A lot of artists dislike working for big companies, and BioWare's co-founder Greg Zeschuk explained why in a less-than-glowing assessment of EA. "I like to comment that EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself," Zeschuk says in an interview with Eurogamer. "And what I mean by that is you have to learn to work within the structure." It might seem like the dream of an artist to have a huge company footing the bill, but that backing also comes with a lot of restrictions creatives need to deal with. "I think we did quite well, if you look at the Mass Effect [trilogy that] came out of there," says Zeschuk. "It was actually a pretty successful run.
But you have to understand how to work within a big company. And, for me, that was the end. It was like, 'oh, I don't like big companies'.
So I knew by year two that I was going to leave at some point. I just didn't know when." It seems that BioWare actually enjoyed reasonable freedom within EA, though. "There's all kinds of shenanigans we did," Zeschuk admits.
Some BioWare devs made games for Facebook under a fake company name, and when EA spotted "a couple of Apple development devices and we weren't in the mobile division, they were like 'what are you doing?'" I suppose when you make a series as successful as Mass Effect, you're given a longer leash.
But EA isn't the only big company BioWare worked with. Zeschuk shared another story about a time Microsoft gave "the worst advice, absolute moronic advice from them, the stupidest thing ever." The advice was to release Jade Empire on the original Xbox in 2005, just before the Xbox 360 came out. "Microsoft was like 'no no, you should release it now, right at the end of the cycle, because it's a great time.'" Now Zeschuk makes craft beer.