• Bioware's Anthem is worse made than initially thought
    99 replies, posted
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1113553795206852609?s=19 They're also cancelling livestreams and the like. Bioware is on a fucking warpath to shit their own pants
Fuck no man, if you ever feel like that, just do passion projects on your weekend or something. If your work conditions are good and you're getting good pay, what's to stop you from using your bottled up passion on your free time?
This would be standard of any company that has an article published about them like this. I believe THQ had something similar with the 8chan thing. The company wants a unified PR meaaage to address this as to try and mitigate further escalation. and a side note (not related to your comment), the article offers good insight as to why EA has standardized Frostbite as their dev engine. It allows them to avoid licensing fees associated with other engines being that it’s in house. More importantly, it allows for cross studio collaboration to take place, blurring the geographic lines that separate studios. While they clearly have not implemented this well thus far, there was an example from late in development, where DICE employees were able to help with development of anthem. This might not be as big of a deal to devs, but to EA as a publisher this is an enormous (potential) asset that sets them apart from companies like Activision. From a business standpoint, I can see where this idea makes sense if properly executed.
For the record. Anybody interested in game development should consider there are a lot more options than AAA studios. i work for a smaller mobile game company, that mostly does work for other companies, while work on our own projects on the side. Life is good with them, pay is great, and I feel pretty stable. Working for a smaller team creates a family vibe, and I still get to enjoy the work I do. We don’t go into crunch, but sometimes we work extra just because we genuinely want to problem solve a creative solution because we’re into it. The entire industry isn’t hell, small companies have a lot of benefits.
UE4 is Epic's saving grace and it confuses me as to their quick yet obviously lurching launch of EGS. With UE4, they tend to take it slow, but the actual codebase is rock-solid (in most areas). It's open source, so anyone can fix a bug they find, and the devs sometimes fix bugs - though, admittedly, not often unless it's in Fortnite. Regarding Frostbite and other older engines (like Source), the engines were built specifically for one game or game series. This means it will be really good at doing that, and only that. Most game engines fall into this category - UE4 for instance is very good at arena shooters and not really much else without headaches. Whatever you want is doable, but with headaches. Unity is colloquially '''indie quality''' but the reason it's been used so much is because it has a low barrier to entry. You don't have to hack away at it to get it to do what you want, save for multiplayer - if you throw a piece of code in an update loop, that code will get executed and will do what you expect. Unity devs can speak out for stuff they'd like changed, and Unity the company might listen and implement features. Because Frostbite has a userbase of "just EA", engineers can't google solutions, or ask for help easily, or separate engine logic from rendering logic from gameplay logic. It makes me think that managers don't really understand how to program or how the process of programming works when they say 'you have to use Frostbite for your game'. These parts of programming are nonexistent when it comes to proprietary engines, which is why it takes so long to get something good out of them. Hence why they had to get a team from DICE in to help them - it's not easy following someone else's code, particularly when documentation is nonexistent. I really feel sorry for Bioware developers. I hope when EA shutters the company they can find more gainful and comfortable employment.
UPDATE: https://kotaku.com/bioware-boss-addresses-studio-issues-vows-to-continue-1833802608
The videogame industry is a cynical shithole
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