Thoughts On BioWare After Reviewing Almost All Of Their Games

Talking a bit about bioware as a whole and how I saw their games evolve over the course of reviewing almost all of them!

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#gaming #gamereviews #bioware #biowaregames #masseffect #dragonage

[GrumpyNorthman]

My thought on Bioware are the same as my thoughts on Blizzard. I remember being so excited at the idea of a new game with their name on it. Now, total indifference.

[REALVINERGY]

Until I replayed all of these games and started making videos on them, I never realized how bad the time crunching from EA actually was. ME3 & DA2 could've been so perfect. I also liked that you mentioned that Bioware is basically a quarter century old at this point. The same guys that made Jade Empire and Baldurs Gate were probably just coming out of college or even high school then, and now they're probably slowly but surely considering retirement. "Bioware" doesn't mean anything anymore, people look at the logo but fail to realize it's a company, which has seen over thousands of employees come and go over the years

[cassiusvictus]

Dragon age 2 and mass effect 3 problems could largely be put on the short development time from EA. 14 months and 18 months respectively (I think that's accurate). If the games had more time a lot of the systems would have been fleshed out more.

[ravenfeeder]

Bioware's strength has generally been its writing of the supporting cast of characters. The 'Companions' usually. Add in a couple of well designed questlines that add some punch to interact with those characters and all the other problems go away. This to an extent is where Andromeda went awry (bugs didn't help obviously). Not the open world bit, which was mostly great (fetch quests excepted), but the small cast who were either OK, boring or just bad (Liam). There was no Mordin or Morrigan. Plus it had no standout questline. It put most of its Companion character interaction into the banter in the Nomad where most players would miss large amounts of it.

[SadekMerchant]

Honestly, my expectations are pretty low from most games nowadays. I'd rather wait for a game to be in a better state post release than get on the disappointing hype train. Every game IMO is in a much better state 3 to 6 months after launch. That gives me time to make a more informed decision.

[alhoon]

Your comment about making a game about what you're good at making instead of just another triple A release, it reminded me of what Chris Wilson (lead dev of Path of Exile) said when interviewed by Josh Strife Hayes:

"The correct choice, for both the indie, and for the big company, is to make what they're good at. There is a game they have knowledge about. There's a genre that they have a special connection with, that they understand the secret sauce of that, they can judge whether their game is good. They should make that game, or something like it, have an innovation on it, but that's the kind of thing. They shouldn't just say the money is in “play to earn” therefore I'm making a Pokemon-style game that involves - basically comes out with Axie Infinity. Because they may not have even enjoyed that. I mean if they did enjoy it, go for it, they'll probably make a good one. We'll actually have gameplay that people care about. But everything else is a hollow shell, and it's amazing to see all these small projects chasing a fad like that. As well as huge companies chasing a fad like that. Because in both cases, people just think it's the thing to do. And at the end of the day, I feel that the best games come from someone who's actually got passion for making that particular type of game based on their own gaming experiences.

And that's why I mentioned RTS's earlier and how there aren't any good ones. And I desperately want there to be a good RTS. But GGG will never make an RTS, because we do not have the core competency, right? I enjoyed it, shallowly, when I was younger. I have nostalgia, but I was never good enough. No one here's played RTS’s competitively, we couldn't make one that actually did the genre justice. Whereas we all intimately understand action RPGs. And so, we'll make good ones of those for sure."

[MichaelGalt]

Bioware used to be the gold standard for cRPGs. If it was made by Bioware, I pretty much knew I would enjoy it. What Bioware always did a good job with is making interesting characters, villains and stories.

I think that when they started to taste real profits from Mass Effect and Dragon Age, they grew and ended up with a lot of people in management and executive positions who didn't play RPGs, didn't care about the fan base, only cared about maximizing profits. So, it went from a focus on creating amazing games and stories with deep RPG mechanics to trying to chase whatever contemporary gaming trends seemed to be most popular and profitable.

I can't blame a company for trying to make a lot of money. But, I can blame a company for being the gold standard of a specific game genre and then becoming largely irrelevant and disliked by a significant portion of the gaming community. I can blame them from being one of the best and making unforgettable games to being mediocre at best and making completely forgettable games.

Right now, my eggs are in the Larian, Obsidian, and CDProjekt Red basket. That being said... Obsidian is making a 1st person Pillars of Eternity game... why? It concerns me that they are going down the Bioware path of trying to chase more popular genres and dumb down their cRPG elements. Larian will be working on BG3 related content for a while... and so far, so good. CDProjekt Red biffed it a bit with Cyberpunk 2077... but hopefully learned from their mistakes and will be a bit less ambitious and hyperbolic with their marketing going into the future.

[justadad]

2:30 - Couldn't agree more. I don't recall the choice and effects of Mass Effect one, but I was blown away by the story. I really didn't pay attention to much else. Because it all was good, I had no complaint, as the story was amazing.
And Dragon Age Origins, is still one of my favorite games of all times. Never before had I wanted to date a witch more. And the humor, world, story, choices, balance, music, art, the game was a master piece.
Just like Witcher 3, my favorite game.

[xxTICxxTOCxx]

I miss engaging writing in 'AAA/RPG games'. Bioware stories engaged me, until Andromeda, where it seems to me they didn't think good writing was essential to their game.
Following Andromeda up with Anthem, and it's almost like they didn't think writing was needed at all.
I really do miss good writing, and engaging stories in 'AAA/RPG games'.

[shockmesane]

The bottom line is that the creative people at Bioware that made the "Bioware Magic" don't work there anymore. It is just any other EA owned studio, it just happens to produce games based on the intellectual property the old Bioware created. Same story with Blizzard really.

