Lets face it, EA is a huge company. Bioware has a lot of people too. From time to time, we have learned information about TOR from disgruntled employees. In fact, that's how we first heard that Bioware was working on "The Old Republic". Well we seem to have a new disgruntled EA employee who's dishing out the information.

Going by the name "EALouse", an anonymous writer claims to have worked in the art department for Mythic under EA. He discovered that he was going to lose his job in November so he wrote his article about how EA killed Warhammer Online. His article is a long, detailed rant about specific employees of EA and what he dislikes about them.

It's far too specific to be dismissed as a hoax or a fake article, so I'm going to take this one seriously. He doesn't work on TOR, and doesn't know much about it, but he does know it's cost. Here's what he wrote:

And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. Shit you not. More than $ 300 million! Can you believe that?

And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work. That’s the best they have. The rest of the game is a joke. EA knows it and so does George Lucas,they’re panicking , and so most of Mythic has already been cannibalized to work in Austin on it because they can’t keep pushing back launch.

Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too ……

To put that in perspective, WOW is estimated to have cost some number over $100 million for upkeep and development up to this point, but nowhere near $300 million. The idea that Bioware has spent three times that number, and done so before any upkeep costs is mind boggling.

The majority of the linked article is about problems with Warhammer, and EALouse has gone on to admit in a later article that he knows very little about it TOR, and very few people in his department have beta keys. His real beef is with those in charge of Warhammer and Mythic.

2 comments:

Michael said...

The problem with this guy's article is that he admits to being laid off from his job at BioWare Mythic prior to writing it. This admits a complete and total bias against BioWare Mythic. Of course one will be pissed at the company that laid him/her off. I know if I got laid off I'd tell everybody anything and everything I can and twist it so that it seems horrible. Sure, some of this might be true (I can't really care less about Warhammer though) but with the bias against BioWare, you can't take everything said at face value. There are a ton of people on the forums talking about this blog and some people are getting nervous. Personally, I'm not swayed too much by it. I'll still get the game, I'll still get a subscription, and I'll still enjoy the story BioWare is famous for while enjoying the fun an MMO provides.

Suzina said...

I agree he's biased against Bioware, but I don't think TOR will fail because it's too expensive. That's his opinion, and he's pretty mad right now. Anyone who's been fired from someplace will say, "OH yeah, and those jerks are going to run this place out of business!" So I don't take that stuff seriously. The 300 million dollar number is something I believe, however. And that's really interesting because it makes it the most expensive MMO in the history.

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