"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
So they will neither confirm nor deny an upcoming DLC.
Count me in as waiting for a sale, which is how I buy most of my games lately.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
So they will neither confirm nor deny an upcoming DLC.
Count me in as waiting for a sale, which is how I buy most of my games lately.
Well, to be fair I almost always wait for sales.
It makes sense the rumor was fake because it doesn't pass a basic logic test - why would they commit to leaving money on the table? I'm not saying they're going to do a DLC anytime soon, but to think they'd outright nix one isn't logical.
IDK, some higher up decides the series is too expensive to continue. The lobby format most games use now is a lot cheaper. They don't want to just end the series so they cut it off at the knees and focus on other games. Could be wrong but it feels like ME days are numbered.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Not really surprised, but very sad. It definitely cuts my "enthusiasm" for Anthem, however, as I feel as if they ditched the Mass Effect series in favor of it.
BW used to be about single player game that had multiplayer tacked on. Now, like all of the "big player publishers", it's all about multiplayer with maybe a bit of single player content.
I don't give a rodents donkey about pvp. When I want pvp I go play a pvp game, but that's pretty darn uncommon.
Mass Effect was always about the story and the gameplay, something this is apparently being ignored in this latest version.
Well, that clinches it, it's off my want list.
Not true. If you read both of those stories, what BW was denying is that a company called Sinclair Networks claimed that it had been hired to create DLC for MEA. This hoax was posted on FB a day or two ahead of the Kotaku story. When EA / BW made statements about Sinclair, it was before the Kotaku story broke which, incidentally, has nothing to do with the Sinclair rumor, but is its own story based on interviews with employees inside BW.
These are 2 separate stories about the same general topic but from 2 different places.
1) PC Gamer's story and EA/BW response is about Sinclair Networks, NOT Kotaku's story.
2) Kotaku's story has nothing to do with Sinclair Networks and there has been NO response to it
Because they're about the same thing, namely DLC, it's easy to blend them together when they're not the same thing at all.
I wonder if they are looking at GTA5 as example, where all the money seems to be in multiplayer (mainly shark cards). Not releasing singleplayer DLC doesn't seem to have hurt T2 and Rockstar.
Oh and the popularity and monetization of the 1001 different hunger style games.
That's another great Studio ruined by Electronics Arts after Origins, Westwood, Maxis, Bullfrog, Mythic, Pandemic.
Will they ever learn to give complete freedom to those talented Artists who work for those Studios? Thank God Bethesda is too big now, there was a time I though EA was going to buy them (After Oblivion).
When you try to promote a SJW/PC agenda instead of making a good game, it suffers. Serves Bioware right.
Sorry dude, but that's not the problem. Bioware always supported Gender and Race equality and LGBT issues with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, yet the games were best sellers and nobody really complained before Andromeda.
Problem with Andromeda was that most of the game was outsourced to third parties rather than be developed in-house in order to save few pennies. Let's see if those fat cats at EA will manage to kill the Dragon Age franchise as well. They have a good track record so I won't be surprised.
When you try to promote a SJW/PC agenda instead of making a good game, it suffers. Serves Bioware right.
Sorry dude, but that's not the problem. Bioware always supported Gender and Race equality and LGBT issues with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, yet the games were best sellers and nobody really complained before Andromeda.
Problem with Andromeda was that most of the game was outsourced to third parties rather than be developed in-house in order to save few pennies. Let's see if those fat cats at EA will manage to kill the Dragon Age franchise as well. They have a good track record so I won't be surprised.
That's complete lies. The game was not outsourced at all. Stop putting beliefs in internet trolls with no social life.
Bioware squashed this rumor the other day didn't they?
Yes they did. Unfortunately the damage is done. Unfortunately there's a lot of people trying to set this series on fire.
They squashed the rumor that they had outsourced DLC to Sinclair Networks.
They have not squashed the insider information leaked to Kotaku by BioWare employees that was published the next day.
These are two completely different events. Get your facts straight.
I'd love to see MEA get 2-3 DLC but according to Kotaku's sources, that's not going to happen, also putting into jeopardy any future installments in what was thought to be a trilogy.
