Mike Laidlaw leaves BioWare

[fantadomat]

That "We will see each other again." sounds like Mark Darrah will be quitting Titanic 2 soon.

 

[J_C]

I know I'm a bit behind the times in twitter culture, but why is this written on his twitter account: "He/Him. Poly." ?

It is a thing in Twitter cuckture to explicitly tell people what pronouns you want to go with. So for example: "He/Him", "She/Her" (rare), "They/Them" (kinda rare), "Fag/Faggot" etc. Apparently "He/Him" is the most common one, so it really is a cuckture going on.

Dafakk? I can look at his picture and I can see that he is a beardy man. Of course i will call him with "he/him". He doesn't have to spell it out for me. What, does he think I will call him a She? Fucking internet culture.

 

[Urthor]

So didn't the exact same thing happen to Andromeda in like 2015 and then they redid a chunk of the game and it was actual literal garbage? Is DA4 in trouble?

 

[Roguey]

Is DA4 in trouble?

A creative director/lead designer leaving in the middle of a project would suggest so, yes.

 

[fantadomat]

Is DA4 in trouble?

It is made by Bioware....off-course it is!

 

[Frozen]

shut it down

 

[fantadomat]

Hahahahaha bright future indeed !

 

[Xeon]

This guy's camera seems to be pretty good, quality of his face is outstanding.

yeah got nothing else to say

 

[Iznaliu]

I have a feeling that there may be more occurring at Bioware than meets the eye; it will remain to see whether they will weather the internal turmoil that is likely happening.

 

[Zer0wing]

Why is animators so shunned at Bioware? It's important since they never put them to good use ever since Mass Effect 1.

 

[Freddie]

Why is animators so shunned at Bioware? It's important since they never put them to good use ever since Mass Effect 1.

Yeah, especially after what masterpiece of animation ME: Andromeda turned out to be one can't but wonder what's their problem.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

EA made them change engines at some point during the development process and it completely screwed up the existing animations according to some dev interview I read.

 

[Freddie]

EA made them change engines at some point during the development process and it completely screwed up the existing animations according to some dev interview I read.

EA chose Frostbite engine for all EA studios to use.

That said, why do almost all aliens in ME series has 4 fingers instead of 5? and it happened that Protheans were retconned to space bugs because animators couldn't animate tentacle faces. And what happened to certain enemies in ME3, oh wait, animators couldn't animate them. Damn, so unreasonable demands.

I mean all the effort they gave. Like:

 

[Iznaliu]

Why is animators so shunned at Bioware? It's important since they never put them to good use ever since Mass Effect 1.

It could be that internal company culture decided that animators weren't necessary to produce a well-selling RPG, and that was only vindicated by the success of games like DA:I and other companies' games, such as Fallout 4.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Good riddance... that won't save bioware tough.

 

[fantadomat]

Good riddance... that won't save bioware tough.

We still haven't invented the resurrection spell. Humanity is lacking in the white magic skill tree.

 

[Santander02]

So, who's even left from the old guard at this point?

 

[RepHope]

So, who's even left from the old guard at this point?

Hudson? The guy in charge of KOTOR is in charge of TOR now.

 

[Infinitron]

BioWare has had more retention than many people expect. James Ohlen (lead designer), Mark Darrah (programmer), Lukas Kristjanson (writer), all worked on Baldur's Gate and are still there.

 

[DragoFireheart]

fuck bioware

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Bioware credibility now is under the grave.. And the fact they are also EA don't help either... considering the shitstorm on EA about SWB2... Also unlike the past now there is a lot more competition on RPG...

For action rpg they released inquisition and felt way much subpar compared with witcher 3 also was a really bad mediocre title.. Then the mess that was Mass Effect Andromeda...

Will be interesting to see how they will slowly crumble....

 

[DragoFireheart]

Bioware credibility now is under the grave.. And the fact they are also EA don't help either... considering the shitstorm on EA about SWB2... Also unlike the past now there is a lot more competition on RPG...

For action rpg they released inquisition and felt way much subpar compared with witcher 3 also was a really bad mediocre title.. Then the mess that was Mass Effect Andromeda...

Will be interesting to see how they will slowly crumble....

fuck bioware!

