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How Do You Honestly Feel about Today's BioWare?

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Bedameister said:
To me it is just a name but not Bioware anymore
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Agreed.
And as a longtime fan that wanted them to evolve, I think I'm part of the problem.

I wanted them to get with the times and do the 'Open World' formula. Do the Elder Scrolls, but with an amazing story featuring companions. ...But I really disliked the MMO-lite Dragon Age: Inquisition. From there, at least, I wanted them to refine their combat with Mass Effect so that it wasn't so janky - but not at the expense of dropping focus on everything else - in Andromeda.

Now - after what I deem as two utter failures - I hear they are making their version of Destiny called Anthem: a team-based shooter set on a foundation of interchangeable mech world-building with light narrative elements about an eternal quest for end-game loot. ...This couldn't be further from what made me fall in love with the company in the first place.

I'm to the point where I want the company to go back to Dragon Age: Origins. It was the pinnacle of over a decade of their experience evolving the table-top dungeon master RPG genre - and I very much wish they would go back to putting their time and production budgets into that fantastic, replayable deep role-playing single-player fantasy.

...But the tastes of consumes has changed. And so have business models. ...Eight years later, its clear there's no going back. Guess I should've been careful about what I wished for.
 
Vigilant Walrus said:
And right now, I worry that CDProjekt is going through the same thing. I worry that Cyberpunk is a nightmare, has tons of problems and slow progress. I worry the staff is being worked half to death, and that the game will become a broken shell. They did the impossible with Witcher 3, but I am super concerned.
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Take the following as you will, but this is what Mike Pondsmith himself had to say shortly after the latest, possibly worrying rumors emerged:

Sigh. Look my friend. 99% of all development projects go through the exact same process 2077 is going through right now. The only diff is that 98% of them labor on in silence and there aren't a million people combing the studio's trash looking for clues. There usually aren't a million people also trying desperately to create drama to fuel hits on their blogs either. Relax and use your endorphin dump to chill--that's why you have one implanted.
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I still love them. I thought Inquisition and Andromeda were both great despite being bloated. They nailed the combat in Andromeda for once.
 
Downhill since Neverwinter Nights & Kotor.

Hate how they abandoned the promise of those and instead gone for simplification and mass-market appeal.
 
Bioware is nothing now. I'd say Larian Studios has surpassed them with D:OS 2 despite some issues with that game I don't like such as the whole armor system. Larian proved modern cRPGs can still sell, and sell a lot better than so called 'AAA' games.
 
Their last four games were Dragon Age 2 (bad), Mass Effect 3 (average with bad ending), Dragon Age Inquisition (well recieved but not for me, I hate it's design) and Mass Effect Andromeda (terrible).

Anthem is some kind of coop-multiplayer-service-game-destiny-killer so it's fair to say that they simply don't produce products I'm interested in anymore. I'm not willing to say they can't make good games, but what they're making aren't games for me.
 
since i'm huge fan of Dragon Age (finished all of them), i still have hope they can create enjoyable game in DA 4, even if the quality is on par with DA 2, i'll accept it
 
The studio started showing signs of turning away from making complex and/or good rpgs with Jade Empire (which was a decent game but compared to their previous games it felt very basic, Neverwinter Nights was a buggy mess but its editor was a work of genius and KoTOR is great) and after Mass Effect I realized they either had lost the ability to make RPGs or had decided to make games for a new audience. To me, the BioWare of today is the BioWare of 10 years ago.
 
I haven't played Andromeda, so I'll leave that one out. I loved the other ME games, though. Mainly for the characters (Garrus, Mordin, Wrex, etc). The story was always kind of schlocky. I loved the Reaper reveal in ME1 but never really felt the story ever managed to top it, and it was always space operatic cheese, but I loved it for it. Post-EC the trilogy's ending wasn't as terrible, but it was still pretty bad. I really liked everything up to the final mission, though, even if 2 was still the better game.

I enjoyed Inquisition the first time through, but couldn't really force myself to do more than one playthrough. That said, I did actually really like DA2—as flawed as it was, and it was horribly flawed. I enjoyed the characters a lot, as well as the themes of the story and the setting, and I really liked Hawke as a protagonist. I'll still say that Origins was the better game of the series, but I think if Inquisition had been closer to a highly refined DA2 rather than an MMO-lite it would have been a much stronger game.

