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aresant 22 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.
beloch 20 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.
baud147258 18 hours ago [-]
> 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?
nottorp 6 hours ago [-]
Personally I stopped after Dragon Age 1 / Mass Effect 2.
Mainly because ME3's original ending was tied to you grinding in multiplayer to reach the single player goals. No thank you.
And Dragon Age 2 was more famous for copy/paste dungeons than for the actual game.
So... i just stopped looking at "the new Bioware".
FroshKiller 40 minutes ago [-]
Even at launch, I do not believe you had to play multiplayer to get a sufficiently high readiness rating to see any endings. There were other tie-in like the Datapad app that contributed. The expansions and Legendary Edition re-release made a lot of changes that lowered the readiness requirements and totally removed multiplayer anyway.
You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!
The last two games listed are "Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021)", which was incredibly popular, "Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024)" which seems to have been widely panned, so still hitting 50/50 at the end of it?
Going back further, "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was unpopular with fans but found a fairly solid cult following, and "Dragon Age: Inquisition" is the one you mentioned as well-received, so still batting 50/50
Admittedly, "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" is more of a well-done cash grab, and even Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)
Given EA bought them in 2007, it's clear they released some solid games even years after being acquired
howlingfantods 14 hours ago [-]
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a remaster and Dragon Age Inquisition marked a significant dumbing down of the original Dragon Age franchise. I would think Bioware fans marked the fall of Bioware at ME3 or even a little before, which means EA ran Bioware into the ground in 5 years.
ffsm8 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah I just replayed ME through the LE and it was just how I remembered from my original playthroughs back when the games were released:
ME1 nailing the story building but being pretty slow overall. Combat feeling very dated. (8/10 overall)
ME2 nailing the combat, streamlining the overall game but sacrificing some of the exploration spirit - but very well done from a lore perspective because the urgency of the crisis builds over the game - leaving the protag less time for exploration. (10/10 overall)
Then ME3... A pale imitation of ME2. From a player perspective it feels like the general storyline was still from the same author of the ME2 game, because you can see the urgency picking up more and more until the final conclusion. But the execution is really really lacklustre.
(Maybe 6-7/10)
It was a decent enough conclusion, but overall pretty mid . Most definitely this was the first time you could feel the cultural shift in the production and it's impact in the product.
Political correctness kept sneaking in. The objectively horrible things you could do in both previous installments were toned down a lot. You're no longer deciding to decimate populations, shoving people out of windows etc.
Still some questionable things, but clearly with a lot less ... Edge.
And I'm seriously surprised this thread considers DA:I good.
I gave it multiple attempts, and never even got further then maybe 5h before dropping it. Honestly, DA2 was already such a massive step down in vibes, clearly aimed at what's today being called "modern audiences", there were still some quiet extreme scenes in it, but it felt completely artificial to me compared to the ruthlessness in DA:O
I also hated how the gameplay went from pretty down to earth to complete implausibility.
Like in DA:O people were still limited by their physical bodies. In DA2 you get rogues jumping gigantic distances etc. it felt like it took too much inspiration from MMOs at the time, sacrificing it's wonderful world it built up. But a more cynical view is probably that they just hired people that previously worked on other fantasy games, consequently importing the same fantasy settings of their previous projects.
And inquisition... Again I was unable to finish it to date because I just cannot get myself to keep playing... It's just no spirit to it at all. It'd say it's work by a amateur that's trying their best to imitate a previous work, and failing.
zenithirl 4 hours ago [-]
I always feel like ME2 gets off very lightly for doing essentially nothing to progress the main story. It feels like the story could have been used in a spinoff game.
Part of ME3's problem was that it was left with too much to do, the Reaper invasion needs to be started and concluded in the same game when it should have been started in ME2.
ffsm8 2 hours ago [-]
hmm, i can only say that i disagree with that sentiment.
Storyline wise ME1 is the only one that hardly progressed anything, but that itself is by design of the lore. Also I dont think that a sequel was actually planned for ME1 (hence the very light touch for an actual overarching storyline)
ME1 the Reapers are unknown, they fight via subterfuge while utilizing the Geth and Indoctrination. Only one Reaper is in the Milky Way, and only for oversight.
The game ends with the DLC in which the protagonist annihilates the main Relay which the Reapers wouldve used for their invasion.
ME2 starts with the overseeing Reaper killing the protagonist. Who is the nrebuild by a clandestine human supremacist organization. Its central theme is trying to rally a defense against the upcoming invasion. It ends with the "Suicide mission" against the overseeing Reapers base to forestall the creation of a Human Reaper. That was actually the first part where I got completely stumped back then: why does a human reaper matter?. It was a very good scene, but lore wise it was very confusing to me.
ME3 starts with the arrival of the Reapers and tells the story of their loosing battles, until the final attempt building on the previous cycles survivors magnus opus.
You could've split ME3 into two parts for sure, former being the loosing battle lines and the third one the final conclusion via the Ansible (i think thats what it was called?) - but I feel that last installment wouldve been too little content, if attempted. It wouldve been a good choice as a seperate DLC however, so that the main game ended with the discovery of the schematics and the DLC being about the final desperate struggle to get the resources before all is lost in the inevitable defeat.
drw85 8 hours ago [-]
Inquisition felt like it was at some point supposed to be a MMO. The zone and quest design felt very MMO-like.
I couldn't make myself play through that game.
WorldMaker 16 hours ago [-]
Mass Effect 3 also greatly expanded the endings in post-launch DLC. Though I also still maintain one of the greatest things about the ending was also the psychological trick it made. A lot of people complained "There was only one 'real' choice for my Shepard" but didn't see enough playthroughs to understand that why all four endings [0] were still rather equally distributed. The ending asked the player to sum up hours and hours of game play with a wild story tapestry of complex interlocking decisions and in general that "there was only one choice that made sense" feeling was that you had characterized "your" Shepard pretty strongly by that point, but different playthroughs pushed each of the four different endings into feeling like "the one and only that makes sense for my Shepard".
I still find that fascinating.
(I'm also a rare fan that I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda second favorite after only ME1 and thought Veilguard was probably my second favorite after only DA2. Engine issues and somewhat dull maps aside on Andromeda I thought it most captured the "Exploration" side of Mass Effect better than any but the first one. Veilguard seemed to prove BioWare had finally wrangled their Frostbite tools to be nearly as good at storytelling as their previous engine, and the story culminated a lot of threads for my "main" characters across the series.)
[0] There is a not-so-secret fourth "no color" "walk away" ending through the dialog trees with no epilogue, but it feels like what some Renegade Shepards' only option.
15 hours ago [-]
moomin 12 hours ago [-]
Nah, ME3 is pretty poor throughout. Almost every mission feels anodyne and flat, the skill balancing is way off. There’s still some decent writing though.
People go on about the ending but never really address the whiplash of revealing a third party at the finale. It’s not a question of Shepherd survives or not, it’s that even with all the changes they made, it just doesn’t feel like it has very much to do with what’s gone on before.
armada651 12 hours ago [-]
ME3 was a mess, ME2 was the last solid Mass Effect and the height of the series.
bigstrat2003 8 hours ago [-]
ME2 was also a mess, and was part of why ME3 was a mess (because 2 didn't actually advance the story of the series).
16 hours ago [-]
baud147258 9 hours ago [-]
> Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)
Mass Effect 3 had plenty of problems elsewhere, like the whole Cerberus, subplot, the idiotic fights with Kai Leng, the whole Crucible concept, how important parts got shoved on in DLCs...
And while DA:I seemed to have been well-received, I don't think it's a very good game
TheCapeGreek 9 hours ago [-]
Read a youtube comment that I think sums up some of the fanbase's thoughts: Bioware has been going downhill since the last 30 minutes of Mass Effect 3 gameplay. Even with the later expanded endings it felt disappointing. Not to mention "Marauder Shields" being your final boss.
gmerc 11 hours ago [-]
The founders left 2012 along with many of the core staff. I consider that the end.
doctorpangloss 18 hours ago [-]
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.
beloch 16 hours ago [-]
It's actually a little bit ironic that today's AI has capabilities that closely match what Bioware was looking for quite desperately a decade or so ago. For several of their games, they tried to get procedural dungeon/world generators working so they could have a hand-made main quest-line and generated environments for side-quest content. Their attempts at procedural generation typically didn't work very well, so several Bioware games feature dozens of hours of side-quests in monotonously repetitive environments.
It's an interesting conundrum for players. Some of us, when we play great game, just can't let go. We want to spend more time in that game's world even after we've exhausted the lovingly hand-crafted content. So, many developers throw us a bone and include side-content that is occasionally brilliant but frequently very low effort. Bioware did this in many of their games. You could easily tell when you were on the main story's track and when you were off in low-effort-land.
AlAjem 16 hours ago [-]
I think you underestimate how much of a game’s success comes from innate appeal that you can’t simply pivot into with AI boosted workforce, high profile failures like Concord and Highguard didn’t lack production value they lacked the appeal to millions it takes to fuel a live service game of that scale not everyone can be Fortnite and make the switch at the perfect time to hop on a new trend.
doctorpangloss 3 hours ago [-]
i don't know, the writing about concord was pretty clear, "toxic positivity" were the words that stuck out to me to describe its cause of failure according to the people who worked on it, which is a leadership issue. this is a side of being nimble to player feedback.
so-gala-massey 21 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.
WorldMaker 16 hours ago [-]
Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 were Interplay. BioWare's D&D involvement was NeverWinter Nights 1 & 2.
gmerc 11 hours ago [-]
Interplay was the publisher. They stole royalties which provided the leverage for BioWare to buy itself out of the contractual onligations and publish NWN with Atari.
NWN being one of the first games to use master server and key technologies at scale was motivated to detect publisher royalty theft by tracking sold copies (and indeed an Atari division in Europe tried selling copies of NWN with copied keys) not just traditional piracy because the company had first hand experience with it.
Black Isle, an interplay first party studio made Infinity Engine spin off games which gets people confused here.
Source: Ex Bioware
freehorse 13 hours ago [-]
BG 1 & 2 were definitely developed by bioware, interplay was the publisher. Interplay (black isle studios) developed icewind dale and planescape:torment, which were based on bioware's infinity engine. NWN1 was bioware and NWN2 was obsidian (came from black isle studios).
Source: memory and crawling through wikipedia articles
chocochunks 6 hours ago [-]
BioWare didn't make NWN2, that was Obsidian on the same Bioware engine that powered KOTOR 1 & 2 and NWN1.They did do Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 which were originally published by Interplay.
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.
hinkley 20 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.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
I'm curious where you draw the line for Carpenter?
I think besides increased funding there is also a common problem where creative leads become blinded by their own past success and start ignoring critical feedback.
GolfPopper 17 hours ago [-]
The term for this that I got from a C.J. Cherryh story is 'Wave Without a Shore'.
darth_avocado 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
krige 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
That's because almost all of them were live service games anyway. Do not put the chicken before the egg.
hx8 20 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.
tancop 10 hours ago [-]
Kepler Interactive might be that? It's a relatively new publisher started by industry veterans (as in lead developers and product managers, not MBAs). They did Clair Obscur, Sifu, Rematch and Pacific Drive.
They are very selective and you need to come at them with a fully formed game idea but once you get in it's completely hands off. No managers breathing down you neck, all you have to do is ship on time and they take care of the rest.
You get enough funding to grow your team, make a big project and go fully independent as a mid size studio if it's successful enough.
hinkley 20 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.
DonHopkins 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
f6v 8 hours ago [-]
> I think the best way to keep quality up is to stay small.
Yes, but it's also rational for founders to sell a successful small studio when they can.
