Former Dragon Age writer says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 prove 'what's possible when a game is given time to cook'
Former Dragon Age writer says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 prove 'what's possible when a game is given time to cook'
Last three Bioware games had plenty of time to cook. The chefs were just bad. They chose the wrong ingredients multiple times, had to start over and still ended up with something barely edible.
I know it's popular to go "developer good, publisher bad", but in Bioware's case, from what I've read, they were mostly just given the rope to hang themselves.
I know it’s popular to go “developer good, publisher bad”, but in Bioware’s case, from what I’ve read, they were mostly just given the rope to hang themselves.
Ever since ME Andromeda they've been outsourcing a lot of the work, and/or using smaller and inexperienced studios while promoting and launching them as if made by the main studio.
To be fair, I've read that Sandfall also outsourced a lot of work for Expedition 33, which is how they've kept the team small.
I see no issues with outsourcing if done right: not every small developer needs to have a motion capture crew, etc.
If there are companies out there that can provide that for you at a reasonable cost, then you just need to focus on the core gameplay and the artistic aspects of your game.
This way you don't bloat your headcount with hundreds of people that you'll have to sack after the project is done, seems like a win for everybody.
If I am going to be completely honest, part of their outsourcing is why I waited until a few days ago to start the game.
Not because I knew, but because the initial screenshots and clips showed a very generic unreal engine level of graphics. With chromatic abberation everywhere, the exact same hair you see in every recent UE game, the same facial style that makes it easier to match mouth movements, and so on. Once I heard it actually had a good story I ended up putting in about ten hours in a day after I started. But they did suffer from outsourcing parts of the game.
They've been trying to "Central Engineering" things.
I worked as a massive chip company, they thought they could fix things by moving a lot of engineering out of the groups and into a single place where different groups and products could borrow and plug and play tech from.
Which was a great idea, except the groups didn't really understand what they wanted, and central engineering just wanted to make what they thought people wanted, which often fit nobody but looked really cool.
Bioware looks like they've been trying to pull all the game engine stuff central, which would be fine but the frostbite engine didn't work for half of what they wanted, and more importantly the "divisions" ended up just being pushed to make "something" to show off their best new tech, even if there was 0 story or creativity behind it (I'm looking at you Anthem).
I dont think his point is 'These amazing games are what you get if you give devs tine' but rather 'you can only get these games from giving devs time'. Its no guaruntee by any means, but you are never going to get greatness from suits focus grouping decisions and crunching out a game.
