Trent Oster suggests fan negativity may have proved "just too much" for Bioware doctors

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The outpouring of online negativity surrounding Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic may have proved "just too much" for Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, who left Bioware and the games industry behind a couple of weeks ago.

“You have to love games and you put your heart into them to create them. To have the fans creating petitions against the work is pretty hard to take, especially when you've spent the last few years crunching overtime to try and ship a game. It can be hard to shut off the overwhelming negativity the internet spews forth, especially when it has your name or the name of your company in it.”

Oster also suggests that the failure of The Old Republic may have spelled the end for Ray Muzyka's EA ambitions. “I had him pegged as an EA lifer," says Oster. "My thought was the Ray agenda was to first usurp Frank Gibeau and then later John Riccotello as CEO.”

“I'm sure the internal culture at EA had pinned the Old Republic conversion to free to play as a failure and hung that completely on Ray, so that would have hurt his upward climb. But, I figured he would fight harder. EA upper management must have been even worse than I thought.”

Trent Oster is currently the creative director on the Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition. Greg Zeschuk now plans to pursue "some personal passion-driven projects related to craft beer," while Ray Muzyka has announced that he'll be "investing in and mentoring new entrepreneurs, and more specifically, the field of social/impact investing."

Tom Senior
Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.