EA is shutting down BioWare and the next Mass Effect has been canceled
https://www.respec.net/news/266-ea-shutting-down-bioware-next-mass-effect-has-been-canceledOpen linkView original on poptalk.scrubbles.techSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on poptalk.scrubbles.techhttps://www.respec.net/news/266-ea-shutting-down-bioware-next-mass-effect-has-been-canceledOpen linkView original on poptalk.scrubbles.tech
172 replies
Sorry, Saudi Arabia don't like sci-fi. Just football and hacking up journalists.
They'd love to make a game about hacking up journalists, but their lawyers say it would be inadvisable.
i wish it was just "EA is shutting down"
This meme was a prophecy.
I can still remember that feeling of anticipation when "Westwood" came on the screen. I haven't felt that in decades 😔
There should only be one company making video games. That's the most efficient and cheapest.
When Saudi Arabia PIF and Jared Kushner bought EA, I expected something like this to eventually happen. They would want to prop up consumable yearly microtransactioned garbage over games with more moral dilemmas than their respective regimes are willing to tolerate..
Valve please acquire BioWare challenge (seriously, please acquire BioWare, Gaben)
I just wanted one more mass effect. I guess it wasn't nearly a far along as they'd teased.
ill never forgive EA for destroying westwood studios and maxis,
FUCK EA
i am also never forgiving EA for killing Renderware
Fuck. Now I have to add Bioware to the pile.
yoyo they found 21 missing people off of that music video. its really a song of hope.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/oct/31/missing-kids-soul-asylum-runaway-train-tony-kaye-david-pirner#%3A%7E%3Atext=The+football+team+AS+Roma%2Cfrom+the+Runaway+Train+video
Didn't the song out a bunch of people who went missing on purpose and ruin their lives?
from the article:
i don't know the specifics, but that sounds like what they're trying to say very gently. i wouldn't go so far as to say it ruined their lives, but in our experiences (two of my cousins and one niece ran away when they were teenagers) if their lives were ruined it was the shit that caused them to run away that did it.
i know, small sample size, but most people expect their lives to be ordinary. it makes it easy to fall into the logical trap that everyone has the same experiences
Absolutely. Incredible what came from that campaign. The song still fit the tone I wanted for the meme.
Damn it. What's the first one again? I instantly remember the feeling playing this game, but I can't remember...
Fantastic game. I think it ran on Amiga 500 and other OS I can't remember. Now my night is ruined until I recall.
Thanks for the memories!
EA is exactly the republican party. Destroy everything they touch with loads of bigotry and sheer incompetence.
Are EA bigots? They have always been the epitome of amoral capitalism in the gaming world to me
Given their new owners, it wouldn't be too far off to call them bigots now.
Valid point
Many game companies were bigots. shrugs. Another example is Ubisoft, founded by 5 brothers (no cooties eh), very toxic environment from my experience.
"Woke" was actually a problem with DA4 with how piss poorly the writers handled it, it was embarrassing. Absolutely not bigots
The bigotry is probably a new thing for them then because at least back in the day they didn't give a fuck as long as it made money. Bioware games usually had LGB(perhaps not T, don't remember any) characters, often as romance options and I recall racial justice being a theme in both Mass Effect and Dragon Age games.
But I suspect the new owners don't really want their games to infect anyone with the gays(tm)
They had at least one T.
Ah, I didn't know about that one because I could never get into Inquisition myself. Though it seems to have been well received enough as a game that perhaps I should try it.
Part of me wonders if Krem received less hate than some other Ts in media because the Internet hate machine mostly seems to have it out for MTF rather than FTM folks or because he genuinely had good writing rather than being shoehorned in
Typically MTFs are seen as "misogynistic perverts" and FTMs are seen as "misunderstood lesbians"
Neither are an accurate picture but one is far easier to sympathize with.
I wish it wasn't so hard for people to see them as "folks just living their lives and not affecting mine in the slightest"
Everybody affects everybody else. We absolutely do not live in a vacuum. It's why libertarianism fails.
Good news is that EA self-destructed in the Saudi deal so a few guys at the top could fill their pockets one more time. The debt they loaded EA with will be paid by selling everything. There is no other way. EA can no longer operate and their IPs will go to different studios. Let‘s hope one or two of them treat the franchises a tiny bit more carefully. Maybe. Or it will all be AI slop. Time will tell. But the way I see it EA is toast.
Generals 2 was in the make. There was a promo gameplay video. They fucking canceled it. I'll never forgive them for it.