I am a huge fan of the series (check the avatar, after all) and think that MEA was a good idea to move the series forward. For the 18 months of steady work put into the game after years of mismanagement, they did a credible job. Too bad it was forced out long before it was ready. I wish they'd get a chance to move it along to its DLC and an eventual GotY with additional chapters / installments later on. Sadly, that doesn't seem like it's going to happen.
That's another great Studio ruined by Electronics Arts after Origins, Westwood, Maxis, Bullfrog, Mythic, Pandemic.
Will they ever learn to give complete freedom to those talented Artists who work for those Studios? Thank God Bethesda is too big now, there was a time I though EA was going to buy them (After Oblivion).
I agree with you to and extent only because I think EA was better off
not acquiring Bioware , but they needed a known developer like Bioware
in their house. EA may or may not be the big evil that a lot of us would
like to believe, but Bioware has shown that it can not step up and be
the developer that EA wants and needs them to be. They don't have the
managerial talent to coordinate with their studios due to logistics,
lack of over site and just bad over all management and decisions. It
seems that they have lost a lot of their creative genius. Every title
that Bioware has released since 2012 has come under some consumer and
critic backlash.
Greg Zeschuk also rejects any notion of
Electronic Arts being a negative influence on BioWare. "They don't
second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that," he explains.
"We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't
like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly."
I agree with you to and extent only because I think EA was better off
not acquiring Bioware , but they needed a known developer like Bioware
in their house. EA may or may not be the big evil that a lot of us would
like to believe, but Bioware has shown that it can not step up and be
the developer that EA wants and needs them to be.
Dude you don't get how EA works, I'll explain to you.
1) EA buys a big Studio 2) EA start to micromanage the new acquired Studio. 3) The original Managers/Owners of said Studios quit because of EA interfering with the creative process. 4) EA put new managers (ex EA tea boys) in charge of the newly acquired Studio 5) The new game bomb, because of the incompetence of those tea boys...I mean managers. 6) EA shut the Studio down 7) EA buys another big independent Studio, rinse and repeat.
I am not making this up, go and read the history of Origins, Westwood, Maxis, Bullfrog, Mythic, Pandemic, all the original staff/management leave after few years.
Bioware founders and creative brains Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, left Bioware in 2010, probably because they weren't happy about SWTOR creative direction, it wasn't up to Bioware high standards. After they left, EA managed to publish two successful games Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, but even those two games had some input from Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk as they were already in production before they left. Mass Effect 3 is the first Bioware game EA fully managed, and it was ok, mainly because they didn't mess with the formula (though it wasn't as good as ME2). But without good managers and creative people eventually the luck runs out and you have ME:A.
I agree with you to and extent only because I think EA was better off
not acquiring Bioware , but they needed a known developer like Bioware
in their house. EA may or may not be the big evil that a lot of us would
like to believe, but Bioware has shown that it can not step up and be
the developer that EA wants and needs them to be.
3) The original Managers/Owners of said Studios quit because of EA
Seems to me the "good" doctors were already on their way out, hence selling off Bioware in the first place. That was a nice chunk of change to retire from the industry on; which didn't take long for them to do after the fact. I don't really see any other reason to sell when they did, if that wasn't the intent. Especially with TOR coming up.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
"During pre-production in 2013 and 2014, as the engineers and technical animators tried to figure out how they would handle Andromeda’s
animation, they ran into several obstacles. They’d hired an Egyptian
company called Snappers that could create beautiful facial animations,
but there were lingering questions about how to implement those
animations into the engine and how to scale across the whole game. And
there were constant arguments over which technology to use. Some on the
team wanted to use a program called FaceWare, used by EA’s Capture Labs
studio in Vancouver, but others argued that it wasn’t good enough. Most
of the lipsync in Mass Effect: Andromeda—like other Mass Effect
games—was handled by a common piece of software called FaceFX that can
interpret sounds and automatically move characters’ lips accordingly. Because the animation team remained relatively small, BioWare, like most
AAA studios, outsourced a fair amount of the cinematic work in Andromeda,
using studios in Russia, China, India, and other countries. "
I agree with you to and extent only because I think EA was better off
not acquiring Bioware , but they needed a known developer like Bioware
in their house. EA may or may not be the big evil that a lot of us would
like to believe, but Bioware has shown that it can not step up and be
the developer that EA wants and needs them to be.
