Bioware, the studio behind the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series of video games, announced today that it is closing and that the development of the new Mass Effect game has been put on the shelf.
It’s a sad day for fans of the adventures of Commander Shepard and Pathfinder Ryder.
They didn’t say if Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMO, will be shuttered.
Well… F***.
I know EA (Bioware’s owner) is a terrible company driven by profit above all else, and I know Bioware has it’s own problems and stumbled, but it’s a shame for Mass Effect and possibly SW:TOR. And the endless drive for live service (got to have that revenue stream) is the death of many a quality franchise, there were problems with that as far back as Andromeda…
But I’ll mourn the storytelling, and probably just right off EA entirely, not that I wasn’t 90% of the way there anyway.
Wow, talk about a big shock.
I enjoyed Mass Effect 1-3, never played the fourth one. Is it well regarded?
It’s very uneven.
The story has it’s moments, and does draw a bit upon the AI/Biological life dichotomy, but it’s not the only element.
It’s got a lot more crafting elements, and some (now defunct) loot box mechanics especially for PVP and other multiplayer (see my anti EA rant), which (no surprise) was continued long after they stopped everything else…
Mechanically, I enjoyed it a lot, with builds being a LOT more flexible than 1-3, but also moving a bit back towards ME1, with large numbers of points to distribute across different playstyles. And I enjoyed the airborne mechanics.
The protagonist though was a huge fail (for me, TBC) because a smart alec late teen / early twenty-something felt like a calculated effort to appeal to a younger base, who probably didn’t care about ME in general.
The story felt unfinished (because it was), and so… yeah, not nearly as polished as ME1-3. Give it a B. Certainly worth a play if you get a sale copy at $20-25, certainly not at the current $39.99 on steam though.
My sister, @EllieNeo , enjoyed it very much. She played the entire game all the way through many, many times.
I haven’t finished it yet.
I replay 1-3 almost once a year. I gave up on 4 and never tried again. I was super unhappy with it.
YMMV
As for ME5 that sucks…I was looking forward to it. Talk about leaving money on the table…not sure what the geniuses at Bioware are thinking.
The finance bros that own the games industry are thinking that by cutting employeee salaries and production costs they’ll be able to create the illusion of increased revenue on next quarters statement, which is as far into the future as they’re capable of caring about.
The people who run the company don’t care about making games - it’s all just a house of cards to Make Line Go Up.
My main complaints:
There were a few fun gameplay additions, though. I liked the build-a-gun system and the jump jets opened up some interesting platforming elements.
I’ll add:
I’d have to replay it to see how it holds up, but my main complaint with the story was how the main character gets played up as this all-important nexus holding the entire Andromeda Initiative together and nobody can so much as figure out how to take a shit without their telling them how. When you show up at the beginning of the game, the advance team has already been in Andromeda for a year and a half, their HQ is overrun, and they can’t figure out how to even get the lights turned on, but praise be! The Pathfinder has arrived! Meanwhile, the literal criminals and exiles who got kicked out of the fleet already have a self-sustaining colony world going.
In a fantasy game you could write that up to some sort of prophecy or destiny or special bloodline, but the Pathfinder is just some guy, and it’s underplayed by the fact that the Big Decisions you’re asked to make (who to wake up first, should your first colony be focused on research or defense, etc.) never really have any visible consequences in game.
To be honest, that doesn’t seem any stupider to me than in Mass Effect 2 where nobody bothers searching for the Reapers for two years, even though one Reaper almost killed everybody in Mass Effect 1.
It’s even worse than that. Bioware and its parent EA aren’t just run by any old finance bro. They were bought by Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia’s national investment fund earlier this year.
This was pretty much inevitable after that.
EA hasn’t been a good company since the Westwood days, and is only going to get much worse now.
(AKA “Why I never feel bad about letting the Council die in ME1”).
Hell, they already had a reputation as villains who went from studio to studio conquering them, consuming them, and spitting out their bones in 1992 when Richard “Lord British” Garriott made the villains of Ultima VII thinly-veiled stand-ins for EA.
(Guess what wound up happening to the company that made Ultima?)
I wish we had more Larians and CD Projekt REDs in the world, and fewer shitty conglomerates…
Oh well, at least we still have indie games for now.
Hey, these days I love the Council - watching every known sentient species of note and influence being just as stupid, short sighted, and self-interested as our own makes me feel less “exceptional” in our stupidity.
The only thing that feels stupid is how “nobly” and “heroically” humans run things - given how things go these days, I’m sure someone wearing a dead weasel on his head would be selling Reaper-Repellent in the form of Tide Pods to the people of Earth…
Okay, that got dark.
My advice to anyone who owns a business they actually care about the future of these days is “never go public” and “never take a buyout from private equity”.
Would you expect any less from Keith David and Lance Henriksen?
Seriously, though, one of the big letdowns in the series is that when you take the Renegade let the Council die/put Udina in charge route it implies that humanity is about to turn the entirety of Citadel space into a human-dominated police state, and then in ME2 things are running the same as before and when you meet the new Council in ME3 they’re practically identical to the old one.
(Well, that and the fact that you don’t get a choice to have Shepard be utterly remorseless about slaughtering an entire planet of batarians.)
EA handed control of SWTOR to Broadsword in 2023, so it appears to be unaffected by BioWare’s closure.
It very well may have sucked. I wonder how far in production it was.