I wish them good luck as well. But seriosuly, by god! Nobody should go through what has been going on in Bioware lately. The way they do things cannot be a good thing on a creative or health level.

Except we also know it’s been a contributing factor to the collapse and cancellation of various Star Wars games.

+1 for making me laugh.

This right here, “ while over a dozen followed former BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn to Improbable, a technology company that recently announced plans to develop its own game.” is what is in important. People make games not companies. What magic Bioware had is gone, but I look forward to seeing what Improbable and other…

This makes it pretty clear that Bioware themselves are as much to blame for the mess. EA forced some things on them but Bioware also made a lot of bad calls on their own.

KILLED IT on this one Jason.

This is such a common theme in the industry in recent years; using the wrong engine for the job because someone upstairs wanted to skip licensing fees. Then in the end the added development time trying to squash bugs, and sales lost to bugs that slipped through, wind up costing them more money than the licensing would…

Huh, going to take an unpopular opinion here and say that outside of forcing Frostbyte, and more importantly not supporting it’s mandated use (and yes, that one _is_ huge), EA as a publisher didn’t, according to this story, take any drastic actions that caused this disaster of a development cycle. They perhaps should…

...so, you didn’t read the article at all and just felt like shooting your mouth off? Because that’s not what the article is remotely about.

...you’re reaching a bit. My reading of the article was that the direction for the game, aside from standard check-ins by upper management and those fucking stupid Frostbite and Live Service requirements, largely game from within Bioware.

Happens more often than you think. The original director for Final Fantasy XIV famously never played World of Warcraft.

Other than Frostbite, Bioware seemed to be their own biggest enemy on this one.

Don’t get me wrong, EA sucks, but from reading the article, this really doesn’t seem like EA’s fault. EA set a hard deadline, but it really seems like the problem was a lack of leadership within BioWare.

Frostbite’s razor blades were buried deeply inside the Anthem team, and it would prove impossible to stop the bleeding.

Beyond has a connotation of being outside the norm, the boundary, or the pale. Beyond has whiffs of the alien, the unusual, and the unknown.

I teach effective team strategies in the context of an introductory composition course, and this article is a case study of how to mess up a team project. There is so much to highlight, but I want to sit with the first point where I thought, “You’re up the creek without a paddle”:

The most damning part of the article, in my opinion, is this:

Nice job as always, Jason; thanks for confirming a lot of what we all feared. A game that was rushed out and built with a toolset that at the very least wasn’t an ideal fit. And not learning from Destiny’s missteps because they couldn’t talk about Destiny is pretty galling.

Okay, but how is “Beyond” better or more thematically appropriate than “Anthem”? I get that that’s just an example of the aimlessness of Bioware and EA’s interference, but really?

I got an aggressive-aggressive letter once. It punched me in the face when I opened it and then spit on me before proceeding to run off with my fiance.