I'd say that Origins and BG1/2 are the best games they ever made. But I think a lot of that might be due to the modding scene.
 
Anthem really got me interested and I think Bioware can't compete in the AAA WRPG space as well as they used to. So this is a welcome thing for me as someone who likes Destiny but really doesn't care about the story this could do that.
 
Imo, Dragon Age 2 was mediocre, Mass Effect 3 was fun but a total fuck up in bringing a satisfying conclusion, I didn't play Dragon Age Inquisition, and Mass Effect Andromeda was so mediocre.

Anthem looks to have promise if only cause so many hands are involved in it but I'm afraid the game will try too hard to be like Destiny.

So I guess Anthem is my last chance with them. I don't really care to see the Star Wars game they're making and I don't care for the Dragon Age franchise anymore.
 
From ~1998 to 2001 they were my single favorite games company, alongside Black Isle.

From then until about 2010 they were a company whose games I would buy sight unseen, even if I felt they'd lost their way by moving into the console space with all the compromises that entailed.

Starting with Dragon Age 2, I became highly skeptical. That was the first Bioware RPG I didn't finish.

Today, they're a non-buy unless something remarkable occurs. I don't even pay attention to what they're making anymore.
 
I used to be a huge fan, I actually liked mass effect 3 and I loved dragon age 2 despite it's obvious faults.

I did not like dragon age inquisition and what the hell where they thinking when they did mass affect andromeda?

I'm really disappointed and sad actually. It's not that that they did a few lousy games, there fokus seems to go in a totally different direction than whats appealing to me.

Open world, collecting shards, muliplayer. And so on.

Isn't Anthem a muliplayer game like destiny? Why the hell should they put Bioware on that?
 
I was never a massive fan but used to respect them back in the day.

Today I just feel that they've completely lost their edge and are trying to stay relevant against competitors that have surpassed them in domains they used to be good at, by courting another public that is largely disinterested. Andromeda jokes and memes aside, for me what made me dislike modern bioware game is just that there isn't really that much quality left in the writing anymore, and there is a lack of vision and scope that hasn't been recaptured since Dragon Age 1/Mass effect 1. They became satisfied in chasing a core fanbase and I know some of my friends would still get the next dragon age.

But in a post witcher 3, horizon and breath of the wild world, bioware doesn't seem have any particular strong cards to play anymore when it comes to the brands they own.

Anthem might be the last hurrah depending if they can capture something fresh. But despite the pretty visuals and cool mechs, by the time it comes out Destiny 2 will already have made its rounds, as well as a bunch of other CORPG
 
LewieP said:
Who do studio management answer to?
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If Schreier is to be believed regarding the production of Andromeda- nobody. The studio fucked up Andromeda from top to bottom almost entirely and people have to come to grips with the fact that if EA is to be blamed with anything for this game it's for being too hands off.

tuxfool said:
One could make the argument that it was a mistake to give the project to that particular team in the first place. So I wouldn't say wholly.
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I said almost wholly. Also, I don't know how mad I can get at EA for giving a studio as much time and resources they needed to make the game, at the end of the day the studio just wasn't good enough.
 
Good intentions but questionable choices both in terms of gameplay and story direction that they've been repeating over and over again. I've still enjoyed all of their games, but there's always been rather large caveats with each entry. They seem hell bent on repeating the same mistakes and never fully addressing them all the while changing and introducing new things that either don't work or replace aspects of their games that did not need changing.

That said Anthem looks really really good, at least the first impressions of it. Remains to be seen if they've learned from their past mistakes there and if that will follow suite to other titles like Dragon Age and if we're lucky not a decade from now Mass Effect.
 
diaspora said:
I said almost wholly. Also, I don't know how mad I can get at EA for giving a studio as much time and resources they needed to make the game, at the end of the day the studio just wasn't good enough.
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I don't think it is worth getting angry about at all, but ultimately they're in charge of allocating resources.

To me, for example, Anthem screams "we need something like Destiny", and almost certainly that project is taking fairly significant resources. I'm not convinced that Anthem was a game that bubbled up organically from within Bioware, pure speculation on my part though.
 
Used to be a huge fans of Neverwinter Nights , KOTOR and Mass Effect 1 , but the recent sequels and Dragon Ages are mediocre .

