Once upon a time, BioWare was one of the darlings of the game development world.
The Mass Effect trilogy is my all-time favorite game series. Depending on what aspects you enjoy most as a player, you can debate which installments are better or worse than the others (narrative? characters? gameplay mechanics? world-building?), and of course you can argue about how satisfying the ultimate wrap-up was. I don’t want to litigate any of those questions here; that’s a thoroughly beaten horse. The important thing is that, with these games, BioWare was doing something no other developer was even attempting at the time, and which few studios have approached since, balancing curated storytelling with freedom of player choice and the ability to influence, within limits, the shape of the outcome.
I got into the Dragon Age series entirely on the strength of Mass Effect. It’s obviously a different experience, leaning more toward the RPG than the action genre, but it still uses clever technology to foreground character interactions and draw the player into the emotion of the interactive gameplay. And in Inquisition, they pulled off one of the ballsiest stunts in gaming, giving the player a key choice midway through that changes the narrative in a fundamental way, with dozens of hours of content going literally unseen unless you restart from the beginning and make the other choice, and see just how differently things can turn out.
BioWare was pushing these boundaries from close to the beginning. Their KOTOR now feels so primitive it verges on being unplayable, but you can still tell that BioWare was doing something unique, exploring new ground with their games and giving players experiences they weren’t getting anywhere else. Their approach has proved deeply influential; you see BioWare-esque dialogue trees pop up in everything from Uncharted 4 to Horizon Zero Dawn, but they’re pretty superficial, giving you a chance to express your sense of the character in the moment, without the same depth of integration BioWare was able to achieve at their best.
The real influence of BioWare, though, was in showing that game stories can actually foreground the narrative, instead of just using it as a conceptual framework to justify the gameplay. “The big monkey kidnapped the princess, so get climbing those ladders,” and such. In something like Doom, for example, the player doesn’t really care why the demons are appearing on Mars, and the linear drive to interrupt their invasion is just a motivator for all the running and gunning. Bungie’s HALO was praised for having more of a narrative throughline than normal, but (as in their earlier Marathon series) not much of it is actually in the gameplay; it’s clearly been thought out and has been layered into the game, but mostly as hints and suggestions to justify game challenges and motivate player action, and the player who wants to know more needs to dig into the ancillary material. Half Life 2 has good world-building and interesting narrative development, but Gordon Freeman himself, as the player avatar, is a silent cipher with no emotional life and no personal arc. Gameplay is still the primary interest.
BioWare’s games were part of a revolutionary wave that showed a game’s plot and characters could be just as compelling as the mechanical experience of joysticking and button-pushing, that the player could become legitimately emotionally involved in the unfolding story beyond simply the feeling of personal achievement at beating the game’s challenges. Following the precedent established by cult favorites Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series and the like, BioWare’s titles, along with now-established classics from other studios like Bioshock, proved that games could offer satisfying story experiences along with the gameplay. Before this revolution, gamers didn’t really mind if a game’s plot was nonsensical and stupid (“Rash, Zitz, and Pimple navigate the hazards of Ragnarok to rescue the Princess from the Dark Queen…”); they would ignore that part as long as the gameplay was fun. Afterward, well, there were still plenty of stupid game plots (Assassin’s Creed, I’m looking at you), but most of them at least tried to service the player’s interest in seeing a story unfold in conjunction with the gameplay. And while this is not, of course, entirely due to BioWare’s influence, they contributed significantly to this evolution.
Electronic Arts began sniffing around BioWare as the first Mass Effect was released, buying into a holding company that had a primary investment in the studio, and then gradually aligning its branches and operations with other EA units. For the first several years, BioWare still developed and released its own titles more or less independently; the long lead time in planning and development meant a lot of the conceptual creative work had been finished before EA began the organizational restructuring.
But as EA got more influence over BioWare, their output became more uneven. Dragon Age II was terribly rushed, with a brutally compressed development cycle. (Even so, it has its defenders, who argue the fascinating story outweighs the clumsy gameplay and repetitive locations, in an interesting reversal of the earlier play-over-story model.) Mass Effect 3 was terribly divisive, and its climax, the result of an all-nighter writing session, remains controversial to this day. Consider how many people are looking ahead to the upcoming remaster and wishing for a total do-over on the ending; but, at the same time, consider that player dissatisfaction with ME3 is entirely on the basis of the story, with hardly any criticism of the gameplay, which is easily the most polished in the series. Dragon Age Inquisition turned out pretty well, but it has a totally extraneous multiplayer component shoehorned in, for no reason other than EA demanding it.
The most recent titles from BioWare, developed after EA assumed complete control, are the worst yet. Mass Effect Andromeda was a technical fiasco at release, but even after its numerous bugs were patched up, making the game reasonably playable from a mechanical standpoint, the story remains clunky and unsatisfying. There’s some good work in the game, technically speaking, and things to enjoy here and there, but at a narrative level Andromeda is wrongheaded, uninvolving, and dull from the ground up, making it the first game in BioWare’s history where both the technology and the story were completely broken. After that came Anthem, the first BioWare game that feels simply like product and nothing more, planned by spreadsheet from a checklist of generic player interests and built out of the least-interesting components stolen from other games like Destiny and the Titanfall series. It failed, deservedly, and after little more than a year is already in the discount bins.
In the wake of this, BioWare seemed to do some soul-searching, and attempted to course-correct. They brought back Casey Hudson, who had formerly led the Mass Effect teams and departed the company in the middle of the Anthem effort, to supervise the development of a new Mass Effect title. They gave the green light for a new Dragon Age title to Mark Darrah, who with writer David Gaider had overseen the franchise from the very first game.
This past week, both Hudson and Darrah simultaneously quit BioWare. (Gaider had already left a couple of years ago.)
Their farewell statements were blandly positive, with no explanations for their departures, but the timing of the twin exit is very odd. That Darrah would leave right now, especially, is quite worrying; he’s been shepherding Dragon Age since the beginning, and they’re at a critical point in planning the upcoming installment. He was famously invested in seeing the story through, so for him to quit at this moment means something bad was happening behind the scenes. Was he pushing for another bold structural experiment like in Inquisition, which required the significant resource overhead of developing large blocks of content that would be invisible to the user base depending on narrative choice, and EA said no, it’s too expensive to make stuff not everyone will see? Or something else? The truth will come out eventually, and there’s no way it will be pretty.
As a longtime fan, it’s very sad to watch the studio fading like this. It’s been happening for a while, and thankfully there have been other developers stepping up to advance the form. Right now a lot of my interest is focused on Naughty Dog, which has lately been eating everyone else’s lunch with character-driven game stories. Although I was mixed on their Uncharteds (liked 2 and 4, didn’t care for the first, haaaaated the third), I’m over the moon for what they’ve achieved with the Last of Us series. And I’m very much looking forward to Horizon Forbidden West, as Zero Dawn might be my overall favorite gaming experience since Mass Effect. So there’s good stuff happening, but I’ve still got a flickering wish for BioWare to get their act together and recapture some of their past magic.
But the problem, obviously, is that EA is a notoriously poor corporate parent. Not only have they overseen the eventual decommissioning of nearly every studio they’ve acquired, they’ve mismanaged their own production slate. The Star Wars game license should be a money-printing machine, but EA has squandered it, cancelling as many projects as they’ve released, with only Jedi: Fallen Order as a last-minute high-profile semi-success. They’re a famously dysfunctional company, and under their stewardship, BioWare has spiraled further and further into mediocrity.
So, after all these words, I arrive at the question of the title. Is BioWare’s end in sight? As long as EA is still calling the shots, is BioWare’s failure now inevitable?