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,
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).
117
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,