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news..._Mike_Laidlaw_shares_storytelling_lessons.php

Ex-BioWare scribe Mike Laidlaw shares storytelling lessons

Mike Laidlaw, who recently stepped down as creative director at BioWare, took a break from his new consulting firm to talk to GDC about what he’s learned about writing and narrative design from his many years with the legendary game studio.

“Trust” is the theme he framed his talk with. “The key thing is to establish trust” in a team, he said, drawing on what he did in corralling BioWare’s writers to work as a team.

“Making sentences out of words appears to be the same skill-set as writing and storytelling. It’s not,” he said, but added that above and beyond that is the overriding need to “win the hearts and minds of your team,” whether as a director or a rank and file team-member. As a foundation, you have to schedule things properly. He managed to make the concept of scheduling a fascinating exploration of the fundamentals of game development.

“A writer can casually write ‘and the universe explodes,’ and it turns out… that’s really hard to render,” Laidlaw said, as he emphasized the importance of working with “downstream teams,” like editing, VO, cinematics, localization and QA, all of which depend on the writers to produce something viable to workshop. As he described it, his games began from the ground up with writing, where an approximate draft was needed before anything else could be done.

You can mitigate time loss by targeting cinematic and performance capture content locks first--meaning that in order to schedule responsibly, you would write for things that had a very high dependency on downstream departments. In addition, all major characters need one piece of marquee content early to ensure that the VO casting “sticks,” ensuring that a perfectly characteristic scene is ready to go and used by the VO team to cast the right actor. He also suggested working closely with translators and clearly tagging each piece of content with the status of every parallel bit of work it depends on.

Laidlaw went into detail about “Crumple” plans, which are, essentially, strategies to reduce the size of a game, scaling it back to realistic expectations. “As a writer, you have said ‘I’m not precious, I’ve created something that can survive an impact,’” he said, likening this to a car that has ‘crumple zones’ to absorb impacts during a crash. He argued that even a tightly plotted game, where everything that happened was “critical content,” could still stand to be reduced by about 25 percent in scope. By contrast, for a more expansive game, like Inquisition, he argued that no more than 25 percent of such a vast and open-world game should be “critical” content.

Equally essential to good scheduling, in Laidlaw’s view, is articulating a clear theme for your game. Inquisition was about “faith and what happens when that faith is challenged.” Centralizing such a snappy “vision touchstone” is essential to getting comfortable with making elevator pitches, a process that allows you to quickly sell every major moment in your game.

“An instantly graspable thing that allows you to… create a shorthand that gets everyone on track,” he said, noting the example of the Temple of Mythal scene in Inquisition was pitched as Dragon Age meets Indiana Jones, a simple and memetic idea that gave everyone a standard around which to rally, giving the players a sacred place where they had a choice of respecting or desecrating it.

For Laidlaw, developing a vision was essential for creating a framework for feedback during BioWare peer review of the evolving game. That, then, created a spine for a structured system--peer review followed a precise set of rules at BioWare.

“Multi-discipline fixes are the best fixes because everyone plays to their strength, which is why other departments were always at reviews,” he noted, saying that this particularly helped with preventing a major problem with writers where we tend to solve thematic issues with more words. “Oh, this character is sad but the text doesn’t make that clear. Well, animation can make her cry and change her posture, you don’t need to add more words.”

Another important rule was that junior writers were able to hear and give feedback to peers and leads alike, where “celebrity” writers were put on the same level as new blood. This, Laidlaw says, made the constructive criticism of peer review useful to everyone.

“Be transparent, be open, and then, be vulnerable,” he said. “Feedback you get from your team is feedback you can use to change.”

Once again, emotional intelligence was prized, “make efforts to earn the trust of the team around you. Make clear that what you do is not just put words into sentences, you write.” Leadership, even, requires vulnerability. This, he said, “is probably the lesson that I learned at BioWare.”

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Ladiaw storytelling truly a pinnacle!

Ladiaw... Get another job

 

[Terra]

Scribe, lol. If I ever want to quickly tank and piss away the potential of one of the few promising crpg franchises in the space of two games, I'll look you up Mike. As it stands, I'll maintain my stance of never touching anything you're associated with, that is the lesson I learned from BioWare.