There’s a lot of worry surrounding EA’s BioWare right now. After multiple underwhelming releases and a recent buyout of its parent company by a Saudi Arabian investment firm, how long will the studio exist as we know it?
Speaking on a recent episode of the FRVR Podcast, veteran EA developer Alex Hutchinson—who worked on The Sims 2, Spore and Army of Two: The 40th Day—explained that the studio is already no longer the studio fans fell in love with, but it should be safe from censorship of its games’ political beliefs.
“Bioware is not Bioware,” Hutchinson explained. “I mean, whatever people think Bioware is, there’s no one there from the years that people loved Bioware anyway, right? There’s no one. They haven’t been there for give years, ten years some of them.”
When speaking specifically about the studio’s lean towards progressivism and LGBTQ characters, Hutchinson doesn’t believe that content will be threatened, even with Saudi Arabia investing in EA. The veteran developer—who recently released the fantastic Revenge of the Savage Planet—explained that the studio simply needs to follow the lead of Larian Studio’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and give players every choice possible until any so-called “agenda” can simply be seen as player option.
“If you look at, say, Baldur’s Gate 3 and the last Dragon Age, both are very LGBTQ+ friendly, but one handled it perfectly and one fumbled it,” Hutchinson said. “It’s not the content that’s the problem, it’s how you put it together.
“You know, like [Baldur’s] Gate 3 just supports you in any decisions that you make, but it doesn’t feel like it has an agenda, but it lets you [choose] which I think it exactly how to handle all of these issues is, like, embrace people’s cool choices, but don’t front-load it.”
Hutchinson explained that a mass of player choice essentially dilutes the issues that some vocal players have. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse is essentially moot by the fact that nearly all of its cast are pansexual and all romances are spurred on, or stopped, by the player. The EA veteran explains that designing content like this would essentially give Bioware a free ride as investment groups—even those run by Saudi Arabian royalty—only really care about money.
“I think it’ll just be sales driven,” Hutchinson said. “These guys won’t [care]. When you go full business, if it makes money, they’ll let you do it forever. Everyone loves money.”
Hutchinson’s comments almost mirror those of ex-Dragon Age director Mark Darrah who said it would be “hard to imagine” Bioware being forced to abandon its history of LGBTQ characters as it would be terrible PR for EA.
“It’s hard to imagine that the public perception of a game that comes out of BioWare even if you do do that isn’t apocalyptically bad,” the former developer said. “So in that case you either have to decide that you’re willing to just leave it alone, or you have to think that they don’t fit any more within the goals of this new organisation.”
