'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'
"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."
For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:
Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.
The Onion is funny, but not exactly kind here. I would recommend Mark Darrah's post-mortem on Anthem; he's not an unbiased source (he became an executive producer on the project part way through development, and I think he does try to let himself off easy in his retelling of events), but it's pretty clear that mismanagement--both within Bioware and especially from EA--set Anthem down a track that was hard to recover from. Development goals, gameplay design, and even architectural decisions were constantly shifting until late in development, leading devs to constantly rework the game as new requirements came and went.
The game _was_ forced to release in that financial year, but as Darrah eloquently puts it: "There was no point in delaying because that team didn't have another year in them"
former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."
I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).
I loved The Division. Some months ago I re-downloaded it and just ran around for a bit. The setting and world feel are still there and the story is deeper than some single player games. For a while I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if it was ever released (or leaked) so it could be player hosted or modded in a local kind of development like this. But, I didn't stay with that thought. There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Not quite; Darrah says in his video that the direction from EA flip-flopped between client server and peer-to-peer several times during development, so the code they'd be salvaging would be the original peer-to-peer code. But since that code isn't part of the final game and Bioware is going away... I kind of doubt that code exists in a state where it could be re-integrated with the retail release of Anthem.
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.
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*.
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.
I think 2 decades is a bit generous considering the state of Bioware recently. When was their latest game that was well-received? Dragon Age Inquisition?
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.
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.
I think the best way to keep quality up is to stay small. Supergiant Games is a great example of this approach. Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time.
> Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time
Having to ship AAA games isn’t the problem. The problem is the incessant need to only focus on live service games so that they can milk their consumer left and right. Studio executives come in with unrealistic sales expectations, which then means you can only try and make games that have a live service component to generate a constant revenue stream, which then means you can’t make good games anymore. You’re either making games that are similar to other and get lost in the crowd or are forced to differentiate by promising something that’s never done before, which adds scope, risk and budget to the game.
If you noticed all AAA failures in recent times, almost all of them were live service games. Meanwhile the single player market seems to have finally recovering from the neglect it’s gotten in the last decade.
Also, look at the BioWare successes and failures. They did well when they did single player games, failed when they ventured into live service.
We should learn the lesson of John Carpenter. Some people have a medium that they’re brilliant in, and the scarcity of resources is part of what makes them brilliant. Give them an infinite budget and things go to shit.
Timur Bekmambetov might be a more recent example. The Night Watch movies were wonderful. Then he made Wanted, which was expensive dross. The best thing about that movie is that he put a couple actors from Night Watch as supporting cast in it. He’s done one or two things since that rate mention, but going Hollywood made him worse, not better.
It's surprising what a small team can accomplish, but there are some projects that need a large team to be feasible. It would be nice if there was a clear path on how to grow a game studio and continue to deliver quality.
It’s too bad Spore tanked so badly. He thought he had a solution to the high production values issue, but it panned out so poorly that nobody has tried since.
It helps when you have a hit like bastion be your financial foundation and you don’t have AAA aspirations though. A lot of those deals with publishers and such are because it’s that or the game never gets made (or worse, never finished). And despite how much folks scoff at AAA’s, idk man, it’s fun to play a tentpole title. It was fun to get excited for Ace Combat this year. I can’t wait for the new Metro game (I would say they’ve exited AA territory).
Larian hasn’t broken our hearts, yet. And they’ve made overtures that they will avoid doing so for at least another game or two. But eventually people will retire and then who knows.
I really think it’s going to depend on how big they get. Early BioWare very clearly had everyone committed to building games they were proud of; EA’s management equally clearly are just moving money around for things they don’t care about or believe will negatively impact them personally.
I think that pattern is widespread around the greater tech industry: antitrust enforcement, etc. would be great for having fewer cases where decisions which affect thousands of people are being made by executives who are really detached not just from consequences but simply awareness of what’s going on in each of the different segments of their business.
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 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.
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.
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.
>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.
This is generally the case in the games industry. Great dev teams seem to function more like bands than companies. For however you feel about the latest iterations, the first Call of Duty was an absolute revelation to the FPS genre that we never would have gotten without the EA firing of the MoH team.
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.
There's no rule that says it has to be a positive or negative change overall, just that the people involved are always changing. if they had found the right new talent bioware could have pulled it off too maybe, it just wouldn't be the original bioware either way
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.
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 connected? 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.
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.
I'm going to hazard a guess and suggest that the Saudi Investment Fund is invested in many things that would not be considered polite in Saudi society.
Sure, but when one of these investments makes moves that, perhaps coincidentally, make them more polite in Saudi society, it brings up questions regarding the motivation in a way it wouldn't for some other owner.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 more recent Story of Seasons games do: the Friends of Mineral Town remake (2019/2020) does, and pioneers of olive town does.
Both are more recent than the BioWare examples, and of course more recent than Stardew Valley, which is more in line with the Harvest Moon genre.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
>take away bandwidth needed for more important things
in a game that already has romance options, adding a same sex romance option is not taking away bandwidth. and i cannot imagine how it would "soil" an entire franchise. just don't choose the same sex romance option if you don't want to. easy.
They aren't confused about how difficult it is to avoid same sex options in game. They spelled it out clearly - they decided "mainstream appeal" should not even bring up the option and doing so is probably pressure from people they don't like ("activists").
Karens aren't misunderstanding how to mind their own business or live-and-let-live; they are trying to enforce what they see as (or wish were) social norms and don't give a damn about the perspective of the folks on the receiving end of their chirping.
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
>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.
>most often soiling a whole franchise
Calling same sex romance "rot" that ends up soiling a whole franchise is historically ignorant bigotry, and the claim that inclusion ruins games is the same argument GamerGate made, which The Sims had already proven wrong starting in 2000, more than a decade before GamerGate, when it shipped and went on to become the best selling PC game of all time.
If that's what soil looks like, every publisher on earth would line up for a shovel.
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 entirety of Mass Effect 1 was a master class in writing, from the opening cinematic to the ending credits, that more than made up for somewhat janky (though nevertheless entertaining) gameplay.
I think the Mass Effect games were very flashy but the gameplay elements were pretty shallow. It felt like all the dialog led to the same outcomes, you could be a paragon and give all the "good" replies to conversation or give all the edgy renegade replies and the story would proceed the same way. It kind of felt like it gave you the illusion of choice without actually giving you any real choice. I think it was endemic to the 2000's era RPG's Fallout 4 had exactly the same problem.
The combat wasn't very engaging either it was a boring feeling cover shooter. None of your character abilities or gear or anything seemed to have much of an effect.
Much of ME2's story is terrible (some of the side character stuff is delightful, but the 'main quest' is a train wreck).
My point was that ME3 was doomed because ME2 utterly failed at bridging the gap between the strong start of an epic that was ME1 and what should have been the conclusion in ME3.
In fact 'fail' may be generous. I don't think it even 'tried'.
The studio's biggest sin came before that when they used DLC to paywall off major parts of the story in ME2. 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.
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.
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.
With Veilguard I really enjoyed the combat systems. It was fun progression and at the end of the game you were literally a demigod on the batlefield - it was super fun, and taking some of the toughest optional challenges was very satisfying. And the character storylines(especially Lace and Emmrich) were very very good and I enjoyed them a lot. The weakest point for me was the big bad villain, who seemed barely competent to do anything at all - but overall I really enjoyed it.
