AndyFromMonday said:
RvLeshrac said:
People said EA "ruined APB," even though EA had absolutely *ZERO* input into the development process, and warned RTW that releasing the game in the half-assed state it was in at launch was a bad idea.
People said SOE "ruined Vanguard," despite SOE being the *last* publisher to pick up the game, and despite the developers constantly re-writing entire sections of the game on a yearly basis, missing every single development milestone and deadline by years.
You work at EA? You know what control EA exercises? Has Bioware come out and said that EA forced them to make all the changes? No, they haven't. In fact, Bioware has lauded all the changes they were "forced" to make. They seem to be incredibly happy with the design decisions they made in DA2 and ME2.
Do you work at EA? Do you know they actually warned APB's developer to not release the game in a half developed state?
Publishers can make their studios declare anything. In fact, up until the joining with EA has Bioware ever released dumbed down games? It seems that the moment they joined up with EA they released two games still in development and then released sequels to those two games, one rushed and half assed and another dumbed down. Is this Bioware's track record? Have you seen Bioware release games like that? It seems a little suspicious that they'd choose to go in a new direction exactly after a buyout by a publisher that could only be described as a fucking nuisance to the gaming industry.
Once bankrupt, RTW devs corroborated EA's story.
Baldur's Gate had a second-party patch to correct issues with the game script, as did SoA, after Bioware stopped updating them.
Baldur's Gate II had several game-breaking issues that were only corrected by the community after Bioware stopped updating it.
NWN likewise had bugs in the storyline that took forever to be fixed, with players having to fix them via console cheats. There were also numerous issues with the implementation of SecuROM, and the patching system would frequently cause critical game files to break or become out of sync.
Do you think that Bioware's reduced-complexity development was, perhaps, an effort to reduce the number of script issues they encountered after launch? Or maybe the reduction in complexity was due to having to develop game systems from scratch, rather than relying on AD&D?