Mass Effect will not continue.

Damn, sad to see people lose their jobs, but the Mass Effect cancellation is just an extra kick in the ass.

Another studio joins the EA graveyard. EA is such an awful company. Bioware made Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire. What a great studio it was. RIP o7

F

A lot of us predicted this would happen after Veilguard not meeting expectations. EA would eventually make BioWare take the fall for EA's bad management choices.

Honestly, the surprise was that it took them this long to do it.

I've enjoyed a lot of their games, but KOTOR has a very special place in my heart.

I remember falling in love with Kotor and Jade Empire on my original Xbox.

Was super disappointed we didn’t get sequels on the Xbox 360. The first Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins made up for it though. Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 2 were a let down. More action then RPG.

I have so many memories about the hype for Dragon Age: Origins. Reading about it in high school, drooling over screenshots. All via Games for Windows magazine. I was probably the only person subscribed to it lol.

Canadian studio based out of my home town of Edmonton. Fuck you, EA.

Anthem is so funny next to those other titles.

Nothing could top it. Jade Empire came close though. It deserved more recognition.

Worth remembering that most of that list predates EA. Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire and the first Mass Effect were all made before EA bought BioWare in the 2007 deal that also brought in Pandemic, which EA shut down about two years later. The EA years are mostly the later Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, Anthem and Veilguard.

Honestly, this is one where I can't put all of the blame on EA. Bioware has been in a decline since My Face Is Tired, and a complete freefall since Anthem. Veilguard was their last chance and they blew it. The Bioware we're nostallgic for (Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, DA:O) hasn't existed for years, and "Bioware magic" turned out to be a fart in the wind.

(edit) And let's be real, Anthem wasn't EA's doing. Most of the game's failures were Bioware's fault, mostly incompetent management. https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

some of my favorite games ever made. what a travesty.

Bioware was dead shortly after EA bought them.

When I was in college there was a girl I knew who ranted and complained when BioWare was bought by EA. She was right.

That was my first exposure to understanding what EA is.

Yup, it used to be great. Another great will rise, the cycle shall continue.

Aw shit I forgot about Jade Empire. Fuckkk EA.

Ngl, anthem was a lot of fun mechanically. Great Iron Man sim

Dragon Age's inception was long before EA too. I remember them talking about it in the Neverwinter Nights community forums.

Back then very little was known beyond the title, the fact it would be an original IP and that the "Dragon Age" title would be about a literal calendar "age of the Dragon" rather than indicating the presence of actual dragons.

Hard to say how much of it was conceived then, but they were probably already writing stuff.

This one hits close to home. Bioware games were a big part of my youth. I can't remember how often I replayed bg2, but I still remember the joy when I actually properly beat it for the first time. I'll never forget the thrill when I explored the dwarven tunnels in Dragon Age or the magic of Mass Effect's masterful world building. It seriously feels like I just lost a friend.

Fuck EA.

Let's be real, this isn't on EA. The Bioware that made great games hasn't existed for a decade. EA gave Bioware enough time to get its act together and they never could. Any studio with a decade of failures would be shut down.

Weird, given that there's also a Mass Effect TV show in the works. Unless that got axed in the last couple months

I'm not willing to let EA off the hook. ME: Andromeda had good ideas in it. If EA hadn't forced them to use the DICE engine, they could have spent more time on shipping and polishing features and likely would have had a much stronger launch.

If you think EA didn't immediately infect and get their tendrils everywhere in Bioware after they were purchased.. you do not understand how these corporations work. At all.

It's because most of the people who made those games probably left. Companies don't make games, people do.

Even the people who don't leave, after having some success, may end up getting promoted. Once promoted their talents may not be suited to management or the promotion might go to their head and they'll be undone by their own hubris.

It's a minor miracle that any group of people manage to make more than one banger game in a row.

Probably just sold the rights to another company.

If it's anything like the Halo TV show, expect some low budget slop with a 10:1 marketing:production budget.

And when did ea acquire bioware?

I think my issue is more how the IPs go to the graveyard not so much the companies. As you said the company hadn't been doing great. But it always seems like publishers just hoard ideas only to do nothing useful with them.

I’m still mad about that abomination of a show.

before, actually. as soon as bioware execs started sniffing the asses of potential buyers. it wouldn't have mattered which of the game giants sucked up the pieces, the outcome would have been the same. the corpo-culture would chase the talent away and the studio would fade away.