Forgeties79 20 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).
zem 20 hours ago [-]
wasn't bg3 pretty universally praised too?
nrjames 20 hours ago [-]
That was developed by Larian, not Bioware.
zem 20 hours ago [-]
ah, didn't realise that!
hbn 20 hours ago [-]
Yes but Bioware didn't make it
hinkley 20 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 19 hours 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.
tancop 10 hours ago [-]
Larian is independent. That's the main difference. They might partner with a publisher for individual games but it's always going to be a pure investment deal, funding for a share of the profits with no creative control.
After BG3 they're financially secure, they know what happened to BioWare and have the power to avoid it. The only way I see them getting acquired is a series of flops and near bankruptcy.
acdha 5 hours ago [-]
I’d worry if they try to grow too quickly and take on large amounts of investment. Pressure to deliver huge hits can be toxic.
selivanovp 8 hours ago [-]
They may bankrupt if Divinity will flop. BG3 and Divinity are very expensive games to make, they had to expand studio and hire a lot of people to produce them.
KerrAvon 1 hours ago [-]
Yup. This is why indies sell out. You've got all these mouths to feed and all it takes is one flop to kill the whole operation. A large corporate parent provides cushion. Until it doesn't.
cherrychon 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
blanched 20 hours ago [-]
I'm having a lot of difficulty reading this and I'm not sure if it's because of the style or the terminology.
I don't mean to be patronizing but did the formatting go wrong here?
qnpnpmqppnp 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think so, it's just that bad of a comment.
cherrychon 11 hours ago [-]
Hmm... Yep, also a tad bit off the bat but I just went w/ the flow state.
More so, I've only played Arcade games since I got that Sinden Pistol on my B'Day. I was also a DDR junkie once.
Historically, I did & still do a lot of sys admin stuff but not 'professionally' any more.
Maybe I should setup my sig...
>Dude...
Please don't assume... Forget it!
gambiting 20 hours ago [-]
Dude, are you ok?
moron4hire 20 hours ago [-]
This is a typical example of what one would call a "gamer".
59percentmore 18 hours ago [-]
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*.
usefulcat 14 hours ago [-]
low pay (for tech) + poor working conditions (for tech) = more turnover
ETA: That was a bit terse. My point was simply that it's more difficult to do institutional knowledge transfer when turnover is high, which may be a problem in the games industry.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
You can't have both consistency and creativity.
59percentmore 1 hours ago [-]
You can have consistency in quality and creativity in subject matter and mechanics. It's harder to do as a general rule, but easier if you actually retain your current talent and incentivize them to mentor upcoming talent.
red-iron-pine 2 hours ago [-]
plenty of slop coming out of japan too mon ami
you see the homeruns and not the dross, but there is a lot of stuff that is shit
kar1181 20 hours ago [-]
The first dragon's age was absolutely ace too.
idrathernotsay 20 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
gmerc 11 hours ago [-]
The company was forced to rush DA2 by EA because SWTOR was delayed and there’s a metric called “Group Responsibility Profit” each EA group had to commit to (BioWare group - Austin, Edmonton, Montreal, Mythic) and that meant shipping something to buy enough profit in times for earnings.
ethbr1 11 hours ago [-]
Good lord. I didn't think there was anything stupider than per team stack ranking, and now I learn someone found a way to stack rank game release schedules?
swiftcoder 19 hours 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.
kar1181 20 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.
vandahm 11 hours ago [-]
Dragon Age 2 is my favorite of the Dragon Age games in spite of its problems. I liked the characters and the tone of the game, and I really enjoyed the more focused personal scope of the game -- just zeroing in on one person and following them through the different chapters of their life. I do remember chuckling at how baffled the questgivers were whenever they needed to find the SECRET HIDEOUT of smugglers/cultists/runaway mages or whatever the quest was about. The maps were so small and you keep going back to the same ones over and over again, so it's not this big mystery.
christkv 18 hours ago [-]
I just remember dragon age 2 to feel rushed and underdeveloped. The scale also felt a lot smaller than the original.
WorldMaker 16 hours ago [-]
I thought the smaller scale helped make the stakes feel more believable. The very rare case in scifi/fantasy of seeing any sort of stakes deflation.
(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)
vlyan 15 hours ago [-]
yes, you remember correctly. it was also mostly disconnected from DAO, feeling like an offshoot rather than a sequel. iirc, almost not a single character from DAI had appeared in DA2, except for a cameo from Flemeth in the intro.
it had many issues, but the writing was still great, the story compelling, and the characters human. so people were disappointed that it didn't match or exceed DA1, but it was still a good game because of the writing, and people grew to appreciate it.
hinkley 20 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.
cherrychon 20 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!
account42 6 hours ago [-]
I like how you didn't include NwN in your nostalgia list.
Hamuko 22 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 21 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)
jonaustin 20 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 20 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:
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.
SyzygyRhythm 17 hours ago [-]
I disagree. This is the strategy taken by AAA games and is the reason why the AAA games are in such rough shape.
A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.
A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.
dudeinhawaii 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure it's the niche or targeting problem. I think we're getting games with flat out fewer features and smaller scope than earlier entries in the series because _so_ much energy is disproportionately put into graphics. DA:VG was trimmed and had vastly less complexity and depth than any previous DA.
I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".
It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.
SyzygyRhythm 16 hours ago [-]
Graphics is part of the problem, certainly, but at least it's moderately independent of the rest. You can scale the quality up and down without affecting the rest (within limits: having many armor variants, etc. are more costly with greater graphic fidelity). As far as the rest: all of these different gameplay mechanics have a complexity cost. You can try to add everything, but then you run into balance problems and/or it just feels too complex for most people, not to mention having a high development cost. So something needs to be simplified, and that means either reducing the depth or reducing the mechanics. But if you've already decided to include something for everyone, that necessarily means that everything is shallow.
WorldMaker 15 hours ago [-]
I think it is also that DA intentionally had a very complex story tapestry, mostly tried to avoid resets between games, and Veilguard went very deep in Elf and Mage storylines at something of a cost of other storylines. If you were very invested in Elf and Mage storylines (say you had been playing and/or romancing Elves and Mages and Elf Mages since DA:O) then Veilguard was extremely personal and culminated a lot of deep lore things and personal stakes things. On the other hand if you didn't side that way/play that way, I could see it feeling a lot less memorable/important.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
> Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
That's not a given at all. A good game targeted at a nieche can well be more successful than some jack of all trades master of none amalgamation that tries to cateer to everyone but fails in being truly great for anyone.
tancop 10 hours ago [-]
It was supposed to be a live service spin-off, the same way as Gotham Knights or the canceled Spider-Man game from Insomniac. They cut out most of the content and repackaged it as a single player RPG.
Cringe dialogue came from execs who forced writers to do James Gunn style even if they had zero experience with it. Combining serious dialogue with humor in a way that sounds natural is a skill that needs training. You can't make someone write like that if they never did it before and expect good results.
vandahm 11 hours ago [-]
I liked Veilguard when I played it, and as soon as I finished I started up a new playthrough and then said "Nah, I'm done" and haven't touched it since. It's the only time I've ever finished a Bioware game without finishing it twice. It was ...adequate? Parts of it were well-written, and the rest of it was just really tone-deaf, for lack of a better way to describe it.
mjr00 21 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.
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 18 hours ago [-]
It became a corporate job instead of a smallish team excited about building the games they wanted to play.
rvba 9 hours ago [-]
probably 8 hours of meetings, 2 hours of emails and 2 hours of work per day
chaostheory 15 hours ago [-]
After Dragon Age 2 shipped, EA treated BioWare more as a badge that they could stick on several random studios. They did this so often that it diluted the brand. I would argue that BioWare died well over 15 years ago
medstrom 6 hours ago [-]
Dragon Age 2 wasn't 15 years ago... looks it up Oh, it was... What's happening...?
chaostheory 1 hours ago [-]
I know the feeling. For me it happens when I see friends whom I don’t see on a regular basis, or see famous actors actually age
da_chicken 22 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 22 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 20 hours 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.
ramesh31 22 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 20 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
WorldMaker 15 hours ago [-]
Then the cycle rhymed and they got bought by EA between Titanfall 1 and 2, built Apex Legends as a cash cow, diverted to doing nothing but Apex Legends and unceremoniously fired by EA when Apex Legends stopped being quite the cash cow it was at launch.
laughing_man 8 hours ago [-]
"This game brought to you by the studio that fired all the developers that made the games you love."
inSumErgoCogito 4 hours ago [-]
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slg 22 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.
taurath 21 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.
flumpcakes 22 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 21 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.
one dead guy that keeps being brought up meanwhile the US and israel is responsible for the killing of 300 journalists in Palestine but somehow that is never brought up
uniq7 6 hours ago [-]
Tangentially to the topic, I always found funny that in Mass Effect it was possible to hook up with men, women, and even aliens with their bodies covered in space-burkas, and nobody bat an eye, but polygamy was completely off limits: if you tried to establish a relationship with two at the same time, everybody just gets angry at you and you only face rejection.
pixelpoet 21 hours ago [-]
I got married in Ultima 7.
slg 21 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]
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.
mook 9 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, a Pagan successor seems closer to what a modern game looks like… modern RPGs seem to typically have a large action component.
Razengan 9 hours ago [-]
Did you somehow miss Baldur's Gate 3
idrathernotsay 20 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 20 hours ago [-]
He was the first high net worth individual to pioneer space tourism.
duskwuff 16 hours ago [-]
And? Having boatloads of money doesn't make you any smarter or better at making business decisions.
Razengan 7 hours ago [-]
This guy was the first to do many of the things that are taken for granted in gaming now, like morality in RPGs, MMOs and even selling computer games in boxes, starting at just 19 years old, but yeah let's listen to some internet rando :)
account42 6 hours ago [-]
Haven't we already learned many time now that nostalgia doesn't make a great game designer? People change.
Razengan 6 hours ago [-]
Following the actual people behind beloved games is still better than following brands, which is the theme of the discussions on this post
And it's a win against EA (who own Ultima up until 2027)
pinevale 22 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 22 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.
onli 14 hours ago [-]
Andromeda got critized a lot for admittedly unnecessary flaws, but at its core it was a great mass effect. It even corrected many mistakes of the original trilogy, like having a proper ending that used the allies won during the game.
thewileyone 15 hours ago [-]
I'm playing ME: Andromeda now on a handheld and I don't get the hate. Sure it's not ME2 but graphically more polished though the storyline lacks the impact of the first trilogy. Otherwise, I think it's a fine game.
paxy 13 hours ago [-]
Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) was their last critically acclaimed and successful game, and even that oen was considered a drop in quality for the series.
dudeinhawaii 17 hours ago [-]
I think Andromeda was actually more of a victim of modern "outrage" culture. A few bugs, memes, and suddenly a game is "trash". The game wasn't terrible and I recall enjoying playing it at the time. Sure, some of the animations were stiff and the main character design wasn't stellar but those were _really_ blown out of proportion in games media at the time.
Nowadays if your game has even one thing wrong and the wrong influencer makes fun of it, suddenly it's trash. At the same time, your game can be trash and if an influencer laughs their ass off at the bugs (in a good way), everyone wants it. It's a sad culture. /rant
WorldMaker 15 hours ago [-]
I still think Mass Effect Andromeda was one story DLC away from being my favorite Mass Effect game. The team behind Andromeda was the team that made all the best story DLC for the previous three games. Their wheelhouse was taking the game past the last stages of polish to telling the small stories that really tie the whole thing together. I still wonder what we might have gotten from the cancelled DLC if the technical bugs of the Frostbite engine switch hadn't created such a bad first impression.
(Side note, the ME: Andromeda novels are really good and hinted at a lot of storylines that we may never see closure on, but were certainly building blocks the game was working on getting to.)
kzz102 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah, while it's sad they are gone, the reality is that they have been zombies for a long time.
ToucanLoucan 21 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 21 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 21 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 20 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.
WorldMaker 15 hours ago [-]
> missing some of the favorite Mass Effect things (like the Geth)
Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.
keyringlight 20 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.
