Comment on Electronic Arts to Cut 400 Jobs, Shut Down BioWare
voluble@lemmy.ca 6 hours agoEA bought BioWare in 2007. Sometimes enshittification has a long tail.
Comment on Electronic Arts to Cut 400 Jobs, Shut Down BioWare
voluble@lemmy.ca 6 hours agoEA bought BioWare in 2007. Sometimes enshittification has a long tail.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Yep. They bought Bioware after Mass Effect. Dragon Age Origins was already late in development, so that was essentially unaffected.
It’s the games that followed where the writing was on the wall. Mass Effect 2 was mostly fine, but it was one of the first games to introduce the model of “Buy new for the complete experience, pay extra if you buy used.”
Dragon Age 2 tried to be more action-y by deviating from what people liked about the first one. It was just fine in retrospect, but I don’t think it was what anyone was looking for.
Mass Effect 3 had one of the most egregious on-disc DLC examples, coupled with its very controversial ending that was honestly never really fixed, but just carried by the rest of the game.
Dragon Age Inquisition at least won awards, but I think it was boosted by being an early next-gen title in an otherwise slow year, not having to compete with GTA5 the year prior or The Witcher 3 the year after. But I remember a lot of the “singleplayer MMO” discourse when it came out, and I don’t think it succeeded at being a bigger hit than ME3 before it.
Every game that follows can speak for itself.
voluble@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I came late to the party and played Inquisition first, and thought it was really enjoyable, and played Mass Effect 3 before the first 2, and thought it was great. I think sometimes gamer expectations are just impossible to meet, and on some level I’m happier to see a studio try something different, rather than shovel the same old grain into the feedbag.
ripcord@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
In that case also they were effectively done with the game, but it wasn’t out yet.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I stand corrected, looks like EA bought them exactly 1 month before Mass Effect’s release. But yeah, by that point the game was already being printed on discs, with Microsoft as the initial publisher.