Legendary Game Studio Bioware Shuts Down

I didn't play Veilguard as Bioware had already lost me with DA2 and DAI so I just assumed that Veilguard would be a passable game but not amazing enough to get hyped for. From what I gathered from those who've played it it had a good action-combat system and was reasonably fun to play; likely a 6 or 7 game overall. Unfortunately, it had an annoying (and pushy) character that belongs to the hate mob's current favorite people to hate so they jumped all over that bandwagon which meant that it could only be equal to something like E.T. and one of the worst games of all time.
Take away the woke stuff and it was still a bad game. Class design was railroaded, itemization reinforced it.
Combat was bad it seemed good until you realize abilities and spells trigger I-frames and leave you immune to damage.

Makes everything trivial.

Difficulty was just making the same 5 enemy models a different colour and increasing their health pool.

It feels like a gatcha mobile game ported to console.
 
Last edited:
Pushing deviant sexual mental illness isn't woke; it's deviant mental illness itself.
70 years ago you guys were saying that black people were beasts that can't deny their basal impulses.Then after that you couldn't trust women because they were slaves to their hormones. Then after that the gays were gay because they WANTED to be that way. Then after that it was Ozzy Osbourne was mentally ill because "he eats bats" and the people that liked his music were deviants. Then it was the TV or video games making young people violent. Now we're back to the gays being mentally ill even though it hasn't been that uncommon throughout human history and was only looked down upon by people who hate freedom for all; e.g. Christians. Guess what? Humans are a complex amalgamation of cells and meat; they won't all be just like you.

Calling it "sexual mental illness" says all that one would need to know about how you feel about other humans and their desires for autonomous freedom and liberty, "To hell with anyone that doesn't think like me!"

It's time to wake up and realize that you're being taught to get off on hating people that are barely different than you.
 
Last edited:
Take away the woke stuff and it was still a bad game. Class design was railroaded, itemization reinforced it.
Combat was bad it seemed good until you realize abilities and spells trigger I-frames and leave you immune to damage.

Makes everything trivial.

Difficulty was just making the same 5 enemy models a different colour and increasing their health pool.

It feels like a gatcha mobile game ported to console.

Railroaded class design? Forced itemization? In a game based on 5E rules?
1792807941685.png



Abilities and spells trigger i-frames that leave you immune to damage? Damn, I guess Dark Souls, Sekiro, and Elden Ring are shit too since that's a thing there and is a strategy to take out enemy groups...

-Edit-
Dude, like your last 100+ posts weren't even about games in the game forum. Do you even play them or do you just complain about the ones you're told to?
 
Last edited:
Corporations, especially profitable ones often lay off workers to cut costs and increase profitability. There is a saying, if you aren't growing, your dying.
Profitable software developers don't. Until they were bought up, ID didn't, and Blizzard didn't. How do I know? Because I worked with both and know developers and designers in both. They did NOT cut half the staff routinely. You may think it's normal (why I don't know) but when it comes to profitable developers that's rare. It takes time to train people to how you do things and it would cost more money to fire half the staff and then try to hire them back. It's not like they'll be sitting around waiting.
This isn't always correct. Many studios that have been killed by various companies were absolutely NOT profitable.

This isn't true. Selling millions of copies can still be a failure. That's the problem with AAA studios. They often have absolutely bloated and astronomically high development costs due to mismanagement and other factors that create situations where a game isn't successful even if it does sell millions of copies. If a game costs 300 million dollars, it needs to sell 6 to 7 million copies to break even. Remember, not every dollar of the game's cost necessarily goes to the developer.
Which is why EA cut their staff to about 70 after Dragon Age: The Veilguard. They were still able to work on Mass Effect: The Universe and it was already pretty far along in development. More Alpha than Beta to be sure so it still had about a year worth of development left. The entire point of these acquisitions was supposedly to share resources to bring down the cost of development when trying to do AAA titles in the first place. However, when you see the same thing happen to studios like ID and they tell you "hey we were profitable" and they still get half their staff cut, I think that's an issue. Software developers can miss expectations, break even, yet survive. It's done quite often.
 
