Games

I picked up Andromeda for my Series S recently because it was on sale for ~£3 or so. Never played it during its rough launch. I did play a little of the original ME games when I was hanging out with friends back in the day but not a super fan. Although I've spent a lot of time on Bioware's old Infinity Engine games.

I think that game might be underrated. This could just be a patient gamer moment but the writing is pretty good and I'm finding the initial sidequests to be immersive and compelling. Moment to moment gameplay is smooth too, with combat being a lot better than how I remembered the others to be. Interesting playing it when it was pretty much the beginning of the end for Bioware.

I don't think Bioware can cook anything good at this point, but I also think that a studio of 90-99 people should be more than enough to deliver a good RPG, as long as they drop the AAA graphics and focus way more on systems and writing. And it's not like the project can't scale up down the line, but it feels to me like it's a good idea to have less voices and a more concise/streamlined direction at the early scopes of making a game. We have had indie studio after indie studio showing that it's definitely more than possible to cook a masterpiece with 5, 10, 20 people. 100 people seems like a very reasonable number for starting a big project in that way.

Bioware was a ghost of its former long before their staff was cut.

Died when EA took over, now it's just a rotting corpse

We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare.

Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio. We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.

Today’s news will see BioWare become a more agile, focused studio that produces unforgettable RPGs.

https://blog.bioware.com/2025/01/29/bioware-studio-update/

Look how that turned out lol

I have zero hope for me5

I don't understand why anyone expected anything different when DAV clearly did not do well.

Still can't believe they really thought it was going to be well received. They really thought they were cooking.

EA doesn't know how to predict a single player game's sales figures then gets mad when their crazy high expectations are met with only a merely slightly profitable game instead of wildly. Kills the studio rather than learning from mistakes.

Meanwhile GTA 6 is one of the most anticipated games of the decade and other single player studios are thriving. Hm what is the difference, what could it be?

bioware has been dead for ages but EA is still shit