This is not the first time this has come up, there was a rumor about them leaving the company floating around a while ago, that turned out to be untrue. But now they have actually decided to leave the company:

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/09/18/ray-muzyka-greg-zeschuk-retire/

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/09/18/from-greg-zeschuk/

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/09/18/from-ray-muzyka/

I assume they want to get out of the crumbling house before it collapses.  I assume EA will declare bankruptcy or start selling off pieces of itself soon.  They bet the farm on SWTOR and it was a financial disaster.

I saw the SW:TOR fail coming from a long way.

When they started developing the game on their forums they said they were making a "Star wars" game and tot hem Star wars things come before any mmo/game, they'd look at something and ask if it felt like "Star Wars" and what not.

They promised combat that was different then the usual mmo, etc and it all turned out to be a lie.

Leading up to the release with each new video the game looked more and more like "Generic wow style mmo with a star wars skin" the only ldifferent focus was the VERY VERY Few group quests, it was the most fun part of the game the "flashpoints" and they didn't have that many int he game at release period.

I don't know what they were thinking with SW:TOR. The mmo genre is LITTERED with so many failed mmo's that go after WoW's market. You are NOT going to capture it by making "A game that plays exactly like WoW!" Why would people leave WoW, where they've invested months/years of time, made friends, have characters, know the lore/characters for a game that plays the same?

People wanted something new/different, SW had the chance to deliver that and instead of truly truly trying to make an epic STAR WARS game,t aht played like "STar wars" how most people would want it (IE Jedi Knight style lightsaber fighting, battlefront style open world battles, with VEHICLES that actually FELT like the star wars vehicles and not just a reskinned + move buff) we got pretty much standard generic mmo formula with star wars skins slapped on it. People will play a new mmo for the free month, find out it's "more of the same old same old" then go back to WoW or quite (if they are tired of those games). It's what I did, and most people I know that wanted to at least give it a try.

SWTOR was a unmitagated fraud and disaster. They stuck unbeatable bosses at every stage of the main Quest so that it was impossible to enjoy the story and get into the plot and the only way to get past the bottlenecks was to team up with guild members or strrangers and ususally at the price of being a toy for the people with the high skills to order around and treat like trash.

I made it to level 34 or so but gave up in disgust and i say good riddance to bad trash to those jerks who thought they could pull a trick like that on all the dedicated Star Wars fans who has supporeted and modded for the real SW games for years. This was a joke...and a nightmare of bad design.

It was so frustrating that it cost my system a mouse from being beaten into pulp.

If they were smart they would re package it as a SP game strip out all the dumb trash MMO stuff and at least use the cool sets and locatoins, for some of them were good. But in my nightmares i see once again, the inevitable super unbeatable boss wiating on the bridge of yet another generic "star ship" that looked more like a floating casino. The Brief glimpses we had of actual space and the absolutely awful arcade style space missions did nothing at all to give it the feel of an actual space based story line. I say to those two jerks, you deserve whatever failure you experience. It is too bad because i was hoping for Jade Empire 2 but that may never be now.

One of them is going into Socially focused investing and mentoring, and the other is going to make beer.

If you study their faces in the photo of them on the Bioware site, it is clear that both of them are shallow and immature as people and that the success of the company was due to individual staff effort and certainly neither of the "bosses"...they look weak, shallow and uninspired...and their deicisons to make cookie cutter clone games one after the other shows that lack of imaginatoin. their recent games run on steel clad tracks with no real flexibility and are one boring fight after another interspersed with some eye candy footage that makes good movies but very boring games. With modern technology and the potential of modern computers individualy they could have taken a game like Jade Empire and opened up the world whille still keeping superb art and model and texture quality..but no, they made one boring grind game after another, and SWTOR was the worst, with elitism, hyper complex sill trees and the necessity to be a 20 fingered mutant zombie gamer to win against the uber bosses, and an overall atmopshere of "who cares" from support which was all from India and without any real understanidng of the story or the SW universe. So they like most of the rest of North American modern industry sent the real work overseas and left their brains behind on the bus and created junk for the masses and charged us thru the nose for it.

As i said, good ridance to bad trash. Dont bother coming back guys and dont let the door hit you in the bottom line..whcih was junk.

you have to ask yourself how much of a hand they had in SW:TOR.

It was handeled development wise by Bioware Austin, wihch was a (at the time) newly opened Bioware studio under EA that included people from Mythic and such (who made DAOC).

To me SW:TOR seems like an EA game rather then a Bioware game. The art style, the gameplay, they all seemed to be chasing WoW and wanted to get players from it, disregarding the fact that almost any game that even tried competiting with WoW failed and even some that took the companies with it.

They helped make in the past great games like Baldur's Gate, NWN, MDK, KOTOR, DA

To me the studio took a noticable turn after DA

Originally Posted By Stiler (6 OCT 2012 9:10pm)

you have to ask yourself how much of a hand they had in SW:TOR.

 

It was handeled development wise by Bioware Austin, wihch was a (at the time) newly opened Bioware studio under EA that included people from Mythic and such (who made DAOC).

From what I've heard, Bioware (as in the original studio) only had a little input in ToR's design, though it was not non-existent. 

When EA acquired Bioware, they started to slap their name on a lot of studios. Mythic became BioWare Mythic, BioWare Austin was created (they did TOR), then EA also created BioWare Victory, which is working on the upcoming Command & Conquer game, EA2D became BioWare San Francisco and there is even a BioWare Ireland (which mainly works with TOR here in Europe) 

Rumors have also been floating around that the two creators of BioWare left the company because of the negative fan reaction that they got from DA2 & ME 3 (and to a lesser degree TOR). And I can understand them, those games generated a lot of hate from the community that has been built up around BioWare & their games, and it must feel really bad to have 3 games in a row being shot down by the people that you are making them for (for the suits at EA (and other big publishers) it is mainly about maximizing profit, but for people who actually work with the games, it never feels good to be told that they made something bad, they usually put a lot of effort into what they do, even if it is a shoddy licence game with a far too short deadline. You have to like what you are doing, or you will get burnt out very fast)

Personally I hope they eventually both get back together and try their hand at kickstarter. I'm sur eif they got a small team of ex-bioware guys together they'd easily pass the 1mil budget for an rpg.

I think they both want a good long vacation right now though.

Seems a lot of top well known game people are doing that these days, Cliffy B (epic) just left the industry as well.