Yes, the mourning for the company that made KOTOR and NWN was done years ago, it's effectively a completely different company now that's shutting down.
> The company is also laying off around 400 staffers, Bloomberg reports, including around 50 at BioWare. The changes follow EA being taken private by an investor group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal that closed in August.
Never thought that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would shutdown the company that created so many childhood memories.
Well BioWare pioneered romance options with many characters, including same sex options and even threesomes etc. I suppose that doesn't align with Saudi sentiments.
For EA this is modus operandi for a long time. I remember them buying the likes of Bullfrog, Westwood back in the 90s and then shutting them down a few years later.
They're still around, making good shit elsewhere. ChatGPT often helps me track down some of the people behind my favorite games and check out their later work.
Blizzard effectively got bought out when they merged with Activision. It wasn't technically a buyout, but Blizzard quality was never the same after that.
WoW Forever seems like they're at least attempting to try for the brass ring again. But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.
> But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.
The "been there, done that" vibe is their pitch to the older generation who no longer cares as much about technically or ladder climbing and just wants something to do when it's cold outside
Blizzard has not been independent since 1994, but people on the internet love picking some arbitrary point in time when "Blizzard died" when in reality the timeline and quality of their releases has almost zero correlation with who they were owned by at the time.
Blizzard has not been independent since 1994, but people on the internet love picking some arbitrary point in time when "Blizzard died" when in reality the timeline and quality of their releases has almost zero correlation with who they were owned by at the time.
I like Jason Schreier's take that the end of Blizzard began as soon as WoW blew up in popularity.
"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."
I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.
Yes, of course there's the financial performance of a studio and then the identity of a studio that people get attached to.
I didn't get into Blizzard games because they were a financial powerhouse, I got into them because they were fun as hell and the identity of Blizzard at the time gave me faith that their next release would be just as fun. That faith started deteriorating around 2005/6 for me, and was gone within a month or so of SC2 releasing. The identity of Blizzard of the 90s and early 2000s that I fell in love with was gone by 2010.
I can go into more detail about the shortcomings of all of the games from 2010 on (IMO, obviously), but the overall point is that they are fundamentally different than their older games and might as well have been from a different studio.
There's probably a bit of a lottery winners effect.
So consider backing there. There may have been 20 companies trying to make 20 games, All in startup mode.
Now two or three of those succeed ed.. which means the management and team chemistry and creativity all worked really well. And the team members will have them mistaken impression that it's that easy.
But then some people leave some people ad in the next games, sure, they may have a better foundation than some other team situations at others, but it's going to gradually regress to the mean
It really seems to be weird model. Get a hit, get acquired, replace insert corporate culture. Which really doesn't work as most games are not tech products like others with continuous revenue.
It kinda works for those who get that one long term hit and after that can just deliver not much else...
i can assure you that the original amazing group has been gone for over a decade. modern bioware has only been good at dragging someone else's legacy through the mud.
This comes not long after Sony basically killed Bungie. Destiny 2 is "done", and Marathon has an extremely low player count and is in the process of dying.
I am still extremely bitter about how BioWare, in my opinion, ruined the dragon age franchise. While not "truly" turn based, dragon age origins and dragon age 2 had the spirit of it, and felt like a party-based tactical RPG. Then out of nowhere, the studio decided to abandon that with inquisition and turn it into an action/adventure style of game. I had never really been so bitterly disappointed with a game release.
After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.
The studio's biggest sin came before that when they used DLC to paywall off major parts of the story. Anyone who didn't fork over even more of their cash got an incomplete game and a plot that made no sense.
The only major part of story of ME2 that got paywalled is the Lair of the Shadow Broker and I don't feel like I missed much by not playing it (at least on my first playthrough, second I had the DLC). And even if you take a ME2 save with that DLC to ME3, I felt like ME3 does a decent job of explaining what had happened.
IMO the last good game they released was DA:O. ME2 was such a let down, with them removing the RPG elements from the gameplay and the main story being a mess which railroaded you into working with Cerberus. ME3 was even worse. While it's sad to see Bioware go, they haven't been making good games in quite a long time.
I thought Inquisition was quite enjoyable but clearly showing EA's management structure and the story of the game's development and decision chains. It won GOTYs for a good reason because they really did take a huge swing at a massive world and for the most part they succeeded.
Veilguard was very poorly marketed to appeal to a neoliberal crowd as if the characters and identity was the primary draw rather than the core story themes (Wizards v Templars, Societal Order vs Individual Freedom, the capacity for evil and corruption of either side) and the world which was fascinating. I love me some inclusion and well crafted characters, but the focus on it to the exclusion of all else as a queer person it gave me the same ick as a corporate float at a pride parade.
Ironically, the gameplay is what meant I only managed to get through DAO and DA2 with a bunch of cheats. Realtime with pause is a horrible monstrosity. It combines the worst parts of action and turn based.
Veilguard was my favority gameplay wise, but the writing... well you know.
Honestly, I've felt this way before (gaming since the 90s), but try watching somebody play RTwP a bit to get a feel for it. It can become very smooth and comfortable. The hardest part is to learn to trust the timings.
While it is a popular theory, I don't think that Saudi Arabian guys who are trying to diversify their oil-bound economy care about virtual human relations as much as US/EU tech puritanists that already rule tech, assessing every ownership of every nipple in Instagram stories
There's basically no difference between Saudi oligarchs and western oligarchs. They're all just the same assholes who think they should get to dictate how other people live their lives.
BioWare shutting down is sad, but it’s really a classic ship of theseus situation.
There are a handful of notables still there but the majority of the teams that made the classic Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, and Mass Effect disappeared a long time ago through natural turnover and a couple of brutal rounds of layoffs.
The silver lining is that the talent didn't vanish and we have teams like Archetype working on Exodus, Stoic with The Banner Saga, or offshoots like Yellow Brick and Beamdog.
That is true, but by that logic EA ought to have stopped being a completely awful around 15 years ago. It's especially egregious when you consider why Electronic Arts was founded. Activision's origin and reputation when they were bought out are similarly dark.
The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.
They kinda did... You live in a Universe were CnC Remastered Collection happened, CnC Open-Source happened. I'm still kinda mad cuz I'm into Gacha & I really, really wanted 2 see that Legion game. Maybe even... CnCxAnimu? I'd buy that!
They kinda still around w/ BF & FIFA\Madden which is a Money-printing machine.
I never understood this, I just wanted NHL back on the PC.
Yeah, there is 2004 w/ the Rebuild mod & an OSS port which I didn't checked out.
+There Games up 2 '07 4 the PC, but it seems like the Community decided that '04's the ticket.
I always wanted a 'Bloodbowl'/Speedball Hockey title which is a crossover w/ Figure Skating...
Where the Figure Skating gurls are like Bayonetta/Rayne & she posseses certain kind of superpowers while the Males are all like WH40k Space Marines & the Goalie is her FemDom Slave or smh? xD
Anyhow...
2 bad I can't into gfx.
Is the talent not vanishing backed up by data? The gaming industry has always been an extremely brutal industry, and I wouldn't be surprised if the low wages, long hours and zero job security permanently burn out some of the talent.
Note that the 1.5m number given for Veilguard was for the vague term "engagements" rather than sales, so there's additional padding going into that figure.
And veilguard was an abomination of corporate groupthink based on some perceived cultural zeitgeist. I couldn't finish it the dialogue was so painfully cringe.
Weird, I have a friend who's a hardcore DA fan, and he liked it, but told me it's very different.
Tbh, I think the issue is that old RPG designers understood players have very different values and goals, hell they even wrote some academic articles on it:
The devs of today played the games of yesterday, and felt that the game catered to them, and then sought out making a game like that, but they didn't put in the effort or consideration to appeal to other kinds of players.
