But Mass Effect 3 was their last truly great game. Inquisition was very contentious but it did have SOME fans, but their next games were too busy chasing trends instead of sticking to their bread and butter. Each subsequent game doubled and tripled down on the things people didn't care about, while not trying to go back to their roots.
Hopefully the devs can transition into more indy companies, so that they can make the games they want for the niche communities they want to appeal to and not be tied to huge budgets, expecting even larger returns,
The ending and how it was Casey Hudson that pushed for it was the sign to me that BioWare was dying. Since then everything from them has been increasingly worse and veilguard being the epitome of it now. It wasn’t the same team and minds in the end, probably better that they don’t destroy what little is left of Mass Effect- though I’m sad we may never see the universe again
Yep. Still my favorite game ever. It was so epic and good from start to up until the last 30 mins. No other game has had such incredible missions and interactions that never slowed down the whole game. I absolutely love it
Because it completely destroys the Geth lore and turns them into space pinnocchios just because the writers didn't fucking understand their original lore.
for me, that trilogy will always be the greatest sci fi game trilogy of all time, even as someone who regularly reads sci fi books I still rank the story telling of those games among the greatest.
I mean... it was the ending of a massive epic, and you'd kina hope it wouldn't be the exact thing - the EXACT thing - they said it wouldn't be, where it basically erased everything you done or achieved, every decision you'd made, up to that point.
A bad ending can colour how you feel about what came before.
It was a great game, but IMO the most important part of that last game was the final 5%.
Could have been a stand alone game. Incredible story and vibe.
Blood and Wine felt way too whimsical to me. Doesn't fit the universe at all. But Geralt kind of did deserve an ending in a beautiful place full of flowers and wine with yen on the porch i guess.
It was a good expansion, but I'd argue that that's where we saw the beginning of the jokey snark writing that became prevalent in andromeda and veilguard.
The main story is lighthearted but there's nothing that much snarkier about it than most of the rest of the series. It gave us plenty of more genuine emotional beats too, especially for the romance scenes, plus the Mordin and (potentially) Thane cameos.
The issue of ME3 was never the ending. Start to finish the game was neutered of rpg systems, dialog, depth and focused heavily instead on streamlining and combat. It even contradicted its entire lore start to finish many times throughout the game. The ending was the product of all of that. The fact this sold to a wider audience meant you'd get more of the same, as you did with Anthem, Andromeda, Inquistion, Veilguard, etc.
If we keep pretending ME3 was a high quality rpg, then we completely miss how players agreed to the trajectory that EA-Ware was pushing for wider sales by larger audiences of combat focus and less on the depth.
Mass effect 2 did the same thing lol. Mass effect 2 actually shit on the lore even worse.
Cerberus? Actually not that bad guys. You know those guys who were actually the fucking most evil vile pieces of shit the whole time. Jk.
Also now you have ammo so the game can be a better shooter.
Also you have way less level abilities and choices for level ups.
Oh and now instead of dealing with missions that a specter deals with? Now you are doing them for Cerberus. Also even tho cerebrum is so anti alien they do horrible alien experiments they actually work with Aliens now or at least let you.
The geth actually aren’t evil. You know the guys who were only evil. Jk not anymore.
I could go on if you want. I am not saying these changes were bad. I like mass effect 2 more. But it is a pretty disrespectful sequel.
Mass effect 3 actually added a lot more rpg elements back into to the level ups and tied up a lot of character arcs very well.
The ending was indeed a big reason why it was bad
Kind of. Mass Effect 2 definitely maintained a connection to Mass Effect 1 and the first book and it did start the streamlining focus as it got more combat focused and changed skills into detonators and primers for combat, and it did cut down on neutral dialog, but it also maintained significant focus on companions far more than the prior game and encouraged heavy amounts of investigation dialog and dialog depth.
