Which is actually meant to be a positive thing, at least according to BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. Speaking to Games Industry International, Zeschuk said that “The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself.”

Zeschuk, who departed the company last year to focus on making beer, claims he “definitely rejects” the idea that EA forced the company to include microtransactions, DLC, and multiplayer.

“It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that’s something to remember – while we were independent we didn’t have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like ‘wow we can do all this stuff.’ We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.”

“We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn’t like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly,” he said.

Source: Games Industry International

After enduring a tumultuous 18 months, life is about to get just a little more pleasant for BioWare founders Dr Ray Muzyka and Dr Greg Zeschuk. The perceived failure of Star Wars: The Old Republic and the controversy surrounding the conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy will no doubt seem worlds away when the two men take to the stage to accept their lifetime achievement gongs at this year’s Game Developer’s Choice Awards. The ceremony will take place on 27th March at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

Muzyka and Zeschuk founded BioWare, along with Augustine Yip, in 1995 and their contribution to the medium began with a mech action game called Shattered Steel. It wasn’t long, though, before they settled into their niche, producing a string of critically acclaimed RPGs, including Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age.

The men known throughout the gaming world as The BioWare Doctors recently retired from the company, which is now owned by EA. Muzyka has expressed a desire to focus on charitable endeavours, while Zeschuk is working on web series about beer (no, seriously).

Source: Gamasutra

Last year, BioWare’s founders — known colloquially as The Doctors — explained that they were leaving the company to pursue other interest. For Dr. Greg Zeschuk, that interest was beer. Specifically, the brewing of it.

But why did he leave in the first place? Was it, as some suggested, due to the negativity around the reception of Mass Effect 3 and SW:TOR? “Everything’s a factor,” Zeschuk said to Polygon. “There’s nothing that’s not a factor, but there’s no single one thing. I think the best way I can describe is: Do the same thing for twenty years and it’s very, very intense. It’s very high pressure. It’s very high stress. It’s challenging. It’s sometimes rewarding and sometimes it’s not. And you just get tired of it after awhile. That is probably the easiest way to for me to describe it. Sometimes you just need to change things.”

He continued: “One of the few things I find kind of funny is the responses of the fans, because they sort of respond that they are kind of mad at us for leaving because they think we owe them more games. You know, it’s sad: I wish I could deliver on that, but I don’t think I would be as good as I was in that space historically. Like I said, the fire wasn’t there.”

Will he ever return to gaming? “Yeah, probably not,” he replies. “I’m having fun doing what I’m doing, so probably not. We’ll see, but I’m not planning on it at this point for sure.”

Source: Polygon

Romances in Bioware games are often a large part of what players enjoy about each title, adding a sense of character and choice to the protagonists relationships. Senior Writer at BioWare David Gaider understandably has an opinion on them, and it’s perhaps not what you’re expecting.

“These plots are tertiary, optional content… something to add to your enjoyment, and add to your level of emotional investment in the characters,” he says at length on his blog, “and it’s certainly not the main attraction.”

“I always have to keep my eye on the bigger picture, and there is an entire rest of the game that needs to be contended with… which includes a lot of elements that have much more pertinence to the game than who someone does or doesn’t get to have sex with,” he went on. “Romances are a nice extra, and naturally we’re always going to struggle with how to do them right, but they’re well down the list on things I need to concern myself with. I could, in fact, happily have a game without any romances at all… or spend an equal amount of time developing relationships with followers that are non-romantic.”

(more…)

David Gaider, lead writer on Dragon Age, has used his personal blog to explain his avoidance of the BioWare Social Network forums — something he puts down to them feeling “increasingly toxic” and hostile.

“The BioWare Social Network doesn’t constitute the be-all and end-all of BioWare’s fans,” Gaider writes. “They are certainly a group of passionate folks, and while I wouldn’t say they were all ‘utterly gross’ as you put it I do agree that the overall tone of the forums has become increasingly toxic.”

“I tend to largely avoid them these days, myself. Why? Because spending too much time there starts to make me feel negative – not just about the games we make, but about myself and life in general. That’s not a good feeling to have (…) the signal-to-noise ratio does seem to be worsening, and eventually you get the feeling like you’re at one of those parties where all anyone is doing is bitching. It doesn’t matter what they’re bitching about so much as, sooner or later, that’s all you can really hear.”

“At any rate,” he concluded, “rest assured that the BSN is not the only place we go to see what ‘our fans’ think about something. I suspect you’d get a skewed opinion of almost any game if you went solely by its dedicated online community. They certainly serve their place, and if you want to gauge the temperature of the hardest of the hardcore’s opinions about core matters there’s probably no better place to go… but representative of all fans? Not in the slightest.”

Source: VG247

In what is being described as an “error at the disc manufacturer”, a number of PC Black Ops 2 purchases last night opened their cases and went to install the game only to find that their second disc was, in fact, a different game entirely: Mass Effect 2. Players affected by this can still install the game, but they’ll have to do so by entering their serial number into Steam and downloading it that way.

EA and Activision aren’t exactly friends (in fact, some might describe them as rivals) which makes BioWare’s response all the more delightful. “If the universe thinks that you should be playing Mass Effect right now, who are we to argue?” reads their post.

“In fact, we want to help! The first fifty fans affected by this phenomenon to send us a picture holding their special disc 2 will receive a code for a FREE PC copy of Mass Effect Trilogy.” Delightful.

