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