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.
- Talos Principle 2
- Expedition 33
- KCD2
- Anything by Arcane
- Anything by CDPR
- 007 Last light / Hitman
- Blue Prince
This is subject to taste, but the games I've been personally enjoying the most are almost all European. US games are comparatively mediocre. I don't have an explanation; only this observation. I was startled when noticing it.
Most recently, I'm loving Order of the Sinking Star, and that's from a US team. There's hope!
- Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 (same studio as BG3)
BG3 is notable for its gigantic success. And Disco Elysium is one of the best written games ever made, and it showed that you can have a fantastic RPG with no combat system whatsoever, while still having meaningful progression.
To add to this list, Remedy Entertainment. They don't miss.
- Alan Wake 1 & 2
- Control & Control Resonant (came out last month)
- Quantum Break
They are a small studio but release fantastic works of art every time. If you haven't heard of them, you might've heard of Max Payne. It was developed by these guys.
I was going to mention this game as a counter point but then realised that if I am doing that it's kind of the exception that proves the rule.
I do wonder why this is, perhaps there's more money in the US to build bigger games with bigger teams and you just get the 'too many cooks in the kitchen' syndrome.
I must admit most AAA games from the US over the last decade have been underwhelming for me.
The US gaming industry has serious Hollywood envy. There's a constant push to make games "cinematic" and put big name actors in leading roles. This not only bloats budgets but results in barely-interactive monstrosities where gameplay is just a bridge between long, non-interactive cutscenes.
It's ironic because Hollywood is not doing too well at the moment.
I like "cinematic" games, and have never had a problem with long cutscenes as long as they told a good story. Games are a great medium for storytelling and cutscenes are better than delivering plot strictly by having players hunt for thousands of short snippets of text.
I'm far less impressed with big name actors and that seems like a massive waste of money. As long as the acting is good, and the voices aren't obnoxious, I don't care who the actor is. People might see a movie just because it has an actor they like in it, but I don't think that carries over too well to games.
It's definitely a balancing act. There are some great cinematic games (Last of Us), but it's also easy to put all the focus on the cinematic aspects and have a bunch of mediocre gameplay as filler in between. I don't understand why more games didn't go the Half Life 2 route and have the conversation/cinematic play out around you without taking control away completely.
That really is a good way to handle it, although it does open the door to miss certain things if players don't do what's expected. For example, in the opening chapter for the last of us you can miss the news report on the TV and the stuff going on outside through the windows before Joel comes in. More than once in games I've only been clued into the fact that I missed a jump scare by a sudden musical sting.
In one sense, that's perfectly fair. In life if you're looking at your feet or spending your time examining the walls you'd be oblivious to what's going on around you, and for non-critical things having a bunch of little moments that you can only catch if you're in (or looking at) the right place at the right time can improve replay value, but games would have to be careful to make sure that the important stuff can't be missed.
Last of US I replayed about 5 years ago on the PS4, and it isn't a good game. I recently revisited Uncharted (Last of Us is just Uncharted with a more serious tone), and they are not good games. I think casual audiences like them because of the heavy story element, but they are quite tiresome to play.
There are also a bunch of "action/adventure" mechanics that seem to be identical in a bunch of mainstream games. You have an upgrade system, so the actual gameplay of the game is bad at the start because you don't have any of the fun abilities at the start, open world mechanics, a very bland open world and the stories are very PG-13, and the characters are kind of bland in the main story. I was playing Ghosts of Tshushima, and many of the mechanics come straight from Farcry 3. I think I am not going to bother completing it. I feel like I've played this game many times before because it's so similar to other games. I would have probably got bored with it before now if it wasn't for the setting.
Generally, a lot of people are still replaying some of the greats from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s because the games weren't nearly as bland.
I think many of these games you've listed are a 7/10. A lot of games I am playing are either years old now or I am going back to older consoles (via emulation normally) and the classic games on them.
If we are sticking to the CRPG theme. Then the Witcher 3 and Divinity: OG 2, BG3 and Disco Elysium would be the obvious choices. If you told me in beginning of 2010s all of the future hits in this genre will come out outside of US and Bioware/Obsidian will fade away, I would be quite surprised (but maybe shouldn't have, considering their owners and financial situations)
As many have mentioned, BG3, CDPR's Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 franchise, Remedy's Control / Alan Wake franchise (both original IPs) to name just a few. DICE (within EA) comes from Sweden and it's responsible for EA's core Frostbite engine alongside its Battlefield franchise.
I cannot point to the reasons as to why. Many of these teams are global teams - so a lot of the same problems apply: marketing costs/timelines, release-time crunch etc. The one difference I can point to is that perhaps executive payouts are not overly dependent on total shareholder returns.
The Kingdom Come: Deliverance games from Warhorse Studios and the Witcher franchise from CD Projekt Red (both Polish) are excellent and have won a ton of awards
Lots of non EU games fall short, including several mentioned in this thread, e.g. Anthem
Unfortunately CDPR is showing some signs of Bioware-ing. As much as I liked Cyberpunk 2077, it was visibly "less than" Witcher 3 in too many ways. This is a sign of decline.
Not really sure if they're comparable to a Bioware since CD Projekt Red the studio is basically the one and the same as CD Projekt the publisher. They also own GOG.com. They're probably more comparable to a Valve, with game development, game publishing and game distribution under a single roof.
Neverwinter Nights 2 was made by Obsidian, not Bioware.
And I would argue Obsidian was the better studio anyway. Besides NWN2, and moreso its fantastic expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, they also made the excellent Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and their own original franchises, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, and Tyranny.
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.
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.
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.
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
The news that Bioware is being shut down hurts more than similar news for other studios. I knew Ray and Greg from university and played ADnD and various Avalon Hill war games with them in the 80s. Ah the days and nights spent on the 6th floor of the UofA Administrative Services building. They were passionate guys who built ground breaking games (Ok, so some of them were rough…) and created an amazing team.
I remember debating with Ray why dying in games like Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu could be "fun". As I recall he didn't see the point but to each their own.
Thanks private equity for dismembering the carcass of everything you acquire!
The current commercial game studio apocalypse is tragic for the disruption to jobs and lives but it was inevitable and, although painful, I think a necessary correction in terms of improving the health of gaming in the long run.
Around 2020 the industry quickly added around 35% more jobs based on three big things. 1) A COVID-shutdown driven demand bubble, 2) PE capital chasing inflated Live Service gaming profit projections and, 3) Speculative land-grab industry roll-ups by Embracer and Microsoft. These triggers were all either temporary, illusory or chasing trends which are net negative for the gaming. Those inflated jobs weren't justified by organic growth and shouldn't have been created in the first place.
That's the funny point: it's not a mistake from their point of view. The managers deciding this get MASSIVE bonuses because they saved a lot of money, which means more money for the shareholders
EA has its money cows, and neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age are one of them, as it seems. The IP stays with EA anyway, so from their point nothing is really lost.
- Increasingly rapid proliferation of business strategy, competitive analysis and spreadsheet-driven financial optimization means more MBAs in a given industry trying to run similar playbooks at the same time. This increasing homogenization occurs at both the company level and the investor level.