ToucanLoucan 16 hours ago [-]
I didn't say it was bad, I didn't think it was. The combat as I said was the most interesting iteration. I loved the gun play, I just didn't give a fuck about the characters. I found most of them either offputting or just meh.
I genuinely only remember Ryder and PeeBee by name.
LaurensBER 21 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.
WorldMaker 15 hours ago [-]
I liked the fresh reset because it was good excuse to get back to the "Exploration" roots of Mass Effect 1.
That said, the rumor is the in development Mass Effect 5 had found a story way to bridge the gap between the two and make it seem a lot less like a hard reset and find a way to continue past the ME3 endings.
Of course we likely will never get to hear the ME5 story the way it was scrapped along with the studio in this announcement.
asanineassasin 20 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.
m4rtink 20 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 19 hours 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.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
I would disagree that playersexual characters a good thing at all. It's just very cheap gratification for players who want to romance anything they can see.
raincole 11 hours ago [-]
They just haven't released a successful game for years. If you feel the need to attribute their situation to ideologies then it sounds like you are the one who invested in ideologies too much, not Saudi Investment Fund.
paxy 13 hours ago [-]
I'm going to say that a studio not releasing a good game in 12+ years might have more to do with its closing than this convoluted reasoning.
AlexandrB 21 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.
xp84 11 hours ago [-]
I really don't think the guys who make that type of decision for sovereign wealth funds ever play the games, or even read reviews of them where they would know that. Perhaps if it was 1992 and it was a shocking industry first that made mainstream headlines, but nah, I really doubt this particular conspiracy theory.
cherrychon 19 hours 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 19 hours 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.
>On June 7, 2005, DICE formally announced the shutdown of Trauma Studio's New York office.
>The team members of Trauma Studios declined an offer to relocate to DICE Sweden offices.
Your sauce. If you can read between the lines, it was a big thing in forums @ the time.
nailer 19 hours 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 19 hours ago [-]
I would attribute any decrease in those sort of interactions 100% to runaway feminism over anything the Saudis are doing
DonHopkins 18 hours ago [-]
The Saudis would agree with you that runaway feminism is the root of all evil, not them.
dyauspitr 18 hours ago [-]
Actually on this issue, it seems like the runaway feminists and the Saudis both agree.
DonHopkins 16 hours ago [-]
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maxlin 21 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.
preg_match 2 hours ago [-]
Universal appeal naturally includes appealing to gay people. The non-universal option is only appealing to straight people. Straight people are so used to everything ever revolving around heterosexuality that even a tiny bit of affordance to gay people is seen as a departure. It’s not.
swiftcoder 21 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
ainch 21 hours ago [-]
Not sure what what specific claim you're making. Do you think gay romance 'soiled' Mass Effect?
john_strinlai 21 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 21 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.
rexpop 18 hours ago [-]
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DonHopkins 18 hours ago [-]
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slg 15 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing this and making that suggestion all those years ago!
JohnMakin 22 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.
unsnap_biceps 22 hours ago [-]
They wiffed on ME3's ending.
xen0 22 hours ago [-]
To be fair, ME3's ending was doomed before that game started.
I'd place it around the start of ME2.
rl3 21 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 21 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 19 hours 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 19 hours ago [-]
Are there any games you like that you felt did give you a real significant choice in how the story played out?
bigger_cheese 14 hours ago [-]
Going back to the 90's the Original Fallout games (the Turn based ones) would give you different endings depending on the choices you made through out the game. Most recently Baldur's Gate 3.
Edit: Deus Ex series too
marklar423 2 hours ago [-]
Ah we have the same taste in games :)
I originally asked because for most of the games I've played (and the ones you mention) the overall story played out the same regardless of your choices.
There could be branches and dialog changes but they always reconverged at important story points that stayed constant. And of course the cutscenes at very end would be different. Take DeusEx - some minor things would be different depending on your actions, and at the end you basically got to press a button to choose your ending.
The only real exception I can think of is Fallout New Vegas, where the game storyline would become wildly different as you chose to help different factions....that game was a rare exemplar of "choices matter".
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hours ago [-]
Deus Ex which gives you three choices at the end?
xen0 21 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'.
bitwize 13 hours ago [-]
"probing uranus" was so worth it tho
trey-jones 20 hours ago [-]
I always thought this was a hot take but I agree!
iugtmkbdfil834 21 hours ago [-]
True.. it is genuinely hard to deliver on that kind of a build up.
ishouldbework 22 hours ago [-]
At least you can pick the color filter to apply to the ending.
autoexec 21 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.
baud147258 18 hours ago [-]
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.
baud147258 9 hours ago [-]
> if you take a ME2 save with that DLC to ME3
oops, I meant to say without that DLC
nfw2 22 hours ago [-]
they could go from infamously bad ending to one of most creative endings ever by just saying indoctrination theory is correct
Forgeties79 19 hours 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.
nfw2 13 hours ago [-]
it's not a copout if the whole trilogy sets it up and the overarching pillar that holds up the whole story is mind control and the first two games set up villains to warn against the two bad options and 60 hours of gameplay conditions you to never pick the red option
Forgeties79 4 hours ago [-]
If over 2/3rd’s of the game I’m hallucinating, it’s an “it was just a dream” story to me. I don’t like being lied to in games in a way that can’t be found out. KOTOR people are actively obscuring the truth on the fly but the facts are in plain view. It’s way more effective. Especially given the Jedi claim moral authority yet are very comfortable gaslighting you. That’s the kind of story that takes a lot of work, thought, and care, and the payoff is you get something like indoctrination theory but more grounded and less dependent on straight up deceiving the player in a way that they can’t figure out for themselves.
Forgeties79 19 hours ago [-]
Meh I liked it. In fact they shouldn’t have caved and added to it IMO.
brachkow 6 hours ago [-]
While it is a popular theory, I don't think that Saudi Arabian guys who are trying to diversify their oil-bound economy care about virtual human relations as much as US/EU tech puritanists that already rule tech, assessing every ownership of every nipple in Instagram stories
LinXitoW 21 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 20 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.
bigstrat2003 22 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.
esseph 22 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.
gambiting 21 hours ago [-]
I might be in minority but I really enjoyed both Inquisition and Veilguard.
idrathernotsay 20 hours ago [-]
You're in the minority for Veilguard but Inquisition is their highest selling entry in the series
gambiting 20 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.
cjk 21 hours ago [-]
I enjoyed Inquisition and couldn’t stand Veilguard. But I also never played any of the earlier DA games.
taurath 21 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.
WithinReason 22 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.
0cf8612b2e1e 22 hours ago [-]
Check the release dates on those games.
santoshalper 22 hours ago [-]
No doubt. It's been a very long time since Bioware was a great studio.
uberman 21 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.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
Yes although they were already slaves to private equity before EA bought them.
LarsDu88 22 hours ago [-]
Let us not forget MDK2
wellthisisgreat 22 hours ago [-]
MDK, MDK2 are truly like nothing else out there.
Art
flumpcakes 22 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 22 hours ago [-]
Also Anthem!
AdmiralAsshat 22 hours ago [-]
It's not like no one saw this coming. Here's a comic from nine years 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 19 hours 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 19 hours 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 19 hours 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.
kobalsky 22 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.
the__alchemist 22 hours ago [-]
*US game studios. Continental Europe has been continuing to put out masterpieces. (Many countries: Poland, Croatia, Czechia, France, etc)
hbn 21 hours ago [-]
BioWare is a Canadian studio
(But purchased by EA obviously)
flumpcakes 22 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?
the__alchemist 21 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!
tsimionescu 20 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.
freehorse 11 hours ago [-]
Sadly, the studio behind disco elysium (za/um) is a primary example of "can't shake the startup mode", as the company was somehow bought by investors who then fired the original team, there has been a huge controversy around this.
SSLy 19 hours ago [-]
> - Baldur's Gate 3 (German)
Bruh, Larian is in Belgium
tsimionescu 10 hours ago [-]
Oooops... I have no idea why I was certain they're from somewhere in Germany...
11 hours ago [-]
flumpcakes 21 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 19 hours 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.
mrcsharp 18 hours ago [-]
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.
fwip 14 hours ago [-]
Firebreak was not so well received, I think that came out last year? It had the bones to be something good, but I didn't think it ever quite got there.
mrcsharp 3 hours ago [-]
Firebreak was fine in my opinion. From the start Remedy was clear about it being the kind of game you pick up for an hour or so every now and then. Sort of like Left 4 Dead.
The problem was that majority of players wanted to have enough content in the game to play it multiple hours a day for months.
Personally, I think the game, despite it being a "failure", is going to be important in the future. It is an online multiplayer "live service" game built on Northlight. Remedy had to build networking and multiplayer capabilities into their in-house game engine. And it worked really well. This could allow them, in the future, to expand more if they want to.
kridsdale1 21 hours ago [-]
Baldurs Gate 3 was made in Europe!
ZekeSulastin 19 hours ago [-]
> Anything by CDPR
They're lucky they were able to No Man's Sky CP2077 alongside Edgerunners being well received.
underlipton 17 hours ago [-]
Edgerunners saved CP2077 the way the Pokemon anime built the franchise in the US: it took a game that could be quite esoteric in its appeal and sold everybody on the world and the stories that could be told in it. Oh, and built a richer and more focused musical identity.
I always wonder why other games get this aspect of the marketing so wrong. Controversial take, but I think if they'd had a handful of cinematics out before release (and they hadn't gone with the atrocious sales model), Concord might have had a fighting chance. There was a lot wrong with that game, but its biggest failure was that no one loved it enough to defend it when the hatedom descended. Compare to, say, Marathon: it still may fail, in the end, but it's hung on for as long as it has because, in part, it genuinely charmed; it made an earnest attempt to get people to people to buy into the qualia of the vision of its world.
AlexandrB 21 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 21 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.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Those aren't the only options you know. Games should tell story primarily through gameplay. Resorting to effectively videos or novels for large parts of it only shows the authors didn't really want to make a game in the first place.
AlexandrB 20 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 20 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.
IslandRebel 18 hours ago [-]
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. Naughty Dog excels at presentation, but the gameplay is just not there.
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.
autoexec 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Most gamers would disagree with you. That's alright, art is subjective and different people are allowed to like different things. Maybe you just don't like games with a lot of story? If so there are plenty of genres that aren't story heavy like arcade games, tile-matching/match 3 games, fighting, FPS, sports, etc. Or maybe action/adventure might just not be the genre for you?
As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.
> 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
Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.
Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.
IslandRebel 8 hours ago [-]
> Most gamers would disagree with you. That's alright, art is subjective and different people are allowed to like different things. Maybe you just don't like games with a lot of story? If so there are plenty of genres that aren't story heavy like arcade games, tile-matching/match 3 games, fighting, FPS, sports, etc. Or maybe action/adventure might just not be the genre for you?
I understand it is a contrarian take. That doesn't mean that it is without merit. I also find it tiresome when people just claim everything is subjective when it really isn't.
The game play is bad. Joel's movement is slow, like too slow. You can't take certain enemies down without certain weapons. The scavenging aspect becomes a chore.
The buddy system they demoed originally was downgraded heavily from the original E3 demo, which was probably 20 years ago now. They took Uncharted, slowed it down and layered a depressing story on top which people think is deep.
The game is boring to play once you know the story. The presentation is excellent, masks this. It does not change the fact that the gameplay is at best "ok". It has virtually no replayability, to the point where I was dreading having to play the next section, as I knew it was a total chore.
There are plenty of problems that I can point to that are not subjective.
> As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.
I am talking about the fact that they didn't even bother changing it. IIRC, in the Farcry games, you can essentially poison/confuse enemies via arrows or something. This exists in a bunch of games.
