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Both Anthem and Veilguard are examples of exactly what the article is talking about - Bioware, a studio famous for scripted single player RPGs where the focus is on story, being pushed by EA into making live service games for an audience which have "skip dialogue" as a reflex reaction to anything that isn't more shooting or optimising DPS.

err, at least for Veilguard you're missing the point that the dialogue was preachy and stupid. It was a doomed concept when they started forcing bullshit into the game.

Veilguard was doomed long before your complaint about "bullshit" in a game. That's not why it failed.

For dialogue, it seems that no writer has ever read a book before the 2010s, if at all.

I had heard elsewhere that the decision to give live service a go came from Bioware’s own leadership and was not thrust upon them by EA.

I can imagine a universe where Bioware stuck with scripted single player RPGs and faded along with the genre. In which case we might have been at the same point by now, just with a different list of games to use as conversation fodder.

I heard elsewhere - I forget the name of the journalist - that the real root cause was that EA pushed for a yearly release cadence like they’re used to with their sports and sim titles. That version of the story has Bioware juat generally struggling to adapt, and the specific questionable decisions are just symptoms of the underlying problem.

I like it because it fits nicely with the immediate situation: 50 people working on a game that will need a huge headcount ramp-up and multiple years to ship, and EA just deciding they would rather put their money into a more immediate payoff.

> I can imagine a universe where Bioware stuck with scripted single player RPGs and faded along with the genre.

Has the genre really faded? Larian seems to have done quite well with BG3 and the Divinity predecessor games. Owlcat games with Pathfinder series and Rogue trader has also done well.

I would have much rather Bioware tried to do a similar last hurrah with an isometric RPG or any RPG for that matter. I suppose they have, with Andromeda, but that is 9 years old already.

Ultimately, I think Bioware's problem is much simpler - the greatest talent has already left by the time Andromeda released, and the leftovers were too busy checking boxes on corporate cultural requirements rather than making an actual game.

There was probably a huge cultural shift in the years that followed the EA purchase, which was already a decade before Andromeda. Frankly I struggle to justify Bioware's relevance after the ME Trilogy was concluded. I could not get into a single one of their games past that, started a few, but never finished.

Veilguard had literally zero multiplayer content

Veilguard was initialy designed as a live service game(or some kind of)

The decision for Veilguard to have abysmal writing was Biowares.

Personally I think Mass Effect Andromeda has the best gameplay of the series but everything else ranges from just okay to bad

And I really enjoyed Veilguard, I think the combat systems were just great and I loved taking on all the optional challenges towards the end. Some of the side character interactions were very good too - Lace and Emrich especially. But it doesn't change the fact that overal the game wasn't that good.

In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics, the first Mass Effect is incredibly rough, it's really hard to go back to.

That it was such a success and led to an incredibly successful franchise despite that, shows the power of its writing and strong characters and world-building.

A similar thing goes for another legendary series: Assassin's Creed. The first game is borderline unplayable, but it was still enough of a success to spawn AC2 which was a masterpiece of storytelling, although the fundamental mechanics weren't really smooth yet even at that point, and improvements were made all the way through brotherhood to AC3 and then black flag.

Over time, the story-telling and characters weakened, although there were some gems along the way such as odyssey.

>In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics, the first Mass Effect is incredibly rough, it's really hard to go back to.

Anyone who says this isn't the case needs to go back and play it. It's TOUGH gameplay wise.

Can you be more specific? I don’t generally play shooters, but tried Mass Effect a few years ago and didn’t find ME1 particularly rough?

Specifically, I didn’t find the gameplay of ME2 to be much better (and in some places, e.g. the Probing Uranus minigame, it was worse).

It's because of the Star Control II influence. The Gameplay is important, but it's missing so much QoL. That being said, sometimes the gameplay harmonizes with the storyline, especially escaping the Shofixti to talk to them, the Druuge, or playing around with the Utwig's Planet destroyer (which ends your game instantly if you press "use" on it).

Unfortunately "gameplay" wasn't why the franchise was popular or bought by their fans.

We played bioware games for the stories and the lore, gameplay although important wasn't the most important and that's why despite Mass Effect gameplay we loved it.

Some of the people that worked on that Bioware are working on Exodus which was a very interesting story.

Exactly. It wasn’t necessarily bad on an absolute basis, it was they built fundamentally the wrong thing. That is a failure of management rather than the dev team in my opinion.

Like imagine I work at Nintendo and I pitch to leadership: “OK I’ve got an amazing idea for the next Mario game. The way it’s going to work is you have a stamina mechanic so if you jump too much you run out of breath so then you can’t jump until you sit still for a while and recover. And it’s going to be an RPG so you can play for 100 hours and specialize your Mario into various classes and have different kinds of weapons …”

They’re going to put a hand on my shoulder and say 1)That stamina thing sounds like it wouldn’t be fun. 2) The RPG thing sounds like the sort of thing that people aren’t really looking for in a Mario game. There are good games that have a stamina mechanic. There are great games that have RPG mechanics and class specialization, but none of them have anything to do with what makes Mario great.

Nintendo leadership have a really strong conception of what makes a fun game and what makes their particular games distinctive. That’s how they come up with innovative concepts (like super mario wonder or the last DK game) that still feel 100% rooted in what makes those series good.

Getting a story-driven studio to build a looter-shooter was just a terrible idea and the also executed it badly in anthem. Whatever it was that they were trying to do with Veilguard, (I heard that started as a live service and then pivoted), someone senior should have had the courage of their convictions and asked the question of whether someone who loved dragon age inquisition would love this game or whether indeed it was fun at all.

I feel that everyone is throwing so much money at games these days but they have in many cases lost sight of why people play games in the first place.

Agreed. I really liked how the new progression system didn't force you into choosing a particular path.

Sadly, though, the story left a lot wanting. It felt like multiple writers had inserted their own incomplete story lines, so by the end of the game, you're left with unresolved plot threads regarding the Remnant, the Scourge, and the Kett, among other things. The only somewhat resolved plot thread is colonization via ending up inside the Remnant dyson sphere, but that basically renders all the effort you just spent terraforming planets throughout the game moot.

At least with the original trilogy, you're defeating Sovereign in the first game and the collectors in the second game, giving you some form of resolution, even if it was always clear the trilogy was going to lead to a full reaper invasion in the third game. And across all of them, your singular focus was on the reapers and not spread across multiple threats.

> Elder Scrolls 6 will have the same dead-eyed, dumb NPCs, the same disastrously poor writing, the same jank as “Starfield”.

That's been the case for just about every Gamebryo/Creation Engine/Todd Howard game. TES4 and everything after kinda blurs into the same slop for me. I remember people saying F3 was 'Oblivion with guns', and Skyrim was 'Fallout with swords', and having played all those for hundreds of hours, those statements aren't wrong.

Halfway through my second playthrough of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been playing (more or less) the same game for 10 years. Same gameplay loop, more shallow characters, and more mediocre writing, and to top it all off, I wasn't enjoying the open world/sandbox all that much. Not to mention, all of them have the same weird kinds of bugs and crashes. I decided that until Bethesda starts writing games properly (story- and code-wise), I'm going to pass.

I really think Elder Scrolls 6 will be a huge disappointment. It’s been so long (in corporate development hell?) and their passion project showed terrible taste and execution.

Yeah the problem here is "doing a bad job". This is the problem with a lot of things. Everyone wants to analyze the shit out of everything when it's just simple. If you do a terrible job you fail. If the organization under someone's leadership does a terrible job then, almost certainly, they were terrible leaders (and/or were constrained in what they were able to do; regardless, somebody was a terrible leader. I'm certainly inclined to think it was EA).