We ain’t gonna lie. This one hurts:

If you don’t feel like squinting, it basically says that EA has shut down BioWare, and as a result, development on the latest Mass Effect game has ended.

We feel confident that about 90 percent of gamers already know who BioWare is. For decades they were the masters of action RPGs (role playing games). As their own statement reminds us, they made the legendary Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 (basically Dungeons and Dragons branded games). They made Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which regularly tops the list of best Star Wars games of any genre. They made the Dragon Age series (basically off-brand Dungeons and Dragons, if we are going to be honest). They made the mighty Mass Effect series.

And they made um… Anthem. Sigh. We’ll say more than that in a moment.

For non-gamers, the closest metaphor is we can think of is if Disney shut down Lucasfilm (the creators of Star Wars and Indiana Jones). On one hand, both BioWare and Lucasfilm have made some really amazing stuff in the past. But they have also made some real garbage in recent times, cratering the reputation of the studio. If Lucasfilm actually shut down, it would be sad but not entirely surprising. And we think most gamers, on balance, feel the same about BioWare.

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We are sure there will be a lot of autopsies coming out later, but we think two things killed BioWare. First, you can definitely chalk it up significantly to large game companies pushing single player studios into the live service arena. We alluded to this with Anthem, which was where BioWare was pushed by EA into making a live service game, and they had no talent for it, making the game into a catastrophic bomb. It also affected Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s development. That game was originally conceived as a live service game and while this author hasn’t played it, reviews generally seem to agree that it bears the scars of that terrible early decision.

But the studio also seems to have been a victim of the ‘go woke, go broke’ trend. Dragon Age: The Veilguard takes place in one of those pseudo-medieval fantasy settings (think Dungeons and Dragons or Lord of the Rings). And yet, somehow, suddenly that world has joined the transgender movement, including preferred pronouns, top surgery scars in the character creator, and even a lame-seeming plotline about how a transgender character faces family rejection because of their identity. We think a growing segment of the audience has had it up to here with politics ruining art, and because of the stink of wokeness, they stayed away.

And even putting aside ideology, our impression is it is just a terrible game, that stripped away what made the Dragon Age series special. This three-hour deep dive critique of the game is actually hostile to the ‘go woke, go broke’ criticism, but the author still thinks the game stank out loud:

We have come to think that wokeness doesn’t automatically ruin a piece of art. But it typically brings two problems with it. First, immersion is important, and overly woke or otherwise overly modern or current elements take you out of the movie/game/book or whatever. If you are watching a movie that supposedly takes place in 1776, and someone starts talking about their gender identity, it will take you out of the movie as surely as if someone shouted ‘cowabunga!’ Second, it is like the canary in the coal mine: It is an early sign that someone in the creative process has decided that the art needs to take a back seat to political messaging.

And both elements in the downfall of BioWare — the push to live service and going woke/going broke — are almost certainly the fault of EA. The live service thing is definitely their fault, but the wokeness was probably a corporate mandate, too. So, they likely did what EA told them to, it didn’t work, and now they are being shut down because they followed EA’s orders. We suspect someone who used to work for them is saying a bitter ‘I told you so’ right about now.

On to reactions:

The cut off text is simply "KILLED COMMAND & CONQUER."

Not all of them are BioWare casualties, but all of them are EA casualties.

That is true. You can still play the games, Mass Effect or otherwise. Most of their games are available on modern consoles. We are pretty sure all of them are available on PC.

This is allegedly the co-CEO of Cd Projekt Red (CDPR), a Polish studio that has (relatively) recently put itself on the map with The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, answering the question ‘how many Polaks does it take to make a banger RPG?’

(We kid. We have nothing against Polish people, but the joke was right there. You can’t expect us to resist that kind of temptation!)

Anyway, here is the cut off text:

And later they were great help when lending us their engine for Witcher 1, sharing their wisdom and even giving us a spot at their booth at E3. I had a pleasure to visit them a few times in Edmonton and also host them in our Warsaw office. Very sad for the people affected, but also sad to see a legendary brand go down. Not a great day in the games industry.

But ask yourself why EA was bought out in the first place. A healthier company wouldn’t have been. 

Also, we wonder how much the Saudis will tolerate wokeness. We suspect the woke employees might go broke.

This is from a man identifying himself as ‘Project Director / Executive Producer at @bioware.’

