It’s a bad time to be a diehard BioWare fan – or a BioWare employee, for that matter. The house that Dragon Age and Mass Effect helped build is being taken apart piece by piece, with EA reallocating employees to its other studios following Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s bumpy landing and Mass Effect 5’s apparently stunted development. Bloomberg reports that less than 100 people remain at the once-revered studio. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about how it all came to be.
We’re joined by Kat Bailey, former news director at IGN and current host of the Axe of the Blood God podcast, to discuss a news week that’s certainly been… interesting. First we talk about the entire staff of long-running video game site God Is A Geek quitting after its now-ex-priest owner threw up a Nazi salute at a pro-life conference. Guess you can only get away with that shit if you’re a billionaire.
Then we dig into BioWare’s recent post-Dragon Age woes, with EA reshuffling some developers into non-BioWare teams and laying off others. Is the next Mass Effect in trouble? And beyond that, does BioWare as we know it have a future?
Lastly, in response to a variation on the age-old question of which Pokemon would taste best to eat, we pose another: Could Moltres die of avian flu?
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can purchase BioWare and give its developers enough money to finally make their dream game, free of needless trend chasing. There will be just one stipulation: No more punching reporters.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Kat: Things aren’t super amazing at BioWare right now, unfortunately. From what I’ve heard from people who are connected to it, there are people who are on preproduction for Mass Effect 5 – which is still in pre-production because a lot of those folks were working on Dragon Age: The Veilguard – and then there are a number of people who are on loan to other teams at the moment, for example Skate. Yeah, remember Skate?
And then the rest have unfortunately been laid off, including some veterans like the Weekes. Trick Weekes and their partner, Karin, were laid off. Trick Weekes has been around since the original Mass Effect and was I believe the lead writer on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, among other things. So some notable names from the heyday of BioWare are being let go.
Nathan: Can you speak to the scope of the layoffs? EA is being very unclear about it.
Kat: I can’t speak to the actual scope. I can only say that the mood is not amazing at BioWare at the moment. It’s hard to say where they go from here. Not detecting a lot of optimism around Mass Effect 5 at the moment either, unfortunately.
EA as a company is kind of in a weird place. If you look at Maxis, Project Rene [the next Sims game] has been spinning its wheels for literally years now. The EA Sports FC fell off quite a bit on the sports front. They’ve got this wild Manhattan Project going on with Battlefield, which encompasses four or five studios, and it’s going to be the everything shooter. They’ve got a lot of franchises on ice, and oh by the way, last year they did a huge presentation that was centered almost entirely around AI.
Nathan: All of their boxes! They’re very proud of their boxes.
Riley: So much of this mush of “Oh, it’s a live service, it’s a shooter, it’s AI.”
Nathan: It all means nothing. It all sounds vaguely pleasing to investors.
But yeah, it strikes me as telling of where things are at for BioWare. Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn’t a bad game, but neither did it land with the kind of impact they needed. It was yet another mid triple-A game, which is what a lot of triple-A games have been lately as a result of an unwillingness to take risks due to the amount of money invested and the size of audiences they’re trying to attract. All of these games are kind of OK.
Kat: Dragon Age is an interesting case, because it was in development for something like a decade and was rebooted at least twice. It began as a totally different game, then it became a multiplayer live service game. Then the directors on that ended up departing, and they effectively hit the reset button again. And they were using some of the leftover materials from that version. They were using the tech stack. A lot of what happened with Dragon Age: The Veilguard is due to the fact that it started its life as a multiplayer game – particularly in the way the hubs and the mission structure ended up working.
In my view they did their best with what they had, but it was by all accounts quite a grueling production process. They got the entire Mass Effect team to help, and they dragged themselves across the finish line. They put a lot of focus on being as polished as possible, because they were aware that this game would get completely battered and end up in a 50 Metacritic score territory, and instead it ended up in the 80s, which is where they were aiming for.
I think there was a lot of hope that maybe that would be enough, but it didn’t quite land with the base. The word of mouth around it was mixed, especially around the moment-to-moment writing. Because there wasn’t a huge amount of enthusiasm from the actual community – outside certain elements; my sister platinumed that game – and they were getting hammered by, frankly, a hate campaign, it was tough to achieve liftoff. That’s kind of where we ended up with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, unfortunately.
Nathan: I saw the sales numbers for it. 1.5 million, right?
Kat: Maybe just under, because they included EA’s subscription service, where people were getting access to it as well. I think the word they were using was “engagements.”
A lot was riding on Dragon Age: The Veilguard in many respects. The eye of Sauron was upon BioWare, and it was kinda known that they had to get this game out and have it do well. What they were able to accomplish by getting it into the 80s was almost a bare minimum “OK, ship a product and have it not be a complete tire fire.” Dragon Age was not a tire fire.
Nathan: What was the last major game that didn’t have a troubled development cycle or reboot mid-development or change to accommodate whatever the new trend of the day is in a way that ultimately felt half-baked?
Kat: Baldur’s Gate 3.
Nathan: And Baldur’s Gate 3 was tremendously successful.
Kat: It was developed by a fully independent studio that was not beholden to a publisher and was able to make it on their own timeline, and when they needed to cut off development and get the thing shipped, they did. And it went longer than they expected it to – considerably longer. But they plotted out their runway, and it ended up working. They were making a game that they wanted to play and not necessarily catering to mainstream audiences. What’s the result? Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most successful games of the last couple years.
