Comment on EA is shutting down BioWare and the next Mass Effect has been canceled
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 days agoI mean BioWare has been a disaster for like a decade now, hasn’t it?
2007: Mass Effect. BioWare acquired by EA.
2009: Dragon Age: Origins
2010: Mass Effect 2
2011: Dragon Age II (not AS loved as the first one, but still fun game, just a bit repetitive; Good reviews, great sales), SWTOR
2012: Mass Effect 3; The two remaining cofounders resign (the first one dropped off earlier to get back to her medical practice, apparently all 3 founders were fresh med school grads when they started).
2014: Dragon Age: Inquisition; Not my cup of tea, but sales disagree, BioWare’s best selling game (definitely at that point, but possibly still?).
2017: Mass Effect: Andromeda; Sales still strong, but critical reception bad. A lot of people dislike it. Feels rushed, like a cheap “hey we own this IP, let’s make a game unrelated to the previous ones” game. They really backed themselves into a corner with the ending of ME3 and at this point a prequel would’ve done better, but not an unrelated sequel in another galaxy.
2019: Anthem. Live service bullshit. Sold well, but not as well as previous BW games. Abandoned after 2 years, but they continued selling in-game currency after stopping work on the game.
2021: Mass Effect remaster
2025: DA Veilguard. Well received, but sold poorly. Under half of the expected sales. Review bombed on some platforms for being “woke”, but that’s probably irrelevant given it started off “mostly positive” on Steam that requires you to actually play the game before reviewing it. Dropped the whole “your decisions from previous games influence the world” thing BioWare used to have. Explain all the mysterious lore and suddenly everything is simple and straight-forward…
They used to drop literal gold every 2 years or so on average. Now 6 years between two actually new games and quality seems to be dropping. The original people who made BioWare what it was are mostly gone, all of the founders long gone.
This while EA Games has actually been fairly hands-off with their studios. Respawn has been creating single-player games and has another one in the works. Those have no post-launch monetization whatsoever.
But anyway, EA was used as a vehicle to drop a bunch of debt into. I don’t think any of their studios are going to be doing great by the time the decade’s over.
moakley@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Anthem was discontinued after like a month. They kept the servers open but gave up pretty much right away.
Which is a shame, because the gameplay was fucking tight as hell. I loved that game. It could have been the next Destiny if they’d just kept it around long enough. The only reason it was received so poorly in the first place was because the internet hate machine didn’t have enough fodder that month.