Ghosts of Tshushima has the exact same mechanic. They didn't even bother dressing it up differently. The game is fun when you are taking out the camps. However, there is the whole Assassin's Creed gameplay collect-a-thon.
A lot of the games are carbon-copy clones of one another, and the only thing that is different is the setting.
> Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.
I know what it's supposed to do. The games are long because they are padding with bullshit. Why do I want to write haikus in an action game? It's not even a mini game, FFS. They really shouldn't be. It becomes a chore. I've got hundreds of hours in Hell Divers, yet it isn't because I can fire up the game for 30 minutes or all Saturday evening.
How it is implemented often sucks. I am supposed to believe at the start of Ghosts of Tshushima, Jin, who is a trained samurai, can barely fight. The old GoW games at least de-powered you via the plot device, and all the core game mechanics still worked. Why do I have to have a cut scene (which you have to play through but is still really a cut scene) to stab a Mongol in the back?
How about I start awesome and become even more awesome? Or make it make sense that I am weak and incorporate it into the gameplay itself.
> Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.
I am not talking about what I like/don't like. My entire critique is around the problems with the Last of Us and Triple-A games, as you specifically mentioned. I play different games these days and just picked up Ghost of Tsushima because it was on sale and I heard it was good.
As for PG-13, the old God of War games managed to garner a wide audience while being R rated. The argument doesn't make sense.
They also soft-censor a lot of games. For example, the Stellar Blade demo originally (it was patched later) had a lot of gore and cleavage. The game that finally released toned down both.
The new Tomb Raider games (not so new now), Lara is completely sexless. You have this gorgeous athletic woman, and nobody finds her attractive or even comments on it?
IslandRebel 18 hours 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.
Barrin92 17 hours ago [-]
also people shouldn't sleep on Housemarque. Both Returnal and Saros were fantastic. Don't want to spoil Returnal but the narrative and symbolism that tie the game together if you go through everything after you've finished it and have a grasp of the story is incredible. And the gameplay is extremely fun.
RetardedBastard 14 hours ago [-]
Slop
rossvor 21 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)
mcmcmc 22 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 21 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.
mcmcmc 18 hours ago [-]
My mistake, I misremembered. Unfortunately can’t edit.
charm137 21 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.
4dregress 21 hours ago [-]
The Witcher 3, Any GTA game
ozyschmozy 11 hours ago [-]
Rockstar is American right?
ramcle 8 hours ago [-]
GTA games are, as far as I know, mostly built by Rockstar North studio (formerly DMA Design), which is located in Scotland. Obbe Vermeij, former Rockstar North employee, has written some interesting blog posts about the development of GTA from 3 through San Andreas, which can be found archived here: https://gist.github.com/WillPresley/d57d48b3d5f7f7b4bde4a2a3... (he has taken the blog down). It seems that, at least in that era, Rockstar New York was mostly handling the story and voice acting.
santoshalper 22 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.
AdrianB1 18 hours 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.
Hamuko 19 hours 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 18 hours ago [-]
CDPR has looong been separated from the publisher arm, and recently from the GOG one. Probably for the best for CDPR.
izacus 21 hours ago [-]
Warhorse studios as well. Rebel Wolves. Machine Games. IO interactive.
The list is rather long.
Henchman21 21 hours ago [-]
Valheim, Enshrouded. Each sit at the peak of the genre, IMO.
natebc 17 hours ago [-]
Where does Ubisoft slot into this equation?
loosescrews 22 hours ago [-]
Bioware had a string of hits before EA bought them.
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.
esseph 18 hours ago [-]
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.
pepperoni_pizza 20 hours ago [-]
That was Obsidian.
uberman 21 hours ago [-]
... and then EA purchased them and forced the frostbyte engine and release cadence expectations and mechanics that worked for FIFA Ultimate Team.
Ekaros 9 hours ago [-]
It really seems to be weird model. Get a hit, get acquired, replace insert corporate culture. Which really doesn't work as most games are not tech products like others with continuous revenue.
It kinda works for those who get that one long term hit and after that can just deliver not much else...
account42 6 hours ago [-]
If your calling them "Talent" then you are already in that mindset yourself.
Insanity 22 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.
anthonypasq 21 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.
ram1500natrluvr 20 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.
leoc 19 hours ago [-]
There seems to be a bit of a symmetry between what WoW did to Blizzard and what WH40K did to Games Workshop.
anthonypasq 19 hours ago [-]
> the end of Blizzard
extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.
ram1500natrluvr 18 hours ago [-]
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.
keyringlight 20 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)
bigstrat2003 22 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.
goolz 21 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 21 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.
Henchman21 21 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 20 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
AtlasBarfed 17 hours ago [-]
There's probably a bit of a lottery winners effect.
So consider backing there. There may have been 20 companies trying to make 20 games, All in startup mode.
Now two or three of those succeed ed.. which means the management and team chemistry and creativity all worked really well. And the team members will have them mistaken impression that it's that easy.
But then some people leave some people ad in the next games, sure, they may have a better foundation than some other team situations at others, but it's going to gradually regress to the mean
zeryx 14 hours ago [-]
The economics of game development is uniquely brutal. You can't just hit it out if the park once or twice and make a classic you can earn residuals from, people move on quickly and you don't earn on repeated playthroughs.
You can make a complete masterpiece, and build it cheaply - but there's no guarantee you can do it again.
That's why there was such a massive push towards live service games and MMOs, or microtransactions - it's quite literally the only way to make one creative effort valuable 1 year post release.
I don't envy folks who make games for a living and I also don't envy the founders and leadership, it just seems do brutally difficult to do well.
ryukoposting 12 hours ago [-]
> You can't just hit it out if the park once or twice and make a classic you can earn residuals from, people move on quickly and you don't earn on repeated playthroughs.
Unless you're Valve, in which case you sell companion cube plushies until the end of time.
halfmatthalfcat 13 hours ago [-]
I've bought Minecraft, Skyrim and KotOR (I/II) on at least 3 different devices, I would say that's residual.
N_Lens 11 hours ago [-]
I think it's more the economics of capitalism in general and private equity in particular. EA is more like PE now than a game publisher.
lotsofpulp 5 hours ago [-]
Needing (or wanting?) to continuously earn money (or some other thing one can trade for goods and services) seems like a human or physics thing, not a capitalism thing.
everdrive 22 hours ago [-]
It's the new hot business model. Buy a very successful studio then liquidate it.
mosura 22 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.
Crusoe123 22 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.
HelloMcFly 22 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 22 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 22 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 20 hours ago [-]
Veilguard is a serviceable action romp but it's not a Dragon Age game.
HelloMcFly 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
angrydev 22 hours ago [-]
EA bought Bioware 19 years ago. Are you saying this was their strategy for two decades?
anthonypasq 21 hours ago [-]
cmon man, dont let facts get in the way of a narrative. just let gamers whine in peace
> 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.
N_Lens 11 hours ago [-]
Well BioWare pioneered romance options with many characters, including same sex options and even threesomes etc. I suppose that doesn't align with Saudi sentiments.
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
Don’t forget Jared Kushner
hbn 21 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.
glimshe 22 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite game companies ever. But it had already been "shut down" in practice after the acquisition.
eterm 22 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 22 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 21 hours ago [-]
I am grateful they released the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which was a sort of penance for Mass Effect Andromeda.
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.
halfmatthalfcat 13 hours ago [-]
I was honestly surprised at how good it was, would recommend if you have any interest at all. I played ME 1 - 3 then Andromeda in a row and Andromeda took the #2 spot behind ME 1.
PetitPrince 10 hours ago [-]
I'm pouring one out for the developers of Neverwinter Nights, one of the most defining moment of my childhood / teenage years. Its toolset was surprisingly approachable and you could make complex adventures with relative ease (tons of wizards - the assistant kind) ; one of the most acclaimed player created adventure series (The Bustard of Kosigan) was created by a high school history teacher. It had a c inspired scripting language powering it, and player did jerry-rig small MMO ("persistent world" is the correct term) out of it.
rubayeet 21 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.
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.
science4sail 22 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.
aliasxneo 14 hours ago [-]
Probably for the best. I'd be scared what they'd do with the franchise in 2026 considering the video game industry refuses to learn any of the lessons they are offered time and again. Sometimes it's best to just let it keep its legacy.
Yizahi 18 hours ago [-]
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.
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
I don’t think people are surprised so much as disappointed.
jasomill 21 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 21 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 20 hours ago [-]
Is that even a thing? I can't think of any case where company sold off game IP other than in acquisitions
WorldMaker 15 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has a strange habit of doing it. They sold off many of the former FASA's IPs indirectly back to the original RPG source book owner by way of what became WizKids. They made a deal too big to pass up to keep Halo IP when they spun Bungie back out, but allegedly Bungie walked away with a bunch of their pre-Microsoft IP, even if they didn't see how to use it versus building something new with Destiny. (The fact that they've reused the Marathon brand recently seems proof.) Most recently, Double Fine left with all their IP.
(Outside of games, Expedia was a spin out that got an odd mix of old MSN IP.)
tajoma 17 hours ago [-]
Hytale was bought back from Riot Games by its original owner after Riot cancelled the project, but this kind of thing is certainly a 1 in a million situation
rahlokzero 18 hours ago [-]
You must gather your party before venturing forth
account42 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure.
philipallstar 21 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 21 hours ago [-]
"modern audiences"
I can't help but read that in the Critical Drinker's voice.
philipallstar 21 hours ago [-]
My favourite translation of the Bible is THE MESSAGE.
Capricorn2481 19 hours 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.
elktown 20 hours ago [-]
Not every topic needs your reactionary grievances. So incredibly pathetic, both of you.
philipallstar 20 hours ago [-]
Thank you for writing that in such a non-reactionary way. How's the view from the right side of history?
Capricorn2481 19 hours 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.
IslandRebel 18 hours ago [-]
Respectfully, you are taking him far too seriously. He is playing the character of a drunk, grumpy Scottish guy complaining about things. It is an old TV trope. He has just applied it to 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 how 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 YouTuber. There is a show (unrelated) I watch where I would expect the audience to be male-dominated, and many of the callers and super-chat donations are from 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/early 20s, and that was in the mid-2000s.
Capricorn2481 16 hours ago [-]
> Respectfully, you are taking him far too seriously. He is playing the character of a drunk, grumpy Scottish guy complaining about things
That is a very tired thing to say. You don't need to look that hard to see how untrue this is. Take a brief glance at his twitter or his communities and you'll see how much of a "character" it is. They barely even talk about media anymore. They post the same gender war slop shit that bots are posting all over Reddit right now. Critical Drinker takes a bit of a "boiling the frog" approach to his content and his true character isn't obvious on a few listens.
> I am not a fan of him and don't like the culture war stuff
You are likely underestimating how much he does it now. It's night and day different from his earlier work. He was a ghost writer for James Patterson. He knows how to follow the money. He's essentially a parody of himself now.
> and he has much valid criticism of films/games where he highlights how badly written many of them are
I don't think such a vague and easy to defend criticism is worth handwaving the substance of the channel. People have been pointing and laughing at video game writing for 30 years. That's an uncontroversial vague post. And that is the best you're going to get from him, because he rarely talks about games or films in a specific way, he usually just copy pastes the same beat for beat plot complaints that better critics have, and putting an anti woke slant on it. Sometimes he reviews shit he hasn't even seen or played because he wants to get in on the discussion.
> 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
Huh? Sure you do, if it has morphed from entertainment to outrage bait. That is dull, and profitable in the algorithm age. Are you under the impression cynical, lazy pop posting cannot survive on Youtube?
> I would imagine he has a more diverse audience than you would expect
I don't recall saying his audience wasn't diverse, I said his fans often don't play video games. So it's annoying to see people that don't play video games weigh in on the problems with the industry. It's nakedly obvious to the people that have grown up loving games when they are talking to a person who has just engaged with outrage content over the medium and not actually held a controller.
