Out of the games listed in bold. Not one of those franchises have had a hit in the last 15 years. Which is a shame. Some of my favorite games of all time. But id were being honest the same people who made those games do not work at there anymore
1 and 2 were GOOD. just never got the amount of popularity as 3 did. but still some of my favorite games as a kid. But that was OLD bioware.. current bioware makes trash. I'm not sorry they are shutting down cause they basically shot it in the leg close to two decades ago and it's been bleeding out since. Fuck EA.
They were so good they shaped the genre of western RPGs for decades to come and were - and often still are if only for historical reasons - considered as must-haves.
However, it was in a time where pc games, and video games in general simply weren't half as widespread and accepted as today. It simply wasn't physically possible to sell as many copies and have the popularity some games have today, but the cultural impact they made remains nonetheless absolutely massive.
Definitely! I know some folks on their fourth or fifth playthrough (college students). They'd much rather revisit the Forgotten Realms with high quality than waste time on something "new and disappointing."
This, the amount of time is wrong, but still, BioWare has long not been the group of people who made those great games.
Sucks because I love the Mass Effect universe, but they had zero idea what to do with it after the Reaper War and seemed really reluctant to just make another game during it from a new perspective or even just make a fucking MMO outa it.
Just a waste of essentially Star Trek + Star Wars that worked really well.
Inquisition was crosplatform, but we can be right on saying they didn't release a decent game in the past 2 generations (current one, and xbox one/ps4 gen).
Andromeda was a failure, anthem was a failure, veilguard was a failure.
u/Extreme996 RTX 4070 Ti Super | Ryzen 7 9800X3D |32GB DDR5 6000mhz6h ago
Inquisition was released in 2014 which was very poor year for RPG. I never managed complete it because 90% of content I did was just bloat fetch quests.
I didn't hate Inquisition on my first playthrough, but I loathed starting a new game.
Holding R2 to attack is such a boring change from the CRPG roots the series had. (We're not talking about DA2)
And for the love of god, maybe they've patched it now, but the HAIR in Inquisition is some of the worst I've seen in ANY game with relatively good graphics. The beards look like someone smeared shit on their faces, literally.
Inquisition will always have a fond spot in my memories, given it's the first game I bought for my (at the time) completely new PC bought from my first few months of wages.
Even if I also remember it being a bit of a mess already. Like who had the glorious idea of having the introduction to the main villain in the DLC of the previous game? That's just ass.
I’d been awaiting a solid RPG on my PS4 and it was one of the first I remember coming out so I played the shit out of it, so it’ll always have a soft spot for me too
Inquisition took me years to finish because I kept getting burn out. But even when the gameplay got tedious, old Bioware knew how to write characters. Dragon Age still remains to this day, the only series where I have completed it with every race and done every romance.
And still with all that I have tried and failed to finish Veilguard since it came out. Opposite problem as Inquisition, fun game play and poor characterizations.
To be fair if you had previously played 2 and it’s dlc it would have been way cooler.
I’m still stuck in who made the architect and corypheus look like the same damn person.
Also technically solas was the bad guy, but that plot point was so contrived I ignored it entirely. Apparently the rest of BioWare did as well considering veilguard
Inquisition would be a classic if they hadn't Wowified the fuck out of it and filled it with fucking mobile game mechanics to try to force daily engagement
What mobile game mechanics? Genuine question, not being snarky. I've 100% Inquisition on two consoles (three if you count that I had to 100% it for both 360 and then XBox One because of separated achievements). I don't remember any game mechanic that required daily engagement.
Ahh, okay. Yeah agreed. I always forget about the war tables. I played on console so couldn't mod them out but after the first time I completed the game I just changed the Xbox time to complete most of them.
i'm sure a lot of people feel nostalgic about Inquisition, but if you jump into it immediately after playing Origins and DA2, it slaps you in the face with how much of a huge backwards step it actually was.
The moment I cleared through a bunch of mobs and then had them spawn behind me on a one minute timer is the moment I uninstalled it. Wow already exists and it's better. And Origins still exists and it's better.
My first impression into the game was meticulously setting up one of of the opening battles. I moved each of my companions into positions, set up their orders, readied, actions, spent like 30-45 minutes reading through all the abilities and making sure I was good to go. Started the battle and every single character straight up ignored "hold position" and undid all my work. Found out other players were all having the same issue and that "hold position" was treated by the AI as a suggestion, not a hard order. No fucking thank you. I can't speak towards how much fun you may have had with the game, how good or bad the story was, etc. All I can say is they absolutely massacred the tactical playstyle of the franchise that I purchased it for. Quickest refund I ever made.