Litteraly everything they touch, they kill. Either they cancel it or it becomes a pay to win gambling platform which lacks actual content. Enshitification Assholes.
Aw man. Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, and OG Dragon Age saw me through some of my formative gaming years and it’s been a shame to watch since. I didn’t even bother with Veilguard.
Larian is our big shining hope for this kind of game now, it seems.
Tomorrow: "EA to acquire Larian in $100B deal"
Check out Owlcat's new Expanse game, Osiris Reborn. It's an obvious love letter to everything about the Mass Effect series, while also being the best looking video game adaptation of the Expanse yet.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’m not familiar with the Expanse but I’ll keep an eye on the reviews! My windows gaming days are over but if the Xbox version is good I might pick it up.
Strongly recommend reading through the books if you have time. I couldn't ever get in to the TV show but I've gone through the books several times.
The TV show is also great once you get through the first half of the first season, which is sloooow. The rest is amazing though, I actually prefer some aspects of it over the books (like introducing Avasarala earlier and giving Bobbie more to do).
I stopped somewhere in season 2. I kept hearing it gets better and it just kept on being the same.
Miller was also quite a bit more sympathetic than he seems on the page which is... Well it's a choice.
Ooh another Owlcat game to sink too much time into.
Time to rename EA to Saudi TM Gaming
All aliens must wear hijab or be executed. /s
I mean, the Quarians were basically hijabi
Perhaps they can make a game about dismembering journalists.
The T stands for Trump!
Scopely Premium
EA has bought so many good game studios and forced them to make shitty games and then closed those studios because the shit games that they forced them to make didn't turn a profit, i played Red Alert 2 so much and had so much fun and knowing we'll never get anything like that again makes me want to launch all these life sucking corporate ghouls into the void.
As an FYI, I've been having a blast with Tempest Rising, it's not exactly like Red Alert but it's definitely got that old school C&C vibe to it.
I played it and it is good but i grew up playing Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 so that might be why it doesn't click with me, it's too much like Red Alert 3 and apart from Tim Curry (R.I.P.) it didn't take long for me to be bored of it.
Tiberium Wars was kinda the last game from EA in this genre that i would call good and i won't even bother mentioning the garbage that EA made afterwards.
TR did get some updates so i might revisit it and see how it clicks.
I second that. Frank Klepacki delivered some very good tracks on that title too!
Well now I'm definitely getting it!
I just replayed all of the mass effect games and dragonage games about a year or 2 ago, once Saudi Arabia bought EA I was like, welp, there goes that. (PIF can suck my DIF)
Now with Bioware being closed, glimmer of hope a new powerhouse independent studio pops up.
Honestly, is Andromeda worth playing? That’s the only one I haven’t finished but do have it downloaded
It has a different feel than 3 does, but I liked it as it's own thing.
I definitely recall the ship bugged me a little more, the beginning you're forced to navigate it and that bugged me. There are a lot of good aspects to it. If you like the series it definitely deserves a play. When I was playing and reading reviews I felt many reviews were overly critical and not really accurate. More popular to bash it, etc.
I've eventually managed to play it through to the end, there's some enjoyment but it's such a forgettable experience to me. Maybe I've misunderstood it, one day i'll give it another go. It has very little to do with the original trilogy, in anything except name and some references. Combat isn't too bad but the story is not that compelling
I’m a bit out of the loop with studio purchases, but were they going under originally and needed to sell? I have to assume anyone selling their company knows it’s on borrowed time.
EA offered them a ton of money 100 mil or something in the ballpark and they thought they could keep going as before but with EAs corporate boot on their throats they fell apart, unhinged demands, release dates that required a ton of overtime, etc., just typical corporate assholes destroying a team that created some of the most iconic strategy games to date.
You didn't like Generals?! /s
I spent so much time modding Generals and it was fun BUT it had a problem that's present even today that if you play longer it would get slower and slower and eventually crash, there might be a fix but i haven't bothered to check for the past 20 years.
Hence my /s
The mass-unit slowdown was terrible, sadly because the mods were epic
Thank God. I was worried a Saudi Kushner Mass Effect would create some kind of paradoxal tear in reality, like the damn pocket universe in Superman.
Wait for an upcoming patch where they don't change any of the actual content, but if you're in a gay romance it just continually spawns hostile units every time you enter an area.
I play games to escape reality, not relive it.
Give it another 5 years and a different, more inept developer
But we don't even have a goddamn Mr. Terrific.
I'd love to see Microsoft buy EA, then close it
EA was bought by the Saudis along with Trump's son-in-law. This Bioware closure likely isn't the first we'll see.
