havent really been in a sims mood but looking at everyone’s pictures with the pack im foaming at the mouth a little

I really don’t want swtor to shut down it’s the only eu thing that’s active we have left

I knew these asks were going to start coming in.

So for those who haven't heard, it was reported, and then later confirmed by Keith Kanneg on the forums, that EA is "selling" SWTOR to another developer, Broadsword. For those who want to read the article discussing it, you can read here: https://www.ign.com/articles/star-wars-the-old-republic-development-third-party-bioware

TL;DR -- It's not shutting down. The servers are going to stay active for a while

There's a few points to note here:

If I understand things correctly, EA actually owns Broadsword. So EA is in fact not actually offloading a property, I think what's actually happening is BioWare Austin itself is being divvied out and would not be surprised to see if that branch is shut down

At least half of the SWTOR dev team is part of this move, so the key things to keep an eye on is which members of the dev team are moving. If the narrative staff is kept intact, then we have more story ahead of us beyond what's been written, and they've confirmed we're getting 7.3, 7.3.1, and 7.4. It's important to note that their production timeline is generally a year out from things being written, so story-wise, if they have narrative staff, we'll likely still have some story drops ahead of us

SWTOR is profitable (it hit over $1 billion in profit several years ago), and I will admit I don't have the best understanding of video game finances, but my impresion it was far into the black and maybe not an enromous cash cow, but a decent consistent revenue stream. EA is a publisher that is about profits, so as long as the game is profitable, even if there's not new story drops, the game will stay online

Disney has seemingly taken a recent interest in SWTOR after mostly ignoring it after its acquisition of Star Wars, even going so far as to finally acknowledge the general KOTOR/SWTOR era in their presentations last year at Celebration. Does this ultimately mean anything? I don't know, but SWTOR is one of the longest running current properties with a stable player base. They're just as interested in profit as EA. Probably another indicator that the game will keep running for a while.

Other properties that Broadsword operates, such as Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online, are old games. Ultima Online was released in 1997, and the servers are still active. So like, I think regardless of what happens in regards of the story, we're not losing the ability to log in and play the game

Long term subscriptions - I remember reading, and forgive me, because I've long forgotten the source, that a key indicator if the servers are going offline is to also keep an eye on the six-month subscription option. Basically, if suddenly the only option for subs goes down to one month, that's when to worry about being able to actually play the game.

This is probably not about SWTOR, but BioWare as a whole. It seems there's a leadership issue at the main Alberta office that's causing issues. This is likely an Anthem issue all over again, but Anthem this time happens to be the Mass Effect and Dragon Age properties. Unfortunately, BioWare Austin looks like it's going to suffer the consequences of that, even though they've been running a tight ship overall compared to the rest of the branches. I feel for them. This sucks.

Now I'm not an oracle, I have no idea if this is ultimately a good or bad thing for the game itself. There's a lot of evidence for both sides of the coin, so right now the best thing is to wait and see. We at least have the promise of the next two patches. Let's focus on enjoying that, and celebrating what we love about our silly space game.

If you love the game, keep playing it. Spend money on it, and keep it profitable and it will stay around. Be kind and supportive of the devs, who regardless of how this shakes out, are going through a major transition. But immediately decrying an active game's death and going into doom and gloom is not going to help things.

Will we get more story beyond 7.4? I do not know one way or the other. I hope we do, but it's hard to say for certain on that front. But I do believe we'll still have our toons and be able to replay all of the released content for quite a while to come. Again, for now I'm just going to enjoy my favorite game, and support it as long as I have it. Even if this inevitably means it's going to change.

Hearing you talk about ME3 really solidifies to me that Bioware really just tends to drop the ball when it comes to their 3rd games in terms of writing. It's not like the 3rd games are bad, persay, but they fall flat compared to their predecessors.

For the dragon age games, I've chalked it up to EA meddling and certain writers leaving the games at the time; I wonder if it's the same for ME3? Maybe the crunch time? Bioware really released some games back to back.

The evaporating of morally grey areas really sucks too, I always felt Bioware removed their teeth from their writing in order to appeal to the mass market in later years.

EX: Dragon Age got a whole lot less darker with Inquisition

Damn, now I'm worried about liking Dragon Age too much and getting my heart broken by the sequel games.

The problem is that they take steps back a lot, never commit to something and end up ereasing what they've built. It's like removing the things that made them unique just to follow the current trends of that time, which by now have aged like milk and It just makes me confused on why they flipped a switch so suddenly.

In ME1, it's a military game so you assume they'll portray the military and police as the heros saving the galaxy with no corporation right? Especially with how old the game is.

But they don't, they make you think that they do at the start but then flip a switch and show you the bad things too. How a lot of time the military does more harm than good.

In the ending of the game, they especially resonate that point to you with a big reveal. It builds up perfectly to the second game where you go rogue and help an organisation called cerberus that is independently funded and looks out for the well being for all humans.

They achieve progess because they are devoid of politics, it's mission and straight to action and making the best choice you can for the future of humans. In the first game you've only heard of them and stopped some unethical operations they had around.

They're not like the maifa, they're not in it for the money. But they stay in the grey zone a lot. They kill, they fund unethical experiments and only pull the plug if it becomes too unethical and croses the line into evil.

They saved you and gave you everything in the second game and asked for nothing in return but for you to do your damn job and stop the threat on humanity. Afterwards each of you go your seperate ways when the mission ends.

In the third game, you go back to the alliance and you're framed as a traitor for joining cerberus even tho it was the alliance who refused to take you seriously before.

Even when the threat turned out to be real. And you did publicly save everyone's ass, they're still like "bu buhh but you did it with the baddies!"

The alliance is again framed as the hero, Cerberus gets reduced to evil goons who torture for fun and are all power-hungry and the alliance can do no wrong how dare you question the heros of the army.

It's just.....disappointing. they've taken ten steps back and invalidated both the second and first games.

Also it's glitchy and buggy, it's unfinished. The first two games let you explore new spaces and ships on your own pace, in the third game you're dragged from tutorial to tutorial with a barrage of information.

Progress is less organic, combat is more clunky because they added RE and AC movesets with the rolling, stealth kills and survival priority over combat.

