BioWare (2017-present)
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| BioWare | ||||||||||||||||
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 "Everybody's got a fear of something."
"Not everybody." "Sockpuppets." "Where?! Where?!" | ||||||||||||||||
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BioWare is a Canadian video game developer located in Edmonton, Alberta. It was founded in February 1995 by newly graduated medical doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, alongside Trent Oster, Brent Oster and Marcel Zeschuk. The company is owned by Electronic Arts since 2007.
Bad Qualities
- They managed to kill the Mass Effect franchise (at least temporarily) with its underwhelming fourth entry Mass Effect: Andromeda.
- Their recent game, Anthem, was very bad since it's a broken online game and players have to pay for player subscription in order to play (which they stopped updating).
- They have a habit of releasing important parts of the storylines for their games as DLC, most notably with Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, thus forcing gamers to pay extra for content that should have come with the game.
- Their newer RPGs have attempted to get rid of the older "paragon" and "renegade" morality systems, but have replaced them with systems that end up making the dialogue choices feel largely irrelevant.
- Some of the developers are notable leftists, supporters of Anita Sarkeesian and many of them have a history of controversy:
- Jenifer Hepler, a writer, hated playing games and even wanted them to have a "skip gameplay" button, even though the main point of games is, you know, to play them, right?
- Manveer Heir, a former developer who co-founded Brass Lion Entertainment, was a notable racist who made prejudiced tweets against white people.
- One of the 3D animators, Allie Leost, stated that she hated all men.
- David Crooks, a former BioWare employee who is currently working on Motive Studios, mocked TotalBiscuit after the latter died from cancer. Casey Hudson had to apologize on BioWare's behalf to the Bain family.
- Sam Maggs, a former BioWare writer who also works for The Mary Sue, claimed that she was "virtually raped" in Grand Theft Auto V.
- Related to the above, they pander to leftists arguably more than any other major developer out there, with all their games since at least Mass Effect 3 being filled to the brim with left-wing propaganda.
- They also pointlessly censored certain camera angles in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in order to remove the showing of female character's butts, despite them not having any negative effect on the characters in any way (although this can be restored back on the PC version via modding).
- An article by Jason Schreier recently exposed the atrocious work environment and development practices at the studio, as such in-office politics, unreasonable crunch time, feedback being ignored, games being cobbled together in the final 18-24 months of development, and anxiety and depression being so commonplace that it might as well be an epidemic! This is why Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem ended up in such half-assed states. The studio's response to said article was ill-conceived and cowardly in nature. It's worth noting that all of the issues highlighted in the article were present since Dragon Age: Inquisition' first entered development.
- Like Rockstar Games, they and Nintendo don't have a good relationship, as they refused to make games on their consoles or handhelds, the only games were Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the DS, MDK 2 for the WiiWare (Wii), Mass Effect 3 for the Wii U, and absolutely nothing for the 3DS or the Switch.
- In fairness, this can be partly blamed on a lot of their games in the 2000s being Xbox exclusives (at least initially), and then Electronic Arts refusing to support Nintendo's platforms to any real degree. Apparently, a DS-exclusive Mass Effect spin-off game that would have been released around the same time as Mass Effect 2 got quite far into production, but EA forced BioWare to cancel it because they didn't think the game would be profitable.
- They are the kings of poorly done massive cliffhangers. They ensure that players play the game and find out the game was all for nothing. BioWare seems to think cliffhangers are relevant when in reality they are obnoxious and overused to death.
Good Qualities
- Before Electronic Arts ruined BioWare's reputation in 2017, they were a better company in the past, though nowadays they aren't as bad as their parent company.
- Some of their games from this period have still been pretty good, including Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.
- Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the collection of the first three games in the series was a well-done remaster, and might have salvaged the series' reputation enough to make another sequel viable.
- They have moved back to using the Unreal Engine, following Andromeda and Anthem's poor usage of the Frostbite engine.
- Mass Effect 4 will be using Unreal Engine 5. Legendary Edition (the remaster of the original trilogy), which came out in May 2021, used UE3. Although the engine was very outdated by then, the game still had amazing graphics.
- They used UE3 in the Legendary Edition because the Kismet scripting system in Unreal 3 is not available in UE4, so moving to a new engine would mean remaking the entire game from scratch.
- Mass Effect 4 will be using Unreal Engine 5. Legendary Edition (the remaster of the original trilogy), which came out in May 2021, used UE3. Although the engine was very outdated by then, the game still had amazing graphics.
- They announced that they dropped multiplayer mode for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in favor of just making it a single-player game after canceling the reworking of Anthem.
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