[lalitendudas]

I actually played da2 recently, although with a few mods, I really enjoyed the experience for the most part. It was clearly very different than dao, in that instead of using and improving on elements of origins, it went to a completely different direction similar to mass effect 2.
Maybe it's because I just played me2 recently as well, I see much more similarities between me2 and da2 but not dao.
But I do agree that Dao had much more choices and consequences that other games lacked, I still think me2 is fairly linear- and consequences based mostly upon loyalty, ship upgrades rather than actual dialogues. I'm also excited for the new da and me game. But most importantly, all this begs the question, Anthem review when❓

[TeoSkysong]

When a trees branches grow out too far from their base, they will eventually break. A bit to return to roots is needed. A bit sit down is needed. What we do right, what we do wrong. I do hope Dread Wolf helps pull them out the muck they seem to find themselves in atm.

[DuctTapeJake]

I remember when Dragon Age: Origins came out and was touting itself as a kind of return to form even then. There had been a lot of games trying to mess with the formula by simply adding more stuff to it, more classes, more races, more skills etc. DA:O was a new fantasy universe, but the playable races and classes had been cut back to the standard 3 and it was pulling more from OG Baldur's Gate than Oblivion or WoW. And that seems to be the kind of game where Bioware excelled. But then they immediately had to pivot to make their new grand fantasy setting more focused on spectacle, and the same happened to Mass Effect.
To me it seems clear that EA simply wanted them to make their games appeal to a wider audience than simply RPG fans, so put them in the position where they had to make games outside of their skillset on tighter timeframes. Trying to get them to chase trends of 'Open World' and 'Live Service' instead of setting the standard for CPRGs as they had been doing for a decade at that point. I couldn't get into DA: Inquisition because the whole game just felt like an MMO in the way it controlled and the way the quests worked, and never even tried Anthem as at no point did that game look like it knew what it was supposed to be other than a way to make money through online services. Now that that approach has obviously failed, and EA seems more OK with single player focused games, it'll be interesting to see what Dreadwolf looks like on release.

[jacoporegini]

Dragon Age Origins was the Lord of the Rings of video games, Mass Effect 2 was the Star Wars of video games. I suppose we can suffer through a Hobbit and a Phantom Menace if we get to experience a Return of the King and an Empire Strikes Back.

[JoeSmith-mxsr]

Thanks for a very thoughtful and fair analysis of Bioware's high and low points. In today's bipolar time where people think that you have to either one or the other and that there can be no middle ground, truly objective analysis has become more the exception rather than the rule. The acquisition of Bioware and the change in personnel at that company over the years had to change and influence the culture of the workplace--how could it not? I do think that Bioware now is at the edge of a precipice. It pretty much has to hit Dragon Age: Dreadwolf out of the park otherwise it could well go the way of Maxis, Bullfrog, and Westwood. We'll see in the next year or so whether it succeeds or not (hopefully I'll be around to see that, and, for what it's worth, I hope Bioware does succeed), but we'll see...

[Abdool]

To be fair Bioware has multiple studios, Andromeda was similar to Fallout 76 as in a relatively "inexperienced" team was put in charge of these big ass games and failed to deliver. In Bioware's case the "main team" faired even worse due to management on Anthem though.

Regarding DA4, one of the reasons they took multiplayer out and basically restarted development was actually because of the success of Jedi Fallen Order, EA realized that single player games can actually make decent money. At the end of the day you need a publisher where the bosses actually care about the art itself as well as the numbers, because next to FIFA and Apex, Bioware games are doing f all as far as profit is concerned. Single player RPGs are basically prestige games for publishers, hence the constant need to appeal to mainstream taste to carve out a bigger audience.

ME trilogy sold 14 million units by 2014 according to google, thats 2 years after the 3rd game, even if we factor in that the gaming community grew a lot the past decade, Bioware games were not exactly lighting sales charts on fire back then. Respectable but nowhere near outstanding numbers for 3 AAA titles.

There were no streamers back then either to meme niche genres/games into popularity like they did with Souls and even From Soft evolved to appeal more to casual players (and theres nothing wrong with it) by the time it started to show up the charts. You put all the manhours into all these different outcomes in RPGs and then you see statistics that less than 2% of the ppl playing the game even got to see it and naturally management starts to question whether its worth it in the first place. RPGs are my absolute favorite genre and I wish we got AAA rpgs with the complexity of something like pathfinder wotr but its not feasible until the general populace actually starts buying and supporting these games.

[Aggrofool]

WRT choice and consequence, nothing Obsidian / CDPR has done matches the Krogan Genophage arc. The arc spans 3 connected games, has full AAA production value and has decent number of inter-game variables.

[rks]

BioWare was one of the reasons why I got into the CRPG genre. I was too young to play the older BioWare titles or the sequels, but through them I learned about Obsidian and the CRPG genre, as I was looking for something similar to Dragon Age: Origins for a very long time.

[ramonserna]

I think one of the greatest thing bioware did is creating compelling character that felt like they were roleplaying. Ill explain: in mass effect you have a super though female soldier who read poetry, a human psiker who was from a time they used different type of controlling devices, a spock like avian sniper, etc. Each of them is interesting and shows much love in their creation. I was genuinelly excited to learn more of them. With some games is more like this is my mage, my rogue, etc. One has a save my family quest that gives some loot, so Ill skip the dialog and do the quest to level up and things like that.

[MaxiGoethling]

I follow the development of DA:D really closely and I'm pretty optimistic that they are on track again. The directors and writers on the team all wrote some of the best parts of Dragon Age and Inquisition. The writer for the incredible Tresspasser DLC in Inquisition is lead writer for DA:D, that alone makes me really hopeful.