It is definitely a desire to expand population size for players with more combat and streamlining and visuals than ME1 was which was Old Guard through and through. But in itself that EA push to more combat wasn't a bad idea it just would have been better if it didn't cut a bit of depth.
The changes from ME1-ME2 were significant, but the changes from ME2-ME3 were a full forced neutering. It stopped being an rpg.
Cerberus puts up a front for you to get you to do something because your connections and capability is believed the only real avenue of access to uncover this secret, especially since Cerberus doesn't have the diplomatic ties or connections necessary. Being a Spectre also gives you significant access if you retake it, and if you don't well you technically still have it just not officially.
But the Geth weren't evil, remember we learned incredibly one-sided knowledge from Tali in ME1 about them but it was clear immediately that it was a sentience vs not sentience factor as we see in AI media all the time at that point. The question was just whether the Quarians made the first strike or not. We also knew the ones following Sovereign were definitely his minions but he was also worshipped by them as we saw in ME1.
Originally Cerberus was supposed to be an offshoot black ops team from Earth and the Alliance but now it's kind of become a company of sorts.
Inquisition, while contentious amongst modern day fans, is Bioware's best selling game of all time. So technically that was their last great game, at least financially.
People view inquisition as a big turning point and departure from what made DAO great. Inquisition had brand recognition and was designed to be more approachable for a general audience, but fans were pretty critical of the game itself following release.
Similarly, RE5/6 had similar complaints from fans about them taking the series in the wrong direction but sold very well at the time. RE6 was so poorly reviewed that people thought it would kill the franchise. I liked the game but it’s an example of another franchise that hit a wall like BioWare. The difference is that Resident Evil identified what made the original games work so well and integrated it into the new games. BioWare did not.
That doesn't exactly mean anything. AC Valhalla is the highest selling game in the series and if anyone calls it great i have a hidden blade calling for them.
Yes but the point is that it was a financial success, so it couldn't have been the start point for Bioware's downfall. As I said, financially it was great. I'd argue Bioware's downfall had nothing to do with their games (though they certainly didn't help). The problem was internally. With the changing culture of their company.
Also to your point about AC, is Assasins Creed or the company behind it dead, or are they alive and thriving and still pumping out games with no sign of significant financial decline?
I just wanted to point out financial success doesn't mean a good or a bad thing for a studio. Wrong lessons could be learned from it.
In Bioware's case, they got way too pompous after all the success of Inquisition. They crunched the shit out of their employees and it worked in the end. Made them feel like the chaos in developement was not a bad thing while it killed their studio.
Yeah, this whole thread is full of missing the phenomenon that people have to buy something to find out it's bad. The last Paradox game I bought was Stellaris, which is what it took for me to accept they'd basically switched to the pay model of MMOs. A lot of companies go out with a financial bang, releasing an anticipated project that turns out to be crap.
Bioware never made a good game for more than a decade. Time to let that shit rest. The time between their 1st great game and their last great game is about as long as the time between their last great game and present day.
Agreed, and if we're being honest Mass Effect 3 had some pretty big red flags to it.
The ending had such a backlash that they had to rush out a free dlc to expand on it to soften the blow and it's clear the last act suffered hard from strict deadlines.
Inquisition has its defenders and I enjoyed the game. But it isn't close to DA:O in terms of writing quality, pushed again further away from complexity and without rose coloured glasses it is stocked full of time-sink busy-work with a lot of wide areas as deep as puddles.
I mean. Even DA:O had massive red flags. It's just that the red flags were internal with the horrible production that was saved last minute with inhuman levels of crunch rather than external to everyone to see.
And things got worse for then on. I remember people were already saying that BioWare was dead by Dragon Age 2.
Yeah I mean DA:Os issues were behind the scenes primarily. I know there's a few bugs in the game that are notorious but overall the actual product still holds up to this day. The quality wasn't sacrificed and the target audience was obvious.
I do get why Dragon Age 2 started the hate though. There's no two ways about it, the game was rushed out and cut corners at every single hurdle.