And turns out there's economics involved - while people playing shooters want to shoot people in general, RPG players are a diverse bunch with different needs, and if you don't scratch the itch of a certain subgroup, that's part of the audience gone.
Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
I disagree. This is the strategy taken by AAA games and is the reason why the AAA games are in such rough shape.
A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.
A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.
I'm not sure it's the niche or targeting problem. I think we're getting games with flat out fewer features and smaller scope than earlier entries in the series because _so_ much energy is disproportionately put into graphics. DA:VG was trimmed and had vastly less complexity and depth than any previous DA.
I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".
It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.
Graphics is part of the problem, certainly, but at least it's moderately independent of the rest. You can scale the quality up and down without affecting the rest (within limits: having many armor variants, etc. are more costly with greater graphic fidelity). As far as the rest: all of these different gameplay mechanics have a complexity cost. You can try to add everything, but then you run into balance problems and/or it just feels too complex for most people, not to mention having a high development cost. So something needs to be simplified, and that means either reducing the depth or reducing the mechanics. But if you've already decided to include something for everyone, that necessarily means that everything is shallow.
I think it is also that DA intentionally had a very complex story tapestry, mostly tried to avoid resets between games, and Veilguard went very deep in Elf and Mage storylines at something of a cost of other storylines. If you were very invested in Elf and Mage storylines (say you had been playing and/or romancing Elves and Mages and Elf Mages since DA:O) then Veilguard was extremely personal and culminated a lot of deep lore things and personal stakes things. On the other hand if you didn't side that way/play that way, I could see it feeling a lot less memorable/important.
> Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
That's not a given at all. A good game targeted at a nieche can well be more successful than some jack of all trades master of none amalgamation that tries to cateer to everyone but fails in being truly great for anyone.
I liked Veilguard when I played it, and as soon as I finished I started up a new playthrough and then said "Nah, I'm done" and haven't touched it since. It's the only time I've ever finished a Bioware game without finishing it twice. It was ...adequate? Parts of it were well-written, and the rest of it was just really tone-deaf, for lack of a better way to describe it.
It was supposed to be a live service spin-off, the same way as Gotham Knights or the canceled Spider-Man game from Insomniac. They cut out most of the content and repackaged it as a single player RPG.
Cringe dialogue came from execs who forced writers to do James Gunn style even if they had zero experience with it. Combining serious dialogue with humor in a way that sounds natural is a skill that needs training. You can't make someone write like that if they never did it before and expect good results.
Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.
I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.
I mean the graphics got better (not that anyone cares, people still play old games, if graphics were a true differentiator, people would say new games are better because they look better, but they don't).
This is very hard to explain - and so expensive it's actively killing the industry.
BG1 & 2 were clearly labors of love. You could feel it in the game play. But the 90s were a different time before gazillion dollar budgets and expectations.
Nope. I won't even put the bear scene up... Fuck prudes, but why include that sorta thing in the launch event?
Anyway... They baited you w/ Chapter I & then the rest was mediocre @ best.
+Look, I'm an otokonoko, so I love lewd stuff if it's well made... Even if it's just fan service. But all the male chars taking it as consent just when you agreed 2 things like 'target practice involving bows'... Comes off creepy af ~desu~
Just let female chars do it. They allowed 2 be creepy, cruel & demanding if it suits their character.
++Hordes of normalhags playing 'white male knights' or whatever... As soon as 'cw' stuff of kind comes along, I'm out. Bleh.
Then there is aDnD 5, RTwP (Which, apart from Paradox Games, is always a bad if not terrible solution).
Then there is what I call the 'Cyberpunk 2077 effect'. Where ppl assume you mean that particular game, but you actually mean the Genre. Like a good ImmSim in that particular Genre?
>Peripeteia
But it's kinda annoying if you know what I mean?
BG 1 & 2 were definitely developed by bioware, interplay was the publisher. Interplay (black isle studios) developed icewind dale and planescape:torment, which were based on bioware's infinity engine. NWN1 was bioware and NWN2 was obsidian (came from black isle studios).
Source: memory and crawling through wikipedia articles
Interplay was the publisher. They stole royalties which provided the leverage for BioWare to buy itself out of the contractual onligations and publish NWN with Atari.
NWN being one of the first games to use master server and key technologies at scale was motivated to detect publisher royalty theft by tracking sold copies (and indeed an Atari division in Europe tried selling copies of NWN with copied keys) not just traditional piracy because the company had first hand experience with it.
Black Isle, an interplay first party studio made Infinity Engine spin off games which gets people confused here.
BioWare didn't make NWN2, that was Obsidian on the same Bioware engine that powered KOTOR 1 & 2 and NWN1.They did do Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 which were originally published by Interplay.
Weirdly, 2 is the only DA I've ever played all the way through. DA:O and Inquisition both just kind of dragged on and on for me, where 2 had much more even pacing.
I thought the smaller scale helped make the stakes feel more believable. The very rare case in scifi/fantasy of seeing any sort of stakes deflation.
(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)
I suppose one of the things that influences my opinion is that I mostly don't play RPGs for combat encounters. They are all somewhat equally repetitive filler to me.
yes, you remember correctly. it was also mostly disconnected from DAO, feeling like an offshoot rather than a sequel. iirc, almost not a single character from DAI had appeared in DA2, except for a cameo from Flemeth in the intro.
it had many issues, but the writing was still great, the story compelling, and the characters human. so people were disappointed that it didn't match or exceed DA1, but it was still a good game because of the writing, and people grew to appreciate it.
To be honest I have the third one on my ever growing list of games to play. I have been told it's pretty decent and kind of the last game Bioware actually delivered on.
Dragon Age 2 is my favorite of the Dragon Age games in spite of its problems. I liked the characters and the tone of the game, and I really enjoyed the more focused personal scope of the game -- just zeroing in on one person and following them through the different chapters of their life. I do remember chuckling at how baffled the questgivers were whenever they needed to find the SECRET HIDEOUT of smugglers/cultists/runaway mages or whatever the quest was about. The maps were so small and you keep going back to the same ones over and over again, so it's not this big mystery.
The company was forced to rush DA2 by EA because SWTOR was delayed and there’s a metric called “Group Responsibility Profit” each EA group had to commit to (BioWare group - Austin, Edmonton, Montreal, Mythic) and that meant shipping something to buy enough profit in times for earnings.
Good lord. I didn't think there was anything stupider than per team stack ranking, and now I learn someone found a way to stack rank game release schedules?
I never played Diablo more than the demos but loved Torchlight, which was substantially the same team as the first Diablo game. But Runic got tired of making Diablo XX over and over again and eventually folded. I briefly tried to cyberstalking the team to figure out which studios they ended up at, but didn’t dig deep enough to come up with any suggestions.
When EA bought Bioware in 2007, people said they'd run the studio into the ground. It took two decades for that to happen and they released some pretty awesome games in that time. However, a studio that used to hit everything out of the park did become one that missed a lot in recent years.
Going forward, I hope Bioware's people land great new jobs, and here's hoping some of their IP gets picked up by other studios. Mass Effect in particular is a fantastic creation that a lot of people would love to spend more time in.
The last two games listed are "Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021)", which was incredibly popular, "Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024)" which seems to have been widely panned, so still hitting 50/50 at the end of it?