> A lot of people like watching people shit on popular media. Cinemasins was doing the exact same thing a decade ago
Ooph. That's exactly my point, though. Cinemasins is the kind of low brow film criticism that people who enjoy film will despise. It's pop entertainment, which is harmless, but there are 1,000 more interesting channels that can talk about film and are still entertaining. So when someone comes into a film space and you can tell they are just regurgitating Cinemasins videos, it's pretty clear they are not film watchers.
The difference is Critical Drinker has leaned heavily into the culture war stuff and has convinced a legion of fans that the reason everything is bad is down to a bunch of easily violated wokeness rules. I don't necessarily like the movies he dislikes, but the conclusions he comes to and the audience he caters to moronically shove the same 4 woke buttons into any media discussion, ad infinitum. It's extremely reactionary content. Every woman lead is a diversity hire, but every male lead in a bad movie is just an "unfortunate miss." Everything "woke" is going to fail, except whoops, for all of those things that were wildly successful, those are actually not woke anymore. It's just a channel that actively diverts discussion away from actual criticism, and makes it about algorithmically pleasing political content.
One of the funniest things I see is when Critical Drinker fans want us to return to non-woke franchises like...Metal Gear Solid. Maybe the gayest franchise of all time. A game where woke writers weren't trying to humiliate men! Except you're actually disarmed and ass kicked by your surrogate mother like 40 times.
BurnGpuBurn 6 hours ago [-]
> his true character isn't obvious on a few listens
You must have put yourself through some horrible times then, given that you clearly dislike the guy a ton, but have listened to a lot of his content to asses his "true character".
> Sometimes he reviews shit he hasn't even seen or played because he wants to get in on the discussion.
That's a sweet but also very baseless accusation. You should do better research.
> Every woman lead is a diversity hire, but every male lead in a bad movie is just an "unfortunate miss."
I very much doubt he calls every woman lead a diversity hire. I think you are overreacting and putting him in the chuds tribe you are already very opinionated about.
Capricorn2481 34 minutes ago [-]
> That's a sweet but also very baseless accusation. You should do better research
> I very much doubt he calls every woman lead a diversity hire
You do not have to read that literally. He wears kiddie gloves for male actors, implying they are not allowed to be good for political reasons, but he takes on a whole different tone for female actors.
trentnix 14 hours ago [-]
About three paragraphs in you'd think you'd have had a moment of introspection and said, "maybe I'm taking this a bit too seriously". Touch grass, friend.
eaisshutting 20 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 22 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.
Lerc 22 hours ago [-]
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.
bondolo 19 hours 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!
AmazingEveryDay 22 hours ago [-]
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.
D13Fd 20 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 20 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
random_cat_8745 21 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.
melonpan7 18 hours 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.
pm90 17 hours ago [-]
Anyone have any ideas on how to better structure game development? It seems like the studio-corporation model doesn’t really pan out long term in most cases. A few niches like ConcernedApe and Wube seem to be doing fine… maybe the era of “ big” studios is over?
Macha 4 hours ago [-]
To be honest, I’m slightly concerned for Wube in the medium term. They had one mega hit, but they’ve scaled up a lot from that (I think the average team size over factorio development was like… six and they now have like 30). There’s no guarantee their next game is a hit which is the cruel reality of game dev as an industry.
ConcernedApe likely made enough for one person to FIRE on so he’s probably fine and maybe haunted chocolatier even does get finished one day.
Mr_Eri_Atlov 22 hours ago [-]
Knights of the Old Republic will forever be one of my favorite games
RIP to an amazing creative group
nozzlegear 22 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
make3 22 hours ago [-]
maybe obvious, but Baldur's Gate 3 is really that level (or better) of a game (recommendation)
serf 22 hours ago [-]
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.
shoobiedoo 21 hours ago [-]
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
panzagl 22 hours ago [-]
> 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...
ninininino 22 hours ago [-]
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.
Mr_Eri_Atlov 22 hours ago [-]
Oh it definitely is, but I played KOTOR dozens of times as a kid
humanlion87 22 hours ago [-]
Really loved Jade Empire and Mass Effect. But they had lost their touch quite some time ago. Not surprised this was coming
npunt 19 hours 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.
Their last really good game was Dragon Age: Origins. It is nice that they put the studio out of its misery.
ndesaulniers 22 hours ago [-]
Many great memories of KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect. RIP
walrus01 22 hours ago [-]
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.
ErneX 22 hours ago [-]
Destiny will go on.
serf 22 hours ago [-]
by necessity of Marathon having turned out to be a flop.
ErneX 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah it did not do well, but it’s my favourite game of the year so far.
bluefirebrand 22 hours ago [-]
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
indy 22 hours ago [-]
Exactly, the Bioware that people love hasn't existed for a long time
squidmaster 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
akimbostrawman 22 hours ago [-]
Veilguard made Anthem look competent and fun
baud147258 9 hours ago [-]
At least Anthem tried something different with the flying robot suits, whereas hero shooters aren't exactly new
21 hours ago [-]
WhereIsTheTruth 8 hours ago [-]
That's what happen when you treat art as a mere commodity and put tasteless fraudsters at the highest ranks
I find it funny (and interesting at the same time) that the US, despite its massive ressources, never managed to replicate Hollywood's success in video games
And i'm not talking just about commercial success (they already pale in comparison), i'm taling about the blockbusters, the masterpieces, the things that combine technical prowess, artistic ambition and global cultural influence
Where is the Hollywood of video games?
Why was Elden Ring made in Japan?
It's similar with anime vs cartoons, there are some deep existential stakes at play for the west
vlyan 15 hours ago [-]
literally all they had to do was make DA4 a worthy sequel to Inquisition. had it not been the abomination it ended up being, it would've easily made a few billion.
people loved Dragon Age. people craved more Dragon Age for a decade. Inquisition was not perfect, but some parts were great, and it did establish the plot for what could've been an amazing sequel. they only needed to give people more of the thing we wanted.
Veilguard was so irredeemably fucking bad that it seemed like deliberate sabotage. I can't, for the life of me, understand the folly of writers treating the audience of the franchises they inherit with extreme contempt. it happens again, and again, and again. franchise after franchise gets exhumed to have its corpse violated and reimagined into Marvelesque YA slop for the nonexistent "modern audience". they inevitably and predictably bomb, and the people responsible still get hired to do the exact same fucking thing again to other beloved franchises.
it's all so fucking tiresome.
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
A few billion? That’s pretty optimistic
vlyan 14 hours ago [-]
BG3 has >20 million sales being exactly the kind of game Dragon Age audience craved. DA4 could've been as good or even better. and if it was, there could've been half a dozen DLCs.
Forgeties79 5 hours ago [-]
Baldur’s Gate 3 was an event unlike any BioWare (really any studio) has been able to drum up DA:I sold 12mill over a decade ago. So 600mill or so. And inquisition was rough. I liked it a lot honestly but they took a reputation hit. It was EA’s fault to be fair, but it happened anyway. The demand that it play on 360 + frostbite not being nearly done yet forced down their throats hurt the game a ton.
Let’s even be generous and say it hits 20mill sold like BG3. Billions? That’s ridiculous. A game reaching a single billion is rare. Dragon Age isn’t remotely that popular, especially not in 2026.
joshlemer 13 hours ago [-]
I wonder what will happen to all that IP
2OEH8eoCRo0 22 hours ago [-]
The studio behind masterpieces like Dragon Age Veilguard and Mass Effect Andromeda? Sad day
izacus 21 hours ago [-]
I believe you forgot the massive hit that was Anthem.
baal80spam 22 hours ago [-]
You forgot /s, right?
Anyway - good riddance.
rjh29 22 hours ago [-]
For a site with users supposedly more intelligent than Reddit, HN's inability to detect sarcasm (or any kind of nuance) is always amusing.
I thought it was so obvious as to be insulting to readers to include it.
dude250711 22 hours ago [-]
I a bit like scent trail or yellow paint, isn't it.
account42 5 hours ago [-]
Or a quest marker.
droptablemain 20 hours ago [-]
Bioware's long death began when it was acquired by EA.
redanddead 18 hours ago [-]
Could this be related to the war in the Gulf
aghuang 21 hours ago [-]
Always played BioWare's games including Mass Effect.
Such as shame.
spiritplumber 14 hours ago [-]
EA: Nasir
xiaodai 18 hours ago [-]
all these big studios are a waste of space. can't even run BioWare well.
gitowiec 8 hours ago [-]
Go woke go broke
platevoltage 21 hours ago [-]
"EA is shutting down" would be a much more pleasing headline to read.
shevy-java 22 hours ago [-]
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.
AtNightWeCode 22 hours ago [-]
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.
seattle_spring 22 hours ago [-]
End of an era, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now.
koziserek 22 hours ago [-]
They wrote on the flipboard: If GTA6 online next month... We'd better shut down the company
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.
'“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."
ilamont 19 hours 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:
The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.
Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.
user____name 18 hours ago [-]
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.
teirce 17 hours ago [-]
Yes after the success of frostbite around Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 or so, EA decided it should be used in everything. Not unlike the mistake Capcom is making with REngine right now, if the performance woes of Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragons Dogma 2 are anything to go by.
Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite which was... huh.
hugmynutus 13 hours ago [-]
> Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite
7 if wikipedia is to be trusted
Agentlien 12 hours ago [-]
I worked on three of them! While there are some serious issues with Frostbite and everyone loves blaming it for everything, its role in sabotaging huge projects is definitely overblown.
There are some issues with workflow and it is true that the UI definitely was, as many at EA said, "by programmers for programmers". But it's a very capable engine in the right hands.
That said, I'd pick Unreal any day for a AAA project and Unity or Unreal for smaller projects.
saidnooneever 8 hours ago [-]
cool, i think Frostbite is really pretty honestly. performs well in BF but ive not played other games that use it knowingly.
Why would you pick unreal? It seems a lot of games made in it suffer performance issues. In my mind its a really unwieldy engine. (ofc, because its so feature packed, and perhaps because i am no professional engine dev :-))
Agentlien 6 hours ago [-]
For a professional project with at least 30+ developers the complexity of using Unreal is necessary and on par with any competent engine. In fact, I feel it is often much easier to do things well in Unreal.
I like Unreal because it's really quite intuitive and ergonomic for larger productions, fairly well documented, and has some of the coolest tech in the industry. Their rendering pipelines are beautiful and a joy to work with and I could rant all day about my love for Nanite and Lumen. It is light years ahead of Unity and much easier to understand and modify than Frostbite.
I will say that Unity has better support out of the box for custom shaders and compute than Unreal (and Frostbite).
Now, you mentioned performance. Funny thing: performance has been my primary professional concern for the last six years of my career. Unreal itself performs very well if you use it correctly and has really good documentation for best practices as well as amazing tools for measuring performance and indicating what is wrong. The tools in Frostbite were very lackluster. Unity has some fairly good stuff. Unreal feels so far ahead.
I believe the reason there are more visible Unreal games with performance issues is because there are a lot more noteworthy ambitious productions in Unreal. That means games which push what they can deliver, and often don't quite get there. And for smaller productions it's likely just a matter of less experienced teams not following the best practices or cranking settings up to 11 without proper performance budgeting.
gmerc 11 hours ago [-]
It’s just a rerun. Bioware had an entire prototype of a game called “Agent”, a james bond style bioware RPG built on EA technology from sports games … until it became clear the technology to render madden NfL lacked something like “non flat surfaces” you’d need to build a world :/
f6v 8 hours ago [-]
The core issue is wanting to jump on the Fortnite hype train. Every exec wanted their own money printing machine. It's not unique to this studio: abandoning the core IP to pursue an Overwatch clone.
andai 13 hours ago [-]
>Internally, the project was codenamed "Dylan" by BioWare, in reference to Bob Dylan in hopes that it would be a name that would be spoken about years later.
lol wut. Is this like an SEO thing?
krige 9 hours ago [-]
Well, a finger curled on the monkey paw, that's for sure.
ang_cire 13 hours ago [-]
No, this is more like a The Secret thing.
