Then when it launched and was stable, the employee numbers dropped. This is common practice. Articles like this call it laying off, but remember most of these employees are sub-contractors who sign up for a determined period of time. So let's say I'm a Network Engineer, and Blizzard hires me (I wish) for 6 months to create the MMO servers, install them, get em running and stable. Then it's over.FelipeInsideA contract ending is not a layoff. Bioware indicated they are restructuring the studio and confirmed layoffs. Regardless of what you want to call it, the idea here is that the game flopped and BW is in pure damage control now.
Abberon's forum posts
Once the game has been completed and all that is left is maintenance and game updates you don't need the same large staff you did originally. It's not surprising they are laying people off. ferrari2001That's such a goof argument. I'm sorry, but if the game was deemed a success the vast majority of the staff would be kept on to develop serious new content or to start developing the next new game. A publisher is NOT going to want to lose the staff that designed a critically and commercially successful game, especially one that charges a monthly fee. When, however, a game comes out late, way over budget AND fails to impress in terms of sales/subscriptions, THAT'S when you start to lay staff off. EA's seen enough evidence to pretty much confirm that if an MMORPG doesn't make a good first impression and nosedives in subscriptions shortly after release, it's not going to recover from it. SWTOR is a huge disappointment. If the atrociously ugly character art design doesn't turn people off from the very start, the fact that the game looks no better than WoW graphically will. Even if people get past this though, they'll still have to contend with the sad world design, the clunky interface and the boring combat. This game would have probably been a smash success in 2004, but unfortunately it came out in 2011 and offered literally nothing new except for lame stories. It's nice to see the turd fail.
He's an employee, like any other employee in any other industry around the world. The fact that he had success on other games doesn't mean he had good success at this game. Plus with all these successes chances are his paycheck was quite large, which would mean laying him off would be a better business strategy. ferrari2001
Employees ARE the software business, more so than most industries. If the game was a success then the publisher would want to make sure that the people who helped make it successful stuck around. You'd want to make sure that they continue to do good work for you rather than move on to develop competitors' games. This game, however, is very quickly turning out to be a dud, and unsurprisingly there are layoffs.
You can probably guess from the forum title that I wasn't a fan of ME2. I was hugely disappointed with it. The presentation and story of ME1 was absolutely fantastic and ME2 just didn't come close for me. ME2 disappointed me so much (along with pretty much everything Bioware has released since ME1) that I waited until ME3 was 50% off before buying it. I just started playing it a few days ago and I've only done the first couple missions, but it seems a lot better. The atmosphere is way more interesting and I'm actually feeling that sense of urgency that ME1 provoked in me.
I do, however, still have a serious issue with the franchise. After beating the ridiculous giant robot head at the end of ME2 and realizing that 75% of the game revolved around recruiting half a dozen or so characters which were thrown in out of nowhere with literally no interest or links to the overall story, I was annoyed. The other 25% of the game revolved around the introduction and subsequent elimination of a brand new antagonist who was building a giant robot-human hybrid...*sigh*. Anyways, the character writing was so good in ME2 that the game at least had some endearing qualities, and I really grew to like the cast.
Coming in to ME3, which seems like a better game overall, I can't help but feel even MORE disappointed in ME2. I endured the goof story and spent all that time recruiting and nurturing a crack team of specialists, worked hard to make sure they all survived, and then it turns out that they barely even play a part in ME3? Bioware lauded itself on how impactful the consequences of your choices would be, but it turns out this isn't really the case at all.
My concern that ME2 was a completely throw-away story in the overall ME universe seems to be confirmed. You could quite literally skip the entire game and go from ME1 to ME3 and miss very, very little.
::::STORY:::: In the first DA game, it was quite an adventure. You had your origin story, became a Grey Warden, survived the horror at Ostagar, and you had to use treaties to summon an army to fight the blight all while dealing with the death of the king of fereldon. I found the story very engaging in the first game. You also got to see how different the dwarves, elfs, and humans conducted themselves and their atmosphere. Comparing DA2 to DA:O is a joke. DA2 failed to keep my attention on the storyline. I wasn't really sure what the main storyline was at some points in the game. I sure knew what the main story was for DA:O though: Stop the blight.gr8scott
Not to be rude but I have to LOL at that.DA:O had one of the most clichéd fantasy stories the genre has ever seen. A Final Fantasy game couldn't have been more cliché. First, you had the prerequisite hero from humble beginnings become the only person who could save the world from, yep, you guessed, a horde of orcs...err darkspawn. You, the only man in the world who could, then had to run around back and forth across the country to gather allies one by one while the orcs...err darkspawn waited for you to gather an army while they did nothing.The dark and sultry sorceress, drunk and brazen dwarf and then the regicidal betrayal that everyone saw coming from the very beginning all tied into that.
It wasn't bad, but it could have definitely been better. I think we can all agree with that. gr8scott
Sorry. I can't. I thought Origins was mediocre. This is far worse. This is a VERY half-assed game and BioWare is finally getting some well-overdue criticism for how substandard their games are becoming.
First off, Mass Effect 2's story is highly awarded, it wasn't just Kevin V. It won Best Story awards in many places, including the AIAS. Second, DAII breaks from Bioware formula, and in fact breaks from RPG hero that defeats evil formula in general.texasgoldrush
Yes I realize it wasn't Kevin V, but it wasn't just Kevin V on any of the other games I listed. I just know I can count on his review to parrot those of his peers and competitors and not really be fair.
Mass Effect 2's story was a joke. The fact that it won awards is hardly exciting considering how sparse the RPG genre is and how much of a back seat storytelling has taken.
ME2's story was a hodge-podge of unrelated side-quests and characters that for reasons that didn't make any sense all came together to combat an arbitrary villain that was introduced and defeated in a main storyline that took at best 4 hours to complete. As far as the full Mass Effect saga goes, you could literally remove ME:2 from the series and you'd miss nothing in plot. It was one of the worst stories I've gone through in an RPG in years.
As for DA:II, I already mentioned that I was confused by Kevin V's attack against its story. If he was concerned with stories he should havesaid somethingabout ME:2 or DA:O's balogna stories, but he didn't, which doesn't surprise me.
I have todisagree with the OP in this case. By today's reviewing standards, where we work on a 6-10 review scale really, Kevin V totally beat up on DA:2 and it totally deserved it. I'm a little confused why Kevin V would focus in on the story for Dragon Age II, however, because as far as story goes it's no better or worse than the last 2 titles he scored 90+, DA:O and ME:2. Both of those games had TERRIBLE stories with what has now become the Bioware RPG formula but he accoladed them.
Personally I find Kevin V to be one of the most unreliable reviewers on all of Gamespot.Basically any time thata game has hugely disappointed me and my experience has not in any way matched the gamespot review, I can bet with 80+% certainty it was a Kevin V review.
A short list of his completely garbage reviews would be:
Empire: Total War
Spore
Dragon Age
Mass Effect 2
Prince of Persia
I could probably find others if I wanted to but a Kevin V review as far as I'm concerned is completely worthless.
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