Editorial Lessons Learned While Working at BioWare

[Lord Andre]

You know what the funny thing is? Blizzard does a much better job listening to negative criticism and their games are more popular. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

Blizzard also spends 10 times more on advertising. Probably just another coincidence though.

That is a korean plane, like from Korea, where they had like a starcraft tv station since like years ago. So, your argument is a bit moot. Bllizard is possibly the only company that has quality on their mind when they make a game. True, I don't like any of their games that much, because I'm not interested in the genres they cater too. Still, quality of their games is pretty much indisputable.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

Well, he is talking about fans, not just players critical of their "work", so I don't see what's wrong with it beyond "We can't please everyone, so let's not give a shit about anyone, but our publisher overlords." Okay, and the fact that some fans may actually be non-ambiguously right (not talking about BW). And the part about BW having an interest in making quality games. And them caring for and having someone read the criticisms. And a few other unimportant bits.
But other than that, I don't see anything wrong with it. I mean, sure, I'm disappointed I can't romance Chakwas as much as the next fan, but they have to cut corners somewhere. And given the choice, BioWare would always hump an alien over an old lady. And you have to admit it: in reality, that's how quality RPGs are done - through difficult choices that you don't have to make.

You can't blame them for having shit taste or writing lame story that doesn't make sense.

I... I can't?
Is it because I don't own a console?
What if I were a vapourware developer - could I blame them then?
Come on, I really wanna...

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Serious Business was actually quite right in his post and I even considered un-ignoring him until he claimed that Volly was an honest Bio-fanboy, although everyone knows that the "Bio-fanboy"-thing is just Volly's trolling-scheme and he will lie as much as it takes just to keep up the facade...

lol @ taking anything SB says seriou- wait, isn't the fact he's almost always joking the reason you have him on ignore, in the first place?

 

[attackfighter]

You know what the funny thing is? Blizzard does a much better job listening to negative criticism and their games are more popular. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

Blizzard also spends 10 times more on advertising. Probably just another coincidence though.

That is a korean plane, like from Korea, where they had like a starcraft tv station since like years ago. So, your argument is a bit moot. Bllizard is possibly the only company that has quality on their mind when they make a game. True, I don't like any of their games that much, because I'm not interested in the genres they cater too. Still, quality of their games is pretty much indisputable.

You seriously think a South Korean airline company would spontaniously decide to brand giant pictures of Jim Raynor on the sides of their jets? Oh and FYI Blizzard is currently suing that StarCraft "tv station" you speak of - as well as the other one - because it has the audacity to broadcast games of StarCraft instead of StarCraft 2.

quality of their games is pretty much indisputable

LMFAO. Yeah, WoW is a real quality game. So is StarCrap 2, I fucking love StarCrap 2 so much and I'm sure the millions of people that bought it and forgot about it before even finishing their placement matches would agree. Such high quality games!!!!!!

 

[Xor]

Yeah, WoW is a real quality game.

11+ million people agree with you.

Yes, I went there.

I won't bother defending SC2, that was Blizzard's worst game to date.

 

[Dorf]

Just because something has a high volume of sales doesn't mean its good. Look at beer. Some of the top sellers are Miller Lite, Budweiser, & MGD but they are absolute crap.

By that logc Angry Birds, or Farmville are great games, and well they are not. They are amusing and require little thought or skill to play them. They appeal to the masses, and frankly the masses have crap taste.

 

[Smiffy]

Not necessarily. E.T. has been the most successful film of all times for a loooong time, and it's a great movie. Then there is Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Columbo, all good high-quality entertainment and all part of the popular culture.
Harry Potter singlehandedly saved the printing-business and by no means they are shitty books.
Farmville on the other hand is a game for people sick and tired of Hearts and it's being played by moms while they are waiting for hubby to come home from work. It is much more an indication of the arrival of computer games in mainstream culture than it is of the daftness of "the masses".

As of today there is no game which is truly and utterly shit but selling millions and millions. ArkaniA sold so bad that JoWood - having put their bets on it - went bankrupt shortly afterwards. DA2's sales seem to be lacking as well, its Metacritic user score is lower than 5. Shit games receive shit treatment, that's how it's always been. Some good games too but that's life.

 

[Vibalist]

The irony of you lot affirming the truth of his post even as you reject it is quite amusing.

The fact that this irony is lost on you? Double plus amusing.

