I've been replaying Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect over the past couple of months, purely by coincidence, so when Electronic Arts announced that they are closing the studio down for good I felt it more than I would have if I hadn't decided to dust those old titles off.
Truth be told I wrote off Bioware pretty much as soon as the ink dried on the acquisition paperwork. EA has long had a well deserved reputation for buying out studios and sucking the life out of them before shutting them down, even back then, and Mass Effect 3 which was in development when they announced the initial takeover 20 years ago seemed to prove the point.
It was one of the early non-sports games to ship with an in game store attached, they also forced players into proximity with the shop by making multiplayer a pre-requisite to unlock the "best" ending in the game by getting the galaxy to 100% invasion readiness. The tension between what Bioware was good at delivering and what their new corporate bosses wanted was clear from the jump Mass Effect 3 managed to be good in spite of this.
The bigger budgets were put to excellent use, the environments are gorgeous and the game feels like the scifi epic it was always meant to be. Part of this was achieved by making many of the quests their own separate modules that could only be accessed from the planet menu. This means that quest designers aren't locked into making their quest take place in the hub world, but since quests can only be accessed once this leads to things feeling really disconnected and thus, forgettable.
I checked out after that, the writing was on the wall. Bioware put out a couple more Mass Effects and Dragon Age titles, but I didn't play them so I can't speak on them. What I can say is that the old titles still hold up where it counts. Memorable stories and characters that you care about, characters that sometimes made choices that they lived to regret,
Hearing the news this week I felt that mix of sadness and shame that one gets when you hear someone, usually a celebrity, has died that you were sure had already died.
So today I'm pouring one out for Bioware, again.
Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.
- Mordin Solus