EA is shutting down BioWare (theverge.com)

421 pointsby aaronbrethorst5 hours ago257 comments

mandevil 3 hours ago

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."

brendoelfrendo 2 hours ago

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

activitypea 2 hours ago

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"

burningChrome 2 hours ago

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...

gambiting 2 hours ago

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!).

springtimesun an hour ago

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.

brendoelfrendo 3 minutes ago

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.

hbn 2 hours ago

Both articles GP linked were jokes pointing blame at the mismanagement

ilamont an hour ago

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.

aucisson_masque 39 minutes ago

The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.

Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.

aresant 4 hours ago

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.

ramesh31 4 hours ago

>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.

bathtub365 2 hours ago

And then they moved on to make Titanfall 1 and 2 after the founders were unceremoniously fired by Activision, which were also great games

da_chicken 4 hours ago

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.

nemomarx 3 hours ago

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

cherrychon an hour ago

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.

Hamuko 4 hours ago

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.

aresant 3 hours ago

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)

mjr00 3 hours ago

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.

jonaustin 2 hours ago

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.

torginus 2 hours ago

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.

torginus 2 hours ago

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.

christkv 3 minutes ago

It became a corporate job instead of a smallish team excited about building the games they wanted to play.

so-gala-massey 3 hours ago

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.

AlexandrB 3 hours ago

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.

hx8 2 hours ago

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.

hinkley 2 hours ago

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.

Forgeties79 2 hours ago

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).

hinkley 2 hours ago

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.

zem 2 hours ago

wasn't bg3 pretty universally praised too?

hbn 2 hours ago

Yes but Bioware didn't make it

hinkley 2 hours ago

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.

acdha 37 minutes ago

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.

nrjames 2 hours ago

That was developed by Larian, not Bioware.

zem 2 hours ago

ah, didn't realise that!

kar1181 2 hours ago

The first dragon's age was absolutely ace too.

cherrychon 2 hours ago

True dat. DLCs worth every penny & then the modded content... Ohoho!^^ Prolly the last good, genuine CRPG from teh Warez of the Bio!

idrathernotsay 2 hours ago

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

kar1181 2 hours ago

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.

swiftcoder an hour ago

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.

christkv 10 minutes ago

I just remember dragon age 2 to feel rushed and underdeveloped. The scale also felt a lot smaller than the original.

hinkley 2 hours ago

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.

beloch 2 hours ago

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.

slg 4 hours ago

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.

flumpcakes 4 hours ago

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.

slg 3 hours ago

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.

pinevale 4 hours ago

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.

santoshalper 3 hours ago

Don't forget ME:Andromeda (2017). The truth is that it has been almost 15 years since Bioware made an even arguably great game.

ToucanLoucan 3 hours ago

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.

krabizzwainch 3 hours ago

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.

swiftcoder 3 hours ago

> 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

pepperoni_pizza 2 hours ago

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.

keyringlight 2 hours ago

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.

LaurensBER 3 hours ago

> 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.

asanineassasin 2 hours ago

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.

kzz102 2 hours ago

Yeah, while it's sad they are gone, the reality is that they have been zombies for a long time.

maxlin 3 hours ago

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.

ainch 3 hours ago

Not sure what what specific claim you're making. Do you think gay romance 'soiled' Mass Effect?

john_strinlai 3 hours ago

>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.

collingreen 3 hours ago

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.

swiftcoder 3 hours ago

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

pixelpoet 3 hours ago

I got married in Ultima 7.

slg 3 hours ago

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-...

Razengan 3 hours ago

Richard Garriott is getting Ultima back next year btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2El7VtPuSzs

pixelpoet 3 hours ago

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.

idrathernotsay 2 hours ago

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

HWR_14 2 hours ago

He was the first high net worth individual to pioneer space tourism.

deadbabe 2 hours ago

People got married in Ultima Online to real people.

taurath 3 hours ago

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.

