Mass Effect Andromeda Studio To Merge With EA’s Motive
EA announced BioWare Montreal will merge with Motive Studios. BioWare Montreal was known for its work on Mass Effect Andromeda.
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This may be the end of BioWare Montreal. EA has recently announced they will be merging the beleaguered Montreal-based studio with Motive Studios, the creators of the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront 2.
To those paying attention to the EA development scene, this comes as no surprise. After the disappointing results of Mass Effect: Andromeda, EA had been quietly shuffling BioWare Montreal developers onto other projects, with many of them said to be working on getting Star Wars ready for launch. A tiny staff of 10-12 employees remained to support Andromeda and continue to develop its multiplayer content.
Merging the two Montreal studios into one makes sense, especially if they’re both working on the same game.
EA confirmed the merger in a statement published by TechRaptor:
“The teams in EA Worldwide Studios are packed with talent, and more than ever, we’re driving collaboration between studios on key projects. With multiple major projects in development in Montreal, we are merging BioWare Montreal with Motive Studios. This is an ongoing process, but there are many exciting roles and opportunities for everyone on the team.”
“BioWare continues its work on new titles – including the highly-anticipated game, Anthem. What’s coming next for BioWare is very exciting, and we’re thrilled to have Casey Hudson returning to lead the studios in Edmonton and Austin.”
BioWare Montreal was originally created as a spinoff from the original BioWare (based in Edmonton, Canada) back in 2009. At first, the studio made use of former UbiSoft employees to assist with the development of projects such as Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins but then went on to work on their own projects such as the Leviathan downloadable content for Mass Effect 3.
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Mass Effect: Andromeda was the first fully fledged game the new studio would create from the ground up. Unfortunately for Mass Effect fans, the studio would have trouble from day one of the game’s 5-year development cycle. Over the course of development, Andromeda would face a director change, multiple rewrites, an understaffed animation team, tech issues, brutal office politics, and of course, a crunch time that made everything so much worse.
The final product was released with much fanfare but was quickly panned by critics and players alike. Complaints of bugs, wonky facial animations, and generally poor writing. Today, Mass Effect: Andromeda has a Metacritic score of 72 – lower than any other BioWare ever released.
Motive Studios is a relatively new studio working on Star Wars Battlefront 2. Early previews for the game have been resoundingly positive, and it seems the new studio has learned from the mistakes made by their predecessors, EA DICE, who made the first Battlefront game.
However, office troubles are known to exist in BioWare Montreal, will the merger with a seemingly productive studio be the best thing for their upcoming blockbuster title? EA has a history of poorly timed and planned mergers resulting in some truly awful games. Hopefully, this one won’t be one of them.
Freelance writer and contributor at The Gamer, Sean hails from Toronto, Canada. If you ask Sean what he likes, he’ll say, “Robots, Ninjas, donuts – in that order.”
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/mass-effect-andromeda-studio-to-merge-with-eas-motive/