The characters look so ugly- the facial expressions are so weird and your face clips a lot. It's like a rough first animation that needs to be toned down because why am I glaring with spock like eyebrows and why did eyelids clip into my eyes.

There is an annoying vintage filter on the screen, colour is scarce and everything is grey, blue, black and medical white.

The ship is where you spend most of your time when not in missions, it used to be so beautiful and sleek smooth. Stars and futuristic technology. Now it's all gross military base with cables on the ground, dim lighting and empty spaces where decoration used to be. It's greasy at best, who the fuck stole the ceiling boblights I just wanna talk.

This is just sad, I talked so passionately about the first game because I genuinely was impressed. The second game had its flaws, mostly with the story and pacing, but everything else was good! They were turning things around and getting innovative, if you ignore the RE virus slowly spreading.

Now it's like, rather than design a new ship they pissed on the second game's ship and handed it back to you, yellow lights and everything. After robbing it and trashing the place.

I have a theory bc I'm at the start of the game but I might be just coping- what if they ship gets cleaner the more I progress? The construction parts will be gone right? They'll pick up their trash and dirty dishes right? RIGHT? I'M NOT COPING RIGHT?

.

They made companions after mission talks happen without cutscenes and now they're like npcs. Imagine if Lae'zel spoke to you each time you talked to her like the party banter instead of an actual face to face conversation.

Which is so weird because they had the face to face conversation since the first game so why did they remove it???

Resident FUCKING evil does not have it.

It explains the annoyiny cutscenes after cutscene that I can't skip, the bloated dialogue.

They took my eyelashes :(

They took away my ability to speak to people in conversations :(

They took away my clean pristine ship :(

They took away my hero statues and now people in the news hate me :(

They took away my ability to explore freely because the reapers are on my tail 24/7 :(

They took away Ashley :(

But hey. My sniper can shoot three times before reloading now so. There is. That.

Yay.

YET A SINGLE CLIP ONLY HAS 2 BULLETS WHAT WERE YOU THINKING PEOPLE.

Thanks for listening I actually feel better telling someone, I can't wait to play dragonage. Modern game standards I miss you please come back.

unsourced DA4 snippets under the cut:

(Please remember that these are just offhand comments, don’t read too much into them or jump to conclusions. The game is still years out, we know next to nothing about it and many things could change between now and release.)

Q.) Does DA4 have ray tracing? A.) All they can really say right now is that they are taking advantage of the new hardware. When they’re ready to show gameplay we’ll know for sure

A lot of dev creativity comes from them being able to play around with different ideas and such for a while in “DA Weeks”. These are internal periods when the devs can pursue different individual creative projects that in some way benefit DA, and were talked about in the 25 Year Book [ctrl-F “giants”]. In DAI for example the giant mobs were the result of one of these. A surprising amount of stuff from these weeks makes it into the games because they’re things individual people are really passionate about. Something in one of the DA4 videos that have came out so far was actually the result of a DA Week, but they can’t say what specifically

The timing for when to announce or show stuff is always tricky. They know people are hungry for as many details about the game as possible, indeed any, but until the game is done it isn’t done. This sounds obvious but [the point being made here was that] in game development, things can develop ‘out of order’, for example a vertical slice being made before the game’s opening act. And there’s a lot of times when things have to change during production, and different reasons for this - anything they show too early before release is at risk of becoming ‘cemented’ in fans’ minds, naturally, yet also at risk of being cut still. [My observation here is that this is what happened with the DAI Crestwood demo, as an example]

[Related to the above] They also don’t know what’s going to ‘fit’ - the game is taking a few years to make and the real world continues to change and witness events in that time [it sounds like this means that sometimes events which happen in the real world mean they end up reevaluating what storybeats/plotpoints they think would be alright to make use of in DA4]. The hypothetical example used here was of a pandemic [note that this was a purely hypothetical example only for the purposes of explanation, that’s all]: if there was a pandemic or similar plotline in the current draft of DA4, they would now be like “Hmm we probably shouldn’t do that storyline anymore, it’s a bad time to do a pandemic storyline” 

[More of a general comment] A lot of external people say “BioWare is dead/dying”. People have been saying that for like 15+ years now. At this point EA has owned BioWare longer than the time period when BioWare was not owned by EA. A studio being dead only happens when the studio actually closes and stops giving staff paychecks. When a good game comes out, people come for the good game. When a game underperforms, they don’t play it - this is how products should work. It’s okay to be displeased by a product. If you are, that’s okay, don’t buy it, that’s fine! It comes down to the exchange of money for goods and services

Q.) Is it easier to work on the Frostbite engine now that they have multiple games and DAI, which is on Frostbite, under their belts? A.) The more they work with anything the better they learn it and the more they get to know it better, so things do get easier [this echoes a Reddit comment made by Mike Laidlaw about the team knowing the engine for DA4]. Engines aren’t always a defining factor of a game though, it often comes down to what /technology/ is used. For example, no engine has the conversation/dialogue system/technology that they need. One of the “industry-leading” [quotation marks because this is a quote] things BioWare wants to do is the conversation system. This isn’t something they can just ‘get off a shelf’, as it were, because that wouldn’t be industry-leading, instead they have to do that development in order to make something unique. Consequently they have to invest a lot in their own technology. Whether or not the Frostbite engine comes with it is irrelevant because no engine comes with the level of tech that they need to meet the goals for their product. Hence, they want to make sure they focus in on specific technologies that are unique selling-points of their products and that they have to invest in

Related to the above, they also want their character creation to be considered industry-leading (representation, impactful)

[A comment which ties to earlier dev comments (cautions/caveats) about concept art, such as PW’s]: Concept art and similar stuff is just that, concept art/concepts/early stuff. Sometimes we look at concept art and start playing the game in our heads, or make takeaways like ‘I saw [this], which means [that]’. The example used here was of Varric voicing the recent trailer. The VA / character did the voiceover for the trailer, and so some people conclude “well this must mean that he’s a main character”. The caution is that well, that could be the case, or maybe they just needed someone to voice some lines