This would only make sense if The Codex was actually complaining about petty, stupid shit like not being able to romance Morrigan in DA2, as opposed to offering up valid criticisms and complaints about Bioware's games.
This has already been mentioned countless times in this thread, even by grotsnik who posted before you, which makes your post doubly stupid as you apparently didn't understand what he was trying to say, or chose to ignore it.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Serious Business was actually quite right in his post and I even considered un-ignoring him until he claimed that Volly was an honest Bio-fanboy, although everyone knows that the "Bio-fanboy"-thing is just Volly's trolling-scheme and he will lie as much as it takes just to keep up the facade...

Wait, you have put Serious Business on ignore?

 

[Deleted Member 10432]

You know what the funny thing is? Blizzard does a much better job listening to negative criticism and their games are more popular. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

Blizzard also spends 10 times more on advertising. Probably just another coincidence though.

Blizzard therefore has 10 times as much money to spend on advertising. There are a lot of coincidences here, aren't there?

 

[laclongquan]

Harry Potter singlehandedly saved the printing-business and by no means they are shitty books.

That just goes to show you dont even know what you dont know.

2010 newfag

 

[attackfighter]

You know what the funny thing is? Blizzard does a much better job listening to negative criticism and their games are more popular. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

Blizzard also spends 10 times more on advertising. Probably just another coincidence though.

Blizzard therefore has 10 times as much money to spend on advertising. There are a lot of coincidences here, aren't there?

It's almost as if their larger investments lead to larger returns which lead to larger investments...

Mind = Blown

 

[Xor]

Oh come on, you're not trying to suggest that throwing money at a game guarentees success, are you? I mean, marketing helps, but you're just being obtuse if you're suggesting that more money invested automatically equals more profits.

Just because something has a high volume of sales doesn't mean its good. Look at beer. Some of the top sellers are Miller Lite, Budweiser, & MGD but they are absolute crap.

By that logc Angry Birds, or Farmville are great games, and well they are not. They are amusing and require little thought or skill to play them. They appeal to the masses

I would argue that sales are a good indicator of the success of a product, not necessarily the quality (how do you measure quality, anyway?). Angry Birds has over 10 million sales or something like that, but at only $1 per sale. WoW has had millions of customers paying $15 a month for years. It is undeniably a successful product.

frankly the masses have crap taste.

Statements like this are silly. People have different tastes than you. That doesn't make their opinions worse than yours or your opinions better than theirs.

 

[Lord Andre]

Blizzard sucks yo ! They only had a few models of dungeons, a few enemy models, a few npc models and a few quests models that they recycled ad nausea. And to top it off, a one year development cycle. The only reason they sell their games is because of hype and paid-for reviews. Blizzard sucks yo !

 

[villain of the story]

Harry Potter singlehandedly saved the printing-business and by no means they are shitty books.

WAT

 

[Naked Ninja]

This would only make sense if The Codex was actually complaining about petty, stupid shit like not being able to romance Morrigan in DA2, as opposed to offering up valid criticisms and complaints about Bioware's games.

I was talking about this thread. On reading an opinion they didn't like, people started personally attacking the writer. This :

Lead technical artist on DA:O, technical artist on DA2. What a horribly untalented person. I appreciate his anecdote nonetheless.

Please don't act like forums are filled with people having polite, objective conversations over tea and crumpets. They're filled with people spitting bile and treating it like a game of who can craft the best insults. The bigger the community, the more of that there will be, regardless of how good the product is. People have been talking about Blizzard, the WoW forums are a never-ending succession of rants and people threatening to quit because some derived damage percentage has changed 1% and this is proof that "blizzard hates Class X" or that "Blizzard never listens to the community".

Vince and I deal with it but we're the public faces of our respective dev groups. You're completely mad if you think it's the entire dev team's 'moral responsiblity' to stand and take abuse from bored internet trolls looking for amusement. Someone has to sift for valid criticism, sure, and that's generally a specific role in a big company. A technical artist doesn't need to come on here and hear what some kid thinks of his artistic abilities.



Btw, I love this 'Our complaints are different, our complaints are the really valid ones!' arguments you guys have. Clearly you haven't the slightest clue what objectivity/subjectivity actually means. Or it's something you only apply to other people?

 

[Roguey]

I was talking about this thread. On reading an opinion they didn't like, people started personally attacking the writer. This :

Lead technical artist on DA:O, technical artist on DA2. What a horribly untalented person. I appreciate his anecdote nonetheless.