The obsession of making everything "action" with less depth started, every location had three waves of enemies. The same building and cave for literally every location. The entire endgame plot hinging on the idea that every mage with a line of dialogue inexplicitly turns themself into an abomination at the drop of a hat.
DA:2 had its charm, but it was riddled with problems.
I kind of hated DA2 but for the technical reasons (enemy messes, reused assets, revisting same zones over and over) and the final act was horribly done. But it still felt like Dragon Age, it had the same feel as Origins for the dark bleak fantasy setting. Inquisition lost that feeling, and I didn't even play Veilguard.
Yeah I agree. I enjoyed inquisition at the time but didn't think it really held a candle to origins for me and have never had any urge to revisit it.
For DA:2 I had a very similar experience to you. The characters were all interesting if not hindered by the dialogue wheel that we never did escape causing every conversation ever to feel extremely same-y (i.e. Hawke cuts in with an ignorable one liner to break up the monologues).
I really enjoyed what inquisition was at the time, but I played Kingdom of Amalur a month later, and then Witcher 3 not too long after that and can say now that of those 3 titles I remember exactly one scene at the very end of inquisition and some of the scenery, but nothing else at all. I remember most of the other two games like I played them yesterday.
Kingdoms of Amalur was really wild how much of a flash in the pan it was. I think it was the first (and kind of maybe only) game that did single player MMO really well. It's not a terrible comparison for DAI, although the tech feels generations apart in spite coming out within a couple years of each other, the design vision is not all that different.
This comparison never occurred to me, probably because I played KoA at release and DAI long after the fact. But it's a good one and something to contemplate.
It's a generically "good" RPG with generically acceptable skill trees and dialogue options with generically good enough characters. The customisation was pretty bare minimum but not low enough to kill the game.
The storyline was generically okay with a handful of standout moments, primarily from the returning cast of origins for me. Everything was just santatized, inoffensive. It didn't innovate but it didn't leave any particular sour taste either.
I think it benefited massively with going into the game off the back of DA:2 that was an extremely rushed game with its final act story being propped up by baffling logic of mages and templars. That and the "big shallow world" gimmick was actually a positive selling point at the time.
Yeah, Mass Effect 3 had a horrendous main storyline. It was held up purely by all the great characters and the pay-off for stories set up in 1 and 2. Instead of a storyline focused around uniting the galaxy - playing into the themes of the first two games - we instead get some stupid Macguffin that leads to a space child. The rot in the writing team's leadership was clear even when BioWare released financially successful games.
Mass Effect 3 was an absolute mess when launched. All sorts of red flags about the future for Bioware. They have been a shadow of what they once were for quite some time.
KOTOR, DAO, and the ME trilogy are some of my favorite games of all time. Even though I haven't been the target audience for any of their games since ME3 I still held out hope that eventually they would make another classic.
KOTOR and DAO made my childhood. Mass Effect was also great, the suicide mission in game two blew my mind. Sad to see them go but like you said it has been downhill since ME3. It really did feel like watching a train wreck in slow motion unfortunately.
I loved mass effect 1 and was so excited to play 2 ( first play through in 2025). But 2 literally was trying to be a gears of war clone and dropped a lot RPG depth. So dissapointed.
All true but im pretty sure a lot of this was pushed onto them from EA. I think Anthem is one of those examples where the type of game it is was influenced by EA.
DAI was my first DA, it did pretty well as its own game. Well written characters and its story. It got me interested in DA lore that I spent hours reading wikis.
I will fight tooth and nail that Inquisition is actually the best Dragon Age... But otherwise, I honestly fully agree.
Since Inquisition they made Andromeda which was just a bit of a flop. Anthem which was hot garbage. And then Veilguard which went all the way past garbage to genuinely abyssmal.
That's 3 strikes in a row, three bad chances. The writing was on the wall here.