Going back further, "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was unpopular with fans but found a fairly solid cult following, and "Dragon Age: Inquisition" is the one you mentioned as well-received, so still batting 50/50
Admittedly, "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" is more of a well-done cash grab, and even Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)
Given EA bought them in 2007, it's clear they released some solid games even years after being acquired
Mass Effect 3 also greatly expanded the endings in post-launch DLC. Though I also still maintain one of the greatest things about the ending was also the psychological trick it made. A lot of people complained "There was only one 'real' choice for my Shepard" but didn't see enough playthroughs to understand that why all four endings [0] were still rather equally distributed. The ending asked the player to sum up hours and hours of game play with a wild story tapestry of complex interlocking decisions and in general that "there was only one choice that made sense" feeling was that you had characterized "your" Shepard pretty strongly by that point, but different playthroughs pushed each of the four different endings into feeling like "the one and only that makes sense for my Shepard".
I still find that fascinating.
(I'm also a rare fan that I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda second favorite after only ME1 and thought Veilguard was probably my second favorite after only DA2. Engine issues and somewhat dull maps aside on Andromeda I thought it most captured the "Exploration" side of Mass Effect better than any but the first one. Veilguard seemed to prove BioWare had finally wrangled their Frostbite tools to be nearly as good at storytelling as their previous engine, and the story culminated a lot of threads for my "main" characters across the series.)
[0] There is a not-so-secret fourth "no color" "walk away" ending through the dialog trees with no epilogue, but it feels like what some Renegade Shepards' only option.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a remaster and Dragon Age Inquisition marked a significant dumbing down of the original Dragon Age franchise. I would think Bioware fans marked the fall of Bioware at ME3 or even a little before, which means EA ran Bioware into the ground in 5 years.
Yeah I just replayed ME through the LE and it was just how I remembered from my original playthroughs back when the games were released:
ME1 nailing the story building but being pretty slow overall. Combat feeling very dated. (8/10 overall)
ME nailing the combat, streamlining the overall game but sacrificing some of the exploration spirit - but very well done from a lore perspective because the urgency of the crisis builds over the game - leaving the protag less time for exploration. (10/10 overall)
Then ME3... A pale imitation of ME2. From a player perspective it feels like the general storyline was still from the same author of the ME2 game, because you can see the urgency picking up more and more until the final conclusion. But the execution is really really lacklustre.
(Maybe 6-7/10)
It was a decent enough conclusion, but overall pretty mid . Most definitely this was the first time you could feel the cultural shift in the production and it's impact in the product.
Political correctness kept sneaking in. The objectively horrible things you could do in both previous installments were toned down a lot. You're no longer deciding to decimate populations, shoving people out of windows etc.
Still some questionable things, but clearly with a lot less ... Edge.
And I'm seriously surprised this thread considers DA:I good.
I gave it multiple attempts, and never even got further then maybe 5h before dropping it. Honestly, DA2 was already such a massive step down in vibes, clearly aimed at what's today being called "modern audiences", there were still some quiet extreme scenes in it, but it felt completely artificial to me compared to the ruthlessness in DA:O
I also hated how the gameplay went from pretty down to earth to complete implausibility.
Like in DA:O people were still limited by their physical bodies. In DA2 you get rogues jumping gigantic distances etc. it felt like it took too much inspiration from MMOs at the time, sacrificing it's wonderful world it built up. But a more cynical view is probably that they just hired people that previously worked on other fantasy games, consequently importing the same fantasy settings of their previous projects.
And inquisition... Again I was unable to finish it to date because I just cannot get myself to keep playing... It's just no spirit to it at all. It'd say it's work by a amateur that's trying their best to imitate a previous work, and failing.
I always feel like ME2 gets off very lightly for doing essentially nothing to progress the main story. It feels like the story could have been used in a spinoff game.
Part of ME3's problem was that it was left with too much to do, the Reaper invasion needs to be started and concluded in the same game when it should have been started in ME2.
hmm, i can only say that i disagree with that sentiment.
Storyline wise ME1 is the only one that hardly progresses anything, but that itself is by design of the lore
ME1 the Reapers are unknown, they fight via subterfuge while utilizing the Geth and Indoctrination. Only one Reaper is in the Milky Way, and only for oversight.
The game ends with the DLC in which the protagonist annihilates the main Relay which the Reapers wouldve used for their invasion.
ME2 starts with the overseeing Reaper killing the protagonist. Who is the nrebuild by a clandestine human supremacist organization. Its central theme is trying to rally a defense against the upcoming invasion. It ends with the "Suicide mission" against the overseeing Reapers base to forestall the creation of a Human Reaper. That was actually the first part where I got completely stumped back then: why does a human reaper matter?. It was a very good scene, but lore wise it was very confusing to me.
ME3 starts with the arrival of the Reapers and tells the story of their loosing battles, until the final attempt building on the previous cycles survivors magnus opus.
You could've split ME3 into two parts for sure, former being the loosing battle lines and the third one the final conclusion via the Ansible (i think thats what it was called?) - but I feel that last installment wouldve been too little content, if attempted. It wouldve been a good choice as a seperate DLC however, so that the main game ended with the discovery of the schematics and the DLC being about the final desperate struggle to get the resources before all is lost in the inevitable defeat.
ME1 is one of very few games that I like despite weak gameplay - I just started playing some Mass Effect, for the first time, a few weeks ago. The writing is indeed fantastic even though the very coarse shape of the story is Halo-like. It's the people, places and organizations that feel real that make it so good. But "dated" is not what I'd call the combat because it was bad at the time of release, too. There have been much better playing first-person shooters much earlier than Mass Effect. On PC Doom, Quake, Half-Life to name a few. On consoles Halo (and probably others, not my scene).
Inquisition felt like it was at some point supposed to be a MMO. The zone and quest design felt very MMO-like.
I couldn't make myself play through that game.
Nah, ME3 is pretty poor throughout. Almost every mission feels anodyne and flat, the skill balancing is way off. There’s still some decent writing though.
People go on about the ending but never really address the whiplash of revealing a third party at the finale. It’s not a question of Shepherd survives or not, it’s that even with all the changes they made, it just doesn’t feel like it has very much to do with what’s gone on before.
> Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)
Mass Effect 3 had plenty of problems elsewhere, like the whole Cerberus, subplot, the idiotic fights with Kai Leng, the whole Crucible concept, how important parts got shoved on in DLCs...
And while DA:I seemed to have been well-received, I don't think it's a very good game
Even at launch, I do not believe you had to play multiplayer to get a sufficiently high readiness rating to see any endings. There were other tie-in like the Datapad app that contributed. The expansions and Legendary Edition re-release made a lot of changes that lowered the readiness requirements and totally removed multiplayer anyway.
You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!
> You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!
Wasn't it basically a competitive FPS? I don't want a competitive FPS in my single player RPG. Especially when it's made mandatory for the best ending.
The "hardest" ending to get in the sense of having the highest readiness requirement is the one that suggests Shepard survived. I still don't think that required multiplayer at launch, but even if it did, that did not last long at all.
> I still don't think that required multiplayer at launch,
It did. I read the reviews.
> but even if it did, that did not last long at all.
Don't care. It's EA's shitty attitude to players in general, and this is just one more example. I'm old enough to remember when they bought PopCap and made bejeweled IAP based after i paid once for it.
> Wasn't it basically a competitive FPS? I don't want a competitive FPS in my single player RPG.
No, it was a co-op third person shooter, and one of my favorites I've ever played. It was arguably better gameplay than the main game. It even still has an active playerbase.
it's a little complicated. a lot of blizzard and riot execs who left to start game studios took a ton of money and have been developing games for years. nearly all of those games will not be commercial successes. so who really knows the meaning of talent nowadays?
on the flip side, studio owners, through no effort of their own, have been practically gifted a solution (hint: it's two letters) to nearly all of the problems relating to their actual risks, which are all focused on production and the nimbleness to respond to player feedback. the real question is whether or not EA still has distribution channels that no one else has.
