An ex-employee’s opinion of Bioware wasn’t the brightest, to say the least!

On a site called Glassdoor, employees have the chance to form an opinion of their (ex-)employers. That’s what a former Bioware employee has done, who was doing visual effects. On the NeoGAF forums, the review showed up, and it said that the person has worked at Bioware Montreal for over five years, and during this period, over thirteen (!?) development leads have been supervising the Mass Effect project. Quoting the review’s negative points from here (positives: good location, the previously good environment in the team, chance to work on an AAA IP, that is all):

„Bioware Edmonton and Montreal symbiosis are broken. Lots of conflicts and bro culture. Lost over 13 leads (game design, art, audio, prog, senior core leads, etc.) in 5 years at Bioware Montreal on Mass Effect. Edmonton lost only 3. It is clear that Edmonton has the bigger part of the stick when it comes to purging Leads and Producers who are not aligned with their leadership style. Putting people on performance improvement program (PIP Program) is the new tactics to get rid of people. Once again more than ten people in Montreal got slammed with this bureaucratic uppercut to let go people that are not bending to Edmonton leadership styles in the last revision cycle. This approach is used by the Montreal Leadership to purge the mess from the lack of vision cause by upper management in the last four years (throwing people under the bus to protect bad core management).

Renaming crunch to Finaling mode. Which means the company pays for your lunch, but you have only 30 minutes to eat and then to get back on the keyboard. Was lasting for over two months and was a real catastrophy. Retaliation and harassment are sadly a reality. If you talk and ask questions, you will be tag as a trouble maker and end up in a bad position. HR won’t help you out. They will deny the current harassment from Monreal management by ignoring and not documenting the facts. In other words, if you leave don’t talk. […] Many benefits got cut due to too much time extension to get the game done.”

That’s insane. We’d rather not comment on it and show a PlayStation 4 Pro-PC comparison. While Sony’s console holds up quite well with its 1800p native resolution that gets checkerboard upscaled to 4K, the PC version has the advantage, although the GeForce GTX 1080 could barely keep 30 FPS. The Frostbite engine can do better than that… also, the game got downgraded! Have a look for yourself…