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EA is shutting down BioWare

nottorp

a day ago

Personally I stopped after Dragon Age 1 / Mass Effect 2.

Mainly because ME3's original ending was tied to you grinding in multiplayer to reach the single player goals. No thank you.

And Dragon Age 2 was more famous for copy/paste dungeons than for the actual game.

So... i just stopped looking at "the new Bioware".

FroshKiller

a day ago

Even at launch, I do not believe you had to play multiplayer to get a sufficiently high readiness rating to see any endings. There were other tie-in like the Datapad app that contributed. The expansions and Legendary Edition re-release made a lot of changes that lowered the readiness requirements and totally removed multiplayer anyway.

You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!

nottorp

a day ago

> to see any endings

Not "any" but the "best" ending at the least.

> You did miss out not playing the multiplayer mode in my opinion. It was very fun!

Wasn't it basically a competitive FPS? I don't want a competitive FPS in my single player RPG. Especially when it's made mandatory for the best ending.

80fj0348i

a day ago

> Wasn't it basically a competitive FPS? I don't want a competitive FPS in my single player RPG.

No, it was a co-op third person shooter, and one of my favorites I've ever played. It was arguably better gameplay than the main game. It even still has an active playerbase.

FroshKiller

a day ago

No, it was a cooperative player-vs.-enemy mode.

The "hardest" ending to get in the sense of having the highest readiness requirement is the one that suggests Shepard survived. I still don't think that required multiplayer at launch, but even if it did, that did not last long at all.

nottorp

10 hours ago

> I still don't think that required multiplayer at launch,

It did. I read the reviews.

> but even if it did, that did not last long at all.

Don't care. It's EA's shitty attitude to players in general, and this is just one more example. I'm old enough to remember when they bought PopCap and made bejeweled IAP based after i paid once for it.

80fj0348i

a day ago

The launch version required a small amount of MP for the best ending, but it was pretty quickly patched.

handoflixue

2 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWare#Games_developed

The last two games listed are "Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021)", which was incredibly popular, "Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024)" which seems to have been widely panned, so still hitting 50/50 at the end of it?

Going back further, "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was unpopular with fans but found a fairly solid cult following, and "Dragon Age: Inquisition" is the one you mentioned as well-received, so still batting 50/50

Admittedly, "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" is more of a well-done cash grab, and even Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)

Given EA bought them in 2007, it's clear they released some solid games even years after being acquired

howlingfantods

2 days ago

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a remaster and Dragon Age Inquisition marked a significant dumbing down of the original Dragon Age franchise. I would think Bioware fans marked the fall of Bioware at ME3 or even a little before, which means EA ran Bioware into the ground in 5 years.

ffsm8

a day ago

Yeah I just replayed ME through the LE and it was just how I remembered from my original playthroughs back when the games were released:

ME1 nailing the story building but being pretty slow overall. Combat feeling very dated. (8/10 overall) ME2 nailing the combat, streamlining the overall game but sacrificing some of the exploration spirit - but very well done from a lore perspective because the urgency of the crisis builds over the game - leaving the protag less time for exploration. (10/10 overall) Then ME3... A pale imitation of ME2. From a player perspective it feels like the general storyline was still from the same author of the ME2 game, because you can see the urgency picking up more and more until the final conclusion. But the execution is really really lacklustre. (Maybe 6-7/10)

It was a decent enough conclusion, but overall pretty mid . Most definitely this was the first time you could feel the cultural shift in the production and it's impact in the product.

Political correctness kept sneaking in. The objectively horrible things you could do in both previous installments were toned down a lot. You're no longer deciding to decimate populations, shoving people out of windows etc. Still some questionable things, but clearly with a lot less ... Edge.

And I'm seriously surprised this thread considers DA:I good.

armada651

2 days ago

ME3 was a mess, ME2 was the last solid Mass Effect and the height of the series.

bigstrat2003

a day ago

ME2 was also a mess, and was part of why ME3 was a mess (because 2 didn't actually advance the story of the series).

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

baud147258

a day ago

> Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)

Mass Effect 3 had plenty of problems elsewhere, like the whole Cerberus, subplot, the idiotic fights with Kai Leng, the whole Crucible concept, how important parts got shoved on in DLCs...

And while DA:I seemed to have been well-received, I don't think it's a very good game

TheCapeGreek

a day ago

Read a youtube comment that I think sums up some of the fanbase's thoughts: Bioware has been going downhill since the last 30 minutes of Mass Effect 3 gameplay. Even with the later expanded endings it felt disappointing. Not to mention "Marauder Shields" being your final boss.

torginus

12 hours ago

I don't get this; Bioware was bought from MS - another soulless megacorp (which for the record is suffering from the same issues today). During the time EA was 'running it into the ground', they released all but one of the core Mass Effect titles, and 3 Dragon Age games, all of which are considered to be good to excellent.

2 days ago

BG 1 & 2 were definitely developed by bioware, interplay was the publisher. Interplay (black isle studios) developed icewind dale and planescape:torment, which were based on bioware's infinity engine. NWN1 was bioware and NWN2 was obsidian (came from black isle studios).

Source: memory and crawling through wikipedia articles

allturtles

2 days ago

That's not correct. Interplay published Baldur's Gate, but BioWare developed it. See https://www.pcgamer.com/the-history-of-baldurs-gate/.

chocochunks

a day ago

BioWare didn't make NWN2, that was Obsidian on the same Bioware engine that powered KOTOR 1 & 2 and NWN1.They did do Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 which were originally published by Interplay.

AlexandrB

2 days ago

I think the best way to keep quality up is to stay small. Supergiant Games is a great example of this approach. Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time.

hinkley

2 days ago

We should learn the lesson of John Carpenter. Some people have a medium that they’re brilliant in, and the scarcity of resources is part of what makes them brilliant. Give them an infinite budget and things go to shit.

Timur Bekmambetov might be a more recent example. The Night Watch movies were wonderful. Then he made Wanted, which was expensive dross. The best thing about that movie is that he put a couple actors from Night Watch as supporting cast in it. He’s done one or two things since that rate mention, but going Hollywood made him worse, not better.

account42

a day ago

I'm curious where you draw the line for Carpenter?

I think besides increased funding there is also a common problem where creative leads become blinded by their own past success and start ignoring critical feedback.

hinkley

a day ago

Carpenter drew his own line, which is why I like to use him. He said in an interview that he felt the big budget movies he did were worse in some way and he turned down larger purses as a reaction. He wanted the struggle to tell a story without making it expensive to tell. It brings out the best in some people.

GolfPopper

2 days ago

The term for this that I got from a C.J. Cherryh story is 'Wave Without a Shore'.

darth_avocado

2 days ago

> Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time

Having to ship AAA games isn’t the problem. The problem is the incessant need to only focus on live service games so that they can milk their consumer left and right. Studio executives come in with unrealistic sales expectations, which then means you can only try and make games that have a live service component to generate a constant revenue stream, which then means you can’t make good games anymore. You’re either making games that are similar to other and get lost in the crowd or are forced to differentiate by promising something that’s never done before, which adds scope, risk and budget to the game.

If you noticed all AAA failures in recent times, almost all of them were live service games. Meanwhile the single player market seems to have finally recovering from the neglect it’s gotten in the last decade.

Also, look at the BioWare successes and failures. They did well when they did single player games, failed when they ventured into live service.

krige

a day ago

> If you noticed all AAA failures in recent times, almost all of them were live service games. Meanwhile the single player market seems to have finally recovering from the neglect it’s gotten in the last decade.

