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MrWayne on 21 February 2019
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AngryLittleAlchemist said:
MrWayne said:

At this point Bioware is nothing more than a label, most of the creative figureheads who were responsible for the old Bioware games left the company and some of the games you listed were even made by teams who were never part of Bioware befor EA bought them. It's hard to criticize something that doesn't even exist anymore.

What the games developed by "Bioware" in the last 10 years show is that EA don't really care about brand sustainability. They put the label Bioware on new studios who are unrelated to the original one and neglect quality control.


While I can appreciate what you are trying to say with your comment, it is basically blaming EA for wanting to expand one of their acquisitions. Which .... is what every publisher does when they acquire a new studio. And most successful studios that run for an extended period of time see huge shifts in their employees anyways, with massive amounts of new workers who eventually become creative leads. Successful studios can often be categorized into generations even, with a lot of the new workers becoming the main driving forces behind studios. You're kind of seeing this now with Naughty Dog for example, where people who had worked for the company are now becoming the heads of the company.

Your basically saying that all of that is inherently bad, when it isn't, in fact it's pretty normal in the gaming industry. Saying that a studio should have been kept close to it's original staff for the sake of identity is misguided really, it's normal for studios to have huge shifts in focus and game development. A bigger problem is most likely who was hired at Bioware and how the studio was managed, and while some of that is probably on EA a lot of it isn't (Bioware employees and ex Bioware employees have reiterated time and time again how much control they have over their own studios). 

In addition, Mass Effect Andromeda was given 5 years of development time and a massive budget. Dragon Age Inquisition was considered "good". Dragon Age II was a creative decision by Bioware that didn't pay off. And If I had to guess, Anthem was probably an idea proposed by Bioware themselves, with the express purpose of cashing in on Destiny-like games as to appease EA, due to the fact that their games weren't making their owner a lot of money. Which isn't a fault of EA but rather Bioware, because the types of games they make rely way more on the quality of the game in order to make a profit, and their past games failed, so this was probably their way of getting back on good terms. Having some pressure from your publisher is a real and understandable consequence of consistently fucking up. The only thing that I think can be traced back to EA in terms of quality control is probably ME3 and maybe the MMO Star Wars game, but those are funnily enough some of the oldest examples of Bioware fucking up. Unless you are implying that EA should have just outright cancelled Andromeda before release, or restarted development. Both of which are so unrealistic and would take them out of so much money that it isn't even funny.  

I have to elaborate a little bit more. Yes I do think that EAs approach is fundamentally flawed, maybe not financially but it leads to the wear of studios and brands which creates instability.

Putting the label "Bioware" on new studios is always a risky move because the consumer has an expectation of the label and it hurts the brand if the expectation can not be delivered by the new studio. By the way, this is not complete standard in the industry, take a look at Bethesda, the studios they bought still exist in their own structure and are distinguishable, even the new studio who got created to develop TES:O got it's own name, or Activision, even the three studios who develop CoD have their own brand and are distinguishable.

You're right that creative figureheads have to change from time to time but most of the time the new ones grow up within the company culture so the approach to game development stays the same or only slightly evolves. At Bioware how ever happened something different, the new studios with the Bioware label obviously already had a different approach and within the main studio it changed to. Befor Bioware got bought by EA they developed the same kind of games for 20 years, they had a strong creativ vision how their games should look like, under EA their approach changed to a market analytical one.

ME3: tacked on multiplayer
SWTOR: MMO
DI: semi open world
Anthem: destiny like c-oop loot shooter

They followed every big market trend in the last few years and that's not exclusive to Bioware, most of the other EA studios work the same.
Dead Space 3: co-op (rip)
apex legends: battle royal

And last but not least all the Bioware studios are directly owned by EA, so if these studios deliver one disappointing experience after another it's ultimately EA's responsibility to tackel the problems within those studios.