Opinion: Gaming Continues To Be Awful As BioWare Shuts Down
by Sage Ashford
Last week, the gaming industry was rocked by the surprise shut-down of legendary RPG studio BioWare. In a blogpost entitled “Building EA’s Next Chapter”, Electronic Arts outlined their plans for the future, which involved laying off 400 people — including the remaining 50 employees working at BioWare. It’s sad news that feels like it’s been predicted by fans for several years now, particularly after the sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard never approached the numbers of Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t make what’s happening any less sad, especially in the face of other recent layoffs; like what’s going on at Xbox Game Studios, or with Epic Games laying off 1000 people earlier this year. It’s awful enough that another 400 people are out of work in a terrible job market, but BioWare shutting down feels like losing one more great game developer at a time when the older game development companies are becoming increasingly rare.
BioWare spent decades developing some of the finest western RPG experiences on the market, whether it was Baldur’s Gate and Jade Empire, or later franchises like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Losing them so Electronic Arts can develop genius ideas like “an open-world football game” just feels like crap icing on a garbage cake.
Of course, not everyone has been sad about this, as many have pointed out that BioWare hasn’t put out an excellent game since at least 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. In an era where a single bad game can get a studio shut down, BioWare’s had three different opportunities to get it right. Except, that’s not entirely correct, either.
The truth: every game BioWare released in the last decade has been marred by EA meddling. Certainly, the issues with Anthem are well-known, as Electronic Arts tried to force the idea of multiplayer games and BioWare tried to please them by developing something incredibly out of their wheelhouse. Predictably, it failed, feeling like a poorly-thought-out version of Destiny and lacking the worldbuilding, characters, and romance everyone loved about prior BioWare games.
Nearly all of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s problems can be laid solely at EA’s feet. It started development as a single-player game before EA decided that it needed to be a games-as-service project. Then it decided to switch it back to a single-player game. Yet, when the game was single-player again, EA never thought to let them fully reboot the project. Instead — as has been well-documented — they just kept delaying it by six months at a time, giving them the chance to make spot fixes rather than dramatically improve the game with a full multi-year delay. It’s the kind of mistake even most casual gamers would’ve known to avoid, making it baffling that a multi-billion dollar publisher didn’t get it.
Sure, BioWare has their own faults in some of this, and that’s also been well-documented. Still, it’s hard not to think how EA’s compulsion to homogenize every developer they buy is what really put BioWare into this situation. While so many idiots online try to drag their nonsensical culture war points into things, the truth is far more basic: EA forced BioWare onto engines ill-suited to the types of games they made. They tried to pull live service titles out of a company known for single-player experiences and just kept breaking a beloved studio more and more.
The leaked Mass Effect Universe trailer looks amazing, but, even now, it’s easy to imagine how EA would’ve found a way to screw that up too with their demands. This all sucks. But at least we have genius ideas like “Project Gridiron” coming.
