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.
Bioware was a ghost of its former long before their staff was cut.
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.
Died when EA took over, now it’s just a rotting corpse
Everything EA touches dies. Fuck EA
What about the sims
Edit: heh
I think others have said it better than I could, but yes, I include the blatant cash grab that the sims has become.
In case you weren’t aware, Paralives is a thing and looks really promising
remind me: when was the last sims game released?
Remind me: who published the first?
Yeah they are as trash as can be now, but they did make some good ones once upon a time.
the last major release was 11 years ago.
EA let the franchise rot for more than a decade, what does the release of the first have to do with anything??
It was good?
for its time? sure.
nowadays? not really…
And how much did it cost? The whole thing, I mean. Must people who buy a game want to play the content so the price of said content should be included. Somewhere in the region of $1000, isn’t it?
yeah, i think it’s cracked the 1000$ mark for all content. barely any discounts, and lots of content that REALLY should be in the base game is gated behind dlc.
and i mean content that was available in previous games, that traditionally would have been in the new base game…
pirating is basically the only realistic way to play all of the content now.
and on top of that the game does have some pretty egregious performance and UX issues…
Especially The Sims! But also especially Bioware!
The corpse puppets are multiplying in the industry.
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
Nothing augurs success like hearing about the “incredible talent” that just went to “other teams at EA” 🙃
Agile focused? My god, they are doomed
The whole thing reads as “we’re on the verge of being shut down but the brand and IPs still have value, so we’re given the bare minimum to push out ME5 and maybe get one more shot at a next game.”
How are they a credible game studio if they don’t understand that there’s treasure behind the waterfall?
That message was 5 days ago. I have no love for Bioware or their actions, but maybe we need to wait a little while longer before deciding “how that turned out”?
I have zero hope for me5
Yeah the, “Don’t worry Me5 is being worked on by our good team” was hilarious. Why didn’t they give Me4 to their good team?
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.
It didn’t do well because EA set them up to fail, as they have for years.
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?
Odd you cited GTA6 in relation to single payer. GTA5 single player is a great experience but it’s popularity and success is largely attributed to the multi player elements.
GTA 5 sold for 800 million in the first day as a single player game. The multiplayer only shipped a whole year later. GTA 5s single player was a cut above the rest at the time.
To be fair that was over 10 years ago…
My point is that it was the highest grossing game of all time within a week and none of that was because of multiplayer. It’s longevity is due to muliplayer but it was already stupidly popular before that.
The quality of the games, specifically writing and story telling. Something broke by the time of ME3 and never healed.
Technically, as in stability and execution, veilguard was extremely polished.
As others have said, if it would have been “drake century”, noone would have minded. It just failed to be the dragon age from the origins era wanted
bioware has been dead for ages but EA is still shit
Yeah, being bought by EA was considered a death sentence to good studios in the 90s already.
