Post

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

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).

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).

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.

The end result is that the budgets for these games ballooned. The schedules for these games became impossible to predict. The teams - who I want to stress were some really smart people - were in a situation to build all-new tech and 'find the fun' in a new combat model that didn't exist before.