That's because almost all of them were live service games anyway. Do not put the chicken before the egg.

hx8

2 days ago

It's surprising what a small team can accomplish, but there are some projects that need a large team to be feasible. It would be nice if there was a clear path on how to grow a game studio and continue to deliver quality.

tancop

2 days ago

Kepler Interactive might be that? It's a relatively new publisher started by industry veterans (as in lead developers and product managers, not MBAs). They did Clair Obscur, Sifu, Rematch and Pacific Drive.

They are very selective and you need to come at them with a fully formed game idea but once you get in it's completely hands off. No managers breathing down you neck, all you have to do is ship on time and they take care of the rest.

You get enough funding to grow your team, make a big project and go fully independent as a mid size studio if it's successful enough.

hinkley

2 days ago

It’s too bad Spore tanked so badly. He thought he had a solution to the high production values issue, but it panned out so poorly that nobody has tried since.

DonHopkins

2 days ago

[dead]

f6v

a day ago

tancop

2 days ago

Larian is independent. That's the main difference. They might partner with a publisher for individual games but it's always going to be a pure investment deal, funding for a share of the profits with no creative control.

After BG3 they're financially secure, they know what happened to BioWare and have the power to avoid it. The only way I see them getting acquired is a series of flops and near bankruptcy.

hinkley

11 minutes ago

usefulcat

2 days ago

low pay (for tech) + poor working conditions (for tech) = more turnover

ETA: That was a bit terse. My point was simply that it's more difficult to do institutional knowledge transfer when turnover is high, which may be a problem in the games industry.

account42

a day ago

You can't have both consistency and creativity.

59percentmore

a day ago

You can have consistency in quality and creativity in subject matter and mechanics. It's harder to do as a general rule, but easier if you actually retain your current talent and incentivize them to mentor upcoming talent.

red-iron-pine

a day ago

plenty of slop coming out of japan too mon ami

you see the homeruns and not the dross, but there is a lot of stuff that is shit

ramesh31

2 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

The devs of today played the games of yesterday, and felt that the game catered to them, and then sought out making a game like that, but they didn't put in the effort or consideration to appeal to other kinds of players.

And turns out there's economics involved - while people playing shooters want to shoot people in general, RPG players are a diverse bunch with different needs, and if you don't scratch the itch of a certain subgroup, that's part of the audience gone.

Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.

SyzygyRhythm

2 days ago

I disagree. This is the strategy taken by AAA games and is the reason why the AAA games are in such rough shape.

A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.

A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.

dudeinhawaii

2 days ago

I'm not sure it's the niche or targeting problem. I think we're getting games with flat out fewer features and smaller scope than earlier entries in the series because _so_ much energy is disproportionately put into graphics. DA:VG was trimmed and had vastly less complexity and depth than any previous DA.

I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".

It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.

SyzygyRhythm

2 days ago

Graphics is part of the problem, certainly, but at least it's moderately independent of the rest. You can scale the quality up and down without affecting the rest (within limits: having many armor variants, etc. are more costly with greater graphic fidelity). As far as the rest: all of these different gameplay mechanics have a complexity cost. You can try to add everything, but then you run into balance problems and/or it just feels too complex for most people, not to mention having a high development cost. So something needs to be simplified, and that means either reducing the depth or reducing the mechanics. But if you've already decided to include something for everyone, that necessarily means that everything is shallow.

WorldMaker

2 days ago

I think it is also that DA intentionally had a very complex story tapestry, mostly tried to avoid resets between games, and Veilguard went very deep in Elf and Mage storylines at something of a cost of other storylines. If you were very invested in Elf and Mage storylines (say you had been playing and/or romancing Elves and Mages and Elf Mages since DA:O) then Veilguard was extremely personal and culminated a lot of deep lore things and personal stakes things. On the other hand if you didn't side that way/play that way, I could see it feeling a lot less memorable/important.

account42

a day ago

> Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.

That's not a given at all. A good game targeted at a nieche can well be more successful than some jack of all trades master of none amalgamation that tries to cateer to everyone but fails in being truly great for anyone.

tancop

2 days ago

It was supposed to be a live service spin-off, the same way as Gotham Knights or the canceled Spider-Man game from Insomniac. They cut out most of the content and repackaged it as a single player RPG.

Cringe dialogue came from execs who forced writers to do James Gunn style even if they had zero experience with it. Combining serious dialogue with humor in a way that sounds natural is a skill that needs training. You can't make someone write like that if they never did it before and expect good results.

vandahm

2 days ago

I liked Veilguard when I played it, and as soon as I finished I started up a new playthrough and then said "Nah, I'm done" and haven't touched it since. It's the only time I've ever finished a Bioware game without finishing it twice. It was ...adequate? Parts of it were well-written, and the rest of it was just really tone-deaf, for lack of a better way to describe it.

mjr00

2 days ago

Note that the 1.5m number given for Veilguard was for the vague term "engagements" rather than sales, so there's additional padding going into that figure.

torginus

2 days ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5qKN2Yxaok&t=1s

Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.

I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.

christkv

9 hours ago

I just found the encounters were very repetetive as I remember. I had just finished the first one two weeks before the second one came out.

vlyan

2 days ago

yes, you remember correctly. it was also mostly disconnected from DAO, feeling like an offshoot rather than a sequel. iirc, almost not a single character from DAI had appeared in DA2, except for a cameo from Flemeth in the intro.

it had many issues, but the writing was still great, the story compelling, and the characters human. so people were disappointed that it didn't match or exceed DA1, but it was still a good game because of the writing, and people grew to appreciate it.

christkv

9 hours ago

To be honest I have the third one on my ever growing list of games to play. I have been told it's pretty decent and kind of the last game Bioware actually delivered on.

hinkley

2 days ago

I never played Diablo more than the demos but loved Torchlight, which was substantially the same team as the first Diablo game. But Runic got tired of making Diablo XX over and over again and eventually folded. I briefly tried to cyberstalking the team to figure out which studios they ended up at, but didn’t dig deep enough to come up with any suggestions.

cherrychon

2 days ago

True dat. DLCs worth every penny & then the modded content... Ohoho!^^ Prolly the last good, genuine CRPG from teh Warez of the Bio!

da_chicken

2 days ago

That is true, but by that logic EA ought to have stopped being a completely awful around 15 years ago. It's especially egregious when you consider why Electronic Arts was founded. Activision's origin and reputation when they were bought out are similarly dark.

The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.

nemomarx

2 days ago

There's no rule that says it has to be a positive or negative change overall, just that the people involved are always changing. if they had found the right new talent bioware could have pulled it off too maybe, it just wouldn't be the original bioware either way

cherrychon

I got married in Ultima 7.

slg

2 days ago

pinevale

2 days ago

2 days ago

I think Andromeda was actually more of a victim of modern "outrage" culture. A few bugs, memes, and suddenly a game is "trash". The game wasn't terrible and I recall enjoying playing it at the time. Sure, some of the animations were stiff and the main character design wasn't stellar but those were _really_ blown out of proportion in games media at the time.

Nowadays if your game has even one thing wrong and the wrong influencer makes fun of it, suddenly it's trash. At the same time, your game can be trash and if an influencer laughs their ass off at the bugs (in a good way), everyone wants it. It's a sad culture. /rant

WorldMaker

2 days ago

I still think Mass Effect Andromeda was one story DLC away from being my favorite Mass Effect game. The team behind Andromeda was the team that made all the best story DLC for the previous three games. Their wheelhouse was taking the game past the last stages of polish to telling the small stories that really tie the whole thing together. I still wonder what we might have gotten from the cancelled DLC if the technical bugs of the Frostbite engine switch hadn't created such a bad first impression.

