Rip to bioware
(midwest.social)
plinky [he/him]
GamesMay 400 indie studios making bio-likes flourish.
People here are saying recent bioware sucked,which I'm sure is true. I just wonder hoe much of that was EA's influence as well
lots of shitty management coming down from EA. veilguard was delayed like five times and if they had just been like "you have four years" instead of "you have a year. oh wait you have another year. oh wait you have another year" then the work would've been a helluva lot smoother for everybody and the game would've been, i assume better,
idk i fell off dragon age because they fucked up turning a spinoff into dragon age 2 and ruined the gameplay.
Is there any evidence of stuff like this happening before? 400 jobs in Edmonton is a lot and I doubt most of them have the savings to individually spend 1-3 years making an indie game.
They won't all go off to start their own studio but I hope as many of them are able to fulfil their creative vision somewhere else.
Someone post that comic of EA shooting Westwood Studios in the head except replace Westwood Studios with Bioware.
Not to be an asshole, but its odd it took this long.
EA hates making video games and they like closing studios. Bioware hasn't had a hit game since either 2014 or 2010 depending on your criteria.
They've released one new (Non-remake) game since anthem in 2019 and it "underperfomed by half" iirc. Like i am not trying to be shitty about this, but of all the studio closures that have happened recently, this one people could probably see coming.
Well they had to finalize all that Kushner Trump Saudi thing.
Probably best for whatever evolves from the fallout. Saudis are next to have negative public sentiment. The war and it's ties between them, Trump, , their role in 9/11.
For some reason I thought they were already shut down, I guess that's what happens when you have studios that release a game once a decade
I never really liked or got into Mass Effect, I can't really describe why though other than it just feels really american.
Everything about it is incredibly global war on terror/post 9 11.
I played it for the first time recently. It was so absurd that I felt more nostalgic than mad and sort of laughed through the game. But I imagine I would have hated it back when it actually came out
it is a game about an unaccountable space cop.
Yeah maybe that's it. I don't like being space enforcer or whatever. Maybe I would if it wasn't just a way for every single interaction with anyone and anything to end up as a gun battle. Kotor is much better about non-violent and peaceful ways out of things and just generally I don't associate star wars with murica as much.
Mass Effect feels like it's in the same school of scifi influence as Halo, which also feels about as american as possible.
What even was the last unanimously well-liked Bioware release? Mass Effect 2 or the first Dragon Age?
Dragon Age II, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, Mass Effect Andromeda, Anthem and Dragon Age Veilguard were all disappointing or downright crap
mass 2 had a cohort of detractors because of the way it was de-rpged. idk i still liked it but it was steps in the wrong direction like everything else
i recently played the trilogy and that was by far my most hated thing about 2. it didn't make sense to me not to just refine the rough-but-functional systems from 1. i'm glad I pushed past that though because I do think 2's story and characters are really fun.
I liked it at the time because I was wowed by how CINEMATIC and COOL it was but in hindsight there was plenty stupid about it. Still, the reception was mostly positive which cannot be said for Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age II
People definitely liked Inquisition, but that was 12 years ago and it predates gamergate. Since then I'd say Veilguard was good, but the gamergaters decided that they hated that one, and then there was Anthem, the EA mandated live service flop.
Maybe I'm just remembering my friends not liking it which I recall being due to DAI being an open world game which most of them were tired of
it predates gamergate
It's that old? Damn
You don't need to pay more when you earn record profits if you don't employ them anymore.
I love how Dragon Age and Mass Effect are the games name dropped in the headline lol. They made fucking Baldur's Gate!
They made fucking Baldur's Gate!
And Kotor and NWN.
kotor has more staying power than baldur's gate (which is for nerds)
KoTOR was literally the only Star Wars product I liked until Andor came along.
At least Baldur's Gate has more staying power than uhh Jade Empire?
