Much has been said about the way generative AI is worming its way into game development pipelines, and David Gaider—former BioWare writer and lead writer on the first three Dragon Age games—recently spoke to GamesRadar about some of the dangers he foresees for future teams working with these tools.

Gaider said that AI's lack of consistency would make appraising, troubleshooting, and cleaning up its work difficult. The process of having to go back and touch up its output, not knowing why it spat out a certain result "would be frustrating as hell … it's not ready for prime time," he said. "There's just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be."

The writer also told GamesRadar that the idea that AI can replace rote tasks often handed off to junior developers isn't necessarily a good thing, either: "How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?"

AI tools have been used in a 'creative' sense as well—the explanation often goes that they're just used for placeholders or helping with early prototypes and concepts—but Gaider is wary of this application too, given that artists haven't agreed to have "their data pillaged." The reaction to the new Crazy Taxi game suggests that a lot of players are also skeptical of AI's creative applications.

Many other devs were quoted in GamesRadar's feature, and while not all of them shared the exact same concerns about AI, their feelings were along the same lines. Iron Lung and Dusk creator David Szymanski, for instance, said he's not "not categorically against AI as a whole technology" but finds it a bridge too far to "hand wave all the ethical concerns about plagiarism, environmental impact, and job security." Marvel Rivals executive producer Danny Koo said the worries about plagiarism were of particular concern, saying the team avoided AI art tools to ensure the game's assets weren't "poisoned."

The ongoing Neverwinter Nights mod campaign, Swordflight, feels like the CRPG equivalent of fans circulating the tapes, a forbidden, perfect bootleg of the greatest hardcore set ever performed. It's one of the most cleverly-designed, bracingly difficult RPG campaigns I've ever played, and it's a hobby project one guy has been cranking away at since 2008.

Swordflight is a series of discrete playable chunks or "modules" for Neverwinter Nights, BioWare's awkward middle child between Baldur's Gate 2 and Knights of the Old Republic (that we still can't help but love). NwN's Aurora Toolset is one of those legendary mod platforms that balanced ease of use with power and flexibility, resulting in a flowering of fanmade projects.

Think the Doom or Thief mod communities: Not everything is a gem, but so many people took to Aurora and so many projects were made that the best of the best still encompasses several full games' worth of RPG goodness. The Alazander modules, Aielund Saga, and Swordflight are among that best of the best.

Swordflight's first module came out in 2008, and its most recent released in 2022, with at least one more chapter on the way to finish the story. It's a zero-to-hero D&D epic like very few I've ever played: There are low-level adventures like The Temple of Elemental Evil and plenty of level 1-20 campaigns, but very few games or series of games that capture the feeling of coming back to the same character and dungeon master over a span of years.

Swordflight, the original Baldur's Gate duology, and arguably Owlcat's 100-hour campaigns like Kingmaker fit the bill. Many RPG designers rightly fear D&D's early levels, wanting to juice you up to level 3+ as quickly as possible to get you to that midgame sweet spot and past early game one-hit kill, missing your attacks doldrums, but Swordflight creator Rogueknight333 embraced that design challenge.

He felt no need to rush players through Neverwinter Nights' 40-level adaptation of D&D 3E rules, but instead has luxuriated at every possible stage of character development. Swordflight's first chapter, for example, is easily a 10+ hour experience, but you need a fairly optimized character and completionist play to reach level five by the end of it.

Making guys

To date, I've only played the first two of five finished chapters, but multiple times each. That 60 hours or so of roleplaying has hit me with one of the worst cases of reroll-itis I've ever caught, tied with Owlcat's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Neverwinter Nights has a particularly excellent version of D&D's class system⁠—its 11 base and 12 prestige classes presaged Baldur's Gate 3's smorgasbord of 48 subclasses and Wrath of the Righteous' triple-digit madness.

That's already led me to plenty of hemming, hawing, buildcrafting, and rerolling in other Neverwinter Nights campaigns, but Swordflight squeezes even more juice with its gnarly difficulty. Like Wrath of the Righteous, part of the rerolling appeal is wanting to make a guy strong enough to rise up to the challenge.

Swordflight made me look at Neverwinter Nights, a game I'd played for hundreds of hours before even touching the mod campaign, in a whole new light. Rogueknight333 increased the duration of all potions and other magical buffs while making it all but impossible to rest anywhere but an inn with the door locked. Creative restriction of how often you can rest is a big part of difficulty balancing in any D&D-derived game, and most just let you take a nap to get all your spells and health back whenever you want.

Swordflight's restriction makes it a game about planning, resource management, getting maximum value out of every tool at your disposal, and mounting little expeditions from your safe zones.There are potions I never would have given the time of day to in base NwN that become precious commodities in Swordflight⁠—shout out to Barkskin⁠—and you basically never want to go into a fight unbuffed.

Spellcasters have to be super-disciplined with their limited spell slots, but Swordflight makes up the difference with a generous and creative economy of consumable magic items. The aforementioned potions, but also wands, rods, and assorted geegaws. More than pure wizards or warriors, Swordflight rewards adaptability, being a fantasy boy scout with a tool for every occasion, and having a build that can effectively use as many magic items as possible.

Rogue and bard multiclasses are killer in my experience, but you also have to be able to tank or solo incredibly challenging combat encounters. Swordflight carcinization, in my experience, bends all builds toward some flavor of JRPG protagonist "jack of all trades spellsword who also hits like a truck," but even in this niche, there's a ton of variety. I've rocked:

• Fighter / Bard / Red Dragon Disciple
• Fighter / Rogue / Weapon Master
• Rogue / Paladin / Shadowdancer

And I'm feeling the urge to make yet another Swordflight guy, this time maybe a Rogue / Fighter / Shadowdancer with a greatsword to Hulk smash sneak attack helplessly knocked down opponents.

Something that's always struck me is that these deep systems were always there in Neverwinter Nights, waiting like a sculpture in a chunk of marble, but no one ever took advantage of them. It took the unique perspective of this non-professional designer to tease it out, and that's just cool to me.

[Paladin]: "Cool special Paladin dialogue goes here"

Another draw to constant rerolling is how much Swordflight takes your race, class, alignment, and prior choices into account at seemingly every turn. In the starting area of chapter one, people will comment on your class, there are dozens of special alignment and skill interactions, and one jerk has unique racist dialogue for every possible character creation choice⁠—at least he's equal opportunity, I guess.

In Neverwinter Nights, every character race is almost always suboptimal compared to human, given our extra feat at level one. Swordflight's difficulty further encourages powergaming, but its high degree of written reactivity makes it so much more meaningful than usual to go with your heart and pick something fun. The fact that my customary half-orc is at least a little bit disadvantaged, requiring a mechanical sacrifice on my part, lends the choice even more meaning and value to me here. It's like rooting for the White Sox: You gotta really love being an orc to stick it out in Swordflight.

Chapter two introduces special side quests by class, some better than others. Fighters get to clear some jerk's basement of golems, while rogues get a full Thieves' Guild questline. That last one gets to one of the weirder bits I love about Swordflight, part of the reason I often refer to it as RPG "outsider art:" Author Rogueknight333's very specific, exacting standard of ethics and how he applies them.

Every single object stolen earns you an alignment shift toward evil. Even just unlocking an owned chest or disarming its trap: Evil. Killing wild animals unprovoked? Now that's a point toward chaos, a distinction I'd definitely argue with. Swordflight chapters one and two both take place in Calimshan, a slave society in the Forgotten Realms, and I chafe against how Swordflight defines "law," "good," "evil," and "chaos" in such a context.

But it's so good at letting you roleplay and own your choices, I love encountering these disconnects with my far-removed dungeon master. It feels like I'm in conversation with the game and its creator, and this unfamiliar moral code makes for something truly substantial to push on and roleplay against. This is one of the only games where I'm ever comfortable being "Chaotic Evil," for a given value of both chaos and evil.

Swordflight's prose and dialogue can be stiff and voluminous, but it tells an interesting yarn with some clever twists and mechanical flourishes. Chief among them: You're not actually the protagonist here. The true hero is endearingly annoying, YA novel lead girl wannabe Zarala Galhadr, while your created character sits at the intersection of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gurney Halleck. Your own, personal development on D&D's moral spectrum is mirrored by your ward and tracked across Swordflight's chapters.

There's so much more I could gush about, but I should try getting a character past chapter two first. RPG blogger Lilura1 is how I first heard about Swordflight, and she has a number of resources and guides dedicated to the series, as well as an interview with creator Rogueknight333.

Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition is compatible with Swordflight and every fanmade module I've tested, and can frequently be found on sale on GOG and Steam⁠—I might buy this game yet again in the upcoming Steam Summer Sale to see how it plays on Steam Deck. Swordflight itself, meanwhile, can be downloaded for free from the Neverwinter Vault, and you can support Rogueknight333 on Patreon.

It's no secret that the big-budget videogame industry is in a baffling state at the moment—despite games being a larger industry than movies and music combined, studios keep getting shut down, people keep getting laid off, projects keep getting cancelled. Games are both one of the most lucrative entertainment products out there and seemingly incapable of generating cash for anybody.

Per a video from Mark Darrah, a former producer at BioWare whose work includes the Dragon Age games, videogames could stand to learn a little from Hollywood and the rise of streaming services.

Now, I know the instinctive gut reaction to that idea isn't great—if there's one thing that annoys me more than microtransactions, it's streaming services (though it's a pretty close race). Still, Darrah does make some fairly decent points in comparing the two industries.

Movies have "a very strong degree of gatekeeping," Darrah says. "I could make a videogame and put it on Steam and potentially sell 2 million copies even if I have zero dollars of marketing, even if I have no connections in the industry. I probably won't, but I can … There's a curation that's happening in movies that isn't happening as effectively in games."

Instead, movies enjoy a "model where they start with a pretty expensive experience, and then as it descends down through its lifespan, the audience that's being addressed is getting larger and larger and larger. The amount of money that's being made per viewer is getting less and less and less, but over time you are reaching a very broad audience."

In other words, movies move from theatres, to streaming services, to the used market or DVD collections—and as Darrah raises, movies have ways of getting the same fan to put money in the system multiple times. Someone who liked a film in theatres might, for example, buy the boxset a few years later.

Contrast this to videogames, Darrah argues, which have found a way to "make an immense amount of money from some of the players" through live service whales, "way more than anyone is spending watching Star Wars in theatres over and over again … but that model has essentially removed the quest for new and different business models.

"The way we currently have subscriptions set up, they don't tend to make very much money for most games that are on those services—some games make a bunch, a lot of games make very little," which is a problem, Darrah posits, as it encourages developers to optimise for those platforms: "It encourages degenerative design in order to juice the numbers and make yourself more money."

Darrah doesn't have exact suggestions for how videogames might borrow Hollywood's pricing techniques, though he does float product placement and a change to subscription services:

"Maybe they go in for a while and then they leave, the same way that movies leave Netflix. I think the over-reliance on microtransactions is emphasising certain genres and preventing other genres from flourishing." Mmn. Not sure if I want that, but it's not like games are doing a great job of being conserved at the moment, anyway.

"Everything can't be a live service—as I hope we've proven pretty definitively over the past year and a half. And if our monetisation is coming primarily from live services, we run the risk of ending up in a world where there are no AAA games that aren't live services. And I don't think that's a world that any of us want to live in."

Hear hear. I'm not sure we should trade one grotty set of industry practices for another, but I do think Darrah has a point—the way things are right now, I have a hard time blaming these big AAA companies for the live service deluge. I still might, a little, but they wouldn't be continuing to blow money on the losers if the winners weren't so provably profitable when they hit big. It's not wrong to be looking for something else.

It's 4 am and I am sitting in front of my PC, the monitor perched on a makeshift desk in my bedroom. The lights are off but the room is illuminated by my desktop. In the bed, my girlfriend is sound asleep. I told her I wouldn't stay up all night playing Neverwinter Nights, but I am a liar.

The early '00s found me broke, lost and trying to figure out what to do once I'd received a useless degree. Though I wasn't putting much thought into it. Writing, maybe? My sanctuary from terrifying adult questions about my future was BioWare's first post-Infinity Engine game. I flung myself into Neverwinter Nights and then everything was OK.

But it was not BioWare's adventures that I was playing. I was bouncing between new worlds and creating my own—thriving in Neverwinter Nights' vibrant modding scene. For a flatmate's birthday, knowing I couldn't afford a gift, I built him an adventure with the game's versatile Aurora Toolset. That got me hooked.

I quickly moved on from singleplayer adventures and into the arms of roleplaying-heavy Persistent Worlds. In the real world I was a bad student and a crap boyfriend, but I had a second life as a wise-cracking bard and mercenary adventurer trying to overcome an infernal family curse.

NWN's Persistent Worlds were effectively miniature MMOs that came in all sorts of flavours, but it was the roleplaying ones I became smitten with. Tabletop roleplaying is full of logistics and schedules, but now I could just fire up the game and get that same kick whenever I wanted. Even at 4 am.

I made an eclectic group of buds—wildly different ages, careers, locations, but we all loved RPGs. And we wanted to build one ourselves. So we left our Persistent World and fashioned our own. We created thousands of years of history, warring nations, squabbling pantheons, curses and heroes. And then we brought it to life with the Aurora Toolset.

This was my first time GMing, and I made some mistakes. Like the time the Big Bad I'd spent a week teasing appeared and, mid-monologue, was cut down by a player in two sword strokes. I tried to style it out, explaining that he'd merely killed an illusion. My players were lovely and just went with it.

And yeah there were maybe times where I went a bit mad with power. When one player was in a rush, I tried to slow their adventure down a bit with an obstinate shopkeeper, which I definitely didn't expect him to attack. "Well, I'm not having that," I thought. So for the rest of the evening all the players and GMs ended up in a courtroom. It was like detention, but someone loses a hand at the end.

But it's hard not to go mad with power when you have so much of it. I had the same flexible authority as a tabletop GM, but I could turn all the things I conjured out of my imagination into tangible things. The rowdy tavern, the snake-infested swamp, the frozen domain of a megalomaniacal lich—nobody needed to suspend their disbelief, because they were walking around these places and interacting with NPCs who I could immediately possess.

NWN's modding scene had already been around for years at this point, so we had all the tools, documentation and assets that we could ever need to make stories and adventures forever. And nothing ever really replaced it. Sure, games like Roblox and Fortnite let players create their own experiences, and RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 blessed us with potent GM and editing tools, but NWN's Persistent Worlds were like lightning in a bottle.

The scale, the freedom and the focus on roleplaying—sometimes we get attempts to replicate this to a degree, but never successful ones. I've gone hands-on with a few over the years, and they always seem to vanish. I'd hoped Baldur's Gate 3 would change that, but Larian decided not to build on its previous editors. It would have been a lot of work for little return, it said. Of course, modders still found a way to rectify this, and diligently started creating modules and campaigns. But nothing like NWN's Persistent Worlds.

It strikes me as absurd, though, that no other games really carried this torch. The RPG genre is vast and tends to lead the pack. Our Top 100 has been dominated by them for years, and it's probably the genre with the most PCG GOTY wins under its belt. TTRPGs have been enjoying a decade-long resurgence, too, and the best videogame RPGs have been taking notes. On paper, 2026 should be far more welcoming to the kind of NWN-style Persistent Worlds I enjoyed 20 years ago.

I am, as I often do, going to blame capitalism. The studios with the resources to do something like this aren't going to give players the ability to effectively make their own completely free live service games. And I certainly don't want an RPG equivalent of Roblox's heavily-monetised viral slop.

Instead, I'm left with nostalgia. The late-night lore sessions, the arguments with my fellow GMs regarding my overreliance on a penguin-loving god of chaos, the friendships and messy drama. I'd never been so invested in anything before. God, I miss it.

Neverwinter Nights was a good but not great RPG, but as a platform? As a doorway through which you could find worlds of impossible variety? It was second to none. The good news is that the community is still very much alive. My world might be dead, but others have kept on trucking. Maybe it's time to revisit them.

Former BioWare developers launching their own studios may not be the biggest news of all time—lots of them have done it, to varying degrees of success—but the premise of the debut project in the works at Studio Reset has me intrigued: It's "a neon-noir supernatural mystery game set in a stylized Canadian cityscape." It's not a sequence of words that goes together in that particular order very often, and it's pushing my buttons.

Studio Reset was founded by Kaelin Lavallée, Kris Schoneberg, and Francis Lacuna, all of them veterans of multiple BioWare blockbusters ranging from the original Mass Effect to Anthem. Their ambition for the new operation is a "smaller, more intentional" approach to making games, though, with a focus on original ideas, sustainability, and "experiences shaped around the players they are made for."

"Studio Reset is smaller by design," said Lavallée, who will serve as producer and creative director at Studio Reset. "We are not trying to recreate blockbuster development at a smaller scale. We want to build original worlds with focus, intention, and a team that can stay close to the work, the creative vision, and the players we are making it for."

