Jessie

And if you're looking for a clear example of how EA leadership seemingly cannot fail, here's a perfect anecdote:

Our $2M investment in the Sea Cliffs Exhibit Renovation Project has gotten a pretty clear seal of approval.

well, on the one hand AI has made things significantly worse for everyone in almost every capacity that it has touched. But on the other hand, the dumbest guy you know can send emails nobody reads really fast now. So it's impossible to say whether it's good or not

Send this to your producer to inflict an instant sense of cataclysmic dread

I feel like all the Bioware retrospectives have not yet dwelt enough on what an absolute watershed Femshep was in terms of female playable protagonists

Excuse me, sir? I need to use that sidewalk. Sir? Are you listening?

I started reading Yesteryear on my flight today, and even ~100 pages in I can already tell this is an all-timer of a novel

One thing they don’t tell you before moving to the West Coast is that every flight for the rest of your life is going to be EARLY in the morning. There’s no other way to make the time zones work without losing a whole day

I don’t talk about work a lot on here because social media is a tricky place for an NDA’d game dev, but it’s pretty heartwarming to see so much love and support for BioWare and everyone who helped work on the last Dragon Age 💜

One more for the afternoon crowd. Two of the last lines of dialogue I wrote on the last BioWare game I shipped.

a queer person trying to create a video game will necessarily re-create dragon age 2 from first principals

I bought this Mass Effect Grunt plushie a few months after I started working in games full time and he’s been on my desk for my whole career at this point. I’m giving him a lot of hugs today.

We did quite a lot, but James Power on the BioWare side did a shitton of work to make it shippable in absurdly varied conditions. "So... we have a transparent tunnel. Under water. And we want hair to look good there". WAT! And the (two?) hair artists that authored >100 hair assets. Just amazing

Whether any given AAA game is profitable or a financial disaster is now largely a definitional question around what "counts" as the production for that game and not 1-2 other canceled projects

It's hard to explain now how Bioware changed gaming culture by making games that were such great traditional action RPGs AND so compelling as narratives that it normalized caring about both aspects. It sounds weird now that it ever wasn't.

I should go. www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-cG...

i think the games industry should have studios that exist

it cannot actually be ignored or danced around that the closure of BioWare came so soon after the Saudi and Jared Kushner acquisition of EA. they absolutely did take the studio making EA’s broadly queerest games out back and shoot it old yeller style. do not let yourself or colleagues ignore that

I am not a violent person, but people who watch tik toks on full volume at a crowded bar really try my patience.