(Side note, the ME: Andromeda novels are really good and hinted at a lot of storylines that we may never see closure on, but were certainly building blocks the game was working on getting to.)

ToucanLoucan

2 days ago

Andromeda had a lot of good in it, tbf. Their big mistake there IMO was hard-resetting the universe the way they did. Like I was excited for more mass effect but I fell off that game so hard. Mechanically it was solid but I just… didn’t care.

Anthem frankly killed them. A live service looter shooter which were already out of vogue by the time it was released. Obviously made by marketing entirely, no soul whatsoever. They never recovered from it.

krabizzwainch

2 days ago

I will always defend Andromeda as not being as bad as everyone said. I enjoy going back and playing it, and they were a few better writers away from having a really good game. I cared more about the Irish redhead copilot than about any one of the actual companions.

swiftcoder

2 days ago

> I cared more about the Irish redhead copilot than about any one of the actual companions

This squares with Joker being a fan-favourite character in the main trilogy

pepperoni_pizza

2 days ago

Yeah, Andromeda has some cool ideas (the whole Remnant thing felt like a very classic Scifi mistery) but it was stuck in classing BioWare cliches with companions loyalty quests and romances, the main character being weird chosen one, the main plot was dumb and it was barely a Mass Effect because of the disconnect from the main universe and missing some of the favorite Mass Effect things (like the Geth).

It might have been successful if it weren't a Mass Effect. Or maybe not, who knows.

WorldMaker

2 days ago

> missing some of the favorite Mass Effect things (like the Geth)

Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.

keyringlight

2 days ago

I think a large part of the issue is that the sum total of ME trilogy is a hard act to follow, without aiming to sound hyperbolic it's a very bright light that outshines a lot. Anything trying to be a sequel has a difficult balancing act of being familiar versus being different and bringing new ideas in.

2 days ago

They where by than "owing the don" as in there existence was company internally subsidized and you do not recover creative control from that. And those external management initiated "next shiny thing" chases kill you.

kzz102

2 days ago

Yeah, while it's sad they are gone, the reality is that they have been zombies for a long time.

m4rtink

2 days ago

Japanese games very often have this - IIRC in Harvest Moon you even die if you don't get married i0 IIRC 3 yearse. Not to mention dating sims being mainly about this.

robinson7d

2 days ago

2 days ago

>On June 7, 2005, DICE formally announced the shutdown of Trauma Studio's New York office. >The team members of Trauma Studios declined an offer to relocate to DICE Sweden offices.

Your sauce. If you can read between the lines, it was a big thing in forums @ the time.

maxlin

2 days ago

[flagged]

swiftcoder

2 days ago

You know, the neutering of same-sex romances in ME: 2 (due to an extended right media campaign), is one of the most universally decried changes, in a game that was otherwise considered an improvement on the formula

maxlin

a day ago

The worst thing a developer can do is to take a side, then change it. It would be REALLY naive to think they'd just get back to zero doing that.

No. That's why serious studios put serious effort to try to avoid politics by a country mile.

I didn't support my country joining NATO either. Even voted against the president we had for 8 years for his 'strategic ambiguity' on it. But now that we've chosen to join, it's obvious we can't really change the situation or go back neutral, even while Trump is doing breaking ranks doing deals with Putin, which makes the whole NATO situation look silly.

preg_match

a day ago

Universal appeal naturally includes appealing to gay people. The non-universal option is only appealing to straight people. Straight people are so used to everything ever revolving around heterosexuality that even a tiny bit of affordance to gay people is seen as a departure. It’s not.

maxlin

a day ago

Tell me you don't know what the word means without telling.

preg_match

21 hours ago

Which word? Universal?

Yeah, universal doesn’t mean “lowest common denominator” or “only supposedly normal people”. It means everyone. Which includes gay people, and straight people.

The game has options for straight romance, and gay romance. So it’s universal.

Duh.

maxlin

19 hours ago

That's like saying the only way to experience happiness is to cut your leg off because someone somewhere has a fetish of wanting to live in a wheelchair.

No. Universal appeal means that something is liked by generally everyone, obviously without having issues that make it disliked by a ton. Like, idk, Mario Bros. Or water. Very few people dislike those. Basically everyone likes them. Straight people, gays, women, old people, young people, etc etc. Obviously your "but no it has to be gay and yellow and have a MAGA hat on and speak in tongues" kind of line of constraints only reduces the size of the group said thing appeals to.

Good thing is that in real life, universal appeal is also good business. And many companies doing stupid shit because some loud idiots that might not even be interested in the product itself told them to make it x

preg_match

17 hours ago

> That's like saying the only way to experience happiness is to cut your leg off because someone somewhere has a fetish of wanting to live in a wheelchair.

What? No.

Think about it. A universal entrance to a building would have stairs and a ramp, which accommodates everyone. Aka... universal.

Appealing to a subset of people, like only straight people, is decidedly not universal. The only straight people upset by the option to have gay romance are babies, and you'll never make them happy anyway. They can only whine, so there's no point in trying.

Let me make it more clear. If the game MADE you be part of a gay romance, then that's not universal. But it doesn't, right? For straight people, the game is literally equivalent to if there was only straight romance. The complaints are purely made-up in people's heads so they can have something to whine about. I have no patience for it.

maxlin

16 hours ago

I think you proved yourself wrong by saying "appealing to a subset of people, is NOT universal". (Though, "appealing to straight people" isn't an actual thing, as there's hardly anything that gays dislike that straights like. There's no things one could break universal appeal with by putting in things that straight people generally like.)

Exactly. You can make a game with cars in it, with jumping in it, with nice pastel colors in it, and there's no large group in the world that will decidedly dislike those. But when you start doing woke catering of whatever minority themes for example, as you said, the game loses its universal appeal. Often, to even those minority groups too, as such forcing is almost always extremely inauthentic, patronizing them and insulting their intelligence. The obtuse Veilguard clips being shared recently really drive this home. Game might as well make you play Hitler "correctly" at that point, a total universal appeal suicide.

Before you say "but I don't like those men/muslims/women/terfs/gays/dog eaters/dog loving people!!!", that kind of argument is EXACTLY what disqualifies something from universal appeal. This is not hard.

preg_match

5 hours ago

This argument is just dumb. No, gay people don’t live for straight romance, obviously. Universal appeal includes both. And it’s not a problem, because from your perspective it’s equivalent. You can keep complaining, just understand that nobody will think these are valid complaints.

ainch

2 days ago

Not sure what what specific claim you're making. Do you think gay romance 'soiled' Mass Effect?

maxlin

a day ago

I work in games and have enough eye for things that are put in to fit, and what things are forced in, in the way I described.

I think you know and just play stupid.

john_strinlai

2 days ago

>take away bandwidth needed for more important things

in a game that already has romance options, adding a same sex romance option is not taking away bandwidth. and i cannot imagine how it would "soil" an entire franchise. just don't choose the same sex romance option if you don't want to. easy.

collingreen

2 days ago

They aren't confused about how difficult it is to avoid same sex options in game. They spelled it out clearly - they decided "mainstream appeal" should not even bring up the option and doing so is probably pressure from people they don't like ("activists").

Karens aren't misunderstanding how to mind their own business or live-and-let-live; they are trying to enforce what they see as (or wish were) social norms and don't give a damn about the perspective of the folks on the receiving end of their chirping.

maxlin

a day ago

[dead]

JohnMakin

2 days ago

I am still extremely bitter about how BioWare, in my opinion, ruined the dragon age franchise. While not "truly" turn based, dragon age origins and dragon age 2 had the spirit of it, and felt like a party-based tactical RPG. Then out of nowhere, the studio decided to abandon that with inquisition and turn it into an action/adventure style of game. I had never really been so bitterly disappointed with a game release.