[More of a general comment] Looking back at BioWare history, some folks were once like “You have the Star Wars license and made KOTOR 1, why are you now making Mass Effect instead of another KOTOR?” The reason is because they wanted to. Some folks were also like “You have the D&D license and made NWN, why are you now making Dragon Age?” Again the reason is because they wanted to. This is always a factor, they have to have some say in what they make. When you look at anything, be it a movie or a book or a game, you can usually tell if the person or people behind it were enjoying themselves when they created it. If they were, the product is usually better. If people are happy to work on something and into it, it’s better. The point being made here is that the best way to make people work on something is to let them work on what they want. This stuff has an influence on the creative process

[More of a general comment] They love their fans, but a fair bit of decision-making has to come down to the fact that they are paid salaries by a company, which means they need to sell [x]-many copies. It means that if they don’t sell [x]-million units they are at risk because they are spending [x]-million to create a product. This unfortunately means that sometimes they have to make decisions which are impacted by UX reviews [I think this means user experience reviews?]. For example, they could have metrics/data which say that 80% of players want [this], but that [this same thing] is going to anger 5% of players. This sucks but that is good math sometimes at that level [I think “that level” here means in a studio of BioWare’s size which makes AAA games, as there was an accompanying note that in indy game dev they don’t have to do math of this kind as much, as indy games tend to be a lot more tightly-tuned]

The more Bioware speaks out...

I may very well have to cut myself off from some social media until the Mass Effect Legendary Edition launches. Another article came out regarding Gay-Romance options in the upcoming remaster.

Once again, Bioware, EA and the people the employ are driving home the fact that they really don’t fucking care about the LGBTQ community. Every new interview and article brings me closer to burning EA offices to the ground.

In our latest article from Game Informer, we’re told that all the content that exists for MShep | Kaidan romances was left in by accident and they never planned to have Gay options for Shepard in ME1.

Then to drive home the lazy, homophobic attitude they claim they won’t add it in now because they want to keep the remaster as close to the original as possible. Except that Kaiden is BI as of ME3 and adding the content into ME1 changes almost nothing for Cis Straight players. It only gives an extra option for Gay players. But fuck the LGBTQ community, right?

I have basically been repeating the following mantra every time I log into Twitter: The Mod Community Will Fix This...

You’d think they’d have learned something from the MakeJaalBi campaign, but here we are. I really, really miss playing Mass Effect, but it feels like every day they do something to drive me further and further from wanting to play it again.

The only thing I will say for certain is that if Mass Effect 4 has no Gay options from the start I will not be buying it. That goes for the next Dragon Age as well. I’m not giving my money to a company that likes to fly a pride flag, shout about diversity in their employees and game content, and then gives us next to nothing and being expected to be grateful.

If you want to get angry with me....

Anyways, heres a pic of MShenko.

Following Jason Schreier's continued BioWare story, we have direct insight from many BioWare employees regarding the initial Dragon Age 4 BioWare were going to create code named 'Joplin' and envisioned by Mike Laidlaw, against the now in production Dragon Age project that has been code named 'Morrison'.  

Last time we talked about both projects - Joplin and Morrison, equally named after their respected music artists who died at the age of 27, but were both known for revolutionizing their respected industry.

This latest report examines everything that Joplin was going to be regarding the future of the next Dragon Age title.

Let's now delve into the potential game that Dragon Age 4 initially was going to be, before it was rebooted for Anthem and Andromeda's developments.

As I quote:

The plan for Joplin was exciting, say people who worked on it. First and foremost, they already had many tools and production pipelines in place after Inquisition, ones that they hoped to improve and continue using for this new project.

They committed to prototyping ideas early and often, testing as quickly as possible rather than waiting until everything was on fire, as they had done the last time thanks to the glut of people and Frostbite’s difficulties.

“Everyone in project leadership agreed that we couldn’t do that again, and worked to avoid the kind of things that had led to problems,” said one person who worked on the project, explaining that some of the big changes included:

1) Laying down a clear vision as early as possible.

2) Maintaining regular on-boarding documents and procedures so new team members could get up to speed fast; and

3) A decision-making mentality where “we acknowledged that making the second-best choice was far, far better than not deciding and letting ambiguity stick around while people waited for a decision.”

(That person, like all of the sources for this story, spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about their experiences.)

Prepare the tears for this next quote guys....

Another former BioWare developer who worked on Joplin called it “some of the best work experiences” they’d ever had. “We were working towards something very cool, a hugely reactive game, smaller in scope than Dragon Age: Inquisition but much larger in player choice, followers, reactivity, and depth,” they said. “I’m sad that game will never get made.”

You’d play as a group of spies in Tevinter Imperium, a wizard-ruled country on the north end of Dragon Age’s main continent, Thedas. The goal was to focus as much as possible on choice and consequence, with smaller areas and fewer fetch quests than Dragon Age: Inquisition.

(In other words, they wanted Joplin to be the opposite of the Hinterlands.) There was an emphasis on “repeat play,” one developer said, noting that they wanted to make areas that changed over time and missions that branched in interesting ways based on your decisions, to the point where you could even get “non-standard game overs” if you followed certain paths.

A large chunk of Joplin would center on heists. The developers talked about building systemic narrative mechanics, allowing the player to perform actions like persuading or extorting guards without the writers having to hand-craft every scene.

It was all very ambitious and very early, and would have no doubt changed drastically once Joplin entered production, but members of the team say they were thrilled about the possibilities.

The first big hiccup came in late 2016, when BioWare put Joplin on hold and moved the entire team onto the troubled Mass Effect: Andromeda, which needed as many hands as possible during its final months of development.

The Joplin team expanded with people who were rolling off Andromeda and kept working, prototyping, and designing the game. After spending months of their lives helping finish a Mass Effect that didn’t excite a ton of people, it was nice to return to Dragon Age.

One thing that wasn’t discussed much on Joplin was multiplayer, according to a few people who worked on the project, which is perhaps why the project couldn’t last.

By the latter half of 2017, Anthem was in real trouble, and there was concern that it might never be finished unless the studio did something drastic.

In October of 2017, not long after veteran Mass Effect director Casey Hudson returned to the studio to take over as general manager, EA and BioWare took that drastic action, canceling Joplin and moving the bulk of its staff, including executive producer Mark Darrah, onto Anthem.

A tiny team stuck around to work on a brand new Dragon Age 4, code-named Morrison, that would be built on Anthem’s tools and code base. It’s the game being made now. Unlike Joplin, this new version of the fourth Dragon Age is planned with a live service component, built for long-term gameplay and revenue.

