It’s really sad just how hard Bioware dropped off. From Baldur’s Gate and KoTOR to Andromeda and Anthem. Genuinely kinda depressing to see, they used to make such good shit and EA has thoroughly ruined them like they do with every studio they buy out
Especially in the game series that basically put BioWare on the map, that would be like Blizzard losing the Starcraft IP and another studio making Starcraft 3 and reinvigorating the entire RTS genre in the process, setting new standards for what an RTS is and should be.
I’m not sure they even noticed. These studio execs are far more obsessed with how to mint coin from Zoomers with the next freemium mobile game than they are with cultivating a quality franchise.
I mean… the most negative thing I’ve heard about Starfield is that it’s a bit empty, and doesn’t meet the (insanely high) bar that Skyrim set. A lot of people I know bought Starfield at launch, played it through once or twice, and although they stopped after that they didn’t have any really bad things to say.
Fallout 76 was a much worse game, with way more negative sentiment.
I don’t think that’s comparable. Starfield still mostly feels like their old games, it just hasn’t changed so the game feels like it’s 10+ years old versus any real innovation. Bethesda is just stubbornly frozen in time without any fresh ideas. Bioware now versus Bioware then is a much more noticeable difference, in my opinion.
If you see it like this yes. But then you can remember that for skyrim it was seen as the pinacle of its art at the time. As you say, Bethesda has been frozen in time since then, but it is a slow descent to nothingness. Because the world didn’t wait for them and independent studios are doing as well or better than what Bethesda is doing.
Another way to see it is that Bethesda needed 12 years to do what it did with skyrim. Many others did simply better.
With bioware they’re a shadow of their former self, but at least they tried to do new things. They failed, but even andromeda for example is not as empty of innovations as starfield feels.
IMO Bethesda survives only thanks to the devotion of its fans, but they’re irrelevant now.
I dunno, Starfield still has a ton of greatly written quests. Not all of the quests are great, or even good, but there’s still a lot of memorable moments in it. The main drawback of Starfield is its gameplay being fairly shallow by today’s standards.
I wouldn’t say Bethesda is irrelevant. I just think it’s long overdue for Todd to step away from the helm. Starfield was a fairly big success, so I think the numbers speak for themselves in showing they’re still a major player. That being said, I think if they don’t truly strike gold with TES6, that will likely be the last chance that most gamers will give them.
Baldur’s Gate 3, by Larian Studios, is amazing. It’s basically old-school BioWare but with current-day graphics. It’s so good that it shows how much of a mess BioWare games are now, especially because BioWare did BG1 and 2.
The writing is where the rushed final development really showed. Andromeda really frustrated me because there was a great story trying to break through the mediocrity of the writing of it.
I think the change was best illustrated by the ME trilogy already. You could practically observe the shift from exploring a deep and varied science fiction universe to “player character gets told by everyone how great player character is while being given stuff to do a pew-pew to”.
In all fairness though, they really delivered some good pew-pew by the end and could still salvage much of the character stuff. Andromeda just continued the previous trend ad extremum.
ME2 was actually my least favorite in the trilogy because of that shift (as well as how it completely failed to progress the Reaper plot line, leaving 3 to do the plot work of two games).
I’ve never understood this perspective, ME2 doesn’t involve the Reapers because of how ME1 concluded the story. Unless you wanted ME 2/3 to both be about the reaper war, there isn’t much for them to do during the years they’re travelling to the milky way. There has to be some other bad guy to focus on since you can’t advance a plot when the main antagonists aren’t there. I’d also argue that without the character work of 2, ME3 would fall flat with conflicts that don’t gut punch you. You’d never care about the Krogan arc as much if Mordin wasn’t around, and Tali/Legion were crucial in making the Rannoch plot feel alive. All of that emotion exists purely because of the excellent character work of the second game.
ME2 fleshed out the galaxy and it’s people, made it feel a little more cyberpunk, absolutely blew ME1’s art direction and voice work out of the water, and gave the most content out of the three games once you include recruitment/loyalty/N7 side missions/main plot missions/DLC.
Sure the collectors are a bit of a weird side quest, but it’s supposed to be Shepard’s darkest hour. Not their finest. The enemy needed to be scaled down so that the narrative can focus more on personal relationships and world building. ME2 absolutely delivered on that.
