#feels

[upright-fool]

"Rings" by ND Stevenson

My absolute favourite comic journal by Stevenson. Made me cry my eyes out. Even when I can't articulate it, it gets to the core of what I think love is.

[spikes-123]

morning glory

[felassan]

Jason Schreier for Bloomberg reports: 'Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studio'

The latest game in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing series went through ten years of development turmoil. The failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released in October, led EA to gut BioWare

[note: article is below cut after these tweets]

Jason Schreier: "NEW: What went wrong with Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Why was the writing so tonally inconsistent? Why did it feel so shallow? Why were there so few choices? Really, after ten years of turbulence, it was a miracle that anything came out at all. This is the story [link]:" [source]

Jason Schreier: "The fatal flaw for Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn't just that it pivoted from single-player to multiplayer and back again. It was that after the second pivot, the team was forced to keep going rather than hit the reset button and take the time to create a new plan." [source]

Jason Schreier re: this old tweet from Casey Hudson: "Fun fact: when I first reported at Kotaku in 2018 that Dragon Age 4 was rebooted to become a live-service game, BioWare studio head Casey Hudson wrote this on Twitter. But it was not entirely truthful. In reality, the game was being designed around cooperative multiplayer, replayable missions, etc" [source] Casey Hudson's old tweet from 2018: "Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you'll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about "live" it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story."

Rest of post/article under cut due to length.

(bold in the text below is mine for emphasis)

"In early November, on the eve of the crucial holiday shopping season, staffers at the video-game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties. Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new Dragon Age had only reached 1.5 million players, missing the company’s expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, EA Sports FC 2025, was also subpar, compounding the problem."

"As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson explained, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA’s share price promptly plunged 18%. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,” Wilson later said on an earnings call. “However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.” Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare’s staff at the studio’s headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio. According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment."

"The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, like Madden NFL, and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for. Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title went on to win the much-coveted Game of the Year Award and sell 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA’s diversification strategy. Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next Dragon Age installment — code name: Joplin — aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio’s focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike. In 2017, BioWare released Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft Inc.’s Casey Hudson, an alumni of BioWare’s early, formative years."

"Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as Destiny and Overwatch, in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into Anthem, a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes. One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whisky. The next Dragon Age sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved. “I wish that pivot had never occurred,” Darrah would later recount on YouTube. “EA said, ‘Make this a live service.’ We said, ‘We don’t know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.’” Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of Dragon Age — code name: Morrison — while everyone else helped to finish Anthem, which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a “pulpy,” more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series."

"In February 2019, BioWare released Anthem. Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative. In the wake of BioWare’s second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of Dragon Age continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would only experience once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn’t die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay. As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of Anthem hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building “Anthem with dragons.” Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game’s already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare’s new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next Dragon Age would no longer be multiplayer."

"“We were thinking, ‘Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?’” McKay later told Bloomberg News. “No, we need to get back to what we’re really great at.” In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible. This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working. At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an “alpha” build of Dragon Age to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game’s biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games."

"But Dragon Age’s multiplayer roots limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game’s release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream. In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously. As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings."

"“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.” Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.) A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors strike limited the writers’ ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next Dragon Age seem more like Fortnite than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn’t know how to market the game. When Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally premiered on Halloween 2024 after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game’s new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered."

"“The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,” said Caitie, a popular Dragon Age YouTuber. “Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.” Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is now working on the next Mass Effect. After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area. Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new. “That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”"

Article by Jason Schreier. [source]

[gothamundernightlight]

I know we as a fandom don’t talk enough about the Batkids acknowledging how old Bruce is getting, but something I think we talk about EVEN LESS is the Batkids acknowledging Dick getting older.

Like Dick is pushing 30 in canon at this point, and realistically cannot do the same things he was doing as a kid. There is a reason a lot of athletes retire young, and Dick’s life has been brutal on his body, so eventually it’ll catch up with him.

Imagine if you will some random new JL/Titans recruit meeting Nightwing and asking “Is it true you can do a quadruple somersault?”

And Dick has to wince and say “I used to, but not anymore.”

Imagine the Batkids hearing that? Imagine everyone who saw him grow up hearing Dick acknowledge he is getting older and can’t do the same things he did in his youth. Imagine how they feel about their own age. Imagine the grief Dick must feel at knowing he’s losing the gifts his parents bestowed upon him, and the fact he’s out-aged them both.

Imagine Bruce painfully acknowledge (in his head because it’s illegal for him to emote aloud) that not only is he getting older, but his first child, his SON, is now the same age he was when Bruce took Dick in.

Imagine Dick picking the smaller option out on ice cream trips because his body can’t handle sugar the way it used to, or eating less in general because his metabolism has slowed down.

Imagine the Batkids sparring and Dick has to tap out because he can’t keep up with them all for as long anymore. Like he can’t keep still do a lot, and handle himself in a fight, but he is not showing off with flips the same way he used to.