After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.

2 days ago

The entirety of Mass Effect 1 was a master class in writing, from the opening cinematic to the ending credits, that more than made up for somewhat janky (though nevertheless entertaining) gameplay.

bigger_cheese

2 days ago

I think the Mass Effect games were very flashy but the gameplay elements were pretty shallow. It felt like all the dialog led to the same outcomes, you could be a paragon and give all the "good" replies to conversation or give all the edgy renegade replies and the story would proceed the same way. It kind of felt like it gave you the illusion of choice without actually giving you any real choice. I think it was endemic to the 2000's era RPG's Fallout 4 had exactly the same problem.

The combat wasn't very engaging either it was a boring feeling cover shooter. None of your character abilities or gear or anything seemed to have much of an effect.

marklar423

2 days ago

Are there any games you like that you felt did give you a real significant choice in how the story played out?

bigger_cheese

2 days ago

Going back to the 90's the Original Fallout games (the Turn based ones) would give you different endings depending on the choices you made through out the game. Most recently Baldur's Gate 3.

Edit: Deus Ex series too

marklar423

a day ago

Ah we have the same taste in games :)

I originally asked because for most of the games I've played (and the ones you mention) the overall story played out the same regardless of your choices.

There could be branches and dialog changes but they always reconverged at important story points that stayed constant. And of course the cutscenes at very end would be different. Take DeusEx - some minor things would be different depending on your actions, and at the end you basically got to press a button to choose your ending.

The only real exception I can think of is Fallout New Vegas, where the game storyline would become wildly different as you chose to help different factions....that game was a rare exemplar of "choices matter".

2OEH8eoCRo0

a day ago

Deus Ex which gives you three choices at the end?

xen0

2 days ago

Much of ME2's story is terrible (some of the side character stuff is delightful, but the 'main quest' is a train wreck).

Veilguard was my favority gameplay wise, but the writing... well you know.

hakunin

2 days ago

Honestly, I've felt this way before (gaming since the 90s), but try watching somebody play RTwP a bit to get a feel for it. It can become very smooth and comfortable. The hardest part is to learn to trust the timings.

esseph

2 days ago

When Dragon Age 2 came out, Bioware was still running things day-to-day.

By the time of the next Dragon Age game, EA was deep in making decisions.

gambiting

2 days ago

I might be in minority but I really enjoyed both Inquisition and Veilguard.

idrathernotsay

2 days ago

You're in the minority for Veilguard but Inquisition is their highest selling entry in the series

gambiting

2 days ago

With Veilguard I really enjoyed the combat systems. It was fun progression and at the end of the game you were literally a demigod on the batlefield - it was super fun, and taking some of the toughest optional challenges was very satisfying. And the character storylines(especially Lace and Emmrich) were very very good and I enjoyed them a lot. The weakest point for me was the big bad villain, who seemed barely competent to do anything at all - but overall I really enjoyed it.

flumpcakes

2 days ago

Those games are so weird but stylishly alluring. I remember buying a big box of MDK and playing through the game in probably a day or two.

Razengan

9 hours ago

Follow the people, not the brand.

They're still around, making good shit elsewhere. ChatGPT often helps me track down some of the people behind my favorite games and check out their later work.

2 days ago

Talent in western game studios just can't shake the startup mode. Try get a hit, try to get bought, cash out, run away.

Blizzard seemed to defy the stereotype but it died a long time ago, it's just a husk.

The contrast with japanese game studios is impressive.

the__alchemist

2 days ago

*US game studios. Continental Europe has been continuing to put out masterpieces. (Many countries: Poland, Croatia, Czechia, France, etc)

hbn

2 days ago

BioWare is a Canadian studio

(But purchased by EA obviously)

flumpcakes

2 days ago

Why do you think that is? What would you consider a European masterpiece? And what would you consider something that falls short from outside Europe?

the__alchemist

2 days ago

European masterpieces, recentish:

  - Talos Principle 2
  - Expedition 33
  - KCD2
  - Anything by Arcane
  - Anything by CDPR
  - 007 Last light / Hitman
  - Blue Prince

This is subject to taste, but the games I've been personally enjoying the most are almost all European. US games are comparatively mediocre. I don't have an explanation; only this observation. I was startled when noticing it.

Most recently, I'm loving Order of the Sinking Star, and that's from a US team. There's hope!

tsimionescu

2 days ago

You're forgetting a few major ones:

- Baldur's Gate 3 (German)

- Disco Elysium (Estonian)

- Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 (same studio as BG3)

BG3 is notable for its gigantic success. And Disco Elysium is one of the best written games ever made, and it showed that you can have a fantastic RPG with no combat system whatsoever, while still having meaningful progression.

freehorse

2 days ago

Sadly, the studio behind disco elysium (za/um) is a primary example of "can't shake the startup mode", as the company was somehow bought by investors who then fired the original team, there has been a huge controversy around this.

SSLy

2 days ago

> - Baldur's Gate 3 (German)

Bruh, Larian is in Belgium

tsimionescu

chainingsolid

2 days ago

To be fair Order of the Sinking Star is by Jhonthon Blow + (who ever he employed). So if we rephraze it from US to US AAA studios, it still works.

2 days ago

It's definitely a balancing act. There are some great cinematic games (Last of Us), but it's also easy to put all the focus on the cinematic aspects and have a bunch of mediocre gameplay as filler in between. I don't understand why more games didn't go the Half Life 2 route and have the conversation/cinematic play out around you without taking control away completely.

autoexec

2 days ago

That really is a good way to handle it, although it does open the door to miss certain things if players don't do what's expected. For example, in the opening chapter for the last of us you can miss the news report on the TV and the stuff going on outside through the windows before Joel comes in. More than once in games I've only been clued into the fact that I missed a jump scare by a sudden musical sting.

In one sense, that's perfectly fair. In life if you're looking at your feet or spending your time examining the walls you'd be oblivious to what's going on around you, and for non-critical things having a bunch of little moments that you can only catch if you're in (or looking at) the right place at the right time can improve replay value, but games would have to be careful to make sure that the important stuff can't be missed.

IslandRebel

2 days ago

Last of US I replayed about 5 years ago on the PS4, and it isn't a good game. I recently revisited Uncharted (Last of Us is just Uncharted with a more serious tone), and they are not good games. I think casual audiences like them because of the heavy story element, but they are quite tiresome to play. Naughty Dog excels at presentation, but the gameplay is just not there.

There are also a bunch of "action/adventure" mechanics that seem to be identical in a bunch of mainstream games. You have an upgrade system, so the actual gameplay of the game is bad at the start because you don't have any of the fun abilities at the start, open world mechanics, a very bland open world and the stories are very PG-13, and the characters are kind of bland in the main story. I was playing Ghosts of Tshushima, and many of the mechanics come straight from Farcry 3. I think I am not going to bother completing it. I feel like I've played this game many times before because it's so similar to other games. I would have probably got bored with it before now if it wasn't for the setting.

Generally, a lot of people are still replaying some of the greats from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s because the games weren't nearly as bland.

autoexec

2 days ago

> Last of US I replayed about 5 years ago on the PS4, and it isn't a good game. I recently revisited Uncharted (Last of Us is just Uncharted with a more serious tone), and they are not good games.