- Corporate executives and managers can have divergent incentives due to differing scopes, time frames and reward structures. A crass example is "Even an obvious Ponzi scheme can be good as long as you personally get out before the inevitable crash", although the way it actually happens in practice is usually much more indirect.
For instance, even the difference between a manager optimizing for their division's end-of-year bonus can diverge from the CEO's incentive to optimize next year's profit margin increase. And those can both differ from an institutional investor's incentives tied to 5 yr stock price appreciation.
Why is anyone surprised in the least? I've been boycotting EA totally since 2012 or 2013, I don't even remember now, and they had a whole ass graveyard of dead studios even back then, on top of other immoral shit and lies they produced. People rightfully blame corpos like Actiblizzard or Ubisoft, but EA was always in a league of their own.
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.
Bioware hasn't been very successful - creatively or economically - in some time. I loved their heyday more than most, but they're far from what they once were.
I was at another EA studio when BioWare released Andromeda and Anthem. Got to play an early closed beta of Anthem, heard lots of details about Andromeda's development as it was happening. As a huge fan of their games it felt crazy and very sad.
However, The Veilguard to me was amazing. I loved that game and it's my favorite Dragon Age.
BioWare shutting down will hurt a lot, I've met many executives and ex-developers who have worked there, it's going to be a big loss for the community in Edmonton. They've all gone on and done incredible things afterwards, but there will be a key player missing in the pipeline.
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.
As someone who spent so much time in the universe of Mass Effect / Dragon Age, this is hard. I am almost grieving. The latest games of those franchises (Andromeda and Veilguard) could not live up to the expectations. They deserved a better ending.
I wish I had never seen the new ME teaser / trailer [1] out 5 years ago.
While we may be saying goodbye to BioWare, we can still enjoy the games through services like Good Old Games (GOG) who preserve the titles - BG1, BG2, KOTOR and more can certainly keep living on.
> 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.
I think that a lot of Bioware fans just had nostalgia though - their recent work doesn't seem to have been as well received as their franchise initiator games.
Fingers crossed, but it's weirdly uncommon in the games industry.
Apart from whatever the hell happened with Bungie's many changes of ownership, I can't think of many beloved franchises that have been successfully transitioned to new ownership...
Damn, I have a buddy who works for them, he was working on the new Mass Effect. He just lost his mom very quickly a few months ago too.
He hosted a friend and I end of last year and gave us a tour of their offices in Vancouver. Hits close to home.
I had never played any Bioware games but after that trip it inspired me to finally get around to playing through the Dragon Age series, and I marathoned them all over the next few months. It wasn't hard to see the very steep decline in quality. Which is unfortunate cause they definitely had a lot of talent but were being sabotaged internally from executives jerking them around with trend chasing (for as bad as Veilguard was, it's surprising they cobbled something together that's at least somewhat cohesive when it was going back and forth between a single player and multiplayer game), as well as people being put in charge of major creative decisions that clearly had not earned that role.
No they are right. That Youtuber is extremely dull and sidelines actual issues of the gaming industry in favor of inflammatory culture war topics with little evidence or thought behind it. Being a fan of him is a litmus test for tribalism.
I've also learned a lot of people who listen to him don't play games to begin with and are usually just larping. It is what it is.
Respectfully, you are taking him far too seriously. He is playing the character of a drunk, grumpy Scottish guy and doing film/game/TV reviews/commentary. It's not supposed to be taken that seriously.
I am not a fan of him and don't like the culture war stuff, but I've seen the odd video from him in the past. He does have good criticism of films/games, where he highlights how badly written many of them are or character motivations don't make sense.
He has a huge fan base on YouTube. You don't get that by being dull or not having any valid criticisms. You are way off base.
> Being a fan of him is a litmus test for tribalism.
The irony here is that when you make statements like this, you are engaging in tribalism.
Critical Drinker has 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube. I frequently am surprised by the sorts of people that will watch some show. There is a show I watch where I would expect the audience to be male-dominated, and many of the callers and superchatters are women. I was quite surprised.
I would imagine he has a more diverse audience than you would expect.
> I've also learned a lot of people who listen to him don't play games to begin with and are usually just larping. It is what it is.
A lot of people like watching people shit on popular media. Cinemasins was doing the exact same thing a decade ago. I remember them ripping on the dumb stuff that didn't make sense in the original Avengers movie and all the goofs that you are unlikely to notice in the cinema.
People "hate watch" a lot of shows, my sister and I used to hate watch CSI Miami when we were in our teens, and that was in the mid-2000s.
Since the content of the story is negative, every article will start with a picture of a White character and not any of the modern characters, including this Verge article.
RIP Bioware. I was a designer at Pandemic early on before they joined forces. The last remnant of those times falls.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I just hope they sell off the IP rather than letting it stagnate further. There are other game studios out there who could do a lot with it.
Honestly I bet Obsidian is next, and I'm not sure I'll mind. I still love them for the great games they've made in the past, and still I buy their new releases, but they haven't been able to pull off a compelling game since Pillars of Eternity 2. That was 8 years ago.
Isn't obsidian doing the new fallout? I think Bethesda might get the axe before them if anyone does. Or they'll get merged together and shook down for spare devs
I gasped at the news but in retrospect, I'm not surprised... but as a huge Dragon Age fan, I had a bit of hope of a new Dragon Age game. This is a sad day.
The EA I remember was Racing Destruction Set, Pinball Construction Set, great stuff, lots of freeform playtime. Did they continue releasing that kind of stuff? Yeah I haven't kept up.
I suspect the economics and 'shape' of the gaming industry to change over the next few years. Currently we're in this strange place with game dev where a large portion of software engineers (majority?) are using LLMs and AI coding tools, but for some reason the gaming industry (or at least it's customers) are vehemently anti-AI to the point studios have to put out statements about AI usage to assuage the mobs online.
This will change. The silent majority of customers will vote with their wallets once they realise they will get a) more games and b) better games - because the barrier to entry has been lowered, the timeframes, resource requirements reduced, more unique IP or novel games, etc. Yes, there will be more slop/shovelware - that's bound to happen - but we will also get vastly more great games as well if we allow the industry to embrace AI coding and generative AI for assets to assist creatives and developers.
It is sad that EA announced they are choosing not to continue development of the next ME game. I'm sure there are many fans of that franchise here, I know I sank a lot of hours into the series (and the online co-op mode from ME3).
Maybe EA sell off the IP to a studio who can lean into fully AI assisted game development. There's a chance we'll get something decent - and hey, it can't be as bad as Andromeda, right?
I know it's not Bioware, but Kreia from Kotor 2 is still one of my favorite characters from any video game franchise. I wish I could experience those games for the first time again, but as an adult.
kotor was one of the first interactive media franchises to showcase that era in the Star Wars universe, and it was an era that's radically different than anything in the movies.
bg3 is a typical DnD setting + sex + lovecraftian elements and flayers sitting in for beholders to spice it up; and they were only there because during dev-time lovecraft was a huge gaming trend.
don't get me wrong; I love both of them, but the BG3 story was the one that ended up feeling like -- for me -- something that would have been a modpack for Neverwinter Nights.
Likewise. The bg3 story felt like a very long, strung out and milked dry "you have sickness x, go the hospital and figure out a treatment" level of depth
To me at least, somehow KOTOR and KOTOR 2 made me care more about the characters and story than BG3.
