Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Anyone interesting in talking about BioWare going kaput? It’s very much a culture war item. I have to think any honest broker would see this is a clear case of go woke/go broke. Andromeda, Anthem, and Veilgard were total disasters. Even if Anthem wasn’t overtly political like the other two, it’s clear that the company started hiring people that were not good at developing video games. It’s really remarkable since market theory should incentivize the exact opposite. But perhaps this closure is the market correcting and other developers will take note.
Separately, I couldn’t help but check in on Jason Schrier’s coverage. He released a YouTube video this week going over the closure. Early in the video he reminds the viewer that EA was recently taken private by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner. Ah hah! I said to myself, that’s how he will spin this! And sure enough he gives a nuts and bolts overview of the poor sales over the years. And he spends an awful lot of time getting into the nitty gritty on leveraged buyouts and unreasonable meddling publishers.
I’ll remind everyone that when Veilgard came out, Jason posted “Go woke / go to the top of the charts?”. What a hilarious turn of events. The game literally killed the company. It would be funny except for the fact that I think a very large part of the blame for the state of the games industry can be laid at Mr Schriers feet. This guy does nothing but launder the industries perspective as fact and add credibility to the party line.
One thing you will see a lot on Reddit is people blaming publishers and corporate executives for bad releases that are total failures. I’m not one to defend these mercenary executives, but I think the actual rank and file game developers deserve the lions share of the blame. The executives can be blamed insofar as they are the ones making hiring decisions. But the actual developer and artist talent is bad. I’m glad they’re out of a job.
While it's certainly true that Veilguard had some atrocious writing which was just there to advocate for the right politics, I don't think Bioware's fall is as simple as "get woke, go broke". Bioware has been sucking for over a decade at this point. ME3 was a disaster, and so was every game since (with the possible exception of DA:I, which seems to have been pretty positively received). But ME3 was released in 2012, years before there was a general trend of game devs making artistic decisions based on politics rather than what made for a better game. Bioware's games may have suffered from political activism (Veilguard certainly did), but they had already gotten bad at making games even before that.
Why do you think they got bad at making games though? I’m going to guess it’s because the guys who made kotor and ME1 were a bunch of Gen X computer guys who loved early pc games and were incredibly talented. As the commercial success came and they grew exponentially, they hired a bunch of diverse young millennials and women that wanted to instagram their first day at BioWare. Then trump 2016 happened and it became a moral imperative to use their positions to fight the culture war.
This likely comes across as terribly racist and sexist. So be it. I’d love to hear other people theorize why suddenly all these great developers suddenly became bad at making video games.
I also agree it’s not just the politics that make these games suck. In fact it’s not even the primary thing that makes them suck. But I still blame politics since I suspect whatever is making them suck is downstream of politics.
My only other theory is that “video game designer” became a thing that people went to university to learn how to do right around this time. And all of a sudden there was a “right way” to design all these different game elements. And shockingly, this supposed “right way to do it” actually sucks.
I mean, I remember people saying the writing was on the wall when they brought some community manager on staff (why is it always a community manager?) who thought it would be really fun if there were a button that let you skip all the gameplay and just experience the
shippingstory. At least I think I'm remembering that approximately right. Was a long ass time ago now.Jennifer Hepler was a writer, not a CM.
The thing is, the infamous 'Hepler button' is a perfectly reasonable idea and most older games had it. It's called, as Mantergeistmann points out, a cheat code. I freely admit that I played a bunch of Neverwinter Nights modules by Hepler-buttoning my way through them.
Really, it would not have been hard to put cheats in DA or ME, and in general I think that controversy was just one of communication.
I'd agree with it being a communication issue, and I think part of it boils down to people who see gameplay skill as.... well, a skill, and an important part of a game. Having a "just as valid no combat" mode takes away from that in a way that a cheat code doesn't.
Let's look at ME3 itself for a moment. To get the best(?) ending, you need to have a high enough War Readiness score. You need to work for that, by making the right decisions (even with guides existing, that could still be considered "putting in effort"). And mods or cheat codes to increase War Readiness to max would, I feel, be accepted by the fans in a way that having Hackett say right before the final quest, "Shepard, your War Readiness is a bit low, but we have reserves that can bring them to max and give your story the conclusion it deserves".
The original context of the Hepler discussion was an interview she did in 2006. Note that this was back when BioWare was unquestionably good, so there isn't much chance that she ruined the games back then. Anyway, here is the relevant part:
I have two conflicting feelings on this.
The first is - okay, fair enough, most RPGs are massive time-sinks, and if you have to play them because part of your job is knowing what the competition are doing, you'd want a way to go through that more quickly. That's completely reasonable. Heaven knows that I've skipped past combat in games to get to more of the writing before. (A hopefully uncontroversial example - does anybody play, say, the last third of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines without using cheats to skip the combat?) Given that her job was game writing and she didn't have endless time, I understand the frustration.
The second feeling, though, is that she probably shouldn't be a video games writer at all. Writing and playing should not be treated as separate; rather, in a well-made video game, they need to support each other. In a good video game, the writing contextualises play, and the play contextualises the story, and they reinforce each other. Yes, I cheat through the last third of Bloodlines, but the fact that I do that is evidence that Bloodlines is a poorly-designed game. (To be fair it was rushed out and probably unfinished; the combat-heavy final act is garbage, but the low-combat first half of the game is excellent.) If I were hiring a writer for my game company, I would absolutely want the writer to understand and appreciate the gameplay. That's part of the writer's job. Gameplay can cause or intensify emotional reactions!
Hepler kind of has a point, especially for games that have terrible combat or a lot of grinding, and in 2006 I think it's fair to say that most RPGs had pretty lousy combat. But she can only have a point at all because of a larger design failure.
Reading that original quote, I'm in agreement with you on both your thoughts, and think that it reinforces my own. If she had instead said "I wish there was some sort of developer mode or cheat code accessible to the public, like (insert well-loved code here like killsw01 in BG or 'power overwhelming' in sc or even just the Konami code)", it'd have gone over better. And also focused on just being bad/not having time, rather than admitting she just wants to write non-games. Is there any other genre/media where that would happen? "The hardest part of being a Disney writer is that I'm not a fan of writing for kids, and wish musical numbers could be skipped." It's just asking for skepticism and blame for anything people don't like going forward.
It does remind me of the GamerGate-era accusation that a lot of games journalists were actually frustrated culture journalists or lifestyle journalists or something. They wanted to be writing in some more prestigious field, unfortunately had gotten stuck in games, but were still in love with the idea of being a journalist, so they were grudgingly writing about something they disliked and had no real appreciation for.
In this case, it sounds like Hepler wanted to be a writer, and enjoyed writing, but did not like video games. She probably would have been better off just writing short stories or something. But she might not have been able to make it in that field, or it might not pay the bills as well, so video games it is...
Still, I would want, ideally, games writers to understand and appreciate games, as a medium.
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