I didn't attack him personally, I attacked his work. I didn't give an opinion on what he had to say other than how I liked his story. You completely misinterpreted my motivations.

A technical artist doesn't need to come on here and hear what some kid thinks of his artistic abilities.

Btw, I love this 'Our complaints are different, our complaints are the really valid ones!' arguments you guys have. Clearly you haven't the slightest clue what objectivity/subjectivity actually means. Or it's something you only apply to other people?

The art in DA and DA2 is objectively bad on every level. Such a perfect storm of failure. This man is a hack and it's good he's keeping his hackwork to himself now instead of big budget $60 titles.

 

[Naked Ninja]

The best artist in the world, when not given enough time for a task, will do a poor job.

But the art in DA and DA2 is fine. DA2 suffers from poor texture res and a dubious choice of style, but a technical artist doesn't choose the graphical style, they make the models within spec.

Calling it a 'perfect storm of failure' is the kind of hyperbolic nonsense that makes conversation on the internet so tiresome. 'I didn't like a game therefore everything about it is bad in every way' is moronic.

DA doesn't have worse 3D models than Mount and Blade, for example.

 

[felipepepe]

The Codex now face negative feedback from the developers. Epic hypocrisy is to follow.

Well done.


EDIT: The art of both DA are good. DA:O has the pineapple hats, but is very competent and the whole game design is very true to the setting. And DA2 has some of the best-looking armors ever made. Is not the art that makes DA 2 so bad.

 

[attackfighter]

Oh come on, you're not trying to suggest that throwing money at a game guarentees success, are you?

In general I'd say that's true. A conservatively designed game with a massive marketing budget is an almost guarenteed success. Although it's possible for such a game to fail, I can't think of an instance where one has.

And anyways that wasn't really my point. My point was that a company with lots capital is capable of making more money than a company with less capital, and therefore is also capable of funding larger subsequent projects... but that point is irrelevant anyways, since Blizzard just gets all it's money from WoW (which btw is popular for reasons other than "Blizzard listening to negative criticism", at least, not in the way or to the extent that you originally implied).

 

[PorkaMorka]

Yeah, WoW is a real quality game.

WOW is an extremely high quality game, relative to the other games in that sub genre (addiction based PVE focused EQ/Diku Mud clones).

The problem is that the sub genre it belongs to is an abomination.

But judging it within its own sub genre, WOW is pretty clearly *good for what it is*.

 

[attackfighter]

Yeah, WoW is a real quality game.

WOW is an extremely high quality game, relative to the other games in that sub genre (addiction based PVE focused EQ/Diku Mud clones).

The problem is that the sub genre it belongs to is an abomination.

But judging it within its own sub genre, WOW is pretty clearly *good for what it is*.

True, but when compared to Bioware games (even the DA franchise) I'd say it's of an average quality.

 

[Roguey]

The best artist in the world, when not given enough time for a task, will do a poor job.

Excuses, excuses, and DA had five years and it still looks awful.

But the art in DA and DA2 is fine.

This is what Naked Ninja actually believes.

Calling it a 'perfect storm of failure' is the kind of hyperbolic nonsense that makes conversation on the internet so tiresome. 'I didn't like a game therefore everything about it is bad in every way' is moronic.

I liked DA. Every aspect of its art is undeniably awful, didn't stop me from mildly enjoying that one playthrough, but it's still terrible.

DA doesn't have worse 3D models than Mount and Blade, for example.

Wowsers, DA/DA2 had dozens of artists and they somehow managed to not be worse than about half-a-dozen, give them a medal, most talented art team ever.

 

[felipepepe]

Yeah, WoW is a real quality game.

WOW is an extremely high quality game, relative to the other games in that sub genre (addiction based PVE focused EQ/Diku Mud clones).

The problem is that the sub genre it belongs to is an abomination.

But judging it within its own sub genre, WOW is pretty clearly *good for what it is*.

True, but when compared to Bioware games (even the DA franchise) I'd say it's of an average quality.

Today maybe, but around 5-6 years ago, it was as high quality as you could get. But is true, Blizzard got lazy and quality dropped a lot some years ago. Reason why I quit.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Yeah I guess my perception of WOW's quality is probably inflated because I quit a loooong time ago before standards dropped.