Last edited:
Bioware dying isn't even sad or unpredictable. It was expected 10+ years ago when they were bought out by EA. You know what sucks? Looking Glass, Bullfrog, Westwood, Sierra, etc. all being killed 20 years ago when they were at the top of their game and before they had the tech to fully realize their magnum opuses.
 
Bioware dying isn't even sad or unpredictable. It was expected 10+ years ago when they were bought out by EA. You know what sucks? Looking Glass, Bullfrog, Westwood, Sierra, etc. all being killed 20 years ago when they were at the top of their game and before they had the tech to fully realize their magnum opuses.
I listed some of those. I also want my American McGee: Alice Asylum!
 
Profitable software developers don't. Until they were bought up, ID didn't, and Blizzard didn't. How do I know? Because I worked with both and know developers and designers in both. They did NOT cut half the staff routinely. You may think it's normal (why I don't know) but when it comes to profitable developers that's rare. It takes time to train people to how you do things and it would cost more money to fire half the staff and then try to hire them back. It's not like they'll be sitting around waiting.

Which is why EA cut their staff to about 70 after Dragon Age: The Veilguard. They were still able to work on Mass Effect: The Universe and it was already pretty far along in development. More Alpha than Beta to be sure so it still had about a year worth of development left. The entire point of these acquisitions was supposedly to share resources to bring down the cost of development when trying to do AAA titles in the first place. However, when you see the same thing happen to studios like ID and they tell you "hey we were profitable" and they still get half their staff cut, I think that's an issue. Software developers can miss expectations, break even, yet survive. It's done quite often.
BioWare had more than a decade of missed financial and sales targets. It also had a massive game that flopped. BioWare, was not a studio that was making money for EA.

I've also known people in the industry too. Yes, there are core teams, managers and core talent that stay with the studio and move to other projects. Casey Hudson is an example of someone who did that at BioWare. But the people they hire to staff up for full production get cut when the project is over.
 
Last edited:
If you're setting a game in medieval Europe, you'd expect the vast majority of people, 99% or so, to look European. At the time, any "visible minorities" would have likely been traders coming from a completely different region of the world, because you couldn't hop on a plane and be in a completely different area of the planet in a few hours like you can today. He never said every fantasy setting must naturally be non-minority. Read what he said again. You're saying that he said that because you want to argue the point you're trying to make. He specifically says "A minority group existing organically in a story in a setting where it makes sense: Not woke.".
Bullshit. In fantasy, I can create any identity, in any form, in any place, without regard to any experience anchor. If you're making a historical documentary, then yes, you absolutely should abide by what actually happened. Without reading the wall text, I'm only commenting on that sentence. Not to offend.

Pushing deviant sexual mental illness isn't woke; it's deviant mental illness itself.
Again, bullshit. LG+ has always been part of evolution. I don't really appreciate word salads so LG+ includes BTQ. I really fail to understand how we just can't go with LG+. The + includes BTQ.

The whole point, for the most part, I agree most with Dan_D. You can push any fantasy story you want in any time, with any characters with any identity, in any setting. But it does not mean that story will be profitable or connect with people. Profitable stories connect with your target audience. If your target audience is very small, and you've spent a ton of money writing that story to that audience, then I'd expect, you'll be unprofitable.
 
  • Like
Reactions: kac77
like this
BioWare had more than a decade of missed financial and sales targets. It also had a massive game that flopped. BioWare, was not a studio that was making money for EA.
Making money, breaking even, and losing are different buckets entirely. Plus you have to understand that some of BioWare's unprofitable endeavors came from EA itself.
I've also known people in the industry too. Yes, there are core teams, managers and core talent that stay with the studio and move to other projects. Casey Hudson is an example of someone who did that at BioWare. But the people they hire to staff up for full production get cut when the project is over.
Not talking about BioWare. You're making a blanket statement that ALL game developers layoff half of their staff between releases...they don't.
 
