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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

When EA bought Bioware in 2007, people said they'd run the studio into the ground. It took two decades for that to happen and they released some pretty awesome games in that time. However, a studio that used to hit everything out of the park did become one that missed a lot in recent years.

Going forward, I hope Bioware's people land great new jobs, and here's hoping some of their IP gets picked up by other studios. Mass Effect in particular is a fantastic creation that a lot of people would love to spend more time in.

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> It took two decades for that to happen

I think 2 decades is a bit generous considering the state of Bioware recently. When was their latest game that was well-received? Dragon Age Inquisition?

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

Mass Effect 3 also greatly expanded the endings in post-launch DLC. Though I also still maintain one of the greatest things about the ending was also the psychological trick it made. A lot of people complained "There was only one 'real' choice for my Shepard" but didn't see enough playthroughs to understand that why all four endings [0] were still rather equally distributed. The ending asked the player to sum up hours and hours of game play with a wild story tapestry of complex interlocking decisions and in general that "there was only one choice that made sense" feeling was that you had characterized "your" Shepard pretty strongly by that point, but different playthroughs pushed each of the four different endings into feeling like "the one and only that makes sense for my Shepard".

I still find that fascinating.

(I'm also a rare fan that I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda second favorite after only ME1 and thought Veilguard was probably my second favorite after only DA2. Engine issues and somewhat dull maps aside on Andromeda I thought it most captured the "Exploration" side of Mass Effect better than any but the first one. Veilguard seemed to prove BioWare had finally wrangled their Frostbite tools to be nearly as good at storytelling as their previous engine, and the story culminated a lot of threads for my "main" characters across the series.)

[0] There is a not-so-secret fourth "no color" "walk away" ending through the dialog trees with no epilogue, but it feels like what some Renegade Shepards' only option.

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.

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.

I gave it multiple attempts, and never even got further then maybe 5h before dropping it. Honestly, DA2 was already such a massive step down in vibes, clearly aimed at what's today being called "modern audiences", there were still some quiet extreme scenes in it, but it felt completely artificial to me compared to the ruthlessness in DA:O I also hated how the gameplay went from pretty down to earth to complete implausibility.

Like in DA:O people were still limited by their physical bodies. In DA2 you get rogues jumping gigantic distances etc. it felt like it took too much inspiration from MMOs at the time, sacrificing it's wonderful world it built up. But a more cynical view is probably that they just hired people that previously worked on other fantasy games, consequently importing the same fantasy settings of their previous projects.

And inquisition... Again I was unable to finish it to date because I just cannot get myself to keep playing... It's just no spirit to it at all. It'd say it's work by a amateur that's trying their best to imitate a previous work, and failing.

I always feel like ME2 gets off very lightly for doing essentially nothing to progress the main story. It feels like the story could have been used in a spinoff game.

Part of ME3's problem was that it was left with too much to do, the Reaper invasion needs to be started and concluded in the same game when it should have been started in ME2.

hmm, i can only say that i disagree with that sentiment. Storyline wise ME1 is the only one that hardly progressed anything, but that itself is by design of the lore. Also I dont think that a sequel was actually planned for ME1 (hence the very light touch for an actual overarching storyline)

ME1 the Reapers are unknown, they fight via subterfuge while utilizing the Geth and Indoctrination. Only one Reaper is in the Milky Way, and only for oversight. The game ends with the DLC in which the protagonist annihilates the main Relay which the Reapers wouldve used for their invasion.

ME2 starts with the overseeing Reaper killing the protagonist. Who is the nrebuild by a clandestine human supremacist organization. Its central theme is trying to rally a defense against the upcoming invasion. It ends with the "Suicide mission" against the overseeing Reapers base to forestall the creation of a Human Reaper. That was actually the first part where I got completely stumped back then: why does a human reaper matter?. It was a very good scene, but lore wise it was very confusing to me.

ME3 starts with the arrival of the Reapers and tells the story of their loosing battles, until the final attempt building on the previous cycles survivors magnus opus.

You could've split ME3 into two parts for sure, former being the loosing battle lines and the third one the final conclusion via the Ansible (i think thats what it was called?) - but I feel that last installment wouldve been too little content, if attempted. It wouldve been a good choice as a seperate DLC however, so that the main game ended with the discovery of the schematics and the DLC being about the final desperate struggle to get the resources before all is lost in the inevitable defeat.

ME1 is one of very few games that I like despite weak gameplay - I just started playing some Mass Effect, for the first time, a few weeks ago. The writing is indeed fantastic even though the very coarse shape of the story is Halo-like. It's the people, places and organizations that feel real that make it so good. But "dated" is not what I'd call the combat because it was bad at the time of release, too. There have been much better playing first-person shooters much earlier than Mass Effect. On PC Doom, Quake, Half-Life to name a few. On consoles Halo (and probably others, not my scene).

Inquisition felt like it was at some point supposed to be a MMO. The zone and quest design felt very MMO-like. I couldn't make myself play through that game.

Nah, ME3 is pretty poor throughout. Almost every mission feels anodyne and flat, the skill balancing is way off. There’s still some decent writing though.

People go on about the ending but never really address the whiplash of revealing a third party at the finale. It’s not a question of Shepherd survives or not, it’s that even with all the changes they made, it just doesn’t feel like it has very much to do with what’s gone on before.

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

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).

> 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

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".

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!

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

it's a little complicated. a lot of blizzard and riot execs who left to start game studios took a ton of money and have been developing games for years. nearly all of those games will not be commercial successes. so who really knows the meaning of talent nowadays?

on the flip side, studio owners, through no effort of their own, have been practically gifted a solution (hint: it's two letters) to nearly all of the problems relating to their actual risks, which are all focused on production and the nimbleness to respond to player feedback. the real question is whether or not EA still has distribution channels that no one else has.

I think you underestimate how much of a game’s success comes from innate appeal that you can’t simply pivot into with AI boosted workforce, high profile failures like Concord and Highguard didn’t lack production value they lacked the appeal to millions it takes to fuel a live service game of that scale not everyone can be Fortnite and make the switch at the perfect time to hop on a new trend.

i don't know, the writing about concord was pretty clear, "toxic positivity" were the words that stuck out to me to describe its cause of failure according to the people who worked on it, which is a leadership issue. this is a side of being nimble to player feedback.

It's actually a little bit ironic that today's AI has capabilities that closely match what Bioware was looking for quite desperately a decade or so ago. For several of their games, they tried to get procedural dungeon/world generators working so they could have a hand-made main quest-line and generated environments for side-quest content. Their attempts at procedural generation typically didn't work very well, so several Bioware games feature dozens of hours of side-quests in monotonously repetitive environments.

It's an interesting conundrum for players. Some of us, when we play great game, just can't let go. We want to spend more time in that game's world even after we've exhausted the lovingly hand-crafted content. So, many developers throw us a bone and include side-content that is occasionally brilliant but frequently very low effort. Bioware did this in many of their games. You could easily tell when you were on the main story's track and when you were off in low-effort-land.

The founders left 2012 along with many of the core staff. I consider that the end.

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.

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.

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