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
No. Not even once. I don't think I've ever seen works that do less with the concept of moral ambiguity except like TV shows for toddlers. There is more moral ambiguity in an average Sunday school lecture, an episode of Friends deal with ethical questions more complexely (Were they in fact on a break?)
Also wrong.
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
What do you mean? You get great moral choices like: Help save an entire race of beings from extinction OR use a giant death laser to blow up their home planet and murder them all! What a complex moral quandary!
Do you want to continue the slow genocide of an entire sapient species, condemning an entire culture to continuously build literal "Piles of children who never lived", or do you not do that.
I swear the genophage was setup in the beginning to narratively be a sort of mirror of what and why the Reapers were doing what they were (back with the original "the Reapers are the Anti-Spirals we have at home" story), to effectively hold up a mirror to the Council empires and go "look at yourselves, you are just little Reapers already" and then that got lost along the way as the Reapers were dumbed down into just being big caretaker machines that were supposed to preserve life but oh no the definition of "preserve" was too vague so they're just systematically eradicating it all after taking a semen sample and even their core control program is just like "damn we sure do suck huh, shame we don't have the ability to just stop doing this cause I didn't think to include any sort of off switch or 'hey we should revise the plan a bit' function in any of the giant murder bots I made to save people by eating them. Damn I don't even know what I was thinking that sounds so clearly wrong and stupid now that I say it outloud" and then you use the aftermarket off switch you made yourself to solve it all.
The really funny thing is that Mass Effect and Gurren Lagann were released in the same year. So the similarity in ME's apparent original plot is complete coincidence. It's also funny that Gurren Lagann just did the entire concept way better and way more coherently.
Another funny "wait this is literally just the Anti-Spirals but worse" example is the Witness from Destiny 2, which not only is ideologically just a more vapid rendition of the Anti-Spirals it's also aesthetically literally just a cheap copy of the Anti-Spirals.
This depends.... Is their leader a krogan you coincidentally met and allied with or his mad brother. The piles of children will be worth it for the latter apparently.
Obsidian's games are a leap in the morally complex direction, and they're still for babies. Writing in large video game projects still has a long way to go lol
Do you want to let the person with no sense of loyalty, who murdered their entire clan, and oversaw horrific sexual violations of every women including her lover for her short term benefit and the long term detrimental of literally the entire world have control of the murder artifact, or do you let the selfless genius who made it end its reign of terror.
Also if you pick the first option no matter which other options you pick the artifact will never be useful for anyone 😀
This is our most complex series of choices and the one we tell our writers to aspire to!
Wait which one was this🤣
Dragon Age.
Orzimmar, the choice of what to do with the anvil.
But to be fair Orzimmar is also the home of the one instance in the entire library of Bioware games where picking the morally dubious choice actually pans out. No matter what else you do it is literally always the good option to pick the serial assasinating usurper prince who would do anything for power, even though his choice of people to assassinate possibly includes you several times.
If you give him what he wants, he overturns bad traditions and... uhhh... is unwilling to compromise on his morality when it comes to the possible misuse of powerful but evil tools??????
Because once the ending slides roll around the conservative politician and personal keeper of tbe legacy of the last king (That the usurper prince probably had murdered, along with the rest of his family) who repeatedly stresses tbat he will never compromise on their old ways, WILL compromise on their old ways when the option to do so is bad. Also he's petty against you specifically for no reason?
Yo and mfs tried to praise it over mass effect but as someone who has read books and watched movies they're both
You got any more dragon age destruction feed me
the way resource allocation works is a limiting factor in how meaningful decisions can get. nobody is going to make all that only to have a vanishing percent of players see it through
Not nobody. Fallout: New Vegas has all kinds of tiny details that most players will never see, and that's a whole ass open world game made in less than 2 years. It's entirely doable, either with insane crunch like game dev studios usually do, or by taking some extra time.
Please destroy ME in detail since I never played Dragon Age
Also what games or media did this kind of thing well
Okay this whole thing is spoilerific for the mass effect series.
Mass Effect has a literal moral binary with a points system. Depending on your actions you are awarded "Good boy" points (Paragon) or "Bad ass" (Renegade) points, they are explicitly not meant to be "good" and "evil" (But they are).