We had our own concerns about whether it would come out and be good. We suppose we will never know.

We detect sarcasm.

We understood that reference.

The cut off text (with mild censorship and some explanations in brackets):

We all spent a lot of hours on those!

But in the later DA [Dragon Age] and ME [Mass Effect] games every conversation with somebody in my party I took the a******e path because I really didn’t feel like getting propositioned for gay romance. 

And then after I (like most gamers apparently!) quit buying their stuff, they went even more hard core with all the transsexual stuff. As soon as that Pulling a Barth clip leaked all over the internet it was the kiss of death because nobody is into that s**t. And the people who claim to be into that s**t for internet clout, there aren’t enough of them playing video games for it to matter. 

So on one level it makes me sad to see the company that made some wonderful games go under. But really, overall? F*******G GOOD. Let that be a lesson to the big game companies that the audience is tried of getting beaten over the head with this stuff.

Yes, that is the other end of this. We are seeing a lot of formerly great companies go under but we think it can be best interpreted as a market correction, in slow motion. Ultimately, they are for-profit companies and sooner or later they will either stop doing the things that harm their profit margins such as going woke, or they will go under and another company will step in and actually give the customers what they want.

And very few gamers want this woke garbage.

Market corrections aren’t pretty, but they are sometimes necessary.

That would be the denial stage of mourning. We can relate.

That would be making fun of the uglified faces in Mass Effect: Andromeda. While we think Mass Effect 1-3 are stone cold classics (you can buy them today on most modern consoles in the ‘Legendary Trilogy’ bundle), we have avoided Andromeda because we have heard pretty bad things.

Many people were referencing this classic from Iowahawk:

The cut off text:

I say that with Knights of the Old Republic being my third favorite game of all time, and the Mass Effect trilogy as my fifth favorite collection of games of all time.

We honestly forgot about the ridiculous push up scene that went viral when we started writing this piece.

To get deep in the nerd weeds, ‘N7 Day’ is November 7, when fans of the Mass Effect series celebrate the series. This is because the protagonist of the series, Commander Shepard, is labeled an ‘N7,’ thus, November 7. It’s bit like how May 4 is called Star Wars Day, because of the pun ‘May the fourth be with you.’ Some also celebrate the ‘Revenge of the Sixth,’ but we think that is one pun too many.

That’s roughly what we have heard, going back to that Iowahawk reference. Ultimately a company is a collection of people and if you remove enough people, is it even the same company anymore? At some point, the answer is ‘no.’ It might be better, it might be worse, but it is not the same. And logically, if the same people who made BioWare's classics left BioWare  and joined or formed a new company, we might see similar magic again. Maybe that is the bargaining stage of grief, but it’s not illogical.

Pretty much.

Meanwhile, this guy collected some of the worst moments with Veilguard (including the aforementioned push up scene), with some commentary and even laugh tracks put into the audio:

Sorry, folks, but this author just died of cringe. This post was actually finished by a cat running over our keyboard.

Seriously, with our PlayStation Plus subscription, we can play this game for free, and we can’t bring ourselves to do it. We suppose we will sometime, after we finish the games we want to play. Any day now…

Bonus points if you caught the Batman: Arkham Knight reference.

*Snort.*

Well, it is not impossible for these franchises to go on without BioWare. A different developer made Baldur’s Gate III, and by all accounts hit it out of the park so hard, that it might have killed the series in a different way. Larian Studios made that game, and, apparently, they are not interested making a sequel, and many other studios are passing on making a sequel because they are afraid they won’t be able to live up to the quality of Larian’s game. The game is supposed to be that good. So the series might die because one of the games is too good.

What a world we live in.

Finally, about the title:

All credit goes to Marshall McPeak, for inspiring the title. The character he is showing, Tali’Zorah vas Normandy nar Rayya (or just ‘Tali’), is a fan favorite saying a phrase in the Quarian language that literally translates to ‘By the homeworld I hope to see someday.’ After a robot apocalypse on their homeworld, the Quarians were forced to wander the galaxy, unable to return home and unable to establish a new home and that phrase refers to their longing to reclaim their homeworld. So if anyone out there is saying ‘ackshully, it doesn’t translate to goodbye’ you would be technically correct…

…but in the games, she often used it as a farewell, including the final farewell when a person dies, so we think it still works.

In other news, this author is a nerd and proud of it. So there.

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