Iirc, it’s only been 3 or so years between the end of ME1 and the start of ME3. For like 2 of those 3 years, Shep was literally being rebuilt - and then between the end of ME2 and the start of ME3, we go from “Collectors are abducting people” to “holy fuck the Reapers are here” in 6 months or so. To me, that’s the weird whiplash - during the 2 years, the Reapers were doing… something, but practically as soon as Shep comes back from the dead, they are now invading??
Granted, this is being incredibly and obnoxiously nitpicky, but I always disliked that timing. Would’ve made more sense that ME2 took maybe a year after ME1 at most, then have ME3’s story start like a year or 2 after ME2 to at least give a little breathing room.
They were “doing something” that whole time, though. The moment Sovereign died they began travelling via standard FTL to the galaxy. It just took them that entire two years to do it. Meanwhile they set their errand boys on a mission to take out the most wildcard race that had ever stood against them. Humans.
The point of not having the breathing room was to push Shepard to their limit, they thought they’d have the time to build up resources/armies and then they get killed. Wake up two years later to find out no one’s done anything about the Reapers and it’s probably too late.
Had they not killed Shepard and just placed the games chronologically equidistant there would be very little tension in the “Can Shepard pull this off?” Department.
Is was very forgettable compared to the trilogy. Story was bland, many characters were uninteresting, some where annoying, not much new in terms of mechanics and a bunch of bugs. It wasn’t the worst game in recent years, but it was the worst Mass Effect.
It was better than ME3 for me. It was two short and too conservative with the scenario and characters, but there is a solid ground to it. ME3 just betrayed the saga IMO.
It’s really sad just how hard Bioware dropped off. From Baldur’s Gate and KoTOR to Andromeda and Anthem. Genuinely kinda depressing to see, they used to make such good shit and EA has thoroughly ruined them like they do with every studio they buy out
Baldur’s Gate 3 this year really showed just how far BioWare has fallen.
Wonder how BioWare felt when they got out-“BioWare RPG”’d by Larian
I wonder if that’s why they so suddenly added another year to the development of Dreadwolf.
Especially in the game series that basically put BioWare on the map, that would be like Blizzard losing the Starcraft IP and another studio making Starcraft 3 and reinvigorating the entire RTS genre in the process, setting new standards for what an RTS is and should be.
It’s downright embarrassing for BioWare.
I’m not sure they even noticed. These studio execs are far more obsessed with how to mint coin from Zoomers with the next freemium mobile game than they are with cultivating a quality franchise.
Hey there is worse: look at Bethesda and starfield!
I mean… the most negative thing I’ve heard about Starfield is that it’s a bit empty, and doesn’t meet the (insanely high) bar that Skyrim set. A lot of people I know bought Starfield at launch, played it through once or twice, and although they stopped after that they didn’t have any really bad things to say.
Fallout 76 was a much worse game, with way more negative sentiment.
I don’t think that’s comparable. Starfield still mostly feels like their old games, it just hasn’t changed so the game feels like it’s 10+ years old versus any real innovation. Bethesda is just stubbornly frozen in time without any fresh ideas. Bioware now versus Bioware then is a much more noticeable difference, in my opinion.
If you see it like this yes. But then you can remember that for skyrim it was seen as the pinacle of its art at the time. As you say, Bethesda has been frozen in time since then, but it is a slow descent to nothingness. Because the world didn’t wait for them and independent studios are doing as well or better than what Bethesda is doing.
Another way to see it is that Bethesda needed 12 years to do what it did with skyrim. Many others did simply better.
With bioware they’re a shadow of their former self, but at least they tried to do new things. They failed, but even andromeda for example is not as empty of innovations as starfield feels.
IMO Bethesda survives only thanks to the devotion of its fans, but they’re irrelevant now.
I dunno, Starfield still has a ton of greatly written quests. Not all of the quests are great, or even good, but there’s still a lot of memorable moments in it. The main drawback of Starfield is its gameplay being fairly shallow by today’s standards.
I wouldn’t say Bethesda is irrelevant. I just think it’s long overdue for Todd to step away from the helm. Starfield was a fairly big success, so I think the numbers speak for themselves in showing they’re still a major player. That being said, I think if they don’t truly strike gold with TES6, that will likely be the last chance that most gamers will give them.
