Mass Effect Fan Negativity ‘Was Too Much’ For Ray & Greg’

An ex-Bioware developer has shed some light on Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk’s decision to leave BioWare and the games industry, claiming that they simply couldn’t handle the pressure any longer.

Ex-BioWare co-founder and Baldur’s Gate developer, Trent Oster, revealed to NowGamer that just before Muzyka and Greg hung their jerseys, he had a meeting with Zeschuk, and there it became apparent that the Mass Effect mastermind was terribly exhausted.

“The last time I met up with [Greg], I felt his exhaustion,” Oster said. “Punch out, eject, get the hell out”, was my suggestions to him and it hit closer to the mark than I had realised. I also think the Mass Effect 3 fan reaction and the Old Republic fans negativity was just too much.”

“You have to love games and you put your heart into them to create them. To have the fans creating petitions against the work is pretty hard to take, especially when you’ve spent the last few years crunching overtime to try and ship a game. It can be hard to shut off the overwhelming negativity the internet spews forth, especially when it has your name or the name of your company in it.”

Oster said Zeschuk resignation didn’t surprise him one bit, however when he learned that Muzyka was also waving the industry goodbye, that came as a shock.

“Ray surprised me,” Oster continued. “I had him pegged as an EA lifer. My thought was the Ray agenda was to first usurp Frank Gibeau and then later John Riccotello as CEO.

I’m sure the internal culture at EA had pinned the Old Republic conversion to free to play as a failure and hung that completely on Ray, so that would have hurt his upward climb. But, I figured he would fight harder. EA upper management must have been even worse than I thought.”