And that's about the only game you can pin on EA (which BTW isn't even the first Bioware game on the frostbite engine, inquisition was also on frostbite so the engine wasn't completely unfamiliar to them). Anthem got 9 years and the only interesting feature Anthem had was kept only because the EA representative told them to. Veilguard got 6 years after being rebooted. Both games got more than enough time to cook in the oven, one of them came out like a hot snake and the other isn't a turd only if we're being generous.

EA bought BioWare in 2007. Sometimes enshittification has a long tail.

Well... EA bought Bioware in 2007 which means ME2, Dragon Age Origins and ME3 all came out under EA. Seems like it wasn't an immediate infection. And if you've ever looked into the internal workings of EA they're actually relatively hands off. All they do is set unreasonable expectations and leave it up to the studio to match those expectations. Bioware clearly got a pass on those because Bioware got a decade to fail multiple times. If you want an example of EA actually killing a studio look at Visceral, one underperforming game and the studio got turned into a support studio before being killed off.

"under EA" is VERY DIFFERENT from, "produced by Bioware". They eventually (EA has been buying up devs since loooong before Bioware) learned not to immediately tear apart the studios actually producing the games. Instead, they'd gut any heart management ever had, fire any dissenters, and then continue with a gutted crew under the same name.

If you actually understood the steps that history took, it's blatantly obvious how evil and shitty EA has ALWAYS been.

it's dead as soon as leadership starts targeting acquisition. internal priorities change and it's not on a quality product, it's on pumping the numbers to look favourably regardless of truthfulness

or maybe I'm just bitter because I see this happening at my own workplace. we just launched a new website, and pretty much every claim about our culture and process and priorities is a lie. it used to be true. it hasn't been in a couple years, and it sure as fuck isn't right now.

It's E.A.!

You and my husband. Now I know two people who liked that game.

EA making sure I boycott them by cancelling any games I am interested in and enshitifying the rest (Looking at you Skate 4 and the upcoming Fight Night game)

Oh, I can see it now. The plot is clear!

In this timeline, the Geth are actually cyborgs who look like humans. They are attacking Eden Prime at the behest of their mysterious master. Saren is the first human spectre and helps Commander Shepard escape from Eden Prime before the planet is exploded by Sovereign.

Saren and Shepard then go to New York to contact the Council, reporting a strange intelligence supporting the Geth. But then, the duo is attacked by a Geth ambush team! After managing to defeat the Geth fleet in orbit, Saren boards Sovereign and makes it say who the mastermind is, but gets brainwashed!

After this, Shepard chases Saren through a series of mass relays, eventually reaching Ilos. That is where Saren reveals the awful truth - the enemy turned out to be a Prothean VI hidden deep underground. The VI, named Vigil, commands Sovereign, and seeks to destroy the entire galaxy if not stopped! In a moment of lucidity, Saren pilots Sovereign into Ilos, destroying the planet and Vigil for good!

The final scene shows Shepard, distraught over the loss of his friend, just before the Council sends him an email that he is the new human spectre, in Saren's honor!

Pretty interesting that both Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka (the two remaining co-founders by the time of the EA acquisition) both bailed at the same time in 2012. After quite a number of lead developers and writers jumped ship.

So, it took 5 years of trying to tough it out under corporate ownership before they were like 'this is bullshit, let's go'.

And BioWare, who made so many great titles, didn't produce anything particularly noteworthy after that.

Well, the TV show isn't done by Bioware.

Okay, I know nothing of the history or Bioware. Enlighten me.

EDIT: As expected, bro loves to tell everyone they don't know history but won't elaborate what the "actual" history is supposed to be.

They weren't saying "Dragon Age" was an EA‐years product. The later games in the Dragon Age franchise were.

The controls were so smooth, combat was amazing in that game. Someone needed to tell Bioware to focus on that instead of wasting a ton of dev time working on all the segments where you're just a human walking around. It should've been all mech all the time.

Well me and my brother also liked it, so it's 4.

Mechanically, the game was amazing. It just fell short of content. If they had just added more, the game could've been a great looter shooter.

Staying was probably in their contract. Its pretty common when a company is bought out that selling ownership stay for X amount of years after so the company doesn't just instantly nose dive.

I feel like they need to drop the 'Arts' from their name.

Mother fuckers.

Electronic Arts hasn't made a good game since "Mail Order Monsters"

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 examples of on-disc DLC, coupled with its very controversial ending that was honestly never really fixed, but just carried by the rest of the game. It was also one of the games of that era to jump on the obligatory "shoehorned multiplayer mode" bandwagon.

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. I just remember a lot of the "singleplayer MMO" discourse when it came out, and I don't think it managed to top ME3's numbers.

Every game that follows can speak for itself.