Eli5? I thought everyone loved that game, I didn’t wanna try it cause I don’t like turn based
Baldur’s Gate 3, by Larian Studios, is amazing. It’s basically old-school BioWare but with current-day graphics. It’s so good that it shows how much of a mess BioWare games are now, especially because BioWare did BG1 and 2.
Didn’t know it was a different studio, thanks.
It’s because bioware made 1 and 2. And they did it pretty well. A competing studio made 3 and whupped them
I actually really liked Andromeda. It was very different than the original trilogy, but was super fun.
Combat is 10/10
Characters and writing were “My face is tired”/10
The writing is where the rushed final development really showed. Andromeda really frustrated me because there was a great story trying to break through the mediocrity of the writing of it.
I think the change was best illustrated by the ME trilogy already. You could practically observe the shift from exploring a deep and varied science fiction universe to “player character gets told by everyone how great player character is while being given stuff to do a pew-pew to”. In all fairness though, they really delivered some good pew-pew by the end and could still salvage much of the character stuff. Andromeda just continued the previous trend ad extremum.
ME2 was actually my least favorite in the trilogy because of that shift (as well as how it completely failed to progress the Reaper plot line, leaving 3 to do the plot work of two games).
I’ve never understood this perspective, ME2 doesn’t involve the Reapers because of how ME1 concluded the story. Unless you wanted ME 2/3 to both be about the reaper war, there isn’t much for them to do during the years they’re travelling to the milky way. There has to be some other bad guy to focus on since you can’t advance a plot when the main antagonists aren’t there. I’d also argue that without the character work of 2, ME3 would fall flat with conflicts that don’t gut punch you. You’d never care about the Krogan arc as much if Mordin wasn’t around, and Tali/Legion were crucial in making the Rannoch plot feel alive. All of that emotion exists purely because of the excellent character work of the second game.
ME2 fleshed out the galaxy and it’s people, made it feel a little more cyberpunk, absolutely blew ME1’s art direction and voice work out of the water, and gave the most content out of the three games once you include recruitment/loyalty/N7 side missions/main plot missions/DLC.
Sure the collectors are a bit of a weird side quest, but it’s supposed to be Shepard’s darkest hour. Not their finest. The enemy needed to be scaled down so that the narrative can focus more on personal relationships and world building. ME2 absolutely delivered on that.
Iirc, it’s only been 3 or so years between the end of ME1 and the start of ME3. For like 2 of those 3 years, Shep was literally being rebuilt - and then between the end of ME2 and the start of ME3, we go from “Collectors are abducting people” to “holy fuck the Reapers are here” in 6 months or so. To me, that’s the weird whiplash - during the 2 years, the Reapers were doing… something, but practically as soon as Shep comes back from the dead, they are now invading??
Granted, this is being incredibly and obnoxiously nitpicky, but I always disliked that timing. Would’ve made more sense that ME2 took maybe a year after ME1 at most, then have ME3’s story start like a year or 2 after ME2 to at least give a little breathing room.
They were “doing something” that whole time, though. The moment Sovereign died they began travelling via standard FTL to the galaxy. It just took them that entire two years to do it. Meanwhile they set their errand boys on a mission to take out the most wildcard race that had ever stood against them. Humans.
The point of not having the breathing room was to push Shepard to their limit, they thought they’d have the time to build up resources/armies and then they get killed. Wake up two years later to find out no one’s done anything about the Reapers and it’s probably too late.
Had they not killed Shepard and just placed the games chronologically equidistant there would be very little tension in the “Can Shepard pull this off?” Department.
I love ME2 to pieces, but Arrival dropping that bombshell really made it feel weird in hindsight.
Is was very forgettable compared to the trilogy. Story was bland, many characters were uninteresting, some where annoying, not much new in terms of mechanics and a bunch of bugs. It wasn’t the worst game in recent years, but it was the worst Mass Effect.
It was better than ME3 for me. It was two short and too conservative with the scenario and characters, but there is a solid ground to it. ME3 just betrayed the saga IMO.
Don’t forget Jade Empire, that game was tight
deleted by creator