AlexandrB 3 hours ago

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.

m4rtink 2 hours ago

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.

robinson7d an hour ago

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.

cherrychon an hour ago

>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.

nailer an hour ago

> 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

nailer an hour ago

> 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.

dyauspitr 33 minutes ago

I would attribute any decrease in those sort of interactions 100% to runaway feminism over anything the Saudis are doing

JohnMakin 4 hours ago

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.

esseph 4 hours ago

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.

unsnap_biceps 4 hours ago

They wiffed on ME3's ending.

ishouldbework 4 hours ago

At least you can pick the color filter to apply to the ending.

nfw2 4 hours ago

they could go from infamously bad ending to one of most creative endings ever by just saying indoctrination theory is correct

Forgeties79 an hour ago

“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.

xen0 4 hours ago

To be fair, ME3's ending was doomed before that game started.

I'd place it around the start of ME2.

rl3 3 hours ago

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.

jasomill 3 hours ago

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.

bigger_cheese an hour ago

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.

marklar423 an hour ago

Are there any games you like that you felt did give you a real significant choice in how the story played out?

xen0 3 hours ago

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'.

trey-jones 2 hours ago

I always thought this was a hot take but I agree!

iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago

True.. it is genuinely hard to deliver on that kind of a build up.

autoexec 3 hours ago

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.

Forgeties79 an hour ago

Meh I liked it. In fact they shouldn’t have caved and added to it IMO.

bigstrat2003 4 hours ago

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.

gambiting 3 hours ago

I might be in minority but I really enjoyed both Inquisition and Veilguard.

taurath 3 hours ago

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.

cjk 3 hours ago

I enjoyed Inquisition and couldn’t stand Veilguard. But I also never played any of the earlier DA games.

idrathernotsay 2 hours ago

You're in the minority for Veilguard but Inquisition is their highest selling entry in the series

gambiting 2 hours ago

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.

LinXitoW 3 hours ago

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.

hakunin 2 hours ago

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.

bondolo an hour ago

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!

WithinReason 4 hours ago

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.

LarsDu88 4 hours ago

Let us not forget MDK2

wellthisisgreat 4 hours ago

MDK, MDK2 are truly like nothing else out there.

Art

flumpcakes 4 hours ago

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.

newsclues 4 hours ago

Also Anthem!

0cf8612b2e1e 4 hours ago

Check the release dates on those games.

santoshalper 3 hours ago

No doubt. It's been a very long time since Bioware was a great studio.

uberman 3 hours ago

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.

AdmiralAsshat 4 hours ago

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...

john_strinlai 4 hours ago

i enjoyed this comic, similar in theme, posted today:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcf.preview.re...

autoexec 3 hours ago

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...

kobalsky 4 hours ago

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.

loosescrews 4 hours ago

Bioware had a string of hits before EA bought them.

ErneX 4 hours ago

They lost their way when the doctors left.

esseph 4 hours ago

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

4dregress 3 hours ago

I really enjoyed Neverwinter Knights 2.

pepperoni_pizza 2 hours ago

That was Obsidian.

tsimionescu 2 hours ago

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.

uberman 3 hours ago

... and then EA purchased them and forced the frostbyte engine and release cadence expectations and mechanics that worked for FIFA Ultimate Team.

Insanity 4 hours ago

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.

bigstrat2003 3 hours ago

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.

Henchman21 3 hours ago

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.

brailsafe 2 hours ago

> 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

goolz 3 hours ago

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.

anthonypasq 3 hours ago

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.

anthonypasq 3 hours ago

keyringlight 2 hours ago

Similar with Westwood (part of Virgin interactive) and Bioware (parceled up with Pandemic studios, owned by Elevation partners, who sold it to EA)

ram1500natrluvr 2 hours ago

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.

anthonypasq an hour ago

> the end of Blizzard

extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.

leoc an hour ago

There seems to be a bit of a symmetry between what WoW did to Blizzard and what WH40K did to Games Workshop.

the__alchemist 4 hours ago

*US game studios. Continental Europe has been continuing to put out masterpieces. (Many countries: Poland, Croatia, Czechia, France, etc)

flumpcakes 4 hours ago

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?

mcmcmc 3 hours ago

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

antiframe 3 hours ago

> 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.

santoshalper 3 hours ago

CDPR is probably the flagship studio in Europe. Interestingly, they are probably the modern studio that most resembles Bioware in the 2000's.

izacus 3 hours ago

Warhorse studios as well. Rebel Wolves. Machine Games. IO interactive.