All that and a toonie will get you a cup of bad coffee at Tim Hortons, but the ideas underlying the studio's first project are interesting enough to be, well, interesting. First is what the studio calls "Parallax Deduction," which is essentially that each individual investigator has a unique perspective that, through gameplay, informs player perceptions, interpretations, and beliefs; and second is a desire to avoid "Moon Logic," a term that describes arbitrary puzzle solutions that force players to guess at a designer's intent.

"We're interested in mysteries that trust the player,” said Kris Schoneberg, design director at Studio Reset. "A good mystery should make you feel clever, not confused. With Parallax Deduction, we want players to understand that perspective is part of the evidence. Who is looking at the case matters, because each investigator brings their own expertise, history, instincts, and blind spots."

And of course that promised setting, which I, a loyal citizen of the Dominion—did you know that Canada is a Dominion? Now you do—am constitutionally obligated to dig. I hope the team throws a bit of a curveball at it, though: Instead of the usual Toronto or Vancouver cityscapes, let's take this mystery to, say, Saskatoon. Or North Bay. Or Moncton, maybe, where the Cityspeak is a mashup of English, French, and f-bombs. The possibilities are endless! I look forward to seeing where they lead.

All of this is highly aspirational, so of course there's not even a hint of when any of it might come to life. For now, Studio Reset said it will share more about its operations, philosophy, and that as-yet-unnamed first game over the coming months, and there's a website you can poke at sudioreset.io.

The original director of BioWare's long-running MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic—which is now being run by Broadsword—had not played a single game in the genre when he started work on it, he has revealed.

In an interview, BioWare veteran James Ohlen described the studio's founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk calling him into their office in 2006, halfway through the development of Dragon Age: Origins, and asking him to oversee a new office in Austin, Texas, making MMOs.

"And I was like, 'I hate massive multiplayer games. But all right, I'll do it.'

"The day after, I created a character in World of Warcraft and started down that path ... I was playing all the MMOs and getting to a high level and I forced myself to love them," he says, chuckling.

"But before that, no, I just wasn't a fan of the genre."

The Old Republic, which is still going today, launched in 2011 and was the most expensive game ever made at the time, with estimated costs north of $200 million.

"How the hell did they trust me with this much money? And I didn't even like MMOs! I don't understand how the world works. The world is weird."

He said he was "depending on his lieutenants" such as lead writer Daniel Erickson, lead combat designer Georg Zoeller and lead PvP and flashpoint designer Gabe Amatangelo, who was the "MMO expert" handling the endgame.

"And really I was just making sure that they weren't all going to kill each other," he says. "I was making decisions at the highest level, but really it was like, how do I empower [them], and how do I make sure that story is still a big part of it, because that was supposed to be the big differentiator."

Ohlen—who was also lead designer on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic—quit BioWare in 2018 after 22 years.

In the full interview he discussed his regrets around The Old Republic's rocky launch. The team built around 200 hours of content for players spread across eight origin stories—in hindsight, Ohlen would've preferred 60 hours across a couple of meatier origins, he says. He wanted it to be Knights of the Old Republic online, but in the end it felt more like "WoW in space".

"When you're doing that much content the quality starts going down. You have to start depending upon rules instead of creativity, and the content got more vanilla. I feel like if we had maybe just two storylines and a shorter game, that would have had a huge impact," he says.

He also revealed how his grand plan to relaunch the game under a new name—Star Wars: The New Republic—was denied by EA's board despite the backing of EA exec Patrick Söderlund (EA acquired BioWare in 2007).

"The big challenge was Patrick Söderlund, who hates Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I convinced him … it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career," he says.

"We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic, until the board of directors of EA, who all remembered the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and remembered spending $300 million, they're like, 'Why the fuck are we gonna spend a bunch more?'"

It ultimately marked the "beginning of the end" for him at Bioware, he says.

The Old Republic's longevity proves its success. It underwhelmed at launch despite rave reviews but it has, by all accounts, kept a loyal fan base. In 2019 EA revealed it had brought in close to $1 billion.

2019 was also the year Ohlen co-founded Archetype Entertainment, the studio behind sci-fi RPG Exodus, but he left in December 2025 and in the interview he explains why. "I was running on fumes, and it was hurting my health, and my personal life, and everything. I just need to step away."

"My son always says I look like a supervillain," James Ohlen says, laughing as he puffs his daily cigar on his porch in Austin, Texas, smoke twirling around his face.

"It's one of the many bad habits that I picked up when I was doing the job. I always told everybody I should never be the head of a studio because it'll kill me. And it nearly killed me. It was six years of nearly killing me."

Ohlen—a BioWare veteran who was the lead designer on Baldur's Gate 2, Knights of the Old Republic, and other beloved games before leaving in 2018—is describing his recent surprise departure from Archetype Entertainment, the studio he co-founded in 2019.

When he left Archetype he hinted at burnout in an X post. Now, he tells me that being both the head of the studio and the creative lead on its debut game, the sci-fi RPG Exodus, was simply too much. "I was running on fumes, and it was hurting my health, and my personal life, and everything. I just needed to step away," he says.

"As a creative you care about everything so much, and then as the head of the studio, you have to be cutting the baby in half all the time, and having people attack your vision constantly. I definitely wouldn't put myself in that situation again; that's not a healthy place to be."

He's "slowly recovering" and building what he light-heartedly calls his "book empire". He's upbeat during our conversation, laughing hard and often as he recalls what were clearly difficult times, but he says he'll need more time before he's ready to make games again.

It's not his first career break. He says that he didn't give himself enough time to "completely recover" after leaving BioWare in 2018 and that towards the end of his tenure there, overseeing MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, he felt like a "highly paid, completely useless person".

And he also describes, for the first time, the moment that marked the "beginning of the end" for him at BioWare—when EA's board crushed his plan for rebooting the MMO as Star Wars: The New Republic.

Ohlen joined BioWare in 1996, a year after its founding, and was lead designer on both Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. Crunch wasn't mandatory but Ohlen felt that as the creative lead he should work the hardest. "I lived in this apartment complex for more than a year, and I can't even remember my room or anything, because I would just go there, sleep, and then wake up and go straight [to work]," he says.

But 100-hour weeks didn't feel grueling, he says. In a small team he made big decisions, but was also directly writing and scripting in a way he wouldn't get to on later, bigger projects. "That's the last time I was truly in love with my job," he says.

He came out "looking like a cave troll"—but also calling himself a successful videogame designer.

As BioWare grew he oversaw more and more people as lead designer on Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and then Dragon Age: Origins. "On Baldur's Gate, I was writing and scripting, I could do it all. But on Knights of the Old Republic, I had several technical designers that were much better with tools. So I was more divorced from the hands-on stuff."

The biggest change, however, arrived with The Old Republic. Halfway through development on Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk called Ohlen to their office and asked whether he could oversee a new studio making MMOs in Austin. "And I was like, 'I hate massive multiplayer games. But all right, I'll do it.'

"It took me a day, I talked to my wife and said, 'It'll be an adventure, we'll only be there for a year.' I'm still here. Maybe I should have known better."

He accepted the challenge and stuck at it partly out of loyalty to Muzyka and Zeschuk, he says—he felt it was his "duty" to do as good a job as possible.

Suddenly he was overseeing a "never-ending" project made by hundreds of people where his main role was empowering others and making sure "big ego designers … didn't kill each other". It would become the most expensive video game ever made, with costs running into the hundreds of millions.

He's spoken before about his regret at making an MMO akin to World of Warcraft in space, rather than his original vision of an online Knights of the Old Republic. At launch it was a sprawling, diluted 200 hours including eight origin storylines—a 60-hour game with fewer, focused narratives would've landed cleaner and felt more distinctive, he says.

"I'm just not someone who can manage hundreds and hundreds of people to go in a different direction … everyone wants to build WoW in space, and it's my job to say no, we're making [something different], and I wasn't able to do that."

Not for lack of trying: around 2015 he brewed a plan for a complete reboot. It would be called Star Wars: The New Republic. He spent roughly six months compiling a basic design document, powerpoints explaining the game, and a mock-up trailer from Blur Studio, the visual effects company. "It was the chance to do Knights of the Old Republic online, it was a chance to [put right] everything I'd said that we'd messed up."

He convinced LucasFilm president Kathleen Kennedy and met several times with Dave Filoni, a director at LucasFilm including on Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series. "He was like, 'if you set it a couple hundred years before the fall of the Republic, we can have a tie in.'

"I remember I got super excited because the big challenge was [EA exec] Patrick Söderlund, who I think is great but hates Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I convinced him … it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career," he says.

His joy soon withered.

"We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic, until the board of directors of EA, who all remembered the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and remembered spending $300 million," he says, laughing again. "They're like, 'Why the fuck are we gonna spend a bunch more?'"

There was no debate, no chance to plead his case, just a big, fat no.

He understood the rationale but it was "discouraging", he says, and made him realise that "at some point, I'm probably just going to have to get out of here".

"That was the beginning of the end for me … The only way you get through life is by having empathy for everybody, including people that are causing you pain. I was thinking of it through the lens of EA. And I'm like, there's no way I'm ever going to win in this. It just doesn't make sense to empower someone like me. If I was there, I wouldn't.

"So I gotta get out. This is just not for me."

It wasn't the only thing nudging him towards the door.

He doesn't criticise EA—he says it was no worse than any big, corporate bureaucracy, and that it wanted BioWare to succeed—but he says the departures of BioWare founders Muzyka and Zeschuk in 2012 removed the "giant shit shields" protecting him and other developers. He realised then that "I wasn't gonna make singleplayer RPGs ever again".

Towards the end of his time at BioWare he began to feel powerless, unable to enact change, "like I literally provide no value anymore".

"I would tell people, I'm actually a highly paid, completely useless person. It's just that everyone thinks that I'm super useful because of my reputation. No one seems to be able to tell, except me. There's research that shows that when you just feel like you're not accomplishing anything, it's actually the biggest thing to bring about burnout," he says.

"My wife was like, 'But you could have ridden it out. Don't lots of execs do that?' And I'm like, 'I know, but they're not creatives. They enjoy the politics, and I don't blame them. But that's not what I like."

When he launched Archetype Entertainment in 2019 as a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, itself part of Hasbro, he was hiring developers from AAA teams and paying good salaries, so he always knew he was making a large game.

"Maybe I fooled myself," he says. "I fooled myself that I wouldn't be dying inside. But yeah, it was just too much."

As the studio head he was "dealing with people, creatives, dealing with artists, and engineers, and writers, and producers, and the publisher, and everything," he says. Simultaneously he was creative director on Exodus, itself an ambitious, big-budget RPG.

"You're trying to manage all sorts of different personalities, and people, and groups, and organisations, and then there's the pressure cooker of being on a big budget title."

One painful example was the contract negotiations with the author Peter Hamilton, who Ohlen greatly admires (Hamilton is consulting on Exodus and has also written the expanded universe novel Exodus: The Archimedes Engine). Discussions that should've taken months stretched into a year. "That nearly killed me," Ohlen says.

It ended up with "three different groups all trying to negotiate a contract, and [only] one of them seemed to want to get it to the finish line. I was taking calls at like, 11:00 pm."

He pauses, then laughs. "When it finally got it signed, of course my team said: 'Well, why do we have to use Peter Hamilton's stuff?' I'm like, 'I'm gonna kill you all!'"

He says he also failed to hire an "hotshot executive producer" who could be his own personal "shit shield", in the way Muzyka and Zeschuk had been at BioWare. Hasbro, like EA, is a large company, that Ohlen sometimes struggled to navigate: he even felt compelled to text CEO Chris Cocks from time to time to push things through.

"It was one of the only ways I could get things done sometimes—it's not because people were being deliberately bad, it was just, you know, 'I have lots of things on my plate. Why am I gonna do this thing?'"

Ultimately, he's concluded that he's simply not like "all the people I know that have headed up studios because they love it, and I hate it," and he's vowed to "listen to my old self when it comes to knowing my limitations."

His focus this year is on a trio of RPG adventure books published by Arcanum Worlds, a venture he co-founded with Jesse Sky, the former BioWare creative director who helped establish Archetype Entertainment and is now the creative director on Exodus (one of the reasons he could leave Archetype was that he had "good people" like Sky to hand over to, he says). He's also in final edits for The Stygian Passage, a 280-page adventure book.

His eyes light up discussing these projects—I count at least nine that he's working on—but it's also clear that at least some part of him yearns to return to games.

He says, at various points, that his books "might be a jumping off point for videogames"; that he knows "young hot shot" developers he'd love to work with; and that he's received multiple job offers. "I'm actually quite open with them, you don't probably want me right now," he says.

"But that'll change. I'm sure I'll get bamboozled into starting another videogame studio—and all the pain that comes with it."

One of my most universally derided hot takes is that Mass Effect Andromeda was great, actually. A lot of the criticisms levelled against it at the time were valid, and it definitely shouldn't have launched in the buggy state it did. But Andromeda's one of those games where you could almost feel the backlash before it even released: and sure enough, it got mostly middling reviews (though PCG gave it a healthy 80%), and an absolute savaging from elements of the audience.

But I loved it, and the whole setup of being space pioneers trying to establish a foothold for humanity in an unknown corner of the cosmos just worked for me. It quickly became clear, however, that Andromeda was not going to kick off its own Mass Effect trilogy, or even get its mooted singleplayer DLC before Bioware ended support for the title.

Andromeda's protagonist, Ryder, was customisable like Commander Shepard and could be played as male or female. Voice actor Tom Taylorson played the male Ryder, and has given a new interview to fansite We Are Mass Effect in which he bemoans the game's critical and commercial response, and gives publisher EA a bit of a kicking.

"I think, like many, the game got a bum rap," says Taylorson. "It was done dirty by a publisher expecting too much from it, not being fully cooked, forced out the door too early, forced to use corporate's shiny new engine when many of the team didn't know how to work with it, and it was not suited to the storytelling part of the game."

Andromeda was developed on the Frostbite engine, which was the case for the vast majority of EA games in this era (the OG trilogy was developed on Unreal). Bioware did have some familiarity with this toolset, and built several games using it, but Andromeda's development was a troubled time and Frostbite was a big part of it (as this excellent Kotaku investigation details).

"On top of that, it was released to a very toxic atmosphere online and elsewhere in the gaming space," says Taylorson. "It quickly became punching bag of the week for online chuds for views and clicks. Their love of hate sealed the deal. What saddens me is that this would not be the last time I was in a project doomed by online haters picking a game for Punching Bag of The Week: I also worked on Highguard."

Andromeda was planned to have post-launch DLC, though in reality Bioware Montreal spent most of the first few months after release firefighting the game's many technical issues, and obviously the larger intention was for this to kick off a new Mass Effect saga consisting of multiple games. Instead, EA had seen enough, and pulled the plug entirely.

"Personally, I was bummed, but moved on quickly," says Taylorson. "You have to. You're only as good as your last project or audition. So you go out and audition again. Personally/ artistically? It hurt most because I knew that was it—Ryder wouldn't be coming back. I, and others, thought we'd have a good decade of playing with these characters in these spaces. And just like that—gone."

Bioware is now working on its fifth Mass Effect game, and though it's not a direct sequel to Andromeda there are hints that it will incorporate elements of it as the studio tries to reboot one of its flagship series.

Taylorson adds that he "felt terrible" for the developers at Bioware Montreal, and "that hate" directed at them, but says that as the years have passed he's felt a lot more audience affection for Andromeda than it got at release.

"Over time though, I've seen a lot of love for the game and its characters, for what it did well, and appreciation from fans for whom it was their game of the moment," says Taylorson. "A game that helped them, a game that got them through a tough time. There is something to be said for a 7/10 that comes to you in a time of need."

It was reported earlier this month that Amazon MGM Studios' head of global TV Peter Friedlander had requested script rewrites for the in-development Mass Effect TV series in order to make it "more appealing to non-gamers." Not very cool! But the claim may also not be entirely accurate, as writer and executive producer Daniel Casey said on Bluesky that it's news to him.

"So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I'm writing (I've signed NDAs, etc)—but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you," Casey wrote (via Kotaku). "I don't know where that 'non-gaming audiences' quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me."

So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I’m writing (I’ve signed NDAs, etc) — but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you. I don’t know where that “non-gaming audiences” quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me.

— @danielcaseytypes.bsky.social (@danielcaseytypes.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T22:11:54.105Z

Whether that's good or bad is a matter of perspective, I suppose, although frankly I think that if you're writing specifically to appeal to existing Mass Effect fans, you really are running the risk of alienating or shortchanging people coming into it with no foreknowledge of the series. In the bigger picture, though, I think it's better for all involved when executives keep their big ideas to themselves, and let the creative people—who are paid to be creative—do the actual creating.

Of course, at this point not much creation has been done, at least not as far as the public is aware: Casey, who co-wrote the screenplay for F9, is signed as writer and producer for the Mass Effect series, while Doug Yung is showrunner, but there's still no word on a cast, specific timeline, or what the series will actually be about, except that it will not be based on the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Encouragingly, the team behind Amazon's hit Fallout series is also involved in the production. Personally, I feel like Mass Effect is much more of a closed loop than Fallout, but who knows? Maybe lightning will strike twice.

