Dragon Age

Yep, Telltale wasn't the only game in town anymore, so to speak.

The free market is a harsh mistress.

The vid also pointed out that Telltale didn't just not innovate, they apparently actively avoided it for a long time. "We don't need to innovate" or some crap like that.

Like I said, Telltale had some really shitty leadership throughout the years.

Edited by M84 on Apr 6th 2019 at 2:01:20 AM

It's a niche genre which gets all the nicher when you start pairing it with slightly odd-duck properties like Borderlands and Game of Thrones. I guess given the runaway success of TWD it was hard to know exactly what it was they'd done right? Hindsight being 20/20, I'd still say it's that timing thing, but I can see how it would be hard for the company to gauge what the shifting landscape of gaming might look like or how to position themselves to meet it — because of, again, that peculiar gameplay niche they were in.

Edited by Unsung on Apr 5th 2019 at 12:46:34 PM

To pivot back to Dragon Age and Bioware a bit, they seem to be having a similar issue as Telltale when it comes to leadership woes.

That Anthem article revealed that a huge part of their problems is that their leadership is completely fucking out of touch with their workforce. The response from Bioware to that article only reinforced that.

Especially if it's true that Frostbite, another huge part of the problems at Bioware, wasn't actually forced on Bioware by EA. Rather, Bioware's own leaders agreed to use it after EA strongly encouraged their studios to use it instead of arguing a case for why it'd be a bad idea.

There's a reason that some developers actually hoped Inquisition would bomb instead of being the success it was.

Edited by M84 on Apr 6th 2019 at 2:12:12 AM

And it isn't like their post-TWD games were bad, per say. I love Borderlands even more, depending on my mood at the moment, and I really liked Batman Season 2.

But video games, as a medium, demand innovation and change. You can't release The Walking Dead: Season 2 and have it be exactly like the first season, only more of it. The gameplay needs to be more refined and exciting. For better or worse, video games need to be better each time.

Edited by SilentColossus on Apr 5th 2019 at 11:14:23 AM

The Dragon Age games have at least changed things up. Though whether one thinks the changes between each game was good is another matter.

I think Bioware is doing this in the opposite direction. They're focusing on the "live services" and Open World gameplay, but that's not what attracts fans to their work. They're innovating away from what makes them unique. If Telltale was making Knights of the Old Republic over and over again, Bioware is trying to make Skyrim.

I haven't played Anthem, but Inquisition and Andromeda jumped on the open world bandwagon too fast.

Edited by SilentColossus on Apr 5th 2019 at 11:16:14 AM

They attempted to make an open world ala Skyrim but forgot to actually add stuff in said open world to make it a joy to explore rather than a chore.

Bethesda has their own issues, namely going whole hog on monetization schemes, but they used to know that you need to give players incentive to explore the vast open world of a game.

I'd say a lot of Bioware's problems again come down to that whole "niche genre" idea, and leadership over the past decade or so is inevitably going to be torn between the necessary labor-of-love component of making those games and having to answer to whoever their overseers are at EA. I'm not saying that leadership is blameless, but they're human, they're fallible. That idea of "if you're not expanding, you're failing", though, can and has been poison to a niche company, and I'd say that's something that EA pushes hard on the companies it acquires. This has always felt a bit inevitable, right from the time the sale was announced and Muzyka and Zeschuk parachuted out.

Edited by Unsung on Apr 6th 2019 at 3:32:46 AM

The transition from "niche" to "mainstream" has not been a smooth one for Bioware.

Well, "Live Services" is for sure something EA mandates. I believe we got an email from a few years ago saying that all games must have a push for long time service.

Which also causes a problem because 1) if EVERY game demands players to shell out more money for games that they purchased, then players feel like AT Ms rather than audience members and 2) The two best selling games of 2018 were single player games with next to no micro-transactions that being God of War and Red Dead 2 (with RDR 2 somewhat blurring the line since Online is kind of a separate thing that came later). And even RDR:Online has been heavily criticized for its microtransaction elements.

Dragon Age: Inquisition only but in the bare effort to be an 'online multiplayer' game and NO ONE cared for it.

I think the power dynamics here are all out of wack and probably not communicated well. The Bioware devs don't know their own team very well and they don't know how much to push with EA looming over their heads, either because of actual relationship or the perception of what EA does to studios like Bioware and fear that they'll do so if pushed too much. EA probably doesn't realize the fear that they put into their employees (or maybe they do) and won't set absolute nonsense aside to try and just make a game work cohesively instead of all these corporate sticky notes. And the employees are so abused they're falling apart and any refusals to meet demands has the weight of either jeopardizing their career or impacting the game AND THEN jeopardizing their careers.

