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Damion Schubert
@zenofdesign.com

Going to give my own takeaway on the demise of Bioware, which still makes me very sad. The TLDR: Bioware was not killed suddenly by a private equity acquisition. It was slowly strangled by idiots who didn't understand what made Bioware great - some at EA but also some inside of Bioware leadership

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Damion Schubert
@zenofdesign.com

My perspective, I worked there for ... 8 years? I was in the Austin office, where I was lead systems designer on SWTOR, led the free-to-play monetization, was lead designer for an xpac, and then worked on some prototypes that didn't go anywhere (note: most prototypes don't).

Damion Schubert
@zenofdesign.com

Bioware games are great because of story. That's it. They made it their mission early on to be the best storytelling games in the industry, with a single-minded mission to truly advance the state of the art of branching dialogue and the sense that player's actions have consequences.

Damion Schubert
@zenofdesign.com

But this didn't sit well with some of the decision makers. The earliest Bioware games were basically turn-based RPGs and then pause-and-play RPGs. This was, in the opinion of these people, old and busted. So you got Jade Empire, and then Mass Effect and then Dragon Age 2 (the 'action RPG' one).

Damion Schubert
@zenofdesign.com

All these are good and well - and the Mass Effect series in particular was a great game - but each of these required Bioware to build game types they hadn't built before, which tacked uncertainty on top of the story stuff which is, frankly, stupid expensive on its own.