Former BioWare Studio Head Shares What It's Really Like Working Under EA (UPDATED)

With some of our favourite BioWare team members leaving the studio after over a decade of dedicated service, it's hard for long-time fans to come to terms as to why they would want to leave. Usually, it's for the simple reason of "it's time to move on" and we have all heard how demanding the timetable is over at that studio with Electronic Arts at the helm. The mega publisher definitely has efficiency in mind when looking at the game creation process, but many reports have mentioned that it borders on abusive. Both BioWare members and fans alike have brought about both sides of that speculation, and now we can hear a little more direct from the source with the former Studio Head; Aaryn Flynn.

Kotaku recently sat down with Flynn during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. One of the more interesting topics discussed was how different the environment changed once EA took over and what it was like to leave after BioWare having been called home for so long.

With all of the negative press EA has had in the past, moreso recently, you might be surprised to learn that Flynn actually felt empowered by the shift. He told Kotaku's Jason Schreider, "Well, I think the shift is in some ways empowering. Because one of the things that I always felt was tough about being at BioWare when we were independent, talking about Edmonton, is that you feel very isolated when you're up in Edmonton, at least I did. To be part of a community of developers who can all share and relate to you…"

He then went on to explain about what it was like for this smaller, independent company to suddenly become a part of something much bigger and more corporate:

"When you join EA, and you get to be part of that, all of a sudden you're connected with all of these folks who have this perspective that's similar to you, they kinda grew up doing the same things, they have their own war stories, they have their own all that. But then they can bring perspective you don't have. And it feels like, wow, I can just get on a flight and I can fly to Stockholm and spend time at this amazing studio there, or I could go to Guilford UK, and spend some time [there], that's amazing. And it does take some time to get your head around that. You do have to shift your midset to be, we're all part of one big unit now. And that should be a good thing, right?

So yeah, I think the best part of it is the empowering part of it. And you know, like they said in Dead Poet's Society, I told you to drink from the marrow of life, not choke on the bone. Certainly it's fair to say that you have to manage that and still stay true to what you want to do, and stay true to your own culture. Not just see what other studios are doing and say, well, we should do that there! Maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't, there should be a more fulsome conversation about that, really get your head around what that means for yourself."

That being said, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. The subject of EA's most recent mistakes, namely Mass Effect Andromeda and Star Wars Battlefront II, came up and he definitely had a few things to say about the jokingly dubbed "EA: Atrocities and Horror." But it's not, in Flynn's experience, the "horror" show many imagine it to be. He even stated that EA is not some "power-hungry monster" devouring games:

"I guess the biggest one would just be, don't think that there are these edicts about anything like that. It's never a case that it comes own, and it's like, "thou shalt do this." It's quite an open company in my experience. I've had the privilege of having conversations with folks in very senior positions about the status of things, and things like that. And again, these are conversations we have, you know, it never goes that way of "thou shalt do this" and "thou shalt do that." It's never that. It's always, "Look, what do we think we can do? This is what we're trying to achieve, can we do this? Do you think we can?" It's more that than it is anything else. It's unfortunate [when] things don't work out, and that's tough, and everybody should be held accountable to that, and that's how it works when you're in business. But it's not the case that there's some power-hungry monster at the top. It's not that."

Another interesting thing to note is the use of Frostbite, which many fans attributed struggles with the Mass Effect and Dragon Age struggles to. Many thought EA forced the devs to use the more complicated engine, turns out - that wasn't the case:

"No, not at all. It was our decision. We had been wrapping up Mass Effect 3 and we just shipped Dragon Age II and we knew that our Eclipse engine, that we shipped DAII on, wasn't going to cut it for the future iterations of Dragon Age.

It couldn't do open world, the renderer wasn't strong enough, those were the two big ones. We thought about multiplayer as well, as Eclipse was single-player only.

We talked internally about three options. We could have burned down Eclipse and started something new internally, we could have gone with Unreal Engine, or we could have picked Frostbite which had shown some really promising results on the rendering side of things and it was multiplayer enabled.

When it came down to it, we talked to folks and they really liked the Frostbite option and again, back to this idea of being part of a community, there were more and more teams [at EA] that were considering Frostbite. It was a decision that I made after all of the technical deep dives in probably late 2011."

The entire interview was absolutely fascinating! We definitely recommend giving it a listen right here.