It sounds like a tangled mess that won't be sorted out on their own and everyone needs a giant family counseling session. But the thing about therapists is that you need someone smart enough to realize you need to hire one. And I don't think the dev leads or EA are smart enough to research and hire an industry professional to work with everyone.

And the response from Bioware to that Anthem article only seems to confirm that Bioware's leadership is refusing to acknowledge any problems.

The biggest surprise in that article was that it was an EA executive who was indirectly responsible for Anthem having the flight mechanic.

Edited by M84 on Apr 6th 2019 at 2:46:07 AM

Which I think shows that EA executive leadership does have an idea of what actually sells. But there appears to be breakdown between that, the middle managers and then the Devs themselves.

Like, EA understand market trends and KNOW what's exciting. It's just they're sat on a load of I Ps they haven't got a clue how to really exploit.

So, they missed out on the nostalgia of the Dungeon Keeper-likes; missed the MOBA / Strategy reinvention; missed out of the Battle Royale mess (Until Apex Legends - but they had a crap tonne of I Ps that could use it)

It's similar to Activision.

Heck, half their odl titles could be remastered for iPhone / Mobiles and resold. They could then make sequels that incorporate live service... look at Kairosoft! Imagine a Dungeon keeper game like that! ON MOBILE!

Or Desert Strike, and its ilk.

But the large inertia around big corporates and the group-think probably kills off any actual change in direction or attempts to question. I bet you, on an individual level, everyone wishes they were doing it differently... but no one actually thinks they can change anything!

I think the narrative that EA being the oppressive, invisible hand of corporate management stifling the art that developers produce is a large part of why Bioware became toxic, in that Bioware itself has a Cult of Personality and is never called out. Dragon Age II being terrible? EA's fault. Mass Effect 3's ending? EA. Dragon Age Inquisition being boring? EA. Mass Effect Andromeda's mess? EA. EA gets scapegoated so often by the gaming press that anything toxic about Bioware festers because no one's talking about it.

I'd argue that DAII being like it was is at least for the most part EA's fault, as was the Andromeda debacle. The other two do fall on Bioware's shoulders, though.

I've never heard anyone blame EA for the ME 3 endings. There are some people w ho insist BW hasn't made a good game since they were bought by EA but those are the people who think CRP Gs from the 90s/early 2000s were a gift from God instead of clunky messes in both writing and gameplay.

I don't think there needs to be anything particularly conspiracy-minded about it. Bioware's leadership isn't blameless, but EA does have a track record here. There's also EA's own history as a developer, scandals over toxic management, and a culture of brutal crunch time in-house which continued well after the scandal broke.

Bioware has never been a perfect company or some high bastion of the arts, but there's a difference between how Bioware released content before and after the acquisition. Bioware took 7-9 years to develop Origins; DA 2 was pumped out in under two. There's also a sense in which EA burned through the studio's early backlog and are now holding their feet to the fire to produce something new. And yes, if it comes down to it, I do think the art inevitably suffers when you treat it like a factory line — all the more so when you're repurposing the machinery to make an entirely different product.

I don't know anyone who blamed EA for ME 3's ending either. And Andromeda was mostly done by a separate studio opened by EA, so I do think most of the blame there does sit with the parent company. I mean, there are going to be examples where people misblame EA for Bioware's own problems, but those aren't really among them.

Edited by Unsung on Apr 6th 2019 at 6:01:46 AM

@Nikkolas: Careful, ye are showing bias there for both side.

I mean, its still a bias to be biased against people who are biased

I prefer to take the "Bioware has always kinda sucked tbh" stance since I'm type who enjoys 7/10 games anyway

I agree—crunch time is responsible for a lot of the problems we're seeing, not just with Bioware games, but with games across the board.

I blame EA for Dragon Age 2, mostly because Bioware never wanted to do that game at all, weren't ready for the ACTUAL sequel (Inquisition) and kind of just had to force something together because EA was on a train of demanding new installments of their I Ps within x timeframe.

ME 3 is kind of a... both problem. Bioware for scrapping the entire game build mid-development on an already crunched development cycle rather than trying to salvage what was already done and EA for not extending the development period after such a catastrophic change in everything.

I... didn't actually think Inquisition was too bad. Better than DA 2 but kind of more or less 'ok' in the sense that there's a lot of underdeveloped elements to that game, but I think the whole is good and on the right track. Which I think is why I also kind of consider Inquisition a 'soft-reboot' to Dragon Age in the sense that it's redeveloping and reestablishing a lot of basic world stuff. Though, I do kind of feel shitty for loving it knowing that even devs wanted it to fail.

Andromeda seems to fall entirely on Bioware and their cult of personality problems with newer devs trying to please older devs and a myriad of other problems going on.

I never thought Inquisition was boring, exactly, but it's areas always felt bigger than they should be. I feel like I've said that before actually.