I question may have had an overhead strategy mode but the game was very clearly designed for more moment to moment combat. I knew this going in. I preferred it as I find turn based gameplay slow and tedious. So this is a non issue for me.
But I guess we shall gloss over the fact that origins ai wasn’t any better unless you could figure out the convoluted systems.
I think that's fair if you didn't want to play it from an overhead tactical standpoint. HOWEVER, Origins practically redefined the genre. It was the biggest breath of fresh air in tactical RPGs since baldur's gate 2, and opened up the doors for games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity, and I'd argue even BG3. I went into Inquisition expecting those systems to remain in tact, and was completely blindsided by how poor the minute controls were. Felt like they pulled a Mass Effect on me and I wasn't happy about it.
I partially agree. I've played hours into it but the mmo style gameplay threw me off. The classes feel so uninspired. I don't plan on finishing it but it had it's charm.
I know it started life as an MMO (so the story goes) but it genuinely feels like a massive over-correction from all the criticism of DA2.
People didn't like the game being just one city? Fine. Have a dozen different areas that are all huge and very distinct.
There's not enough to do? Here, have a bunch of busy work tasks to while away the hours.
Too short? No problem, just the starter area will take ages to do!
Enemies die to quickly? Here, have enemies that are spongy like a mother fucker even on the lowest difficulty setting.
It's not bad but it's funny to see it so overstuffed with busy work content like it was an Assassin's Creed game where you can be 30 hours in and still find new minigames.
I actually enjoyed dragon age inquisition but it was the last game I bought of theirs. The new dragon didnt look like aomething I would be interested in so I never bought it.
I think the later game went on gamepass a while ago so I tried it and I did not like at all. DQ Inquisition was one of my favorites I remember replaying it many times to try out all the classes. Only played Veilguard for like 2 hours before calling it quits.
It was a shell of what made the original Dragon Age good. It sucks for the people losing their jobs but that franchise was in a downward spiral ever since the first game.
Every installment moved further and further away from the CRPG format and with it went my interest in dragon age every time.
Then adding insult to injury, baldurs gate 3 came out which proved CRPGs are still massively popular if done right and I always felt like that could’ve been BioWares success if leadership had a shred of vision in what made the original dragon age cool.
Inquisition has almost no replay-value with no actual branching choices that matter. When I played Inquisition back in 2014 I was disappointed and was extremely surprised to see it win GotY.
Game play has never really been their problem, they couldn't ripcord and pull Anthem around soon enough on the end game narrative and game cycle. The writing on Andromeda was not fully up to spec through the red lense of their prior games.
I liked Andromeda for the most part, but the quippy companions were soooo unbelievably bad. It's the only thing that's stuck with me and will remain the only reason I don't replay it.
Yeah I didn't mind Andromeda. Was it as good as 1 & 2? No. But that's almost an impossible goal as those were the type of games that don't come around often.
It had a good world and I could see potential in expanding it. The story itself was also solid. Not as good as the trilogy but again, hard to compete.
People are too forgiving for ME3 nowadays because the characters developed in the previous games carried it and received some iconic resolutions like Mordin.
But pretty much every character that ME3 introduced was dogshit. Except Javik, Javik's great but you couldn't even enjoy him originally as he was cut from the base game to be sold as DLC.
People are too forgiving of Andromeda nowadays. It was pretty universally and infamously disliked and heavily criticized when it was released. Horrible bugs, bad graphics and animations, rote gameplay, bad story and dialogue, unfinished story beats, etc.
The studio even got shut down because of it, which back then, happened more due to failure rather than because of the trash way this industry works now.
The problem with both Andromeda and Anthem was that Bioware spent way too long fucking about in preproduction trying to figure out what the game should be.
Andromeda with its procederally generated planets to explore until EA started asking where the actual game was.
Anthem with its... everything to the point an EA exec had to tell them "No. Put the flying back in. That was fun. Why did you take it out?"
Veilguard I put at EA's feet though. They had to reboot that game twice from a singleplayer RPG(Dreadwolf) to a live service game, and then back to a single player game because live service games were dying left and right.
Veilguard's writing I put on Bioware though:
("The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
Yah yah I GET IT! I GOT IT! WE'RE FIGHTING THE ELVEN GODS SHUT UP ABOUT IT!)