Source: Tweaktown, BioWare (Thanks, James!)

Two of the gaming industry’s stalwarts have announced their respective retirements today: Doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk are hanging up their hats and leaving BioWare for good. Rumours of the their upcoming retirement first surfaced in April, but today a pair of touching farewell notes from Muzyka and Zeschuk confirmed their departure.

Muzyka announced his intention to get involved with social impact investing and to to “simply put, help make the world a better place” through charity work, while Zeschuk will be spending his time on “a web-based interview show called The Beer Diaries” where he will “interview notable brewers and showcase their beers”. Horses for courses, then.

Meanwhile, BioWare’s Aaryn Flynn has revealed that the next Mass Effect 3 DLC will be called ‘Omega’, and that the team “have plans for another full game” in the Mass Effect universe. Flynn also revealed that BioWare are “putting together their vision for an all new game set in a fictional universe, built from the bottom-up with all new gaming technology”. Speculation abounds.

Source: BioWare Blog

We’ve long speculated that Electronic Arts maintains a tank division to crush freedom of thought, and now their President of Labels, Frank Gibeau, has confirmed it — by denying it outright.

Speaking to Kotaku about the conspiracy theory that EA were somehow responsible for what fans disliked about Dragon Age II and the ending of Mass Effect 3, Frank Gibeau flatly denied the existence of any dissident-crushing armoured force at EA.

“The truth is BioWare has developed as BioWare and that creative culture is owned by them,” shouted Gibeau over the roar of a tank as he rolled by the microphone on the way up to Canada for an “unscheduled studio visit”.

“There’s nobody in the central planning committee at Electronic Arts that rolls in the tank divisions [into our studios] when they get too independent or too risky or too thoughtful,” Gibeau confirmed as his own personal, customised tank moved into the compound, flattening a car. “Did EA intervene and say, ‘Hey Casey (Hudson, executive director on ME3), you’ve got a really interesting ending here, you’re probably going to cause some fans to get upset?” Gibeau asked rhetorically.

“No, we didn’t do that. Casey is an artist. He made a choice about the story that he [and the team] wanted to tell as related to Mass Effect 3. And we didn’t intervene.”

Gibeau could not be reached for further comment due to what EA’s spokespeople are calling “an explosive studio realignment process”.

Source: Kotaku

BioWare has taken a lot of flak from players recently, but COO of EA, Peter Moore says the studio has “done great”. During an interview with Moore, Eurogamer asked him to comment on the last 12-18 months of BioWare’s performance. He had nothing but praise, despite the player backlash at the ending of Mass Effect 3.

“Nobody in entertainment has more passion and a bigger megaphone than gamers. And to their credit they put their hands up. A lot of them said, we’re not sure about this ending in Mass Effect 3. So the team at BioWare, again, to their credit, said, all right, we’re going to stop a few things right now, the team’s going to go back and provide some DLC, no charge, to provide more context around what went on there. We delivered that recently.”

Source: Eurogamer

“Contrary to what you might hear on the internet, fans do want more content. They tend to say, ‘I want it now,’” says BioWare’s director of online development Fernando Melo. “The problem with day one content and the challenge around it is that the right answer for now is different for every player. There is no single right time, there is no single now. It’s subjective, and it’s unique to every player.”

Defending the company’s decision to release day-one DLC such as the Prothean From Ashes DLC for Mass Effect 3, Melo explained that BioWare always worries about their fans thinking they are just lying to them. “If you have a consistent culture of how you’re communicating to your fans,” claims Melo, “that will increase the number of people that are more likely to believe in your explanation. You’re not lying to them, but they will take whatever you’re saying as like, ‘you’re lying to us.’”

“That will always be there. The only way that that’s going to go away is you fast forward a few more years, where this is just normal.”

Source: VG247

An interesting statistic has come out of GDC Europe recently. BioWare online development director Fernando Melo said that more people finished Mass Effect 2 than did Mass Effect 3 - specifically that 56% of players finished the second game, while only 42% finished the third.

“Well, duh!” you might say. The uproar about its controversial ending was pretty universal, so surely lots and lots of people decided from that that sticking out to the end of the game just wasn’t worth the effort.

This statistic becomes interesting when you compare it to other BioWare games that are far more successful and brought BioWare far less revulsion than Mass Effect 3. Only 40% of players were interested enough to finish the original game, for example. Dragon Age: Origins, one of BioWare’s most successful titles in recent years, only had 36% of players clock it. I know plenty of people who stopped playing Dragon Age 2 because they knew the end was unsatisfying, and only 41% of players finished that.

Of course, there are probably plenty of people who specifically played to the end, despite the criticism, to see what all the fuss was about. But it goes to show that when sites like Eurogamer say that after five months only 42% of players have finished the game, when, after several years Dragon Age: Origin only had 36% beat it, it doesn’t seem like such a bad effort after all.

BioWare may be one of the prized horses in EA’s stable, but they still have to worry about money, unlike Valve and Blizzard, said BioWare’s Dorian Kieken. “We don’t have that yet at Bioware. If we have two games in a row, as expensive as we are, that don’t do well at all… we need to be careful.” Kieken revealed that the company now has more control than it used to, especially with the marketing department. “Ultimately, EA comes to the BioWare boardroom and says. ‘Here is the amount of money you have, and here is the amount of money you need to generate in X years. The way you do it is your problem.’”

Source: Games Industry International