I'm betting that "we" aren't even the people/bosses that allowed their existence.
Pre-Saudi Purchase EA seemed squarely willing to support Bioware no matter what because those bosses seemed to believe in "Bioware-magic". The Post-Saudi Purchase EA bosses clearly do not share that faith in the Bioware-magic.
That well runs dry after over a decade of not producing a game that makes money. They have not put out anything of success in over a decade. Would you rather just continue to burn through cash as a business to prop up a segment of your company that just brings nothing to the table?
This was honestly overdue. The BioWare magic has been gone for a while.
Yeah, no studio can survive the dry spell Bioware has had.
-Mass Effect Andromeda (100 million budget)
-Anthem (100-200 million budget)
-Dragon Age: The Veilguard (200-400 million budget)
The budget is part of it. These games all flopped horrendously, with Anthem's end of service this year accompanied by no refunds representing the most severe hit to player trust. But the main thing was the time. That's like 12~ years of development time that didn't let them make a single decent game. Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League ate Rocksteady's entire output for about 8 years by comparison, which was still a huge failure.
In 12 years, From Software released Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, and Sekiro, as well as DLC for the various games. 12 years of CD Projekt Red output got us Witcher 2, Witcher 3 and two game-length DLCs, Gwent, Thronebreaker, and Cyberpunk 2077. 12 years is a long fucking time.
You can even see it in the games they listed. It starts off banger after banger, on cheaply (compared to today) made games. And then it ends with Anthem, an extremely expensive failure.
They cant be left alone, or you get Anthem. They cant be managed or you get the latest dragon age games. Only thing left is put em down, Old Yeller style.
EA gave them more than they deserved, which is a wild statement.
Literally this. Studios get shut even after successful games. BioWare hasn’t shat out a good game in over a decade. Good fkn riddance. Another useless team of devs removed from a studio which had genuine potential
If only these studios didn't keep seeing purges of their experienced talent in the wake of "creative differences" and shitty workplace conditions.
It used to be the norm that someone would find a place to make their career and stay at the same company until they retired from working entirely. The games industry has a widespread problem where corpo capitalists at the publishers are driving the creatives that work at the dev studios insane with crazy work crunches, demands to change the art in ways that make the most profit but don't align with the creatives' visions for the art, and shrug off consumer complaints/criticisms before blaming the creatives when unrealistic sales expectations aren't met and closing studios as punishment.
Because god forbid EA, or Activision, or any of these other major publishers focus on publishing games rather than trying to own every IP and development studio or would ever entertain the idea of letting an "underperforming" studio go back to being independent (that's how the whole Jason West/Vince Zampella shit happened; they wanted to regain ownership of Infinity Ward and take "Modern Warfare" somewhere else, but Activision wouldn't let either the studio nor the brand go without a massive legal fight)... They'd rather fire everyone, hoarde the IP (that they'll never do anything with), and just sit on the old company's name & legacy so no one else can utilize them.
demands to change the art in ways that make the most profit but don't align with the creatives' visions for the art,
That gray-skinned demon person that was featured prominently in the last Dragon Age game begs to differ. She was ugly in ways that wouldn't lead anyone to think "Oh, this will be profitable" and I'm fairly certain the creatives got what they wanted on-screen.
They got three flops in a row and no sign of their next game. EA was generous if anything. Few parent companies would have given them that many chances.
First game I bought for my Saturn (that I won). I played the living shit out of the game. I still have some of the audio files from the discs. They could be played like a regular CD in a CD player. You just had to skip the first track because it was the data for the game.
Mine was Populous on playstation and i loved it soo much back in the day
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u/sd4f4790k|Z97X-SOC|GTX970 Phantom|16GB HyperX Ram5h ago
C&C, AoE and Blizzard's strategy games, the 90's were it.
BioWare managed to make impeccable story driven RPGs, not to mention fallout 1 and 2.
Adventure games were still a thing. The 90's certainly held up for games. They may be a bit clunky and low res, but with a bit of polish just about all of those games hold up.
As much at I loved the C&C/Red Alert games, unless Westwood planned on creating an RTS that out performed Starcraft or got into the MOBA space and won against DOTA and League; there's not a lot that they could have done especially with such a huge population of gamer's moving out of RTS and into MOBA's.
Shoutout to Richard Garriott aka Lord British! Iolo, Shamino, and Dupree were my first rpg team that I actually cared enough about. And that glow-up that was the magic system in Ultima VI!
Maxis, Westwood, Bullfrog, Square before Enix, Blizzard North, LucasArts, Sierra, iD, hell I'd even throw in Midway coz NBA Jam and NFL Blitz were great. At least Capcom and Konami have had a revival these days.
u/FuckIPLawRyzen 9 7950X3D | MSI Suprim X 24G RTX 4090 | 64GB DDR5 RAM6h ago
I hate how Origin never ends up included in these things. They even desecrated its corpse and used the name for their online store for a while. At least they let the others have the dignity of staying dead.
Saw a post a while back that Lord British is using copyright law to reclaim Ultima's copyright. He can't take the trademark, so he'll have to retitle them or call them "Lord British's Ultima" or some such, but it would mean he could remaster them and/or make sequels.
I just played Saboteur for the first time last week after having missed it despite loving the OG battlefronts and mercenaries and it only made me miss pandemic more.
