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.”
mass effect 3 had the perfect ending stop btiching and grow up it M for mature not every ending has to be happy, and it was good that it ended right there to avoid cod syndrome
its a shame how thankless the industry has become, people really have become spoiled brats!
BUT that said i kinda cant blame them when you have developers selling you bullshit 24/7!
if i had a nickel for every promise ME3 broke, well, id never have to work another second in my life!
so yea i got sympathy for the developers, they pour 3 years of their life into these things to get thanked like this.
but when your lying to your customers day in, day out, when you create something they love then take a shit on it, you kinda brought it on yourself!
If they left the industry because of fan backlash, that says a lot.
I am sorry…but I call BULLSHIT on this one. If you are a serious fan of Mass Effect 3 you can clearly see that the Ending was not part of the plan. It was a last minute, rushed addition to ME3.I love ME3…the game was amazing but it is so clear that little to no thought or effort went into the game’s ending. And now they wanna blame fans as one of the reasons they left?? I got 2 words for Ray & Greg….but I am not gonna say them here as I have respect for www.Gamesthirst.com. The fact is you 2 jokers will not be men and come out and admitt what has REALLY gone wrong with Bioware…so the best you can do is blame it on the fans? Shame on you!!!