Last edited:
Making money, breaking even, and losing are different buckets entirely. Plus you have to understand that some of BioWare's unprofitable endeavors came from EA itself.
Oh I'm aware. Once they sold out to EA, they were on the leash.
Not talking about BioWare. You're making a blanket statement that ALL game developers layoff half of their staff between releases...they don't.
Yes, it's a general statement but I understand it doesn't apply to every studio, but many of them do. A lot of the labor in the industry is contract labor. Different studios in different countries may do things differently. So that's fair.
 
Railroaded class design? Forced itemization? In a game based on 5E rules?
In what possible way is Veilguard based on 5e?

Abilities and spells trigger i-frames that leave you immune to damage? Damn, I guess Dark Souls, Sekiro, and Elden Ring are shit too since that's a thing there and is a strategy to take out enemy groups...
Yeah in those games you get a few I frames, not the entire 2s or so of the animation duration.
Dude, like your last 100+ posts weren't even about games in the game forum. Do you even play them or do you just complain about the ones you're told to?
And I generally don’t feel the need to comment on gaming in general people are going to like or dislike whatever they want, I usually don’t care as it’s not my business. BioWare is different this one hurts, it’s a tad more personal.

But I stand by my comment that even if Taash wasn’t in the game and it wasn’t scripted by psychologists in an HR meeting it was still a fundamentally bad game. The enemy design was bad, the combat was boring, it offers absolutely no replay value, it was one and done. But the different classes??? They all played identically even the melee classes play like casters. My biggest issue in most RPG’s is getting half way through and wanting to make a new character for a different play style for a bit, which absolutely did not happen in Veilguard.

And before anyone chimes in about how lots of single player narrative games are one and done, BioWare games have never been like that, and that was one of the reasons they were so beloved.

But I honestly feel like Veilguard was developed to be a companion mobile game to Dreadwolf, not a stand alone title. Like Mass Effect 3’s Galaxy at War mobile game just turned up a few notches. Inquisition had the mission table, I feel like this was the equivalent but instead you could run the missions yourself instead of just dispatching “allies” to do them as a mini resource gathering game.

But while the game seriously disappoints me, I’m not going to belittle anybody out there who did like it. I after all probably love a lot of games others absolutely hate and I’m still butthurt about Anthem the one game I broke my “no preorders rule for” and I loved that game and they murdered it.

And I really hope that EA’s new owners find employees they can hand Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Anthem back to and they can do something good with it.
 
Last edited:
Them being bisexual was a player choice. It allowed you to play male or female as your player character and allow you to romance whoever you wanted. It was their so people didn't whine about not being able to romance a certain character. That is not woke, but simply giving the player options and you had to choose the dialog option to keep them going.
I get that's the reason for it, but it does disturb me when the cool Mage who banged a goddess and got in trouble for it, then wanted to go down on me because I was really cool in that last fight. It's different when the obvious gay vampire wanted to get jiggy with it because he's obviously gay. On the flip side, Dragon Age Inquisition had Sera which I did want to romance her because she was the only decent looking female, and she basically told me that she can't because we're both into the same thing. Iron Bull was kinda funny because he made it clear that he's down to screw anyone within arms reach. Besides Iron Bull, you could also romance Dorian Pavus who was obviously gay but a character I did like. There was only two female characters you could romance and they sucked.

Compare this to Dragon Age Origins and it's pretty clear there was a very different BioWare back then compared to today. Morrigan was the perfect male fantasy character with the appropriate clothing to match.

View: https://youtu.be/LvGu0xLFwJc?si=wfYXUrz6JquHIZNg
 
Ahh, so woke is LGBTQ+ as being the issue, or a certain amount. Finally, we got it sorted out.
It literally doesn't matter what minority group you demand to be shoehorned into every story, if you do it purely for its own sake, then it is the definition of wokism.

How do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance, that some LGBT characters are accepted while others aren't? If it was bigotry or homophobia, why do some characters slip through the cracks? That's a rhetorical question, the answer is because they are well written, and make sense in the context of the story / setting.

