BioWare is laying off 50 employees | Hacker News Reader

BioWare is laying off 50 employees

blog.bioware.com

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BioWare hasn't been BioWare since the founders left. It's just a name now, thoroughly digested by the EA sarlacc.

Does any company remain being the same company after ~20-40 years then?

Nintendo is the same as ~ever.

I just realised that Nintendo is very old.

Founded as 23 September 1889; 133 years ago

Well, in BioWare’s case it’s been reduced to a sticker that EA haphazardly slaps onto random games and random internal studios. The Bioware that most people think about was only based in Canada. Pretty sure that the DNA that made it great is mostly gone if not completely nonexistent at today’s EA. EA likely destroyed it during 2010-2011.

I am still waiting for new Dragon Age… but can’t keep hopes too high

Dragon Age II was where I lost hope lol

It was so bad that I even did not buy it. But the Inquisiton was good one. Still not even close to the first.

Dragon Age 2 had some unfinished parts and cringey parts but fundamentally was still a decent game. I’ve tried Inquisition three times now and can’t get through it. It’s just a slog IMO.

Inquisition was like a single player MMO. Grindy, level restrictions everywhere. I was extremely bored by it and didn't finish it.

From Software? The new Armored Core is coming soon.

Also Kojima. Death Stranding may have been the most Kojima game he's ever made. Noteworthy that the three examples mentioned here now are Japanese, might also throw in PlatinumGames.

There is still a remarkable strong artistic vision in the games coming out of Japan. It seems weirdly immune to the ironically named gamification everywhere else.

While I do agree with you to an extent, let's not forget where the word "gacha" came from..

Seems like an instance of the Ship of Theseus [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Which, on the Internet, is quickly replaced by the Shit of Theseus.

It's not the same, but the most recent games aren't total disasters IMO. I liked the character story quests in SW: The Old Republic, for example -- Jedi Knight's storyline was enjoyable. (Plus the game is f2p.)

That's already 13 years old though.

The Old Republic would be a fine game, if it wasn't an MMO.

And I don't mean multiplayer, that is fine. But the hotbar mashing combat, the grindy areas filled with standing mooks, all the padding and instancing... Bioware Austin did a great job changing it to be more KOTOR-like over the years, but at its core its a hotbar MMO.

On a seperate note, Andromeda was tragic, but I still liked it.

Anthem was... Just tragic. I am literally the target demographic (a ME3 coop fan) but was not the least bit interested.

Andromeda was very hard to like and deeply flawed on every level.

Anthem, despite interesting art direction, was impossible to like.

It's almost odd that Bioware still exists as a large studio (>300 employees) when it seems they've forgotten how to release a good game. Baldur's Gate -- which is 25 years old -- was released in 1998, and its sequel was released less than two years later, in 2000. All of the Mass Effect games were released in a 4.5 year period from late 2007 to early 2012.

...Now they're in a state where they haven't released a good game in over a decade. They're a zombie studio. If you ask me, EA, despite its reputation and the way they have botched the decision-making process at the studio (e.g. by forcing Bioware to use the Frostbite engine,) has shown admirable patience, tolerance, and forbearance.

If you set your teams up to fail by getting them to work on bad ideas that are not in their skillset, forcing technical choices on them that hamper them, controlling their inputs (budget) and outputs (marketing) and setting the deadlines to please shareholders without taking reality into account you can hardly be said to be patient, tolerant or forbearent.

Allowing teams to fail repeatedly is bad management. Someone at EA should be fired.

Right, but they've been working on the new Dragon Age game for something like eight years at this point, and it's still nowhere near release. They've released nothing since ill-fated Anthem, now nearly five years ago.

This really has to be put into perspective: It took them less than five years to release all three Mass Effect games, and it took less than three years to release the complete Baldur's Gate Series.

So Bioware is a lot like NASA: No longer able to do the things they were once capable of. In Bioware's case -- via mismanagement or poor corporate direction -- they've forgotten how to develop and ship games. Now, at this point, it's really quite surprising that EA has kept them around for so long. With these layoffs, it might be that their patience is beginning to run out.

> they've been working on the new Dragon Age game for something like eight years at this point, and it's still nowhere near release

This is especially worrying in light of Andromeda's development.

The devs (allegedly) wasted years making tools and systems that didn't work, then rushed and cobbled the game together at the very end.

Part of this is just because AAA dev cycles are incredibly long now. Much, much longer than they used to be. Its to the point where its not unusual for a studio to only release 1 AAA game during a console generation (7-8 years). If they time things just right, they might fit 2 in.

