Star Wars: The Old Republic Going Third-Party as BioWare Focuses on Mass Effect and Dragon Age

[TrixxieTriss]

2 hours ago, Quantum said:

Why would they when all of Broadsword works remotely?

We’re assuming they have an office that is based in Virginia. How do you know they all work remotely 🤷🏻‍♀️ Do you have some inside info on the company you’d like to share? 

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

6 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

We’re assuming they have an office that is based in Virginia. How do you know they all work remotely 🤷🏻‍♀️ Do you have some inside info on the company you’d like to share? 

Gotta ❤️ the Trixxie-Baby.

👍

[OlBuzzard]

9 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

We’re assuming they have an office that is based in Virginia. How do you know they all work remotely 🤷🏻‍♀️ Do you have some inside info on the company you’d like to share? 

While some MIGHT (and probably do) .. IMO it would depend largely upon the nature / role of the individual.  I would imagine that in some cases it would simply be impractical to be "offsite".

All speculative at best!

Edited June 10, 2023 by OlBuzzard

[Quantum]

10 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

We’re assuming they have an office that is based in Virginia. How do you know they all work remotely 🤷🏻‍♀️ Do you have some inside info on the company you’d like to share? 

I help run one of the oldest continually running gaming fansites on the internet, it's centered on Ultima Online,  keeping up with Broadsword is part of what we do.  They had an office based in VA,  when everything went remote for COVID the company decided it worked well enough they would continue on that way and save the money over renting a physical location.  

[Whykara]

12 minutes ago, Quantum said:

I help run one of the oldest continually running gaming fansites on the internet, it's centered on Ultima Online,  keeping up with Broadsword is part of what we do.  They had an office based in VA,  when everything went remote for COVID the company decided it worked well enough they would continue on that way and save the money over renting a physical location.  

That's interesting, would you mind sharing your own opinion on the planned Broadsword takeover? How does Broadsword handle UO, and how is player interaction?

[TrixxieTriss]

58 minutes ago, Quantum said:

I help run one of the oldest continually running gaming fansites on the internet, it's centered on Ultima Online,  keeping up with Broadsword is part of what we do.  They had an office based in VA,  when everything went remote for COVID the company decided it worked well enough they would continue on that way and save the money over renting a physical location.  

Thank you for the info. This is what most work places should do, but won’t.

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

2 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Thank you for the info. This is what most work places should do, but won’t.

Well if that's true than that would mean the BW devs they're moving over to Broadsword wouldn't have to move and thereby make it more likely they'd be willing to do it, no?

I mean if they had to move I could see that being a roadblock for some of the Devs and I could see some of them turning it down.

May be the first good news since the announcement.

[TrixxieTriss]

24 minutes ago, WayOfTheWarriorx said:

Well if that's true than that would mean the BW devs they're moving over to Broadsword wouldn't have to move and thereby make it more likely they'd be willing to do it, no?

I mean if they had to move I could see that being a roadblock for some of the Devs and I could see some of them turning it down.

May be the first good news since the announcement.

To me it sounds like EA/BioWare want to completely shut BW Austin down.

So unless there are other EA studios in TX, working remotely for Broadsword or another EA studio is their only other option besides relocating or taking redundancy. 

It must be a very stressful time for the whole BW Austin team. And having IGN leak the news before it’s finalised, means more pressure on everyone there.

Wether we like/dislike the dev team personally or think BW dropped the ball with swtor’s development, we should all have some empathy for the human beings who work there & have had their whole lives thrown into the air. 

As much as I want answers as to what’s to come. I recognise that they need to finalise the deal first. I just hope they give fair warning & plenty of time for any major changes that directly affect the players. That’s my only concern. 

Edited June 10, 2023 by TrixxieTriss

[OlBuzzard]

36 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

To me it sounds like EA/BioWare want to completely shut BW Austin down.

So unless there are other EA studios in TX, working remotely for Broadsword or another EA studio is their only other option besides relocating or taking redundancy. 

It must be a very stressful time for the whole BW Austin team. And having IGN leak the news before it’s finalised, means more pressure on everyone there.

Wether we like/dislike the dev team personally or think BW dropped the ball with swtor’s development, we should all have some empathy for the human beings who work there & have had their whole lives thrown into the air. 

As much as I want answers as to what’s to come. I recognise that they need to finalise the deal first. I just hope they give fair warning & plenty of time for any major changes that directly affect the players. That’s my only concern. 

On this we agree completely!  Well said!

[OlBuzzard]

3 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Thank you for the info. This is what most work places should do, but won’t.

IMO ... this is one of those subjects that depends entirely on the company / it's product AND the personality of those running it!  For some folks this works just fine!  I know of one tech company (small in size) ...  builds computers for individual or corporate applications .. and they now have a "virtual" office.  (Yes, this was a direct side effect of the Covid crisis).  For them it was working just fine.  Components needed were shipped directly to the owners home... and then picked up by the technicians as needed.  All of them worked well together... so ..  yeah it was fine!