Don't really care nowadays because we got Larian .
 
Bioware have comfortably settled into their position as a bottom tier RPG dev house. Indie studios like Larian are clowning them with a fraction of the budget that Bioware gets. I'd even rate janky Euro RPG devs higher and in those games you never know if the next item you pick up will send you flying outside the map limits.

It's not all bad news though. I'd rate Bioware above Steam greenlight scam developers, so that's something at least.
 
They are a great company, mass effect 3 is still one of my favourite games and I thought dragon age inquisition was great and I need to get back to andromeda some day but I know it has tons of issues. I have high hopes for anthem but need to see more of it eventually.
 
They no longer make games that I enjoy. Thankfully, other companies have stepped in to fill the RPG void that was created. I feel the same way about Square Enix.
 
I've been let down with Bioware since Jade Empire, yet i still want to like their games.. ME1 was a sign of hope... ME2 was decent... ME3, couldn't even finish.. DA:I bores me too death no matter how many times I've tried to play it...

With Athem... it's everything, or nothing...

Otherwise, RIP, Bioware.
 
My first BioWare game was KoToR and it was phenomenal then I fell in love with Mass Effect 1 (still in my Top 5 GoAT games), ME2 was absolutely fantastic (not perfect but a damn good game). That was when everything changed. It all went downhill after that, Dragon Age 2 was a joke, an abomination that should never seen the light of day. Mass Effect 3 had a few genuinely good moments but overall felt rushed in a sort of mad-dash scrapped and scrambled together at the last minute way (for a lack of better words). Plus that ending was a complete and utter shitshow of epic proportions, the single worst ending to anything I've ever seen and should never be forgotten and remembered solely to remind/show/educate people of exactly how NOT to end a series.

I was really, really, really excited for Andromeda. The premise sounded perfect for a Mass Effect sequel. A chance to wipe the slate clean, to keep what worked and introduce new mechanics, elements and story ideas etc... What we ultimately got felt under developed, uninspired, mediocre and completely unoriginal. That being said the combat was actually pretty good and some of the RPG elements were good. But after my second play-through I realized I was WAY too generous in my initial impressions.

Dunno, I'm a fan and I want them to be successful and find that spark that made their older games so great. They clearly have some incredibly talented and hard working people there how can do some truly amazing stuff when everything is firing on all cylinders. I think Anthem has promise so I'm cautiously optimistic since Edmonton's at the helm this time. Casey and Drew are back so that's a plus too.

Small moves Ellie, small moves.
 
They lost me with the double whammy of Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3. They are dead to me and I’m not even too keen on giving Anthem a chance.
 
A shadow of their former self.

The cracks started to show during the last 2 or so hours of Mass Effect 3.

Never been more irritated at a botched landing than the ending to that game. Not just the final cutscene either, the entire climax, from the moment the fleets all warped into Earth's atmosphere, was severely lacking.

Their writing has gone downhill as well. Very evident in Andromeda.

I don't have much hope for Anthem on that front. It doesn't look like a story-heavy game, but maybe they will surprise me.
 
They are just a shell. Electronic Arts stooge puppet. Quality has dropped. No longer day one purchase with no chance of regret.
 
Bits N Pieces said:
With Casey Hudson leading the studio a lot more confident than I was six months ago.
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I don't understand this. He was working on ME:A and Anthem when he left. He had been on both games for 3+ years. Also Anthem has been in development longee than Andromeda. Today's BioWare is a shell of its former self. Anyone expecting big things especially with EA in charge is in for a massive disappointment.

They are not a day one purchase anymore. Hell I wouldn't even recommend their games at deep discount months later even.
 
Dragon Age Origins was awesome, them they took that and made Dragon Age 2 and then I realized the magic was gone, now they aren't even a blip on the radar for me
 
Couldn't care less about them anymore, they don't make the type of RPGs I'm interested in anymore. I'll take stuff like Pillars, Divinity and Wasteland 2 over what Bioware is putting out now.
 
kliklik said:
Downhill since Neverwinter Nights & Kotor.

Hate how they abandoned the promise of those and instead gone for simplification and mass-market appeal.
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This. The more they went into console direction, the more their games deteriorated. If you are a console gamer, there's a chance to you like the modern Bioware (approx. post KotOR era). But consolification killed the old BW athmosphere.
 
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