The argument that everyone complaining about poorly conceived LGBT characters is just bigoted falls flat on its face.

Finally, it's a white thing. Gotcha. While in actuality, everything is drawn upon Iranian, Arabian, Indian, and Chinese mythologies and stories, not just Greco-Roman mythologies. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, One Thousand and One Nights, etc. Dragons were also a Chinese thing, converted from Chinoiserie back in the 17th Century.
Non sequitur. The only thing you need to understand is that in a pre-technological feudal civilization it doesn't make sense to have any significant number of non-natives at any location. And like it or not, in a temperate climate which is how most fantasy is depicted as black and brown people don't exist natively. So again, you strawman. It's not a white thing it's an immersion thing. If in Assassin's Creed Origins they made the local NPCs white it would be equally jarring, and you'd be lining up in the first row screaming about whitewashing. Of course they didn't feel the need to do that, somehow it is only when in white people's native land when diversity and representation are suddenly a must, how curious! OK, I retract my previous statement, it is a white thing, after all: anti white racism coming from the woke.
Anti-white? So the blue-haired white woman being woke is... mind blown. See, I knew you would eventually come out of the woodwork. Woke is anti-white... so when did anti-white wokeness happen? Was it always the case, or did it suddenly happen in 2015.
You keep saying gotcha, but when you look down at your hands you always clutch nothing. Yes, there are plenty of self depracating white women (and some men), of course it is an act of virtue signaling, they don't actually hate themselves, in fact it is quite the opposite they think they are better than everyone else. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you were living under a rock until yesterday, because you wouldn't lie about never encountering such a person now would you?

If we are talking about games, no it didn't suddenly happen in 2015, it was slowly creeping in for a while, around 2015 was just when game quality started to noticeably suffer as a result.
So, white-washing isn't woke, right? Taking, say, non-white characters from a non-white story, and putting a white character in as the main character, as well as supporting characters, but putting it in a non-white setting where most of the inhabitants are not white?
Is white supremacy woke then?
Depicting Jesus as non-white is anti-white racism.

Thank you, you made my day.
Who needs me when you can debunk yourself so thoroughly. Just after you rightly argue that depicting non-white characters as white is bad, you turn around and give the 👍 to depicting a white character as non-white.
 
Bullshit. In fantasy, I can create any identity, in any form, in any place, without regard to any experience anchor. If you're making a historical documentary, then yes, you absolutely should abide by what actually happened. Without reading the wall text, I'm only commenting on that sentence. Not to offend.

Yes, and since you didn’t read the entire text, you’re also not responding to what I actually said.

If you want to talk fantasy, I’ll give you two glaring examples of wokeness ruining storytelling that have nothing to do with skin colour, because clearly that’s becoming a red herring.

In fantasy, yes, you have flexibility because you can define things as you want, however, if you’re not the author of the source material, you have constraints to follow in accordance with the source material. Here’s two examples where woke broke it and made it worse.

1) Star Wars

Rey can do anything because Kennedy wanted a feminist power fantasy. Rey has full capacity to use the force with zero training and no one even telling her it exists. It took Yoda all of his force power gained after centuries of training and mastery to lift Luke’s X-Wing slowly out of the Dagoba swamp. Rey stops a spaceship going full speed straight at her in a split second, because she’s Rey. Luke gets his ass kicked by Vader in Empire because of the huge disparity in training and experience. Rey, however, never loses a fight, because she’s a feminist power fantasy. It makes for a boring character. I can’t go on a journey with Rey the way I did with Luke because Rey is perfect at everything all the time.

2) Lord of the Rings

Tolkien wrote the lore with heavy use of metaphor and symbolism. Orcs are a corrupted, irredeemably evil race in the books. All male. Now watch Rings of Power. Woke ideology is based on Marxism. No one in woke ideology is naturally evil, but rather victims of systems of oppression, privilege, and power dynamics. In the Rings of Power, you have female Orcs. You have Orcs that don’t want to fight and just want to raise their little Orc families in peace. Now you have a good guy Orc in season 3 who’s joined Galadriel’s party. Is it fantasy? Sure, but now the wokes have completely broken the lore established in the source material and missed the entire point of Tolkien’s story, and the explanation from the showrunners for fan backlash is, of course, racism.
 