In case you'd forgotten, there's also a new Mass Effect game in development at BioWare, although much like the series we know very little about it beyond the fact that it's happening.

We've been digging back through the archives at PCG, and one particular hands-on experience and Q&A reached its icy hand out of the mists of time and grabbed me by the throat: Now-Strategic Director Evan Lahti's preview of Dragon Age: Origins, and an accompanying interview with BioWare cofounders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk in 2009.

Neither of those men have been part of the beloved RPG studio for more than a decade: Zeschuk appears to be something of a restaurateur these days, while Muzyka is quite the poker player. Reading coverage of the studio only partway through its golden age bummed me the hell out.

After a legendary hot streak beginning with the OG Mass Effect in 2007 (or, arguably, the OG Baldur's Gate in 1998), BioWare struggled to find its footing in the 2010s: Longtime staff left or were forced out, it released three disappointments in seven years vs. nearly a dozen bangers in the previous decade. A new Mass Effect is supposedly still coming, but by all accounts the studio is a fraction of its former size following Anthem, The Veilguard, and multiple rounds of layoffs.

But nobody knew all that was coming down the pike in March 2009. Evan sat down for a hands-on of the Dwarf Noble origin sequence, a world's first look at a slice of RPG that many players could reenact from memory at this point. (Not me—I'm a City Elf man.)

In a Q&A with Zeschuk and Muzyka, the founders were optimistic about the series' and company's future, with Dragon Age sequels already in the planning phases.

"It is a franchise," Muzyka said of Dragon Age. "You can be sure that means more than one game and a whole bunch of other cool stuff on the side. It would make sense that players will get to continue to experience or feel like they've been progressing in some way between products in the franchise, too."

He seems to have already been alluding to the save transfer feature Dragon Age would crib from its sister series, Mass Effect, then ultimately pursue to more ambitious ends.

Dragon Age: Inquisition had to keep track of dozens of setting-spanning variables impacting the politics of the world and which characters would even be alive for you to see in the game, with its rarest world states still the stuff of RPG legend.

It was also a funny man-out-of-time moment to remember the different flavor of controversy and backlash BioWare faced at this time. "It's an artform," Muzyka asserted in response to a question about RPG romance and media pressure. "We're not changing how we make our games based on, well…"

"On Fox News?" Zeschuk cheekily interjected. Before there was Mass Effect 3 ending angst or anti-woke rage against gay companions, there was the whole news cycle about the PG-13 implied sex and nudity in Mass Effect 1. If only someone could go back and warn them about Baldur's Gate 3 penis physics.

Here's the full Q&A with the BioWare docs, whose absence is still felt all these years after their exit from making RPGs.

Dragon Age: Origins interview - PC Gamer #198 (UK, March 2009)

More on Dragon Age from the archives

• Looking back on 15 years of Dragon Age reviews—including that Dragon Age 2 score we've never stopped defending
• EA has learned all the wrong lessons from Dragon Age: The Veilguard
• It was nuts that BioWare based Dragon Age: Inquisition's story on a DLC nobody played, but that DLC also proved just how close Dragon Age 2 was to perfection
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is my third-favorite game of the year, and I don't care who knows
• Looking back at Dragon Age: Inquisition
• Great moments in PC gaming: Choosing your origin in Dragon Age Origins

At the end of 2024, I resigned myself to the fact that BioWare was no longer capable, or willing, to make the kind of RPGs that once cemented it as the titan of the genre—or to put it more selfishly, the kind of RPGs I wanted to play. After The Veilguard, which followed Anthem, which followed Andromeda, I'd lost faith. I was emphatic and probably a little bit dramatic: I was out and the studio that excited me more than any other RPG developer was long gone.

A year-and-change later has caused my fire to dim, leaving behind disappointment but not as much dismay. I played more Baldur's Gate 3. I fell head-over-heels for Esoteric Ebb. I annoyed some people by insisting that Crimson Desert was definitely an RPG—and a pretty damn good one to boot. But that distance from The Veilguard has also made room for speculation—could BioWare make a comeback, and what would that even look like?

First, some hard truths for the folks who understandably bounced off The Veilguard.

A lot of people liked BioWare's last RPG. Reviews were broadly positive—including our own—and it was initially celebrated by EA for becoming its biggest Steam launch. It also managed to net a few awards along the way. While the narrative that BioWare has lost its touch has become increasingly popular and repeated over the last decade—and I believe it to be true—there is no consensus that The Veilguard was a dud.

Anyway, with that out of the way, The Veilguard was a dud. A year and a half after launch and its user review ranking on Steam is sitting at Mixed. In its first three months, sales reached 1.5 million copies, which in isolation is a large number—but was only half of what EA expected it to shift. Publishers like EA frequently have inflated expectations, but I don't think it was unrealistic in this case. A decade before, Dragon Age: Inquisition almost reached that same milestone in a single week, and went on to become BioWare's most successful game in its already long history.

Origins, Dragon Age 2, Inquisition and the original Mass Effect trilogy all received significant post-launch support. But like Andromeda, The Veilguard was quickly cast aside. No expansions, and only one surprise bit of DLC, offering some weapon skins and nothing else. What followed The Veilguard's launch, unfortunately, was redundancies and "downsizing".

So with its last two RPGs underperforming and being cast adrift, and the failure of the Anthem experiment, how can BioWare make a course correction?

BioWare is dead, long live BioWare

Anthem was a huge mistake. It was so disconnected from the studio's RPG roots that it held little appeal for BioWare's primary audience, and it blundered into an established and notoriously competitive market without offering a big hook. But it wasn't a mistake for BioWare to attempt something different. This is even more true now.

Both BioWare's long-time fans and the studio itself need to accept that the old BioWare is dead. The redundancies and staff shuffles have gutted BioWare over the years, and while old devs sometimes return, you cannot simply replace everyone—and you cannot shed this much institutional knowledge and expect success by sticking to the same playbook. We will never get another Baldur's Gate, a KOTOR or an Origins from this company ever again. But with the resources the studio has available, we could get something new.

Here's the thing: BioWare never used to rest on its laurels. In the '90s and early '00s it was bringing tabletop RPGs to PC gamers; then it was taking advantage of console dominance, creating streamlined RPGs that focused on best-in-class storytelling; and by 2007 it was experimenting with cinematic storytelling and shooter mechanics. BioWare's secret sauce was its ability to read the room. It was always looking for new ways to bring us RPGs.

By not putting all its eggs in one basket, the studio weathered the changing industry and maintained its reputation as a juggernaut. Several times over, it reimagined what an RPG could be. If modern BioWare was around in the '90s, it probably would have stuck with Infinity Engine games. Which would have been fine with me! But these isometric RPGs (temporarily) went out of style, and BioWare would have vanished with them. We wouldn't even have been blessed with Neverwinter Nights—an all-timer that only the modders and their fans truly appreciated.

Much has been made of BioWare's incredible legacy, but its ability to move forward and not rely on that legacy is what helped it become such a success story. But this wasn't simple trend-chasing. BioWare wasn't just following the crowd. It was leading them.

Then EA acquired it.

EA, let BioWare cook

BioWare's overlord is undeniably the biggest hurdle to its survival. It would be naive to act like the studio doesn't have any responsibility for its missteps, but it also found itself in an impossible situation, with executives not just pressuring the studio and breathing down its devs' necks, but overtly interfering with it.

The endless sequels, the rush to get Dragon Age 2 out the door, the absolutely unhinged pivot to a multiplayer live service game—not just Anthem, but The Veilguard as well, which started out as a singleplayer RPG, switched to live service, and then back to singleplayer again. This is life under EA.

This pressure created an overreliance on its big brands, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and when BioWare did attempt to get out of its comfort zone after too long resting on its laurels, the results were disastrous. BioWare is just as responsible for Anthem as EA—but the environment it was created in was a product of the publisher. Casey Hudson pitched EA a very EA game—something that could keep making the publisher money forever—but BioWare had no idea how to make this kind of game, the decision makers had no clear vision, and the rest is history.

The studio needs to go back to the drawing board and take a long, hard look at the RPG landscape. Not just to see what's trendy at the moment, but to predict what kind of RPGs players will want in five years. Where are things heading? It needs space, not pressure.

For a risk-averse publisher like EA, though, whose only real priority is to please investors, this is like asking for the world. The only reason it was excited by the prospect of Anthem was because it thought a live service game would print money—it didn't see it as a risk because it couldn't see beyond the big live service successes, despite the massive pile of corpses behind them.

This is also why we're just getting another bloody Mass Effect. People love Mass Effect, so let's do it again—while completely ignoring Andromeda.

Mass extinction event

I'm about to lose a lot of you here, I suspect. In fact, I know it. If anyone so much as whispers "Mass Effect", people go wild. I saw how y'all reacted when we mentioned that Zero Company and Osiris Reborn had big Mass Effect vibes. Regardless, I'm convinced that BioWare should not be making another Mass Effect. It's too late to stop that train, it's already left the station, but I don't see this ending well at all.

Folks, Mass Effect 3 launched in 2012. In videogame terms, it's absolutely ancient. And as a brand, it's not been able to even prove itself when it doesn't have Shepard. Andromeda, on paper, includes most of the things people wanted out of a new Mass Effect: Cinematic storytelling, vastly improved action, denser alien worlds to explore, some more angry krogans. And it was not great.

Awful last minute crunch, the Frostbite Engine (which bit BioWare in the ass in Anthem too) and a dip in writing quality all contributed to this, but beyond that BioWare just never figured out how to replace its heroes and villains. With Shepard and the Geth/Reapers gone, you don't really have Mass Effect at all.

While Dragon Age's original trilogy successfully played around with different protagonists, art directions and vibes, Mass Effect was always about Shep. It's their trilogy. And with Shepard presumably out of the picture, we've not been given any reason to believe BioWare is in a position to reignite the spark that made those games magic.

The Veilguard's missteps should also make us extremely worried about the future of its sci-fi sibling. While change is baked into Dragon Age's DNA, modern BioWare seems so detached from its classic library now that The Veilguard felt more like mimicry than a sequel—as if an entirely new studio had been given the reins.

And that's because it kinda was—even though it still contained some key veterans, like lead writer Trick Weekes. Weekes is a great writer: They'd been with BioWare since 2005, giving us some of Mass Effect and Dragon Age's best characters, like Mordin, Tali, Iron Bull and Solas. I mean, if anyone could write a great Dragon Age with the egg-head as the villain, it's Weekes. But they didn't. They wrote The Veilguard.

And even that version of the studio is gone now, with Weekes and many others no longer with BioWare.

Back to the start

I don't see a way for BioWare to thrive without it finding a new identity. Mass Effect is not the way. Dragon Age is not the way. Wheeling out the corpses of beloved games time and time again won't keep working because it's already stopped.

Modern BioWare needs to find its own Grey Warden, its own Shepard, liberating itself from the constant comparisons to past glories. And it probably needs to start small.

I don't mean a short game—not specifically, anyway, though I'd be here for it. I mean that it needs to find a new focus, one or two things it can build a game around. It needs to be given space to experiment and find itself again. It needs to host game jams and do the indie hustle.

And sadly, none of this will be remotely possible because it's still one of EA's star studios and the publisher is never going to stop chasing those multi-million launch targets. It cannot be freed from this prison. EA would kill it first.

So unless we can go back 20 years and stop BioWare from getting involved with a private equity firm, which two years later would lead to it getting gobbled up by EA, I think it's cooked. And it's so frustrating because there is a path out of this—but nobody will let the studio travel down it.

I don't envy any showrunners currently working on a videogame adaptation, which have been the new hotness since Fallout and The Last of Us hit the big time. On one side, you've got the general TV audience who may be skeptical of what videogames can bring to the table, and on the other, you've got hordes of fans with an axe to grind for anyone who mucks up a take on that thing they love a little too much. In other words, the Mass Effect show was always gonna have an uphill battle—and a new report alleges a rewrite has been ordered already.

The report from The Ankler (via IGN) states that Amazon MGM Studios' head of global TV Peter Friedlander is reviewing various scripts for in-development shows, including Mass Effect, which is "on the verge" of a series order. Friedlander has reportedly requested that the show be rewritten to be "more appealing to non-gamers."

While the phrase "appealing to non-gamers" isn't going to flatter a lot of gamers (who, one assumes, are more excited for this show than anybody), I can't help but think of how The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is currently getting drawn and quartered for basically being a YouTube Shorts-esque parade of incoherent references. Maybe this rewrite will help Mass Effect avoid that sort of pitfall? A wink and a nod every now and then can be fun, but when a TV show is too reverent to the source material, it makes me wonder why I'm not just playing the game instead.

On the other hand, there have been plenty of adaptations that seem embarrassed to be based on a videogame, or fail to fill the void in these stories left by a lack of interactivity. You might remember that the Halo TV show had "absolutely no vibes," as former PC Gamer features producer Natalie Clayton put it. The bar for quality for these adaptations has certainly gone up over time, but bad and funny is usually preferable to okay and boring.

If this kills all your hype for the nascent show, at least you've still got the next Mass Effect game to look forward to—though the recent Saudi-backed buyout of EA reportedly had the team at Bioware wondering how long they had left, and that's after a brutal wave of layoffs carved out a number of the studio's veterans earlier in 2025.

You might find more cause for hope in the realm of off-brand Mass Effectlings: CRPG sicko studio Owlcat has a very Mass Effect-y Expanse game coming next year, Exodus is also set to launch in 2027 and has a lot of former BioWare talent, while even Star Wars Zero Company has a strong BioWare inflection to its pacing and squad interactions.

Dragon Age 2 is a bit of a controversial entrant in the series—we rated it highly when it first game out, perhaps infamously so, but fan opinion bends towards it being more of a cult classic than a straight-up classic like its predecessor.

That's partially because it was made at a blistering speed and had to cut more corners than a pair of scissors trying to make a circle. 16 months was all BioWare had to put it together, which is almost nothing in RPG development time.

In a recent interview with TheGamer, Dragon Age creator David Gaider confirms that the writing process for DA2 was absolutely brutal. Especially given the studio's prior RPG pedigree making some of the longest RPGs imaginable:

"The big problem we faced is that BioWare as a team did not know how to make a small game. We planned for a big game. And when we're told this is a full, full sequel, initially for the first four months of work, we're assuming that it was going to be much bigger."

Then, when that wound up not being the case, Gaider remembers having to operate like a butcher on the cutting room floor:

"I had to go into one writing room. We had all these sticky pads that were breaking up all the quests, like, here are the crit path quests, here are the side quests, and the ones the player could pick up as they go around. I had to take out half of them."

Gaider's only got positive words for how the writing team followed the shift in priority, though, stating that "they were all veterans … I sat down with them near the beginning and said we're going to have very little time to review all this. I'll be lucky if I get to review your stuff, nevermind other people. So I'm going to trust you.

"We're going to measure twice, cut once. Once it's cut, it's done, and we'll have to just accept the result … They knew what was on the line. They all wrote like the wind. There was nobody who wasn't firing on all cylinders."

This, he tells TheGamer, led to a "raw" writing style he believes had its ups and downs: "You start sanding down the edges [on second and third drafts], and that can be a good thing, but you also sand down some of the good edges as well. So, you find a lot of raw storytelling in DA2 that you don't find elsewhere."

That's certainly an opinion shared by our own Fraser Brown, who called Dragon Age 2 the "boldest" of BioWare's RPGs back in 2021—particularly praising Anders, the series premiere trash fire who "causes a lot of problems". It's easy to imagine a less rough-around-the-edges Anders in a Dragon Age 2 that wasn't made in 16 months, so hey—Gaider's probably onto something.

The birds are shining, the trees are singing, the sun is swaying in the breeze: it's the year 1999, and Baldur's Gate has just got another patch. Everything is perfect, and nothing hurts.

Wait, no, my mistake. It's 2026, and everything is bad. Good news, though: the Baldur's Gate patch thing is actually true. 14 years after it released (and 28 years since the original came out), Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition has a new 2.7 patch in beta. So too do Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition. "We’re truly sorry it took this long," write the devs. "With 2026 marking 14 years since BG:EE first launched on PC, we want to thank you for staying with us on this journey."

Which, let me be the first to say: hell yeah. Old bangers getting new patches? I'm all about that, and this new update has at least one fix that's very significant for me specifically (you have to be allowed to write a news post just for yourself sometimes—keeps morale up). Specifically, 2.7 brings native Apple Silicon support to the majority of Beamdog's Enhanced Edition suite—no more running the Intel build via Apple's Rosetta translation layer, like some kind of mediaeval serf.

The patch also makes the games' Steam cloud functionality work like, well, every other game. Up to now, getting cloud saves going on the Infinity Engine collection required checking a box in the in-game settings—now it's entirely dependent on whether you activate them in the Steam client. It might not sound like much, but it's happened more than once that I've installed the games and worried that my saves had been lost before remembering I have to go and check the Steam cloud box in settings to get them. So, you know, I'm spared ever having to face that trauma again in future.