Imagine if EA didn't buy Pandemic Studios and instead they somehow had enough funding to stay private or at least get bought up by a company that wouldn't hollow them out.
Mercenaries would probably would have been one of the bigger and popular open world IP's today.
I was looking for the comic and it's been around for so long that I found the Respawn and Visceral edits but not the original. The prophecy has finally been fulfilled, and that comic was probably made after DA2 so it's... around fifteen years old?
100% this! Dragon Age Origins (DAO) was the last classic Bioware game. It was all downward from there. Even though EA acquired Bioware before the release of DAO, the majority of DAO's production was done before the EA acquisition.
... it was a great game and I attribute that to almost the entire game was done before the EA buy out.
But stuff like an extra emphasis on Gears of War inspired shooting/combat and lack of unique and numerous types of equipment (armor & weapons) to pickup. Also that god awful final boss that most people forget about (rightfully so lol). All that stuff might not be EA's faults but I've always held EA responsible lol.
In my opinion the original Mass Effect will always my favorite. It was something of a rough game in terms of shooting mechanics but it was such an awesome action RPG in terms of storytelling and loot.
Agreed. Where the first game was a slow burner planting down a universe, the second game started with the idea of building a team for a suicide mission, finding a way to start the suicide mission, and pulling through the suicide mission. A pitiful final mission would have made the rest of the game look bad, but holy hell is it a full hour of pure badassness. And even if the boss itself was a bit lackluster, it served its purpose.
And that awesome music for the final cutscene while the Harbinger promises obliteration in the background was nothing but goosebumps inducing epicness.
One thing that niggled me was the fact that weapons didn't need reloading in the first ME. Fully explained why and then in two suddenly you had to have "ammo" like any other shooter.
lack of unique and numerous types of equipment (armor & weapons) to pickup.
While this made ME1 more of an RPG, it had too much inventory bloat that didn't really matter. The only thing that mattered was the manufacturer and tier of the weapon.
I think ME2 was an overall improvement, although it did dumb down the system too much, and ME3 was an improvement on this, keeping the simplified system but allowing for weapon customization.
ME1 weapons and armor was frustrating. I'm playing through the Legendary edition again and I forgot just how useless most of the weapons were - there was no reason to go with anything outside of the most damaging.
ME2, even for its lack of weapons and armors, at least made the ones that you picked up distinctive. Would've been nice to compare damage outputs, etc, but it's so nice not having to deal with 20 Generic Weapon Xs.
Mass effect 2 is exploration of what it be like to make an RPG, except without any choices, exploration, or any kind of meaningful story progression.
It’s a game that gets untold glaze purely based on its cast of characters, but even then 90% of the player base is just running fucking Garrus(an Me1 character).
Even then the interactions with them are pretty shallow and follow the same template of Recruit mission—>”help me with my daddy issues or else I’ll be to busy thinking about the to do my job” conversation —> loyalty mission—> “thanks shepherd, Now I’ll never have any new dialogue again unless we’re fucking” conversation.
The suicide mission was genuinely cool, but even that is soured by the fact it’s really a gimmick that should have been in the final game, not 2 out 3, so me3 had to work around trying to cohesively incorporate an entire roster that all could be dead or not.
Maybe instead you should take off your rose colored glasses.
Remember there's an EA logo right when you start the game - that alone is a bad sign.
Don't forget that Mass Effect 2 was not an action RPG (like ME1) but an action shooter - built as such for mass appeal in the wake of games like Gears of War. I won't bore you with all the details between what was changed from the original game to Mass Effect 2 to make it more marketable and sell to the "Halo crowd".
Also lets not forget things like that terrible final boss battle which was clearly thrown together to feel like an epic finale for a big budget game (similar situation happened to BioShock when in development by 2K).
Anyways, I never said it was bad in fact I said it was a great game but yeah EA did have some influence on it in a minor way and to me the game was always a bit tainted for that.
Dragon Age Origins was one of the few games out there where after the credits rolled, I just went "....damn..."
I dont want to spoil it, but all the shit I ended up doing with morrigan...the way my pc just, ruined allistair all the way to the end. One of my all time favorite stories in gaming.
I tend to think of BG1 through KOTOR as Golden Age Bioware, and then the Mass Effect/Dragon Age era through 2014 as the Silver Age. Both great in different ways.
Every studio they buy gets interfered with and whittled down until what remains is a husk and I got to wonder what is the point other than to drive joy out of this world for profits that end far earlier due to their actions
If it weren't for EA Sports I legit believe EA would've gone bankrupt years ago. They're creatively starved and just know how to kill brands and studios. (It Takes Two and Split Fiction being an exception that proves the rule).
I didn't make this meme, this is a very old meme...
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u/constantlymat9070XT Nitro+ | 9800X3D | Lexar 32GB 6000MhzCL28 | LG 27GR95QE-B7h ago
The unpopular truth is that half the studios that died under EA were actually killed by the original studio bosses who ran their EA subdivisions into the ground for years before EA leadership intervened and pulled the plug.
Eh, it's probably better to add a Saudi behind EA in this meme because after the Saudi takeover, they forced EA to make massive cuts to make up the gigantic 15+ billion debt the take over left behind.
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u/Alucard-VS-Artorias RTX 5090 FE | R7 9800X3D | 2TB 9100 PRO G5 | 64GB DDR5 7h ago