Dude you don't get how EA works, I'll explain to you.
1) EA buys a big Studio 2) EA start to micromanage the new acquired Studio. 3) The original Managers/Owners of said Studios quit because of EA interfering with the creative process. 4) EA put new managers (ex EA tea boys) in charge of the newly acquired Studio 5) The new game bomb, because of the incompetence of those tea boys...I mean managers. 6) EA shut the Studio down 7) EA buys another big independent Studio, rinse and repeat.
I am not making this up, go and read the history of Origins, Westwood, Maxis, Bullfrog, Mythic, Pandemic, all the original staff/management leave after few years.
Bioware founders and creative brains Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, left Bioware in 2010, probably because they weren't happy about SWTOR creative direction, it wasn't up to Bioware high standards. After they left, EA managed to publish two successful games Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, but even those two games had some input from Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk as they were already in production before they left. Mass Effect 3 is the first Bioware game EA fully managed, and it was ok, mainly because they didn't mess with the formula (though it wasn't as good as ME2). But without good managers and creative people eventually the luck runs out and you have ME:A.
1) EA buys a big studio ... Agree 2 ) EA start to micromanage the new acquired Studio. In the case of Bioware that is not so as Greg Zeschuk has already stated numerous times that it is not the case. 3) The original Managers/Owners of said Studios quit because of EA interfering with the creative process. Again that is not the case as Greg Zeschuk has already stated numerous times that Bioware had complete control over creativity . After the failed launch of SWTOR in which it failed to meet expectation in order to save the game it had to go ftp with micro transaction. Note that micro transaction was not in the game at launch. 4 ) EA did place new managers into Bioware after the failed launch of SWOTOR and the backlash that became of ME 3. 5 ) The new game bombed, because of the incompetence of those tea boys...I mean managers. Can't argue with that .Even though I liked Andromeda a lot I have to concede that there were problems with it. Bioware One as a studio sounds good on paper, but fails in implementation.
I wont argue any points as to what was the past with companies that I don't know and didn't follow and because I simply don't care since I am discussing Bioware.
As to your other points Both founders left in 2012 and not 2010. Ray Muzyka(retired in 2012) Greg Zeschuk(retired in 2012). And they left presumably because EA was putting a lot of pressure on them because they wanted to know why a project ( SWTOR) that they gave large sums of money to and allowed them to have complete creative control over failed to meet expectation. And why the backlash over their most popular title Mass Effect 3. Which all of this happened with in a 6 month period. SWTOR was released Dec 20, 2011 and ME 3 March 6, 2012.
While your passion is strong it appears that you are mistaken in some aspects or in the order of things. DA 2 was the first Bioware game that was released under EA followed by the first game totally created and produced under EA SWTOR. Then Mass Effect 3, DAI, and Andromeda.
Neither Ray nor Greg have had anything at all to do with video games or the industry since they retired from Bioware. Although it's not conclusive proof of anything, it seems to indicate that them leaving Bioware was more about truly retiring from video game production than all the speculative rumors that it was about being pissed with EA.
If it'd been the later they probably would have kept their hands in game development in some fashion.
Cue new rumor that their experience at EA was so soul crushing that it soured them to game development for life
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Comments
http://www.pcgamer.com/bioware-kiboshes-mass-effect-andromeda-dlc-cancellation-rumor/?utm_content=buffer99c25&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=buffer_pcgamerfb
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
Count me in as waiting for a sale, which is how I buy most of my games lately.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Mass Effect was always about the story and the gameplay, something this is apparently being ignored in this latest version.
Well, that clinches it, it's off my want list.
Lost my mind, now trying to lose yours...