They closed studios they acquired since they started acquiring game studios…
Yes, but the Saudi deal is a new wrinkle. It's VC bullshit at its worst. EA was bad before, but it's nothing compared to what's coming.
They had announced their next game. I find it just a little curious that it happened now, so soon after de deal was finalised.
Or EA buy XBOX and close it. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)
That works too!
they could buy steam instead and close it 😃😃 what whys everyone looking at me like that
Lol. They already pull in $17B/yr, ~4B/yr profit, ~70% market share, <400 employees.... Privately held...
Gabe already has >9B himself.
Why would they sell?
Sure, some day they may enshitify, but by the time that happens, I'll be able to reverse engineer and recompile my STEAM library on my home server.
hold on, im calling EA to buy your home server rn
Lmao I like how everyone was saying this was going to happen like a year ago. So predictable.
A year ago? People called it eight years ago with the Anthem disaster that Dragon Age 4 would be the studio's last chance. BioWare was already dead, this is just the merciful last bullet.
Anyone that cared about RPGs was pushed out by greedy losers.
Any good old style rpgs old style out there? I haven't found anything since Icewind dale...
Depending on how old you like your old school, you might enjoy Spiderweb Software's games. They (mostly just a guy and his wife) have been cranking out RPGs since 1994. While all their games are superficially similar, there's an impressive amount of narrative and mechanical variety. If you're a D&D fan, especially the Forgotten Realms setting, you might enjoy the Avernum series. You're a prisoner, banished to the underground realm of Avernum , never to see the light of day again. However, you are not alone, as the ruthless Empire which sentenced you has long enjoyed sending its dissidents into the subterranean realm. In fact, there are several factions which vie for influence, and the player can throw their lot in with any or all of them. In some ways, it feels like an old school Underdark module for DnD.
Their other series are worth checking out too. In Avadon, you play a party of inquisitors (essentially) for a tyrannical, immortal overlord who exercises nigh totalitarian control over an alliance of 5 nations. Over the course of the game, your party uncovers a far-flung conspiracy against your boss for his abuses of power, and you are free to RP your characters' reaction to this in a number of ways. Even further afield of that, the Geneforge series is set in a science fantasy world which blends magic with bioengineering and genesplicing. As an apprentice of the Shapers Guild, you have the power to change (or even create whole-cloth) life forms to suit your purposes. Brings created in this way are programmed (for lack of a better word) to be completely obedient to their Shaper, despite otherwise being sentient, free beings. The ethics of this form a large part of the tension in the plot. Mechanically, though, it means that the game is like a weird Ultima/Pokemon hybrid, where your party consists of your mad scientist chimera creations, who will protect your squishy gene wizard until their dying breaths.
I first came across their work when I watched Jeff Vogel's GDC presentation several years ago. It's an hour long, but, if you have the time and interest, it's a very candid look at how the sausage is made in indie game development. In particular, I appreciate that he is very conscious that the games' visuals could at best be described as "quaint", but that just encouraged him to lean into the writing even harder to make up the difference, since that cost almost nothing.
Baldurs Bate 3 is turn based strategy with great writing.
Thanks, I have tried it but couldn't get into it, guess I'll have to try again!
There’s Divinity Original Sin 2 from the same developer. It doesn’t use the DnD system like BG3 but it’s very good.
We'll build our own BioWare! With blackjack! And hookers!
But unfortunately without the IP
Let's just use AI and say that it's fair use.
Surely copyright doesn't last forever plus a day, and they will be released into the public domain in a timely manner.
oh no… what a surprise… ea shuts down a studio they aquired…
Good lord everything EA touches turns to shit. Mass Effect is one of my all time favorite series and I credit it with breaking me out of just playing JRPGs. I was really looking forward to the next entry in the series, but the trilogy (there is no Andromeda in Ba Sing Se) will always be in my top games of all time and has enough of a conclusion to leave me satisfied
My theory is that EA is actually secretly ran by Hollywood in a bid to get people back to watching movies and TV.
It's ran by Saudis, they don't like queer things.
The Saudis who bought it don't care about queer things, religion or morals. They only care about money.
Game companies are reading the tea leaves.
AI bought all the ram
AI bought owns all the GPU
Any Game can be decoded and rewritten in fresh code via AI for the tiniest fraction of a salary. It will eventually be able to do it with performance.
New IP could maybe, possibly be generated by some designer/artist types for the cost of a couple salaries.
The client is in the enemy's (our) hands.
