217 réponses à ce sujet

[Jeffry]

The italed is just silly. The budget is based on what's in the plan for the game. It's not like EA just hands Bio a pile of money and lets them do whatever they want with the money.

 

That is not what I meant and not what I said, next time you can ask if you are not sure instead of putting words in my mouth You believe, that the MP part receives extra money - a separate budget the game would not have gotten otherwise and the budget for SP part stays exactly the same no matter what? Or could it be, that when there is MP planned, the budget for SP is set lower than what it would have been with no MP?

[Jeffry]

I don't think you can say that they took KOTR and turned it into an MMO just because they are both Star Wars games produced by the same company, that would be like saying Lucas Arts took Tie Fighter and turned it into a racing game. There are lots of different types of Star Wars games 

 

Also that is not how budgets in large companies work. The SP and MP budget don't come out of the same pot, just like the budget for SP and stationary don't come out of the same pot.

 

BioWare would've been given a certain amount of SP and a certain amount for MP. Without MP there wouldn't have been additional funding for SP, in fact EA probably gave BioWare a larger budget for both to encourage them to put in MP. Even if they didn't, with two budgets they could've fudged the numbers a bit to add more to SP from the MP budget, for example, since combat is in both SP & MP they could've taken some of the costs to develop that for both from the MP budget to leave more money for VAs for SP.

 

We do something similar in work sometimes, like if our Stationary Budget is particularly big one month and our PC Hardware Budget is a bit low, we can move some money around between the two because there is overlap between what comes under stationary & what comes under hardware.

 

Maybe MP did take money & resources away from SP but given my experience with budgets in big corporations, I doubt it.

 

That is exactly what they did. They knew how popular KotOR was and how popular WoW is. If WoW would not be so successful, there would be no SWTOR (or certainly not in the form it came out). The game's stories even follows KotOR in a way (Revan for example).

 

For stuff regarding budget see my latest reply to AlanC9, no point in writing the same stuff again.

 

All in all, we can discuss the budget issue further, but we will never truly know how things work on the corporate leadership level of EA. I wish there will be some whistle-blower one day (just as a curiosity, one former dev from the Maxis Emeryville team posted on reddit how it was to work for EA, so now we have to wait for a bigger fish )

[phantomrachie]

That is exactly what they did. They knew how popular KotOR was and how popular WoW is. If WoW would not be so successful, there would be no SWTOR (or certainly not in the form it came out). The game's stories even follows KotOR in a way (Revan for example).

 

For stuff regarding budget see my latest reply to AlanC9, no point in writing the same stuff again.

 

All in all, we can discuss the budget issue further, but we will never truly know how things work on the corporate leadership level of EA. I wish there will be some whistle-blower one day (just as a curiosity, one former dev from the Maxis Emeryville team posted on reddit how it was to work for EA, so now we have to wait for a bigger fish )

 

Is it? Or did they want to try their hand at an MMO and the Star Wars franchise was an easy one to base it on. Revan made his way into the extend Universe, so it could be said to be following on from that too.

 

Just as you said for the budgets, we'll never know for sure.

 

Personally though, I think you are extrapolating how you create your own personal budget and saying it would similar for a corporate budget, i.e. equating, cutting back on meals in restaurants to go on holiday with cutting back on SP to get MP.

 

After doing both personal and corporate budgets, I can tell you that, that is not how it works for corporate budgets. The major parts would each have their own separate budgets and then there would be sub budgets for each sub part.

 

BioWare would've submitted an expectation of what they needed for each of those parts and then EA would've approved the budget. At the approval stage EA  can ask for detail reasons why the money is needed, say they'll give BioWare more money if they use in house software or ask them to cut expensive items.

 

While it is possible that an MP budget could affect the SP budget negatively, I find it highly unlikely because that would be like saying increasing a travel budget would negatively affect the stationary budget.

 

If your travel budget was too high, you'd be asked to reduce that, not another budget.

[Jeffry]

Is it? Or did they want to try their hand at an MMO and the Star Wars franchise was an easy one to base it on. Revan made his way into the extend Universe, so it could be said to be following on from that too.

 

Just as you said for the budgets, we'll never know for sure.