BG3 has better systems and combat and gear and such, but for many the worldbuilding, story, quests and such of KOTOR have yet to be beaten. Bastia Shan, Carth Onasi, Visas Marr, HK47.
The story of Revan and its twists.
Perhaps its just nostalgia and many KOTOR fans having been at an earlier age when they played those Bioware games compared to DOS 2 and BG3 though. Maybe people who were teenagers playing Larian games feel as attached to the characters and story as those of us who were teens in KOTOR's heyday did.
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.
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.
There are dozens of better sites to use for something like this than Verge. They have horrid policies with regards to displaying sources, and put half their articles behind a paywall. At least use an archive service.
As always, the Onion nailed it perfectly long ago:
https://theonion.com/anthem-developers-assure-players-whiteb...
'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'
https://theonion.com/people-criticizing-anthem-don-t-underst...
"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."
For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...
The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.
The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.
Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.
Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.
The Onion is funny, but not exactly kind here. I would recommend Mark Darrah's post-mortem on Anthem; he's not an unbiased source (he became an executive producer on the project part way through development, and I think he does try to let himself off easy in his retelling of events), but it's pretty clear that mismanagement--both within Bioware and especially from EA--set Anthem down a track that was hard to recover from. Development goals, gameplay design, and even architectural decisions were constantly shifting until late in development, leading devs to constantly rework the game as new requirements came and went.
https://youtu.be/CxwrCRdqZb8
The game _was_ forced to release in that financial year, but as Darrah eloquently puts it: "There was no point in delaying because that team didn't have another year in them"
Seems Anthem is gone, but not completely?
From the same post-mortem video:
former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/anthem-is-dead-after-t...
I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).
I loved The Division. Some months ago I re-downloaded it and just ran around for a bit. The setting and world feel are still there and the story is deeper than some single player games. For a while I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if it was ever released (or leaked) so it could be player hosted or modded in a local kind of development like this. But, I didn't stay with that thought. There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Not quite; Darrah says in his video that the direction from EA flip-flopped between client server and peer-to-peer several times during development, so the code they'd be salvaging would be the original peer-to-peer code. But since that code isn't part of the final game and Bioware is going away... I kind of doubt that code exists in a state where it could be re-integrated with the retail release of Anthem.
Both articles GP linked were jokes pointing blame at the mismanagement
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.
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*.
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.
> It took two decades for that to happen
I think 2 decades is a bit generous considering the state of Bioware recently. When was their latest game that was well-received? Dragon Age Inquisition?
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.
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.
I think the best way to keep quality up is to stay small. Supergiant Games is a great example of this approach. Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time.
> Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time
Having to ship AAA games isn’t the problem. The problem is the incessant need to only focus on live service games so that they can milk their consumer left and right. Studio executives come in with unrealistic sales expectations, which then means you can only try and make games that have a live service component to generate a constant revenue stream, which then means you can’t make good games anymore. You’re either making games that are similar to other and get lost in the crowd or are forced to differentiate by promising something that’s never done before, which adds scope, risk and budget to the game.
If you noticed all AAA failures in recent times, almost all of them were live service games. Meanwhile the single player market seems to have finally recovering from the neglect it’s gotten in the last decade.
Also, look at the BioWare successes and failures. They did well when they did single player games, failed when they ventured into live service.
We should learn the lesson of John Carpenter. Some people have a medium that they’re brilliant in, and the scarcity of resources is part of what makes them brilliant. Give them an infinite budget and things go to shit.
Timur Bekmambetov might be a more recent example. The Night Watch movies were wonderful. Then he made Wanted, which was expensive dross. The best thing about that movie is that he put a couple actors from Night Watch as supporting cast in it. He’s done one or two things since that rate mention, but going Hollywood made him worse, not better.
It's surprising what a small team can accomplish, but there are some projects that need a large team to be feasible. It would be nice if there was a clear path on how to grow a game studio and continue to deliver quality.
It’s too bad Spore tanked so badly. He thought he had a solution to the high production values issue, but it panned out so poorly that nobody has tried since.
It helps when you have a hit like bastion be your financial foundation and you don’t have AAA aspirations though. A lot of those deals with publishers and such are because it’s that or the game never gets made (or worse, never finished). And despite how much folks scoff at AAA’s, idk man, it’s fun to play a tentpole title. It was fun to get excited for Ace Combat this year. I can’t wait for the new Metro game (I would say they’ve exited AA territory).
wasn't bg3 pretty universally praised too?
That was developed by Larian, not Bioware.
ah, didn't realise that!
Yes but Bioware didn't make it
Larian hasn’t broken our hearts, yet. And they’ve made overtures that they will avoid doing so for at least another game or two. But eventually people will retire and then who knows.
I really think it’s going to depend on how big they get. Early BioWare very clearly had everyone committed to building games they were proud of; EA’s management equally clearly are just moving money around for things they don’t care about or believe will negatively impact them personally.
I think that pattern is widespread around the greater tech industry: antitrust enforcement, etc. would be great for having fewer cases where decisions which affect thousands of people are being made by executives who are really detached not just from consequences but simply awareness of what’s going on in each of the different segments of their business.
The first dragon's age was absolutely ace too.
Dragon Age 2 got a chilly reception at launch but has aged well considering what came after and is definitely worth a playthrough, doubly so with mods
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 got on with 2 the worst of all of them. Well like most people didn't play Veilguard but of 1-3, 2 was hard work.
I just remember dragon age 2 to feel rushed and underdeveloped. The scale also felt a lot smaller than the original.
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.
True dat. DLCs worth every penny & then the modded content... Ohoho!^^ Prolly the last good, genuine CRPG from teh Warez of the Bio!
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.
I don't have inside knowledge but have followed Bioware (given how many of their games live rent free in my head)
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)
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:
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5qKN2Yxaok&t=1s
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.
It became a corporate job instead of a smallish team excited about building the games they wanted to play.
>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.
This is generally the case in the games industry. Great dev teams seem to function more like bands than companies. For however you feel about the latest iterations, the first Call of Duty was an absolute revelation to the FPS genre that we never would have gotten without the EA firing of the MoH team.
And then they moved on to make Titanfall 1 and 2 after the founders were unceremoniously fired by Activision, which were also great games
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.
There's no rule that says it has to be a positive or negative change overall, just that the people involved are always changing. if they had found the right new talent bioware could have pulled it off too maybe, it just wouldn't be the original bioware either way
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.
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 connected? 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.
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.
I'm going to hazard a guess and suggest that the Saudi Investment Fund is invested in many things that would not be considered polite in Saudi society.
Sure, but when one of these investments makes moves that, perhaps coincidentally, make them more polite in Saudi society, it brings up questions regarding the motivation in a way it wouldn't for some other owner.
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.
Don't forget ME:Andromeda (2017). The truth is that it has been almost 15 years since Bioware made an even arguably great game.
Yeah, while it's sad they are gone, the reality is that they have been zombies for a long time.
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.
> I cared more about the Irish redhead copilot than about any one of the actual companions
This squares with Joker being a fan-favourite character in the main trilogy
> 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 got married in Ultima 7.
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]
[1] - https://blog.bioware.com/2022/07/15/bioware-developer-story-...
Richard Garriott is getting Ultima back next year btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2El7VtPuSzs
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.