Most gamers would disagree with you. That's alright, art is subjective and different people are allowed to like different things. Maybe you just don't like games with a lot of story? If so there are plenty of genres that aren't story heavy like arcade games, tile-matching/match 3 games, fighting, FPS, sports, etc. Or maybe action/adventure might just not be the genre for you?

As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.

> You have an upgrade system, so the actual gameplay of the game is bad at the start because you don't have any of the fun abilities at the start

Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.

Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.

IslandRebel

a day ago

> Most gamers would disagree with you. That's alright, art is subjective and different people are allowed to like different things. Maybe you just don't like games with a lot of story? If so there are plenty of genres that aren't story heavy like arcade games, tile-matching/match 3 games, fighting, FPS, sports, etc. Or maybe action/adventure might just not be the genre for you?

I understand it is a contrarian take. That doesn't mean that it is without merit. I also find it tiresome when people just claim everything is subjective when it really isn't.

The game play is bad. Joel's movement is slow, like too slow. You can't take certain enemies down without certain weapons. The scavenging aspect becomes a chore.

The buddy system they demoed originally was downgraded heavily from the original E3 demo, which was probably 20 years ago now. They took Uncharted, slowed it down and layered a depressing story on top which people think is deep.

The game is boring to play once you know the story. The presentation is excellent, masks this. It does not change the fact that the gameplay is at best "ok". It has virtually no replayability, to the point where I was dreading having to play the next section, as I knew it was a total chore.

There are plenty of problems that I can point to that are not subjective.

> As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.

I am talking about the fact that they didn't even bother changing it. IIRC, in the Farcry games, you can essentially poison/confuse enemies via arrows or something. This exists in a bunch of games.

Ghosts of Tshushima has the exact same mechanic. They didn't even bother dressing it up differently. The game is fun when you are taking out the camps. However, there is the whole Assassin's Creed gameplay collect-a-thon.

A lot of the games are carbon-copy clones of one another, and the only thing that is different is the setting.

> Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.

I know what it's supposed to do. The games are long because they are padding with bullshit. Why do I want to write haikus in an action game? It's not even a mini game, FFS. They really shouldn't be. It becomes a chore. I've got hundreds of hours in Hell Divers, yet it isn't because I can fire up the game for 30 minutes or all Saturday evening.

How it is implemented often sucks. I am supposed to believe at the start of Ghosts of Tshushima, Jin, who is a trained samurai, can barely fight. The old GoW games at least de-powered you via the plot device, and all the core game mechanics still worked. Why do I have to have a cut scene (which you have to play through but is still really a cut scene) to stab a Mongol in the back?

How about I start awesome and become even more awesome? Or make it make sense that I am weak and incorporate it into the gameplay itself.

> Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.

I am not talking about what I like/don't like. My entire critique is around the problems with the Last of Us and Triple-A games, as you specifically mentioned. I play different games these days and just picked up Ghost of Tsushima because it was on sale and I heard it was good.

As for PG-13, the old God of War games managed to garner a wide audience while being R rated. The argument doesn't make sense.

They also soft-censor a lot of games. For example, the Stellar Blade demo originally (it was patched later) had a lot of gore and cleavage. The game that finally released toned down both.

The new Tomb Raider games (not so new now), Lara is completely sexless. You have this gorgeous athletic woman, and nobody finds her attractive or even comments on it?

IslandRebel

2 days ago

I think many of these games you've listed are a 7/10. A lot of games I am playing are either years old now or I am going back to older consoles (via emulation normally) and the classic games on them.

Barrin92

2 days ago

also people shouldn't sleep on Housemarque. Both Returnal and Saros were fantastic. Don't want to spoil Returnal but the narrative and symbolism that tie the game together if you go through everything after you've finished it and have a grasp of the story is incredible. And the gameplay is extremely fun.

RetardedBastard

2 days ago

Slop

2 days ago

My mistake, I misremembered. Unfortunately can’t edit.

charm137

2 days ago

As many have mentioned, BG3, CDPR's Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 franchise, Remedy's Control / Alan Wake franchise (both original IPs) to name just a few. DICE (within EA) comes from Sweden and it's responsible for EA's core Frostbite engine alongside its Battlefield franchise.

I cannot point to the reasons as to why. Many of these teams are global teams - so a lot of the same problems apply: marketing costs/timelines, release-time crunch etc. The one difference I can point to is that perhaps executive payouts are not overly dependent on total shareholder returns.

santoshalper

2 days ago

CDPR is probably the flagship studio in Europe. Interestingly, they are probably the modern studio that most resembles Bioware in the 2000's.

AdrianB1

2 days ago

Unfortunately CDPR is showing some signs of Bioware-ing. As much as I liked Cyberpunk 2077, it was visibly "less than" Witcher 3 in too many ways. This is a sign of decline.

gherkinnn

8 hours ago

Cyperpunk 2077's 2.x updates (free, of course) saved the botched release turning it in to another masterpiece.

The Witcher 3 just got a free remastering >10y after release and a third DLC is on its way.

That is so much more than anybody can reasonably expect and gives me hope for The Witcher 4 as Ciri.

izacus

2 days ago

- Baldur's Gate

- Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn

- Neverwinter Nights

- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

- Star Wars: The Old Republic

- Jade Empire

- Mass Effect

- Mass Effect 2

- Mass Effect 3

- MDK2

- Dragon Age Origins

- Dragon Age II

- Dragon Age: Inquisition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWare

4dregress

2 days ago

I really enjoyed Neverwinter Knights 2.

tsimionescu

2 days ago

Neverwinter Nights 2 was made by Obsidian, not Bioware.

And I would argue Obsidian was the better studio anyway. Besides NWN2, and moreso its fantastic expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, they also made the excellent Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and their own original franchises, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, and Tyranny.

4dregress

3 hours ago

Damn I forgot about Mask of the Betrayer, that was awesome!

When games came in boxes!

esseph

2 days ago

Bioware sent engineers to provide help to Obsidian (SW KOTOR2, I think).

Obsidian and Bioware both had a working relationship with Black Isle Studios.

Love them all, they did some great stuff.

pepperoni_pizza

2 days ago

That was Obsidian.

uberman

2 days ago

... and then EA purchased them and forced the frostbyte engine and release cadence expectations and mechanics that worked for FIFA Ultimate Team.

2 days ago

Blizzard has not been independent since 1994, but people on the internet love picking some arbitrary point in time when "Blizzard died" when in reality the timeline and quality of their releases has almost zero correlation with who they were owned by at the time.

ram1500natrluvr

2 days ago

I like Jason Schreier's take that the end of Blizzard began as soon as WoW blew up in popularity.

"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."

I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.

leoc

2 days ago

There seems to be a bit of a symmetry between what WoW did to Blizzard and what WH40K did to Games Workshop.

anthonypasq

2 days ago

> the end of Blizzard

extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.

ram1500natrluvr

2 days ago

Yes, of course there's the financial performance of a studio and then the identity of a studio that people get attached to.

I didn't get into Blizzard games because they were a financial powerhouse, I got into them because they were fun as hell and the identity of Blizzard at the time gave me faith that their next release would be just as fun. That faith started deteriorating around 2005/6 for me, and was gone within a month or so of SC2 releasing. The identity of Blizzard of the 90s and early 2000s that I fell in love with was gone by 2010.

I can go into more detail about the shortcomings of all of the games from 2010 on (IMO, obviously), but the overall point is that they are fundamentally different than their older games and might as well have been from a different studio.

keyringlight

2 days ago

Similar with Westwood (part of Virgin interactive) and Bioware (parceled up with Pandemic studios, owned by Elevation partners, who sold it to EA)

bigstrat2003

2 days ago

Blizzard effectively got bought out when they merged with Activision. It wasn't technically a buyout, but Blizzard quality was never the same after that.

goolz

2 days ago

Yep, and all these years later, we have lost so much. It may seem like such a small thing, but losing real GMs in WoW makes me really sad.

anthonypasq

2 days ago

Henchman21

2 days ago

WoW Forever seems like they're at least attempting to try for the brass ring again. But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.

brailsafe

2 days ago

> But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.

