Or maybe because Bioware didn't make a single looter-shooter in their life, and the only "shooter" they made were the ME games, and their loot distribution was ASS in every single game they ever made (including SWTOR). Maybe they could've committed to it and fixed it to a place where it was actually good (like Bungie did with D1 and D2 for a combined 5 or so times - until they didn't), but I just don't think they ever really had it handled in the first place.
Also, as far as Bioware shitting the bed goes, by all accounts ME:A was a complete wreck and got "saved" (or at least thrown out of the door in a playable state instead of scrapping it after like 4 years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on it) by EA who had to bring in multiple other teams - like the NFS one - just to salvage that particular mess. It also always had a very toxic work environment - the crunch for ME1 (which was partially before EA fully took over) was so bad that they basically lived in the office and held "screaming sessions" in the recording studio to not go insane. Don't get me wrong, EA can go fuck itself for so many reasons, but Bioware was dying with or without them, and I don't think it was particularly long for the world once the writing team started to leave one by one because of how horrible working there was. And that happened without EA.
It's easy to blame the publisher, but dodging every shred of responsibility is still somewhat unbecoming. Especially from Bioware. This was not Krafton and Unknown Worlds.
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u/FecalSplatter 8h ago
Anthem had SO MUCH potential. Absolute shame that it went the way it did.