 

Personally though, I think you are extrapolating how you create your own personal budget and saying it would similar for a corporate budget, i.e. equating, cutting back on meals in restaurants to go on holiday with cutting back on SP to get MP.

 

After doing both personal and corporate budgets, I can tell you that, that is not how it works for corporate budgets. The major parts would each have their own separate budgets and then there would be sub budgets for each sub part.

 

BioWare would've submitted an expectation of what they needed for each of those parts and then EA would've approved the budget. At the approval stage EA  can ask for detail reasons why the money is needed, say they'll give BioWare more money if they use in house software or ask them to cut expensive items.

 

While it is possible that an MP budget could affect the SP budget negatively, I find it highly unlikely because that would be like saying increasing a travel budget would negatively affect the stationary budget.

 

If your travel budget was too high, you'd be asked to reduce that, not another budget.

 

In the case of SWTOR it was more than that, they followed a bit on the settings of KotOR. One of the main characters there is for example a direct descendant of Bastila and Revan (I believe a grand-daugther, but I could be wrong). Playing for the Jedi Knight class you actually felt a bit like playing KotOR3, but since it was an MMO it was just not exactly like it.

 

Well, I am more basing my arguments on what it would be in an ideal world, where there would be great SP games produced with love and care, without additional not needed elements and everybody would be happy

 

Ok, joking aside. I understand the separate budgets, I am just not sure to what degree the presence of MP can affect the SP. And when profits are concerned it is not silly to allocate less money to the SP part in favor of adding MP, since the game will make roughly the same amount of money (marketing will make sure of that) if there is 100 or 130 hours of content. By gimping the SP and adding MP earns you more than either producing just a SP game or a game with the same amount of SP with extra MP.

 

I think my logic is not completely wrong in the last paragraph, but if you could comment on it, I would be grateful.

[durengo]

more news about a dlc.

 

 

http://conservativec...working-on-dlc/

[SwobyJ]

We already know they said they're working on DLC. At least I did.

 

Predict BE for March-April and story DLC April-May ("Oh hey Witcher 3! We have ___ goin on.")

 

I'd love another DLC for the summer and another for the autumn.

[KilrB]

The big question is ... how many patches will it take to fix the game after installing the dlc?

[AlanC9]

That is not what I meant and not what I said, next time you can ask if you are not sure instead of putting words in my mouth

You said "payed (sic) from the same big budget." I didn't put any words in your mouth. If "the same big budget" doesn't mean the same big budget, what does it mean?

And how am I misrepresenting your position?

You believe, that the MP part receives extra money - a separate budget the game would not have gotten otherwise and the budget for SP part stays exactly the same no matter what? Or could it be, that when there is MP planned, the budget for SP is set lower than what it would have been with no MP?

Why would the SP budget be set higher without MP? Why wouldn't they set the SP budget at whatever they thought was optimal?

If anything, I can see cutting the expensive things from the SP budget without MP, since the MP is apparently highly profitable. I've worked in subscription businesses where the supplemental stuff is priced at exploitative levels. If we couldn't have sold the supplements at such prices, we wouldn't have published the base products at the prices we did publish them at; those products existed at the price points they did because we knew that we could make our profits on the supplements.

[AlanC9]

I
Ok, joking aside. I understand the separate budgets, I am just not sure to what degree the presence of MP can affect the SP. And when profits are concerned it is not silly to allocate less money to the SP part in favor of adding MP, since the game will make roughly the same amount of money (marketing will make sure of that) if there is 100 or 130 hours of content. By gimping the SP and adding MP earns you more than either producing just a SP game or a game with the same amount of SP with extra MP.
 

You say "making the same amount of money" here. The total amount of money you make isn't really the issue; the question is what your return on investment is. In the long term staffing levels are flexible, and in the short term Bio can swap people between IPs fairly easily.

[Sylvius the Mad]

You say "making the same amount of money" here. The total amount of money you make isn't really the issue; the question is what your return on investment is. In the long term staffing levels are flexible, and in the short term Bio can swap people between IPs fairly easily.

I both applaud and pity your efforts to teach people basic economics.

[Jeffry]

You say "making the same amount of money" here. The total amount of money you make isn't really the issue; the question is what your return on investment is. In the long term staffing levels are flexible, and in the short term Bio can swap people between IPs fairly easily.

