#ea critical

Just saw this and it makes me so sad.

Because of this part:

"On top of that, it was released to a VERY toxic atmosphere online and elsewhere in the gaming space," Taylorson continued. "It quickly became punching bag of the week for online chuds for views and clicks. Their love of hate sealed the deal.

but mostly that one:

"It hurt most because I knew that was it — Ryder wouldn't be coming back," Taylorson said. "I, and others, thought we'd have a good decade of playing with these characters in these spaces. And just like that — gone."

It kinda hits me hard to read about Ryder not coming back because some part of me hopes they do come back :(

In the full article he also says "There is something to be said for a 7/10 that comes to you in a time of need." and I feel that as I am playing MEA again.

And I don't think he's exaggerating about the hate. it was quite toxic at times. But I think there was a tipping point, when they did a final update, and this was it. It was over, with no DLC.

God knows Andromeda had its issues (and oh boy, did it have issues!), but I do feel like EA gave up on it too easily. EA wasn’t willing to let them try to fix their mistakes (see also them declining to let BioWare Austin have a real crack at fixing Anthem). I don’t want to let BioWare off the hook (the dithering for years trying to make procedurally generated planets in Andromeda, how long it took for them to finally decide to commit to flight in Anthem), but EA not letting them even try to cook once a team finally has a set vision is frustrating. (I still think some solid DLC really could have helped Andromeda.)

frankly an AI backed heavily sanitized version of a deeply complex story with inherent queerness baked into it (the asari) (to say the least) sounds absolutely miserable

I wanted it to be good. I wanted so badly for it to be a new BG3 or Mass Effect for me, that I could play over and over. I wanted it to be a new Dragon Age game for me, something I could replay and never feel like it was old.

It didn’t even make it two full playthroughs before the scales completely fell away. And now? It’s gone from my PC…along with the other DA games, because now I know how the whole thing ends, with Veilguard, and I can’t look at the old games the same. The Mass Effect trilogy and BG3 are still there. But the games that got me started playing western RPGs in the first place, the Dragon Age games, are gone.

I’m still mourning the series I loved. It didn’t deserve what EA and the shambling corpse of what once was BioWare did to it.

No wonder that scene at the Lighthouse with Varric’s mirror was so…clunky. It was basically EA’s doing. BioWare wanted to let you chose to be trans or cis in the character creator, but EA said no, so they had to do it this way. That whole cludgy-ass, “You are an insert class here, wasn’t your training so hard? You are a insert race here, isn’t this thing so cool” character creator recap scene was so they could let you select if your Rook was cis or trans.

Not to completely let the writers off the hook; there HAD to be a smoother way to write the dialogue menu options so it didn’t seem quite so jarring and clunky, and that’s on them because it’s their job (there were SO many problems with that mirror scene in general, like how it made an elf with vallaslin a city elf no matter what your head canon might have been). But I really do wonder how much EA’s interference also fucked up and screwed with a lot of how the game handled things all around.