The list is rather long.

Hamuko an hour ago

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.

SSLy 25 minutes ago

CDPR has looong been separated from the publisher arm, and recently from the GOG one. Probably for the best for CDPR.

AdrianB1 22 minutes ago

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.

the__alchemist 3 hours ago

European masterpieces, recentish:

  - 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!

kridsdale1 3 hours ago

Baldurs Gate 3 was made in Europe!

flumpcakes 3 hours ago

> 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.

chainingsolid 39 minutes ago

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.

AlexandrB 3 hours ago

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.

autoexec 3 hours ago

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.

AlexandrB 2 hours ago

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.

autoexec 2 hours ago

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.

tsimionescu 2 hours ago

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.

SSLy 32 minutes ago

> - Baldur's Gate 3 (German)

Bruh, Larian is in Belgium

ZekeSulastin 43 minutes ago

> Anything by CDPR

They're lucky they were able to No Man's Sky CP2077 alongside Edgerunners being well received.

IslandRebel 8 minutes ago

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.

rossvor 3 hours ago

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)

4dregress 3 hours ago

The Witcher 3, Any GTA game

Henchman21 3 hours ago

Valheim, Enshrouded. Each sit at the peak of the genre, IMO.

charm137 3 hours ago

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.

hbn 2 hours ago

BioWare is a Canadian studio

(But purchased by EA obviously)

mrandish an hour ago

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.

ex-aws-dude an hour ago

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

Kovah an hour ago

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.

mrandish 40 minutes ago

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.

everdrive 4 hours ago

It's the new hot business model. Buy a very successful studio then liquidate it.

HelloMcFly 4 hours ago

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.

mardef 4 hours ago

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.

Agentlien 3 hours ago

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.

hbn 2 hours ago

Veilguard is a serviceable action romp but it's not a Dragon Age game.

mosura 4 hours ago

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.

jbmchuck 4 hours ago

Nothing new under the sun - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

angrydev 4 hours ago

EA bought Bioware 19 years ago. Are you saying this was their strategy for two decades?

anthonypasq 3 hours ago

cmon man, dont let facts get in the way of a narrative. just let gamers whine in peace

Crusoe123 4 hours ago

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.

ex-aws-dude 3 hours ago

You could not be more wrong

They were purchased decades ago

redanddead 6 minutes ago

Could this be related to the war in the Gulf

glimshe 4 hours ago

One of my favorite game companies ever. But it had already been "shut down" in practice after the acquisition.

eterm 4 hours ago

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.

vkou 4 hours ago

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.

sys32768 3 hours ago

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

bigfishrunning 2 hours ago

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.

rubayeet 3 hours ago

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

sbodnar 2 hours 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.

RIP to one of the best game studios.

barbazoo 4 hours ago

> 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.

rahlokzero 15 minutes ago

You must gather your party before venturing forth

science4sail 4 hours ago

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.

jasomill 3 hours ago

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.

swiftcoder 3 hours ago

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...

ex-aws-dude 2 hours ago

Is that even a thing? I can't think of any case where company sold off game IP other than in acquisitions

npunt an hour ago

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.

hbn 3 hours ago

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.

D13Fd 2 hours ago

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.

nemomarx 2 hours 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

philipallstar 3 hours ago

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.

trentnix 3 hours ago

"modern audiences"

I can't help but read that in the Critical Drinker's voice.

philipallstar 3 hours ago

My favourite translation of the Bible is THE MESSAGE.

elktown 2 hours ago

Not every topic needs your reactionary grievances. So incredibly pathetic, both of you.

philipallstar 2 hours ago

Thank you for writing that in such a non-reactionary way. How's the view from the right side of history?

Capricorn2481 40 minutes ago

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.

Capricorn2481 an hour ago

> 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.

eaisshutting 2 hours ago

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.

Night_Thastus 4 hours ago

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.

random_cat_8745 3 hours ago

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.