Naughty Dog released Uncharted 1-3 and the TLOU during the PS3 era so 4 games. They released Uncharted 4 and TLOU 2 during the PS4 era which is 2 games. And so far they haven't released any game during the PS5 era (not including remasters/remakes). They will likely only release 1 new game before the PS6 is released.

Lets take Starfield as another an example since its the next big studio RPG to be released. Its been in development since 2015 so basically 8 years.

Why is this the case?

Mass Effect 3, which is by no means a small or content-poor game, however controversial its ending, was released just two years after its predecessor. It incorporated a number of obvious mechanic/gameplay updates, engine tweaks, and QoL improvements. It even incorporated a popular multiplayer mode. All of the music, all of the voice acting, all of the motion-capping (if they did any of that) was done quickly.

Bioware could release "Mass Effect 4" with the same mechanics and systems, if the story's good enough, and people would be (extremely) happy. So what now takes them >8 years that previously took them two?

Also noteworthy: Content can't possibly be the bottleneck, as Pillars of Eternity (a Baldur's Gate-like RPG) and its sequel were released within a roughly three year period, and those games contain millions of words of content. The second game is also fully voice-acted.

A couple of places fingers are pointed at are increased fidelity requirements and complexity as hardware has improved, increased use of outsourcing (see Halo Infinite and Star Citizen), churn and larger teams which makes effective collaboration harder, executive meddling in order to chase after trends (it needs a battle pass/battle royale/zombies) and it becoming increasingly realistic for devs being able to splinter off and make something with a smaller more effective team.

For example on Infinite you had a scenario where people might not be around long enough to learn the in house tooling which was troublesome enough to cause some to want to drop what's been done and switch to Unity whiplashed around by directions set by different parts of the company and half the workers were 18 month contract workers.[1]

If you compare the credits for the Mass Effect trilogy series for example there's a good amount of people who left by the end of ME3 and fewer are still there for a ME4. Mike Laidlaw, Steve Gilmore for example. Drew Karpyshyn is lead writer on only the first two ME games. Aaryn Flynn, James Ohlen and Casey Hudson both went off to make their own studios.

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/how-micro...

They reached the end stage as talent pool for other EA games, were they Park burned out developers till it's time for another buzzword death march?

"they've been working on the new Dragon Age game for something like eight years at this point"

Also bad management. We also learn that usually teams aren't actually working for such periods as they get dragged around. Cyberpunk was only actively developed for a few years it turned out, despite the claim being they had been working on it that entire time.

> Andromeda was very hard to like and deeply flawed on every level.

The gameplay was my favorite in the series, maybe in any RPG. Thats a high bar, considering how much time I put into ME3 coop.

And... There were a few interesting side quests and lore bits.

But general character/writing quality really made me sad. I get the whole game was rushed, but it makes me worry about BioWare even more than Anthem. Character writing was their bread and butter, and Andromeda was supposed to be a character game, not a coop arcade like Anthem/Destiny.

Final Fantasy 14 is at its core a hotbar MMO, but it seems pretty succesful, with padding and instancing.

SWTORs problem was that they used their singleplayer game focused engine for an MMORPG.

SWTOR (which, as another comment points out, came out in late 2011) might actually be their original total disaster. Lengthy development, tremendous cost for a clunky, below-average (give or take) MMO that could not attract subscribers. It's been downhill since about then.

Yeah, people forget that up until star citizen, SWTOR was the winner for biggest blown budget…

That is the entire history of gaming though, no? It's the same churn you are working with now but you're not making games or fun, you're making productivity tools or better graphics or whatever, and other people are using that for games.

It's just marking the end of an era. Maxis wasn't the same after Will Wright left, and the writing on the wall was how EA put him in a box with Spore. Rare wasn't the same after the brother founders left and sold it to Microsoft. Origin wasn't the same after Richard Garriot and Chris Roberts left.

Funny how the era started with pay to win (coin-op arcades where the games depend on you spending money on them and are completely unforgiving) and ended a generation or two later with pay to win (micro transactions, subscriptions, etc etc)

Enshittification seems to be the entire history of humanity.

Good things deteriorate. If we are lucky, parts of them will dissolve and reincarnate.

TIL there are two "C"s in "sarlacc"

EA hungers like Stormbringer for the souls of top tier RPG developers.

This is Bullfrog, Origin, and Westwood erasure.

(okay Westwood did the pretty great Nox, so maybe they are covered but still)

Bullfrog’s big hits were very much RPG adjacent too. I think it’s fair to say Syndicate is something of a tactical RPG. Populous is more of a stretch, but if you squint…

And Origin did Ultima, which is practically the PC RPG archetype.

Yeah I guess I outed myself as a Wing Commander fan without saying I'm a Wing Commander fan, huh?

