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Former BioWare Emloyee Review of company sheds distuburing light on MEA's development

Jumeira

Banned
Really a post about an anonymous review from a disgruntled employee? That's where we're at?
It's more to do with the shitness of ME:A and the atrocious level of quality in what should have been the next step in story, acting and delivery. It's insulting to have to sit through dialogue and acting that looks like storyboards and placeholders. £60 for this shit has pissed off alot of fans who were waiting a long time. They also lied about the game being seen to and improved when these issues were brought up months before release.

I mean, just watch the video posted in the OP! They degraded the acting and tech...from.last year. They can come up with meaningful reasons for the tech reduction, but the acting? How can you remove acting when it's already complete?
 

120v

Member
taking this with a grain of salt and all but we get stories like this for every slew of AAA games that come our way. pretty par for the course at this point
 

Falchion

Member
So the development seems troubled, but that doesn't explain how some of the graphical stuff would actually take a step backwards.
 
There needs to be a thread on the big downgrade

Agree. Mass Effect has always had this amazing noir-ish lighting and amazing cinematic feel to it graphically. That video of then and now... who makes that decision to dial back the fantastic quality and turn on the flat 2-D lighting? I wonder what happened. Damn. Sucks.
 
Agree. Mass Effect has always had this amazing noir-ish lighting and amazing cinematic feel to it graphically. That video of then and now... who makes that decision to dial back the fantastic quality and turn on the flat 2-D lighting? I wonder what happened. Damn. Sucks.

It's almost like Dark Souls 2 downgrade all over again. There's no reason to do it, the hardware can run it just fine.
 

Kaako

Felium Defensor
Quite disheartening to read and even if all that stuff is fake in the OP, you can clearly tell that some shit went down during the development cycle of this game.
 
Assuming this isn't fake or just another disgruntled employee, I'm getting some eerie deja-vu of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow II's development hell here...
 

riotous

Banned
Mother of god. And thus, the game was forever ruined for me. I'm not ever gonna bother now that I saw what It should have been.

What the fuck happened ?

Those might have been renders that weren't using the actual game engine?

I don't see how else a game changes that much; or maybe at he very least the animation system involved static sort of hard-coded animations.. vs. the final product that needed to have a system of feeding in words/actions and letting the engine generate the facial movements.
 
It always seems dangerous to draw immediate correlations to one hearsay story to the general quality of product. Does anyone remember the similar post from someone supposedly at CDPR months before Witcher 3's release that discussed a similarly harsh working environment?
 

Laughing Banana

Weeping Pickle
The thread title needs to be changed.

Perhaps put an "allegedly" in there somewhere, or maybe "RUMOR"

Just because ME:A seems like a sub-par product doesn't mean we have to believe a single unvetted post from an anonymous source without any proof whatsoever.
 
Just to clear up something, because I'm not sure myself, but isn't the March 2017 portion of that comparison video taken from this glitched YouTube video? The glitched video has obviously some animation issues going on (and other like duplicated models in T-poses, maybe even possible lighting, texture or LOD problems), so I was just wondering if that's really a representative sample for comparison.

Or was that footage taken from a normal (not glitched) version of the cutscene? (I've no idea when the scene happens, if there's footage of it elsewhere from other sources etc.)

Not trying to detour the conversation at all, just curious if that's really how that particular scene looks like in the final build, since there are some glaring inconsistencies in at least texture and model detail, compared to other cutscenes I've seen (like Drack has some shitty detail and textures, compared to, say, this introductory cutscene).

I mean, the game looks like a mess in many respects, I'm just curious about the facts in this particular instance.
 
Bro Culture

hd0umye-640x359.png
 

HaloRose

Banned
I hear bioware edmonton help development nearly the end. If you want montreal to do another IP or in the mass effect universe they should do FPS. the combat and gameplay is amazing.
 
This is just one side of the story. Jumping into conclusion right now is premature.
I wonder if others would be silence about this or not.
 

Slaythe

Member
Those might have been renders that weren't using the actual game engine?

I don't see how else a game changes that much; or maybe at he very least the animation system involved static sort of hard-coded animations.. vs. the final product that needed to have a system of feeding in words/actions and letting the engine generate the facial movements.

Irrelevant though.

In 2017, when you look at the competition, that target render was 100% doable.

It's not like I was satisfied with what I had seen.