On the other hand ..  I've seen some REAL knot-heads in my life.  Honestly... they couldn't manage a Tupperware party without breaking something or just plain getting things messed up.  They needed CLOSE management!  (If you catch my drift).

In tech support areas it is much easier to manage in a "virtual" office setting and IMO can work easily with the right people working together!

[Quantum]

10 hours ago, Whykara said:

That's interesting, would you mind sharing your own opinion on the planned Broadsword takeover? How does Broadsword handle UO, and how is player interaction?

I'm not really sure what to think about it.  If and when it goes through, it will be interesting.  Nothing has happened like this before with Broadsword, and if half the SWTOR teams joins them it will likely more than double the size of the studio.   That is where the uncertainty comes in on my part.  I can't really make a good guess as to how a new title making up such a large portion of the studio would be handled by the head man Rob Denton, or how much EA is going to demand knowing that SWTOR will be the biggest project they (Broadsword) have as part of the contract for Broadsword to manage, develop and maintain titles on EA's behalf, which incidentally is 100% of Broadswords revenue, they have no IPs of their own to fall back on if their deal with EA turns sour. 

I know that with UO, it's team and producer have a good amount of freedom in their creative choices, but they also make up the smallest portion of the studio's total employee base.  As for interaction, I don't know about how Broadswords other title DAoC handles things, but UO has individuals contracted in to create unique content for each server, in addition to content that comes from the development team that due to the team size makes up a minority of the content added to the game.  The Producer backs contractors in that endeavor and manages the team of contractors personally.   I can't see something like this happening with SWTOR however due to the greater complexity of the game.

As for interaction, they used to do regular meet and greet nights that rotated through the various servers, but those seem to have fallen to the wayside about 2 years ago, as they have been working on a seasonal server format that is occupying the very small development team's focus.  They still publish a newsletter, and the producer welcomes emails from the player base. 

[Stradlin]

1 hour ago, Quantum said:

. 

I know that with UO, it's team and producer have a good amount of freedom in their creative choices, but they also make up the smallest portion of the studio's total employee base.  

...Which is quite strange. UO must bring like 5 times as much money as DAOC manages, yet they don't really give Ultima the spotlight.

Broadsword is independent technically, but I wonder how full control EA has over the studio and all that  happens within it. Nearly absolute would be my guess. I assume EA basically handles all the costs,pays all the bills, essentially pays them a  salary and collects all the profits. 

 

Clearly EA is happy with Broadsword, no way they would otherwise push for something like this. I'd be amazed to learn this in anyway is Broadsword's initiative.

 

Edited June 11, 2023 by Stradlin

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

11 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

To me it sounds like EA/BioWare want to completely shut BW Austin down.

So unless there are other EA studios in TX, working remotely for Broadsword or another EA studio is their only other option besides relocating or taking redundancy. 

It must be a very stressful time for the whole BW Austin team. And having IGN leak the news before it’s finalised, means more pressure on everyone there.

Wether we like/dislike the dev team personally or think BW dropped the ball with swtor’s development, we should all have some empathy for the human beings who work there & have had their whole lives thrown into the air. 

As much as I want answers as to what’s to come. I recognise that they need to finalise the deal first. I just hope they give fair warning & plenty of time for any major changes that directly affect the players. That’s my only concern. 

Wow Trixxie, this was a beautifully written post. Concise, empathic, and apropo. No wonder it got so many likes.

I guess in the meantime the best thing (and only thing) we can do is keep our fingers crossed.

+1 to the Trixxie-Baby.

 

[aeterno]

Game has a decent size player base that's stable and was clearly still profitable.

What worries me is that, with the SW exclusivity deal gone, IP licensing they've now set up with darth Mickey has hit the bottom line enough for EA to be willing to wash their hands of the game and the steady revenue stream it represented...

Meaning resources will likely be scanter for the new studio. And SWTOR type content takes money to produce. I don't think the game is being propped up because of the pvp/raiding scene as much as by people into the setting/their personal sw fantasy. A reduction to minimalistic mmo group content probably won't serve the bulk of the remaining player base.

But then again it's pretty safe to assume EA/BW didn't exactly re-invest the vast majority of the revenue back into the game, so it's all speculation.

It all depends on the scope of ambition of the new studio, do they plan to still be the glorified maintenance crew or use the opportunity to step up to the higher leagues... we'll see soon enough I guess. 

 

[Planner]

On 6/9/2023 at 12:17 AM, casirabit said:

You are also assuming those people want to move to Virginia and that might not happen.  Moving from Texas to Virigina will be costly, even doing it yourself.  I know when I moved from Texas to South Carolina it was expensive to do so, and Virginia is even further than South Carolina.

Fairfax is a crazy expensive place to live.  From what I have found, Fairfax is ~12.5 more expensive than Austin.  Combine that with high mortgage rates and abysmal traffic, I'm not too sure it's going to give many of those employees as pause.   

[Syal]

So, we're going to have updates that are even poorer in content than now!!! so excited!

[Hadsil]

Leaves hope the new owners will create new content. Continuing the story likely, new Class Stories for a new storyline as a dream. Would be cool to see one of your characters in that class in a cameo.