I think you underestimate how much of a game’s success comes from innate appeal that you can’t simply pivot into with AI boosted workforce, high profile failures like Concord and Highguard didn’t lack production value they lacked the appeal to millions it takes to fuel a live service game of that scale not everyone can be Fortnite and make the switch at the perfect time to hop on a new trend.
i don't know, the writing about concord was pretty clear, "toxic positivity" were the words that stuck out to me to describe its cause of failure according to the people who worked on it, which is a leadership issue. this is a side of being nimble to player feedback.
It's actually a little bit ironic that today's AI has capabilities that closely match what Bioware was looking for quite desperately a decade or so ago. For several of their games, they tried to get procedural dungeon/world generators working so they could have a hand-made main quest-line and generated environments for side-quest content. Their attempts at procedural generation typically didn't work very well, so several Bioware games feature dozens of hours of side-quests in monotonously repetitive environments.
It's an interesting conundrum for players. Some of us, when we play great game, just can't let go. We want to spend more time in that game's world even after we've exhausted the lovingly hand-crafted content. So, many developers throw us a bone and include side-content that is occasionally brilliant but frequently very low effort. Bioware did this in many of their games. You could easily tell when you were on the main story's track and when you were off in low-effort-land.
Read a youtube comment that I think sums up some of the fanbase's thoughts: Bioware has been going downhill since the last 30 minutes of Mass Effect 3 gameplay. Even with the later expanded endings it felt disappointing. Not to mention "Marauder Shields" being your final boss.
I don't get this; Bioware was bought from MS - another soulless megacorp (which for the record is suffering from the same issues today). During the time EA was 'running it into the ground', they released all but one of the core Mass Effect titles, and 3 Dragon Age games, all of which are considered to be good to excellent.
In other industries, institutional knowledge is transmitted to subsequent generations of employees, resulting in some amount of consistency in product quality. But that does require a leadership culture that is, *gestures vaguely towards Japanese developers* and not *gestures vaguely toward everything beget by EA and Activision's standard-setting*.
You can have consistency in quality and creativity in subject matter and mechanics. It's harder to do as a general rule, but easier if you actually retain your current talent and incentivize them to mentor upcoming talent.
One of the notable ways BioWare pushed the industry forward was the ability for the player to initiate a romance storyline with any one of a variety of in game characters. That often included the option of romancing characters of the same gender. I point this out because the Saudi Investment Fund bought EA a couple months back and they obviously have very strong opinions on those sorts of relationships. Are these two connect? I don't know, there are plenty of other potential reasons to close a studio, so probably not. But these are now the sort of questions we have to ask ourselves anytime EA makes a decision like this.
BioWare hasn't published a successful game in a very long time. Their last releases were Anthem (2019) and DA: Veilguard (2024), both of which tapped into the studio's reputation but underperformed in the long haul. Veilguard was also so "meh" against the backdrop of Baldur's Gate 3 that it probably harmed the brand and the franchise more than if it never came out.
They basically used to make amazing games in the 2000s and never quite lived up to that reputation again. Whether the acquisition by EA was the cause or the symptom of the decline, I don't know.
Andromeda had a lot of good in it, tbf. Their big mistake there IMO was hard-resetting the universe the way they did. Like I was excited for more mass effect but I fell off that game so hard. Mechanically it was solid but I just… didn’t care.
Anthem frankly killed them. A live service looter shooter which were already out of vogue by the time it was released. Obviously made by marketing entirely, no soul whatsoever. They never recovered from it.
I will always defend Andromeda as not being as bad as everyone said. I enjoy going back and playing it, and they were a few better writers away from having a really good game. I cared more about the Irish redhead copilot than about any one of the actual companions.
Yeah, Andromeda has some cool ideas (the whole Remnant thing felt like a very classic Scifi mistery) but it was stuck in classing BioWare cliches with companions loyalty quests and romances, the main character being weird chosen one, the main plot was dumb and it was barely a Mass Effect because of the disconnect from the main universe and missing some of the favorite Mass Effect things (like the Geth).
It might have been successful if it weren't a Mass Effect. Or maybe not, who knows.
I think a large part of the issue is that the sum total of ME trilogy is a hard act to follow, without aiming to sound hyperbolic it's a very bright light that outshines a lot. Anything trying to be a sequel has a difficult balancing act of being familiar versus being different and bringing new ideas in.
> missing some of the favorite Mass Effect things (like the Geth)
Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.
I didn't say it was bad, I didn't think it was. The combat as I said was the most interesting iteration. I loved the gun play, I just didn't give a fuck about the characters. I found most of them either offputting or just meh.
I genuinely only remember Ryder and PeeBee by name.
> Mechanically it was solid but I just… didn’t care.
This is a great summary of the entire issue with the game.
I really tried to like it but it didn't inspire any enthusiasm. I didn't really care for the plot, the stakes seemed so low compared to the previous title and none of the races/planets really scratched that explore itch.
They where by than "owing the don" as in there existence was company internally subsidized and you do not recover creative control from that. And those external management initiated "next shiny thing" chases kill you.
I liked the fresh reset because it was good excuse to get back to the "Exploration" roots of Mass Effect 1.
That said, the rumor is the in development Mass Effect 5 had found a story way to bridge the gap between the two and make it seem a lot less like a hard reset and find a way to continue past the ME3 endings.
Of course we likely will never get to hear the ME5 story the way it was scrapped along with the studio in this announcement.
Forward? Sideways at best. Good game developers focus on universal appeal, but instead these kinds of features are almost always driven by activist developers who don't care what damage they do inside the team itself to push these kinds of things through, they muffle true innovation, take away bandwidth needed for more important things, and break teams.
And all that before those features and how they're pushed often making the games leave a bad taste on one's mouth, most often soiling a whole franchise.
I'm in the process of reshaping my game dev career to avoid contributing to this kind of rot. Don't mind eating noodles if that's what it takes.
You know, the neutering of same-sex romances in ME: 2 (due to an extended right media campaign), is one of the most universally decried changes, in a game that was otherwise considered an improvement on the formula
The worst thing a developer can do is to take a side, then change it. It would be REALLY naive to think they'd just get back to zero doing that.
No. That's why serious studios put serious effort to try to avoid politics by a country mile.
I didn't support my country joining NATO either. Even voted against the president we had for 8 years for his 'strategic ambiguity' on it. But now that we've chosen to join, it's obvious we can't really change the situation or go back neutral, even while Trump is doing breaking ranks doing deals with Putin, which makes the whole NATO situation look silly.
>these kinds of features are almost always driven by activist developers
Guilty as charged! I'm an activist developer who threw down the gauntlet and insisted The Sims support same sex relationships.
In the June 1998 prototype, when two women tried to kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up in my design review that it should support same sex relationships instead of resulting in homophobic violence. The design documents were updated to say heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and Patrick J. Barrett III implemented it his own way, which was better than mine: no sexual preference property at all, just relationships, so it was up to you who to love.
Then a lesbian kiss lit the fire at E3 in 1999, right after Columbine, when the press was desperate for a non-violent gender inclusive video game to write about.
>who don't care what damage they do inside the team itself to push these kinds of things through, they muffle true innovation, take away bandwidth needed for more important things, and break teams.
That's unmitigated GamerGate bullshit. Nobody's bandwidth was stolen, and the team didn't break up -- just the opposite: we original Sims team members have continued working with each other frequently on different projects over the many years since.
And same sex relationships WERE the innovation -- Gonzalo Frasca used them as the textbook example of procedural rhetoric, because the designers didn't just draw a rainbow flag, they built a rule into the simulation.