The "been there, done that" vibe is their pitch to the older generation who no longer cares as much about technically or ladder climbing and just wants something to do when it's cold outside

account42

a day ago

If your calling them "Talent" then you are already in that mindset yourself.

AtlasBarfed

2 days ago

There's probably a bit of a lottery winners effect.

So consider backing there. There may have been 20 companies trying to make 20 games, All in startup mode.

Now two or three of those succeed ed.. which means the management and team chemistry and creativity all worked really well. And the team members will have them mistaken impression that it's that easy.

But then some people leave some people ad in the next games, sure, they may have a better foundation than some other team situations at others, but it's going to gradually regress to the mean

mrandish

2 days ago

The current commercial game studio apocalypse is tragic for the disruption to jobs and lives but it was inevitable and, although painful, I think a necessary correction in terms of improving the health of gaming in the long run.

Around 2020 the industry quickly added around 35% more jobs based on three big things. 1) A COVID-shutdown driven demand bubble, 2) PE capital chasing inflated Live Service gaming profit projections and, 3) Speculative land-grab industry roll-ups by Embracer and Microsoft. These triggers were all either temporary, illusory or chasing trends which are net negative for the gaming. Those inflated jobs weren't justified by organic growth and shouldn't have been created in the first place.

ex-aws-dude

2 days ago

What I don’t get is how do so many companies make the exact same mistake?

It’s like corporations all get the same memo and do the exact same things in lockstep

Kovah

2 days ago

That's the funny point: it's not a mistake from their point of view. The managers deciding this get MASSIVE bonuses because they saved a lot of money, which means more money for the shareholders

EA has its money cows, and neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age are one of them, as it seems. The IP stays with EA anyway, so from their point nothing is really lost.

mrandish

2 days ago

There are multiple causes. Two big ones are:

- Increasingly rapid proliferation of business strategy, competitive analysis and spreadsheet-driven financial optimization means more MBAs in a given industry trying to run similar playbooks at the same time. This increasing homogenization occurs at both the company level and the investor level.

- Corporate executives and managers can have divergent incentives due to differing scopes, time frames and reward structures. A crass example is "Even an obvious Ponzi scheme can be good as long as you personally get out before the inevitable crash", although the way it actually happens in practice is usually much more indirect.

For instance, even the difference between a manager optimizing for their division's end-of-year bonus can diverge from the CEO's incentive to optimize next year's profit margin increase. And those can both differ from an institutional investor's incentives tied to 5 yr stock price appreciation.

everdrive

2 days ago

It's the new hot business model. Buy a very successful studio then liquidate it.

mosura

2 days ago

Bioware have not been very successful for a very long time.

Even in the good times their ability to create (and hide) black holes was prodigious.

Crusoe123

2 days ago

For EA this is modus operandi for a long time. I remember them buying the likes of Bullfrog, Westwood back in the 90s and then shutting them down a few years later.

HelloMcFly

2 days ago

Bioware hasn't been very successful - creatively or economically - in some time. I loved their heyday more than most, but they're far from what they once were.

mardef

2 days ago

The people who made everything we loved from BioWare left more than a decade ago.

BioWare, in the last 12 years, has released: Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Veilguard, and Anthem.

It's still painful to see the studio go away, but I sadly agree.

Agentlien

2 days ago

I was at another EA studio when BioWare released Andromeda and Anthem. Got to play an early closed beta of Anthem, heard lots of details about Andromeda's development as it was happening. As a huge fan of their games it felt crazy and very sad.

However, The Veilguard to me was amazing. I loved that game and it's my favorite Dragon Age.

hbn

2 days ago

Veilguard is a serviceable action romp but it's not a Dragon Age game.

HelloMcFly

2 days ago

[dead]

angrydev

2 days ago

EA bought Bioware 19 years ago. Are you saying this was their strategy for two decades?

2 days ago

Nothing new under the sun - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

barbazoo

2 days ago

> The company is also laying off around 400 staffers, Bloomberg reports, including around 50 at BioWare. The changes follow EA being taken private by an investor group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal that closed in August.

Never thought that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would shutdown the company that created so many childhood memories.

N_Lens

2 days ago

Well BioWare pioneered romance options with many characters, including same sex options and even threesomes etc. I suppose that doesn't align with Saudi sentiments.

Forgeties79

ryukoposting

2 days ago

> You can't just hit it out if the park once or twice and make a classic you can earn residuals from, people move on quickly and you don't earn on repeated playthroughs.

Unless you're Valve, in which case you sell companion cube plushies until the end of time.

Atreiden

a day ago

bigfishrunning

2 days ago

I never played Andromeda, and i often think that maybe i should, but there's just not enough time and too many good games to play.

halfmatthalfcat

2 days ago

I was honestly surprised at how good it was, would recommend if you have any interest at all. I played ME 1 - 3 then Andromeda in a row and Andromeda took the #2 spot behind ME 1.

rubayeet

2 days ago

As someone who spent so much time in the universe of Mass Effect / Dragon Age, this is hard. I am almost grieving. The latest games of those franchises (Andromeda and Veilguard) could not live up to the expectations. They deserved a better ending.

I wish I had never seen the new ME teaser / trailer [1] out 5 years ago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg-Ctg6k_Ao&vl=en

sbodnar

2 days ago

While we may be saying goodbye to BioWare, we can still enjoy the games through services like Good Old Games (GOG) who preserve the titles - BG1, BG2, KOTOR and more can certainly keep living on.

RIP to one of the best game studios.

Mr_Eri_Atlov

2 days ago

Knights of the Old Republic will forever be one of my favorite games

RIP to an amazing creative group

nozzlegear

2 days ago

I know it's not Bioware, but Kreia from Kotor 2 is still one of my favorite characters from any video game franchise. I wish I could experience those games for the first time again, but as an adult.

Henchman21

2 days ago

You may enjoy Kreia's Conundrums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nziFrCt5o2w&list=PLujAdpHxJg...

akimbostrawman

2 days ago

ninininino

2 days ago

In some ways yes, in some ways no.

To me at least, somehow KOTOR and KOTOR 2 made me care more about the characters and story than BG3.

BG3 has better systems and combat and gear and such, but for many the worldbuilding, story, quests and such of KOTOR have yet to be beaten. Bastia Shan, Carth Onasi, Visas Marr, HK47.

The story of Revan and its twists.

Perhaps its just nostalgia and many KOTOR fans having been at an earlier age when they played those Bioware games compared to DOS 2 and BG3 though. Maybe people who were teenagers playing Larian games feel as attached to the characters and story as those of us who were teens in KOTOR's heyday did.

Mr_Eri_Atlov

2 days ago

Oh it definitely is, but I played KOTOR dozens of times as a kid

bluefirebrand

2 days ago

Apart from whatever the hell happened with Bungie's many changes of ownership, I can't think of many beloved franchises that have been successfully transitioned to new ownership...

ex-aws-dude

2 days ago

Is that even a thing? I can't think of any case where company sold off game IP other than in acquisitions

WorldMaker

2 days ago

He has a huge fan base on YouTube. You don't get that by being dull or not having any valid criticisms. You are way off base.

> Being a fan of him is a litmus test for tribalism.