8 hours ago [-]
andai 13 hours ago [-]
>Just weeks prior to E3, EA notified BioWare that their desired name for the game, Beyond, would be too difficult to trademark.
They dumped the coolest name ever because of the legal department. Sad!
Frostbite was also a bugaboo for Mass Effect 3, contributing heavily to its shortcomings (although it was a great game nonetheless)
transcriptase 16 hours ago [-]
What’s most disappointing about Anthem was that the game had so much potential. The graphics, flying around like Ironman, sound, etc was incredible. But the world and content felt like you were playing a tech demo. It was like they finished polishing everything technical and were forced to launch before the game to rest on top of it was even started.
No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.
laughing_man 8 hours ago [-]
One problem with live service games is management will be tempted to release it as a minimum viable product and add all the features that would make it competitive in later updates. That's all well and good if players are hooked enough to stay, but if they don't there will never be enough money to finish the game.
WorldMaker 16 hours ago [-]
I still think that the storyline of the game and that the fact that an AT-AT just shows up in the middle of the storyline like you should know what it is seemed to hint the game might have at one point been intended to be a "Mandalorian simulator" (the central macguffins also had a very "Lost Mandalore" from Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons/"KOTOR" feel; the central quest hub pub was very Star Wars cantina-ish; etc). I don't think we'll ever get the full story on what happened, but it seemed like the game came out in a period where EA was worried they had lost the Star Wars license forever and might have panicked and over-corrected from a licensed game with a lot of excitement behind its storyline to an "original" property without the right writers to file the serial numbers off very well and without enough passion for whatever they were trying to make original about it. Whereas if they waited just a couple years they would have a shared Star Wars license again and the hype train of Disney+'s Mandalorian show, and a "Mandalorian simulator" might have been very well timed to be what "everyone" wanted.
failbuffer 10 hours ago [-]
> No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.
Au contraire! Unreal Tournament with the Strangelove mod and no extras (e.g., just the puny Yellow Jacket gun) was some quality flying.
BoxwoodSeed 7 hours ago [-]
> felt like you were playing a tech demo
Seems like that description fits a whole lot of modern (read: everything from the past decade) games. And some of those even enjoy success and are beloved by many players for some reason, like Breath of the Wild.
15 hours ago [-]
f6v 8 hours ago [-]
It's like when CA decided to build Hyenas, put millions into it, and shut it down just be the release.
Then they release Pharaoh TW that nobody wanted, Shogun TW "remaster" that everyone hates, and failed in many other ways.
At this point, I hope Sega puts them out of their misery. I can't stand another decade of Warhammer without any proper historical titles.
brendoelfrendo 21 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.
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 20 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."
Mark Darrah suggested releasing a single player only version but presumably this version of EA that has entirely shutdown BioWare altogether has even less reason to release Single Player Only Anthem.
There is maybe some hope archivists will find a production build of Anthem in the wilds of Steam versions with that local server code still accessible in some sort of debug flag and then reverse engineer some of the other live services Anthem depended on.
gambiting 20 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 19 hours 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.
hdjrudni 10 hours ago [-]
> There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
I think you had a very different experience than me. I enjoyed The Division 1 and 2 but the story was completely unmemorable and by the time you get to the end they shift you into end-game Diablo-esque grind-mode, not some definitive ending.
springtimesun 7 hours ago [-]
The voice recordings and non-linearity were what made it for me. I felt like I was piecing the world together as I explored. Even after doing the boss fight finding intel that explained something that wasn’t known before slotted it into my understanding of the story. By the time I reached the grind at the end, it was like I had a world in my head and it was ok to close the book.
brendoelfrendo 18 hours 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 20 hours ago [-]
Both articles GP linked were jokes pointing blame at the mismanagement
akimbostrawman 22 hours ago [-]
good day for gamers, bioware has been dead for a decade so it can finally rest in peace.
r0ckarong 22 hours ago [-]
Another victim of EA. Bought, ruined, buried.
dayyan 17 hours ago [-]
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gazpachotron 22 hours ago [-]
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jocelyner 10 hours ago [-]
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150g2 20 hours ago [-]
Industry of Scam. Industry of Spy.
jdw64 22 hours ago [-]
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marsven_422 12 hours ago [-]
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tinfoilhatter 19 hours ago [-]
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gfosco 21 hours ago [-]
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vlyan 14 hours ago [-]
my brother in Christ, none of it would've mattered if the game was good.
I am as much of a chud as you are, and I had romanced every gay character in the previous games because the games were good, the characters were good, and I wanted to explore every bit of them. I would have done the same in BG3 if I still had the time to replay 50 hour games every few years.
even without the current year bits, the "D" in DA4 is for "Disney".
bigfishrunning 20 hours ago [-]
Bioware's downslide predates the "woke" narrative -- i don't remember Anthem being particularly woke, but it certainly wasn't the sort of game they should have been making.
AlexandrB 20 hours ago [-]
I think the core issue is bad writing. All of that other stuff is only a problem because it's written with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. In many cases the writing reduces characters to their identity group instead of being believable humans with believable motivations.
platevoltage 21 hours ago [-]
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gfosco 19 hours ago [-]
So you want to be disingenuous, that's ok with me. Everybody knows it.
milchek 20 hours ago [-]
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?
vor_ 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Users hate AI-generated assets, and justifiably so because they're often really terrible, and they take work away from artists. Regarding LLMs, users are far less passionate unless the project has clearly been slopped out as a quick-and-dirty vibecoded app.
milchek 10 hours ago [-]
Sure, but not all users hate AI generated assets, there are some who do not care either way (or can’t tell). I know plenty of artists (designers) in digital who are embracing generative AI and getting more done - granted, they are not artists who generate assets for games. But hey, maybe I’m biased working in the industry.
I can sympathise why many hate gen AI for the jobs it’s taken (and there is nuance here because often it’s not gen ai - it’s cost cutting or misaligned expectations from executives) but I feel like the craftsman who embraces the tool can create more value for the world than the craftsman who does not.
In any case, there will be a market for 100% human made art, media, and games -I’m just not sure we should obsess with enforcing (and gatekeeping), if someone who is a mediocre artist with a great game idea wants to make a game and use AI to accelerate themselves to deliver a better product for the world then that’s great.
samcolson42 20 hours ago [-]
I think that the anti-AI stance from gamers online is really about art and art style, not about the code behind the game.
milchek 15 hours ago [-]
I suspect you are right. Interestingly this reminds me of the John Carmack interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast where he mentions that game devs and game artists/designers are different in their need for attribution with the later treating the discipline more like art (which it clearly can be).
The thing is, customers/players generally don’t care. Just look at the annual incremental releases of games that continue to sell well. Sure, there is also a cohort of players who love the indie scene for its more grassroots or authentic approach to games. Both sides of that player spectrum would ultimately be happy with more quality content, but I agree with you that perhaps one side may be more averse to AI “assisted” game development.
I think the nuance here is for a fan of indie games, how much of the artwork has to be hand generated? What if the artist uses AI to help speed up tedious work like additional frames or animation? What the game is entirely coded in AI but hand drawn (or vice versa).
____mr____ 9 hours ago [-]
Most consumers dont really care about AI code but rather hate AI art assets, writing and dialouge
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.
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?
Mainly because ME3's original ending was tied to you grinding in multiplayer to reach the single player goals. No thank you.
And Dragon Age 2 was more famous for copy/paste dungeons than for the actual game.
So... i just stopped looking at "the new Bioware".
You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!
The last two games listed are "Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021)", which was incredibly popular, "Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024)" which seems to have been widely panned, so still hitting 50/50 at the end of it?
Going back further, "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was unpopular with fans but found a fairly solid cult following, and "Dragon Age: Inquisition" is the one you mentioned as well-received, so still batting 50/50
Admittedly, "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" is more of a well-done cash grab, and even Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)
Given EA bought them in 2007, it's clear they released some solid games even years after being acquired
ME1 nailing the story building but being pretty slow overall. Combat feeling very dated. (8/10 overall) ME2 nailing the combat, streamlining the overall game but sacrificing some of the exploration spirit - but very well done from a lore perspective because the urgency of the crisis builds over the game - leaving the protag less time for exploration. (10/10 overall) Then ME3... A pale imitation of ME2. From a player perspective it feels like the general storyline was still from the same author of the ME2 game, because you can see the urgency picking up more and more until the final conclusion. But the execution is really really lacklustre. (Maybe 6-7/10)
It was a decent enough conclusion, but overall pretty mid . Most definitely this was the first time you could feel the cultural shift in the production and it's impact in the product.
Political correctness kept sneaking in. The objectively horrible things you could do in both previous installments were toned down a lot. You're no longer deciding to decimate populations, shoving people out of windows etc. Still some questionable things, but clearly with a lot less ... Edge.
And I'm seriously surprised this thread considers DA:I good.
I gave it multiple attempts, and never even got further then maybe 5h before dropping it. Honestly, DA2 was already such a massive step down in vibes, clearly aimed at what's today being called "modern audiences", there were still some quiet extreme scenes in it, but it felt completely artificial to me compared to the ruthlessness in DA:O I also hated how the gameplay went from pretty down to earth to complete implausibility.
Like in DA:O people were still limited by their physical bodies. In DA2 you get rogues jumping gigantic distances etc. it felt like it took too much inspiration from MMOs at the time, sacrificing it's wonderful world it built up. But a more cynical view is probably that they just hired people that previously worked on other fantasy games, consequently importing the same fantasy settings of their previous projects.
And inquisition... Again I was unable to finish it to date because I just cannot get myself to keep playing... It's just no spirit to it at all. It'd say it's work by a amateur that's trying their best to imitate a previous work, and failing.
Part of ME3's problem was that it was left with too much to do, the Reaper invasion needs to be started and concluded in the same game when it should have been started in ME2.
ME1 the Reapers are unknown, they fight via subterfuge while utilizing the Geth and Indoctrination. Only one Reaper is in the Milky Way, and only for oversight. The game ends with the DLC in which the protagonist annihilates the main Relay which the Reapers wouldve used for their invasion.
ME2 starts with the overseeing Reaper killing the protagonist. Who is the nrebuild by a clandestine human supremacist organization. Its central theme is trying to rally a defense against the upcoming invasion. It ends with the "Suicide mission" against the overseeing Reapers base to forestall the creation of a Human Reaper. That was actually the first part where I got completely stumped back then: why does a human reaper matter?. It was a very good scene, but lore wise it was very confusing to me.
ME3 starts with the arrival of the Reapers and tells the story of their loosing battles, until the final attempt building on the previous cycles survivors magnus opus.
You could've split ME3 into two parts for sure, former being the loosing battle lines and the third one the final conclusion via the Ansible (i think thats what it was called?) - but I feel that last installment wouldve been too little content, if attempted. It wouldve been a good choice as a seperate DLC however, so that the main game ended with the discovery of the schematics and the DLC being about the final desperate struggle to get the resources before all is lost in the inevitable defeat.
I still find that fascinating.
(I'm also a rare fan that I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda second favorite after only ME1 and thought Veilguard was probably my second favorite after only DA2. Engine issues and somewhat dull maps aside on Andromeda I thought it most captured the "Exploration" side of Mass Effect better than any but the first one. Veilguard seemed to prove BioWare had finally wrangled their Frostbite tools to be nearly as good at storytelling as their previous engine, and the story culminated a lot of threads for my "main" characters across the series.)
[0] There is a not-so-secret fourth "no color" "walk away" ending through the dialog trees with no epilogue, but it feels like what some Renegade Shepards' only option.
