The thing that bugs me about it that Bioware seems to have strayed too far from their mission statement 'to deliver the best storydriven games in the world' to the all hail the mighty US dollar. This is what I read into Myzyka's comment abou it, the games, not being abstract, but instead being 'commercial art'.
Video game companies that don't focus on making money get to make, on average, 0.75 games before they go out of business. It might be a really great three-quarters of a game, but unless a whole bunch of post-company-death fan patches come through, that's all it is.
It is also rather clear to me that Bioware's focus now unfortunately seem to be about making money, not about making the greatest storydriven games in the world that in turn would make Bioware enough money to stay afloat and alive as (an) independent game developer.
And how is that clear to you, exactly? The easiest way to simplify Mass Effect would have been to force you to do the planets in one order, remove leveling, and just make it a straight-line action shooter that happened to have some story-based cutscenes. Heck, to hear some folks say it, that's what we did... except that there are a couple dozen uncharted worlds floating around there, along with a dozen or so talking plots on the Citadel, three or four different ways to talk your way into the labs on Noveria, and at least one planet on which multiple followers may die, and since that planet can be done in different orders, those deaths have to be accounted for on other planets. Hell, the game might have been more profitable if we'd tossed all choices out the window and made a shooter with some well-written cutscenes. We probably could have gotten multiplayer in there, too.
You may not agree with
how Ray and Greg have opted to focus on storytelling -- you might think that storytelling requires turn-based gameplay for some reason, or you might think that storytelling requires an open world, or that storytelling precludes player voice-over. I don't know what your definition is. But your definition is too narrow, by my standards. I don't love everything Mass Effect is and does, but it isn't lacking for storytelling.
As for what would make the company stay afloat, you must have been looking at BioWare's finances at a deeper level than I have, which is surprising. And moving beyond financial information that you know nothing about and I know little about, moving to EA is, I think, going to make BioWare make better games in the long run, for a few simple reasons:
1) Before this, Ray and Greg spent about half their time,
if not more so, traveling to different publishers to do talks about upcoming games and figure out what the best deal for BioWare was. That article about glamor over games in the other thread? All that moving and shaking wasn't something that happened in their spare time. As part of EA, BioWare now has a publisher lined up for every future game, as I understand it -- and that means that Ray and Greg can spend less time trying to secure a publisher and more time keeping a closer eye on games. You want BioWare to get back to its roots? This is going to help.
2) If you accept that BioWare games have to have cutting-edge technology (and if you don't, tough luck, because people far above you and me have already answered that one), it makes a lot of sense to be with EA, where we've got a ton of resources that can help teams develop games faster. In Mass Effect, we had to worry about what someone's frelling eyebrows looked like. You wonder why the game is shorter than BG2? It's because you're worrying about the eyebrows, and the tone of the voice, and the way that hand comes up, and where they're standing on the conversation stage, on top of everything you were worrying about in BG2 (is this the right time for this conversation to happen, is this the right node to fire, does this convey the right information to the player?). If working with EA means that our level-art textures come in faster because we get to use an EA-internal-use-only tool, then I'm all for it. EA isn't telling us how to tell our stories. They're giving us tools that get impediments out of our way, so that we can actually get back to telling stories.
3) Most video-game employees are run by people who like making video games more than money. This is great for the games, but not great for things like scheduling, resource planning, and all of the other stuff that makes sure that we ship a polished game at something close to the time we said we were going to do so, more or less around the right budget. Working for EA is going to kick us in the butt a bit and make us design more intelligently. That doesn't mean cutting depth. That means planning smart and executing well so that you don't
have to cut that really deep meaningful thing at the end.