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I know a lot of people here don't like Bioware games anyway by jeep 05/15/2012, 2:10pm PDT
(This started as a reply to someone but it got long and jeepy so I moved it to its own thread.)

I still want to like their new games as they come out, but I think maybe I've been looking at this as a ship to be righted rather than something that will never float to begin with. Like bdr I'm still shocked by how much I love Baldur's Gate 2 and even to some degree still love Knights of the Old Republic (pick guardian, get your lightsaber and go force jump around dantooine's outdoor areas. it's the Goldeneye snowfield level of stabbing things, plus it has that little murder mystery which is the only time the conversation system really stands out). I have genuine nostalgia for playing those games, the way normal people have it for stuff like shitty 80s tv shows or whatever, but in retrospect they may have just been accidentally fun rather than good in any kind of repeatable way. BG2 and KOTOR weren't technically brilliant, they didn't have novel play control, the stories weren't awesome so much as they had 'something for everyone', so you'd see awesome things. Even if different people came away with different memories of what was great, everyone who liked them would talk about it until pretty much everyone who might like BG2 or KOTOR has played them. I'm pretty sure I haven't loved any of their games since then, maybe Mass Effect 2 excluded. The other games since, like Neverwinter Nights or Mass Effect 1 (the only game I finished on xbox), feel clumsy, rushed in parts, and overall aren't really compelling even as narrative.

There's another change though. These new games they've released since Dragon Age 2 aren't just not compelling, they're simply not good. I mean they're really actively bad. All of the criticism people had for KOTOR and BG2 and Jade Empire and the earlier Mass Effect games is all true of the new stuff to some degree, but now there's not even much of a fig leaf of writing or art there to cover for the deficiencies. The games are clearly stripped down to what some marketing research deems minimum viable product and they lost the 'something for everyone' element that made people build a community around them in the first place. The Mass Effect series got more and more focused on that shitty cover combat. No one knows where Dragon Age 2 was going but everyone hated where it ended up. I don't think it's right to blame it on EA, because I think Bioware had been going in the wrong direction for a long time, but I'm confident now that they're going to make it worse.

You can say you really liked Star Wars: The Old Republic if the only other game you ever played is World of Warcraft and you only played the first 10 levels of different classes in SWTOR, but the second you hit 15, 20, and certainly by 25 there's no excuse to keep playing, everything about the game gets sparser and sparser and then just dies. Their attempt to make a thing that was "at least as good as WoW plus voice acting" just ends up a series of poor decisions...they literally could have made the character stories denser, wrapped them up by the equivalent of level 20 and spent the effort they put into 21-50 on just tons of endgame content. Everyone would have played every class to 20 by now, and right out of the gate their big patches would just be built around more endgame content. They'd have a hell of a lot more than 1M people playing still if they'd done that to begin with.

I don't think that EA has the actual vision required to accomplish anything big and original, no matter how much money they throw at it, and I think they have this firehose of marketing data that guarantees their dev teams won't develop any kind of vision either. I'm sure Bioware has lost the writing focus they had, even as the stories became a little more sophisticated. It's like they're working over their heads in small ways with every part of the narrative and dialogue. There was an article about how EA's internal decision makers see cross-platform linked games as the future. The problem is they can't make anything ambitious work on one platform how the fuck are they going to coordinate teams across a lot of them?

To see where EA is fucking up, first look at Syndicate on the basic platform, if you're going to make a fps out of this old franchise it's got to have new stuff in every aspect of the game. I don't think a plain old "Max Payne fights like he's in The Matrix" tweak is going to cut it now, each piece of a new game has to have something both novel and integrated at the same time, or it won't stand out, which is why no one bothered playing Syndicate. The writing has to be better, the art has to be better, the gameplay has to really show something new to justify reviving a franchise. EA are one of the few companies with the money to do this, but it would require a bit of vision and experimentation and they can't afford that in terms of investor respect rather than in financial terms.

Anyway this utter failure of a game would destroy revenue across any linked games on other platforms, because its shitty reputation would cascade through product reviews across the internet. Maybe they're just dumb little PopCap games cross-branded, which is basically the only thing EA has demonstrated the vision for, but maybe the lightbulb flickers for a few minutes and they start to think about things in kind of an organic way. Say they'd have an iPhone thing where you'd play out some hacking minigame and it builds up bonuses in the PC game, or a iPad one where you'd be able to engineer futuristic weapons and then test them in a firing range, maybe transfer them back to your PC to try them out in single and multiplayer. Whatever kind of cross-platform thing you can think of. Each of these comes with a cost to make and expected revenue. So when they make a fucking tepid disaster like Syndicate every single one of their connected apps also falls short on revenue, and if you include marketing, they just spent 5x as much to earn nothing. Then apply this strategy to Bioware games, which have become tepid disasters and are just coasting on reputation now. EA's plans to spend on cross-device play is going to put more pressure on the anchor game's budget, and this is going to fuck Bioware, who at this point is pretty much ripe to have their market taken away by any competent developer who comes along with a good space opera narrative.

A couple years ago I watched this documentary on coffee, and how when companies compete they're basically copying each other with some 'improvement' to the product or process. At one point american coffee companies would compete on price, which is a race to the bottom. Shitty coffee basically made people stop buying it in the 70s, and then Starbucks was a thing, and as it grew (slowly, then quickly) everyone competed on quality for a while, a race to the top. EA can spend what it needs to spend to make any kind of game they want, but right now they seem to be in a race to the bottom with...everyone? no one? I don't know. I'm 100% certain that Bioware's shit is only going to work in a race to the top, though. At this point they're back to having to get lucky to make anything fun.
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I know a lot of people here don't like Bioware games anyway by jeep 05/15/2012, 2:10pm PDT NEW
    Re: I know a lot of people here don't like Bioware games anyway by Ice Cream Jonsey 05/16/2012, 12:09pm PDT NEW
    jeep was pretty prescient here. NT by John Gulp 12/16/2016, 11:03pm PST NEW
    I just want to say that EA's Starbreeze's Syndicate was shockingly good, by if you can tolerate 2012-era FPSes. 12/17/2016, 2:46am PST NEW
        It was a generic, shitty, two weapon, cover shooter clone with a shit story. NT by bullshit. 01/06/2017, 12:37pm PST NEW
            It's very high quality and not remotely a cover shooter, but the rest is spot on NT by Decoding '2012-era FPS' 01/06/2017, 1:45pm PST NEW
                I bought this on your recommendation but I haven't played it yet. by Worm 01/07/2017, 12:59am PST NEW
                    Play on hard. Don't give up on the first boss, nothing else is as bad as he is. by The train boss is actually fun! 01/07/2017, 2:09am PST NEW
                        I really like it so far, the missile boss sucked by Worm 05/21/2017, 8:13pm PDT NEW
                            They frame it as a moral conundrum. by Vaneza 05/23/2017, 6:12pm PDT NEW
 
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