Garriott is a crypto bro, all in on genAI and (IMO) has done nothing noteworthy since selling off the IP. I wouldn't get your hopes up
He was the first high net worth individual to pioneer space tourism.
People got married in Ultima Online to real people.
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 more recent Story of Seasons games do: the Friends of Mineral Town remake (2019/2020) does, and pioneers of olive town does.
Both are more recent than the BioWare examples, and of course more recent than Stardew Valley, which is more in line with the Harvest Moon genre.
I would attribute any decrease in those sort of interactions 100% to runaway feminism over anything the Saudis are doing
The Saudis would agree with you that runaway feminism is the root of all evil, not them.
Actually on this issue, it seems like the runaway feminists and the Saudis both agree.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> Dice pushed le Industry forward when they stole Desert Combat, made a shitty Engine & called it 'BF2'.
Dice acquired the Desert Combat studio, and the same people made BF2.
https://giantbomb.com/wiki/Companies/Trauma_Studios
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.
Not sure what what specific claim you're making. Do you think gay romance 'soiled' Mass Effect?
>take away bandwidth needed for more important things
in a game that already has romance options, adding a same sex romance option is not taking away bandwidth. and i cannot imagine how it would "soil" an entire franchise. just don't choose the same sex romance option if you don't want to. easy.
They aren't confused about how difficult it is to avoid same sex options in game. They spelled it out clearly - they decided "mainstream appeal" should not even bring up the option and doing so is probably pressure from people they don't like ("activists").
Karens aren't misunderstanding how to mind their own business or live-and-let-live; they are trying to enforce what they see as (or wish were) social norms and don't give a damn about the perspective of the folks on the receiving end of their chirping.
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
>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.
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/
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.
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.
>most often soiling a whole franchise
Calling same sex romance "rot" that ends up soiling a whole franchise is historically ignorant bigotry, and the claim that inclusion ruins games is the same argument GamerGate made, which The Sims had already proven wrong starting in 2000, more than a decade before GamerGate, when it shipped and went on to become the best selling PC game of all time.
If that's what soil looks like, every publisher on earth would line up for a shovel.
Enjoy your noodles, but get used to them!
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.
They wiffed on ME3's ending.
To be fair, ME3's ending was doomed before that game started.
I'd place it around the start of ME2.
ME2's ending was just terrible. The boss fight was ridiculously cheesy.
In contrast, ME1's ending may have well been a master class in game cinematography and writing.
The entirety of Mass Effect 1 was a master class in writing, from the opening cinematic to the ending credits, that more than made up for somewhat janky (though nevertheless entertaining) gameplay.
I think the Mass Effect games were very flashy but the gameplay elements were pretty shallow. It felt like all the dialog led to the same outcomes, you could be a paragon and give all the "good" replies to conversation or give all the edgy renegade replies and the story would proceed the same way. It kind of felt like it gave you the illusion of choice without actually giving you any real choice. I think it was endemic to the 2000's era RPG's Fallout 4 had exactly the same problem.
The combat wasn't very engaging either it was a boring feeling cover shooter. None of your character abilities or gear or anything seemed to have much of an effect.
Are there any games you like that you felt did give you a real significant choice in how the story played out?
Much of ME2's story is terrible (some of the side character stuff is delightful, but the 'main quest' is a train wreck).
My point was that ME3 was doomed because ME2 utterly failed at bridging the gap between the strong start of an epic that was ME1 and what should have been the conclusion in ME3.
In fact 'fail' may be generous. I don't think it even 'tried'.
I always thought this was a hot take but I agree!
True.. it is genuinely hard to deliver on that kind of a build up.
At least you can pick the color filter to apply to the ending.
The studio's biggest sin came before that when they used DLC to paywall off major parts of the story in ME2. 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.
they could go from infamously bad ending to one of most creative endings ever by just saying indoctrination theory is correct
“It was all a dream” nonsense IMO. It’s fun to play with that idea, but I’d find that a lame cop out ultimately.
Meh I liked it. In fact they shouldn’t have caved and added to it IMO.
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.
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.
When Dragon Age 2 came out, Bioware was still running things day-to-day.
By the time of the next Dragon Age game, EA was deep in making decisions.
I might be in minority but I really enjoyed both Inquisition and Veilguard.
You're in the minority for Veilguard but Inquisition is their highest selling entry in the series
With Veilguard I really enjoyed the combat systems. It was fun progression and at the end of the game you were literally a demigod on the batlefield - it was super fun, and taking some of the toughest optional challenges was very satisfying. And the character storylines(especially Lace and Emmrich) were very very good and I enjoyed them a lot. The weakest point for me was the big bad villain, who seemed barely competent to do anything at all - but overall I really enjoyed it.
I enjoyed Inquisition and couldn’t stand Veilguard. But I also never played any of the earlier DA games.
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.
The makers of Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins.
Sad, even though BioWare was dead already.
Check the release dates on those games.
No doubt. It's been a very long time since Bioware was a great studio.
Check the release dates of their best games against the date of purchase by EA and then compare everything after than to everything before that.
Let us not forget MDK2
MDK, MDK2 are truly like nothing else out there.
Art
Those games are so weird but stylishly alluring. I remember buying a big box of MDK and playing through the game in probably a day or two.
Also Anthem!
It's not like no one saw this coming. Here's a comic from nine years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cxz4a/eas_graveyar...
For those without reddit accounts, here's an accessible link to that page at old.reddit.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20230610092047/https://old.reddi...
i enjoyed this comic, similar in theme, posted today:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcf.preview.re...
Talent in western game studios just can't shake the startup mode. Try get a hit, try to get bought, cash out, run away.
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.
*US game studios. Continental Europe has been continuing to put out masterpieces. (Many countries: Poland, Croatia, Czechia, France, etc)
BioWare is a Canadian studio
(But purchased by EA obviously)
Why do you think that is? What would you consider a European masterpiece? And what would you consider something that falls short from outside Europe?
European masterpieces, recentish:
This is subject to taste, but the games I've been personally enjoying the most are almost all European. US games are comparatively mediocre. I don't have an explanation; only this observation. I was startled when noticing it.Most recently, I'm loving Order of the Sinking Star, and that's from a US team. There's hope!
You're forgetting a few major ones:
- Baldur's Gate 3 (German)
- Disco Elysium (Estonian)
- Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 (same studio as BG3)
BG3 is notable for its gigantic success. And Disco Elysium is one of the best written games ever made, and it showed that you can have a fantastic RPG with no combat system whatsoever, while still having meaningful progression.
> - Baldur's Gate 3 (German)
Bruh, Larian is in Belgium
To add to this list, Remedy Entertainment. They don't miss.
- Alan Wake 1 & 2 - Control & Control Resonant (came out last month) - Quantum Break
They are a small studio but release fantastic works of art every time. If you haven't heard of them, you might've heard of Max Payne. It was developed by these guys.
> Order of the Sinking Star
I was going to mention this game as a counter point but then realised that if I am doing that it's kind of the exception that proves the rule.
I do wonder why this is, perhaps there's more money in the US to build bigger games with bigger teams and you just get the 'too many cooks in the kitchen' syndrome.
I must admit most AAA games from the US over the last decade have been underwhelming for me.