Imagine the day one of the Batkids spots gray hair on Dick’s head, or realize that the lines on his face are just a little deeper than they used to be?

Babs keeps calling him the Boy Wonder as a private joke, but the boyish charm that Dick once had has since faded. He’s a grown man, and while at heart he still is the kid that brought light back to Gotham, his outside reflects the life they’ve lived and shared together, which didn’t just pass by in the blink of an eye.

And Jason pretends he doesn’t care, but realizes that Dick isn’t the same 16-year old kid that Bruce put on a pedestal. That he, out of all their siblings, saw Dick the most when he was in his prime, and that his older brother is just a little more fragile than he used to be.

And Tim thinks back to the days of him stalking Batman and Robin before, pulling out those old photos and realizing just how much Dick has aged. When did that happen, he wonders, and how much more will Dick change as he gets older?

Cass, Steph, and Duke acknowledge that Dick Grayson grew up, and left behind a legacy for them to fill, but they’ll always wonder what he was like when he was younger, and wonder how much longer he’ll be around. Bruce has been doing this vigilante schtick for 20+ years, but will Dick still be doing this when he’s Bruce’s age?

Damian takes it the hardest. He can’t look at Dick without thinking of him as the same Grayson who was his Batman, but the truth is, he’s not the same. His old portraits of Dick bear witness to that, with each one just a little different because time is not frozen to Dick the way it is with Ra’s and Talia. Damian privately grieves everyone he comes to care about in advance because death has surrounded him his whole life and eventually despite Dick’s promises that he’ll always be there for Damian, a day is coming when that promise will be broken.

But yeah. Older Dick Grayson. I have thoughts on this.

(Anyways don’t mind me. Just coming to terms with being the same age canonically as my childhood hero.)

[svartedrommevibber]

Følelsene!

[occasionalauthoring]

Could you perhaps do something with the idea:

Bruce finds a hobby. Alfred said it would be good for him, anything to take his mind off of things Bruce didn’t need a hobby without his kids he’s nothing so why try to find something he’s good at

He really enjoys this new hobby (crotchet, pottery, woodwork stuff that involves making things). And he’s very proud. It also is very soothing. He makes something for each of his kids. Something special and valuable. He tries to give each gift to the kid he made them for but each time they turn him away. (They think he bought some cheap gifts that looked weird and thought he was buying his way back into having a relationship).

Bruce is heartbroken. But it hurts worse when he overhears one of his kids calling his gifts “those things”. He tried something and enjoyed it. But. It doesn’t matter. Nothing he does matters. So he packs it up. Stuffs it in a closet and never mentions it again.

(Then he dies and the kids find the gifts with little letters attached and sob because they took away another part of Bruce’s happiness and now they’ll never get to fix anything but the bit is optional)

Bruce picks up crochet when he's in recovery from an injury. An old mentor of his knitted, and Bruce always had an appreciation for what he could create. It's not the same, but he finds his mother's crochet needles in the attic, exactly where he thought they were, and buys some wool.

He makes trinkets, at first. Little starter things, same as everyone getting into a new hobby. Little granny squares, coasters, a number of things.

But Bruce is Bruce, and can't wait for long to move onto more complex things. He finds patterns for a little robin, and falls in love with it. He makes three in quick succession, and tucks them onto his bedside table. Seeing Damian the next morning at breakfast, the idea strikes him.

He slows down, makes each one carefully. None of them are perfect. All of them have their imperfections. The one he plans for Dick has a wonky beak. Steph's has a warped wing. Jason's stitches are misaligned, and it's a bit lumpy. But Bruce loves them anyway, and is excited to give them to the kids.

He leaves them in a box downstairs, labelled so he remembers whose is whose, and goes to his study to write letters to accompany them. Barely letters, more notes, small things just to say he loves them. That he's thinking of them. Sweet, personal sentiments.

While he's gone, they find the box. They laugh at first, at the shameful state of the birds. Cass and Barbara are the only ones without them, but are equally amused by the tragic attempt at making the birds.

Humour turns to offence when Jason gripes a trinket won't make him be Bruce's Robin again. Then the sentiment twists into offence, assuming Bruce is reminding them of the old days, or telling them they'll always be his Robins, when most of them are trying to escape that label. (They will always be Bruce's Robins. Some days they cherish that, other days it is a curse.)

Bruce comes back downstairs to an empty box, and while he's miffed he didn't have time to attach the notes, he's happy the kids liked their gifts. Until he sees Damian at dinner, and asks what he did with it, expecting an answer like 'in my room' or 'on the shelf with my others', not "In the bin, Father. Where it belongs." He didn't appreciate Bruce destabalising his stance as Robin, saw it as Bruce saying Damian wasn't a good enough Robin alone, and lashes out, making his displeasure clear.

Bruce apologises to Alfred that he's gone off his dinner, and leaves the table. Sure enough, he checks the paper basket in Damian's room, and the robin sits atop, mishapen and encapsulating Bruce's failures as a father. He takes it back and secrets it away into his room, leaves it on his desk.