That IS universal appeal. Gays and girls and even boys played it, and it proved there was a huge female audience for games 14 years before Gamergate got it all wrong by attacking women while pretending it was about journalism. You people who spew GamerGate hate speech had all of your arguments knocked out from under you in 2000, 14 years before GamerGate even started.
>soiling a whole franchise
If that's what soil looks like, every publisher on earth would line up for a shovel.
Damn. I feel bad for a guy who has dug himself in such a deep hole they can't even hope to see the light ever again. Just Putinist tier firehose non-arguments one after each other. Like blaming firemen for fires. The point where a game developer starts blaming gamers, you know they have nothing positive to contribute anymore.
Now he got downvoted so hard I can't even reply to him directly. Maybe that's for the better. I tend to always put effort to responding to effort, even if said effort is unhealthy, but not even temporarily vouching for him will make his comment repliable now ...
Most of what you've said is an incoherent Gish Gallop of unsubstantiated unmitigated bullshit with absolutely no evidence or citations, that I've already refuted with many quotes and links to evidence. So to ask you where I ever blamed gamers would be the tip of the iceberg, a complete waste of time, because you are not arguing in good faith, and you have no clue what you're talking about.
But go ahead, instead of deflecting again, try replying to my points instead of making another bald faced lie with cowardly excuses for why you're unable to reply, when you certainly can but jusy don't want to, because the facts and evidence aren't on your side.
You sound like an un-funny right wing comedian with a muti-million dollar Netflix special complaining about how he's being canceled because he can't say anything he wants and just doesn't want to be held responsible for his own words. Simply because you can't defend your own ignorant homophobia.
Projecting? As I pointed out, Your other comment is literally unrepliable-to. I don't think I've even seen such cratering on this site before. Hell, the site's CSS makes your message almost impossible to read without copy-pasting it somewhere else first.
My messages are fact-based, I work in the industry and everything I create is of universal value. You instead just spam bullshit and slop links. YOU saying I don't argue in good faith is hilarious; but that doesn't mean I keep my standard merely _above you_, given how far down you've gone.
I don't need to follow your crazy tangent-driving and Buzzfeed-tier spam and attacking everyone capable of validly criticizing you. What you talk about has no grounding on how things get done, it's just a crazy man's collection of news clippings as if you were a fanatic fan to some singer. You are the kind of person who'll never be capable of creating value, just at best transferring it, with great loss in efficiency.
I'd tell you to leave the industry but I'm happy no notice that you already haven't been in a position to destroy more good work in a long time. Pie menus as one's life's work, LOL
Universal appeal naturally includes appealing to gay people. The non-universal option is only appealing to straight people. Straight people are so used to everything ever revolving around heterosexuality that even a tiny bit of affordance to gay people is seen as a departure. It’s not.
Yeah, universal doesn’t mean “lowest common denominator” or “only supposedly normal people”. It means everyone. Which includes gay people, and straight people.
The game has options for straight romance, and gay romance. So it’s universal.
That's like saying the only way to experience happiness is to cut your leg off because someone somewhere has a fetish of wanting to live in a wheelchair.
No. Universal appeal means that something is liked by generally everyone, obviously without having issues that make it disliked by a ton. Like, idk, Mario Bros. Or water. Very few people dislike those. Basically everyone likes them. Straight people, gays, women, old people, young people, etc etc. Obviously your "but no it has to be gay and yellow and have a MAGA hat on and speak in tongues" kind of line of constraints only reduces the size of the group said thing appeals to.
Good thing is that in real life, universal appeal is also good business. And many companies doing stupid shit because some loud idiots that might not even be interested in the product itself told them to make it x
> That's like saying the only way to experience happiness is to cut your leg off because someone somewhere has a fetish of wanting to live in a wheelchair.
What? No.
Think about it. A universal entrance to a building would have stairs and a ramp, which accommodates everyone. Aka... universal.
Appealing to a subset of people, like only straight people, is decidedly not universal. The only straight people upset by the option to have gay romance are babies, and you'll never make them happy anyway. They can only whine, so there's no point in trying.
Let me make it more clear. If the game MADE you be part of a gay romance, then that's not universal. But it doesn't, right? For straight people, the game is literally equivalent to if there was only straight romance. The complaints are purely made-up in people's heads so they can have something to whine about. I have no patience for it.
I think you proved yourself wrong by saying "appealing to a subset of people, is NOT universal". (Though, "appealing to straight people" isn't an actual thing, as there's hardly anything that gays dislike that straights like. There's no things one could break universal appeal with by putting in things that straight people generally like.)
Exactly. You can make a game with cars in it, with jumping in it, with nice pastel colors in it, and there's no large group in the world that will decidedly dislike those. But when you start doing woke catering of whatever minority themes for example, as you said, the game loses its universal appeal. Often, to even those minority groups too, as such forcing is almost always extremely inauthentic, patronizing them and insulting their intelligence. The obtuse Veilguard clips being shared recently really drive this home. Game might as well make you play Hitler "correctly" at that point, a total universal appeal suicide.
Before you say "but I don't like those men/muslims/women/terfs/gays/dog eaters/dog loving people!!!", that kind of argument is EXACTLY what disqualifies something from universal appeal. This is not hard.
This argument is just dumb. No, gay people don’t live for straight romance, obviously. Universal appeal includes both. And it’s not a problem, because from your perspective it’s equivalent. You can keep complaining, just understand that nobody will think these are valid complaints.
There's a reason I used the admittedly nebulous phrase "pushed the industry forward" rather than a simpler "introduced" or "invented". BioWare was certainly not the first with this sort of thing, but they popularized it and it was clearly impactful to a bunch of people. For example, you can hear about the impact directly from the mouths of some of BioWare's former employees. [1]
Yes, I heard about that too! I really hope he does at least one more truly great Ultima, and he can name his price as long as it really is a proper spiritual Ultima 7 / Ultima Online successor.
This guy was the first to do many of the things that are taken for granted in gaming now, like morality in RPGs, MMOs and even selling computer games in boxes, starting at just 19 years old, but yeah let's listen to some internet rando :)
Though I think that will absolutely be a factor in future releases for EA for the reason you describe, I think the larger factor was that Bioware wasn't able to succeed in pushing out games that sold well enough, and that is not necessarily entirely on the studio.
AAA games in general have been having massive problems with over-management, where you have hundreds of stakeholders for a game. The second there is proven money in a franchise, massive structures of managers start to meddle in everything, demand day and date release promises, and get involved in everything from creative direction to engineering to resourcing. You end up with thousands of people in the credits for games made by a team of 100 artists and programmers.
The same thing has been happening to big budget movies and prestige TV shows, to the point that everything becomes this sort of neoliberal corporate soup that reflects the culture of the company. Game studios become victims of their own success. In the same way enterprise software becomes consultant feature slop soup, media becomes focus grouped appeals-to-no-one ultra high production value shovelware.
Creative studios stop producing art or meaningful experiences and start producing content.
This is a reach. Not because the Saudis don't want to influence the direction of games, but because Bioware has had such a run of embarrassing flops over the past decade that I'm surprised they stuck around this long. Peak Bioware was probably Mass Effect 2 and it's all been downhill from there.
Japanese games very often have this - IIRC in Harvest Moon you even die if you don't get married i0 IIRC 3 yearse. Not to mention dating sims being mainly about this.
None of the old Natsume Harvest Moon games allowed same-sex marriage or romance. The friends of mineral town remake (2019/2020) does, and pioneers of olive town does.
>pushed the industry forward
Yeah... And Dice pushed le Industry forward when they stole Desert Combat, made a shitty Engine & called it 'BF2'. Great game nj but they literally hired that mod team & ripped them off harder than any skiddie on a carding board could...