Not true. If you read both of those stories, what BW was denying is that a company called Sinclair Networks claimed that it had been hired to create DLC for MEA. This hoax was posted on FB a day or two ahead of the Kotaku story. When EA / BW made statements about Sinclair, it was before the Kotaku story broke which, incidentally, has nothing to do with the Sinclair rumor, but is its own story based on interviews with employees inside BW.
These are 2 separate stories about the same general topic but from 2 different places.
1) PC Gamer's story and EA/BW response is about Sinclair Networks, NOT Kotaku's story.
2) Kotaku's story has nothing to do with Sinclair Networks and there has been NO response to it
Because they're about the same thing, namely DLC, it's easy to blend them together when they're not the same thing at all.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh and the popularity and monetization of the 1001 different hunger style games.
That's another great Studio ruined by Electronics Arts after Origins, Westwood, Maxis, Bullfrog, Mythic, Pandemic.
Will they ever learn to give complete freedom to those talented Artists who work for those Studios?
Thank God Bethesda is too big now, there was a time I though EA was going to buy them (After Oblivion).
Bioware always supported Gender and Race equality and LGBT issues with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, yet the games were best sellers and nobody really complained before Andromeda.
Problem with Andromeda was that most of the game was outsourced to third parties rather than be developed in-house in order to save few pennies.
Let's see if those fat cats at EA will manage to kill the Dragon Age franchise as well.
They have a good track record so I won't be surprised.
Yes they did. Unfortunately the damage is done. Unfortunately there's a lot of people trying to set this series on fire.
(,,,)=^__^=(,,,)
That's complete lies. The game was not outsourced at all. Stop putting beliefs in internet trolls with no social life.
(,,,)=^__^=(,,,)
They have not squashed the insider information leaked to Kotaku by BioWare employees that was published the next day.
These are two completely different events. Get your facts straight.
I'd love to see MEA get 2-3 DLC but according to Kotaku's sources, that's not going to happen, also putting into jeopardy any future installments in what was thought to be a trilogy.
I am a huge fan of the series (check the avatar, after all) and think that MEA was a good idea to move the series forward. For the 18 months of steady work put into the game after years of mismanagement, they did a credible job. Too bad it was forced out long before it was ready. I wish they'd get a chance to move it along to its DLC and an eventual GotY with additional chapters / installments later on. Sadly, that doesn't seem like it's going to happen.
Source material:
MEA's Troubled 5-Year Development
http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
No Single Player DLC According to Inside Sources (SEPARATE FROM SINCLAIR NETWORKS RUMOR!!!!)
http://kotaku.com/sources-mass-effect-andromeda-will-not-get-single-pla-1796548159
This is the article about how EA / BW squashed the Sinclair DLC outsourcing rumor that came out before the insider information
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/06/30/bioware-quashes-mass-effect-andromeda-dlc-cancellation-rumours-are-false-but
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
I agree with you to and extent only because I think EA was better off not acquiring Bioware , but they needed a known developer like Bioware in their house. EA may or may not be the big evil that a lot of us would like to believe, but Bioware has shown that it can not step up and be the developer that EA wants and needs them to be. They don't have the managerial talent to coordinate with their studios due to logistics, lack of over site and just bad over all management and decisions. It seems that they have lost a lot of their creative genius. Every title that Bioware has released since 2012 has come under some consumer and critic backlash.
Greg Zeschuk also rejects any notion of Electronic Arts being a negative influence on BioWare. "They don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that," he explains. "We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly."
https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/10/bioware-co-founder-talks-eas-influence-beer-and-gamer-negativ/
Another good article
https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/10/zeschuk-ea-gives-you-enough-rope-to-hang-yourself-in-a-good/
I feel that if D2 (is that Ok to call it that?
Bartoni's Law definition: As an Internet discussion grows volatile, the probability of a comparison involving Donald Trump approaches 1.
Aloha Mr Hand !
1) EA buys a big Studio
2) EA start to micromanage the new acquired Studio.
3) The original Managers/Owners of said Studios quit because of EA interfering with the creative process.