That is the marketing for it, and I feel ok with going with it for as long as it makes sense. (Which isn't long because the game writers themselves framed this as Jean Luc Picard vs Dirty Harry, and if you think about it, that spectrum doesn't actually make any sense)
Point are awarded both for the binary choices you make at inflection points and for how you conduct yourself (Being rude or violent to a reporter is renegade, appealing to people's reason is paragon). The point supposedly is that the paragon choices are for compassionate and heroic actions, you supposedly get it for favouring non-violence, talking things out and standing up for your moral principles; while Renegade points are awarded for ruthless actions, for doing what needs to be done, and at inflection points for taking a stand that may be morally dubious but will have benefits in the future - Also racism gets you renegade points.
You start off by being given two sets of 3 choices as to your background. The most paragon option is being from a privileged military family and being a war hero who fought bravely against slave traders, the most renegade option is being a street urchin war criminal. Not a great start as to establishing these as equally viable, also pretty fucked up to establish street urchin status as equivalent to being a war criminal. But ok.
I don't want to go over the whole plot of all 3 games. But basically you are given a series of binary choices, and asked to pick one. And the renegade option is always the wrong choice. The paragon choice is always right. Not merely because it means you don't do whatever morally questionable thing the choice involves, but because it is always revealed later that whatever bad thing the renegade choice was meant to avert doesn't come to pass, or whatever benefit is meant to be extracted from the moral compromise is either irrelevant or sometimes even less impactful than the support of the people who you didn't let bad things happen to. This is in part because they didn't want to write and design entire series of separate branching narratives
At one point for instance you are asked whether you want to let a scientist torture an autistic child to build an anti geth defense system. See he is autistic so he speaks computer because he thinks like one (Great writing!) Now see the idea of a "necessary" weapon powered by a tortured child is at base a choice worthy of depiction in media. Do you walk away from Omelas? But you don't have any conflicts with the geth as a group after this, and the skirmishes with individual geth you do have this doesn't have any effect on, the geth conflict gets solved without this making any difference. And not only that but you get a numerical score of how strong the war effort is, and I'm pretty sure the autistic child untortured gives you a higher points score than the weaponised autism torture device.
Do you let the Rachni queen live? They did try to take over the galaxy and do fucked up mind shit! But if she dies that's the end of her species. You've done a genocide. But can she be trusted? If you save her then she promises she can be of use to you later, and she will make the rachni choose a better path, but the rachni also show up as enemies later on oh ho ho... except If you kill her the rachni are still around for uhhh reasons, don't think about it. Except these rachni are all evil and can't be reasoned with and won't help you.
Do you choose to sacrifice the alliance'a fleet to save the galactic government who don't respect humanity hopefully winning the respect of the galactic community through your heroism, or do you focus on killing the big bad and preserve humanity's strength in the aftermath and let humanity assert itself on the galactic stage.
Turns out the council just respawns with new names and it makes literally no difference to the story, the only impact being that you get like two stray lines about selfish humans.
Oh but there is the war readiness score again, surely your navy having been blown up makes a difference. No because the council flagship is stronger than the difference in the strength of tbe rebuild fleet.
I don't even think you get better quest rewards in any instances. Which means in every single single situation you are given the option to resolve things one way or a strictly inferior way for no reason except to be a dick.
Yooo well said
In addition, the more renegade your character, you take on more facial deformities. I'm told this is a direct cop from KOTOR and a parallel mechanic there for Sith vs Jedi decision making. Because as all citizens of Treatlandia know, good people are pretty and bad people are ugly. As I recall in 2, your character won't reach the apex of power unless you are 100% paragon or renegade
Did anyone play Frost punk 2? I know little about the series
Frostpunk 2 has a difficulty that meant I completed the game without doing any of the (By the game designated as) morally questionable stuff without quite understanding half the gameplay mechanics.
It also doesnt deal with the moral issue as well, since all the things it will ding you for doing are clearly marked as such and you have to get rid of them to do the "good" end.
You instituted state run media and survived, but at what cost?!
The game has silly politics sometimes, but is pretty fun for a city builder/survival game that my attention span can survive lol
The biggest problem I had with Frostpunk was the idea that you're literally fighting for humanity's survival, and any sort of compromise with "authoritarianism" is permanent and irrevocable, the idea that your people could suffer through even just a few months of hard work to ensure their own survival is just non-existent in the game. Every "bad" choice is just permanent, but the game takes place over the course of a few months, how pampered do these survivors need to be when their own literal survival is on the line.