Polygon: The State of BioWare
Polygon recently spent a day at the developer’s Edmonton office, talking to several members of its leadership team about the state of BioWare — about new challenges posed by Anthem as well as scant details on the next Dragon Age, how BioWare figures into EA’s plans for the Star Wars license, and the future of the Mass Effect franchise.
This article is a cover story from Polygon delving into the recent history and current state of BioWare, including a look at what was happening behind-the-scenes during Anthem’s development, and details on how Anthem came to be over time, conceptually from the ground-up. The article also touches on stuff like Hudson, Ohlen and Flynn leaving, the storied problems that dogged Andromeda’s development, and the cancelled Shadow Realms. A good read, I do recc.
Choice, tastiest excerpts, from my perspective, because clearly what I care about most is Dragon Age and Mass Effect:
The studio has made a tradition of nicknaming its projects after folk singers — the next Dragon Age was reportedly called “Joplin” at one point
[…]
Anthem’s a roll of the dice — one that’s been a long time coming. According to one source familiar with the company who requested anonymity, there’s a great deal of uncertainty about what the game might mean for BioWare. In the event that it flops, some tough decisions will follow. And if it’s a big success, that, too, could have a significant impact on the future of the studio’s games.
Just what that impact might look like is another question entirely. A story published at Kotaku last year said that BioWare went back to the drawing board for its next entry in the Dragon Age franchise sometime in 2017. Amid speculation about the game’s new direction, Hudson took to Twitter to assure fans that the series would retain its focus on narrative, with live-service support allowing for “continued storytelling after the main story.”
Although the group is reluctant to confirm any hard details about upcoming iterations of Dragon Age or Mass Effect, BioWare’s leadership isn’t ruling out the idea of a strong multiplayer element taking root in either series. “It’s not like we’ve decided, hey, all of our games are now gonna be Anthem,” Warner says. “Our other games, as we go forward, are gonna take things out of the toolbox that they need to be true to themselves. Whether that’s another bout of multiplayer — we’ll see.”
Darrah, for one, is eager to explore the unique experience of tabletop role-playing games like D&D, which isn’t the purpose of a fast-paced shooter like Anthem. (In January, EA filed a new trademark application for Jade Empire, the name of BioWare’s 2005 action RPG, though there’s no word yet on what new plans might be in store for the property.)
[…]
As for BioWare’s own space-opera franchise, Darrah says, “We’re definitely not done with Mass Effect. There’s a lot of stories to be told. We could pull on the threads we put down with Andromeda; we could pull on threads from Mass Effect 3. There’s a lot of interesting space to be explored.”
“In my mind, it’s very much alive,” says Hudson. “I’m thinking all the time about things that I think will be great. It’s just a matter of getting back to it as soon as we can.”
But the wait for the next Mass Effect could be a long one. Between heavy production on the next Dragon Age and Anthem’s ongoing live-ops support — not to mention the likelihood of another major update to The Old Republic — Mass Effect is still firmly in the pre-production phase. [x]
(via stealth-boy)