As a person that worked at BioWare for 10 years. This is my theory. They just laid off 50 people src: theverge.com/…/bioware-layoffs-dragon-age-dreadwo… Based on my current knowledge, Dragon Age and Mass Effect are still on; however, kotor 3 was pretty early. Some people suggested the 50 people were from swtor, however, BioWare Austin was sold to another publisher Broadsword: …swtor.com/…/929816-an-update-on-the-development-…
When i was at EA, support orgs were moved to internal EA and only the game team was specic to the studio. 50 people does not equal support, 50 people is a new project.
I theorized they cancelled kotor 3 then laid off a bunch of people, then transferred a bunch of people to mass effect and dragon age. I’ve been through 2 layoffs with EA and this is exactly what they do. It’s a shame because it was a long held passion project for a lot of the devs.
Indeed, who are they even going to piss off, it’s not like there’s a ton of people playing in Ukrainian who’ll be offended by the localization choices. (Although maybe in 20 years or something, references to the warship and such might be harder, but I imagine the crimes one will make even more sense)
I'm not a fan of games that are designed by committee, and I fear AI-generated games would take that to the 11th degree.
Given that, I feel very specific aspects could still be vastly improved by AI, like games that implement procedural generation; I feel like his mention of procedural fears more of everything becoming procedural, instead of it supplementing the pre-existing applications of it. Those kinds of games hit a plateau at a certain point in the gameplay loop - the limitations of the tiles or combinations of assets starts to become very predictable and doesn't achieve the purpose it sets out to at that point.
Also to take into account, AI needs a dataset to train it, and to avoid the homogenization he fears would involve producing datasets for specific tasks, and differentiating them from one another; to me, devs producing these unique datasets to sell is inevitable, and there's definitely going to be a lot of "shovelware"-quality datasets being thrown around. The ethics of the data contained in a lot of those kinds of ones will definitely be questionable.
I watched two of the three, and really enjoyed them. Sure, I'd much rather see more gameplay, and they didn't do anything to sell me on the game itself, but they were enjoyable nonetheless
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