I unironically loved that game. It was half baked but the core gameplay (especially flying around like Iron Man) was fun as fuck. With good leadership it probably could have at least been somewhat successful.
It was fun for about a week. The idea was good but the loot was quarter baked and the available activities to do was minimal. No idea what they were thinking
The flying was fun, I just wish that was the focal point of combat, instead they stuck a timer on the length you can fly before overheating so a lot of combat took place on the ground, except for one class.
Hm... what happened a little more than 15 years ago with Bioware?
"The next few years saw a number of changes in BioWare's corporate status. In November 2005, it was announced that BioWare and Pandemic Studios (itself founded by former Activision employees) would be joining forces (with each maintaining their own branding), with private equity fund Elevation Partners investing in the newly named VG Holding Corp. partnership. On 11 October 2007, it was announced that VG Holding Corp. had been bought byElectronic ArtsforUS$775 million (equivalent to $1.2 billion in 2025).\13]) BioWare therefore became a unit of EA, but still retained its own branding."
Funny how that works. But Bioware's founders made a fortune so I guess good for them?
They made a fortune and dipped from Bioware the moment their contracts with EA allowed them to. They already had careers before Bioware in the medical field (which is why they named the company Bioware) and by the time they sold the company they were already looking towards what they wanted to do next because they were basically bored with games.
Yeah aware of the Bioware lore, my brother in law lived in Edmonton around the time Bioware started and is friends with more than a few of the original staff. It's weird to hear him talk about those days and know when he mentions "Mark" he's talking about Mark Meer...
..Those people were passionate gamers themselves. Making games wasn't just a job to them, and you could feel that passion when you played their games. Nowadays, it feels like some developers are just watching the clock, waiting for their shift to end. You can't expect people who genuinely care about games to take lectures from some suits who know nothing about gaming. So they left.
People have this problem where they don't realise how much churn there is at developers. The company that made "Dragon Age: Origin" is not the same company that made "Dragon Age: Veilguard".
The glory days are a long time ago and much of Bioware's hype has been a function of people mistakenly thinking that - despite all evidence to the contrary - they're going to turn around and make another KOTOR or ME or DA:O like they haven't spent almost a decade and a half proving they simply aren't able to do that any more.
BioWare did BG1 and BG2 back in the 90s. It was a different time. I tried playing BG1/BG2 after playing BG3 and I instantly regretted my choice. They are not modern games at all and I don't think hold up well today.
"NeverWinter Nights" still has a modding community; Luke Scull is on Patreon making money making modules.
Say whatever you want about "hits", I, and many others, could not care less about market share. Some peoples' definition of "success" is incredibly disappointing.
Funny enough they got bought by EA in 2007 or 19 years ago. Basically no good games post buyout, anything shipped the first four years was already in development.
EA has shut down a lot of studios for fewer failures, or none at all. BioWare just lost a lot of the talent that made it great. Writing, coding, they all left over crunch and other issues, or were forced out over things they had no control over. What was left is barely worth mourning.
Didn’t Baldur’s gate 3 come out like 3 years ago? Wasn’t that like a huge hit? Like I recall not being able to escape baldurs gate 3 content for like a year at least, and I actively tried to avoid it
Yeah. This is sad to hear but the Bioware I grew up on died a long time ago - none of guys who were there for Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Knights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age or Mass Effect are there anymore, and haven't been for a long time.
Like a lot of people I hoped Mass Effect 4 might pull it together for them, but it was at best a very cautious optimism.
Larian ironically found success by making the type of RPG that BioWare has been too embarrassed to make for the last twenty years as they have increasingly focused on style over substance.
And to be fair, some if not a lot of that was probably due to pressure on them by EA.
Not really, the BioWare Baldurs Gate games are considered some of the best DND PC games of all time, they just hadn’t touched the franchise since 2001 and left it for Larian to pick up again. Not that I would have trusted EA’s BioWare to do anything good with it.
Purely semantics, but the original post simply said that the franchises haven’t had a hit game, didn’t mention anything about it being made by BioWare or not
Baulders gate is one of the franchises listed in bold that has had a hit game in the last 15 years. Why would I delete it because nobody knows how to read?
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u/PoroPopRocks 7h ago
Out of the games listed in bold. Not one of those franchises have had a hit in the last 15 years. Which is a shame. Some of my favorite games of all time. But id were being honest the same people who made those games do not work at there anymore