All games must go back to Gaming as a Service
We won't pay for gaming as a service.
No new affordable tech is coming to drive the industry, all games will need to shift to online only, AI may get good enough to make games for pennies.
The only part of gaming that survives this is indie developers that push past making shovelware with AI. AAA is cooked.
Saudi Arabia bought it to diversify. They want success.
Neverwinter Nights. Dragon Age Origins. Mass Effect. Knights of the Old Republic. It may all be considered unc slop now but man Bioware at its peak was some good times in gaming.
Calling those games unc slop is laughable, considering the comparative quality of modern games.
Gen Z really is the saddest generation.
Uh... You've met boomers before, right!?
i keep having trouble with this because most of the people in my newest band are boomers. i have to remind myself that i'm very fortunate to find people who don't fit stereotypes
So you play a mono-type I guess?
Sorry
You're right, it's good to separate the individual from the group. We obviously shouldn't specifically blame every single person in that age group, but we know the generation, in general, took most of the wealth and opportunity, then pulled the ladder up behind them, denying it to the following generations. They also voted for most of the current politicians and policies that are keeping inequality high.
So I guess this means that we'll never get that KotOR remake then...
I’m guessing those new owners don’t appreciate stories where gay characters are treated with respect.
Yes, I'm sure THAT'S the reason, and not that Bioware has been dead in the water for 12 years at minimum
People keep blaming Saudi Arabia/Kushner for this, but it was going to happen with or without them.
They don't care. That kind of thing would be censored locally but as long as it makes them money, it doesn't matter.
Eh... It was written on the wall 12 years ago when EA bought Bioware.
Man, I remember being so fuckin stoked for the original release of Nevereinter Nights. You will be missed.
I remember being excited for the original Neverwinter Nights that was made by Stormfront and SSI
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(AOL_game)
It may also have been the first graphical MMO.
Same. It was the first major title I recall with a native linux release. They famously didn't deliver it on release but got it out eventually. Met a lot of good linux gamers on those forums while we waited.
Capitalism
Bioware has been dead to me since they got bought by EA anyway. All this means is that if they ever made a Jade Empire 2, it's gonna be bland and stupid.
Fuck Jade Empire is such a good game.
Bioware was already rotting in the mass grave where formerly successful studios they bought spend their last days being milked of any remaining collective goodwill in the gaming zeitgeist before being summarily executed.
This was just them posting the obituary we all knew was coming.
I suspected this would happen after the Saudi take-over. I haven't played Veilguard, but i did see something about a non-binary character. I'd be very surprised if the saudi's funded something progressive like that, even if it was poorly executed from what i've seen.
good. It died years ago, should have killed the walking corpse way earlier.
We should've never let the psychotic zombie making fucks at EA buy any of these studios in the first place.
that, is exactly it.
safe to say we won't get controller support for dragon age origins anytime soon 😅
I remember saying this when they were acquired and Anthem wasn't even a sperm in Daddy EA yet.
On one hand, hundreds of people without a job, but on the other hand, seeing one of the many companies I boycott on ethical principle bleeding money bolsters my resolve
Mass Effect Citadel DLC was the final good product that Bioware made. It's oddly prescient.
Been a damn good ride.
That was my last experience with the Mass Effect setting and it felt like a very appropriate sendoff.
I was initially looking forward to Andromeda, but I'm glad I waited for the reviews. I would have been disappointed if that was my last Mass Effect experience.
I guess Exodus and the Expanse game will have to fill that void
I think good stories and corporations are at opposite ends. Corporations and the opposite of human, and thus can't write good human relatable stories. They can't make art. The more people in the room the more bland the outcome will be. Too much overhead - marking, advertisers, lawyers, HR, everyone. I think Bioware proves they can't do it. I think smaller studios are the only ones really capable of it. The only outliers appear to be rockstar and CDPR, for the time being at least.
I'd not heard of an Expanse game. I hope it features Shohreh Aghdashloo. I fucking love that woman.
I really hope Exodus will live up to the expectations.
What void? The void of casual role playing games with bad gameplay and worse writing?
I don’t think that void needs to be filled. The last BioWare game I enjoyed was Mass Effect 2 in 2010.
Jade empire was really good
and it had Nathan Fillion!
Who actually is a gamer himself too
Apparently day 1 of Firefly filming he told Alan Tudyk to go buy an Xbox so they could play Halo. Day 2 he asked Alan "so what'd you think" and Alan was confused, having thought it to be a joke. That day he had to go and buy said Xbox.
