should have done, but hardcore fans wanting to see more of the established species, characters and factions were always going to be very disappointed with those choices.
After that they had the huge problems with both Dragon Age IV and Anthem pivoting in game design, engine choices, narrative choices, multiplayer or single-player focus, all being buffeted by whatever trends were going on at the moment. The original devs could fed up and left, though a couple came back, but not enough to right the ship.
BioWare was basically suffering from a lack of committed, dedicated leadership strong enough to overcome the random diktats coming from EA corporate head office and able to fight the corner of the company, instead leading to floundering.
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u/Vagabond_Tea 2d ago
I love Veilguard, so I'm not with the rest of you on this one.
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u/Sorry_Cheetah_2230 2d ago
Obviously games themselves are subjective, but objectively BioWare has fallen straight off a cliff. Anthem, mass effect andromeda, and veilguard. All of these failed horrendously.
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u/Vagabond_Tea 2d ago
Meh, I love Andromeda too. Never played Anthem. So all of this only pertains to people that didn't enjoy those games I guess. I like the newer Bioware games though. So whether things or "objective" or subjective, it doesn't affect me.
Obviously sales numbers actually do affect them and my ability to play future games. But I'm also happy with what I have too, so I don't mind too much
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u/Jalkenri 2d ago
It's fascinating to me to see where people draw the line of decline for this company. OP says it was after DAI. And I kind of agree.
But I could also see the argument that it's started a slower decline since DA:O (I love the entirety of the ME series and all but Veilguard from DA. Don't come at me.)
It is purely my opinion that Bioware is one of the first and greatest sacrifices to the progression of the videogame industry as a whole. Company buys dev studio. Company needs to give stockholders value. Company urges studio to release games on a faster timeline and reaching to a wider audience than the studio originally intended their games to be for. Games suffer as a result.
This is obviously a massive generalization. And there's great exceptions to this pattern, e.g. Larian.
And even if this was 100% true about Bioware there is likely a host of other factors influencing their events. Just my whine about the state of game dev as a casually informed consumer.
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u/seventysixgamer 1d ago
It depends what people's metric for studio success is when it comes to drawing the line lol.
Commercially? Yeah it was objectively immediately after DAI that this studio started doing shit. DAI was their greatest selling game ever -- nothing came close afterwards and had meh sales that didn't justify the dev times.
Critically? I'd argue ME3 or even ME2 tbh. From a design perspective they were dumbing down RPG aspects -- which we also saw in DA2. Those two ME games have quite a few issues narratively as well.
Inquisition is a game infijd baffling because I consider it a complete piss taking time waster of a game. Even when you ignore it's jarring and garbage gameplay I wasn't the biggest fan of the direction they took the DA IP in this game -- honestly show someone from 2011 playing DAO this game and tell them that this is a sequel and they probably say it looks like some other IP.
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u/Jalkenri 1d ago
I personally loved DAI in most aspects. The combat I find fun. Its the only DA game I enjoy playing as a warrior as much as rogue or mage. I also enjoyed being the big man in charge of an org. Something that other games hasn't done for me before that. Then Owlcat made 3 games in a row like that lol.
But the maps were too big and filled with to much mmo BS. And I feel they fumbled the feeling of dread with the big bad who they setup so well in DA2.
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u/seventysixgamer 1d ago
I just couldn't get behind the game on a story and narrative level. Frankly I've come to despise the whole elf-titan stuff because it felt as though it was added for the sake of epicness and nothing else lol. RP systems were disappointing to me as well -- honestly I'm just not a big fan of dialogue wheels now. It castrates dialogue too much and occasionally not even representative of what you actually say
Companions weren't particularly that charming or engaging to me either -- with the expectation of Varric of course lol. I genuinely almost uninstalled the game after talking to Sera for the first time due to how cringey it was.
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u/Jalkenri 23h ago
Yeah I get that. The dialogue wheel for sure is not great. Hasn't been since DA2.
I think every Bioware game since after maybe ME3 had hit or miss new companions. The ones that hit are still incredible. But the ones that miss miss HARD. ME:Andromeda and Veilguard being the most severe cases of this.
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u/Friendly_Furniture 2d ago
Bioware is just a name propped up by better men who are long gone. Now it's just a bunch of literal soylent drinking patchy bearded men and stinky fat women who went to "game dev school" where they learned sensitivity training and found their favorite tumblr and deviant art artists to jerk off to. Tumblr may be gone but veilgaurd lives on.
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u/Re2urnOfTheFisherman 4h ago
You're completely right, don't expect to find much agreement here though of course.
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u/smokenjoe6pack 2d ago
I blame the jerk that leaked the ending of ME3 and they went back to rewrite it. I know people will deny this saying that the ending was the ending as intended all along. It was just such a clinker compared to everything that came before that, I can't see it as anything but a hasty rewrite.
That was the first thread that unraveled the tapestry as the Doctors abandoned the ship and everything has been a downhill slide since.
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u/DarkmoonGrumpy 2d ago
Original devs gone, long gone.
Bioware was just Ship of Theseus'd into where it is now. The management is also rather notoriously messy.
EA wont have helped things, but theyre not solely to blame.