The irony here is that when you make statements like this, you are engaging in tribalism.

Critical Drinker has 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube. I frequently am surprised by the sorts of people that will watch some YouTuber. There is a show (unrelated) I watch where I would expect the audience to be male-dominated, and many of the callers and super-chat donations are from women. I was quite surprised.

I would imagine he has a more diverse audience than you would expect.

> I've also learned a lot of people who listen to him don't play games to begin with and are usually just larping. It is what it is.

A lot of people like watching people shit on popular media. Cinemasins was doing the exact same thing a decade ago. I remember them ripping on the dumb stuff that didn't make sense in the original Avengers movie and all the goofs that you are unlikely to notice in the cinema.

People "hate watch" a lot of shows. My sister and I used to hate watch CSI Miami when we were in our teens/early 20s, and that was in the mid-2000s.

Capricorn2481

2 days ago

> Respectfully, you are taking him far too seriously. He is playing the character of a drunk, grumpy Scottish guy complaining about things

That is a very tired thing to say. You don't need to look that hard to see how untrue this is. Take a brief glance at his twitter or his communities and you'll see how much of a "character" it is. They barely even talk about media anymore. They post the same gender war slop shit that bots are posting all over Reddit right now. Critical Drinker takes a bit of a "boiling the frog" approach to his content and his true character isn't obvious on a few listens.

> I am not a fan of him and don't like the culture war stuff

You are likely underestimating how much he does it now. It's night and day different from his earlier work. He was a ghost writer for James Patterson. He knows how to follow the money. He's essentially a parody of himself now.

> and he has much valid criticism of films/games where he highlights how badly written many of them are

I don't think such a vague and easy to defend criticism is worth handwaving the substance of the channel. People have been pointing and laughing at video game writing for 30 years. That's an uncontroversial vague post. And that is the best you're going to get from him, because he rarely talks about games or films in a specific way, he usually just copy pastes the same beat for beat plot complaints that better critics have, and putting an anti woke slant on it. Sometimes he reviews shit he hasn't even seen or played because he wants to get in on the discussion.

> He has a huge fan base on YouTube. You don't get that by being dull or not having any valid criticisms. You are way off base

Huh? Sure you do, if it has morphed from entertainment to outrage bait. That is dull, and profitable in the algorithm age. Are you under the impression cynical, lazy pop posting cannot survive on Youtube?

> I would imagine he has a more diverse audience than you would expect

I don't recall saying his audience wasn't diverse, I said his fans often don't play video games. So it's annoying to see people that don't play video games weigh in on the problems with the industry. It's nakedly obvious to the people that have grown up loving games when they are talking to a person who has just engaged with outrage content over the medium and not actually held a controller.

> A lot of people like watching people shit on popular media. Cinemasins was doing the exact same thing a decade ago

Ooph. That's exactly my point, though. Cinemasins is the kind of low brow film criticism that people who enjoy film will despise. It's pop entertainment, which is harmless, but there are 1,000 more interesting channels that can talk about film and are still entertaining. So when someone comes into a film space and you can tell they are just regurgitating Cinemasins videos, it's pretty clear they are not film watchers.

The difference is Critical Drinker has leaned heavily into the culture war stuff and has convinced a legion of fans that the reason everything is bad is down to a bunch of easily violated wokeness rules. I don't necessarily like the movies he dislikes, but the conclusions he comes to and the audience he caters to moronically shove the same 4 woke buttons into any media discussion, ad infinitum. It's extremely reactionary content. Every woman lead is a diversity hire, but every male lead in a bad movie is just an "unfortunate miss." Everything "woke" is going to fail, except whoops, for all of those things that were wildly successful, those are actually not woke anymore. It's just a channel that actively diverts discussion away from actual criticism, and makes it about algorithmically pleasing political content.

One of the funniest things I see is when Critical Drinker fans want us to return to non-woke franchises like...Metal Gear Solid. Maybe the gayest franchise of all time. A game where woke writers weren't trying to humiliate men! Except you're actually disarmed and ass kicked by your surrogate mother like 40 times.

BurnGpuBurn

a day ago

> his true character isn't obvious on a few listens

You must have put yourself through some horrible times then, given that you clearly dislike the guy a ton, but have listened to a lot of his content to asses his "true character".

> Sometimes he reviews shit he hasn't even seen or played because he wants to get in on the discussion.

That's a sweet but also very baseless accusation. You should do better research.

> Every woman lead is a diversity hire, but every male lead in a bad movie is just an "unfortunate miss."

I very much doubt he calls every woman lead a diversity hire. I think you are overreacting and putting him in the chuds tribe you are already very opinionated about.

Capricorn2481

a day ago

> That's a sweet but also very baseless accusation. You should do better research

Okay, here he is doing just that. Didn't watch it, tries to weigh in on it for clout. His own comment section is not having it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ubB8tjL04.

> I very much doubt he calls every woman lead a diversity hire. I think you are overreacting and putting him in the chuds tribe you are already very opinionated about.

You don't have to take that literally. He wears kid gloves for male actors. He takes on a different tone when talking about women.

> I think you are overreacting and putting him in the chuds tribe you are already very opinionated about.

I didn't call him a chud, you're just inventing stuff now. But it's definitely easy to see who butters his bread.

In his Sydney Sweeney video, which is a pretty bad video in general because it doesn't engage at all with why people might not like her, he has a very long rant (for him) about liberal women and how broken they are. How they've been corrupted by college and they're just secretly jealous of beautiful women. Just empty ranting full of every stereotype he could pull out of a hat. He doesn't respond to the fact that it's a gambling ad at all, which a huge amount of people criticized. He boils everything down to "She's hot and women hate that." He doesn't even think it's worth mentioning what people actually said. He posts a bunch of completely unrelated studies to the point he is making.

Then he, for whatever reason, attacks the interviewer that asked Sydney about the American Eagle ad? Implying she's a secret liberal placed there to make her look bad? Even though she gave her the most softball questions possible. Like, I think anybody can understand this is an interviewer giving a person a chance to react to news. Why is he just seeing a woman and implying she's secretly seething with anger? It's an extremely creepy way to talk about people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlVovsQQGdk

IslandRebel

20 hours ago

> Okay, here he is doing just that. Didn't watch it, tries to weigh in on it for clout. His own comment section is not having it.

I wouldn't watch Series 4 & 5 of The Boys if I had a time machine. So I don't blame him, tbh.

> In his Sydney Sweeney video, which is a pretty bad video in general because it doesn't engage at all with why people might not like her, he has a very long rant (for him) about liberal women and how broken they are. How they've been corrupted by college and they're just secretly jealous of beautiful women. Just empty ranting full of every stereotype he could pull out of a hat. He doesn't respond to the fact that it's a gambling ad at all, which a huge amount of people criticized. He boils everything down to "She's hot and women hate that." He doesn't even think it's worth mentioning what people actually said. He posts a bunch of completely unrelated studies to the point he is making

It is a slop video that they put out to keep the algorithm gods happy at YouTube. I don't expect a Critical Drinker video to be some well-researched social study on political biases in media.

As for the advert itself. A lot of the criticism I heard was because she was basically naked. I didn't even know it was a gambling ad until recently. How much of this is organic is hard to say, as the whole controversy in almost all of her adverts is probably done by either her or whatever company hired her to do the advertising campaign.

The same thing happens every time a Sydney Sweeney ad comes out. She does some provocative or "safe-edgy" stuff, and there is a bunch of controversy drummed up. Everyone the talks about the advert and then she has made another huge sum of money.