Last edited:
It literally doesn't matter what minority group you demand to be shoehorned into every story, if you do it purely for its own sake, then it is the definition of wokism.

How do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance, that some LGBT characters are accepted while others aren't? If it was bigotry or homophobia, why do some characters slip through the cracks? That's a rhetorical question, the answer is because they are well written, and make sense in the context of the story / setting.

The argument that everyone complaining about poorly conceived LGBT characters is just bigoted falls flat on its face.


Non sequitur. The only thing you need to understand is that in a pre-technological feudal civilization it doesn't make sense to have any significant number of non-natives at any location. And like it or not, in a temperate climate which is how most fantasy is depicted as black and brown people don't exist natively. So again, you strawman. It's not a white thing it's an immersion thing. If in Assassin's Creed Origins they made the local NPCs white it would be equally jarring, and you'd be lining up in the first row screaming about whitewashing. Of course they didn't feel the need to do that, somehow it is only when in white people's native land when diversity and representation are suddenly a must, how curious! OK, I retract my previous statement, it is a white thing, after all: anti white racism coming from the woke.

You keep saying gotcha, but when you look down at your hands you always clutch nothing. Yes, there are plenty of self depracating white women (and some men), of course it is an act of virtue signaling, they don't actually hate themselves, in fact it is quite the opposite they think they are better than everyone else. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you were living under a rock until yesterday, because you wouldn't lie about never encountering such a person now would you?

If we are talking about games, no it didn't suddenly happen in 2015, it was slowly creeping in for a while, around 2015 was just when game quality started to noticeably suffer as a result.

Is white supremacy woke then?

Who needs me when you can debunk yourself so thoroughly. Just after you rightly argue that depicting non-white characters as white is bad, you turn around and give the 👍 to depicting a white character as non-white.

View: https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg?si=qcLEcRcKifUkXhDl
 
The "asylum" is already being run by inmates, what's a few more?
This time the inmates have to worry about their future where before they were betting on EA funding. I'm not sure how we went from developers who made Dragon's Age Origins to Veilguard but whoever is left running the studio will need to do some restructuring. Gary McKay was the president of BioWare from 2020 forward so I would replace him first. Casey Hudson ran the studio twice from 1998 to 2014 and for a short time in 2017 to 2020. His reasoning for leaving was "Desire for Creative Freedom". Casey Hudson needs to be behind BioWare if this corpse of a studio is to ever come back. Problem is he's managing Arcanaut Studios which is unsurprisingly Canadian and working on Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic which is the successor to Knights of the Old Republic. No way he's going to leave Arcanaunt Studios to manage the inmates in BioWare. Maybe if Arcanaunt Studios takes over BioWare's IP then we have some serious potential here?
 
This time the inmates have to worry about their future where before they were betting on EA funding. I'm not sure how we went from developers who made Dragon's Age Origins to Veilguard but whoever is left running the studio will need to do some restructuring. Gary McKay was the president of BioWare from 2020 forward so I would replace him first. Casey Hudson ran the studio twice from 1998 to 2014 and for a short time in 2017 to 2020. His reasoning for leaving was "Desire for Creative Freedom". Casey Hudson needs to be behind BioWare if this corpse of a studio is to ever come back. Problem is he's managing Arcanaut Studios which is unsurprisingly Canadian and working on Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic which is the successor to Knights of the Old Republic. No way he's going to leave Arcanaunt Studios to manage the inmates in BioWare. Maybe if Arcanaunt Studios takes over BioWare's IP then we have some serious potential here?
BioWare is never coming back, and hopefully the talentless people that rotted it out will never work in the industry again. (Some people have a way of failing upwards.)

Best we can hope for is EA licenses out the IP to people that actually care about the source material and telling a good story.
 
Back
Top