Bioware discussion (from Random Rants)

[SS-18 ICBM]

Human is a lovely song. A shame I'll associate it forever with Bioware's incompetence.

 

[Arakhor]

Why's that, SS?

 

[Takhisis]

Hmmm. I think that discussing the specific causes of Bioware's incompetence would require a thread of its own.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

One video should be enough.

 

[Mouthwash]

Human is a lovely song. A shame I'll associate it forever with Bioware's incompetence.

Add it to the list:

 

[Arakhor]

It's easy to hate on Bioware without knowing the full details of any given situation, but of course that's not required to generate YouTube clicks about how awful some minor (but rather noticeable) glitches might be.

 

[Takhisis]

If only we had a moderator with the power to split such discussion off into its own thread, lest it grow stale and perish…

 

[Mouthwash]

Since I'm too lazy to Google Bioware I humbly ask what it is and why we are discussing it.

 

[Arakhor]

If only we had a moderator with the power to split such discussion off into its own thread, lest it grow stale and perish…

Moderator Action: Done.

 

[Synobun]

Since I'm too lazy to Google Bioware I humbly ask what it is and why we are discussing it.

Without awareness of what it is and what they do, you're frankly not equipped to talk about it especially if you are not willing to Google it.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

I liked Andromeda.

 

[Ryika]

Bioware was better when they focused more on skin-tight suits and less on being ideologues on twitter.

 

[Takhisis]

They were?

 

[Ryika]

Absolutely. Mass Effect 2 has some of the best asses in video game history.

 

[Commodore]

Yeah, I think people are going more than a little overboard by calling Bioware incompetent. They certainly don't have the talent they used to have as much of the original staff that worked on their masterpieces are no longer there and they simply did not replace them with equally good talent. However, they are still certainly a competent development studio and Mass Effect Andromeda is still a very good game overall compared to most of the straight up garbage that comes out now.

I know I rag on Andromeda quite a bit, but that's because I think it's a bad Mass Effect game and I think the franchise is heading in the wrong direction both in terms of game mechanics and story. However, being a bad Mass Effect game still makes it a damn good video game overall which is a testament to just how far ahead of other development studios Bioware really is.

 

[Kozmos]

It's easy to hate on Bioware without knowing the full details of any given situation, but of course that's not required to generate YouTube clicks about how awful some minor (but rather noticeable) glitches might be.

For a 40$ mill, 5 year development project that is not minor. That is Belgian intern hackery passed off as a 60$ triple A game. The game is bad from the design up and the only good thing (shooting gameplay) has been lifted from previous games and only slightly modified. It has gone the way of all good studios, get bought out, annoy the good game designers with corporate overrides and bully the good programmers until they leave, expand the studio and double down on asset production with interns. Make everything look good for the casual standard, load it up to the gills with dumb design choices mandated by microtransaction nonsense and MMORPG elements.

Japanese studios are not far behind from Westernizing their production process, but at least their technical execution is on point (or was) most of the time.

 

[Commodore]

For a 40$ mill, 5 year development project that is not minor. That is Belgian intern hackery passed off as a 60$ triple A game. The game is bad from the design up and the only good thing (shooting gameplay) has been lifted from previous games and only slightly modified. It has gone the way of all good studios, get bought out, annoy the good game designers with corporate overrides and bully the good programmers until they leave, expand the studio and double down on asset production with interns. Make everything look good for the casual standard, load it up to the gills with dumb design choices mandated by microtransaction nonsense and MMORPG elements.

Japanese studios are not far behind from Westernizing their production process, but at least their technical execution is on point (or was) most of the time.

Have you even played Andromeda? Because this post makes it seem like you haven't and are just jumping on the YouTube hate train for Andromeda.

 

[Kozmos]

I've played 2 hours of DA:Inquisition and Andromeda is just that, Inquisition in space. I've watched enough LPs (beyond the intro, second/third planets and into the core gameplay with all relevant mechanics in play) to have my worst fears confirmed. Substandard AI (they can navigate Z with tons of hacks woo, welcome to DMC1 circa 2001), collect 5 flurbos and 28 scmekels to craft a weapon you can't test beforehand, bad quests, removal of the barebone binary attitude systems and bad, bad writing. Everything that made ME and DA work, was torn apart and mutilated into this...thing. I mean it's not a surprise, all the good studios that made games with actual passion and dedication got industrialized. It's the same with Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Capcom, Konami, EA and the list goes on. Churning out for the most part hollow, collecthathon games that were shells of what they used to be. Take Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls or Witcher, perfect games? No, not by a longshot. But you can see they tried to make something different and actually cared about the end product. A card game inside Witcher 3 is more fun that what most of the market puts out normally. Civ series is also not immune, completely disregard AI tuning and refining the gameplay, double down on the graphical assets.

Games and standards may be subjective so for some people ME:A is great. Not for me though. My money will keep going to studios who actually give a damn about what they do. Free market and all that. I apologize for the salt. I've just watched everything that I loved over a decade and more being run into the ground. It made me kind of bitter and cynical

 

[Commodore]

I've played 2 hours of DA:Inquisition and Andromeda is just that, Inquisition in space. I've watched enough LPs (beyond the intro, second/third planets and into the core gameplay with all relevant mechanics in play) to have my worst fears confirmed. Substandard AI (they can navigate Z with tons of hacks woo, welcome to DMC1 circa 2001), collect 5 flurbos and 28 scmekels to craft a weapon you can't test beforehand, bad quests, removal of the barebone binary attitude systems and bad, bad writing. Everything that made ME and DA work, was torn apart and mutilated into this...thing.

So you are just jumping on the YouTube hate train then? Got it. I was on the hate train too until I actually bought the game and played it. It's not anywhere near as good as the other Mass Effects but the footage you see on YouTube is not an accurate representation. What a lot of YouTubers are doing is showing footage from the beta and passing it off as current footage so they can get views by saying "OMGZ, look how turrible deez faces iZ!" I bought it a day after its release and didn't experience any of these supposed glitches or bad animations. Now that Bioware did a patch to fix these supposed glitched, the game looks and plays even better now.

The AI also isn't terrible. Those YouTubers play the game on easy and say they are playing it on a harder difficulty in order to make it seem like the AI is terrible. I play on normal and the enemy regularly uses pretty solid tactics to pin me down and outflank me. My point? You can't trust LPs on YouTube. There are simply too many ways to manipulate your footage (even on live streams) to make a game seem good or bad. That's why the best way to see what a game is really like is to buy it for yourself and play it.

 

[Arakhor]

There were some fairly ludicrous facial expressions to start with, but the human/Asari facial fix made those much less obvious.

At what point in Mass Effect could you ever try a weapon before you bought or built it? The closest I can think of is the Citadel shooting range in ME3 and I think that still required you to own the weapons you were testing.