To be fair Order of the Sinking Star is by Jhonthon Blow + (who ever he employed). So if we rephraze it from US to US AAA studios, it still works.
Baldurs Gate 3 was made in Europe!
> Anything by CDPR
They're lucky they were able to No Man's Sky CP2077 alongside Edgerunners being well received.
The US gaming industry has serious Hollywood envy. There's a constant push to make games "cinematic" and put big name actors in leading roles. This not only bloats budgets but results in barely-interactive monstrosities where gameplay is just a bridge between long, non-interactive cutscenes.
It's ironic because Hollywood is not doing too well at the moment.
I like "cinematic" games, and have never had a problem with long cutscenes as long as they told a good story. Games are a great medium for storytelling and cutscenes are better than delivering plot strictly by having players hunt for thousands of short snippets of text.
I'm far less impressed with big name actors and that seems like a massive waste of money. As long as the acting is good, and the voices aren't obnoxious, I don't care who the actor is. People might see a movie just because it has an actor they like in it, but I don't think that carries over too well to games.
It's definitely a balancing act. There are some great cinematic games (Last of Us), but it's also easy to put all the focus on the cinematic aspects and have a bunch of mediocre gameplay as filler in between. I don't understand why more games didn't go the Half Life 2 route and have the conversation/cinematic play out around you without taking control away completely.
That really is a good way to handle it, although it does open the door to miss certain things if players don't do what's expected. For example, in the opening chapter for the last of us you can miss the news report on the TV and the stuff going on outside through the windows before Joel comes in. More than once in games I've only been clued into the fact that I missed a jump scare by a sudden musical sting.
In one sense, that's perfectly fair. In life if you're looking at your feet or spending your time examining the walls you'd be oblivious to what's going on around you, and for non-critical things having a bunch of little moments that you can only catch if you're in (or looking at) the right place at the right time can improve replay value, but games would have to be careful to make sure that the important stuff can't be missed.
Last of US I replayed about 5 years ago on the PS4, and it isn't a good game. I recently revisited Uncharted (Last of Us is just Uncharted with a more serious tone), and they are not good games. I think casual audiences like them because of the heavy story element, but they are quite tiresome to play.
There are also a bunch of "action/adventure" mechanics that seem to be identical in a bunch of mainstream games. You have an upgrade system, so the actual gameplay of the game is bad at the start because you don't have any of the fun abilities at the start, open world mechanics, a very bland open world and the stories are very PG-13, and the characters are kind of bland in the main story. I was playing Ghosts of Tshushima, and many of the mechanics come straight from Farcry 3. I think I am not going to bother completing it. I feel like I've played this game many times before because it's so similar to other games. I would have probably got bored with it before now if it wasn't for the setting.
Generally, a lot of people are still replaying some of the greats from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s because the games weren't nearly as bland.
I think many of these games you've listed are a 7/10. A lot of games I am playing are either years old now or I am going back to older consoles (via emulation normally) and the classic games on them.
If we are sticking to the CRPG theme. Then the Witcher 3 and Divinity: OG 2, BG3 and Disco Elysium would be the obvious choices. If you told me in beginning of 2010s all of the future hits in this genre will come out outside of US and Bioware/Obsidian will fade away, I would be quite surprised (but maybe shouldn't have, considering their owners and financial situations)
As many have mentioned, BG3, CDPR's Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 franchise, Remedy's Control / Alan Wake franchise (both original IPs) to name just a few. DICE (within EA) comes from Sweden and it's responsible for EA's core Frostbite engine alongside its Battlefield franchise.
I cannot point to the reasons as to why. Many of these teams are global teams - so a lot of the same problems apply: marketing costs/timelines, release-time crunch etc. The one difference I can point to is that perhaps executive payouts are not overly dependent on total shareholder returns.
The Kingdom Come: Deliverance games from Warhorse Studios and the Witcher franchise from CD Projekt Red (both Polish) are excellent and have won a ton of awards
Lots of non EU games fall short, including several mentioned in this thread, e.g. Anthem
> The Kingdom Come: Deliverance games from Warhorse Studios and the Witcher franchise from CD Projekt Red (both Polish)
Warhorse Studios is Czech; Slavs are not all alike.
My mistake, I misremembered. Unfortunately can’t edit.
The Witcher 3, Any GTA game
CDPR is probably the flagship studio in Europe. Interestingly, they are probably the modern studio that most resembles Bioware in the 2000's.
Unfortunately CDPR is showing some signs of Bioware-ing. As much as I liked Cyberpunk 2077, it was visibly "less than" Witcher 3 in too many ways. This is a sign of decline.
Not really sure if they're comparable to a Bioware since CD Projekt Red the studio is basically the one and the same as CD Projekt the publisher. They also own GOG.com. They're probably more comparable to a Valve, with game development, game publishing and game distribution under a single roof.
CDPR has looong been separated from the publisher arm, and recently from the GOG one. Probably for the best for CDPR.
Warhorse studios as well. Rebel Wolves. Machine Games. IO interactive.
The list is rather long.
Valheim, Enshrouded. Each sit at the peak of the genre, IMO.
Bioware had a string of hits before EA bought them.
They lost their way when the doctors left.
Probably one of the best game studios ever, IMO.
(In no certain order)
- Baldur's Gate
- Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
- Neverwinter Nights
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
- Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Jade Empire
- Mass Effect
- Mass Effect 2
- Mass Effect 3
- MDK2
- Dragon Age Origins
- Dragon Age II
- Dragon Age: Inquisition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWare
I really enjoyed Neverwinter Knights 2.
Neverwinter Nights 2 was made by Obsidian, not Bioware.
And I would argue Obsidian was the better studio anyway. Besides NWN2, and moreso its fantastic expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, they also made the excellent Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and their own original franchises, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, and Tyranny.
Bioware sent engineers to provide help to Obsidian (SW KOTOR2, I think).
Obsidian and Bioware both had a working relationship with Black Isle Studios.
Love them all, they did some great stuff.
That was Obsidian.
... and then EA purchased them and forced the frostbyte engine and release cadence expectations and mechanics that worked for FIFA Ultimate Team.
Blizzard is owned by MSFT now, so it did get bought out (back in 2022). So it fits the 'startup mode' model that I _think_ you're trying to say?
There's other studios that similar to Blizzard didn't get bought out early and published multiple hit games, like Insomniac Games.
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.
There seems to be a bit of a symmetry between what WoW did to Blizzard and what WH40K did to Games Workshop.
> the end of Blizzard
extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.
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.
Similar with Westwood (part of Virgin interactive) and Bioware (parceled up with Pandemic studios, owned by Elevation partners, who sold it to EA)
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.
Yep, and all these years later, we have lost so much. It may seem like such a small thing, but losing real GMs in WoW makes me really sad.
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.
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
The news that Bioware is being shut down hurts more than similar news for other studios. I knew Ray and Greg from university and played ADnD and various Avalon Hill war games with them in the 80s. Ah the days and nights spent on the 6th floor of the UofA Administrative Services building. They were passionate guys who built ground breaking games (Ok, so some of them were rough…) and created an amazing team.
I remember debating with Ray why dying in games like Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu could be "fun". As I recall he didn't see the point but to each their own.
Thanks private equity for dismembering the carcass of everything you acquire!