People go on about the ending but never really address the whiplash of revealing a third party at the finale. It’s not a question of Shepherd survives or not, it’s that even with all the changes they made, it just doesn’t feel like it has very much to do with what’s gone on before.
Mass Effect 3 had plenty of problems elsewhere, like the whole Cerberus, subplot, the idiotic fights with Kai Leng, the whole Crucible concept, how important parts got shoved on in DLCs...
And while DA:I seemed to have been well-received, I don't think it's a very good game
on the flip side, studio owners, through no effort of their own, have been practically gifted a solution (hint: it's two letters) to nearly all of the problems relating to their actual risks, which are all focused on production and the nimbleness to respond to player feedback. the real question is whether or not EA still has distribution channels that no one else has.
It's an interesting conundrum for players. Some of us, when we play great game, just can't let go. We want to spend more time in that game's world even after we've exhausted the lovingly hand-crafted content. So, many developers throw us a bone and include side-content that is occasionally brilliant but frequently very low effort. Bioware did this in many of their games. You could easily tell when you were on the main story's track and when you were off in low-effort-land.
NWN being one of the first games to use master server and key technologies at scale was motivated to detect publisher royalty theft by tracking sold copies (and indeed an Atari division in Europe tried selling copies of NWN with copied keys) not just traditional piracy because the company had first hand experience with it.
Black Isle, an interplay first party studio made Infinity Engine spin off games which gets people confused here.
Source: Ex Bioware
Source: memory and crawling through wikipedia articles
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.
I think besides increased funding there is also a common problem where creative leads become blinded by their own past success and start ignoring critical feedback.
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.
That's because almost all of them were live service games anyway. Do not put the chicken before the egg.
They are very selective and you need to come at them with a fully formed game idea but once you get in it's completely hands off. No managers breathing down you neck, all you have to do is ship on time and they take care of the rest.
You get enough funding to grow your team, make a big project and go fully independent as a mid size studio if it's successful enough.
Yes, but it's also rational for founders to sell a successful small studio when they can.
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.
After BG3 they're financially secure, they know what happened to BioWare and have the power to avoid it. The only way I see them getting acquired is a series of flops and near bankruptcy.
I don't mean to be patronizing but did the formatting go wrong here?
Maybe I should setup my sig...
>Dude...
Please don't assume... Forget it!
ETA: That was a bit terse. My point was simply that it's more difficult to do institutional knowledge transfer when turnover is high, which may be a problem in the games industry.
you see the homeruns and not the dross, but there is a lot of stuff that is shit
(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)
it had many issues, but the writing was still great, the story compelling, and the characters human. so people were disappointed that it didn't match or exceed DA1, but it was still a good game because of the writing, and people grew to appreciate it.
1 - 2017 they cut from 500 -> ~350
2 - 2023 went from 350 -> 200 that included a bunch of very senior people including the OG writer of Baldur's gate Lukas Kristjanson
3 - Early '24 cut down to 100 skeleton crew as the writing on the wall for DA Veilguard sales materialized (sold about 1.5m vs 3m projected)
Tbh, I think the issue is that old RPG designers understood players have very different values and goals, hell they even wrote some academic articles on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
The devs of today played the games of yesterday, and felt that the game catered to them, and then sought out making a game like that, but they didn't put in the effort or consideration to appeal to other kinds of players.
And turns out there's economics involved - while people playing shooters want to shoot people in general, RPG players are a diverse bunch with different needs, and if you don't scratch the itch of a certain subgroup, that's part of the audience gone.
Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.
A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.
I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".
It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.
That's not a given at all. A good game targeted at a nieche can well be more successful than some jack of all trades master of none amalgamation that tries to cateer to everyone but fails in being truly great for anyone.
Cringe dialogue came from execs who forced writers to do James Gunn style even if they had zero experience with it. Combining serious dialogue with humor in a way that sounds natural is a skill that needs training. You can't make someone write like that if they never did it before and expect good results.
Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.
I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.
I mean the graphics got better (not that anyone cares, people still play old games, if graphics were a true differentiator, people would say new games are better because they look better, but they don't).
This is very hard to explain - and so expensive it's actively killing the industry.
The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.
They kinda still around w/ BF & FIFA\Madden which is a Money-printing machine. I never understood this, I just wanted NHL back on the PC. Yeah, there is 2004 w/ the Rebuild mod & an OSS port which I didn't checked out. +There Games up 2 '07 4 the PC, but it seems like the Community decided that '04's the ticket.
I always wanted a 'Bloodbowl'/Speedball Hockey title which is a crossover w/ Figure Skating... Where the Figure Skating gurls are like Bayonetta/Rayne & she posseses certain kind of superpowers while the Males are all like WH40k Space Marines & the Goalie is her FemDom Slave or smh? xD Anyhow... 2 bad I can't into gfx.
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.
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.
[1] - https://blog.bioware.com/2022/07/15/bioware-developer-story-...
And it's a win against EA (who own Ultima up until 2027)
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.
Nowadays if your game has even one thing wrong and the wrong influencer makes fun of it, suddenly it's trash. At the same time, your game can be trash and if an influencer laughs their ass off at the bugs (in a good way), everyone wants it. It's a sad culture. /rant
(Side note, the ME: Andromeda novels are really good and hinted at a lot of storylines that we may never see closure on, but were certainly building blocks the game was working on getting to.)
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.
This squares with Joker being a fan-favourite character in the main trilogy
It might have been successful if it weren't a Mass Effect. Or maybe not, who knows.
Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.
I genuinely only remember Ryder and PeeBee by name.
This is a great summary of the entire issue with the game.
I really tried to like it but it didn't inspire any enthusiasm. I didn't really care for the plot, the stakes seemed so low compared to the previous title and none of the races/planets really scratched that explore itch.
That said, the rumor is the in development Mass Effect 5 had found a story way to bridge the gap between the two and make it seem a lot less like a hard reset and find a way to continue past the ME3 endings.
Of course we likely will never get to hear the ME5 story the way it was scrapped along with the studio in this announcement.
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.
>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 acquired the Desert Combat studio, and the same people made BF2.
https://giantbomb.com/wiki/Companies/Trauma_Studios
Your sauce. If you can read between the lines, it was a big thing in forums @ the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.
I'd place it around the start of ME2.
In contrast, ME1's ending may have well been a master class in game cinematography and writing.
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.
Edit: Deus Ex series too
I originally asked because for most of the games I've played (and the ones you mention) the overall story played out the same regardless of your choices.
There could be branches and dialog changes but they always reconverged at important story points that stayed constant. And of course the cutscenes at very end would be different. Take DeusEx - some minor things would be different depending on your actions, and at the end you basically got to press a button to choose your ending.
The only real exception I can think of is Fallout New Vegas, where the game storyline would become wildly different as you chose to help different factions....that game was a rare exemplar of "choices matter".
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'.
oops, I meant to say without that DLC
Veilguard was my favority gameplay wise, but the writing... well you know.
By the time of the next Dragon Age game, EA was deep in making decisions.
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.
Sad, even though BioWare was dead already.
Art
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cxz4a/eas_graveyar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230610092047/https://old.reddi...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcf.preview.re...
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.
It’s like corporations all get the same memo and do the exact same things in lockstep
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.
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.
(But purchased by EA obviously)
Most recently, I'm loving Order of the Sinking Star, and that's from a US team. There's hope!
- 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.
Bruh, Larian is in Belgium
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.
- 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.
The problem was that majority of players wanted to have enough content in the game to play it multiple hours a day for months.
Personally, I think the game, despite it being a "failure", is going to be important in the future. It is an online multiplayer "live service" game built on Northlight. Remedy had to build networking and multiplayer capabilities into their in-house game engine. And it worked really well. This could allow them, in the future, to expand more if they want to.
They're lucky they were able to No Man's Sky CP2077 alongside Edgerunners being well received.
I always wonder why other games get this aspect of the marketing so wrong. Controversial take, but I think if they'd had a handful of cinematics out before release (and they hadn't gone with the atrocious sales model), Concord might have had a fighting chance. There was a lot wrong with that game, but its biggest failure was that no one loved it enough to defend it when the hatedom descended. Compare to, say, Marathon: it still may fail, in the end, but it's hung on for as long as it has because, in part, it genuinely charmed; it made an earnest attempt to get people to people to buy into the qualia of the vision of its world.
It's ironic because Hollywood is not doing too well at the moment.
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.
Those aren't the only options you know. Games should tell story primarily through gameplay. Resorting to effectively videos or novels for large parts of it only shows the authors didn't really want to make a game in the first place.
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.
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.
Most gamers would disagree with you. That's alright, art is subjective and different people are allowed to like different things. Maybe you just don't like games with a lot of story? If so there are plenty of genres that aren't story heavy like arcade games, tile-matching/match 3 games, fighting, FPS, sports, etc. Or maybe action/adventure might just not be the genre for you?
As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.
> 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
Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.
Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.
I understand it is a contrarian take. That doesn't mean that it is without merit. I also find it tiresome when people just claim everything is subjective when it really isn't.
The game play is bad. Joel's movement is slow, like too slow. You can't take certain enemies down without certain weapons. The scavenging aspect becomes a chore.
The buddy system they demoed originally was downgraded heavily from the original E3 demo, which was probably 20 years ago now. They took Uncharted, slowed it down and layered a depressing story on top which people think is deep.
The game is boring to play once you know the story. The presentation is excellent, masks this. It does not change the fact that the gameplay is at best "ok". It has virtually no replayability, to the point where I was dreading having to play the next section, as I knew it was a total chore.
There are plenty of problems that I can point to that are not subjective.
> As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.
I am talking about the fact that they didn't even bother changing it. IIRC, in the Farcry games, you can essentially poison/confuse enemies via arrows or something. This exists in a bunch of games.
Ghosts of Tshushima has the exact same mechanic. They didn't even bother dressing it up differently. The game is fun when you are taking out the camps. However, there is the whole Assassin's Creed gameplay collect-a-thon.
A lot of the games are carbon-copy clones of one another, and the only thing that is different is the setting.
> Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.
I know what it's supposed to do. The games are long because they are padding with bullshit. Why do I want to write haikus in an action game? It's not even a mini game, FFS. They really shouldn't be. It becomes a chore. I've got hundreds of hours in Hell Divers, yet it isn't because I can fire up the game for 30 minutes or all Saturday evening.
How it is implemented often sucks. I am supposed to believe at the start of Ghosts of Tshushima, Jin, who is a trained samurai, can barely fight. The old GoW games at least de-powered you via the plot device, and all the core game mechanics still worked. Why do I have to have a cut scene (which you have to play through but is still really a cut scene) to stab a Mongol in the back?
How about I start awesome and become even more awesome? Or make it make sense that I am weak and incorporate it into the gameplay itself.
> Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.
I am not talking about what I like/don't like. My entire critique is around the problems with the Last of Us and Triple-A games, as you specifically mentioned. I play different games these days and just picked up Ghost of Tsushima because it was on sale and I heard it was good.
As for PG-13, the old God of War games managed to garner a wide audience while being R rated. The argument doesn't make sense.
They also soft-censor a lot of games. For example, the Stellar Blade demo originally (it was patched later) had a lot of gore and cleavage. The game that finally released toned down both.
The new Tomb Raider games (not so new now), Lara is completely sexless. You have this gorgeous athletic woman, and nobody finds her attractive or even comments on it?
Lots of non EU games fall short, including several mentioned in this thread, e.g. Anthem
Warhorse Studios is Czech; Slavs are not all alike.
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 list is rather long.
(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
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.
Obsidian and Bioware both had a working relationship with Black Isle Studios.
Love them all, they did some great stuff.
It kinda works for those who get that one long term hit and after that can just deliver not much else...
There's other studios that similar to Blizzard didn't get bought out early and published multiple hit games, like Insomniac Games.
