TGO Daily | November 4 | BioWare Departures
It’s the end of the week already! The days are going by faster and faster.
Today, we’re looking at four major career shifts. I like to chart people’s careers with events like these. Too often we’re left with no idea of who makes our games besides the brand that is slapped on it.
I’ll be back Monday with the weekend news wrap-up. Hope you’re doing extremely well :)
Adrian
In The News
BioWare Departures
Two major figures from BioWare left the company today: general manager Casey Hudson, and the executive producer of Dragon Age Mark Darrah. Both announced their retirements from the company (read: they quit the company) on the same day, and without a definitive path forward.
Both Hudson and Darrah left blog posts upon their leave, which spoke very highly of the company, the team they were leaving, and the people who would be replacing them. While these two resignations may have coincidentally lined up at the same time, there is also chatter from industry professionals about how abrupt this is. With both Dragon Age 4 and the Mass Effect remasters in the works…let’s just say it’s usually not a great sign for leadership to change hands during projects like that.
Keep your fingers crossed!
Two New Studios
Speaking of personnel changing hands, we’ve also got the creation of two new studios from industry veterans!
The first is a development company called Liquid Swords, which is created by the founder of Avalanche Studios (Just Cause, Mad Max), Christofer Sundberg. He left Avalanche in 2019 after 16 years with the company, and only 1 year after it got acquired by a larger studio. He has stated that he wants to make similar experiences to Just Cause with Liquid Swords.
The other new company is called Bokeh Game Studio, and is formed by Keiichiro Toyama, who is the creator of Silent Hill (more recently, Gravity Rush). This means that Toyama has left Sony after more than 20 years with the company, which is pretty wild. They’re still a few years from putting out a game, but already their concept art is showing off some spookiness.
Haven Released and Reviewed
French indie developer The Game Bakers (Furi) have released their newest game, Haven.
Here’s a great description of the game:
Yu and Kay are two people stuck on an isolated planet together…Haven bounces between…two driving concepts, emphasizing Yu and Kay’s relationship at home in their spaceship, then following them as they explore the planet’s mysterious frontiers. The result is a low-impact fusion of visual novel and RPG…
Most reviewers agreed that the narrative and relationship dynamics worked very well, so if you are in to visual-novel type experiences, you’ll probably like this. It also has a local co-op mode where you each control the dialogue and actions of one character, which I imagine would be a lot fun.
Unfortunately the second half of the game, exploration and combat, was not well received. At best its tedious (IGN), at worst it’s dull and derivative (DualShockers). So if you pick this up, be aware that you’re probably relying on the narrative to pick up the slack (which it did for a few critics).
I played the demo for this game and saw a lot of potential with the concept. It’s a beautiful game, using a great pastel colour scheme, but I definitely understand how it could get repetitive. If you’ve got a partner to play with though, I’m sure it’d be a lot of fun.
Also In The News
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