Breaks Alfred's house arrest, and goes to the others' houses, finds theirs in the bin too. Cleans the food scraps' off Dick's, stitches up the torn stitches in Jason's, and they go away too.

The others are excited to give Bruce a piece of their mind, but Damian telling them how it went the night before halts that plan when he recaps how Bruce did not defend himself, and simply left the table. Later that day, they get another message that the toy is no longer in his bin. That day, the one after, they realise theirs are missing too.

It's dismissed. If Bruce likes them he can have them, if he wants to buy their love he'll have to try harder.

Bruce heals over time and gets back into the swing of things. Occasionally Alfred will try to ask about 'that hobby of yours, Master Bruce', but Bruce always shuts it down, and the kids never clue in.

Dick gets a keyring some months later, a little knitted robin, barely bigger than his thumb. Bruce swallows when Tim calls it 'way better than those things Bruce tried to buy us with'. They don't notice him slip away.

It's a year later, and Bruce goes off-world. Duke pops by the manor asking for something, and Dick offers to fetch it from Bruce's room. The others start to wonder when he doesn't come back down. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Half an hour.

He finally returns, a little crocheted robin clutched in his hand. Someone asks why Bruce kept that, another why Dick is taking so long.

"Hey, kiddo. I found this pattern, and it made me think of you and your siblings. I'm new to this, so forgive me his imperfections, but I think it makes him cuter. None of us are perfect after all, he'll fit right in. I just wanted you to have a reminder you'll always be my son, but my Robin too, even if you've moved on now." Dick looks up with red eyes, a shaking hand holding a white slip of paper, and chokes. "He made them."

Duke shoves by, and comes back down with the box. Their robins are all still in there, as are small envelopes tossed into the bottom of the box.

"I know we didn't end on good terms, but you'll always be one. And don't tell Cass or Barbara, but I'm trying to find a bat pattern for them too, but they're more advanced than my skills." Steph reads the last portion of her letter, and Cass and Barbara are hit with the same guilt as the others. They never got their bats. They made him think he shouldn't even try.

"He made them," Damian repeats, clutching his robin with a wonky foot.

Bruce comes back from space to a bat pattern printed out on his bed, his mother's needles brought down from the attic again, and a rich black wool set alongside the other items.

Resting against the small pile, is a simple card.

"We're sorry."

[mylifeisfruk4ever]

It started with Alfred.

In retrospect, it was obvious it started with him. He was the one everyone looked to.

It began with Bruce still reeling from the fear toxin, more unbearable than usual, and Alfred, who really had to ask him about that shoulder injury, decided to take matters into his own hands and slapped him.

Now, it wasn't a very hard slap. Just something to clear Bruce up enough to help. No one spoke about the incident. It should have ended there.

But Tim had seen it, and he had told the others.

From there, the idea was born: maybe there was a way to deal with Bruce and have him less on his back, less oppressive, less of himself. It was just a little violence.

What could go wrong? It was a small pebble, which led to the collapse of the mountain.

As soon as they had a disagreement with Batman, or he wouldn't let them do what they wanted, or something else they felt was important, they'd hit Bruce. It felt good.

Maybe they tended to overdo it, but they thought Bruce could handle it. He was Batman, for crying out loud.

(It didn't occur to anyone that he never hit them again.)

Not surprisingly, the situation escalated. Of course it would happen; it always happened with them.

There was a breakout from Arkham, a bad one, led by the Joker, and Batman ordered Jason to stay behind. Jason didn't listen.

Repressing the riot was a hundred times harder because of that, and even when they brought everyone back in, Joker had escaped, taking advantage of the chaos.

Jason was furious, and once in the cave, he unleashed all his rage on Bruce.

No one said anything. It was a familiar pattern by now, something that happened often.

No one thought to stop Jason when he pounced on Bruce.

No one blinked at the blood.

But when Cassandra noticed that Bruce wasn't moving, that he wasn't breathing, she acted and pushed Jason away.

Jason, still furious, who had gone too far, who would have even hit Cassandra if it hadn't been for Dick.

And when he had a moment of lucidity, he saw her trying to revive Bruce, and he showing no signs of life.

"I...I can't hear his heart anymore...Dick, I can't hear his heart anymore!" Cassandra said, crying, and Bruce still wasn't moving, why he wasn't moving, he was Batman, he shouldn't...

Before Dick could say anything, there was a shift in the air, and Superman was there.

It shouldn't be surprising. If it was true that Bruce's heart wasn't beating anymore, the first person to notice would be him.

Superman didn't ask what had happened. He didn't look at any of them.

What he did was hug Bruce with such a grip that he looked like a man who had seen the world end.

And when he looked up, he asked only Damian, "Where is the Pit?"

@occasionalauthoring @loonstar4477 @whatalovelydaytodie @nikiexe0