The patch also integrates some community translations, should you have a hankering to experience BG2 in Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, or Ukrainian. Or if you want to enjoy Icewind Dale in Hungarian or Japanese. You can check it all out by selecting the 2.7 beta in the properties of the games in your Steam client.

The only bad news is that Planescape: Torment doesn't yet have an equivalent beta, but Beamdog says it hopes to get that going later on. More promisingly, the studio detailed its philosophy towards similar updates going forward: "Our goal is to keep these classics running smoothly amid evolving technical requirements and operating systems on both PC and mobile… We’re focused on improving the overall quality-of-life experience."

So no sweeping overhauls—which you wouldn't want for these classics anyway—but maybe some more tweaks to keep things ship-shape down the line. My incredibly pernickety request? I'd like an easy way to toggle BG1's original UI back on in place of the Siege of Dragonspear one that replaced it when I bought that DLC. Why? Nostalgia. That's really it.

I'm not entirely confident that Mass Effect 5 will ever see the light of day. Between the Andromeda debacle, the dismantling of BioWare after Dragon Age: The Veilguard missed whatever expectations EA had for it, and the upcoming acquisition of EA by Saudi Arabia, the environment just doesn't seem entirely conducive to another big sexy space adventure.

But the wheels are continuing to turn. The most recent sign of progress comes from Mass Effect executive producer Michael Gamble, who's looking for help getting the new game done. "Hi, I’m hiring a very important senior leadership role," Gamble wrote on X. "They’ll report to me and it’s gonna be awesome."

The post includes a link to a job listing for a production director on the next Mass Effect game. Before you get too excited, this is a high-level position (pay range is $187,000 - $259,400 CDN plus benefits), so you're not going to get any details about the game itself except that it will be the next chapter of "one of the highest-rated and most celebrated series in video game history." Except for the last chapter, I suppose.

But if you're curious about what it is a production director actually does, here's the lowdown:

• Act as a strategic bridge between creative intent and development execution, translating high-level vision into a clear direction that enables teams to deliver at AAA quality.
• Provide leadership across the full development lifecycle, anticipating needs, setting executional direction, and ensuring teams are positioned to succeed at each phase.
• Build and sustain strong coalitions across creative, technical, production, and partner teams, fostering alignment and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Break down complex creative and technical goals into understandable, actionable components, ensuring teams understand both the why and the how behind their work.
• Identify and mitigate risks early, drive resolution of cross-team challenges, and make informed tradeoffs that protect quality, schedule, and long-term franchise health.
• Represent the project and production organization in communications with studio leadership, EA partners, and external stakeholders, including press as needed.
• Establish and reinforce clear objectives, transparency, and accountability across teams to maintain alignment and momentum

It goes without saying but just to ensure everyone's on the same page here (and maybe save Mike some unnecessary rejection emails), this is not an entry-level gig. You'll need at least 10 years of game-dev experience "including senior-level leadership on multiple large-scale AAA titles," expertise in the RPG and action RPG genres, and "strong executive presence with an influence-based leadership style," among other things. So that lets me out, then.

What matters here is not the likelihood that I might one day get a real job, though, but that EA is hiring—and more pointedly, that it's hiring for a role that will usher Mass Effect 5 from concept to reality. The fact that the team doesn't already have someone like that indicates that work is still in the very early stages, but that they're looking for someone to take the job means EA is, at least for now, serious about moving ahead with it. I call that good news.

Well, Anthem is dead, and let's be honest with ourselves: It's fine. Most of us forgot Anthem even existed long before the final call, and we were genuinely surprised to discover last summer that the servers were still running. Which isn't so much an indictment of the game but of the system that produced it. Who tells BioWare to make a live service shooter?

Anyway, what's done is done—or maybe not. As the curtain fell, a small group of diehards expressed hope that it might somehow be brought back without a reliance on EA's servers—hope that was given, well, hope when former executive producer Mark Darrah said Anthem did actually have local server code "right up until a few months before launch," and more importantly, "the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."

That's a far cry from actually making it happen, but some people do seem to at least be making progress in that direction. Youtuber And799 (via Kotaku) has posted a video showing Anthem alive and kicking, and—big points here—with two players (actually two accounts) logged in simultaneously.

The second account joins at around the 4:30 mark, if you want to cut straight to it:

It's very preliminary stuff, a proof-of-concept rather than anything like a playable game, and a redditor who says And799 is working with the Fort's Forge restoration project described it as "a really hacky thing" and advised that everyone temper their expectations accordingly.

Of course, not everyone is taking that advice entirely to heart.

Comment from r/AnthemTheGame

There's still a long way to go, and it's quite possible the whole thing will be derailed, either by technical issues or a cease-and-desist letter from EA. And even if it does all come together perfectly, I don't anticipate a great Anthem revival: The game was a flop, and the fact that it's effectively impossible to get it now means that whatever curiosity spike revived servers might drive isn't going to result in a surge of new players. I think it's great that Anthem could remain accessible to those who love it, but hopes expressed by a few turbo-optimists that EA will recognize the error of its ways and bring Anthem back officially are awfully optimistic.

The renewed interest in Anthem has resulted in at least one notable change of mind, though. Moderators announced earlier today that with the game shut down, the Anthem subreddit would be moved to an archived read-only mode. Following pushback from the community, however, moderators said they "didn't realize how much demand there'd still be for this forum to keep discussions going," and so they're "pausing and rethinking the approach."

"If this community is going to continue, it needs solid volunteers who are genuinely willing to take on ongoing moderation responsibilities so the sub can be maintained at a level it deserves," the mod team wrote in a now-stickied comment. "There have been several and long phases where it has all been just one moderator away from "banned due to the lack of moderation" and the exhaustion from it is the reason why the closure of the servers felt like a fitting end. But, the community comes first."

It's a bit like Anthem itself, then: Maybe the lights will stay on, if the community can make it happen. And maybe it can.

While Anthem wasn't well-loved at launch, it wasn't hated either. Steven Messner gave it a middling score of 55 in his review, which aligned with my own feeling of being a bit whelmed by a game with a clear identity crisis—a live service multiplayer game that wanted you and your friends to play strongholds together, but then return to a singleplayer hub where you'd have to shush during the story bits.

Even then Anthem had its diehards, and the patches and updates that followed addressed some of its more significant flaws. Not enough to save it unfortunately, but enough to guarantee a small but dedicated community of Freelancers who have suited up and returned to Fort Tarsis for the final day before EA pulls the plug on Anthem for good.

Our Lauren Morton is one of the players who logged on to say goodbye. "It's not empty," she says, "but it is quiet." There are Twitch streamers running missions until the end, and high-level veterans "waving and jumping and emoting" around the Launch Bay. The subreddit is full of players sharing their last screenshots and achievement pop-ups and quoting Anthem's tagline, "Strong alone, stronger together."

They're also praying for last-minute salvation, or an eventual revival via community-run private servers. As dinklebot117 points out, "avengers and suicide squad added offline modes before ending support. i believe redfall as well". When a less optimistic player said, "Great, Redfall. For the 5 people still playing it", dinklebot117 quite fairly replied, "bro we are in the anthem subreddit careful where you throw those stones".

Anthem's loss, whether it affects you or not, is another reason to value the message of the Stop Killing Games campaign. Messy though it was, Anthem had its fans, and now they're losing access to a thing they paid for and supported through to the end.

There's plenty of argument to be had about when and where BioWare—the erstwhile king of RPGs—began its fall from grace, but I don't think you can dispute the point it hit rock bottom: the 2019 release of Anthem, a live-service co-op looter-shooter that had little in common with the games that once made the studio great.

The game got a poor reception, including from us. Steven Messner scored the game 55% in his Anthem review and called it "deeply flawed and frequently frustrating," though very pretty indeed (I am often described the same way). BioWare pledged to "reinvent" the game around a year after release until another year later in 2021, when EA execs said 'Actually, hold that thought', and cancelled development entirely.

Despite all that, the game's servers have been up and running for all that time; the world's slim supply of Anthem-heads have been able to get their fill for years. But it's all about to come to an end. Anthem's servers are set to finally judder to a halt on January 12, 2026, putting an end to any way to play the game. That's seven days from now, if you've still not wrapped your head around what year it is. Which, hey, same.

BioWare had its fair share of controversies. Plenty of folks disliked the endings for Mass Effect 3 in 2012, Dragon Age 2 earned a lot of scorn (save from your brave truth-tellers at PC Gamer) a year earlier, Mass Effect: Andromeda was a bug-ridden mess of a game that turned out not to be that good even once the glitches were ironed out.

But for my money? Anthem was the nadir—the mortal wound that had onlookers grimacing and wondering if a once-beloved studio wasn't heading for a bleak and quiet end. It felt like the culmination of EA's philosophy that BioWare—in the words of studio vet David Gaider—"didn't have to try and appeal" to its traditional fans, because they'd turn up for whatever it put out. "You had to worry about the people who weren't [already RPG fans], which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."

Well, if the ignoble Ol' Yellering of Anthem on January 12 doesn't put paid to that philosophy, I suppose nothing will. For its part, BioWare has put out two games since development on Anthem officially ended: Mass Effect Legendary Edition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The remaster of three classic Mass Effects went over well. The new Dragon Age, though, got a more tepid response.

I'm gonna go ahead and say it all rides on how the next Mass Effect game goes down as to whether Anthem's end is seen as part of BioWare's ignominious conclusion or the start of a new chapter. Forgive me, but I can't say I'm optimistic.

We don't know much about the next Mass Effect game in development at BioWare except that it's happening, and even that feels a little soft right now, what with all the layoffs and looming sale of Electronic Arts to Saudi Arabia. But one thing we do now know, thanks to a Fall Damage interview on YouTube with Commander Shepard actors Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale, is that they're both pretty eager to return to the role.

After a bit of semi-philosophical musing on the question of whether Shepard is alive following the events of Mass Effect 3 (spoiler: well, maybe), Hale invited fans to "email the powers-that-be who make these games and say, 'Give us more Shepard, please'."

"Because we will be there, because we should not go," Hale says. "I would be there with bells on if they asked us to play Shepard again."

"I agree," Meer then chimes in with faux seriousness, "but only under any circumstances."

It could happen. BioWare made a point of offing Shepard at the start of Mass Effect 2, and insisted that it was really for real—but then of course he was brought back to life by the Lazarus Project so he could save us all from the Reaper threat. Classic hero stuff.

If it can happen once, it can happen again, and while I personally feel like bringing Shepard back for a new adventure would be a rather shabby treatment of the original trilogy, I can see why the suits at EA might find the idea appealing: After the mess of Mass Effect Andromeda and the failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to meet expectations, a return to the reliable familiarity of tried-and-true videogame heroes might seem like the best next step.

The very little that BioWare has teased of the next Mass Effect has certainly leaned on familiar elements, including Liara T'Soni digging up a broken chunk of something with the N7 logo on it. That was five years ago and things can change, but for now it's what we've got.

But if Shepard doesn't return for the next Mass Effect, that's okay too. "Sometimes narratives have an ending," Meer says. "I am happy with the way it ended, considering that chronologically anyway the very last thing that we did was the Citadel DLC, which I think addressed issues that people had, especially in terms of closure."

"The Citadel DLC was the bomb. It was so much fun. It was a love letter from BioWare to the entire community," Hale adds, setting Meer up for the closer: "My favorite DLC on the Citadel."

Whatever's ahead for Mass Effect, it won't be with former BioWare project director Casey Hudson at the helm, who's busy working on the next closest thing: Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic.

Nightmarishly, it's possible there are people reading this who were either unborn or incapable of forming long-term memories when Mass Effect 3 released in 2012. If that's you: consider it a blessing, because my chief recollection of that era is everyone being very upset about it on the internet.

What were they upset about? Well, they said it was a lot of stuff to do with the endings and your choices across the series not mattering that much. I know better, though. In their heart of hearts, in the deep, festering reaches of their collective subconscious, the gamers yearned for the lifts. The first Mass Effect was beloved. It was also a game about standing in a lot of lifts. These things are not unconnected.

Now, a doughty modder has restored the third Mass Effect (in its Legendary Edition form) to the pristine condition of its predecessor. Glorious Elevators (LE3) comes from Linkenski, who also put in the work to restore the original setup for ME1's Saren fights to the Legendary Edition and created, ah, Miranda Buttfarts Restored.

"Glorious Elevators return to Mass Effect beyond the first game," declares our modder. "Originally Mass Effect 3 actually had a working elevator right up until its finaling phases. Because the game was stuck on PS3/Xbox 360 as the lowest common denominator at the time, they couldn't optimize the game any further and ended up with load times just as notorious as Mass Effect 1 was originally known for."

But in 2025 my PC vibrates with parts potent enough to wound god, and there's no need to cut out these little additions. So Glorious Elevators sticks them back in. Using the lift in the Normandy? Rather than a humdrum load screen, you will whirr your way up or down in (something resembling) real time. I know. I'm excited too.

It is, I admit, a pretty minor thing, but I find this kind of obsessive, detail-oriented modding rather admirable and more than a little fascinating. Plus, I hear tell it's a banger. "It's better than the elevators in ME1, and adds to ME3's signature seamlessness and slickness," boasts Linkenski. "That's why this is a must-have!"

Once upon a time, in a game called Baldur's Gate 2, there was a girl named Aerie. Aerie was a formerly-winged elf who worked in a circus and had a great deal of personal trauma, which she worked out over the course of an extended courtship with you, the male player character. At some point, she would get pregnant, and the resulting child—named, in the blunt language of early CRPGs, "Aerie's Baby"—would hold eternal tenure in your already-limited inventory, in a space you might otherwise put a bundle of arrows or a longsword.

This is a sequence of events which I now regard as having ruined all of videogames.

To be fair to poor, pinioned Aerie, she was not the only option in the game's ragbag of sweethearts, but she is the one that sticks in my memory, mostly because of the storage baby. But the shape of BG2's romances is the shape of so many RPG romances since. Swap out Aerie for Liara, Viconia for Lae'zel, Anomen for Alistair—decades later and we're still wooing the same hotties by different names. It does not work for me.

The thing about relationships is they occur between two people (perhaps more, if you're radical or French), not one fully realised character and their beloved blank slate. For as much as I try to roleplay a certain vision of my avatars in games like Baldur's Gate (2 and 3), Mass Effect, Pathfinder or, hell, even Stardew Valley, they have fundamentally fewer dimensions than their romantic counterparts.

Shadowheart is a well-rounded person with history, preferences, and traumas. My player character is a level 9 Monk who hits things really hard and picks the nice dialogue options, which is not a personality. Perhaps the failure here is in my imagination, but while I am invested in Shadowheart's arc, I'm not invested in the alchemy that takes place between her and my cut-out of a protagonist. It will never feel like much more than making my dolls kiss.

Some RPGs do pull this off, sure: I genuinely cared about Geralt's relationship with Yennefer, for instance, and that's because both Geralt and Yennefer felt like individuals with flaws and quirks fencing in my roleplay options. You can't do the same thing when you allow the range of main character personalities in your usual BioWare-style RPG—what, of interest, can be produced between two people when one of them could exist anywhere on the moral spectrum from Albert Schweitzer to Albert Fish?

Obsidian has always understood this, I think, and it's why—for as much as I've felt its most recent RPG output has been solidly 'pretty alright'—I will always defend its choice not to invest writers' time in shoehorning in romances that would only be there because they're expected. When it introduced your companions for The Outer Worlds 2 in pre-release marketing, it pointedly affirmed that you could not sleep with them.

Romantic elements of Obsidian's games often occur between other characters, rather than between protagonist and party members: Christine and Veronica in New Vegas, or Parvati and Junlei in the first Outer Worlds. When they do occur between the player and an NPC, they're some flavour of all-screwed-up (KOTOR 2's Exile and… everyone). The rare times the studio has taken stabs at traditional CRPG-style romances, as in Deadfire, they've been, well, kind of unmemorable.

So perhaps what I want is not necessarily less romance in my blank-slate RPGs, but more romance between characters that are actually fully fledged. More romances between my party members for me to spectate and less between my party and their glorified blow up doll of a leader.

I might be a Baldur's Gate 1 stan, but it's undeniable that Baldur's Gate 2 is the more important of BioWare's original duo of games. Heck, it created a mould for RPG design that studios still embrace today, at least in part. Just look at recent RPGs like Avowed or The Outer Worlds 2, and it won't take you long to find the BG2 DNA.

But BG2 didn't emerge in a vacuum, and in a recent chat with Slandered Gaming it emerged that—while we can thank BG2 for a lot of our favourite RPGs since—we have a whole other game to thank for BG2. That'd be Final Fantasy 7, which lit a fire under BG2 director James Ohlen to go all out with the game's structure and companions, per Trent Oster—who worked on the original Baldur's Gate and has since become CEO of Beamdog, the studio behind the BG1 and BG2 Enhanced Editions.

"So, James had played Final Fantasy 7, and they had character interaction and romance, and he was scared shitless," recalls Oster. He had good reason to be—BG1's companions had their enduring standouts (Minsc, most famously of all), but they were ultimately just collections of barks, to be swapped out and ditched the second you met someone better or they got gibbed by an errant critical hit. They were tools, not things you cared about.

