Mass Effect and Dragon Age veteran invokes BioWare's biggest RPG flop as he rails against EA's newfound "hunger" for AI
May. 11, 2024David Gaider has some interesting memories of Anthem
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Mass Effect and Dragon Age veteran David Gaider has hit back against his former publisher’s apparent “hunger” for AI development tools, referencing developerBioWare’s biggest failure to do so.
Earlier this week, Andrew Wilson, CEO of BioWare owner EA,doubled down on the company’s commitment to AI. During an earnings call, Wilson suggested that “more than 50% of our development processes” would be affected by generative AI in the future and that there was a “real hunger” to use the tools across the company.
Several figures across the industry have hit back against Wilson’s aims, but perhaps none more cuttingly so than David Gaider, who worked at BioWare for 17 years from 1999. In his time at the studio, he helped shape several massive CRPGs, as well as the developer’s pivot towards the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
In a tweet, Gaider said that the ‘hunger’ that Wilson referred to “is the allure of a spreadsheet where the labor costs suddenly show as a teeny tiny bar compared to the other bars.” He also suggests that the benefit of AI is to executives, rather than developers. In a follow-up, he says, “They want you to believe the devs under them are super stoked to work generative AI into their processes, but I assure you what they took as excitement was really a veiled wail of despair.”
Check out our list of thebest BioWare games, ranked.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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