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Former BioWare Emloyee Review of company sheds distuburing light on MEA's development
- Thread starter MasterMenace
- Start date
There was already a thread on downgrades.
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?
Micromegas
Member
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.
DevilDog
Member
It actually explains it fairly well.
Soul of the Beast
Member
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.
RedAssedApe
Banned
paging jason
VolticArchangel
Member
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...
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.
CrichtonKicks
Member
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.
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.
ichtyander
Member
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.
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.
Muscle Wizard
Banned
Bro Culture
SirPinkyNose
Member
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.
I wonder if others would be silence about this or not.
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 :
But they already had the animations, why go back and make it worse
Muscle Wizard
Banned
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.
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.
:/
"Actual news".
SirPinkyNose
Member
VanCityGamer
Member
Oh the humanity...only 30 minutes for lunch. WTF, big deal. I quickly eat my lunch in 15 minutes at my desk and it's no big deal.
SonicXtreme
Member
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 :/
Muscle Wizard
Banned
Still more substantial than "EA ruined this game"
RedlineRonin
Member
.....you know Press Sneak writes for them, yes?
Maple-Tech
Banned
not really
LegendofJoe
Member
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.
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
Holy hell. That looks like some early access stuff. What the hell.
evilromero
Member
A lot of hyper masculine posturing. It's pretty tightly linked with gamer culture as well. Sheltered egos within a historically male-dominated fandom that for many decades never had to deal with the consequences of their behavior.
Wishmaster92
Member
oh my
Wishmaster92
Member
dat smoke! The textures...where u go.
LegendofJoe
Member
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.
SolicitorPirate
Member
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.
oh my
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.
Diablohead
Member
oh my
Look how backwards they took the krogen design, his armor shrank, lose detail and in places got redesigned to show texture resolution flaws over the older design.
It's like taking a beast of a brute and removing everything threatning from it.
sugarhigh4242
Banned
Union of Videogame Workers
You have nothing to lose but your "finalizing mode".
You have nothing to lose but your "finalizing mode".
bishopcruz
Member
dat smoke! The textures...where u go.
The Krogan's face looks like it's got clown paint on too. What the hell happened?
LegendofJoe
Member
Well into development yes, so it was on a good path by the time they left. That wasn't the case with Andromeda.
Baron_Calamity
Member
dat smoke! The textures...where u go.
Smoke isn't a big deal.
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