That is to say, they were a far cry from your pals in FF7, who you grew very attached to indeed. "[Ohlen] literally said, 'These guys kicked our ass. This is how a game should be. We don't know what we're doing.'"

Which is how you go from your party in BG1 consisting of folk like Ajantis, whose entire character was just shouting "By Helm!" whenever you selected him, to the whole plotlines that your comrades got in BG2—the first seeds of the loyalty missions that would reach full flower in Mass Effect 2.

It wasn't just companions, though, it was also how the game was structured. "With the setting as well," recalls Oster, "Baldur's Gate is kind of linked to one map, whereas in Baldur's Gate 2 it's kind of like a rollercoaster through some of the most great places in the realms—you're in the Sahuagin city, and you're in the Underdark, you're just hitting all these high spots that you've always read about in books."

If you've not played the OG BG games, it's hard to overstate how different they were, structurally. BG1 consisted in the main of a vast amount of bland 'generic countryside' maps.

Now, to be fair, pretty much all of them would be dotted with a few interesting or funny encounters, but there was barely anything to distinguish them from one another. BG2 carted you from setpiece to setpiece. I still remember the Windspear Hills, or Waukeen's Promenade, or Ust Natha. I don't really remember places in Baldur's Gate beyond, uh, Baldur's Gate itself. And it turns out we can thank Square for that.

Mass Effect chief Michael Gamble didn't have much to say about the next game in the series in today's N7 Day update, but he did throw some new light on the Mass Effect TV series being developed by Amazon.

"I haven't talked about it much, but you might have heard a little something about a TV series?" Gamble wrote. "We've been partnering closely with Amazon on it, and we're really excited with what the talented team over there is coming up with.

"The writers room is going strong, and we've got a lot figured out about how it fits within the Mass Effect canon, and where it sits in respect to the new game. The show will explore a brand-new story within the universe's timeline, and will be set after the original trilogy. It won’t be a retread of Commander Shepard’s story—because after all … that's YOUR story, isn't it?"

A Variety report on N7 Day 2024 confirmed that the Mass Effect series had officially entered development: I'm not intimately familiar with the ins and outs of television production but a full year from that to "we're figuring out how it fits with the games" seems like kind of a languid pace to me. And that's fine—as with videogames, I'd rather wait for something good than have something right now that sucks—but it does suggest to me that it's going to be a good while yet before we see a debut date announcement (or anything else).

Even though things don't seem to be fully nailed down just yet, it is interesting that BioWare and Amazon are opting to move away from the story that underpins one of the most famous videogame trilogies of all time. BioWare previously tried that with Mass Effect: Andromeda, and yes, being an absolute Gong Show on the technical side certainly helped bring it low. But I've never shaken the feeling that Shepard and company are essential to its success. That seemed to be reflected in previous teases for the next Mass Effect game, which featured an asari who is almost certain Liara T'Soni, one of the central NPCs of the original trilogy.

One other fun thing about setting the TV series after the Mass Effect trilogy is that it will have to establish one of the endings as canon, and then we can all go back to arguing about that for another year or three. Oh boy!

Gamble also said in today's N7 Day update that BioWare is still hard at work on a new game, but it's not ready to share anything just yet. He also asked everyone to please stop yelling at him about it.

Between the post-Veilguard massacre and EA's looming acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the storied studio known as BioWare is having a pretty rough time. It's still kicking, though, and still working on a new Mass Effect game—and executive producer Michael Gamble would really like it if you'd all stop yelling at him about it.

"Like you, we’ve heard the rumors lately," Gamble wrote in his traditional N7 Day blog post. "You’ve made it clear you care deeply about what’s next. So let’s start by setting the record straight: the next Mass Effect game is in development, and EA and BioWare remain committed to telling more stories in this universe.

"The truth is, the last few years have been an incredibly busy time at BioWare. But currently, the team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect. We have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out. We’re excited by what we’re building, and we promise you: when we’re ready, it’ll be a lot of fun to show. Until then, thank you for your patience because y’all are thirsty for news and I see you looking for secret meaning in my tweets (okay, sometimes they have secret meaning)."

And sure enough, there was something hidden in Gamble's message. I've left the formatting intact so you can see bits of it in the part I've posted above: Characters in the post are intermittently italicized. Put them all together, leaving out the italics on the game title, and you get:

URL Krogan N7

Right on cue, dozens of Mass Effect fans set about trying to unravel the mystery. For the moment, the mystery remains ravelled: Sharp minds noticed that the link blog.bioware.com/2025/11/07/n7-day-2025/krogan/n7—tacking the hidden message onto the URL for today's update—redirects to a 2012 blog post detailing Mass Effect 3's first-ever multiplayer "Challenge Weekend," which some took to mean that multiplayer might finally be coming to the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. (It was omitted because BioWare felt the effort to get it working wouldn't be worth the payoff, which was unfortunate because it really was excellent.) T

hat was as far as internet sleuths got until the official Mass Effect account on X dropped a hint. Based on that, fans quickly decoded the "krogan" message to a series of numbers, which linked to this image:

Gamble also shared the image on his X account, and more interestingly said it depicts a "future" event.

Despite everything that has and hasn't happened to Mass Effect over the 13 years since Mass Effect 3 (and yes, it's been 13 years), there's clearly excitement among some fans for something new.

My own thoughts, though, went back to N7 Day 2023, when I said I really wish BioWare would quit dicking around and just tell us what's going on. The series, and BioWare as a whole, no longer has the cachet to pull off this kind of cookie-dangling song-and-dance: It is way past time to, as my mother puts it, shit or get off the pot.

Based on Gamble's follow-up post on X, I'm not the only one who expressed this perspective. "For everyone yelling at me because we didn’t use N7 Day to provide a whole bunch of info… I mean, I get it. I’m a fan too. I want you to see stuff. But it’s not the time… yet. Has it been years since announce? Yes. Have we been busy? Yes. Are we NOW 100% on Mass Effect? Also yes."

That's fair enough, but I might retort by saying that if BioWare really has nothing to say about the next Mass Effect game, cutesy code games and ARGs leading fans to think there is something new hidden in the digital shadows might not be the way to go, especially at a time when fans are so clearly eager for straight talk about what seems like a very uncertain future for both the series and the studio.

In Gamble's defense, he did conclude his N7 Day blog post by saying, "There is no secret game information to be gleaned by anything I’m saying today, I promise." But tossing that in after so obviously slipping a hidden message into the post? Yeah, I don't think that's going to convince too many people. It might even have the opposite effect.

Despite not having anything to say about the next Mass Effect game, Gamble did shed some light on the Mass Effect TV series in development at Amazon. It sounds like writers are still nailing down the details but it "won’t be a retread of Commander Shepard's story," Gamble said: "The show will explore a brand-new story within the universe's timeline."

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the game that put BioWare on the map for people who thought Baldur's Gate was the thing that kept Baldur's dog in Baldur's yard, has an incredible twist. Unfortunately, I knew about it ahead of time because of the internet, but if you haven't played it yet—it's an old game, but young people exist and not everyone has time for everything—then this is me warning you to play it before somebody spoils it for you.

(If you just want to know what it is, you can spoil it for yourself by reading the fourth slide in this article about PC gaming's greatest twists.)

Jennifer Hale, the voice actor playing Jedi Master Bastila Shan in Knights of the Old Republic, did not know the twist in advance. As is often the case in videogame recording, she didn't get to see the script until she was in the booth. "We never got our scripts ahead of time", Hale recently told Buzzfeed. "Most of the games I've ever done have been cold reading. I walk in, and I see the line. I do the line, and it goes to market."

And so she got to be as shocked as most players were when she got to the end. "I did not see the twist coming!" she said. "Knights of the Old Republic really showed me the level of writing, storytelling, and surprise that was possible in games. It was so adventurous and forward-thinking and incredible. It completely shocked me. I remember just being gobsmacked by this game so many times because I didn't see it ahead of time."

The other thing she didn't know is that her character could turn to the dark side. "This was my first experience with the light side and dark side", she said. "I first did all the light-side story, and I got to feel fantastic. I got to feel like the big hero, and it was so much fun. Then I came back in, and I was a little bit confused. I wasn't exactly sure what we were doing."

As would later be the case with Mass Effect's paragon and renegade paths, Hale essentially had to play two different characters so players had the freedom to choose how things would go. But unlike Mass Effect's tough-cop renegade, Bastila Shan can be a full-on villain. "Ginny McSwain and Darragh O'Farrell were our voice directors, and they told me, 'It's the same stuff, but you're doing it this way now.' I went, 'What? She what?' I almost felt personally betrayed."

In 2021, Aspyr announced it was working on a KOTOR remake. A year later, we heard it was indefinitely delayed, though as recently as March of 2025 there were signs of life. Fortunately, the original remains entirely playable today, though if you want to run it widescreen you can download Steam Superheater to help with that.

I'll be honest, I've never really understood the 'RPG to action game' pipeline that many popular series—and studios—have gone through. Consider Dragon Age; born as a CRPG, forced to live through little chips and nicks that turned it into a third-person action game with RPG elements.

I mean, I get it on paper. Action games have more mainstream appeal, so sayeth industry wisdom. If you want huge, big-budget successes, the best way to spoil those dreams is to brain newcomers over the dome with a character sheet, or gross them out with an orb-based skill tree that looks more like a trypophobia trigger than a UI element.

But as we've gone on, I'm growing less and less convinced that this idea—that we simply cannot handle anything more difficult, or it'll hurt our walnut gamer brains—was ever true. At the very least, it's not true right now.

Complexity, turning games into the sea

Before I get stuck in, I want to define what I mean by "crunch", which is a TTRPG term I'm cribbing for this article about videogames, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

Crunchy systems are typically three things: They're granular, in that the rules get into specific detail, and you're given a lot of insight into how those rules work. They're complex, in that you have a wide range of builds and playstyles to pick from. And they're meaningful, in that the choices you make about your character have an appreciable impact in how you can approach the system—and, crucially, it's possible to get it wrong to a point where you might have a harder time.

In videogames, granularity usually manifests in gnarly, spiderwebbing skill trees and modifier-flooded menus. Complexity usually walks hand-in-hand with this, but it can also crop up with more streamlined perks systems as long as those perks are actually impactful; meaningful choices can appear either as part of character-building systems or in the open-ended approaches of the immersive sim. The core thread being, knowledge is power.

Games at the deep end of this spectrum, possessing all three in spades, are those oldschool CRPGs based (suitably) off those crunch-laden TTRPG systems of eld: Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Neverwinter Nights, for example. All increasingly unpopular, if you're to believe the bigwigs.

Per Dragon Age series creator David Gaider, the executive 'wisdom' has increasingly been: "The nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG … You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."

But I think that said nerd-cave is far, far larger than the industry's ever given it credit for. Just look at what's actually done well in the past five or so years, and it's clear we can handle far more—not just that, but we're hungry for it.

Crunching numbers

Baldur's Gate 3, which has nestled in for a cosy spot at the top of our Top 100, is based off Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. While 5e is nowhere near as complicated as its predecessors—3.5 in particular—it's still decently crunchy by videogame RPG standards. At the very least, you can get buck wild with it—building some truly godlike power out of intersecting mechanics and Larian's madcap homebrew magic items.

This year, there was also Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which went ahead and has, as fellow PCG writer Wes Fenlon pointed out, properly cemented the fact that people do like turn-based RPGs, actually.

Ol' 33, like a lot of the JRPGs it was based on, starts out with straightforward characters that explode exponentially into baskets of optional modifiers. By then end of my playthrough, I was juggling dozens of possible buffs, trying to squeeze as much juice as I could out of my squad.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is also granular and systems-heavy while selling bucketloads. In Joshua Wolens' review, he says it nearly "approaches Stalker-levels of zeal", and that "by the end of the game, when you're teeming with perks and fancy gear, you'll be a rambling Bohemian Cuisinart turning all your foes to shreds, but even this feels like a more earned and systems-driven process than it does in your average Skyrim-inspired RPG." Mm, crunchy.

And while it's more Diablo 4 than Baldur's Gate—Borderlands 4's done well and it's plenty complex. In fact, it's been like that for years and it's always trucked along just fine, which only further goes to prove my point: There's an appetite. It's there.

Even when it comes to studios that've tried to broaden their audiences—cough, Obsidian, cough—that there's an effort to try and find the right balance.

I've heard mixed things about The Outer Worlds 2's build system from my fellow RPG sickos on the PC Gamer team, but Ted Litchfield seems to think Obsidian's erred on the side of meaningful choices in his review, even though there aren't attributes anymore: "There were often quest solutions or routes that were completely closed to me because of how I built my character, and I appreciate that."

Speaking of Obsidian, I do think the studios who're flirting with the idea of going back to their roots just need to commit, already.

More, more!

I had a decent enough time with Avowed, but man I wish it was more of an RPG—I'm not talking about those immersive sim elements, it's good for a game to be focused—but if Avowed was going to focus on that core combat loop, then it should've doubled down and let me go all Path of Exile on it.

For a game mostly about whacking enemies with sticks, it didn't have that many ways to do that. It felt too restrained, like Obsidian had just really started to get going with its build options and then pulled up at the last second.

I think there's also an association of crunch with unassailability—and that's not unfounded. My biggest shame, my biggest hypocrisy in all of this, which I bare along with my soul to you now for judgement? I've never stuck with a Morrowind playthrough. I just can't do it. It makes my head hurt.

But it's clear that we can build games that ease you in—in fact, that might just be the gambit going forward. As I mentioned, Baldur's Gate 3 is based on a system where simply going mono-class in any given choice will do you well enough—a Fighter's still gonna slap. Similarly, Expedition 33, like many of the JRPGs it was influenced by, is a slow-burn story that gives you access to its complicated systems piecemeal.

My point is that players—or "audiences", if you want to use that infernal corpo-speak—respond far better to deep, complicated RPGs than conventional industry wisdom would have you believe. While I use Obsidian as an example of a studio that's strayed too far from the crunch, I do think Josh Sawyer was bang on the money earlier this year: If you're really worried, you can just slap some difficulty settings on the dang thing.

When an RPG developer shies away from depth, they shy away from granularity that could keep players around for longer. They shy away from complexity that can make repeat runs appealing. And they shy away from meaningful decisions that actually make you feel like your systems mastery and experimentation has paid off in some appreciable way.

So I say: No more skill trees with a scant 12 points to starve between nodes, no more diluting classic RPG series into stealth archer simulators, no more compromises! We can handle crunchy, complicated RPGs. We like them. Give us a pair of arm floaties we can take off later, sure—but don't be scared to give your RPG a deep end, because it's gonna scare off way fewer people than you think.

Also, we can kill the dialogue wheel while we're at it. Thanks.

Mark Darrah, a former producer at BioWare, has once more taken to YouTube to voice his opinions on the massive EA buyout. Which is more than fair enough, given the guy worked at BioWare for over 20 years, and has seen firsthand what EA's company culture did to not only his studio, but others.

Unfortunately, as he calls it, this whole thing's going to result in more industry layoffs. Ah, it's happening again.

The buyout is a leveraged buyout, which Darrah says means "EA is going to have an additional $20 billion of debt on its balance sheet. Obviously, adding $20 billion to your balance sheet is going to require you to pay a lot of interest. If we look at EA's current financials, they're netting out about $1.1-1.2 billion each year. If that $20 billion is sitting at a 5% interest rate, that's $1 billion of interest that needs to be paid every year just to service that debt."

He adds that, "for a company that's as historically financially conservative as EA, you're going to be looking for additional cost savings. And for a company where a majority of your costs come from people, that is likely going to mean layoffs and studio closures." The only reason you shouldn't imagine me pushing my head into my hands out of sheer frustration is because I'm using said hands to write this article.

But there's also another looming concern, given that the buyers in this instance involve both the Saudi Arabian government's Public Investment Fund (PIF), and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners—Kushner being President Trump's son-in-law.

That's a two-pronged nightmare when it comes to human rights—the Saudi Government is often criticised for its human rights abuses, and the Trump administration has been taking aim at DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) practices.

When it comes to the PIF's "sportswashing", that is, attempts to "cover over or distract from some of the legitimate human rights violations that have been levelled against the country", Darrah says, "It's hard to imagine acquiring a $55 billion media company … won't play into that effort.

"... If this is a PR move for the Saudi government as much as it is a financial one … what you might do is just come in and put your thumb on the scale and push their messaging in directions you want. In directions that make you look good, or at the very least steer them away from messaging that makes you look bad."

That's not to say the next Mass Effect game will be anti-social justice, though—since completely flipping the script would also be disastrous: "It's hard to imagine that you'd have BioWare pivot from having very progressive messaging to having the reverse—because it's what the government wants. It's hard to imagine that the public perception of a game that comes out of BioWare [that does that] isn't apocalyptically bad."