Andromeda I never finished, which was a first for me when it came to Bioware games.

Like I said, Bioware tried to emulate other open-world games like Skyrim but forgot to add stuff to make exploring said open-world interesting the way Skyrim did.

Someone else mentioned that Bioware always had a problem with emulating other games, but managed to pull through by also adding their compelling narratives and character writing to make up for the shortcomings. At least, they used to be able to do that.

Edited by M84 on Apr 8th 2019 at 12:05:47 AM

The way Inquisition was usually described to me was "single-player MMO.

DAI took the wrong lessons from Skyrim. The point of Skyrim is to have an open world teeming with caves, forests, and towns. The point isn't to traverse miles of featureless countryside. The real meat of Skyrim is in finding a cave or old ruin to delve into. I don't blame Bio Ware for looking for ways to stay current, but it would have been better if DAI was structured more like the previous two. It's pretty clear that it has more or less the same amount of content, just stretched thin over the Skyrim-kitsch game design.

I mean, even in their writing, Bio Ware has never really been that innovative.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Apr 7th 2019 at 1:22:35 PM

Bioware have always been masters of performing well what already existed. Dragon Age Origins and the first KOTOR were exactly that: really good stories that took what already existed and executed it very well. Innovating has never been their thing.

As for Inquisition, I felt it was a game that maybe needed a slight change in direction and a few more months in production. Most of the rest of the game is fine as is. I like it's huge maps and beautiful scenery, all that was left was something to do in them. Some parts of the story could have been rewritten as well, but it's nothing too major. As it is, it feels like the world is a bit too empty. It should either have been scaled down a bit or had more content in what was already built.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Apr 8th 2019 at 7:40:24 AM

Bioware games tend to tell the same story, same beats. Yes, there's the whole "There are only 7 stories in the world" thing, but theirs REALLY do trend over the same formula. They sometimes buck the trend (DA 2 making you just an everyman who witnesses the batshit crazy stuff but isn't INHERENTLY special; Jade Empire making your inherent specialness a plot point that the villain outright EXPLOITS)

But they tend to boil down to:

1) Hero fights initial problem 2) Hero gains weird maguffin powers that makes them Special 3) Hero goes through a series of defeats or near misses 4) Hero recovers the advantage and brings the fellowship together 5) Final attack

ME 1 (Prothean Beacon - although that didn't give them powers but tdid give them a wikipedia entry really) ME 2 (Unifying presence and apparently an Ubermensch for all species to rally to) ME 3 (See above, but also REASONS) ME: Andromeda (See above, but can restart big engines)

DA: O - Grey Wardens (Only ones able to stop blight) DA: I - Magical glowing hand (Only ones able to stop Fade!Blight)

You get the same quirky character mixes, same plot beats, same almost insurmountable problems, same villain styles, same speeches, same threats / loss of hope / against-all-odds bit.

It's schlocky and, until now, it's worked. But Andromeda felt like a remake of ME 1 (Their intent, obv) but without as compelling a villain - heck the villains OUTRIGHT ASSIMILATE THEIR ENEMIES. DA: I felt like Origins, but with better cinematics and production (To its advantage - it looked gorgeous)

Anthem is one that weirdly breaks the mold a little - your character ISN'T anything special, but the way the cast talk to you as if You're The Only One Who Can Save us doesn't sell it.

Now, don't get me wrong - I love the Bioware story style. Or I did. But it's running out of steam (And ME 3 shows they don't know how to write themselves out of corners) AND they keep upping the blooming threat. And again, as per my prior point, they then don't know how to resolve that within the confines of GAMEPLAY.

Couple this with their chasing-the-dragon style. Andromeda they outright stated they wanted to follow the No Mans Sky idea of procedural generation. Anthem they wanted to jump the dragon of service shooter. DA: I they wanted some of that tasty Skyrim revenue.

But they don't LEARN from those other attempts. They didn't understand the "One more dungeon" attitude of Skyrim; each area self contained arena. Instead they saw Nirnroot and thought "Yeah, lets stick shards everywhere". Each map was beautiful but felt... dead. Nothing changed there, you couldn't interact with anything beyond enemies.

They didn't grasp the complexity of live service shooters and thought they could do better; they didn't get procedural generation or how they would then even build a story or a game around it.

And when it fails, they fall back on the same template since Neverwinter nights - special protagonist moves through a cobbled together series of environments with a checklist of characters, hitting the same plots, villains and Towers Of Hanoi puzzles.

So I have no idea what we can expect from the last game. Maybe it'll be "Solas enters the map. You and 50 other Grey Wardens must fight in a shrinking arena as the Fade consumes everything, to see who can claim the power of Fen'Harrel... and also unlock cool new costumes (Premium currency sold separately)