One promise from management, according to a developer, was that in EA’s balance sheet, they’d be starting from scratch and not burdened with the two years of money that Joplin had already spent. Question was, how many of those ideas and prototypes would they use?

It’s not clear how much of Joplin’s vision will shape Morrison (at least some of it will, says one person on the game), but shortly after the reboot, creative director Mike Laidlaw left, as did some other veteran Dragon Agestaff.

Matt Goldman, art director on Dragon Age: Inquisition and then Joplin, took over as creative director for Morrison, while Darrah remained executive producer on both that project and Anthem.

In early 2018, when I first reported that BioWare had rebooted the next Dragon Age and that its replacement would be a live service game, studio GM Casey Hudson responded on Twitter.

“Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you’ll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about ‘live’ it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story.”

The game is still very early in development and could evolve based on the negative reception to Anthem. Rumor among BioWare circles for the past year has been that Morrison is “Anthem with dragons”—a snarky label conveyed to me by several people—but a couple of current BioWare employees have waved me off that description.

“The idea was that Anthem would be the online game and that Dragon Age and Mass Effect, while they may experiment with online portions, that’s not what defines them as franchises,” said one. “I don’t think you’ll see us completely change those franchises.”

When asked, a few BioWare developers agreed that it’d be technically possible for a game built on Anthem’s codebase to also have an offline branch, but it’s not yet clear whether Morrison will take that approach. If it does turn out to be an online game, which seems likely, it would be shocking if you couldn’t play the bulk of it by yourself.

(Diablo III, for example, is online-only on PC yet can be played entirely solo.)

One person close to the game told me this week that Morrison’s critical path, or main story, would be designed for single-player and that goal of the multiplayer elements would be to keep people engaged so that they would actually stick with post-launch content.

Single-player downloadable content like Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Trespasser, while often excellent, typically sells only a fraction of the main game, according to developers from BioWare and elsewhere across the industry.

Yet this wouldn’t be a “live service” game if it was a repeat of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which compartmentalized its single- and multiplayer modes.

Fans in the past have grown outraged at the idea of BioWare putting a lot of emphasis on multiplayer gaming, but there are ways in which a service-heavy Dragon Age 4 could be ambitious and impressive.

For example, some ideas I’ve heard floated for Morrison’s multiplayer include companions that can be controlled by multiple players via drop-in/drop-out co-op, similar to old-school BioWare RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, and quests that could change based not just on one player’s decisions, but on the choices of players across the globe.

Maybe in two or three years, Morrison will look completely different. It’s not like Dragon Age hasn’t changed drastically in the past. In the office, BioWare developers often refer to Mark Darrah’s Dragon Age team as a pirate ship, one that will eventually wind up at its destination, but not before meandering from port to port, drinking as much rum as possible along the way.

His is a team that, in the past, has iterated and changed direction constantly—something that they hoped to cut down for Joplin, but has always been part of their DNA (and, it should be noted, heavy iteration is common in all game development).

One BioWare employee summed it up well as we talked about the future of BioWare’s fantasy franchise. “Keep in mind,” they said, “Dragon Age games shift more than other games.

”Said another current BioWare employee about Morrison: “They have a lot of unanswered questions. Plus I know it’s going to change like five times in the next two years.”

There are other questions remaining, too: With BioWare’s Austin office gradually taking over Anthem going forward, when will the bulk of employees at the company’s Edmonton HQ move to the Morrison team?

Will Morrison be able to avoid following the lead of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which took on too many people too early and wound up suffering as a result?

And, most important, will BioWare work to prevent the burnout that has led to dozens of developers leaving over the past two years, with so many citing stress, depression, and anxiety?

End of article, so my thoughts on this, of course, I have my worries especially regarding the multiplayer part, it was to my knowledge that there is a separate Dragon Age team working on the multiplayer component completely estranged from the core team.

I hope that this is still the case, however, it's EA that're the ones who plaque BioWare to incorporate multiplayer and live-service.  

Honestly the biggest concern here is how much of Joplin's original vision and resources are going to be put into Morrison's production, because the description of Joplin is everything I've wanted in a Dragon Age game following from Inquisition.

To hear that this initial game has been canned is heart-wrenching, any signs of Joplin's ashes in Morrison is all I can hope for.

Hope is all we really have right now regarding the future of Dragon Age, and don't forget Mass Effect, which is also going to affected by this too.

Of course, I have my worries. But I am hopeful for what the Dragon Age team can do, and I feel to fear when we still haven't seen the game yet is a little blind-sighted. Who knows when we will see or hear anything, I imagine we may see something on EA Play's live-streams next June, just before E3, but honestly, I'm not sure!

The next Dragon Age project is expected to release within 2-3 years from now, all we can hope for next is a reveal of some-sorts, like a title or development update.

It would be incredible if BioWare could come out and share some insight on what the heck is going on with the next Dragon Age, like a development diary which they did with Mass Effect: Andromeda.

To get a glimpse of this next game and the vision for it is what we in the BioWare fandom all need right now. To know what is going on with the next Dragon Age and how true it will stick to Joplin's original vision.

But until we do hear something, like always, you're already in the right place...

Alright Bioware fandom, we need to have a LONG serious chat about the Bioware DOOM bullshit...

... because this is getting ridiculous. Bioware might be dropped by EA someday, but they also might NOT be dropped by EA. We literally have no way of knowing what will happen. We don’t have enough inside information to predict what will happen.