To be brutally honest I've never played a single Ultima game in my life!

EA ruins everything.

The doctors left the house literally - same as Origin once the key folks left.

Ultima Wing Commander Strike Commander

I stopped reading when I got to the agile part, which these days has just become a buzzword for dis-empowering employees and to move even more power towards the company.

Agile is an euphemism for factory work.

I couldn't start reading because disapproving to cookies let to "processing my request" for half a minute. Las time i checked, this was just a fake timeout by the coonie banner provider.

What a sad state the internet has reached.

Agile in my experience is very easy to game. Just overestimate all your tasks and you can pretty much work as slow as you want.

That doesn't work if you like coding and want to be productive, not mediocre.

Bioware does not exist anymore.

Mass Effect on the Xbox 360 will always be one of my fondest gaming experiences of my life just like Halo and Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4.

I am going to buy an Xbox Series S just for playing Starfield - hope they don't disappoint me like they did with Fallout 76.

Who isn't?

AAA development seems to be broken. With a few exceptions, mega publishers put a stupendous amount of manhours into delayed and ultimately mediocre games.

"AA" seems to be the sweetspot now. Big enough for economies of scale to kick in, small enough to take targeted risks and avoid scaling issues. And I think software advancements (especially gen AI) are going to make that discrepancy even more extreme, as AAAs lose the content volume edge they have over smaller studios.

> AAA development seems to be broken.

it is broken because they are putting in too much money into single titles, and therefore, want to "reduce risk". This basically means following a known formula and IP, because previous success means they're likely to get at least brand recognition for the sequel.

But this means you get mediocre games as it rehashes the same property over and over again.

That's why indie games are so fantastic, because they love risk taking on new ideas.

They're actually putting too little money into the actual development. A huge part of the budget is marketing.

Yes, and yet that is a symptom of the problem, not a root cause. You'll find the same issue in big budget movies these days. Huge marketing budget, huge special effects budget, etc.

But the contents and script writing is terrible, or at best mediocre. The ultimate root cause is the fact that the money invested in a single movie is too high, and thus the studio/production company cannot have it fail. So they do everything in their power to make it succeed (financially), even if it goes against an artistic vision.

AAA gamers seem to be broken.

They are all preordering the next AAA ultimate Edition with bonus cosmetics for $100 after spending the last year complaining about how terrible the previous title from 6 months ago is.

If I had a steady stream of customers willing to pay for garbage, I too would happily deliver.

There's maybe 3 fantastic indie games per year and millions of garbage ones. It's also full of clones of the popular games that aren't quite as good or downright terrible. The reason indie games seem to be better is the massive work other people have put in to actually find the good ones in a sea of crap, and most "indie" games that are popular are borderline mainstream production companies.

I thoroughly enjoy youtube channel Splattercatgaming who reviews indie games every day. Most of the time I am not interested and just skip through the video but occasionally there is a game with novel and interesting gameplay that I'd never stumble onto otherwise.

Yup, that's a direct result of replacing engineering talent with mediocre MBAs and focusing on making games for shareholders instead of players. Story as old as capitalism

> We are doing everything we can to ensure the process is handled with empathy, respect, and clear communication.

Zero mention of what these employees are getting in terms of severance. Passing mention that there are “other roles in other studios”. Spends the rest of the announcement talking about what it means for the games in development, doesn’t even mention the people involved again

I don't see how not mentioning how much they are getting in severance has anything to do with what they mentioned. You may wish to know for curiosities sake but frankly it's none of your business.

It can be helpful to tell the employees left behind the severance structure. Knowing their cohorts are being well taken care of can help alleviate the bad vibes for those left behind. General public? Yeah I don't see any benefit to sharing that info.

It signals to the public how much you actually care or don’t about your employees by announcing it. Presumably if they didn’t have anything to say it is gonna be garbage, since the companies who are generous always shout it from the rooftops if it’s good because it’s great press. Click through a few of these to get an indicator: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/14/tech-industry-layoffs-2023...

> Presumably if they didn’t have anything to say it is gonna be garbage

You are wrong.

-Signed, an employee who was laid off today

What was the severance offer?

Why would you expect that in a blog post targeted at the general public? It focuses on what the target audience cares about (games).

Mentioned this in a sibling post, but bragging about how generous you are in a layoff announcement is pretty par for the course in these because it is good press for the company. See a bunch of examples here: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/14/tech-industry-layoffs-2023...

Lack of said braggadacio indicates the severance offer was garbage

This should be handled by laws, unions and the company, not the public

And yes we have a union for all knowledge workers with or without degrees

When was the last BioWare game that was actually excellent? ME2 in 2010?