The current commercial game studio apocalypse is tragic for the disruption to jobs and lives but it was inevitable and, although painful, I think a necessary correction in terms of improving the health of gaming in the long run.
Around 2020 the industry quickly added around 35% more jobs based on three big things. 1) A COVID-shutdown driven demand bubble, 2) PE capital chasing inflated Live Service gaming profit projections and, 3) Speculative land-grab industry roll-ups by Embracer and Microsoft. These triggers were all either temporary, illusory or chasing trends which are net negative for the gaming. Those inflated jobs weren't justified by organic growth and shouldn't have been created in the first place.
What I don’t get is how do so many companies make the exact same mistake?
It’s like corporations all get the same memo and do the exact same things in lockstep
That's the funny point: it's not a mistake from their point of view. The managers deciding this get MASSIVE bonuses because they saved a lot of money, which means more money for the shareholders
EA has its money cows, and neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age are one of them, as it seems. The IP stays with EA anyway, so from their point nothing is really lost.
There are multiple causes. Two big ones are:
- Increasingly rapid proliferation of business strategy, competitive analysis and spreadsheet-driven financial optimization means more MBAs in a given industry trying to run similar playbooks at the same time. This increasing homogenization occurs at both the company level and the investor level.
- Corporate executives and managers can have divergent incentives due to differing scopes, time frames and reward structures. A crass example is "Even an obvious Ponzi scheme can be good as long as you personally get out before the inevitable crash", although the way it actually happens in practice is usually much more indirect.
For instance, even the difference between a manager optimizing for their division's end-of-year bonus can diverge from the CEO's incentive to optimize next year's profit margin increase. And those can both differ from an institutional investor's incentives tied to 5 yr stock price appreciation.
Why is anyone surprised in the least? I've been boycotting EA totally since 2012 or 2013, I don't even remember now, and they had a whole ass graveyard of dead studios even back then, on top of other immoral shit and lies they produced. People rightfully blame corpos like Actiblizzard or Ubisoft, but EA was always in a league of their own.
It's the new hot business model. Buy a very successful studio then liquidate it.
Bioware have not been very successful for a very long time.
Even in the good times their ability to create (and hide) black holes was prodigious.
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.
Bioware hasn't been very successful - creatively or economically - in some time. I loved their heyday more than most, but they're far from what they once were.
The people who made everything we loved from BioWare left more than a decade ago.
BioWare, in the last 12 years, has released: Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Veilguard, and Anthem.
It's still painful to see the studio go away, but I sadly agree.
I was at another EA studio when BioWare released Andromeda and Anthem. Got to play an early closed beta of Anthem, heard lots of details about Andromeda's development as it was happening. As a huge fan of their games it felt crazy and very sad.
However, The Veilguard to me was amazing. I loved that game and it's my favorite Dragon Age.
Veilguard is a serviceable action romp but it's not a Dragon Age game.
EA bought Bioware 19 years ago. Are you saying this was their strategy for two decades?
cmon man, dont let facts get in the way of a narrative. just let gamers whine in peace
Nothing new under the sun - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
You could not be more wrong
They were purchased decades ago
BioWare shutting down will hurt a lot, I've met many executives and ex-developers who have worked there, it's going to be a big loss for the community in Edmonton. They've all gone on and done incredible things afterwards, but there will be a key player missing in the pipeline.
One of my favorite game companies ever. But it had already been "shut down" in practice after the acquisition.
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.
It wasn't shut down after the acqusiition, it's been dead and just shambling along as a zombie for nearly two decades.
The 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.
I am grateful they released the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which was a sort of penance for Mass Effect Andromeda.
Speaking of Andromeda, I still rewatch videogamedunkey's hilarious review of it titled Mess Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDjci1ODoBs
I never played Andromeda, and i often think that maybe i should, but there's just not enough time and too many good games to play.
As someone who spent so much time in the universe of Mass Effect / Dragon Age, this is hard. I am almost grieving. The latest games of those franchises (Andromeda and Veilguard) could not live up to the expectations. They deserved a better ending.
I wish I had never seen the new ME teaser / trailer [1] out 5 years ago.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg-Ctg6k_Ao&vl=en
While we may be saying goodbye to BioWare, we can still enjoy the games through services like Good Old Games (GOG) who preserve the titles - BG1, BG2, KOTOR and more can certainly keep living on.
RIP to one of the best game studios.
> 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.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
I think that a lot of Bioware fans just had nostalgia though - their recent work doesn't seem to have been as well received as their franchise initiator games.
Hopefully this opens the door for EA to sell off the Mass Effect IP to a company that's interested in making something other than a live service game.
Fingers crossed, but it's weirdly uncommon in the games industry.
Apart from whatever the hell happened with Bungie's many changes of ownership, I can't think of many beloved franchises that have been successfully transitioned to new ownership...
Is that even a thing? I can't think of any case where company sold off game IP other than in acquisitions
Damn, I have a buddy who works for them, he was working on the new Mass Effect. He just lost his mom very quickly a few months ago too.
He hosted a friend and I end of last year and gave us a tour of their offices in Vancouver. Hits close to home.
I had never played any Bioware games but after that trip it inspired me to finally get around to playing through the Dragon Age series, and I marathoned them all over the next few months. It wasn't hard to see the very steep decline in quality. Which is unfortunate cause they definitely had a lot of talent but were being sabotaged internally from executives jerking them around with trend chasing (for as bad as Veilguard was, it's surprising they cobbled something together that's at least somewhat cohesive when it was going back and forth between a single player and multiplayer game), as well as people being put in charge of major creative decisions that clearly had not earned that role.
The good news is that Dragon Age: The Veilguard was made by, and for, modern audiences. The bad news is it sunk the company alongside Anthem.
"modern audiences"
I can't help but read that in the Critical Drinker's voice.
My favourite translation of the Bible is THE MESSAGE.
> I can't help but read that in the Critical Drinker's voice
Sounds like a horrible existence. Might as well listen to a cheese grater.
Not every topic needs your reactionary grievances. So incredibly pathetic, both of you.
Thank you for writing that in such a non-reactionary way. How's the view from the right side of history?
No they are right. That Youtuber is extremely dull and sidelines actual issues of the gaming industry in favor of inflammatory culture war topics with little evidence or thought behind it. Being a fan of him is a litmus test for tribalism.
I've also learned a lot of people who listen to him don't play games to begin with and are usually just larping. It is what it is.
Respectfully, you are taking him far too seriously. He is playing the character of a drunk, grumpy Scottish guy and doing film/game/TV reviews/commentary. It's not supposed to be taken that seriously.
I am not a fan of him and don't like the culture war stuff, but I've seen the odd video from him in the past. He does have good criticism of films/games, where he highlights how badly written many of them are or character motivations don't make sense.
He has a huge fan base on YouTube. You don't get that by being dull or not having any valid criticisms. You are way off base.
> Being a fan of him is a litmus test for tribalism.
The irony here is that when you make statements like this, you are engaging in tribalism.
Critical Drinker has 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube. I frequently am surprised by the sorts of people that will watch some show. There is a show I watch where I would expect the audience to be male-dominated, and many of the callers and superchatters are women. I was quite surprised.
I would imagine he has a more diverse audience than you would expect.
> I've also learned a lot of people who listen to him don't play games to begin with and are usually just larping. It is what it is.