> Then he, for whatever reason, attacks the interviewer that asked Sydney about the American Eagle ad? Like, I think anybody can understand this is an interviewer giving a person a chance to react to news.

I've seen the clip. The question was bullshit. Anyone that isn't terminally politics brained recognised the play on words was due to her being attractive. It was that simple. She is probably contractually obliged not to say anything either.

Again, this whole controversy was likely manufactured by American Eagle themselves to have everyone looking at the advert.

Well done. You got played like everyone else did.

> Why is he just seeing a woman and implying she's secretly seething with anger? It's an extremely creepy way to talk about people.

Because the trope is that is what lefty female journalists are in that space.

If you want to be a very popular YouTuber, all you have to do is tell your audience what they want to hear. There is a whole small industry of these people on YouTube/Rumble and Kick. They cover the entertainment news and shit on dumb movies and TV series (which are most of them, tbh), and most of the time people have this stuff on in the background while they are doing their boring office job.

Every YouTuber has "dents", "marks". The former are people that eat up everything they say, and they are normally their whales.

2 days ago

The studio behind masterpieces like Dragon Age Veilguard and Mass Effect Andromeda? Sad day

izacus

2 days ago

I believe you forgot the massive hit that was Anthem.

baal80spam

2 days ago

You forgot /s, right?

Anyway - good riddance.

rjh29

2 days ago

For a site with users supposedly more intelligent than Reddit, HN's inability to detect sarcasm (or any kind of nuance) is always amusing.

serf

2 days ago

2 days ago

shevy-java

2 days ago

People kind of predicted this, didn't they?

I guess in a way it was unavoidable. Still sad though.

I miss many great companies of the 1990s.

npunt

2 days ago

a day ago

Baldur’s Gate 3 was an event unlike any BioWare (really any studio) has been able to drum up DA:I sold 12mill over a decade ago. So 600mill or so. And inquisition was rough. I liked it a lot honestly but they took a reputation hit. It was EA’s fault to be fair, but it happened anyway. The demand that it play on 360 + frostbite not being nearly done yet forced down their throats hurt the game a ton.

Let’s even be generous and say it hits 20mill sold like BG3. Billions? That’s ridiculous. A game reaching a single billion is rare. Dragon Age isn’t remotely that popular, especially not in 2026.

droptablemain

2 days ago

Bioware's long death began when it was acquired by EA.

aghuang

2 days ago

And i'm not talking just about commercial success (they already pale in comparison), i'm taling about the blockbusters, the masterpieces, the things that combine technical prowess, artistic ambition and global cultural influence

Where is the Hollywood of video games?

milchek

2 days ago

Sure, but not all users hate AI generated assets, there are some who do not care either way (or can’t tell). I know plenty of artists (designers) in digital who are embracing generative AI and getting more done - granted, they are not artists who generate assets for games. But hey, maybe I’m biased working in the industry.

I can sympathise why many hate gen AI for the jobs it’s taken (and there is nuance here because often it’s not gen ai - it’s cost cutting or misaligned expectations from executives) but I feel like the craftsman who embraces the tool can create more value for the world than the craftsman who does not.

In any case, there will be a market for 100% human made art, media, and games -I’m just not sure we should obsess with enforcing (and gatekeeping), if someone who is a mediocre artist with a great game idea wants to make a game and use AI to accelerate themselves to deliver a better product for the world then that’s great.

samcolson42

2 days ago

I think that the anti-AI stance from gamers online is really about art and art style, not about the code behind the game.

milchek

2 days ago

I suspect you are right. Interestingly this reminds me of the John Carmack interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast where he mentions that game devs and game artists/designers are different in their need for attribution with the later treating the discipline more like art (which it clearly can be).

Tho not the first aquisition I see nose-diving due to incompetent management.

ChrisArchitect

2 days ago

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-21/electroni... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50184357)

underlipton

2 days ago

There are dozens of better sites to use for something like this than Verge. They have horrid policies with regards to displaying sources, and put half their articles behind a paywall. At least use an archive service.

https://archive.is/ZUR5H

mandevil

2 days ago

As always, the Onion nailed it perfectly long ago:

https://theonion.com/anthem-developers-assure-players-whiteb...

'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'

https://theonion.com/people-criticizing-anthem-don-t-underst...

"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."

ilamont

2 days ago

For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...

The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.

aucisson_masque

2 days ago

The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.

Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.

2 days ago

I worked on three of them! While there are some serious issues with Frostbite and everyone loves blaming it for everything, its role in sabotaging huge projects is definitely overblown.

There are some issues with workflow and it is true that the UI definitely was, as many at EA said, "by programmers for programmers". But it's a very capable engine in the right hands.

That said, I'd pick Unreal any day for a AAA project and Unity or Unreal for smaller projects.

saidnooneever

a day ago

cool, i think Frostbite is really pretty honestly. performs well in BF but ive not played other games that use it knowingly.

Why would you pick unreal? It seems a lot of games made in it suffer performance issues. In my mind its a really unwieldy engine. (ofc, because its so feature packed, and perhaps because i am no professional engine dev :-))

Agentlien

a day ago

For a professional project with at least 30+ developers the complexity of using Unreal is necessary and on par with any competent engine. In fact, I feel it is often much easier to do things well in Unreal.

I like Unreal because it's really quite intuitive and ergonomic for larger productions, fairly well documented, and has some of the coolest tech in the industry. Their rendering pipelines are beautiful and a joy to work with and I could rant all day about my love for Nanite and Lumen. It is light years ahead of Unity and much easier to understand and modify than Frostbite.

I will say that Unity has better support out of the box for custom shaders and compute than Unreal (and Frostbite).

Now, you mentioned performance. Funny thing: performance has been my primary professional concern for the last six years of my career. Unreal itself performs very well if you use it correctly and has really good documentation for best practices as well as amazing tools for measuring performance and indicating what is wrong. The tools in Frostbite were very lackluster. Unity has some fairly good stuff. Unreal feels so far ahead.

I believe the reason there are more visible Unreal games with performance issues is because there are a lot more noteworthy ambitious productions in Unreal. That means games which push what they can deliver, and often don't quite get there. And for smaller productions it's likely just a matter of less experienced teams not following the best practices or cranking settings up to 11 without proper performance budgeting.

gmerc

2 days ago

It’s just a rerun. Bioware had an entire prototype of a game called “Agent”, a james bond style bioware RPG built on EA technology from sports games … until it became clear the technology to render madden NfL lacked something like “non flat surfaces” you’d need to build a world :/

f6v

a day ago

The core issue is wanting to jump on the Fortnite hype train. Every exec wanted their own money printing machine. It's not unique to this studio: abandoning the core IP to pursue an Overwatch clone.

andai

2 days ago

I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).

springtimesun

2 days ago

I loved The Division. Some months ago I re-downloaded it and just ran around for a bit. The setting and world feel are still there and the story is deeper than some single player games. For a while I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if it was ever released (or leaked) so it could be player hosted or modded in a local kind of development like this. But, I didn't stay with that thought. There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.

hdjrudni

2 days ago

even without the current year bits, the "D" in DA4 is for "Disney".

bigfishrunning

2 days ago

Bioware's downslide predates the "woke" narrative -- i don't remember Anthem being particularly woke, but it certainly wasn't the sort of game they should have been making.

AlexandrB

2 days ago

I think the core issue is bad writing. All of that other stuff is only a problem because it's written with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. In many cases the writing reduces characters to their identity group instead of being believable humans with believable motivations.

platevoltage

2 days ago

[flagged]

gfosco

2 days ago

So you want to be disingenuous, that's ok with me. Everybody knows it.