And not because of “doomposting,” but because the business and political reality around BioWare has fundamentally changed.
BioWare built its name on: Queer romance options, Player-driven identity, Moral ambiguity, Rebellion against authority, Stories about oppression, faith, politics, resistance, and personal freedom
Those themes directly contradict the values and censorship rules of the entity that now owns EA:
Saudi Arabia’s PIF (93.4% ownership pending deal)
A state where: LGBTQ+ identity is criminalized, Media is censored if it challenges religious/state values, Art and entertainment are used as political tools, Public criticism is dangerous, Female autonomy is restricted
BioWare’s brand is literally everything Saudi cultural authority rejects.
any future BioWare games like Mass Effect 5, any new IP, any Dragon Age game will require approval from an ownership structure that prioritizes: “Global market compatibility", “Brand safety”, “Cultural alignment”, “Risk minimization”
BioWare’s storytelling approach is the opposite of all of that.
Even before PIF stepped in: EA removed branching storytelling (“too expensive, most players won’t see it”), They cut replayability, They replaced choice-based design with linear action systems, They pushed Frostbite on every project, They caused the departures of nearly every foundational writer, creative director, and systems designer
BioWare was already surviving on legacy fumes.
Now? Their new majority owners oppose nearly everything BioWare stands for.
Does that mean BioWare will shut down? Not necessarily.
But the BioWare that existed, the BioWare of Inquisition, Origins, DAO, ME1–3, KOTOR is basically dead artistically.
Even if the studio name continues, the creative soul is gone or will be tightly controlled.
At this point, preserving the legacy of BioWare storytelling probably won’t come from EA at all, it’ll have to come from ex-BioWare talent forming independent studios or fan-driven projects and studios like Larian and Owlcat
It’s funny because its kinda right. BioWare did build an image of moral ambiguity - its just that that was a marketing sham even within the studio.
When you look at Dragon Age: Origins you have a game that was meant to be ‘dark fantasy’ but all the difficult choices got left behind in the cutting floor. The most egregious example is how they went back and gave you an easy way out of the choice regarding Redcliffe’s fate.
BioWare never had the heart to actually follow through that idea of moral ambiguity and once the best thing about Dragon Age 2 was the fact that they churned it out in like a year (which, to be fair, is kinda impressive) the series’ tone changed irrevocably with Dragon Age 3.
in defense of the people who worked on dragon age 2, it wasn’t scoped as a full numbered sequel and was sabotage/promoted to that because EA was bad before the saudi acquisition.
it is mildly bemusing that what EA did to all those studios it bought will probably happen to EA itself.
Oh, I did not mean that in a denigrating way. It just goes to show that a project is well and truly fucked by management when the people involved are (justifiably) proud of just getting it out the door in record time. There’s also context to be had here because RPGs are hard to make and, at the time, the EA Gold Standard was yearly FIFA sequels. The notion that BioWare could get something out in a year, even something as flawed as Dragon Age 2, seemed like a win for the devs at release.
Of course at the time everyone who played the game had the taste that almost every creative choice in the game was made to try and save on labour and time as much as possible. Setting a whole RPG in a city is if anything a cool idea. But it couldn’t reach its potential in Dragon Age 2.
I still genuinely like the idea and the choice on how to approach this (if you don’t change the area then change the time, IIRC the game takes palce over a decade so Kirkwall has some significant changes in setting) enough that I actually do like DA2 but realistically it was pretty trash.
yeah, the same things that forced them into that idea also kept them from doing it justice.
nah i was just specifying that i wasn’t defending the game itself. there’s a couple interesting ideas in the story but everybody other than EA shareholders deserved better