I'm generally inclined to agree—Dragon Age games have always been progressive for their time—but I think the cynic in me also says companies make ill-advised decisions based on vibes all the damn time. I'm inclined to agree with Darrah that a studio closure or sale is more likely: "You either have to decide that you're willing to just leave it alone, or you have to think that they don't fit anymore within the goals of this new organisation."

Which is more likely now, given the debt thing. Darrah explains that EA historically doesn't flog off its IPs because it's inherently risk-averse, as its higher-ups' "actual incentives are to do nothing." But as the deal closes, "those incentives could radically change … to shed costs or generate revenue if at all possible" to fight off the debt.

There's a small silver lining, though, however tiny. Going private, Darrah explains that EA will have to report its financials on a longer-term basis: "They can decide individually on their own terms what they want to see. If they want to see a studio go dark for 25 years in order to investigate some sort of radical new way to develop games? They can do that."

This might help avoid this "line must go up, very short term, three-month focus on the way that revenue works … it makes the studios very risk-averse."

It's a little like looking at a cup with a few drops of water in it and going 'Hey, this could be half-full at some point', as Darrah states that "in the short-term it almost definitely means a bunch of layoffs. In game studios, but also in financial and PR roles, EA is going to shed a bunch of people. That is definitely bad. In the medium term, it might mean studio closures … In the long-term, it's probably good for whatever EA still exists after the dust settles."

EA went private in a Saudi-backed $55 billion deal earlier this week, and pretty much no one with a net worth south of $100 million is happy about it. Least happy of all? The staff of EA's myriad studios, who now have to wonder if their jobs are going under the guillotine to make Mohammed bin Salman and Jared Kushner's pocketbooks a little happier. With EA now on the hook for a $20 billion debt to JP Morgan in the wake of its leveraged buyout, frantic cost-cutting (and, joy of joys, AI) seems inevitable.

Especially worried are the staff at BioWare, which hasn't chalked up an unalloyed win since 2021's Mass Effect Legendary Edition and which hasn't chalked one up with an actually new game since 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition. In a chat with Insider Gaming, anonymous staff at the RPG developer sound like they're just waiting for the axe to fall.

"I’ve been doing it since last year, but I’m making sure I have a portfolio ready and feelers out for other jobs," said one source, who added that it "Kind of feels like a matter of time" before things turn dark for the studio.

Another staff member said "Look at the negativity that came after Dragon Age [The Veilguard]. If we felt it was only going to get worse then, you can imagine what some of us think now." BioWare was hit by layoffs in the wake of Veilguard's release, with EA suits declaring the game was "down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations."

So BioWare was already in the dumps, Veilguard's lukewarm reception made things worse, and EA's take-private deal seems to have frayed the thread on the sword of Damocles even further. According to Insider Gaming, talks were underway at some point to sell BioWare off entirely, but it's not clear where they ended up. Frankly, that might be the positive outcome at this point.

With BioWare in the doldrums and the take-private deal anticipated to close in Q1 of FY2027, it feels like the studio's future is either a quick sale or complete closure—an ignominious end for a studio that was once the undisputed king of RPG development. Per one anonymous BioWare dev, "We’re going to keep working until they tell us we're done. It’s not the healthiest way to live, but as long as the paycheques keep coming, we’re not going to just walk away."

The rumours have been swirling for a while, before today brought a major industry announcement: EA has struck a $55 billion deal to go private in a Saudi-backed buyout. It's the biggest leveraged buyout in history, meaning that the new EA is instantly saddled with $20 billion of debt, and will face intense pressure to crank those profits. And it's also the latest step in the Saudi Arabian Investment Fund's mission to "sportswash" the brutal regime, by using its influence and ubiquity across entertainment industries to distract from some of the world's most appalling human rights abuses.

As the crack team at PCG towers discussed the deal, one line stuck with me: "I wouldn't want to be sitting in a BioWare chair right now." The vibes around one of the all-time great RPG studios have not been good in recent years, and the fairly decent Dragon Age: The Veilguard didn't persuade anyone that the studio is capable of surpassing contemporary greats like Baldur's Gate 3 or Disco Elysium. Early this year, the studio was apparently cut to the bone in a round of layoffs, though a new Mass Effect game remains in development. For now.

Everyone who's ever loved a BioWare game, which is surely an awful lot of us, is probably feeling quite gloomy about the studio's prospects. And that extends to former BioWare leads, who're watching this acquisition and thinking pretty much what we're all thinking: It might not happen tomorrow, but this could be the death knell for the studio.

Patrick Weekes, who goes by Trick Weekes, was a writer at BioWare from 2005 to 2025, working across various Mass Effect and Dragon Age titles, and was lead writer for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. They recently took to Bluesky, linking coverage of the EA-Saudi deal alongside an imaginary conversation that goes like this:

Buyers: So your games... guns and football, yes?

EA: Mmhmm, mmhmm, mostly guns and football, yep.

Buyers: No gay stuff? No politics we're not going to like?

EA: Haha, definitely not! Hey, could you give me one sec? I just need to shut down a studio real quick.

Weekes was one of those laid off at the start of the year and so can afford to be frank, while anyone still at BioWare will no doubt be deleting all social media apps lest temptation win out.

As for the fans? A quick look at the Mass Effect subreddit shows the top thread on the acquisition is called simply "It's over, Commander", with seemingly every fan of the series bracing for bad news. The only slight notes of positivity are those who think EA might sell BioWare but, honestly, who's lining up to buy a AAA studio that hasn't had a major hit since arguably Mass Effect 3?

The EA-Saudi deal was only announced today, and we're going to be watching the fallout from this for years to come. It doesn't bode well for fans of any EA series, really. But for BioWare especially, this could be existential.

I loved the idea of Dungeons and Dragons when I was young, but can't claim the same about playing it. Because I didn't play it: Circumstances—small town boy, limited circle of friends, not very outgoing—meant that while I could and did spend hours poring over rules, sourcebooks, and even a few modules, I got very little in the way of actual playtime. A good, deep D&D adventure as I imagined them to be—basically Mazes and Monsters, minus the moral panic psychosis—was out of reach.

The first Baldur's Gate changed all that, with great dungeons, an epic quest, and most important of all, a deep cast of characters with their own thoughts, beliefs, and personalities—and who, just like in the real world, would sometimes gel or clash with their fellows in unexpected ways.

Some became fast friends, others would try to literally murder each other, and a handful would just throw their hands up in disgust at my obvious incompetence and leave, after giving me a good telling-off of course.

Baldur's Gate 2 raised the stakes with a more focused cast and wider range of interpersonal possibilities, plus an unpleasant kickoff that reminded me just how much these characters meant. Discovering that two beloved* party members from BG1 (your mileage may vary on that point, but they were with me from start to finish in the first game and would've been for BG2, too) had been killed in pre-game events—irretrievably, irreversibly, no-resurrecting-thing dead—was a genuine gut-shot: We're supposed to be the heroes, and now a third of us are just... gone.

It took a while to get my head around that, but I was fortunate enough to find a new companion of poise, ability, and coolness while making my way out of that first dungeon: Yoshimo, an immediately likeable bounty hunter who proved his worth a dozen times over on our adventures across Amn. And then, after weeks of camaraderie and good times, he screwed me!

I was less upset about Yoshimo's betrayal than I might otherwise have been for two reasons. One, potential spoiler here⁠—but come on, it's been exactly 25 years⁠—it wasn't really his fault, right? Lawyers call it "The Geas Defense." Two, speaking of spoilers, that major twist had been spoiled for me weeks earlier by a jerk in a Baldur's Gate 2 IRC channel. I was seriously pissed off at the time and yes, I still harbor a grudge.

Anyway, even though I knew it was coming, I was still heartbroken in the moment. Yoshimo was such a good guy, a solid all-arounder, and I'd grown genuinely attached to him and his presence in my party. It wasn't the betrayal that hurt, it was knowing that—like Khalid and Dynaheir, victims of the madness of Irenicus—he was gone forever.

Party down

It sucked! But it's also at the heart of why Baldur's Gate 2 was, and is, so special to me. No game before or since has so perfectly captured the sense of a gang of pals (or occasional allies of convenience) roaming a massive fantasy world, butt-kicking for goodness.

And what a gang it was: The bloodthirsty berserker Korgan, occasionally setting aside his evil ways to mack on Mazzy Fentan, the halfling fighter desperate to be a paladin; sad Aerie and her broken wings, Valygar and his family problems, insecure Anomen, old friends Imoen, Minsc, and Jaheira, and of course Viconia, the original BioWare bad girl with a deeply-buried heart of gold—all of them and others shared the road with me in Baldur's Gate 2.

And yes, I did put the smooth moves on Viconia. Of course I did! Videogame romances can be trite and formulaic these days, but 25 years ago that kind of NPC relationship was new, unexpected, and real in a way that gave it a sense of significance beyond the mechanical necessity of cranking out loyalty missions.

Best of all, amidst that bantering, bickering crew was me, ostensibly the leader of the pack but also just one among many: Grown from a young half-elf caught up in events beyond my understanding to a seasoned adventurer, but with still so much to discover and learn. I called the shots but my companions had their own ideas, and I ignored them at my peril.

That's what really sealed the Baldur's Gate 2 deal for me: I wasn't an unseen hand controlling an anonymous party of min-maxxed randos, I was that guy on the screen right there, and yes I was the boss but I was also getting yelled at by Jaheira on a regular basis and spending more time than I probably should wondering why I'm still putting up with Anomen's bullshit. Sort out your daddy issues on someone else's time, bud.

Baldur's Gate 2 did so many great things: The art, the audio, and the huge, packed game world remain among the best of the RPG genre. But it was the decision to focus on the characters, and to make me one of their number, that elevated it from a great RPG to one of the most important and unforgettable videogames of all time.

It gave the game a feeling of tabletop authenticity I'd never previously experienced, and for someone who spent his youth on the outside looking in, suddenly having a seat at that table was nothing short of magical. That's the real legacy of Baldur's Gate 2 for me: Imoen, Jahiera, Minsc, Mazzy, and Viconia: Literally, and without a shred of irony, the friends I made along the way.

God help us, it has been 25 years since Baldur's Gate 2 released, and even though a third game under the same name has since come out and got everyone very excited with its sexy-haughty vampire boys and whatnot, we're still talking about it.

Why?

Well, that's easy. Baldur's Gate 2 is a good game. It's a very good game, actually: a plane-hopping, swashbuckling, high-fantasy adventure filled with great performances and memorable characters.

But that's not quite enough explanation, is it? There have been a lot of very good games in the past few decades, and not all of them get anniversary write-ups. Heck, personally I'm more of a Baldur's Gate 1 guy, and yet I don't think I said a thing when that game's 25-year anniversary hit two years ago.

It's because Baldur's Gate 2 is a lot more than just Baldur's Gate 2. It represents BioWare hitting on an approach to design that would define it—and consequently, so much other RPG development—for over a decade afterwards. BioWare never stopped making Baldur's Gate 2 once it made it the first time. Dig in almost any RPG, especially one that has you roll deep with a party of whining misfits, and you can find a trace of it.

Party mode

The obvious question is, 'Why attribute all this influence specifically to BG2, and not the first game in the series?' Great question. Thanks for asking. BG1, for as much as I love it, came into the world still coated in a thin layer of early-'90s RPG stuff—friction-generating busywork and a combat-first philosophy.

Travelling between its hubs meant crossing multiple long maps of little but bare nature: wide stretches of grassland and trees. In fairness, BioWare took all the opportunities it could to speckle those maps with amusing little encounters, but it was tedious and old-fashioned. BG2 ditched that stuff. From now on there would only be hubs, stuffed with quests and things to do. When you fly between planets in Mass Effect or cities in Dragon Age, you can thank BG2 for cutting out the cruft.

But that's minor. What really set BG2 apart from all that came before it was its party. BG1's helpers were a collection of cliches and barks—meatshields you shouldn't feel bad about discarding if they happened to get gibbed by an unlucky crit. BG2's cast of freaks were people, man.

Your half-sister who struggled with her divine heritage, the smooth-talking rogue with a guilty conscience, the woman dealing with the grief of her husband's death as she (maybe) falls in love all over again. Also Anomen. Anomen sucks.

Do these remind you of anything? Of course they do. They're BioWare NPCs—characters you could slap a Star Wars name and put in KOTOR, or turn into Turians and Salarians and slot them in Mass Effect, or change literally nothing and put them in Dragon Age. BG2 was when BioWare truly tried its hand at making you fall in love with your companions and absolutely nailed it, and then it never stopped trying to do that in any major release after 2000. Except Anthem, and look how that turned out.

BG2 marked the studio realising its superpower wasn't encounter design, or combat, or worldbuilding (which is not to say it was bad at those things) it was that it could drive players absolutely nuts with passion for these tiny paper-cut avatars; that people were ravenous to build relationships, theories, headcanons on the basis of the personalities the studio's writers imbued their party-members with. They might even choose to set out with a statistically nonoptimal party because they like the people in it—unthinkable!

And having discovered this dark alchemy, BioWare never stopped using it. Every big RPG it made thereafter was defined just as much—if not more—by its party than by its narrative. The pattern of BG2 now defined BioWare as a whole.

The studio knew it, too. Mass Effect 2 and ME3's Citadel DLC are perhaps the peak of the whole style: ME2's main plot was almost an afterthought compared to its lineup of party loyalty missions—an anthology of vignettes each centering around an individual companion (BG2's party members had these, too).

Citadel, meanwhile, almost had the feeling of a mea culpa—BioWare knew you were upset about how ME3 had wrapped up so it let you throw a big party with your pals to make up for it. You could just as easily have made the same DLC for Dragon Age, or KOTOR, or BG2.

BG2 wasn't the first RPG to give a damn about its characters, but it was certainly the most impactful. It defined BioWare, sure, but it helped define Obsidian, Troika, Owlcat, Larian, even CD Projekt Red, a studio which doesn't even deal in party-based RPGs.

It fired the starting pistol on a philosophy of RPG design that continues to echo today. When The Outer Worlds 2 put out a companions trailer last month, giving you a quick overview of the game's party and wearily letting you know in advance that no, you can't sleep with them, it was echoing a lineage that traces its Big Bang back to the year 2000. When you celebrate BG2, you celebrate 25 years of RPGs, and that's why its anniversary really matters.

BioWare fans can never agree on which era of the studio was its peak—classic Baldur's Gate 2, the original Mass Effect, or (correctly) Dragon Age: Origins—but there's no debating that it was the frontrunner in a golden era for RPGs that influenced at least a decade of other games.

If that sounds like the beginning of a eulogy…yeah. It isn't technically dead, and there's a universe where BioWare makes some incredible comeback with Mass Effect 4, but I don't think it's this one. After Andromeda, Anthem, and Veilguard, it seems that no matter the talent still left in the studio, EA just isn't going to give BioWare the time or trust to make the kind of RPGs it originally spearheaded anymore. I'm finally ready to let go.

If you too are mourning the studio's effective downfall, rest assured that the BioWare-style RPG lives on elsewhere. My colleague Fraser Brown insisted back in 2023 that the BioWare-style RPG was dead and just didn't know it yet. At the time I almost even agreed, but two years later it feels like we've finally arrived breathless at a tough summit to look down into a valley of plenty in the big-budget, story-forward party RPG scene.

Larian Studios

• Working on: two unannounced things

I know better than to assume anything goes without saying, so I'm saying it: Larian is the number one RPG developer to watch right now for mourning BioWare fans. Its incredible triumph with Baldur's Gate 3 (our 2023 Game of the Year and current number one in the Top 100 PC games) is a masterclass character-forward RPG sandbox jam-packed with deep strategy and roleplay opportunities that BioWare itself should have been making these 15 years since Dragon Age: Origins.

Despite some rough early years, Larian's recent backlist is well worth dumping a couple hundred hours into. Divinity: Original Sin and D:OS2 are both excellent, though I wouldn't say it was doing the full course BioWare RPG until Baldur's Gate 3. Larian is worth staying excited for in the wake of BG3 because it's got two new projects on the go now.

Neither are Baldur's Gate 4, and instead it's going to "develop our own IPs," studio head Swen Vincke said. That may mean Divinity: Original Sin 3, which I would not complain about, but likely also means something completely new and original. I only hope they stick to their sword and sorcery chops and don't fly off into sci-fi territory. Larian scaled up massively to pull off BG3, and not being beholden to a publisher or IP-holding partner means it can take full creative control in bringing that expertise to bear.

Obsidian Entertainment

• Working on: The Outer Worlds 2

Obsidian is living the life I wish BioWare could have had: trucking along as the subsidiary of a major publisher, being trusted to make the singleplayer RPGs that made it popular in the first place, valiantly juggling two original series—one fantasy and one sci-fi—and being the belle of the yearly company showcase. Seriously, this year's summer Xbox event was very Obsidian-focused.

With Avowed getting compared so often to Skyrim and Obsidian itself loving a trailer gag reminding us that they made Fallout: New Vegas, it's easy to have missed that their latest RPGs are actually more BioWare than Bethesda. Avowed was a great, party-focused RPG with genuinely impactful narrative choices and roleplaying moments around the campfire that will warm any Origins fan's heart, and The Outer Worlds 2 is looking promising with its imminent launch too.