>romancing characters of the same gender
You mean yuri action? Otherwise, nobody wants that.
And yes. I'm talking solely out of a feminine perspective here.^^
Otherwise, I once was teh mastermind behind a FemDom/FLR Megamod 4 Sims 3.
To unite them all was a kinda scummy affair but the monies that stuff generated, man... Yes, it was/is common 4 The Sims mods 2 be paywalled.
> I point this out because the Saudi Investment Fund bought EA a couple months back and they obviously have very strong opinions on those sorts of relationships.
They do, but only as a means for controlling the people they rule over. The House of Saud, when outside Saudi Arabia, drink alchohol, wear revealing clothing, and make use of the sex industry.
I really don't think the guys who make that type of decision for sovereign wealth funds ever play the games, or even read reviews of them where they would know that. Perhaps if it was 1992 and it was a shocking industry first that made mainstream headlines, but nah, I really doubt this particular conspiracy theory.
They just haven't released a successful game for years. If you feel the need to attribute their situation to ideologies then it sounds like you are the one who cares about ideologies too much, not Saudi Investment Fund.
I would disagree that playersexual characters a good thing at all. It's just very cheap gratification for players who want to romance anything they can see.
Tangentially to the topic, I always found funny that in Mass Effect it was possible to hook up with men, women, and even aliens with their bodies covered in space-burkas, and nobody bat an eye, but polygamy was completely out off limits: if you tried to establish a relationship with two at the same time, everybody just gets angry at you and you only face rejection.
One of the few corps I applied for a job at that did not even reply. Also known for being a bit of a crappy employer as well even long before EA bought them. Many other studios was also out of line back then to be fair.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] threadThe last impressive things they shipped were Mass Effect and DA:O. That was 19 and 17 years ago.
Everything since has been trend-chasing and running on creative fumes.
Anyway - good riddance.
Never thought that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would shutdown the company that created so many childhood memories.
I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long. Sad to see them go but only because they should have been way better
They were purchased decades ago
A what now?
Sad, even though BioWare was dead already.
They're still around, making good shit elsewhere. ChatGPT often helps me track down some of the people behind my favorite games and check out their later work.
Blizzard seemed to defy the stereotype but it died a long time ago, it's just a husk.
The contrast with japanese game studios is impressive.
There's other studios that similar to Blizzard didn't get bought out early and published multiple hit games, like Insomniac Games.
The "been there, done that" vibe is their pitch to the older generation who no longer cares as much about technically or ladder climbing and just wants something to do when it's cold outside
"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."
I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.
extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.
I didn't get into Blizzard games because they were a financial powerhouse, I got into them because they were fun as hell and the identity of Blizzard at the time gave me faith that their next release would be just as fun. That faith started deteriorating around 2005/6 for me, and was gone within a month or so of SC2 releasing. The identity of Blizzard of the 90s and early 2000s that I fell in love with was gone by 2010.
I can go into more detail about the shortcomings of all of the games from 2010 on (IMO, obviously), but the overall point is that they are fundamentally different than their older games and might as well have been from a different studio.
(But purchased by EA obviously)
So consider backing there. There may have been 20 companies trying to make 20 games, All in startup mode.
Now two or three of those succeed ed.. which means the management and team chemistry and creativity all worked really well. And the team members will have them mistaken impression that it's that easy.
But then some people leave some people ad in the next games, sure, they may have a better foundation than some other team situations at others, but it's going to gradually regress to the mean
It kinda works for those who get that one long term hit and after that can just deliver not much else...
RIP to an amazing creative group
i can assure you that the original amazing group has been gone for over a decade. modern bioware has only been good at dragging someone else's legacy through the mud.
After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.
I'd place it around the start of ME2.
oops, I meant to say without that DLC
Veilguard was very poorly marketed to appeal to a neoliberal crowd as if the characters and identity was the primary draw rather than the core story themes (Wizards v Templars, Societal Order vs Individual Freedom, the capacity for evil and corruption of either side) and the world which was fascinating. I love me some inclusion and well crafted characters, but the focus on it to the exclusion of all else as a queer person it gave me the same ick as a corporate float at a pride parade.
Veilguard was my favority gameplay wise, but the writing... well you know.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cxz4a/eas_graveyar...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcf.preview.re...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230610092047/https://old.reddi...
There are a handful of notables still there but the majority of the teams that made the classic Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, and Mass Effect disappeared a long time ago through natural turnover and a couple of brutal rounds of layoffs.
The silver lining is that the talent didn't vanish and we have teams like Archetype working on Exodus, Stoic with The Banner Saga, or offshoots like Yellow Brick and Beamdog.
The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.
They kinda still around w/ BF & FIFA\Madden which is a Money-printing machine. I never understood this, I just wanted NHL back on the PC. Yeah, there is 2004 w/ the Rebuild mod & an OSS port which I didn't checked out. +There Games up 2 '07 4 the PC, but it seems like the Community decided that '04's the ticket.
I always wanted a 'Bloodbowl'/Speedball Hockey title which is a crossover w/ Figure Skating... Where the Figure Skating gurls are like Bayonetta/Rayne & she posseses certain kind of superpowers while the Males are all like WH40k Space Marines & the Goalie is her FemDom Slave or smh? xD Anyhow... 2 bad I can't into gfx.
1 - 2017 they cut from 500 -> ~350
2 - 2023 went from 350 -> 200 that included a bunch of very senior people including the OG writer of Baldur's gate Lukas Kristjanson
3 - Early '24 cut down to 100 skeleton crew as the writing on the wall for DA Veilguard sales materialized (sold about 1.5m vs 3m projected)
Tbh, I think the issue is that old RPG designers understood players have very different values and goals, hell they even wrote some academic articles on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
The devs of today played the games of yesterday, and felt that the game catered to them, and then sought out making a game like that, but they didn't put in the effort or consideration to appeal to other kinds of players.
And turns out there's economics involved - while people playing shooters want to shoot people in general, RPG players are a diverse bunch with different needs, and if you don't scratch the itch of a certain subgroup, that's part of the audience gone.
Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.
A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.
I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".
It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.
That's not a given at all. A good game targeted at a nieche can well be more successful than some jack of all trades master of none amalgamation that tries to cateer to everyone but fails in being truly great for anyone.
Cringe dialogue came from execs who forced writers to do James Gunn style even if they had zero experience with it. Combining serious dialogue with humor in a way that sounds natural is a skill that needs training. You can't make someone write like that if they never did it before and expect good results.
Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.
I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.
I mean the graphics got better (not that anyone cares, people still play old games, if graphics were a true differentiator, people would say new games are better because they look better, but they don't).
This is very hard to explain - and so expensive it's actively killing the industry.
Then there is aDnD 5, RTwP (Which, apart from Paradox Games, is always a bad if not terrible solution). Then there is what I call the 'Cyberpunk 2077 effect'. Where ppl assume you mean that particular game, but you actually mean the Genre. Like a good ImmSim in that particular Genre? >Peripeteia But it's kinda annoying if you know what I mean?
Take care. And control, kind stranger!
Source: memory and crawling through wikipedia articles
NWN being one of the first games to use master server and key technologies at scale was motivated to detect publisher royalty theft by tracking sold copies (and indeed an Atari division in Europe tried selling copies of NWN with copied keys) not just traditional piracy because the company had first hand experience with it.
Black Isle, an interplay first party studio made Infinity Engine spin off games which gets people confused here.
Source: Ex Bioware
(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)
it had many issues, but the writing was still great, the story compelling, and the characters human. so people were disappointed that it didn't match or exceed DA1, but it was still a good game because of the writing, and people grew to appreciate it.
