Working At FASA After the Borg

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @04:26AM from the that's-zapper-weisman-to-you dept.

amitlu writes "What's it like to be assimilated by Bill Gates' empire? Russ Pitts from The Escapist talks two game industry veterans, Bruce Shelly of Ensemble and Jordan Weisman of FASA, to contrast two hugely different opinions on the matter. While Bruce, still employed by Microsoft, has nothing but nice things to say, Weisman paints a much different picture. From the article: 'Let's say, part of what they wanted from us was our development culture, because we'd worked very hard to have this collaborative, effective team, and they wanted to kind of build those kinds of teams and kind of capture that. In reality, ... the machine of Microsoft, unintentionally, I believe, and inadvertently, ripped that apart. Rather than model itself around what we had done, our [culture] got forced into their model. ... We lost that special sauce that we had built.'" Speaking of FASA, if you're interested you can sign up for the Shadowrun Beta. They're only looking for 360 players, at the moment, and only ones with gold Live accounts.

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FASA and Activision were great by Drakino · 2006-11-28 04:33 · Score: 3, Interesting

I really miss the days that FASA and Activision worked together on MechWarrior 2. The follow ups out of FASA/Microsoft just didn't quite ever live up to those older games, and MechAssault helped drag what used to be a fun mech simulator franchise down into "Halo with Mechs". True, it opened it up to a wider audience, but the fun of the franchise left for many people.