Of note is that Avowed's game director Carrie Patel left Obsidian after over a decade. A bummer, but the fact that Patel came up from a writer on Pillars of Eternity to a narrative lead and then game director suggests that Obsidian's been able to affirm the importance of storytelling in its RPGs. Here's hoping it continues to do so wherever it heads after Outer Worlds 2.

Owlcat Games

• Working on: The Expanse: Osiris Reborn

Standing at the precipice where BioWare itself once stood is Owlcat Games. The developer of top-down, party-based RPGs is coming off two Pathfinder games and a Warhammer 40k game and making a big jump into a cinematic sci-fi RPG, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. We've consistently praised Owlcat for nailing a setting and The Expanse, with its very popular political space opera book series and also popular TV adaptation, is a hell of a setting to be starting from.

"Your companions are more than just mission assets—they are people with their own scars and loyalties," Owlcat says. "Over time, your relationships will flourish or deteriorate depending on the choices you make and how you choose to lead." Between that, your customizable character, and the third-person sci-fi shooter action, Osiris Reborn may not outrun the Mass Effect comparisons. Maybe it shouldn't try to.

Harebrained

• Working on: Graft

When it was owned by Paradox, the studio formerly known as Harebrained Schemes gave us a couple of RPGs that were basically "what if classic BioWare had gone turn-based and also cyberpunk" in Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Both had strong parties of companions to butt heads and then bond with, and Dragonfall even borrowed the plot structure of Baldur's Gate 2.

Unfortunately Paradox pushed the studio out of its comfort zone and the result was the less-impressive Lamplighters League, after which Paradox cut it free. Now independent and just called Harebrained, it's working on an isometric body-horror RPG set on a space station. It's called Graft, because it's about stitching together a new body for yourself by scavenging from others as they fall, which I'm sure is totally not a metaphor for anything. "Form fragile alliances and build them into deeper relationships" says the Steam description, which sounds very BioWare to me.

See also

Games and studios you may have heard of that I'm not hanging my BioWare successor hopes on for one reason or another:

• CD Projekt Red: I'm jazzed for The Witcher 4, but I've always considered CDPR's RPGs a different beast from BioWare's.
• Warhorse Studios: Ditto the above, though we did quite like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
• Spiders: Its Greedfall series is actually BioWare-style, but the first was middling and the second is still in early access.
• Tactical Adventures: Another studio doing D&D RPGs, but we praised Solasta's combat while finding its storytelling a bit amateurish, so I'm not holding my breath on Solasta 2 as a BioWare-like.
• InXile: We praised the writing in Wasteland 3 but its upcoming Clockwork Revolution looks like it will play more like Dishonored than anything.

Buddy, you'd be amazed at my capacity for forgetting videogame adaptations. Remember when I wrote about The Sims movie yesterday? I don't. What's more, now I'm suddenly remembering that, somewhere out there, Amazon is working on a Mass Effect TV show.

What's more, perhaps you could be in it, provided you could play any of: a young Colin Farrell-type male (aged 30-39) of any ethnicity, a female co-lead alien character requiring prosthetics (34-39), a female human at the centre of a separate-but-corresponding plot on Earth, a Doug Jones-type male villain (40-60), or a male wrestler-type soldier (30-49).

That's a casting call recently leaked by industry in-crowd figure Daniel Richtman (via Eurogamer), and I don't think I fit any of them, so I guess I'm stuck in the games journalism mines. Anyway, with there being zero information out there about what the show's plot will focus on, the leak has inevitably led to a flurry of speculation about just who, from the games, each character refers to.

A young Colin Farrell-type male could easily be Shepard. Tragically, male Shepard, which would be the objectively incorrect choice, but I guess Amazon hasn't seen my frequent emails on the subject. A female co-lead alien? That could easily be Liara, who would likely end up as our canon love interest.

A female human at the centre of a separate plot? Well, that one's a doozy. If we're accepting for a minute (which, honestly, I don't) that the TV show's plot will reflect the one from the games, it could be that this would be an original character with an original plot to flesh things out a little. Either that, or Ashley Williams is on Earth now. I guess no one liked her anyway.

As for the final two: a Doug Jones-type villain seems like it could only really refer to Saren, if we're sticking with the OG games' story. And a wrestler-y male? By god, that's James Vega's music.

That's the speculation, anyway, and frankly, I don't buy any of it. I wouldn't be surprised if the Mass Effect show opts to tell a wholly original story in the wider ME universe—just like Amazon's (very good) Fallout show did. That'd give you room to brush up against characters and plots fans know and love without shackling you to the original narrative. But we'll only know for sure when Amazon deigns to tell us, and with everything around the series being so quiet for years now, that could be a good while yet.

How many Dragon Age games would you say there are? Only four, right? Origins, its sequel, Inquisition and last year's Veilguard. Not many, for a beloved franchise spanning a decade and a half at a major publisher. But then the BioWare team behind the series was often characterised as a pirate ship by colleagues: sailing haphazardly between projects and often drifting off course as it found its way to its next hit.

Certainly, there was never a straightforward follow-up that built directly on the success of Origins. BioWare's pirates were routinely tossed about on the rough seas of EA's whims, following mandates for tight budgets or new engines or live service features. Those internal skirmishes added years to the development of mainline Dragon Age games, and we got fewer of them as a consequence. It's hard not to talk about the series in the past tense, given EA's apparent disdain for a nerdy universe in which nobody carries either a ball or a gun.

Where can one find more Dragon Age, then? In the novels, which are in my experience rather good, written by lead writers of the series like Trick Weekes and David Gaider. In expansions like 2010's Origins: Awakening, well-received yet frequently forgotten. And, buried amid the Flash-based Facebook distractions and long-dead mobile spinoffs, there's a sole survivor on Newgrounds: Dragon Age Journeys. It's a briefly charming turn-based affair set under the earth, amid the dwarves and the darkspawn. But even that was cancelled after its first episode.

In that latter graveyard of browser games lies the saddest loss to the series—Dragon Age: The Last Court. Built by Failbetter, the developer of Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, it was a game of lordship, in which you managed the affairs of an eccentric fiefdom at the edge of Orlais (France for dweebs). You'd choose a bodyguard, a counsellor, a lover. You'd steer your realm through a crucial period of potential relegation, where the ranking of fiefdoms is concerned—tackling bandits and revolutionaries and creepy things in the forest, while uncovering secrets across multiple playthroughs.

"What lies in the Sealed Chantry?", wrote Failbetter narrative director Chris Gardiner. "Who is the Horned Knight? Who is behind Serault's recent troubles?"

Well, I don't think I'll ever know. Because The Last Court existed for a six-year span during a period when I was a lapsed Dragon Age fan. After which, it popped its clogs in the pandemic. Servers never stay on forever, and EA is particularly brutal in this regard: BioWare's second-most-recent game, Anthem, is shutting down early next year.

I have a strong sense of what The Last Court must have been like to play, however, having recently become obsessed with Failbetter's Fallen London. Like that masterpiece of interactive Victoriana, The Last Court was almost entirely text-led, spinning its world from the kind of ambitious prose that's typically consigned to codexes in 3D RPGs. You would draw cards, each representing a visit from a subject or a new event within your borders, and read all about it—choosing how to respond in the process. Some choices would involve a risk, a dice roll that drew on your skill level in something like scholarship or derring-do, and the outcome would influence the overall health of the realm.

Court management, of course, is an activity with its roots in the days of classic BioWare. In Baldur's Gate 2 you could take on the ruling of a stronghold, tax the peasants, and deal with the complaints of bandit-dogged merchants, who claimed you weren't policing your lands effectively enough. As a spiritual successor, Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity revived the stronghold. And Dragon Age: Inquisition's war table riffed on a similar idea—that there were important things going on in the world, beyond the corners of your dialogue box.

Characters in The Last Court came with oblique, Failbettery names like the Acerbic Dowager, the Purveyor of Teas and the Well-Read Pig-Farmer. But I notice that one, named the Scornful Sorceress, had a familiar face. "This is not a childhood I recognise," she would say, watching the courtiers' kids at play. "The games my mother encouraged were less innocent." It's only a proper Dragon Age game if it has Morrigan in it.

I can still quote The Last Court because fans have peppered parts of it liberally throughout the Dragon Age wiki. Once EA announced the game's shutdown, a diligent effort was made to save everything that could be screenshotted. Players coordinated via BioWare's forums and Reddit, exploring as many avenues of The Last Court as possible over the course of the seven real-world days it took to finish any given playthrough.

Their efforts are to be applauded, but in some ways only increase the retroactive FOMO. A wiki is not a game, unless you're playing Neurocracy. Cataloguing The Last Court's additions to the lore is not the same as experiencing it as a choose-your-own-adventure mystery or strategic management sim. And a once-public Google Drive, stuffed with images from the vanished game, has long since expired.

We live in an era where MMOs can be brought back from the dead through sheer fan ingenuity, and even granted official recognition by their original publishers—saving them from the fear of sudden takedown notices. But, while I'd love to be proven wrong, something tells me that this isn't EA's style. And in 2025, BioWare is fighting for its life and its soul—in no fit state to advocate for a project only a hardcore subset of its fanbase remembers.

Instead, I'm finding solace in something that Failbetter has often mined in its stories: the romance of the buried place that you can never quite reach. It is the very unattainability which makes you all the more eager to visit that forgotten city, to catch a glimpse of its crumbling pillars or lost literature. It's the same distance that allows it to live as a gleaming wonder in your mind—freed of the imperfections and mundanities that come from contact with reality. I'll say this for my experience of The Last Court: there is no way to be disappointed by the game you can never play.

In response to a viewer question for a 200k subscriber Q&A on his YouTube channel, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah got into the fine details of what it might actually have looked like for BioWare to release Joplin, its initial pitch for a fourth Dragon Age, and whether he thinks it would have been better received than last year's The Veilguard.

"I do think that Joplin's gonna live as this mythological game in a lot of people's memories," Darrah said. "The ways that a Joplin happens are basically in a world where it ships in 2019, February 2019.

"It takes Anthem's spot. In that world, that is a game developed on a pretty tight timeline. Not from the ship [date] of Inquisition⁠—I suppose it's more than four years, almost five. But still, pretty tight timeline."

Most public knowledge of Joplin comes from an April 2019 Kotaku report from Jason Schreier. Joplin entered preproduction in 2015 after the release of Inquisition's Trespasser expansion.

It was reportedly intended to be a smaller scale, but deeply reactive game centering on spies and heists in the setting's then yet to be explored Tevinter Imperium.

Joplin was paused in 2016 so its staff could assist in the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda, then canceled outright in 2017 so they could help with Anthem.

Development on Dragon Age 4 was rebooted into a live service project codenamed Morrison, which would eventually be retooled back into the singleplayer Veilguard.

It's unclear whether Darrah is saying that Joplin "takes Anthem's spot" in the sense that Anthem is canceled entirely in favor of a new Dragon Age game, or if he's picturing a scenario where resources are split between the teams, allowing a delay on Anthem while the smaller scale Joplin is able to release in that early 2019 window.

The latter seems more realistic, given the head of steam BioWare had on Anthem, but of course it's all academic at this point: Anthem took priority as EA was devaluing singleplayer games and BioWare in particular in the late 2010s.

"It's gonna be a compromised game for sure," said Darrah, but he still thinks it would have been better-received than Veilguard, with a caveat: "We'll never know, and it's very easy to pretend like it definitely would be yes."

In response to a viewer question in a 200k subscriber Q&A for his YouTube channel, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah explained why Mages in Dragon Age: Origins were so feature rich or "complete" when compared to Rogues and Warriors.

"I would say it's more because the design space that Dragon Age: Origins was being built into was heavily influenced by second edition D&D," said Darrah. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or AD&D, formed the basis of the mini RPG golden age of Infinity Engine games started by Baldur's Gate.

Famously, at the time of its release, Dragon Age was BioWare returning to its roots to make a more tactical, complex RPG like the Forgotten Realms-based duology that put it on the map.

"The reality is: [Fighters] and Rogues, they were thinner classes. They were simpler classes," Darrah explained. "And the Mage was the stronger, more fully implemented, more fully considered class. Much more complicated, in terms of spells and such."

This was something I struggled with coming to Baldur's Gate after later RPGs like Neverwinter Nights: Feats weren't really a thing until third edition D&D, cribbing off Fallout's notes with perks.

Fighters and related combat classes in the OG Baldur's Gates are mostly there to auto attack enemies, the Battlemaster maneuvers and whirlwind attacks of later games just a twinkle in some designer's eye.

Mages, meanwhile, could summon demons, draw on a host of direct damage and crowd control effects, and even engage with an interactive Wish spell with ironic punishments for poorly worded wishes due to a low Wisdom score. You can see Baldur's Gate 2's Throne of Bhaal expansion try to ameliorate this with the addition of "High Level Abilities"—basically feats by another name.

I've always been partial to Rogues in Origins, but you can see who got the most love of the trio: Warriors and Rogues share archery and dual weapon ability trees, with some special dirty tricks and the requisite sneak attacks for Rogues, while Warriors get exclusive access to two-handers and the sword and board setup. Just like in Baldur's Gate, Mages have a smorgasbord of game-changing spell effects.

But there's one more factor Darrah points to as well: Origins' relative realism compared to later entries in the series. "Of all the Dragon Ages, Dragon Age: Origins is the most 'grounded,'" said Darrah. "It's the one that's worrying the most about everything making perfect sense within the overall lore of the game."

"So Warriors and Rogues in Origins basically don't have talents or skills that violate physics, whereas, as we move into Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition and Veilguard, you get a lot more things that are not really possible for someone to physically do."

This is something that always vexed me in Inquisition and Veilguard in particular: Why are Mages so persecuted if basically everyone has godlike magical abilities now? Assassins get flash step shadow clones, Reavers have fire blood dragon claws, Champions in Veilguard can do AoE fire magic spellsword stuff. Everybody's a super hero.

It's certainly fun and feels very cool to do wild Tempest elemental stuff in Inquisition or poison Duelist flurry attacks in Veilguard, but I found it contributed to this flattening effect on the class fantasies. Things might have been unbalanced in Origins, but it made Mages feel special in a fiction where they were supposed to be incredibly powerful.

I've noticed a trend—particularly in some recent RPGs—of, well, let's call it 'Netflixiness'.

Dialogue designed to leave absolutely nothing to interpretation, to exposit information in the most direct way possible, devoid of any real character or context. There's an assumption that any moment the audience spends confused, curious, or out-of-the-loop is a narrative disaster.

I hate to keep knocking Dragon Age: The Veilguard about, especially since I still had a decent time with it all told, but the thing that made me break off from it after 60 hours really was its story. It's a tale that does get (slightly) better, but it gave me a terrible first impression I never quite shook.

Given the game's troubled development history, and the fact that some of its writers have produced perfectly fine work before (Mordin Solus, for cryin' out loud), I'm led to believe this pattern comes from the top. Well, I have a hunch.

When Varric says "That ritual is going to tear down the Veil—the only thing separating us from the Fade and an endless number of demons" to Rook, his mission partner, who should know all of this already, I can't help but think of one thing. Second screen viewing.

In this excellent article in the International Journal of Communication, Daphne Rena Idiz recounts a time where an interviewee told her that Netflix had insisted: "What you need to know about your audience here is that they will watch the show, perhaps on their mobile phone, or on a second or third screen while doing something else and talking to their friends, so you need to both show and tell, you need to say much more than you would normally say."

Now Harvey, one might say, that makes absolutely no sense. Videogames—with some exceptions in genre, like idlers—aren't played as second screen activities. To which I would reply: You're exactly right, but since when has that stopped executives from chasing trends against common sense before? These are the people who thought Veilguard still should've been a live service game. After everything.

This is conjecture, but I don't think it's out of pocket to assume some of these companies are chasing the narrative successes of streaming services. Or that in doing so, their big bosses might adopt all sorts of "wisdom" designed for making media meant to be consumed, not enjoyed.

After all, in these second-screen shows, nothing is left up to chance. If your audience gets lost, it's bad. If your audience gets confused, it's bad. Bad stories are confusing. Good stories are understood. I know these things because I've looked at other good, popular stories.

The Veilguard follows in this trend, because it's a game that's terrified of audiences getting lost at any point. As fellow PCG writer Lauren Morton put it, it's "desperate to chew my food for me". And whether the problem lies with big movers and shakers at EA, or their selected testing audiences, it doesn't matter. Because we're shooting ourselves in the foot, here.

Everybody loses

Videogames are enjoyed in a ton of different ways—some are even designed for you to tap out of the story entirely, or to only engage with it as an option. And this is fine. But you cannot, as EA did, reach for other audiences on the assumption that the nerds will like whatever you give 'em.

Some players will skip every cutscene, glaze over every dialogue entry, and hammer their skip button 'till the face button's worn out. And I have no qualm with these people—they simply value a different set of things from me. We can coexist. It's the design assumption that we must be met in the middle that's messing us up.