Going forward, I hope Bioware's people land great new jobs, and here's hoping some of their IP gets picked up by other studios. Mass Effect in particular is a fantastic creation that a lot of people would love to spend more time in.
The last two games listed are "Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021)", which was incredibly popular, "Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024)" which seems to have been widely panned, so still hitting 50/50 at the end of it?
Going back further, "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was unpopular with fans but found a fairly solid cult following, and "Dragon Age: Inquisition" is the one you mentioned as well-received, so still batting 50/50
Admittedly, "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" is more of a well-done cash grab, and even Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)
Given EA bought them in 2007, it's clear they released some solid games even years after being acquired
I still find that fascinating.
(I'm also a rare fan that I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda second favorite after only ME1 and thought Veilguard was probably my second favorite after only DA2. Engine issues and somewhat dull maps aside on Andromeda I thought it most captured the "Exploration" side of Mass Effect better than any but the first one. Veilguard seemed to prove BioWare had finally wrangled their Frostbite tools to be nearly as good at storytelling as their previous engine, and the story culminated a lot of threads for my "main" characters across the series.)
[0] There is a not-so-secret fourth "no color" "walk away" ending through the dialog trees with no epilogue, but it feels like what some Renegade Shepards' only option.
ME1 nailing the story building but being pretty slow overall. Combat feeling very dated. (8/10 overall) ME nailing the combat, streamlining the overall game but sacrificing some of the exploration spirit - but very well done from a lore perspective because the urgency of the crisis builds over the game - leaving the protag less time for exploration. (10/10 overall) Then ME3... A pale imitation of ME2. From a player perspective it feels like the general storyline was still from the same author of the ME2 game, because you can see the urgency picking up more and more until the final conclusion. But the execution is really really lacklustre. (Maybe 6-7/10)
It was a decent enough conclusion, but overall pretty mid . Most definitely this was the first time you could feel the cultural shift in the production and it's impact in the product.
Political correctness kept sneaking in. The objectively horrible things you could do in both previous installments were toned down a lot. You're no longer deciding to decimate populations, shoving people out of windows etc. Still some questionable things, but clearly with a lot less ... Edge.
And I'm seriously surprised this thread considers DA:I good.
I gave it multiple attempts, and never even got further then maybe 5h before dropping it. Honestly, DA2 was already such a massive step down in vibes, clearly aimed at what's today being called "modern audiences", there were still some quiet extreme scenes in it, but it felt completely artificial to me compared to the ruthlessness in DA:O I also hated how the gameplay went from pretty down to earth to complete implausibility.
Like in DA:O people were still limited by their physical bodies. In DA2 you get rogues jumping gigantic distances etc. it felt like it took too much inspiration from MMOs at the time, sacrificing it's wonderful world it built up. But a more cynical view is probably that they just hired people that previously worked on other fantasy games, consequently importing the same fantasy settings of their previous projects.
And inquisition... Again I was unable to finish it to date because I just cannot get myself to keep playing... It's just no spirit to it at all. It'd say it's work by a amateur that's trying their best to imitate a previous work, and failing.
Part of ME3's problem was that it was left with too much to do, the Reaper invasion needs to be started and concluded in the same game when it should have been started in ME2.
ME1 the Reapers are unknown, they fight via subterfuge while utilizing the Geth and Indoctrination. Only one Reaper is in the Milky Way, and only for oversight. The game ends with the DLC in which the protagonist annihilates the main Relay which the Reapers wouldve used for their invasion.
ME2 starts with the overseeing Reaper killing the protagonist. Who is the nrebuild by a clandestine human supremacist organization. Its central theme is trying to rally a defense against the upcoming invasion. It ends with the "Suicide mission" against the overseeing Reapers base to forestall the creation of a Human Reaper. That was actually the first part where I got completely stumped back then: why does a human reaper matter?. It was a very good scene, but lore wise it was very confusing to me.
ME3 starts with the arrival of the Reapers and tells the story of their loosing battles, until the final attempt building on the previous cycles survivors magnus opus.
You could've split ME3 into two parts for sure, former being the loosing battle lines and the third one the final conclusion via the Ansible (i think thats what it was called?) - but I feel that last installment wouldve been too little content, if attempted. It wouldve been a good choice as a seperate DLC however, so that the main game ended with the discovery of the schematics and the DLC being about the final desperate struggle to get the resources before all is lost in the inevitable defeat.
People go on about the ending but never really address the whiplash of revealing a third party at the finale. It’s not a question of Shepherd survives or not, it’s that even with all the changes they made, it just doesn’t feel like it has very much to do with what’s gone on before.
Mass Effect 3 had plenty of problems elsewhere, like the whole Cerberus, subplot, the idiotic fights with Kai Leng, the whole Crucible concept, how important parts got shoved on in DLCs...
And while DA:I seemed to have been well-received, I don't think it's a very good game
Mainly because ME3's original ending was tied to you grinding in multiplayer to reach the single player goals. No thank you.
And Dragon Age 2 was more famous for copy/paste dungeons than for the actual game.
So... i just stopped looking at "the new Bioware".
You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!
Not "any" but the "best" ending at the least.
> You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!
Wasn't it basically a competitive FPS? I don't want a competitive FPS in my single player RPG. Especially when it's made mandatory for the best ending.
The "hardest" ending to get in the sense of having the highest readiness requirement is the one that suggests Shepard survived. I still don't think that required multiplayer at launch, but even if it did, that did not last long at all.
It did. I read the reviews.
> but even if it did, that did not last long at all.
Don't care. It's EA's shitty attitude to players in general, and this is just one more example. I'm old enough to remember when they bought PopCap and made bejeweled IAP based after i paid once for it.
No, it was a co-op third person shooter, and one of my favorites I've ever played. It was arguably better gameplay than the main game. It even still has an active playerbase.
on the flip side, studio owners, through no effort of their own, have been practically gifted a solution (hint: it's two letters) to nearly all of the problems relating to their actual risks, which are all focused on production and the nimbleness to respond to player feedback. the real question is whether or not EA still has distribution channels that no one else has.
It's an interesting conundrum for players. Some of us, when we play great game, just can't let go. We want to spend more time in that game's world even after we've exhausted the lovingly hand-crafted content. So, many developers throw us a bone and include side-content that is occasionally brilliant but frequently very low effort. Bioware did this in many of their games. You could easily tell when you were on the main story's track and when you were off in low-effort-land.
you see the homeruns and not the dross, but there is a lot of stuff that is shit
They basically used to make amazing games in the 2000s and never quite lived up to that reputation again. Whether the acquisition by EA was the cause or the symptom of the decline, I don't know.
Anthem frankly killed them. A live service looter shooter which were already out of vogue by the time it was released. Obviously made by marketing entirely, no soul whatsoever. They never recovered from it.
It might have been successful if it weren't a Mass Effect. Or maybe not, who knows.
Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.
I genuinely only remember Ryder and PeeBee by name.
This is a great summary of the entire issue with the game.
I really tried to like it but it didn't inspire any enthusiasm. I didn't really care for the plot, the stakes seemed so low compared to the previous title and none of the races/planets really scratched that explore itch.
That said, the rumor is the in development Mass Effect 5 had found a story way to bridge the gap between the two and make it seem a lot less like a hard reset and find a way to continue past the ME3 endings.
Of course we likely will never get to hear the ME5 story the way it was scrapped along with the studio in this announcement.
And all that before those features and how they're pushed often making the games leave a bad taste on one's mouth, most often soiling a whole franchise.
I'm in the process of reshaping my game dev career to avoid contributing to this kind of rot. Don't mind eating noodles if that's what it takes.
No. That's why serious studios put serious effort to try to avoid politics by a country mile.
I didn't support my country joining NATO either. Even voted against the president we had for 8 years for his 'strategic ambiguity' on it. But now that we've chosen to join, it's obvious we can't really change the situation or go back neutral, even while Trump is doing breaking ranks doing deals with Putin, which makes the whole NATO situation look silly.
Guilty as charged! I'm an activist developer who threw down the gauntlet and insisted The Sims support same sex relationships.
In the June 1998 prototype, when two women tried to kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up in my design review that it should support same sex relationships instead of resulting in homophobic violence. The design documents were updated to say heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and Patrick J. Barrett III implemented it his own way, which was better than mine: no sexual preference property at all, just relationships, so it was up to you who to love.
Then a lesbian kiss lit the fire at E3 in 1999, right after Columbine, when the press was desperate for a non-violent gender inclusive video game to write about.
The Kiss That Changed Video Games:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...
Then the franchise made EA $5 billion dollars.
How EA’s $5 billion Sims empire has become a magnet for female talent in a male-dominated field:
https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/the-sims-25-anniversary/
>who don't care what damage they do inside the team itself to push these kinds of things through, they muffle true innovation, take away bandwidth needed for more important things, and break teams.
That's unmitigated GamerGate bullshit. Nobody's bandwidth was stolen, and the team didn't break up -- just the opposite: we original Sims team members have continued working with each other frequently on different projects over the many years since.
And same sex relationships WERE the innovation -- Gonzalo Frasca used them as the textbook example of procedural rhetoric, because the designers didn't just draw a rainbow flag, they built a rule into the simulation.
Procedural Rhetoric:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
Here are the design documents and the record, so you don't have to take my word for it:
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
>Good game developers focus on universal appeal
That IS universal appeal. Gays and girls and even boys played it, and it proved there was a huge female audience for games 14 years before Gamergate got it all wrong by attacking women while pretending it was about journalism. You people who spew GamerGate hate speech had all of your arguments knocked out from under you in 2000, 14 years before GamerGate even started.
>soiling a whole franchise
If that's what soil looks like, every publisher on earth would line up for a shovel.
Enjoy your noodles!
Damn. I feel bad for a guy who has dug himself in such a deep hole they can't even hope to see the light ever again. Just Putinist tier firehose non-arguments one after each other. Like blaming firemen for fires. The point where a game developer starts blaming gamers, you know they have nothing positive to contribute anymore.
Now he got downvoted so hard I can't even reply to him directly. Maybe that's for the better. I tend to always put effort to responding to effort, even if said effort is unhealthy, but not even temporarily vouching for him will make his comment repliable now ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185797
So why don't you reply to my comment -- with five upvotes so far, not flagged dead -- directly above, or right here if you like:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185797
Most of what you've said is an incoherent Gish Gallop of unsubstantiated unmitigated bullshit with absolutely no evidence or citations, that I've already refuted with many quotes and links to evidence. So to ask you where I ever blamed gamers would be the tip of the iceberg, a complete waste of time, because you are not arguing in good faith, and you have no clue what you're talking about.
But go ahead, instead of deflecting again, try replying to my points instead of making another bald faced lie with cowardly excuses for why you're unable to reply, when you certainly can but jusy don't want to, because the facts and evidence aren't on your side.
You sound like an un-funny right wing comedian with a muti-million dollar Netflix special complaining about how he's being canceled because he can't say anything he wants and just doesn't want to be held responsible for his own words. Simply because you can't defend your own ignorant homophobia.
My messages are fact-based, I work in the industry and everything I create is of universal value. You instead just spam bullshit and slop links. YOU saying I don't argue in good faith is hilarious; but that doesn't mean I keep my standard merely _above you_, given how far down you've gone.
I don't need to follow your crazy tangent-driving and Buzzfeed-tier spam and attacking everyone capable of validly criticizing you. What you talk about has no grounding on how things get done, it's just a crazy man's collection of news clippings as if you were a fanatic fan to some singer. You are the kind of person who'll never be capable of creating value, just at best transferring it, with great loss in efficiency.
I'd tell you to leave the industry but I'm happy no notice that you already haven't been in a position to destroy more good work in a long time. Pie menus as one's life's work, LOL
Yeah, universal doesn’t mean “lowest common denominator” or “only supposedly normal people”. It means everyone. Which includes gay people, and straight people.
The game has options for straight romance, and gay romance. So it’s universal.
Duh.
No. Universal appeal means that something is liked by generally everyone, obviously without having issues that make it disliked by a ton. Like, idk, Mario Bros. Or water. Very few people dislike those. Basically everyone likes them. Straight people, gays, women, old people, young people, etc etc. Obviously your "but no it has to be gay and yellow and have a MAGA hat on and speak in tongues" kind of line of constraints only reduces the size of the group said thing appeals to.
Good thing is that in real life, universal appeal is also good business. And many companies doing stupid shit because some loud idiots that might not even be interested in the product itself told them to make it x
What? No.
Think about it. A universal entrance to a building would have stairs and a ramp, which accommodates everyone. Aka... universal.
Appealing to a subset of people, like only straight people, is decidedly not universal. The only straight people upset by the option to have gay romance are babies, and you'll never make them happy anyway. They can only whine, so there's no point in trying.
Let me make it more clear. If the game MADE you be part of a gay romance, then that's not universal. But it doesn't, right? For straight people, the game is literally equivalent to if there was only straight romance. The complaints are purely made-up in people's heads so they can have something to whine about. I have no patience for it.
Exactly. You can make a game with cars in it, with jumping in it, with nice pastel colors in it, and there's no large group in the world that will decidedly dislike those. But when you start doing woke catering of whatever minority themes for example, as you said, the game loses its universal appeal. Often, to even those minority groups too, as such forcing is almost always extremely inauthentic, patronizing them and insulting their intelligence. The obtuse Veilguard clips being shared recently really drive this home. Game might as well make you play Hitler "correctly" at that point, a total universal appeal suicide.
Before you say "but I don't like those men/muslims/women/terfs/gays/dog eaters/dog loving people!!!", that kind of argument is EXACTLY what disqualifies something from universal appeal. This is not hard.
[1] - https://blog.bioware.com/2022/07/15/bioware-developer-story-...
And it's a win against EA (who own Ultima up until 2027)
AAA games in general have been having massive problems with over-management, where you have hundreds of stakeholders for a game. The second there is proven money in a franchise, massive structures of managers start to meddle in everything, demand day and date release promises, and get involved in everything from creative direction to engineering to resourcing. You end up with thousands of people in the credits for games made by a team of 100 artists and programmers.
The same thing has been happening to big budget movies and prestige TV shows, to the point that everything becomes this sort of neoliberal corporate soup that reflects the culture of the company. Game studios become victims of their own success. In the same way enterprise software becomes consultant feature slop soup, media becomes focus grouped appeals-to-no-one ultra high production value shovelware.
Creative studios stop producing art or meaningful experiences and start producing content.
>romancing characters of the same gender You mean yuri action? Otherwise, nobody wants that. And yes. I'm talking solely out of a feminine perspective here.^^
Otherwise, I once was teh mastermind behind a FemDom/FLR Megamod 4 Sims 3. To unite them all was a kinda scummy affair but the monies that stuff generated, man... Yes, it was/is common 4 The Sims mods 2 be paywalled.
They do, but only as a means for controlling the people they rule over. The House of Saud, when outside Saudi Arabia, drink alchohol, wear revealing clothing, and make use of the sex industry.
I guess in a way it was unavoidable. Still sad though.
I miss many great companies of the 1990s.