4) EA put new managers (ex EA tea boys) in charge of the newly acquired Studio
5) The new game bomb, because of the incompetence of those tea boys...I mean managers.
6) EA shut the Studio down
7) EA buys another big independent Studio, rinse and repeat.
I am not making this up, go and read the history of Origins, Westwood, Maxis, Bullfrog, Mythic, Pandemic, all the original staff/management leave after few years.
Bioware founders and creative brains Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, left Bioware in 2010, probably because they weren't happy about SWTOR creative direction, it wasn't up to Bioware high standards.
After they left, EA managed to publish two successful games Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, but even those two games had some input from Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk as they were already in production before they left.
Mass Effect 3 is the first Bioware game EA fully managed, and it was ok, mainly because they didn't mess with the formula (though it wasn't as good as ME2).
But without good managers and creative people eventually the luck runs out and you have ME:A.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
http://www.gamezone.com/news/mass-effect-andromeda-s-facial-animation-was-reportedly-outsourced-3452342
https://www.geek.com/games/mass-effect-andromedas-facial-animations-were-reportedly-outsourced-1694894/
http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2017/04/03/possible-explanation-for-me-andromeda-animations/
https://geekreply.com/geek-culture/gaming-geek-culture/2017/04/01/mass-effect-andromedas-awful-facial-animations-result-rampant-outsourcing
There are some other 40K results on the subject, don't have space to list them all here.
A snippet from a very interesting article from Kotaku:
http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
"During pre-production in 2013 and 2014, as the engineers and technical animators tried to figure out how they would handle Andromeda’s animation, they ran into several obstacles. They’d hired an Egyptian company called Snappers that could create beautiful facial animations, but there were lingering questions about how to implement those animations into the engine and how to scale across the whole game. And there were constant arguments over which technology to use. Some on the team wanted to use a program called FaceWare, used by EA’s Capture Labs studio in Vancouver, but others argued that it wasn’t good enough. Most of the lipsync in Mass Effect: Andromeda—like other Mass Effect games—was handled by a common piece of software called FaceFX that can interpret sounds and automatically move characters’ lips accordingly.
Because the animation team remained relatively small, BioWare, like most AAA studios, outsourced a fair amount of the cinematic work in Andromeda, using studios in Russia, China, India, and other countries. "
2 ) EA start to micromanage the new acquired Studio.
In the case of Bioware that is not so as Greg Zeschuk has already stated numerous times that it is not the case.
3) The original Managers/Owners of said Studios quit because of EA interfering with the creative process.
Again that is not the case as Greg Zeschuk has already stated numerous times that Bioware had complete control over creativity . After the failed launch of SWTOR in which it failed to meet expectation in order to save the game it had to go ftp with micro transaction. Note that micro transaction was not in the game at launch.
4 ) EA did place new managers into Bioware after the failed launch of SWOTOR and the backlash that became of ME 3.
5 ) The new game bombed, because of the incompetence of those tea boys...I mean managers.
Can't argue with that .Even though I liked Andromeda a lot I have to concede that there were problems with it. Bioware One as a studio sounds good on paper, but fails in implementation.
I wont argue any points as to what was the past with companies that I don't know and didn't follow and because I simply don't care since I am discussing Bioware.
As to your other points Both founders left in 2012 and not 2010. Ray Muzyka (retired in 2012) Greg Zeschuk (retired in 2012). And they left presumably because EA was putting a lot of pressure on them because they wanted to know why a project ( SWTOR) that they gave large sums of money to and allowed them to have complete creative control over failed to meet expectation. And why the backlash over their most popular title Mass Effect 3. Which all of this happened with in a 6 month period. SWTOR was released Dec 20, 2011 and ME 3 March 6, 2012.
While your passion is strong it appears that you are mistaken in some aspects or in the order of things. DA 2 was the first Bioware game that was released under EA followed by the first game totally created and produced under EA SWTOR. Then Mass Effect 3, DAI, and Andromeda.
If it'd been the later they probably would have kept their hands in game development in some fashion.
Cue new rumor that their experience at EA was so soul crushing that it soured them to game development for life
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED