For the record I feel like saying “Dreadwolf is going to suck because they laid off Mary Kirby” is like… really dramatically missing the point of what’s going on here.
The next game has been in alpha for nearly a year now. Kirby’s work on the game as a writer was probably mostly finished. Which does not make this better. If anything, it makes it worse.
The layoffs aren’t terrible news because a game we’re looking forward to might be worse because of them. They’re terrible news because people who have devoted years of blood, sweat, and tears to making the game good (including the person who wrote one of the two characters on which they’ve been hanging the entire marketing campaign for said game thus far) have been axed now that the company has decided it can probably get by without them.
The quality of the game when it finally comes out is irrelevant here. If it’s amazing, it won’t make this any better, and if it’s awful, it won’t make it any worse. What matters is the people whose labor made it exist at all are profoundly undervalued, the industry as a whole is broken and frankly abusive, and I wish everyone in it some good labor organizing.
Bioware just announced it’s canning another 50 employees, including Mary Kirby, and I’m just miserable about what that means for the state of the games and the future of the studio.