 

Yes, and? That is not in defense or in contradiction of anything anyone here has said. It is the same as if I quoted Adam Smith right now or something from an Econ 101 textbook. Also me saying "making money" does not mean I don't know basic economics, but since translating econ (as well as law) terms is kinda difficult for me, I am using the very basic layman's "terms". So next time, if you reply, you can keep your posts to only the EA issue.

 

 

Why would the SP budget be set higher without MP? Why wouldn't they set the SP budget at whatever they thought was optimal?

If anything, I can see cutting the expensive things from the SP budget without MP, since the MP is apparently highly profitable. I've worked in subscription businesses where the supplemental stuff is priced at exploitative levels. If we couldn't have sold the supplements at such prices, we wouldn't have published the base products at the prices we did publish them at; those products existed at the price points they did because we knew that we could make our profits on the supplements.

 

Why? For example to create a better game for their customers and clean a bit their tarnished reputation? Which we both know that happy customers are not the reason why EA makes games and we both know EA doesn't care about its reputation untill there is a massive sh*tstorm with possible law suits incoming.

 

Btw you can keep posting about your work experiences, but unless you have worked for EA at some higher tier job, you as well as I can't say anything for sure (makes you wonder why we still have this discussion). As of now we saw 2 BW games with added MP and they both had their SP portion rushed. Would the SP part be the same with no MP at all? Maybe. Maybe the SP part would be better because of it, since there would be stronger focus on making it better. Maybe it would be even worse, since the overall game would make less money (because of no microtransactions) and thus its budget would be set lower (because the projected revenue would be ofc lower).

 

I both applaud and pity your efforts to teach people basic economics.

 

I both applaud and pity his efforts to defend EA in this and many other threads. In every regard, almost all of their decisions, even the dubious and questionable ones. Makes you wonder why.

[Farangbaa]

Jeffry: the added expected revenue from multiplayer is much more likely to add to SP, than that it's going to detract from SP.

And how was DA:I rushed exactly? They got a whole extra year of development time from EA. A whole damn year! The game's gotta release at some point

[o Ventus]

 

I both applaud and pity his efforts to defend EA in this and many other threads. In every regard, almost all of their decisions, even the dubious and questionable ones. Makes you wonder why.

He only defends it from the idiotic and nonsensical posts that attack all of the wrong things.

 

Like yours did.

[AlanC9]

Yes, and? That is not in defense or in contradiction of anything anyone here has said. It is the same as if I quoted Adam Smith right now or something from an Econ 101 textbook. Also me saying "making money" does not mean I don't know basic economics, but since translating econ (as well as law) terms is kinda difficult for me, I am using the very basic layman's "terms". So next time, if you reply, you can keep your posts to only the EA issue.

You said "making the same amount of money," and I took that to mean that you meant making the same amount of money. As opposed to, say, talking about return on investment, or some other sensible approach to thinking about the topic. How should I have read "making the same amount of money"?
 

Why? For example to create a better game for their customers and clean a bit their tarnished reputation? Which we both know that happy customers are not the reason why EA makes games and we both know EA doesn't care about its reputation untill there is a massive sh*tstorm with possible law suits incoming.

Sure. They could. They don't feel they need to. If they need to do something more to retain you as a customer, well, I guess they've written you off as a customer.
 

Btw you can keep posting about your work experiences, but unless you have worked for EA at some higher tier job, you as well as I can't say anything for sure (makes you wonder why we still have this discussion).

It's an example of how business planning works. Have you actually worked? High enough to be exposed to project planning?

And if you don't think we can talk about this stuff sensibly, why do you keep bringing it up in multiple threads?

 

I both applaud and pity his efforts to defend EA in this and many other threads. In every regard, almost all of their decisions, even the dubious and questionable ones. Makes you wonder why.

Don't be silly. I disagree with EA when they actually do something wrong. If you had been right about this, I wouldn't have posted at all.

[Il Divo]

Jeffry: the added expected revenue from multiplayer is much more likely to add to SP, than that it's going to detract from SP.

