A lot of it is almost exactly what you’d expect.
I wasn’t aware they tried to make it a live service game, but that’s also incredibly unsurprising. It explains so much.
I don’t get EA/Bioware. Fantasy is consistently more popular than scifi. Inquisition was their best selling game. Yet DA was never treated like a heavyweight like Mass Effect. My expectations tanked when David Gaider left
Looking through each series’ Wikipedia articles, it looks like Mass Effect sold about 50% more than Dragon Age 1 and 2. And that tracks with my experience. I know far more people who’ve played Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and I’ve never played Dragon Age myself.
One factor might be just that Mass Effect came out first and was also Bioware’s last game before EA bought them.
The rest is just my opinion, but I do believe that Mass Effect simply told a better story (multicolored endings aside) and had a better cast of characters. Not to mention the fact that it was a single narrative across the three installments helped keep engagement up. And shooters were incredibly popular at that time.
Basically confirming what I suspect.
I just don’t like the tone of putting the blame on EA, 80% of this mess is Bioware’s fault alone.
How do you figure? That’s not what I got out of this article.
Search for the story of Anthem and David Gaider opinions about how they handle their writers, they fucked that up on their own.
And reading this article is basically: The DA team blames the ME team for diverting them to Andromeda. Then they blame Anthem. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the pandemic. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the ME team again.
The only moment that they actually put some blame on the DA team is with the tone of dialogue and they quickly blame EA for saying “you guys doesn’t have time to make changes”. The ME team made changes, it’s because of favouritism from EA or the ME team just has better management and know how to negotiate?
A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they’re granted though. I’m not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. “Knowing how to negotiate” can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn’t really something the developers are responsible for.
I could believe that if they didn’t have a history of poor management and lack of leadership and unified vision as demonstrated during the Anthem development.
But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn’t usually make; etc.
I could argue in favour of EA’s decision regarding the engine. Their previous engine was also a mess, but they mishandled the change. They didn’t give the studios the necessary time or support to implement it properly. But at the time of Veilguard they already had plenty of experience, the game performs really well and they release the game practically bug free.
The part of EA forcing them to build a type of game that they didn’t usually make I’m particularly not inclining to believe it’s was a problem. Bioware developed and maintain Star Wars Old Republic, an MMO, MMOs have many similarities to live services(it’s a type of live service), they already had experience with that. They also released Anthem, and looks like the idea of a multiplayer for Anthem came from Bioware.
The idea of a multiplayer Dragon age to finish the story is completely stupid but Bioware had the expertise to work on it. It’s a different case for Fallout 76 as Bethesda has never developed a multiplayer game before, TESO is a completely different studio with its own team, SWTOR is from a team within Bioware.
there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare… In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises… Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
Ironically, EA grew out of Origin, one of the original grand-daddies of computer RPGs and the maker of the Ultima series in the 1980s-1990s.
