The shuttering of Visceral Games, and shifting the studio’s Star Wars game from a single-player, story-driven title to a multiplayer open-world one got here as a shock to individuals outdoors of EA.
For individuals who labored at EA, nonetheless, this pivot wasn’t stunning in any respect. For gameplay designer at BioWare, Manveer Heir, who labored on multiplayer in Mass Effect three and later Mass Effect Andromeda, mentioned that this transfer was “a thing inside EA.”
“They are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetise them better,” he mentioned on the Waypoint podcast (by way of Eurogamer).
“Why do you care about that at EA? The reason you care about that is because microtransactions: buying card packs in the Mass Effect games, the multiplayer. It’s the same reason we added card packs to Mass Effect 3: how do you get people to keep coming back to a thing instead of ‘just’ playing for 60 to 100 hours?”
Heir touched as regards to bloated recreation budgets, usually pushing nicely previous $100 million. According to the designer, this doesn’t depart room for mid-tier, single-player-only video games with smaller budgets as a result of “publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment.”
“They don’t actually care about what the players want, they care about what the players will pay for,” he added.
Heir gave the instance of microtransactions in Mass Effect three multiplayer, which made a lot cash that EA determined to have an analogous multiplayer mode in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and naturally in Andromeda.
“I’ve seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards,” he recalled.
The unnamed Star Wars venture is now being constructed by EA’s new Motive studio, and EA didn’t share another particulars in regards to the recreation past the shift in scope.
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