And how was DA:I rushed exactly? They got a whole extra year of development time from EA. A whole damn year! The game's gotta release at some point

 

Pretty much how I feel. In terms of quality, I believe Bioware games have been all over the place, but I suspect the issues with Inquisition are less to do with time/money and more to do with Bioware overextending themselves in terms of total content. Mass Effect 3 was similar in that sense; there wasn't enough reactivity given what Bioware wanted to pull off. 

[AlanC9]

Pretty much how I feel. In terms of quality, I believe Bioware games have been all over the place, but I suspect the issues with Inquisition are less to do with time/money and more to do with Bioware overextending themselves in terms of total content. Mass Effect 3 was similar in that sense; there wasn't enough reactivity given what Bioware wanted to pull off.

Yeah, that's pretty much my take on it. Bio's lately been emphasizing reach over grasp. They used to abandon lots of ideas fairly early in development -- see, for instance, the way ME1 radically downsized the originally planned reactivity, both. physical and narrative. Even DA2 was a big experiment in RPG narrative structure. ME2 got away with it by pushing all the costs onto ME3.

[Jeffry]

And how was DA:I rushed exactly? They got a whole extra year of development time from EA. A whole damn year! The game's gotta release at some point

 

Can you picture the game being released a year sooner? 2 years for AAA games today is impossible (then you get such a mess like AC:U), even BF and CoD are now running on 3 years cycles. Ofc they got extra time when they had to switch engines. I feel the main story and extra content were rushed, or more along the way the world was filled with filler content because there was no time / resources for more meaningful one - for example FedEx quests starting from a note and ending in the middle of nowhere instead of the traditional BW approach where you interacted with various NPCs.

 

Like Il Divo said, I too feel BioWare overextended themselves. Honestly the game could do without 3 zones and the resources and time could have been spent on the main story or filling the rest of the zones with more engaging activities. But that is their fault and we can criticize them for that. More space to play in is not really better than having slightly less space but with more stuff to play in with. Or you know, do it the Bethesda way, release a blank slate video game and allow the people to mod it to their liking (and to fix the game for you for free, win win).

 

Also about the game being rushed, there were so many game-breaking bugs because it clearly was not as polished enough as it should have been (because EA at least for the past 2 years have been shipping games in basically their beta states - BF4, SimCity, Sims 4, NHL, FIFA and now DAI). For example the MP part was rushed as well, someone here on BSN in the MP section some time ago played a total of 340 games, made notes and the result was he couldn't complete almost a 1/3 of them because of bugs / glitches. For what product / at what job is a failure rate of 30% acceptable? And ofc MP lacks content as well.

 

 

He only defends it from the idiotic and nonsensical posts that attack all of the wrong things.

 

Like yours did.

 

I missed you too Well, sorry that I attack all the wrong things like false advertisement, lies, shady practices, money grubbing and so on. Should I be happy with them and defend them at all cost like you are trying to do more often than not? And you can think they are idiotic, but that is pretty much anything that doesn't fit your point of view according to your tone in all those posts of yours I have seen recently. Maybe you just had a bad day back then and are actually a very reasonable person, too bad I'll never know.

 

 

Sure. They could. They don't feel they need to. If they need to do something more to retain you as a customer, well, I guess they've written you off as a customer.

And if you don't think we can talk about this stuff sensibly, why do you keep bringing it up in multiple threads?

Don't be silly. I disagree with EA when they actually do something wrong. If you had been right about this, I wouldn't have posted at all.

 

Yeah, they pretty much have. Unfortunatelly it will change nothing, there will for now be more customers coming in than those running away from their products. It is pretty shocking what they are able to get away with with just hype and PR, but that is pretty much the state of the industry right now.

 

Honestly, I am not sure anymore. Probably in the hope someone can come up with something convincing enough to change my mind (and set it to ease about this issue). But that is basically hoping for an EA/BW whistle-blower to appear out of nowhere A bit silly, isn't it. (We had one from Maxis Emeryville studio few days ago tho, good read that was)

 

Fair enough, I might very well not be right about this issue (SP <-> MP) at all and I will drop it, for all we know nobody here is right. But honestly, you are saying you have not defended any of their wrong actions? I believe it was you who was arguing about for example if BW / EA had lied about stuff prior to DAI release (specifically PC controls, tac cam, many meaningful decisions, we reacting to world's reactions to our actions, etc.)