"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."
I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.
extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.
I didn't get into Blizzard games because they were a financial powerhouse, I got into them because they were fun as hell and the identity of Blizzard at the time gave me faith that their next release would be just as fun. That faith started deteriorating around 2005/6 for me, and was gone within a month or so of SC2 releasing. The identity of Blizzard of the 90s and early 2000s that I fell in love with was gone by 2010.
I can go into more detail about the shortcomings of all of the games from 2010 on (IMO, obviously), but the overall point is that they are fundamentally different than their older games and might as well have been from a different studio.
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
So consider backing there. There may have been 20 companies trying to make 20 games, All in startup mode.
Now two or three of those succeed ed.. which means the management and team chemistry and creativity all worked really well. And the team members will have them mistaken impression that it's that easy.
But then some people leave some people ad in the next games, sure, they may have a better foundation than some other team situations at others, but it's going to gradually regress to the mean
You can make a complete masterpiece, and build it cheaply - but there's no guarantee you can do it again.
That's why there was such a massive push towards live service games and MMOs, or microtransactions - it's quite literally the only way to make one creative effort valuable 1 year post release.
I don't envy folks who make games for a living and I also don't envy the founders and leadership, it just seems do brutally difficult to do well.
Unless you're Valve, in which case you sell companion cube plushies until the end of time.
Even in the good times their ability to create (and hide) black holes was prodigious.
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.
However, The Veilguard to me was amazing. I loved that game and it's my favorite Dragon Age.
A what now?
They were purchased decades ago
Never thought that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would shutdown the company that created so many childhood memories.
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 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.
Speaking of Andromeda, I still rewatch videogamedunkey's hilarious review of it titled Mess Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDjci1ODoBs
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
RIP to one of the best game studios.
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.
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...
(Outside of games, Expedia was a spin out that got an odd mix of old MSN IP.)
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.
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.
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 how 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 YouTuber. There is a show (unrelated) I watch where I would expect the audience to be male-dominated, and many of the callers and super-chat donations are from 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/early 20s, and that was in the mid-2000s.
That is a very tired thing to say. You don't need to look that hard to see how untrue this is. Take a brief glance at his twitter or his communities and you'll see how much of a "character" it is. They barely even talk about media anymore. They post the same gender war slop shit that bots are posting all over Reddit right now. Critical Drinker takes a bit of a "boiling the frog" approach to his content and his true character isn't obvious on a few listens.
> I am not a fan of him and don't like the culture war stuff
You are likely underestimating how much he does it now. It's night and day different from his earlier work. He was a ghost writer for James Patterson. He knows how to follow the money. He's essentially a parody of himself now.
> and he has much valid criticism of films/games where he highlights how badly written many of them are
I don't think such a vague and easy to defend criticism is worth handwaving the substance of the channel. People have been pointing and laughing at video game writing for 30 years. That's an uncontroversial vague post. And that is the best you're going to get from him, because he rarely talks about games or films in a specific way, he usually just copy pastes the same beat for beat plot complaints that better critics have, and putting an anti woke slant on it. Sometimes he reviews shit he hasn't even seen or played because he wants to get in on the discussion.
> 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
Huh? Sure you do, if it has morphed from entertainment to outrage bait. That is dull, and profitable in the algorithm age. Are you under the impression cynical, lazy pop posting cannot survive on Youtube?
> I would imagine he has a more diverse audience than you would expect
I don't recall saying his audience wasn't diverse, I said his fans often don't play video games. So it's annoying to see people that don't play video games weigh in on the problems with the industry. It's nakedly obvious to the people that have grown up loving games when they are talking to a person who has just engaged with outrage content over the medium and not actually held a controller.
> A lot of people like watching people shit on popular media. Cinemasins was doing the exact same thing a decade ago
Ooph. That's exactly my point, though. Cinemasins is the kind of low brow film criticism that people who enjoy film will despise. It's pop entertainment, which is harmless, but there are 1,000 more interesting channels that can talk about film and are still entertaining. So when someone comes into a film space and you can tell they are just regurgitating Cinemasins videos, it's pretty clear they are not film watchers.
The difference is Critical Drinker has leaned heavily into the culture war stuff and has convinced a legion of fans that the reason everything is bad is down to a bunch of easily violated wokeness rules. I don't necessarily like the movies he dislikes, but the conclusions he comes to and the audience he caters to moronically shove the same 4 woke buttons into any media discussion, ad infinitum. It's extremely reactionary content. Every woman lead is a diversity hire, but every male lead in a bad movie is just an "unfortunate miss." Everything "woke" is going to fail, except whoops, for all of those things that were wildly successful, those are actually not woke anymore. It's just a channel that actively diverts discussion away from actual criticism, and makes it about algorithmically pleasing political content.
One of the funniest things I see is when Critical Drinker fans want us to return to non-woke franchises like...Metal Gear Solid. Maybe the gayest franchise of all time. A game where woke writers weren't trying to humiliate men! Except you're actually disarmed and ass kicked by your surrogate mother like 40 times.
You must have put yourself through some horrible times then, given that you clearly dislike the guy a ton, but have listened to a lot of his content to asses his "true character".
> Sometimes he reviews shit he hasn't even seen or played because he wants to get in on the discussion.
That's a sweet but also very baseless accusation. You should do better research.
> Every woman lead is a diversity hire, but every male lead in a bad movie is just an "unfortunate miss."
I very much doubt he calls every woman lead a diversity hire. I think you are overreacting and putting him in the chuds tribe you are already very opinionated about.
Okay, here he is doing just that. Didn't watch it, tries to weigh in on it for clout. His own comment section is not having it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ubB8tjL04
> I very much doubt he calls every woman lead a diversity hire
You do not have to read that literally. He wears kiddie gloves for male actors, implying they are not allowed to be good for political reasons, but he takes on a whole different tone for female actors.
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.
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!
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.
ConcernedApe likely made enough for one person to FIRE on so he’s probably fine and maybe haunted chocolatier even does get finished one day.
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.
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.
I guess you have the edition of Deities and Demigods where they were cut...
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.
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'm honestly surprised they lasted this long. Sad to see them go but only because they should have been way better
I find it funny (and interesting at the same time) that the US, despite its massive ressources, never managed to replicate Hollywood's success in video games
And i'm not talking just about commercial success (they already pale in comparison), i'm taling about the blockbusters, the masterpieces, the things that combine technical prowess, artistic ambition and global cultural influence
Where is the Hollywood of video games?
Why was Elden Ring made in Japan?
It's similar with anime vs cartoons, there are some deep existential stakes at play for the west
people loved Dragon Age. people craved more Dragon Age for a decade. Inquisition was not perfect, but some parts were great, and it did establish the plot for what could've been an amazing sequel. they only needed to give people more of the thing we wanted.
Veilguard was so irredeemably fucking bad that it seemed like deliberate sabotage. I can't, for the life of me, understand the folly of writers treating the audience of the franchises they inherit with extreme contempt. it happens again, and again, and again. franchise after franchise gets exhumed to have its corpse violated and reimagined into Marvelesque YA slop for the nonexistent "modern audience". they inevitably and predictably bomb, and the people responsible still get hired to do the exact same fucking thing again to other beloved franchises.
it's all so fucking tiresome.
Let’s even be generous and say it hits 20mill sold like BG3. Billions? That’s ridiculous. A game reaching a single billion is rare. Dragon Age isn’t remotely that popular, especially not in 2026.
Anyway - good riddance.
[0]: https://www.autismparentingmagazine.com/autism-and-sarcasm/
Such as shame.
I guess in a way it was unavoidable. Still sad though.
I miss many great companies of the 1990s.
Bad decisions, mismanagement, greed.
Tho not the first aquisition I see nose-diving due to incompetent management.
https://archive.is/ZUR5H
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...
The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.
Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.
Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite which was... huh.
7 if wikipedia is to be trusted
There are some issues with workflow and it is true that the UI definitely was, as many at EA said, "by programmers for programmers". But it's a very capable engine in the right hands.
That said, I'd pick Unreal any day for a AAA project and Unity or Unreal for smaller projects.
Why would you pick unreal? It seems a lot of games made in it suffer performance issues. In my mind its a really unwieldy engine. (ofc, because its so feature packed, and perhaps because i am no professional engine dev :-))
I like Unreal because it's really quite intuitive and ergonomic for larger productions, fairly well documented, and has some of the coolest tech in the industry. Their rendering pipelines are beautiful and a joy to work with and I could rant all day about my love for Nanite and Lumen. It is light years ahead of Unity and much easier to understand and modify than Frostbite.
I will say that Unity has better support out of the box for custom shaders and compute than Unreal (and Frostbite).
Now, you mentioned performance. Funny thing: performance has been my primary professional concern for the last six years of my career. Unreal itself performs very well if you use it correctly and has really good documentation for best practices as well as amazing tools for measuring performance and indicating what is wrong. The tools in Frostbite were very lackluster. Unity has some fairly good stuff. Unreal feels so far ahead.
I believe the reason there are more visible Unreal games with performance issues is because there are a lot more noteworthy ambitious productions in Unreal. That means games which push what they can deliver, and often don't quite get there. And for smaller productions it's likely just a matter of less experienced teams not following the best practices or cranking settings up to 11 without proper performance budgeting.
lol wut. Is this like an SEO thing?
They dumped the coolest name ever because of the legal department. Sad!
No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.
Au contraire! Unreal Tournament with the Strangelove mod and no extras (e.g., just the puny Yellow Jacket gun) was some quality flying.
Seems like that description fits a whole lot of modern (read: everything from the past decade) games. And some of those even enjoy success and are beloved by many players for some reason, like Breath of the Wild.
Then they release Pharaoh TW that nobody wanted, Shogun TW "remaster" that everyone hates, and failed in many other ways.
At this point, I hope Sega puts them out of their misery. I can't stand another decade of Warhammer without any proper historical titles.
https://youtu.be/CxwrCRdqZb8
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...
There is maybe some hope archivists will find a production build of Anthem in the wilds of Steam versions with that local server code still accessible in some sort of debug flag and then reverse engineer some of the other live services Anthem depended on.
I think you had a very different experience than me. I enjoyed The Division 1 and 2 but the story was completely unmemorable and by the time you get to the end they shift you into end-game Diablo-esque grind-mode, not some definitive ending.
I am as much of a chud as you are, and I had romanced every gay character in the previous games because the games were good, the characters were good, and I wanted to explore every bit of them. I would have done the same in BG3 if I still had the time to replay 50 hour games every few years.
even without the current year bits, the "D" in DA4 is for "Disney".
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?
Users hate AI-generated assets, and justifiably so because they're often really terrible, and they take work away from artists. Regarding LLMs, users are far less passionate unless the project has clearly been slopped out as a quick-and-dirty vibecoded app.
I can sympathise why many hate gen AI for the jobs it’s taken (and there is nuance here because often it’s not gen ai - it’s cost cutting or misaligned expectations from executives) but I feel like the craftsman who embraces the tool can create more value for the world than the craftsman who does not.
In any case, there will be a market for 100% human made art, media, and games -I’m just not sure we should obsess with enforcing (and gatekeeping), if someone who is a mediocre artist with a great game idea wants to make a game and use AI to accelerate themselves to deliver a better product for the world then that’s great.
The thing is, customers/players generally don’t care. Just look at the annual incremental releases of games that continue to sell well. Sure, there is also a cohort of players who love the indie scene for its more grassroots or authentic approach to games. Both sides of that player spectrum would ultimately be happy with more quality content, but I agree with you that perhaps one side may be more averse to AI “assisted” game development.
I think the nuance here is for a fan of indie games, how much of the artwork has to be hand generated? What if the artist uses AI to help speed up tedious work like additional frames or animation? What the game is entirely coded in AI but hand drawn (or vice versa).