I'm listening to their podcast (Once We Were Spacemen) right now, though the episode where they talked about how they became friends was ages ago, so I might be misremembering some details. They also have an episode with the guy who directed the Uncharted fan film Nathan starred in, Allan Ungar.
And then both of them ended up in Halo as Buck and Mickey in ODST.
Which I did not know or remember from the podcast (though they may have mentioned it) because I've never played Halo myself :( Never been a console gamer unfortunately. Though protondb lists Master Chief Collection as Gold status so I may yet get to play it, it just happened that it came to PC when I was already an adult with little time for vidya :( Then by the time I got into my career enough that I didn't worry about hitting 8 hours a day in the office to stay employed, I'd forgotten it existed again. Aaand now I have new reasons for not having enough time for playing as much vidya as I'd like.
ME2 is amazing and ME1 was great. 3 had good mechanics but worse writing, and Andromeda was terrible on many fronts but the ability to change your build on the fly was cool.
When I talk about Exodus and Expanse Im talking more about the style of third-person sci-fi RPGs with companions.
Does anyone have any methods on studying Marx easily without losing focus and without losing memory, and what should I do if I don't have any motivation to study, mostly out of laziness?
And that after the success the last Mass Effect game was…
They've had 3 flops in a row, and the worst part is that they did absolutely no learning from any of them. Each failed for the same reason. Bland boring story, no risks, souless worlds from the studio that was known for epic deep lore based worlds. As sad as I am, EA and Bioware did it to themselves.
Everything EA touches loses its soul. EA was always this turbo-capitalist locust-plague of a company. 'Consume and destroy' is their unofficial company motto.
As soon as they bought Bioware it was just a matter of time.
Hey, I liked Andromeda! Maybe it just needed a few patches, I played it a few months after release and didn't see any of the bugs I remember people posting about.
I don't think you patch out the idea of 'exploring a new galaxy except someone else already did all the exploration for you'
I beat the whole game but thought it was bland as hell. Looking back, I feel like 90% of the game was just running from one side of the map to the other to collect some item and bring it back. None of the characters were very appealing especially the protagonist
I didn't finish it (I'm a serial quitter, I almost never finish games) but I enjoyed that Ryder was sort of an anti-Shepard. I played the Shepard trilogy as a Vanguard and even on the highest difficulty Vanguard!Shep is an unstoppable biotic death god, especially in 3 where Charge > Nova > Charge > Nova is possible. On the hardest difficulty in Andromeda, Ryder is a plucky underdog who has to somehow squeak by against enemies who frankly outclass them one-on-one (or at least my Ryder was; perhaps there is a stronger build I could have been using, but this one sold the fantasy).
Similarly I remember cracking up when Ryder tried to call a crew meeting about something important and immediately lost control of the room.
I don't remember much about the plot, tbh.
I played it a good while after launch. I couldn't find any of the goofy bugs either by then and I did actually like the beginning of the game. But I felt the story was the strongest at the beginning and then it became a bit formulaic. Overall though I didn't think it was a bad as some made it out to be but also not stellar of course.
They should make that failure of a game, Anthem, open source. No money to be made there. Make it so everyone knows just how bad. As an example of a terrible game and assuming terrible source code. Only 1 way to find out. I'm not still hopeful that it has huge potential. Nope nope nope.
Is there another gambling company that has as hobby mass murdering game studios? Or is EA rather unique in that?
They've lost me as customer. Didn't buy the BF either.
The masses were uneffected!
not gud enough, ea needs to BURN
For letting them have free reign and them squandering it?
BioWare did this entirely to themselves.
Were they about to unionize?
In other news, EA is allergic to money; explaining decades of canceled work, half baked releases, and other poor decisions.
I 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.
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.
I'm guessing ME4 looked more like ME:A or Anthem than ME1/2.
Good, MDK2 was the last good game they put out.
Now you'll get an Allah based RPG where you blow yourself up, so you can get to the 72 virgins.
Thanks Jared Kushner.
EA was declining way before saudis and kusner bought it, was a matter of time.
And the fans rejoiced over the closing of a game studio they didn't interact with for decades anyway.
Get fucked, all of you.
Sounds like EA is doubling down on live service games, Star Wars and sports. Not surprising, the industry has been moving away from the big AAA single player game culture for a long time. That might end up being an era that was linited to Millennials.
So much better game experience, but nowhere near the cash cow of people blowing money on cosmetics in live service games and pay to win. Even super low effort mobile games will frequently milk out way more cash.
Basically the good money is with low quality content, so good quality has to come out of enthusiasm for gaming, not from board rooms.