EA played a major part in the poor performance of their last 3 games
Let’s not act like BioWare are entirely blameless, a lot of the staff that made their games iconic left and they’ve been making crap for 3 games straight.
As to my last point: dragon age origins for me is up there with BG3 in terms of great RPGs, I absolutely adored the art style, the way the characters interacted and the world created. I launched into dragon age veilguard when it came out as a huge fan of the series and it was honestly one of the most jarring games I’ve ever played, it was like the people at the studio hated everything the series had been and went out of their way to annoy old fans. There’s innovation and then there’s self mutilation. BioWare as we knew it was gone long before EA shut it down
Every form of journalistic media had the same title in their reviews of DA:Veilguard.
“A return to form.”
They had to buy their way into every media outlet to make the game look like it was Origin but better, instead of actually creating a game that was true to its name.
The game actually made me enjoy the other Dragon Age installments less.
Yeah i didnt even bother with veilguard because it looked the furthest yet from DA:O, which they started moving away from with DA2 imo, trying to make it more like ME. Tragic too, because I agree BG3's success seems like a huge indication that they'd be hugely successful actually returning to form with DA:O style gameplay.
Tragic loss for gaming imo, but nothing lives forever
True enough, but stuff like Pullars of Eternity and the old-school Baldur's games are similar enough because they ran turn-based underneath the realyime feel. Imo BG3 makes me feel like it's an "if you build it, they will come" situation
What killed it for me was the complete keep removal and no real choice carryover from previous games. That's like the hallmark of bioware games and they completely done away with it.
IMO 2s combat system was very solid and had they simply made a game with an Origins level story and used that combat system, they would've been golden.
Inquisition in particular was not the same gameplay wise
People point out pretty obnoxious pronoun scene
But the main issue with DAV vs dao or da2.. was how you could react treat the world/party members.. in the most recent game it was completely sanitised
Whats funny is that EA/Bioware every installment moved closer to action gameplay and further from slower more deliberate combat.. because they believed that it wouldn't sell
But then bg3 comes along with modernised but similar combat to DAO.. but also gave you the personal choice to do whatever you want (that old Dragon age, mass effect had) and makes huge amounts of $$ and wins awards and huge acclaim
That’s exactly why we shouldn’t be sad BioWare is closing down. There wasn’t an original cell left in that body. It became what everything we love in this world will become when corporate greed gets its fingers in there, a husk of itself driven by people who don’t even enjoy the games that made them who they are.
"Return to form" doesn't mean going back to the same systems, it just means going back to a previously higher standard of quality than they had been at recently.
Which is true for Bioware as Anthem sucked and DA:V was definitely made to a level more like their old stuff. Before Anthem was Andromeda. I liked that a lot more than DA:V, but it did ship pretty rough.
That tagline was so disconnecred from reality. It implies that they would be moving away from Inquisistion yet its story, visuals and humor was basically Inquisition part 2. It also implies they would be more like Origins, yet there is no Origin style start.
I finished Veilguard, because I kept hoping 'the good part will come any moment now!', but you know, it never came. It's really a very bad RPG, with a terrible story and some of the worst written dialogues and characters in the history of gaming.
I hope the writers of this abomination will never touch a game again.
I hope the writers of this abomination will never touch a game again.
Bad news buddy, the writer of this crap was hired by Bethesda. These ppl tend to fall upwards. They took control of the industry from the inside out like a virus because they only hire their buddies that share the same dumb views. They need to be purged before anything can get better.
it's a bit werid for me, Veilguard is the only DA I played, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's not the greatest, but not every game has to be a 95/100 to be enjoyable.
What I believe to be true though, is that the game is really subpar compared to its predecessors, but that it's a pretty okay game in a vacuum.
In a vacuum it's fine. Like a 7/10. It's boring, bland and forgettable which is a giant slap in the face to fans of what Bioware used to put out. I finished each dragon age at least once. Veilguard was so boring I dropped it early. I couldn't tell you about a single party member besides Scout Harding and that's only because she was in Inquisition.
I am actually jealous of you to be able to experience DA: Origins for the first time. The combat is a lot less flashy than Veilguard and rather more tactical, but the beauty lies in the RPG elements the story has to offer.
Read the Veilguard art book if you ever see it. They briefly touched on doing focus groups for the art style, but decided against it because they were going to do it regardless of the focus test results.
Making crap for 3 games straight over the span of nearly 10 years.
The constant cock-teasing with Mass Effect 4 (5?) got so boring. After a short while I just resigned myself to the thought of never getting another good bioware game ever again, so this means absolutely nothing to me.
Anthem was purely Bioware screwing up tho. They sat for years doing nothing until EA got tired of them and demanded they give them the game they promised. Hell, that Anthem had flying in it was EA's idea since Bioware had removed it so the one good thing in that game, Bioware did not like.