[Sylvius the Mad]

I both applaud and pity his efforts to defend EA in this and many other threads. In every regard, almost all of their decisions, even the dubious and questionable ones. Makes you wonder why.

1. That is not an accurate description of AlanC9's behaviour.

2. When I argue the other side of a position, it is nit always because I support that side, but often because the argument I'm countering is shallow and poorly conceived. I'm an enemy of shoddy reasoning more than I am of EA.

[Sylvius the Mad]

...for all we know nobody here is right.

This is very nearly the most important lesson anyone can learn, and something everyone should keep in mind basically all of the time.

[Jeffry]

1. That is not an accurate description of AlanC9's behaviour.

 

Well, maybe I have wrongly put him in a category of "EA supporters" because of his previous posts (those regarding the EA/BW lies before release). I know this is not fair at all and I am sorry for that, but he kinda earned it It should be noted though he earned it with flying colors (gz!), since I found his argumentation to be the best and most reasonable from all "EA supporters". I often don't know what to make of it, especially when compared to some other certain posters who are clearly oblivious to almost everything wrong with the game/BW/EA (won't point at them though, that would be rude).

 

This is very nearly the most important lesson anyone can learn, and something everyone should keep in mind basically all of the time.

 

Yup. But there are some cases when you are right and have proofs (real evidences) that you are, yet the other chooses not to see it. The key is knowing when it is so and when not and alas, this was not the case. I should have realized the possibility of nobody being right or wrong about this issue sooner, would save me some time.

[phantomrachie]

 

Ok, joking aside. I understand the separate budgets, I am just not sure to what degree the presence of MP can affect the SP. And when profits are concerned it is not silly to allocate less money to the SP part in favor of adding MP, since the game will make roughly the same amount of money (marketing will make sure of that) if there is 100 or 130 hours of content. By gimping the SP and adding MP earns you more than either producing just a SP game or a game with the same amount of SP with extra MP.

 

I think my logic is not completely wrong in the last paragraph, but if you could comment on it, I would be grateful.

 

That would make sense IF it was the same team making both SP & MP but they way BioWare has structured their org, there are always two separate teams.

 

So this is how it would work.

 

• Both SP & MP teams would create their project plan and forecast their budget. The teams would consult each other on their budget to see where they could share resources, like level design and each part of the game would have a cost next to it.
• There would be some tweaking as both budgets went up the chain to get approved
• EA may or may not require changes based on their overall development budget for all of their games. Like asking for an expensive feature to be changed to make it cheaper, or offering more money to use in house software (which I suspect happened with Frostbite 3)
• This approval process would be done separately for SP & MP because they would be submitted as separate budgets.

While it is possible that this could mean that SP would lose out on budget to MP, because the two teams are separate but work closely together, what is more likely to happen is that SP could save money by having MP develop a feature that would be used in both and spend that money on something else or vise versa.

[Monoservo]

i rather want them to take their time im still not done playing Inquisition i want to explore da3 more before i get the dlc common guys just play some other game if u that unmotivated , instead bio W should give us a bad product,, what about trying out the multiplayer part ?

[Jeffry]

(snip)

 

Thanks for the reply. Believe it or not, I actually defended ME3's MP back in 2012 on the very same grounds - that they were done by separate teams (and we knew exactly who they were - BW Edmonton and BW Montreal) with separate budgets. (We then even knew which team worked on what DLC and we know what team is working now on ME4)

 

The problem here is that in DAI I don't see this clear distinction. I don't know who is responsible for the MP part. And then also because of the state of the MP and because of post-launch care. In ME3MP we could clearly see they had it planned out pretty well, balance changes every week, free DLCs, active presence on the forums, etc. I don't see any of this in DAI, I only see a shoehorned MP with a serious lack of content and the skeleton crew trying to take care of it.

[ApocAlypsE007]

Fix the goddamn game, then we'll talk about DLC.

[In Exile]

Pretty much how I feel. In terms of quality, I believe Bioware games have been all over the place, but I suspect the issues with Inquisition are less to do with time/money and more to do with Bioware overextending themselves in terms of total content. Mass Effect 3 was similar in that sense; there wasn't enough reactivity given what Bioware wanted to pull off.

I actually think ME1 is a good parallel for DAI. The side quests got the exact same amount of care and investment.