Ex-employees of BioWare Austin Dallas Dickinson (Dallas Dickinson) and Gabe Amantangelo (Game Amantangelo) told how Electronic Arts forced them to leave the famous studio and open their own company for the sake of reviving their own project.
Dickinson and Amantangelo worked together in the Texas office of BioWare on the online action role-playing game Shadow Realms. But in 2015, Electronic Arts Corporation, which owns BioWare, closed their project. The publishing house decided that the company did not need a multiplayer free-play game.
Shadow Realms
“The management of large gaming companies acts in the interests of their business. Usually they are not interested in what the developers think about it. We wanted to decide for ourselves what our game should be, and here we are,” explained Dickinson, who holds the position of CEO of QC Games.
The decision of the managers at EA crossed out the months-long efforts of Gabe and Dallas. Soon they quit and started their studio QC Games to work on Breach. The game became the spiritual heir of the never-released Shadow Realms.
According to Dallas and Gabe, they are inspired by how Blizzard and BioWare have worked in the past. Then the developers cared less about the trends of the gaming market and did what they themselves liked in the first place.
The founders of QC Games do not rely solely on their vision. They also count on the help of the community. Dickinson noted that feedback from players will help identify problems in the interface and other aspects. This is important because Breach is not like other MMOs.
“We are very interested in how the press and players will react to the Breach. Many compare it to Shadow Realms, but Breach is already much more elaborate and complete than the previous project. We ourselves have a lot of questions about the game, which only gamers can answer after getting acquainted with Breach,” Dallas noted.
According to the creators’ descriptions, Breach is an asymmetric action movie with role-playing elements, where four players jointly confront the fifth. The latter plays the role of the boss — it is in his power to set traps and summon monsters attacking his opponents.
Breach will be released on Steam early Access this month, and the official release of the game is scheduled for next year.
Also on the topic:
- Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age Designer left BioWare
- BioWare: we abandoned KotOR 2 in favor of Mass Effect for the sake of creative freedom
Source: Games Industry