And if Mass Effect 3 was their last “great” game, that’s a horrible sign. The mass effect Trilogy literally got worse with each entry, stripping away more and more of the RPG elements in favor of just trying to be Gears of War
Mass Effect 3 was the primary example of streamlining and hyper combat focus at the cost of reduction of depth in dialog, shifting of side quests into fetch quests, reduction of investigation dialog so it's only in hubs, ship dialog becoming A or B, contradiction of all established lore start to finish. The ending was never the only issue there.
Because the community saw a major streamlining game and did not really react negatively to it and it sold due to hype, advertising and marketing and the community being okay with what it was given, this pushed them to keep streamlining even more than they did in ME2 when they removed the Biotics physics engine, turned combat abilities into detonations and primers, and had all that hyper monetization and other issues in it. This led to the singleplayer mmo that was ME:A and DA:I and then Veilguard and whatever mE5 would have looked like which would likely have been very similar.
Shifting its best writers to The Old Republic hurt ME's writing ability, but the depth reduction in the rpg systems and dialog was a major hit. Being okay with it meant it'd happen more. Players saw it happening and just dismissed the issues and thus the company just kept getting worse.
The issues started with DA:O's dlc losing focus of its game unlike the expansion and ME2 pushing away towards more combat focus. This sold to a larger audience wanting more combat but hurt its rpg prospects and so on and so forth it went.
BioWare has had over 7+ titles that have just been consistent reduction of depth with each future title.
Yeah i was thinking the same thinking about the last BioWare game I truly enjoyed and it was mass effect 3. I used to play that game online and loved it so much. That was back in 2012 how many years and they never had a great release or something similar to match the success.
Indie studios give me hope. Arthur Bruno, Crate Entertainment CEO, literally calls his team a retirement home for AAA devs. Nearly everyone on his team are former devs from managerial positions that just want to crack on with their work. They schedule their own work time, handle their own work pipeline and generally do what they want, how they want.
You should always celebrate talentless people being fired from positions they don't belong in - it's called incompetence and it is a destroyer, as Bioware has found out.
'Incompetence' can be fixed. People losing their livelihoods is much harder.
You can give the devs more time to fix bugs.
You can give writers that want to tell more... niche stories a smaller budget so that you don't end up trying to sell a game that can't be sold to most people.
You can give your new hires more time, since they'll need more time to learn, as well as better direction.
This is bullshit. Somebody didn't read what happened. This was EA cutting 400 jobs and years of development because private equity vultures in the Saudi government and the Kushners saddled it with $18 billion in debt that they never accrued.
If I go to my place of business and I see everyone shitting on the fucking floor, I'm firing everyone - I'm not waiting to hear that the manager told them to shit on the floor.
They should have known not to shit on the fucking floor. That is pure, inexcusable incompetence.
If you're sitting in those meetings and you're seeing a trans blue thing in DRAGON AGE talking about how it is trans and gay etc, you don't fucking stay quiet. You speak the fuck up and save your job.
Or go to McDonald's.
I can't wait for more firings. Came too late, though. AI is going to completely put the video game development industry in the grave.
Okay you're debating that a game developer quit their job and go work at McDonald's, so you're clearly being obtuse or unserious, so this convo is over.
Same sentiment here. It seems like no one was still there that made their bangers anyway so it’s not like we are losing out on more games of that calibre, but it’s not nice that more game devs are unemployed in an industry that’s not hiring
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u/SoupyStain 7h ago
I'd never celebrate people losing their jobs.
But Mass Effect 3 was their last truly great game. Inquisition was very contentious but it did have SOME fans, but their next games were too busy chasing trends instead of sticking to their bread and butter. Each subsequent game doubled and tripled down on the things people didn't care about, while not trying to go back to their roots.
Hopefully the devs can transition into more indy companies, so that they can make the games they want for the niche communities they want to appeal to and not be tied to huge budgets, expecting even larger returns,