I dunno, I really enjoyed Dragon Age: Inquisition... but it was also my first real exposure to BioWare, so take it with a grain of salt.

I had a lot of fun with Inquisition, but the MMOish world design and the fact that so much core plot was hived off into Trespasser makes it hard to call the game truly excellent.

You should play Dragon Age: Origins. It's a lot tighter, way less filler. I look at these games with a million copy-paste quest markers and "points of interest" and just know there's little actual substance there.

Or you can play Baldur's Gate 3 like everyone else is now :) The DnD systems take a bit of getting used to. The game is an excellent story-telling experience, despite that ("despite" in my opinion).

Good news, they've got several other, better RPGs :)

Kotor 2

Kotor 2 was Obsidian, not BioWare.

Provided you use mods and community patches, sure. I had to replay all of Nar Shaddaa, and kept getting the bug where it's skipping all the dialogue. (Also, I felt my ending was underwhelming.)

Never been able to get past a game breaking crash bug so I've never finished KOTOR2 sadly.

Deus ex mankind divided was a great game that just feels like it ends too early. Apparently square enix is to blame for that.

Mankind Divided was developed by Eidos Montreal, not Bioware.

Not a Bioware game. They have no involvement with that franchise at all.

BioWare had nothing to do with Makind Divided or Human Revolution.

MDK2

They made a 2? I remember getting the demo disk of MDK from GamePro Magazine AGES ago.

Ya, but the first was made by Shiny Entertainment.

Except the infamously underwhelming ending, ME3 was excellent.

This. I got through like 98% of the game thinking "What is everyone on about? This game is amazing..."

Doesn't mean it's not a valid criticism. See also: Game of Thrones.

Are you kidding? The third title in their famous Baldur's Gate series just came out and everyone is talking about it. It's being called a triumph of PC gaming and a return to form.

Oh wait. They only made the first two. (The answer to your question is ME1)

Did Bioware even make either Baldur's Gate game?

I thought they were just the publisher, Black Isle was the developer? Do I have that backwards?

Edit: I looked it up and I do have it backwards.

Reread the parent. They were attempting sarcasm.

You've actually misread bluefirebrand's comment in this case.

No, I got the joke. I'm fully aware that Baldur's Gate 3 is not related to Bioware at all.

Also that Larian is basically eating Bioware's lunch right now because Bioware has dropped the ball on Dragon Age which would occupy a similar space to BG3

It's actually even funnier that Larian is doing it by using a franchise that Bioware built 20 years ago.

Dragon Age hasn’t occupied a similar space to BG3 since Origins.

Gameplay wise I would agree.

But generally I think many people who love these games are in it for the writing, the character romances, the storyline, and the exploration. In this regard, Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of similarities with Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, and presumably Dreadwolf whenever that comes out.

The individual details of the mechanics are less important to many.

I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's not stretching too hard to say that gameplay also matters for games. Romances, storyline, and so on are fine and dandy, but at some point you have to have some gameplay. Or not, if you want to make a visual novel. And that's fine too!

You might also be thinking about Planescape Torment, which was developed by BlackIsle with licensed BioWare technology (the Baldur's Gate engine). As far as I'm aware, Planescape Torment is the closest BioWare has ever gotten to the creation of an excellent game.

BioWare developed the Infinity Engine, BG1 and BG2. Interplay was the publisher. Black Isle was an internal division of Interplay and box label. Black Isle developed Icewind Dale 1 & 2, and Planescape: Torment using the Infinity Engine.

Mass effect 2 was much more polished, even if it did lean more towards action than RPG. I personally didn't like Dragon Age inquisition, but it was widely acclaimed and was the company's most successful launch at the time.

Baldur’s Gate 2, which is also BioWare’s best game.

I Love Shadows of Amn but I'd personally rather play Icewind Dale :)

Icewind Dale was amazing. I feel like Tyranny is IWD’s spiritual successor as a great game lost in a bigger game’s shadow.

I also prefer playing IWD, the pacing is much better without so many fetch type quests, and the tactical situations seem more interesting.

Dragon Age: Inquisition 2014 was quite good. Not as good as origin, but far better than dragon age II.

I really enjoyed Andromeda, even though everyone shat on it.

I’ve heard rumors Microsoft was going to buy BioWare from EA, but when that fell through, they pursued Activision instead.

It’s too bad. With MSFT they wouldn’t have had to do this.

Please remind me how many people Microsoft has laid off over the past 12 month?

10k layoffs announced in January 2023, and an unspecified number of additional layoffs announced in July 2023:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/14/tech-industry-layoffs-2023...

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/microsoft-confirms-more-job-...

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