A lot of people like watching people shit on popular media. Cinemasins was doing the exact same thing a decade ago. I remember them ripping on the dumb stuff that didn't make sense in the original Avengers movie and all the goofs that you are unlikely to notice in the cinema.
People "hate watch" a lot of shows, my sister and I used to hate watch CSI Miami when we were in our teens, and that was in the mid-2000s.
Since the content of the story is negative, every article will start with a picture of a White character and not any of the modern characters, including this Verge article.
RIP Bioware. I was a designer at Pandemic early on before they joined forces. The last remnant of those times falls.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I just hope they sell off the IP rather than letting it stagnate further. There are other game studios out there who could do a lot with it.
Honestly I bet Obsidian is next, and I'm not sure I'll mind. I still love them for the great games they've made in the past, and still I buy their new releases, but they haven't been able to pull off a compelling game since Pillars of Eternity 2. That was 8 years ago.
Isn't obsidian doing the new fallout? I think Bethesda might get the axe before them if anyone does. Or they'll get merged together and shook down for spare devs
Bioware has been dead for over a decade. What we have now has just been wearing its name. Honestly best to just let it go.
all these big studios are a waste of space. can't even run BioWare well.
Could this be related to the war in the Gulf
I gasped at the news but in retrospect, I'm not surprised... but as a huge Dragon Age fan, I had a bit of hope of a new Dragon Age game. This is a sad day.
You must gather your party before venturing forth
May all of those developers go off to create their own IP and, in turn, get acquired by EA.
It's like the cluttered overgrown forest that periodicly burns down to create space for new life.
EA is like a landowner who does no maintenance but loves to buy things that have been maintained because they look so good.
Really loved Jade Empire and Mass Effect. But they had lost their touch quite some time ago. Not surprised this was coming
The EA I remember was Racing Destruction Set, Pinball Construction Set, great stuff, lots of freeform playtime. Did they continue releasing that kind of stuff? Yeah I haven't kept up.
I suspect the economics and 'shape' of the gaming industry to change over the next few years. Currently we're in this strange place with game dev where a large portion of software engineers (majority?) are using LLMs and AI coding tools, but for some reason the gaming industry (or at least it's customers) are vehemently anti-AI to the point studios have to put out statements about AI usage to assuage the mobs online.
This will change. The silent majority of customers will vote with their wallets once they realise they will get a) more games and b) better games - because the barrier to entry has been lowered, the timeframes, resource requirements reduced, more unique IP or novel games, etc. Yes, there will be more slop/shovelware - that's bound to happen - but we will also get vastly more great games as well if we allow the industry to embrace AI coding and generative AI for assets to assist creatives and developers.
It is sad that EA announced they are choosing not to continue development of the next ME game. I'm sure there are many fans of that franchise here, I know I sank a lot of hours into the series (and the online co-op mode from ME3).
Maybe EA sell off the IP to a studio who can lean into fully AI assisted game development. There's a chance we'll get something decent - and hey, it can't be as bad as Andromeda, right?
I think that the anti-AI stance from gamers online is really about art and art style, not about the code behind the game.
Knights of the Old Republic will forever be one of my favorite games
RIP to an amazing creative group
I know it's not Bioware, but Kreia from Kotor 2 is still one of my favorite characters from any video game franchise. I wish I could experience those games for the first time again, but as an adult.
You may enjoy Kreia's Conundrums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nziFrCt5o2w&list=PLujAdpHxJg...
maybe obvious, but Baldur's Gate 3 is really that level (or better) of a game (recommendation)
game to game, sure. story to story, I disagree.
kotor was one of the first interactive media franchises to showcase that era in the Star Wars universe, and it was an era that's radically different than anything in the movies.
bg3 is a typical DnD setting + sex + lovecraftian elements and flayers sitting in for beholders to spice it up; and they were only there because during dev-time lovecraft was a huge gaming trend.
don't get me wrong; I love both of them, but the BG3 story was the one that ended up feeling like -- for me -- something that would have been a modpack for Neverwinter Nights.
Likewise. The bg3 story felt like a very long, strung out and milked dry "you have sickness x, go the hospital and figure out a treatment" level of depth
> they were only there because during dev-time lovecraft was a huge gaming trend.
I guess you have the edition of Deities and Demigods where they were cut...
In some ways yes, in some ways no.
To me at least, somehow KOTOR and KOTOR 2 made me care more about the characters and story than BG3.
BG3 has better systems and combat and gear and such, but for many the worldbuilding, story, quests and such of KOTOR have yet to be beaten. Bastia Shan, Carth Onasi, Visas Marr, HK47.
The story of Revan and its twists.
Perhaps its just nostalgia and many KOTOR fans having been at an earlier age when they played those Bioware games compared to DOS 2 and BG3 though. Maybe people who were teenagers playing Larian games feel as attached to the characters and story as those of us who were teens in KOTOR's heyday did.
Oh it definitely is, but I played KOTOR dozens of times as a kid
>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.
Bioware's long death began when it was acquired by EA.
Many great memories of KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect. RIP
Their last really good game was Dragon Age: Origins. It is nice that they put the studio out of its misery.
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.
Destiny will go on.
by necessity of Marathon having turned out to be a flop.
Yeah it did not do well, but it’s my favourite game of the year so far.
Bioware hasn't released a good game in over a decade, and Anthem was a low point for the entire game industry imo
I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long. Sad to see them go but only because they should have been way better
Exactly, the Bioware that people love hasn't existed for a long time
Veilguard made Anthem look competent and fun
Always played BioWare's games including Mass Effect.
Such as shame.
"EA is shutting down" would be a much more pleasing headline to read.
People kind of predicted this, didn't they?
I guess in a way it was unavoidable. Still sad though.
I miss many great companies of the 1990s.
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.
Scummy EA. They really ruin the industry. They kill all the good stuff and promote the crappy yearly FIFA crap.
They wrote on the flipboard: If GTA6 online next month... We'd better shut down the company
too late to edit, adding the reference https://youtu.be/X5ZbQgPfvkA?si=RUDwdzn8ADavfAFF&t=164
End of an era, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now.
I see the acquisition by the Saudi government is going well.
I think its safe to say that its pure failed management from EA.
Bad decisions, mismanagement, greed.
Tho not the first aquisition I see nose-diving due to incompetent management.
Industry of Scam. Industry of Spy.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-21/electroni... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50184357)
The studio behind masterpieces like Dragon Age Veilguard and Mass Effect Andromeda? Sad day
I believe you forgot the massive hit that was Anthem.
You forgot /s, right?
Anyway - good riddance.
For a site with users supposedly more intelligent than Reddit, HN's inability to detect sarcasm (or any kind of nuance) is always amusing.
probably not related[0]
[0]: https://www.autismparentingmagazine.com/autism-and-sarcasm/
I thought it was so obvious as to be insulting to readers to include it.
I a bit like scent trail or yellow paint, isn't it.
good day for gamers, bioware has been dead for a decade so it can finally rest in peace.
You mean Saudi Arabia is shutting down Bioware?
There are dozens of better sites to use for something like this than Verge. They have horrid policies with regards to displaying sources, and put half their articles behind a paywall. At least use an archive service.
https://archive.is/ZUR5H
Another victim of EA. Bought, ruined, buried.