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Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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