Overwhelming fan negativity for Mass Effect ‘was too much’ for Ray & Greg, claims Ex Bioware dev

Legends

Bioware founders recently left EA and the gaming industry and they also posted a lengthy response, which you can read over here. However, an Ex-Bioware dev has revealed that overwhelming fan negativity for games like Mass Effect 3 and Old Republic took its toll on ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

“The last time I met up with [Greg], I felt his exhaustion,” explained Oster. “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,” Ex-BioWare co-founder and Baldur’s Gate developer Trent Oster, told Nowgamer.

“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.

“Ray surprised me. 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.”

EA upper management is to be blamed as well, according to Oster.

“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.”

Truly some shocking revelations here. Whatever it is, two terrific game developers have left the game industry and such a void can never be filled soon. Was the fan reaction for Mass Effect 3 so bad that it upset the working environment at Bioware? Are gamers somewhere at fault for trying to make a mountain out of a molehill? I guess it’s a combination of factors that made Greg and Ray lose interest in the gaming industry.

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