I do like KotOR and NWN a lot, though (even though both had great Obsidian made sequels).
i've played 2nd and nwn around 00s, but observing (pardon my french) gaming culture, people were waxing poetic about both kotors much more than bg, until bg3.
cowards at EA never had the shanghai studio do jade 2
I would want to play a Jade Empire 2, but it'd probably end up a mess like Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 lol
i certainly don't want one now but ~10 years ago might've been good.
Correct choice. I imagine most people would think about BG3 when they read baldurs gate in a headline.
Baldur's Gate
i just did a playthrough 20 years since i last played it. truly teenage me did not appreciate the game nearly enough, it's excellent.
I used to prefer 2 more as a kid, but the low level DnD vibes of the original are immaculate (plus less time casting the same fucking buffs/debuffs over and over lol)
bg1 just has better pacing too. you get ejected into the wilderness and it's random shit + rural stuff + small villages/towns until you get into THE CITY towards the end. it feels significant.
and some of the best parts of bg1 are the random maps with no connection to anything. in bg2, you have 1) the tedious starting dungeon 2) immediately being dumped into an overwhelming city 3) all the rural areas are strictly the quest areas
Yep, I liked BG1 more for the same exact reason. For BG2, you're stuck in this giant city before getting railroaded into the Underdark where you're also stuck in for a while.
Tbf, I imagine that by this point almost nobody who was around back then was still at Bioware at this point.
some 20 year veterans but idk how many.
EA truly does kill everything great they acquire, Maxis, Westwood, Criterion, Bioware, etc.
At least older EA wasn't quite as bad, so we managed to get Burnout 3 at least.
Why do they bother spending all that money acquiring them if they're just gonna let it fester? It's not to kill off competition because they didn't have competing franchises in those niches. And they weren't even exploiting the properties for a quick cash grab. Was it to fleece the talent? But even then, they aren't building games that would take advantage of those particular specialties.
They were forced by a leveraged buyout. Private equity comes in with borrowed money (debt), swamps up all the shares, then saddles the company with all the debt used to buy the shares.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
None of the "big names" at bioware ended up un other EA studios. They all basically quit one after one and ended uo either as indies, in other fields, or working for non ea studios. Although some came back for anthem (and then left permanently).
there's got to be a place for a graveyard
damn, the zombie of bioware was finally put down. they lasted 23 years longer than Black Isle did
don't worry everyone, Saudi Arabia bought EA games, everything is safe
Ansarallah, steel your heart
I think game devs could ddos saudis with their salaries as well, if they were reasonable people
Oh god
400 fucking jobs???
They haven't made a good game in well over a decade so this isn't super surprising
NWN was a high water mark of mod tooling focused games. Map editor, DM Client, scripting engine with DB hooks all as part of the base game was really cool. Some of the micro-Persistent World communities that were built out are still running today. Hopefully that kind of thing comes back around eventually with open-source game engines, etc.
EA slowly drained all the potential away until they were just a shambling shell of what they once were.
They haven’t made anything of quality in a long time, so I am having a hard time caring. Only thing that matters are the folks that are now out of work.
It sucks for those 400 people. Especially because they've probably been dreading this happening for years (As a group if not necessarily individually) while probably being made to do work that was totally useless the last two years, and likely under shit conditions.
Indeed, as I mentioned. I hope they can find work, but with how the field is right now, it's going to be rough for them.
surprised it took them this long tbh with the way they had been acting
So I guess all that teasing about a new Mass Effect was just that
Teasing
The Protheans tried to warn us but all we did was allow the reapers to buy and merge all the companies. Gg no re.
More thankful than ever these days for Owlcat, who has largely been BioWare as I remember them for a decade now.
They're doing the Expanse game too which looks to be filling the Mass Effect hole.
Officially the death of the old era
given how fashy mass effect was almost 20 years ago i dont wanna imagine how bad a new one would be
no loss, the bioware of 2026 was already a shell of its former self
(though obviously even more people losing their jobs is bad)
same fash, less gay.
they wouldnt let you romance tali as femshep in 2 or 3 so -1 morbillion gay points
Can't say I'm surprised.
