Gaming DBWI: Destroy Bioware's Reputation

[xie323]

OOC: In this alternate reality, Bioware was never acqiored by EA and makes epic games to this day. The details of whether EA tried to buy Bioware or not is not well known amoung the gaming community. Also the gaming crowd is much less reactionary since Bioware still embraces more progressive social politics, but progressive politics being associated with good games allow for less stigma towards the idea of women and minorities in gaming.

To this day Bioware remains one of the most well regarded game companies for it's masterful RPGs and storytelling. But what if it isn't the case. What if sometime during the last decade Bioware's reputation was totally destroyed? Maybe due to some bad games and blunders, through I don't know how this could be accomplished.

Yeah I know this is a bleak thought, but I wonder, what if Bioware's reputation was totally destroyed. How could this happen and if it did, what would the gaming industry be like? Who will fill and potential void left by Bioware with regards to RPGs?

For one I could see Mass Effect trilogy ending on a whimper if the "original" planned ending was what we got, through we have to remember, it's just one trilogy and I don't see it being replicated by other devs.

 

[chankljp]

As a game company that focuses and is most famous for their title's storytelling, perhaps some of their higher-ups can get greedy, and decide to either deliberately cut out the ending of a game, or have the 'best' ending be locked behind a paid DLC? A blatant money grab such as this will most certainly antagonise almost of of their most devoted fans, no matter how well written the ending turns out to be.

Either that, or perhaps they can half-heartedly slap on a poorly thought out and implemented multiplayer function on their story focused titles that does need such a thing. Which wouldn't be too much of an issue on it's own.... Unless you will somehow be required to play at least a few hours of said poorly design multiplayer in order to unlock the 'best' ending for single player. But in such a scenario, I imagine that the fan community's outcry will be so great that the developers will quickly realise their mistake, and patch out such a requirement.

 

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

To this day Bioware remains one of the most well regarded game companies for it's masterful RPGs and storytelling. But what if it isn't the case. What if sometime during the last decade Bioware's reputation was totally destroyed? Maybe due to some bad games and blunders, through I don't know how this could be accomplished.

Yeah I know this is a bleak thought, but I wonder, what if Bioware's reputation was totally destroyed. How could this happen and if it did, what would the gaming industry be like? Who will fill and potential void left by Bioware with regards to RPGs?

Hard to imagine, really.

I suppose it could happen if they got bought out by someone like EA who preferred playing it safe over taking narrative risks.

Consider ME2. It was considered a major risk their whole thing of having Shepard be resurrected by the Geth and you starting the game with your Shepard looking more like something out of the Borg collective. But at the same time, players responded well to how the Geth were shown to be not all evil, and thought that that side of the story (plus the gameplay side of it) was well-done.

A company like EA might have gone with a far more 'by the numbers' story rather than beginning in such a way. Which would have cost us the story element - Shepard being traumatised by the initial crudeness of the cybernetics; being afraid of what others in general and the chosen love interest in particular would think of them looking like they do; and the way that the Paragon/Renegade thing got tweaked to become more 'Human/Machine', where 'Human' actions are the emotional ones and 'Machine' are the 'At any cost' ones...and that an imbalance one way or the other either shows Shepard becoming more and more cold and unemotional, or gradually becoming more human again, and that being then shown by the cybernetic upgrades that become accessible either being just obvious 'strap on more metal' or things that looked more human.

Sorry for rambling about it, but you get my point. That was a brilliant weaving of story and gameplay, and it required BioWare committing to that somewhat risky narrative decision. With someone risk-averse...odds are that would never have been the case.

I'm also not entirely sure that the ending would have been as satisfying. I liked the fact that we could get an unambiguously happy ending in ME3 through hard work to build up the war-score...

 

[Roches]

This is dead simple. Any game design company that's acquired by EA dies a horrible death. So, Bioware wasn't. If it had been, it would die.

Origin's Ultima 7: The Black Gate, which is probably one of the best RPGs ever in terms of gameplay, has a plot device where the player has to destroy a cube, a sphere, and a tetrahedron, in order to stop the evil Guardian from entering the world through the Black Gate. EA's logo at the time was "ECA" on a cube, a sphere, and a tetrahedron, with "Electronic Arts" under it. The plot of the game is based around a jab at EA.

Fortunately, Origin's owner, Richard Garriott, was tenacious enough to keep them out of EA's grubby paws. His father was a literal astronaut who lived in space for two months. He got to go actual space himself; he's the first second-generation American space traveler. And, as we all know, he, like Bioware, did not get acquired by EA.

I'm off to play World of Wing Commander.

[OOC, sorry if it feels like I hijacked by talking about Origin instead of Bioware... but the two companies did meet the same fate in our own cruel timeline, and RPGs will ever be the worse for it. Oh, and the only alternate thing above is that Origin doesn't get purchased by EA. Today, they use the brand for their DRM/microtransaction/bug-adding/game-finishing platform.]

 

[xie323]

So a couple of you have noted that a hypothetical situation of EA(or even Activision for that matter, they aren't stellar either) buying Bioware would lead to it's demise.

Given how EA fucked over the Command & Conquer franchise, it's perfectly logical that EA getting it's greedy hands on Bioware would see Bioware dissolved within 5 years at most.

That said, EA alone is not enough to totally destroy Bioware's reputation. It's enough to destroy Bioware as a company by running it into the ground sure, but to totally destroy Bioware's reputation you'd need the company to be generally seen as destroying it's past goodwill and accomplishiments and seen as a black mark on the modern gaming industry notwithstanding their earlier games. If it's anything like how Command & Conquer was fucked over, you'd get most of Bioware's projects cancelled by higher management, let's say a hypothetical Dragon Age Sequel or spinoff is cancelled to "save costs", and all resources are pooled into Mass Effect(ooc: This is what happened with C&C), the release of a good but flawed game, and this being followed by a VERY horrible game with EA's fingerprints over the place that sells poorly and sees Bioware dissolved by EA not long after and it's characters used by EA in cheap p2w gimmicks.

Assuming this is the fate of Bioware after EA buys it, it's somewhat conceivable that Bioware could, like Westwood and the C&C team, end up be seen as tragic victims that wanted to make good games fucked over by a greedy corporate giant, which would kill the company but not necessarily destroy it's image forever since it would end up memorializing Bioware.

I think what could happen is that EA or Activision, after a hypothetical buyout, does a different strategy. Let's say Dragon Age is released in the same state as Fallout New Vegas; has good moments but a lot of bugs due to rushed development. It is gradually patched due to a combination of user mods and DLCs. After that however, <insert greedy AAA publisher> fires a couple of staff members that were responsible for the storytelling, and controls the narrative(they'd have to be really lucky to make sure no one speaks the truth about what happened), and hires yes-men to replace them. They then have Bioware branch off into genres they have no experience(let's say RTS or First-person shooter) and give them even less time, which means more bugs. They fuck over Mass Effect 2(or it is decent, but fractures the community, and <insert greedy AAA publisher> suceeds in fucking over Mass Effect for good with the finale) and also many of the games where they were "pooled" into working. Eventually over time Bioware comes to mean what EA or Activision makes of it, which is, with nothing remembered of the company it once was.

OOC: The C&C devs are generally seen as totally tragic figures in gaming screwed over by EA(with one Youtube video actually presenting the C&C 4 devs in a very tragic light and as full on victims of EA rather than "you're bad now for developing this terrible game").