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by Hamuko8 hours ago |

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by aresant8 hours ago|

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I don't have inside knowledge but have followed Bioware (given how many of their games live rent free in my head)

1 - 2017 they cut from 500 -> ~350

2 - 2023 went from 350 -> 200 that included a bunch of very senior people including the OG writer of Baldur's gate Lukas Kristjanson

3 - Early '24 cut down to 100 skeleton crew as the writing on the wall for DA Veilguard sales materialized (sold about 1.5m vs 3m projected)

by jonaustin7 hours ago|

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And veilguard was an abomination of corporate groupthink based on some perceived cultural zeitgeist. I couldn't finish it the dialogue was so painfully cringe.

by torginus6 hours ago|

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Weird, I have a friend who's a hardcore DA fan, and he liked it, but told me it's very different.

Tbh, I think the issue is that old RPG designers understood players have very different values and goals, hell they even wrote some academic articles on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

The devs of today played the games of yesterday, and felt that the game catered to them, and then sought out making a game like that, but they didn't put in the effort or consideration to appeal to other kinds of players.

And turns out there's economics involved - while people playing shooters want to shoot people in general, RPG players are a diverse bunch with different needs, and if you don't scratch the itch of a certain subgroup, that's part of the audience gone.

Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.

by WorldMaker2 hours ago|

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I think it is also that DA intentionally had a very complex story tapestry, mostly tried to avoid resets between games, and Veilguard went very deep in Elf and Mage storylines at something of a cost of other storylines. If you were very invested in Elf and Mage storylines (say you had been playing and/or romancing Elves and Mages and Elf Mages since DA:O) then Veilguard was extremely personal and culminated a lot of deep lore things and personal stakes things. On the other hand if you didn't side that way/play that way, I could see it feeling a lot less memorable/important.

by SyzygyRhythm4 hours ago|

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I disagree. This is the strategy taken by AAA games and is the reason why the AAA games are in such rough shape.

A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.

A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.

by dudeinhawaii3 hours ago|

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I'm not sure it's the niche or targeting problem. I think we're getting games with flat out fewer features and smaller scope than earlier entries in the series because _so_ much energy is disproportionately put into graphics. DA:VG was trimmed and had vastly less complexity and depth than any previous DA.

I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".

It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.

by SyzygyRhythm2 hours ago|

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Graphics is part of the problem, certainly, but at least it's moderately independent of the rest. You can scale the quality up and down without affecting the rest (within limits: having many armor variants, etc. are more costly with greater graphic fidelity). As far as the rest: all of these different gameplay mechanics have a complexity cost. You can try to add everything, but then you run into balance problems and/or it just feels too complex for most people, not to mention having a high development cost. So something needs to be simplified, and that means either reducing the depth or reducing the mechanics. But if you've already decided to include something for everyone, that necessarily means that everything is shallow.

by mjr007 hours ago|

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Note that the 1.5m number given for Veilguard was for the vague term "engagements" rather than sales, so there's additional padding going into that figure.

by torginus7 hours ago|

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5qKN2Yxaok&t=1s

Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.

I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.

I mean the graphics got better (not that anyone cares, people still play old games, if graphics were a true differentiator, people would say new games are better because they look better, but they don't).

This is very hard to explain - and so expensive it's actively killing the industry.

by christkv5 hours ago|

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It became a corporate job instead of a smallish team excited about building the games they wanted to play.