This was from a week ago on Waypoint's wonderful podcast, but it's definitely a very informative interview with Manveer Heir. Heir used to work on Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda via Bioware Montreal. He was in charge of directing the team of what he called the three C's - character, combat, camera - basically the aspects that were received well by critics and players. I highly suggest listening to the podcast in full, it's really good. Heir and the Waypoint crew also talk about having the Spike Lee of the games industry and if that chance has gone by at this point (Austin's argument).
Heir reveals a lot of different things about EA's management, on Bioware Montreal's inner conflicts, the reason why publishers need lootboxes, on labor conditions and burnout, how it is to navigate white spaces as a brown person in a game company & the games industry, and his own upcoming indie studio.
On lootboxes & monetization (via Eurogamer):
On Mass Effect Andromeda
On the leadership who denied there was any problem with e.g. the theme of colonialism :
On navigating white spaces as a brown person:
Listen to the interview here: https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/art...-ea-woes-with-former-mass-effect-manveer-heir
Heir reveals a lot of different things about EA's management, on Bioware Montreal's inner conflicts, the reason why publishers need lootboxes, on labor conditions and burnout, how it is to navigate white spaces as a brown person in a game company & the games industry, and his own upcoming indie studio.
On lootboxes & monetization (via Eurogamer):
"It's definitely a thing inside of EA," he said, "they are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetise them better. The words in there that were used are 'have them come back again and again' [not quite but that's the gist - see above]. 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?
"The problem is that we've scaled up our budgets to $100m+ and we haven't actually made a space for good linear single-player games that are under that. But why can't we have both? Why does it have to be one or the other? And the reason is that EA and those big 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.
"You need to understand the amount of money that's at play with microtransactions. I'm not allowed to say the number but I can tell you that when Mass Effect 3 multiplayer came out, those card packs we were selling, the amount of money we made just off those card packs was so significant that's the reason Dragon Age has multiplayer, that's the reason other EA products started getting multiplayer that hadn't really had them before, because we nailed it and brought in a ton of money. It's repeatable income versus one-time income.
"I've seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards."
On Mass Effect Andromeda
"The problem is, what ultimately comes out with a Mass Effect Andromeda isn't the game we started making," he said. "We started by making a prequel called Mass Effect Contact, and as we started testing things we realised a prequel wasn't a good idea and we moved to a sequel, which a lot of the team was happier with. We rebooted that game design multiple times, so the version of the game you see come out is probably the last two and a half years of direction."
It sounds like BioWare Montreal wasn't a happy ship, (there have been deeper dives into the turbulent development of Mass Effect Andromeda) and as soon as Heir had seen the project through to manufacturing, he left. "I was done," he said. "It was a real difficult project and time."
On the leadership who denied there was any problem with e.g. the theme of colonialism :
When the game debuted earlier this year it caught some criticism for glorifying colonialist fantasies, for example, and now Heir says there were people within the team who spoke up about the issue years in advance -- and in vain.
"I wasn't the only one. There were other people, there were other white people, white men, who spoke up. There's a lot of really good people inside of BioWare who spoke up on this stuff," he said. "This is what happens when, I think, you have a homogeneous leadership. The leadership of Mass Effect: Andromeda was all white men."
On navigating white spaces as a brown person:
He also ruminated on what it was like to be someone who works at a large, high-profile studio and also speaks publicly about topics like diversity, race, and representation in games. Heir describes being "talked to all the time about speaking up" and feeling like some people in the company wanted him to stop rocking the boat.
"As somebody's who's public, you become the loud guy, you become the angry guy, and you become the person who's just trying to get all the press for yourself. That's how it's read, and then there becomes internal strife," said Heir.
"It is our job to speak up and do that thing. I'm not gonna quiet down and I'm not gonna not fight. So to me, when I realized I was in an environment that did not accept that and want that, and that was telling me I was being too angry or I was speaking up too much, and basically tried to tell me to sit down and be humble, I was like...peace out."
Listen to the interview here: https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/art...-ea-woes-with-former-mass-effect-manveer-heir
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