But now that I've actually seen the good "Mass Effect" that we'll never get, I'm done.

I can't deal with this as the norm :

8c8Pcei.png
 
Nice to see the gamers here circling the wagons over their precious game. Funny how EA was the horrible company that heartlessly eroded the franchise but some actual news about Bioware themselves being hell to work for and getting up to even worse things leads to defending them.
 

rackham

Member
I'm trying to figure out why this looks so weird. Is it the shadows? Something about the coloring or lighting just looks bad.
 

Slaythe

Member
But they already had the animations, why go back and make it worse

Most likely because they had to handle 500 NPCs.

So they had to either keep the good animations but make them jarring, or make everybody "bad" so that the end result is coherent.

:/
 

Rozart

Member
Nice to see the gamers here circling the wagons over their precious game. Funny how EA was the horrible company that heartlessly eroded the franchise but some actual news about Bioware themselves being hell to work for and getting up to even worse things leads to defending them.

"Actual news".
 

tuxfool

Banned
The real irony is that when the thread went up about that leaked section, people went "lol, Bioware".

If we only knew back then...
 
If only there is an occupation called journalism that can get the bottom of stuff like this.

tbh i take gaming journalism with more skepticism than i do anonymous reviews on glassdoor nowadays; it's a shame how clickbait and low effort the industry has gone down in the past decade. if kotaku did a piece on this story i guarantee their highest effort of research would be neogaf threads like this one :/
 
tbh i take gaming journalism with more skepticism than i do anonymous reviews on glassdoor nowadays; it's a shame how clickbait and low effort the industry has gone down in the past decade. if kotaku did a piece on this story i guarantee their highest effort of research would be neogaf threads like this one :/

.....you know Press Sneak writes for them, yes?
 

HotHamBoy

Member
Hey y'all, I think I have an idea.

We should stop supporting the AAA game industry. Or at least any companies that abuse their employees for the sake of their bottom line.

Plenty of games to play, don't need to buy every blockbuster shoved down our throats.
 
The leadership of Bioware has all left over the last few years. Anyone who was paying attention should have seen this coming. The exact same process played out with Rare once the Stamper brothers sold the company. When the founders sell and then leave it's over.

The last quality game we'll get from Bioware is Inquisition unless EA finds a really strong lead to more or less take over the company and have complete control.
 

Iorv3th

Member
Irrelevant though.

In 2017, when you look at the competition, that target render was 100% doable.

It's not like I was satisfied with what I had seen.

But now that I've actually seen the good "Mass Effect" that we'll never get, I'm done.

I can't deal with this as the norm :

*img*]

Holy hell. That looks like some early access stuff. What the hell.
 
It seemed like a given something went down.

The something that went down is that all of the leadership left once Dr's Muzyka and Zescjuk moved on. You don't replace the people who found a company unless they groom a successor. I imagine Casey Hudson was the guy, so once he left it was all over.
 
The leadership of Bioware has all left over the last few years. Anyone who was paying attention should have seen this coming. The exact same process played out with Rare once the Stamper brothers sold the company. When the founders sell and then leave it's over.

The last quality game we'll get from Bioware is Inquisition unless EA finds a really strong lead to more or less take over the company and have complete control.

I might be getting my timelines wrong, but wasn't Inquisition well into development by the time the doctors and other BioWare stalwarts left? I seem to recall Inquisition being hailed as proof that post-Doctors BioWare would be alright.
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.

Given abnormally limited character editor and this point of comparison, I'm thinking maybe they ran into serious issues related to face rigging? Possibly a combination of production resources (and/or talent), or maybe even technical barriers related to the nodes on character constructed faces?

Beyond that, even if this old footage was unusuable just because it was test footage, it does highlight how utterly important highly expressive faces are in conveying mood, tone, and emotion. Even if it's exaggerated and not entirely realistic, it's always preferable to stilted, robotic, expressionless nothing.
 
I might be getting my timelines wrong, but wasn't Inquisition well into development by the time the doctors and other BioWare stalwarts left? I seem to recall Inquisition being hailed as proof that post-Doctors BioWare would be alright.

Well into development yes, so it was on a good path by the time they left. That wasn't the case with Andromeda.
 

Thanati

Member
This is one of the reasons I got out of the games industry after being in it for around 12 years. It's an awful culture.
 
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