I’m not about to ignore EA’s bad track record. They dropped Visceral like a box of rocks, right? I am not saying it isn’t possible for Bioware to be canned as well. It IS POSSIBLE. You should all be cautious and not get your hopes too high because you never know when a studio is tied to a AAA company (especially EA), but that doesn’t mean immediate doom. Someone in the industry correct me if I’m wrong, but under AAA companies, studios die all of the time. Regardless, the fandoms opinion may influence more than they know, and when people constantly go into the rant of “EA is Palpatine and Bioware will turn into an EA sith machine. Bioware is pushing political agenda. Bioware’s new live shit is all because of EA.” And then spew these posts on Youtube, tumblr or reddit without any forethought towards the consequences, it just kind of makes what we fear... so much more likely to kill what we love, right? Can you see that logic? Stop allowing our uninformed outrage to turn our fears into reality. Bioware has been known to interact with fans far more than other studios. But not just that, Bioware fans can be very polarized and since the Bioware dev community is so accommodating, I worry about that. Do you think the above worries adds to or diminishes the odds of another Mass Effect or Dragon Age being made? IMO, the biggest and most important thing keeping Bioware creators inspired is the support of its passionate fans who have gobbled up their games like candy. So please stop trying to destroy what you love, but don’t stop giving them your opinions and honest critiques. To youtubers and other game reviewers, please be honest about your reviews but don’t bash a franchise for clicks, instead criticize them for the shit they can improve on. Be honest about the faults but don’t do it in a way that sways a viewer to love or hate the title based on outrage, instead point out the good and the bad and let people decide on their own. Your opinions hold significant weight in the gaming community. I’m not saying we should ignore the terrible state Anthem was ‘released’ in. Seriously, tell Bioware and EA that their incomplete mess was unacceptable, because I agree. EA won’t care because $$$money$$$$, but at least the creative part of the team can see what they did wrong and improve upon it. They worked hard and I can tell they love their work. They are passionate about it, and for good reason. Bioware fans and Bioware devs have both felt the pain of EA forcing an amazing title out before it was ready. DA2 anyone? We don’t need to sit here yelling at Bioware devs for the shit they’ve already agonized over. We need to clearly state our problems by saying “I didn’t pay for this, instead this is what I was promised. I love your game but this is what I want instead. This is what I expected and you didn’t deliver, here is where you can improve. And also, I can wait but this is what we need in the future.” So that EA understands fans hate their rushed releases and devs have feedback that actually helps US, as consumers. I’m not clearing Bioware of all blame, but they have been known for listening to fans and fans go with the attack route first. I.e. Mass Effect 3 ending drama. We can’t jump to conclusions about Bioware’s future, because we aren’t directly involved. I'm just a fan but, even if Anthem does poorly, which it honestly... it has already done poorly, according to metacritic. If my opinion matters to you, I think it’ll be a while until we see Bioware’s demise regardless, but that is just my pleb prediction. It has been confirmed that EA already sunk money into Dragon Age 4, so if anything we still have that. Casey Hudson has confirmed they haven’t forgotten about Mass Effect either. Sure... Bioware could close down tomorrow, and if it did... I honestly wouldn’t be able to properly convey how devastated I would feel if that happened, but we aren’t there yet. And if it did close down, that isn’t Bioware’s fault. And if it did close down, who knows, maybe they’ll pick back up and be even better and rise up apart from EA. Trust me, I worry about it too... more often than I want to admit. It’s actually pathetic how obsessed I am with Mass Effect and Dragon Age. If either franchise was destroyed forever, I would be rendered emotionally useless  as far as gaming goes (and that isn’t an exaggeration), but the reality is that... I am just a fan, so all I can do is put hope and trust in the creators who have carried me along the way with what I can only call brilliance. If the franchise died I’ll still remember the times I sobbed. I sobbed when Mordin walked into that tower despite Shepards protests and then recited his song until the end, when legion made the ultimate sacrifice due to Shepards actions and Tali accepted it and mourned a race she once hated, or when Morrigan told my Warden that she was the only female friend Morrigan ever had, or when Fenris warmed up to a mage(friend or romance Hawke) and Hawke helped him through his trauma, or when Dorian (in a romance) was flirtatious but over time realized he could finally be loved without frivolous expectations, or with Solas where he lost all hope in the physical world and you could give him something to hope for outside of his narrow perspective (friend or romance), or Zevran, where you could have killed him but you finally gave him a purpose beyond veiled slavery and now he has a true friend, Varric, who was always a jokester but found his way to a better family that wasn’t blood related, but everything he ever wanted was Hawke and their friendship could never be broken. Edi and Joker, who both survived the war and symbolized what hope could mean in a time of adversity and diversity. Aveline, who felt her fate was tied to your survival at first, but in time Hawke became her only and most trusted family. Trust me, I have emotional investment in what we could lose. Regardless of what happens I do sense that the people at Bioware are invested as we are. Imo, that is the most important aspect.

I keep thinking about BioWare. [buckle-up, kiddo]

Specifically, I keep asking myself why I’m so disappointed. Why am I sad when I think about BioWare now?

It could be that I’m a gamer who made myself too comfortable in the home that BioWare built. In an industry that didn’t even see me, much less the money in my pocket, BioWare invited me in and treated me like family. They gave me everything: Victory, defeat, magic, spaceships, friendships, heroism, loyalty, betrayal, comedy, romance.

Choice-->Consequence-->Life.  

Theirs weren’t primarily games of battle strategy with maybe a whiff of story, or a smidgeon of character. Their games had everything. BioWare crammed it all in. And it worked. Not flawlessly, but goddamn close.

Why would I ever leave a place that suited me so completely? I nested. I squatted. I chased away the authorities and invited my friends. We re-decorated, took pictures, made memories, made enemies.

For me, there are a couple of factors that make letting go of “BioWare Games” real, real hard. One of them is EA, and the status they earned (fairly or not) as a studio-killer.

I know next to nothing about game development. So, why do I cling to this narrative about the Helpless Dev, captive to the will of the Corporate Vampire? “If only they could be saved, set free, old partnerships and modern purpose reunited on a pile of money in Canada. Then, surely, that Good Good Work could begin anew!” Wtf kind of fairy tale is this? And where's the link to donate?

Varric would argue that when there’s a pinch of truth to something, it validates the fiction. It’s the salt that makes the cake taste sweeter. Idk about you, but I want cake every damn day.

Lord, just think of the TOR games, Dragon Age, Mass Effect. . .I imagine the process of making “BioWare Games” as something of a miracle. Achieved by tooth-and-nail, maybe, and something called ‘crunch.’ But it’s astounding if you remember that they did it multiple times. Multiple talented, dedicated teams of for-real people produced these truly, undeniably, incredible games. More than once! With expansions! And. AND. . .it was a circumstance that I, as a fan, never once considered as anything but sustainable.

I grudgingly accept that this belief might be preposterous. Things end. New things begin. Exceptions exist, of course. 

But, smart creators build to a satisfying endgame. If they’re lucky, they work for companies that respect the process as much as the money. If they’re deserving and #blessed, creators have a fanbase that supports new projects.

Y’all, it’s been a decade since SWTOR was announced. People, especially creative people, need their mobility. They need to move on from their previous work without standing before a tribunal. Hell, I get hives when people hit ‘like’ on a post I made ten years ago. So.

So? Thing is.

I don’t like the new things that they want me to like. 

It could be the year 2035 and I'd re-play DA2 until my GPU melted before I’d join randos in a massive online game with a hundred fiddly bits of customization per space-rifle. I’d re-play the conclusion of Mordin’s Mass Effect arc every day before I’d pay for some season pass that unlocks hours of bland content. Sublime graphics are a cool motive for game design. Still not a story.

That’s the other factor making it hard for me to let go of the BioWare That Was. After abandoning every play-through of Skyrim, Bioshock, Dishonored, Destiny, Fallout, Battlefront. . .jfc. . .I came to the realization that perhaps I’m only a gamer. . .because of “BioWare Games.” 

If BioWare doesn’t make “BioWare Games” any more, and neither does anyone else. . .well, my sadness is understandable. I’m back where I started when I first ached to play video games: Invisible. 

(Except that now, I’m more discerning and have waaaay more money to spend)

My sadness is a reaction to the terminal stage of a long, heartfelt irrationality. It’s often called ‘being a fan,’ and its built on the expectation that all good things must continue. When I love a thing that’s so clearly good, it feels like medicine tailored to my chemistry. And when it runs out? When there’s no alternative treatment?

I get down with the sickness, I guess.

I bought Mass Effect: Andromeda on PS4 for £6.49, and it’s...

Awful. Awful awful awful awful awful.

From the moment the game begins the lack of quality and polish is immediately evident: the lip-syncing is still terrible, the walking animations are still terrible, the dialogue is some of the worst I’ve ever heard in a modern AAA game - repetitive, nonsensical, frequently grammatically incorrect, and annoying - and it both looks and plays like a giant, poorly-designed, unintuitive turd. The cutscenes are unpausable and unskippable, the subtitles are either completely on or completely off and can’t be limited to dialogue, including every single gasp, scream, and breath the characters take. Lines of speech are activated but never voiced, or begin ten seconds after the subtitles pop up, or cut themselves off mid-sentence. Characters continually comment on things you can’t see, or make the same point in five different ways for no reason. I’d accuse the acting of being shit if it weren’t for the fact that, with writing like this, Lawrence Olivier couldn’t turn in a decent performance. But even then, much of the acting is shit. Textures and NPCs pop in every time you exit a menu screen, or turn too fast, or the camera switches angles in a cutscene, and people sound like they’re right next to you when they’re blips in the distance. The hair textures look like shit, some of the NPCs stand at 45 degree angles, or pop through walls and floors, and for all the supposed power of the Frostbite engine, everything - everything - looks worse than the previous games. And don’t even bother turning the motion blur off, because it becomes more than clear that it’s simply a band-aid applied over the less-than-30fps framerate in order to make the game look at least somewhat digestible. 

I can’t even cover everything that is wrong here. The button to get in your car changes to the button to leave the planet once you’re inside, meaning you have to sit through minutes of loading screens and cutscenes to get back to a checkpoint even more minutes away from where you were if you forget, like an idiot, that you can’t get in and out of a vehicle using the same button. You have to go through multiple steps to perform the most basic actions such as checking your map or changing weapons. The map itself is ugly, textureless, and nearly featureless, making it almost impossible to identify where you are in relation to your surroundings. This textureless, featureless map can also somehow glitch out. Certain events can fail to trigger and require a reload to progress. Random, unimportant doors will lock you out for no reason right up until a piece of key dialogue has been spoken. The game emphasises that you’re on inhospitable planets, and yet your teammates can run around without helmets. The enemy race is named ‘the kett’ because ‘some people in engineering started calling them that’, and no reason is ever given why. There’s no menu list of your side missions - what fucking game in this day and age doesn’t list your side missions? Furthermore, your main mission is just one long accumulating list of completed objectives that you have to scroll through to find your current objective. Your car cannot automatically go up slopes, and the game doesn’t tell you how to do it until long after you’ve figured it out for yourself, at which point you realise that the mechanic is pointless. If you die at any point, it’s a checkpoint restart. In an open-world game. You can’t change your loadout on the fly or call your vehicle to you if you’ve neglected to return to it every 5 minutes and drag it along with you - instead, you have to travel back to certain discrete waypoints spaced far and wide if you want to install the mod you just picked up, or use your new sniper rifle, or you decided that maybe you didn’t want to have to spend half your time babysitting your vehicle for once. 

This isn’t Mass Effect 2 - the levels aren’t discrete individual missions that begin and end in one go - and yet they haven’t adapted ANY of the systems to compensate for the defining design change they made for this release. Which is absurd, given that they literally had to build the game from the ground up to make it work with the god-damn Frostbite engine. But then, perhaps that’s the answer to all my complaints right there - maybe they just had to spend that much time dicking around with an engine that was notoriously unfit for this type of game because of some nonsensical EA mandate that every single thing they release from now on has to be on the Frostbite engine that they literally had no time to make a new game. Kind of seems counter-productive, doesn’t it? But then that’s what happens when you let a lizard in a suit that hasn’t touched a video game since he played Pong that one time in the 70s make pivotal decisions for your product’s design.

In any case, after all that, this exchange takes place:

Microsoft Excel text-to-speech stars as Foster Addison.

And that’s just the Cliff Notes version of some of my experiences in the first few hours of play. 

What the actual fuck were they thinking when they were developing this game? How did they stand in front of journalists and the public, knowing that they had something that performs this badly, that is written so poorly, and that looks so terrible, and speak about it as if it were something impressive? Did they genuinely believe they were making a decent product here, that this would carry the series’ legacy? Or was it more of a ‘fuck it, we’ve gone this far’ mentality, where they had no choice but to try and recoup some of the money invested? If it’s the latter, then they’re con men, because this looks and plays like the efforts of a first-time developer. 

I mean, I’m not even a series fanboy and I think this is an utter travesty. Why was this greenlit? No-one was asking for it, and in the aftermath of ME3 and the ever-worsening Dragon Age sequels, there was a rapidly diminishing pool of people who trusted or cared about Bioware enough to get it right a second time round. On top of all that, EA, with literally all the money in the world, devoted neither the resources nor the talent required to make this game resemble something of a worthy successor to the others in the series, so five minutes is all it takes before it becomes immediately apparent that we we're in amateur hour here. To my mind, the only appropriate way for it all to end was for EA to throw some dirt over it and call it buried, because if this broken, boring, incompetent diarrhea is the best effort they can muster at continuing this series, then it’s better off dead. Mass Effect: Andromeda is not the worst game in existence, but for all the resources that EA had at their disposal and with the history and experience Bioware has as a studio, this is the worst ‘AAA’ game I have ever played. Everyone involved should have known better, but then again perhaps I should have as well, because EA helmed this absolute joke of a release. Now I have to come up with a new rating - a warning, and one for which I can always include a qualifying title: 

0/10

Do not buy

actually the Devs of Andromeda wanted to put more effort into the facial animations, but EA shut them up and let some weirdass team in poland take care of the animations and that's why they look so off sometimes. (and in my humble opinion the animations got better and better as the game progresses? I didn't really see much cringe-worthy stuff after the first 10-15 hours.)

Yeah, that’s something I also have heard and wouldn’t past EA to do so, just to save time and money. And I agree that while the face animation in general could have been more lively, it’s not horribly bad. Only in a few moments I was like: Okay, that could have been made better. At the same time I also was like: Yeah, that exactly would be my expression, good work. What I agree with from the post I reblogged is, that they simply put too much time, money and effort into the big areas of the planets. It’s sadly (in my opinion) a big trend in current videogames to have as much space to explore as possible. What they did in MEA was over the top for me, it looked all beautiful and that, but it was still a lot of dead space only filled with little camps of enemies. The amount of sidemissions is very annoying and I’m glad you can teleport to some areas, otherwise I would have ignored them completely. It’s something that already annoyed me in Dragon Age Inquisition. Bioware really should more concentrate on the story and characters, because that is the part they can do the best. As example, Dragon Age 2 was really bad when it came to the designs of the maps, since there were only a few and it could get annoying after a while to go through the same dungeon again and again. Yet I love this game because the story was really great and I enjoyed every companion character and their side missions. I know that with Mass Effect Andromeda it was a logical step to give it more parts to explore, since you come to a completely new galaxy and all that. But half the size of all the maps would have been enough and instead they should have given you the opportunity to give tasks to your outposts, so that they discover the planet and all that. Just my opinion. 

Dragon Age is my favorite IP ever. I'm reading the news that the new DA project was "rebooted" to "implement more live elements". I'm also reading several people saying that DA4 might not happen if Anthem doesn't do well. Is that a fair assessment, and in your professional opinion does "live elements" most likely mean it won't be single-player?

I can’t comment on whether DA4 will or will not make it due to Anthem. I know that EA had scheduled the next Dragon Age for release before 2020 (as of around 2016), but it’s old information and I can’t say anything more specific than that. That said, let’s discuss what “live elements” actually means, since that’s something I know a little more about.

“Live elements” doesn’t necessarily mean multiplayer. “Live elements” means that the game service will be able to push new data to your game over the internet whenever you log in and start it. This way, you can get live updates to your game in the form of new content, featured things, live events, etc. without having to release (and certify) a patch. You can most commonly see this in sports titles, where players can follow along with the season results and play through pivotal moments and scenarios in the game that were broadcast live mere days before. 

If you ever played Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer, you might remember how they had special bonus weekend events. That’s an example of a live update. Other examples of live updates could be hypothetical new war table missions periodically appearing in DAI, ME:A’s N7 day missions, and the like. In fact, what they could even do is provide incentives to play the game (e.g. collectively kill 10,000,000 ogres across all platforms) and provide rewards to everybody if the criteria are met. 

Now… certainly, this can have a large effect on any multiplayer modes, but there’s nothing that restricts it only to multiplayer. It can just as easily affect single player gameplay as well, as long as the developers can track everybody’s collective contributions. Being able to take live data updates and reflect them in game has a lot of potential, like allowing the in-game world to change over real time on a week-to-week basis, or recognizing the collective efforts of players towards a goal. It entirely depends on how the designers at Bioware decide to take advantage of this. If you’ve observed things carefully at all, you’ve probably realized that most of this stuff can and does already happen in a variety of games.

The important thing to remember is that EA’s ultimate goal isn’t to make every game multiplayer. It isn’t even to cram loot boxes into everything, because loot boxes attached to a game that isn’t engaging won’t earn much money. EA’s goal is to maximize player engagement, because maximizing player engagement is the path to more money. EA doesn’t want single-use one-time products anymore because they’re too expensive to build and don’t have enough of a return. Instead, they want games that they can continue to support (since continued support is less expensive than developing an entirely new product), and that players will want to support. This results in a mutually beneficial situation - you, as a player, get a steady stream of content updates of varying type and size to keep you playing the game, and we get more people who are willing to chip in a few bucks because they keep having fun with the game.

We’re going to do a follow-along project, either designing a Game System or Designing a Level! [Click here to vote for which]. I’m surprised at the results of the poll so far. It seems almost exactly evenly divided between both choices!

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Defeating Used Games: Why Incentives to Discourage Pre-Owned Gaming Are Awful

Do you buy your games second-hand? Then you are a complete cheapskate and the scum of the gaming industry. You’re worse than any pirate sailing the high seas of warez. Or at least, that’s what publishers want us to think. Whether you have the right to sell the products you have purchased is irrelevant: the sale of used games is damaging the games industry.

When a new game is traded in or sold to a game store, that money is then kept by the retailer rather than reaching the hands of the hardworking developer who spent blood, sweat and tears on creating their pride and joy. The same game could be bought and sold numerous times and it can be argued that those purchases are a potential sale which has been stolen from the game companies themselves. It is true that you don’t hear the music or film industry complaining about their second-hand losses, but does creating an album or a movie compare to the amount of money and effort spent on developing a Triple-A game title? As always, it is the consumer that decides whether a game is worth its $50 price tag, and often they decide to go with a pre-owned price instead.

Rubbish Incentives for New Purchases

Game companies already utilize a number of methods to gain extra cash after the release of their games in the form of downloadable content (DLC) and there are now incentives to buying new. Pre-order bonuses seem to be popular right now with many games including codes for additional DLC or specific in-game bonuses.

We’ll be taking a look at some of the rubbish incentives offered by publishers to encourage new purchases and what alternatives would be more welcome.

Exclusive DLC & Pre-Order Bonuses: Gamers aren’t new to the idea of receiving bonuses within collectors editions and the like, but more recently we’ve been seeing a lot of extra freebies within new games or as part of pre-ordering a title. Most of this is in-game DLC, such as new weapons and armor, new maps or various other cosmetic additions which don’t actually add that much to the game. In fact, most of this stuff you could probably live without. I don’t really need the Blood Dragon Armor in Dragon Age Origins and I can live without a tattoo set in Fable 3, thank you very much. I would go as far to say that DLC armor is one of the most pointless examples of a DLC incentive, ever. Although perhaps not as pointless as the Horse Armor from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

In some cases, the DLC offered is a little more substantial. Some games offer quests or missions, and this feels like more of a ‘thank you’ bonus. Bioware have taken this one step further by offering a DLC delivery service in Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2. This service allows players to download a series of free items, as well as access paid DLC. In Mass Effect 2, this included a few extra side-quests and exclusive armor/weapons (Groan). Player’s could also add a new character to their game squad, Zaeed, and he came with his own loyalty mission as well as a few small areas to explore plus a new weapon. Whilst this is a better incentive and adds more to the game, if you didn’t purchase Mass Effect 2 new, then getting a hold of Zaeed would cost you 1200 Microsoft Points ($15). Yikes.

The cost and worth of DLC is something to discuss at a later point, but to judge the quality of future DLC, compare it to the Undead Nightmare pack from Red Dead Redemption. For only 800 Microsoft Points ($10), a whole new single player game is unlocked which rivals the original game. It’s a stunning example of quality DLC.

Online Passes: Now this seems to be an interesting/worrying trend in recent games, delete as appropriate. It all started with EA as they introduced the idea of an ‘Online Pass’ for some of their major titles, such as Dead Space 2, The Sims 3, Madden NFL 11, etc. This online pass is a one-time code which gives access to online multiplayer functionality within their games. What this means is that you are restricted from playing online unless you either buy the game new, and thus have a pass code, or you spend $10 on acquiring this pass if you’re unfortunate enough to buy the game second-hand.

A few companies have already started to take on this system, including Ubisoft, Codemasters, Warner, THQ and now Sony. Sony will be following the same trend by offering a code at $10 for second-hand gamers and this initiative will begin with the release of Resistance 3.

Whilst online passes are a good method to create profits from potential lost sales, they’re also rather worrying as they penalize second-hand gamers, effectively stripping away a chunk of game content from the player. In some cases, the online portion of the game is much bigger than the obligatory story mode and if you’re already paying for services like Xbox Live Gold or PlayStation Plus, then it just adds on an extra fee.

Un-resettable Game Saves: Now this ‘incentive’ really does take the cake. In the recent Resident Evil Mercenaries title by Capcom on the 3DS, players are prevented from erasing their save data. This means that the game cannot be started from scratch and appears to be a direct attack against second-hand games. Now, it isn’t a big deal in Mercenaries 3D, as this data roughly translates into high scores and some unlockables, but imagine if this system was used in other games, such as an RPG? What if you bought a second-hand game which was already completed? As a result for this move, most rental stores are unwilling to stock Mercenaries 3D.

But the worst thing about un-resettable games is that it also penalizes gamers who have bought the game new, as they are prevented from resetting their game data if they wish.

What’s the Alternative?

So, if these incentives which encourage us to purchase brand-spanking new games are not working, or are ‘slightly crap’ at best, then what is the alternative?

Club Nintendo: Nintendo offer some of the more interesting incentives for new purchases. Each new game comes with a card which can be redeemed for points within the ‘Club Nintendo’ service. Here, gamers can spend their points on a wide variety of collectable Nintendo merchandise, ranging from posters to clothing. There are loads of items which can be saved for. Never mind that some of the better items require a handful of points and probably ten hundred Wii’s, getting physical items for your loyalty is a pretty neat idea.

Imagine if you could be awarded with Microsoft points to spend on XBLA games? Or maybe you could spend those points on real world items, such as control pads, or posters? I would love to see real rewards as an incentive rather than some shoddy in-game armor.

Casual & Digital Games: There is a reason why digitally downloadable games, such as those on XBLA or PSN as well as mobile gaming, have become so popular. They offer a great gaming experience for a cheap price. All of these services have grown over the years, from selling small retro games to fully-fledged gaming experiences which are big enough to make many full-priced games weep. I know I would sooner have Limbo on my Xbox than some dodgy Kinect version of Carnival Games, and it’s much more value for money too.

Mobile and indie games are continuing to grow and many game developers are already aware that smaller games are an alternative to big budget titles. This doesn’t mean we’ll see the end of Triple-A games, but it does re-evaluate the value of such games.

Lower Those Prices: Fact is, not everyone can afford to buy a full priced video game. We’re living in tight times, and with some titles selling for as much as $60, for many it’s a case of buy cheap or miss out. Some games are quite frankly not worth $50 and are reduced to half price in a matter of weeks. Even digitally distributed titles can cost just as much if not more than their retail counterparts. Pre-owned games are popular because they are cheaper. Simple, really.

Whilst it appears that certain game stores are taking advantage of the popularity of used games to maximize their profits, especially as their pre-owned selection seems pretty overpriced anyway, pre-owned titles are also the lifeline for smaller independent retailers that battle against the larger chain stores. We all know that choice offers the best deal for customers, whether selling new or used games.

Online retailers such as Amazon and Play.Com offer lower prices still, but I would hate to see these replace the magic of main street shopping. However, if retailers can offer better deals on new titles, then maybe this will encourage sales.

So What’s Next?

Perhaps the games industry needs to rethink their half-baked incentives and look at the reasons why gamers would sooner buy a second-hand game than fork out the cash for a shiny new copy. The industry also needs to shake off the idea that second-hand gamers are the enemy. We’re not pirates, we haven’t stolen a game. We’re just customers. However, the real problem lies with those retailers who maximize their own greed at the expense of the industry.