You can kinda blame EA for Veilguard since they kept changing what they wanted with the game but the terrible story, the terrible characters, terrible combat and terrible artstyle and the removal of all things that made Dragon Age well Dragon Age is all on Bioware as well.
But yeah as others have said, the people that made Bioware famous left years ago. And while it is a bit sad that we didn't get Mass Effect 5, chances of it being good was very low so it's for the best that Mass Effect 3 was the end.
The people who are losing their jobs are the people who made ensure the game they released post 2014 were bland, unoriginal and controversial. Get em out the industry honestly.
Just like fking over Maxis with the Sims. All they had to do was create Sim City as a standalone game like previous ones, instead release that hot garbage in 2012. Then closed the studio. Same people that had Maxis create so many expansion packs for TheSims, to nickel and dime their customers. And now they are killing Bioware after fking up ME3, ME:A, latest dragon age, still never got a KOTOR remaster or remake or sequel.
They could have just milked these IP's like COD or EA Sports games that just recycle the same shit year after year but they couldn't even muster up even that low level of effort. It's bizarre.
the gameplay in veilguard is pretty fun but it’s not Dragon Age in much except name and a few characters. i’ve been pretending it’s an action RPG by a Romanian developer that wrote it with english as a 2nd language and if you frame it like that, it’s a solid 8/10
Most of the senior staff who'd worked on the previous DA games had been let go, so a lot of Veilguard's production fell in the hands of the team that was supposed to be doing ME5 pre-production. I think that plays a huge part in the final product feeling so not-DA.
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u/BriggieRyzen 7 5800x / ASUS Crosshair VIII Dark Hero / TUF RTX 40905h ago
Most of the people that worked on the early BioWare games in the 2000’s were gone by the time Mass Effect 3 had released.
Yeah I’m with you on this take. It’s easy to blame EA for everything, but we can’t act like Bioware didn’t also fuck up on so many core development levels along the way. It’s just been a complete mess and I don’t think anyone is completely shocked about this news, as sad as it is.
You mean BG3 is up there with Dragon Age Origins in terms of great RPGs, but I would disagree, since the story is awful and nonsensical, and your companions in BG3 are nothing more than toys for the protagonist to use.
There's enough evidence that Bioware themselves were as bad as EA in everything that happened to them. The crunch culture they supported and lived by for each and every single game for most of itz's existence, the different development teams basically hating themselves and more or less sabotaging each other (like the ME team shut down any help from the Veilguard team as they tried to fix what couldn't be fixed), the general favoritism towards ME by EA and Bioware. Guess why they actionified Dragon Age with each game more and more
Absolutely right on the 3rd point. I was the biggest Bioware fanboy you could find 15 years ago. But you're just being dishonest if you don't place a large piece of the blame on Bioware themselves. First with their inability or lack of desire to keep important developers around (Hudson, Laidlaw, Gaider, Karpyshyn, etc). Second with their inability to replace those lost devs with real talent and being overly focused on optics and current day politics over true creativity. EA did a lot to hamper Bioware over the years, but they didn't force them to do any of that.
People always got angry at me when I defended Andromeda for having really good gameplay for a mass effect game. The story had a few really good beats, but they were sparse, and never went anywhere after. The characters were awful. But the gameplay was there...
Anthem was the same way. Anthem was botched from day one, but the fluid feeling of the combat was so GOOD MAN. IT WAS SO GOOD.
Andromeda was an unfinished unpolished mess which a couple years ago I played with mods and really enjoyed myself but within andromeda lies the seed of one the main issues with veilguard and that issue is weak character writing. Peebee in andromeda is the template for every single companion in veilguard, peebee by herself is an annoying companion but just one in a crew of others so it’s more tolerable, veilguard felt like it was written as fan fiction.
Did you actually read my comment and the part where I said BioWare have blame and that veilguard was self mutilation of a great series of games?
Their own fans didn’t have any faith in BioWare developing games anymore so no I didn’t expect the massive company whose bottom line is to make money to keep a sinking ship like BioWare open.
This has way less to do with game quality and everything to do with EA's private equity leveraged buyout. The company is now $20 billion in debt, so they need to gut their workforce to cut costs.
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u/GrimJimmy94 7h ago
As to my last point: dragon age origins for me is up there with BG3 in terms of great RPGs, I absolutely adored the art style, the way the characters interacted and the world created. I launched into dragon age veilguard when it came out as a huge fan of the series and it was honestly one of the most jarring games I’ve ever played, it was like the people at the studio hated everything the series had been and went out of their way to annoy old fans. There’s innovation and then there’s self mutilation. BioWare as we knew it was gone long before EA shut it down