For this player, a story that's impossible to ignore will barely register for them. If anything, it might backfire—making them feel coddled or pushed into situations they don't care about. And for me, dialogue that's written for people who aren't paying attention makes my brain want to crawl out of my skull and autonomously go do anything else.

Here's the thing: Good writing advice says to 'show, not tell' not because everything must be shown as soon as it comes up, lest the audience be lost, but because it's inherently more interesting to give us the pieces we need to draw conclusions. Crucially, you don't always have to actually give people information.

Confusion isn't a fail-state, not having the answers immediately isn't a disaster. It's okay to let a question mark float above your player's head, or to trust they'll get the gist from context clues. We can tell the ritual Varric and Rook are trying to stop is dangerous because they're trying to stop it. I promise.

I feel like there's this phantom assumed viewer who, without a full set of narrative cards in their hand, will throw their controller and immediately do something else. And that makes me sad, because it assumes your players aren't curious. That they don't want to have questions, or aren't interested in seeing where something leads.

Some aren't, sure, but if you design videogame stories for them, you rob from your most invested players the simple pleasures. Analysing the story, looking deeper into scenes, discussing it with each other online. And as someone who watched Final Fantasy 14 reach a fever-pitch of over-explaining during Dawntrail, that stings, let me tell you.

I'm sick of seeing games with an air of corporate weight sitting on top of them. I'm tired of watching a scene and going "yep, that probably tested well with audiences". I'm exhausted by this pervasive idea that writers are to be resented, or that I have the memory of a goldfish (I do, but that's besides the point).

I want to get a little lost. I want to have to think about what a scene I just watched meant. I want to see where your story goes, rather than be told where it's headed. We simply cannot keep making videogames for people who aren't paying attention, because it won't change anything for them—and it's making the rest of us bloody miserable.

The mothballing of live service games has become a hot button issue in gaming with the continued momentum of the Stop Killing Games initiative. And on that topic, 2019’s maligned MMO-lite Anthem will shut down early in 2026 after a seven-year run.

You’ll never be able to play it again—no matter how much money you previously spent on Anthem. In a recent interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, BioWare’s Mark Darrah, who was executive producer on Anthem, said it doesn’t have to be this way⁠—but it'd be challenging to reconcile with current multiplayer game design.

"I always knew it was going to go away eventually," Darrah said of Anthem—a pretty mind-boggling thing to hear about a multi-million dollar project that took years of work from dozens of industry veterans. However we might feel as players, there must be a special kind of pain for a developer to see their own work erased like a sand castle at high tide.

“We don’t let chemical companies just flush their toxic waste into the nearest stream. [But] there are consequences to us not letting them do it," said Darrah. “It costs them money to not do that. But we’ve decided correctly as a society that that’s a cost we’re willing to make them pay.”

Darrah’s point: everything comes with a cost. "Anthem could have been built in a way where this wouldn’t have been necessary," he argued.

He cited Destiny’s peer-to-peer hosting system, implying it theoretically could allow for the game to live on after its developer, Bungie, cut off support. Though this kind of infrastructure is apparently quite expensive—overbudget for BioWare, per Darrah. And it comes with its own host of issues.

"But we could have done something," he mused. "It would have been an uglier game, probably would have had more latency issues. It would have been a worse experience second-to-second in order to get something that basically wouldn’t need to ever be sunset."

These sorts of compromises don't sound so bad to me, when the alternative is losing a game I've invested time, money, and effort into, maybe over the course of years. Ubisoft removed (pilfered?) its 2014 racing MMO-lite The Crew from my Steam library in March of 2024, perhaps never to be played again.

I put money into that game. I genuinely enjoyed my drives from New York to LA⁠—and even getting stuck in the Grand Canyon for about half an hour on the way every now and then. But now it’s gone! Maybe given a couple of compromises, it didn't have to be.

"Is that the world we want?" Darrah asked. "I think maybe it is—that we want to be in a world where we’re willing to sacrifice some fidelity… sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don’t just vanish one day."

In a recent interview with MrMattyPlays, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah talked about how player expectations for Dragon Age 2 as a full sequel to Dragon Age: Origins may have damaged the more experimental RPG's reception at launch.

"In terms of the project I was most proud of, in a lot of ways I would say that's probably Dragon Age 2," Darrah said in the interview. "Not because it's the best game I've ever done, but because it was done under such tight constraints, and I'm really proud of what we were able to do in the time we had."

MrMattyPlays followed up by asking Darrah to expand on the mixed (but increasingly more positive) legacy of Dragon Age 2. "I do think that a lot of the problem with Dragon Age 2's reception at launch is: We didn't adequately prepare people for the change," said Darrah. "That's one of the reasons I feel like it's been able to repair its reputation over time.

"When people come and look at it five, 10, 14 years later, they're able to say, 'Ok, I'm going to look at it with fresh eyes and let it stand on its own.' It's just when it came up and we called it 'Dragon Age 2,' and we said 'Compare this directly to Dragon Age: Origins,' and then people look at it and they're like, 'Well this sure isn't Dragon Age: Origins 2,' which it isn't. But we didn't do a good job of preparing people for that fact."

Dragon Age 2 had an infamously clipped development time: No more than 16 months, which is blistering compared to the long gestation of Origins and three-plus year triple-A minimum of today.

This resulted in DA2's extensive reuse of environments⁠—you'll fight evil cultists in the same warehouse at the end of the game that you beat up gangsters in at the start of DA2⁠—and copy-paste, wave-based fights that underserved DA2's actually quite strong character building and real time with pause combat.

But Darrah got at one of my favorite things about Dragon Age 2 here: It felt more like a Dragon Age side story, three seasons of a TV show set in Thedas, than another save the world epic quest like Origins or the later Inquisition and Veilguard.

You get to see the same places and cast of characters change over the course of 10 in-game years, and despite the limited real estate, Kirkwall remains a striking and believable videogame city, while DA2's cast is one of the best BioWare has ever done.

For a studio whose main plots were almost always less interesting than the side stories and characters, making a game that was all side story and characters was a masterstroke. It makes me once again pine for the canceled Joplin, the codenamed first version of "Dragon Age 4" that would have focused on urban heists in the Tevinter Imperium.

Instead, Dragon Age: Inquisition chased after "Dragon Age: Origins 2," while Veilguard ultimately tried for "Dragon Age: Inquisition 2," with neither game quite measuring up. So many globetrotting, world-saving adventures spread the once-enticing world of Thedas too thin, killing the mystery and sense of scope it had with the keyhole views of Origins and DA2.

Elsewhere in the interview, Darrah talked about how Dragon Age wasn't even planned to be a full series at its inception, as well as how Veilguard's insane development cycle left it effectively "four games stitched together."

Mark Darrah's tell-all with YouTuber MrMattyPlays has been doing the rounds—including on the good site PC Gamer—and for great reason. The former BioWare producer seems to've hit a point where he's happy to simply divulge exactly what (he believes) went wrong with BioWare, the dozen little disasters that led to the, at the moment, death of Dragon Age.

In the video below (starting at around 39 minutes), Darrah says he believes Veilguard was "four games stitched together, and you can really see the stitching," a shot before the absolute chaster that is: "assuming that EA was gonna prioritise Anthem over Dragon Age … the one single act that could've made a massive difference to Veilguard would've been to shut the project down completely when I moved on to Anthem."

For context, Darrah moved on to Anthem proper in 2017 when he took over as executive producer, roughly two years after The Veilguard, then called Dreadwolf, entered development.

It's not a statement made with malice—rather, Darrah pins its confused identity on its false-start origins. The Veilguard was initially conceived as a live service game. "It's carrying a lot of the weight of being that live-service game, running without an executive producer, [and] it's just picked up a lot of stuff that's still in there … in part because it was always a year and a half away from [being shipped]."

Veilguard, which he later dubs a "zombie" project, was "always in this constant state of being too close to its ship-date to completely retool."

This basically tracks with what Darrah says earlier in the interview—that EA's games tend to get better when a studio is making those games, and only those games. He admits that this strategy could've spelt the doom of the series earlier, but it'd have been a risk worth taking.

"Now there's a non-zero chance that Anthem ships, and we go to try to start the Dragon Age up from a cold start, and EA goes 'no, we don't want it anymore'. Maybe you don't get a Dragon Age 4 at all in that world."

However, if EA did bite post-Anthem, then "you're not carrying that baggage in that case … A lot of that is multiplayer, live-service stuff—and it was worked away, it was worked on—but that was the base."

Darrah also has a lot to say about The Veilguard's long, downright tortured development—using the Thor movies (The Dark World, Ragnarok, and Love and Thunder) as prime examples: "Dark World came out right around Inquisition, and people were like 'ugh'. And Ragnarok came out early in Dragon Age 4's development—so that was like, the height of the love with this brighter, quippier tonal landscape from traditionally very dark IPs."

Just to pin up some more points on this timeline, Thor: Ragnarok came out in 2017, two years after The Veilguard started development.

"But we had a lot of years to go, and if you continue down Thor, Love and Thunder comes out before Veilguard ships, as well … We can pretty much use Thor as the 'we love this [comedic tone]' to 'we hate this with a burning passion'." In case you missed Love and Thunder—well, you didn't really miss much. It is considered thoroughly mid.

Darrah concludes: "The game was in development for so long, it's out of its place and time in terms of its tone."

He then goes on to absolutely vindicate our own Fraser Brown, who called this very same shot back when the game arrived: "It wasn't Marvel on purpose, but it was drawing from that zeitgeist. It was very Marvel-y, and it also was living with the consequences of people not really wanting that anymore."

Or, in other words, the trailer was "a better trailer in 2020 than it was in 2024."

Mark Darrah has been on a tell-all, recently, speaking with YouTuber MrMattyPlays about the failures and foibles of BioWare in the wake of Dragon Age being likely being dead and gone. Darrah, who was an executive producer, left the studio back in 2020; though has been speaking up on his own YouTube channel recently.

He echoes fellow alumni and Dragon Age creator David Gaider's words somewhat, claiming that the fantasy series was always "having a lot of difficulty getting the resources that it needed". Gaider had similarly claimed that Mass Effect was EA's favourite child, though Darrah says the situation's muddier than that.

The issue, as Darrah puts it, is the fact that BioWare tried to have several irons in the fire at once: "We try to do multiple things at the same time. Even if you look at DICE, basically they're just doing one thing at a time, and sometimes that does really well, and sometimes it doesn't do so well."

Darrah says there was "a lot of cannibalisation" of developers as a result, with talent being shuffled around projects repeatedly—spreading the studio bone-thin.

When it comes to EA having a favourite child, he says: "Did EA like Mass Effect better than Dragon Age? I think they did. Was that the cause of Dragon Age not getting the people it needed? That I'm not as certain about. I think that might just be the structure of BioWare and the fiscal conservatism of EA not quite meshing together."

This grim, unseemly mess led to a situation where one person Darrah spoke to was "amazed that I hadn't quit earlier, because we weren't getting the people."

Darrah is quick to clarify, however, that he doesn't think EA being more suited to studios like DICE or Maxis is because it's better at supporting them—rather, it's just a huge headache to shut a whole studio down if their big, mainline project isn't working.

"I think within EA, you're better off being 'one game at a time' … Battlefield 4 shipped, and it was really rocky at launch, and DICE spent the time and the resources necessary to fix that game up. Sims 4 launched and had a really rocky launch—same thing."

In other words, Darrah says that "Those two studios had nothing else. If Battlefield 4 wasn't working, EA would've had to shut the studio down. If Sims 4 wasn't working, you'd basically have to shut Maxis down."

Pan to the world serpent of BioWare, gnawing on its own tail. Darrah paints a picture of a multi-project studio desperate to snap up developers where it could: "If Andromeda isn't working… there are two other projects desperate for those people! EA does not like failure, and is eager to move on from failure, but if there's nothing else [to work on]? The studio is saying 'no no, we can fix this'." Which, Darrah implies, is why Sims 4 had years of updates and Veilguard will not.

"[That's] highly simplified, but I do think that, given that? Within EA, BioWare is better off being one game at a time."

We'll just have to wait and see—while I'm sure BioWare's next Mass Effect game could use the talent, a lot of the people who made Veilguard are gone. I wasn't much of a fan of Veilguard either, but tossing out, say, Trick Weekes, the writer who wrote Solas, Iron Bull, and Mass Effect's Mordin? That's a waste of institutional talent, no matter my feelings in the present-day.

There's also the fact that the Veilguard team did pull a semi-decent action RPG out of its flaming pile of development that included rewrites, live-service flip-flops, the works—all of it more attributable to EA's shoddy management than the team's lack of ability.

The fact I had a moderately enjoyable 60 hours before getting frustrated with the script and putting it down does speak to the good work that was done in Veilguard. It doesn't matter, though: Those people are out the door. I appreciate Darrah's optimism, but I'm not so optimistic that BioWare's better off now—but hey, EA said Mass Effect is totally fine.

Dragon Age: Origins took some big swings when it came to letting players, as the future Hero of Ferelden, make such a big mark on the world, changing the fates of individuals and nations. And BioWare felt free to give players this kind of agency, this ability to shape the story, because it didn't expect to make more Dragon Age games.

This is according to former executive producer Mark Darrah, who recently gave a wide-ranging and candid interview to MrMattyPlays. Darrah was at BioWare between 1998 and 2022, so he had a front row seat to all of its dizzying highs and depressing lows.

"Dragon Age: Origins originally was intended as a standalone game," Darrah says. "You can see this, if you play Dragon Age: Origins, knowing that it was intended to stand alone. There's a lot of threads that are cast out that kind of had to be abandoned because there could be werewolves all over the world, there might be a civil war happening underground in Orzammar."

These threads, he says, were "great to put out in a game you never had to come back to," but in a series they were much trickier to wrangle.

A big feature of the Dragon Age games, until Veilguard, was the ability to import your choices from previous games, giving you a more bespoke Thedas to play in. The most ambitious version of this system was Dragon Age Keep, an app that took your existing saves from Origins and Dragon Age 2 and then imported them into Dragon Age: Inquisition. If no saves were found, you could pick pre-defined heroes and then select major decisions, deciding how you wanted them to play out.

The third game in the series sort of united the somewhat disparate journeys of the Hero of Ferelden and Hawke, and Dragon Age Keep helped facilitate that, breaking the previous games down to around 300 choices.

But even with that tool, there was a limit to how much the sequels responded to the choices you made previously. Because BioWare never expected to have to deal with them ever again. But that was before Origins became a hit.

"It's pretty much financial reasons more than anything," says Darrah. "And I think that the franchise has been much more forward looking ever since then."

This assertion is backed up by BioWare's decision to make Dragon Age 2's reactivity more localised. The choices you made in that game still had echoes, but a lot of them were more personal or focused specifically on the game's primary location: the city of Kirkwall.

Dragon Age: Inquisition, though, suggests that BioWare didn't actually learn its lesson. Its world state was the product of all the choices you made in the two previous games, and then it introduced lots of major decisions that had a global impact, giving the team more stuff to untangle than ever before.

Except that it didn't actually do that. Not at all. One of The Veilguard's many letdowns was the disconnect between it and its predecessors. There was no save import feature, no return of Dragon Age Keep. Instead, it took 15 years of agency and player-driven world building and boiled it all down to a trio of decisions, most of which were frankly meaningless. All of them stemmed exclusively from Inquisition, primarily its Trespasser DLC, and had only a minor impact on The Veilguard.

If BioWare had known it was making a series, it might have held back, so I'm pretty glad it came as a surprise. It was more work for the developers, of course, but also produced games where it felt like we were the authors of our journeys. Until The Veilguard, anyway.

A much more notable obstacle, from the sounds of it, was EA. Even though the publisher saw value in the series after Origins' success, it didn't really get it.

"The problem that Dragon Age has had, charitably I guess, is that EA wants mainstream success," says Darrah, "and it's hard, or at least it has historically been hard, for corporate people, people who come from the sports side of the organisation to look at a game like Dragon Age: Origins, which is super nerdy, not very attractive looking, and say 'Oh, this is a mainstream game.' They don't see it."

This echoes what Darrah's former colleague, David Gaider, said earlier in the year. EA just didn't know what to do with Dragon Age.

Darrah describes the series' development as "wobbling back and forth a lot, trying to reach out, and then pulling back when it got ahead of itself". And we saw it again with The Veilguard. The action-based combat, the streamlined choices, the disconnect with the previous games. The whole thing was designed for people who didn't really care about Dragon Age; the broadest possible audience.

The version of BioWare that made Origins didn't know Dragon Age was going to be a whole thing, it wasn't making future plans, and it wasn't trying to support a brand by bringing in players who don't like nerdy CRPGs. And that's how we got one of the best and richest RPGs ever made. The BioWare of today, meanwhile, is more firmly entrenched in EA's corporate culture, encouraged to make simpler people-pleasers. And that's how we ended up with an RPG that feels like the series' death knell.

As reported by TheGamer, BioWare producer Mark Darrah opened up about the history of attempted Dragon Age remasters and remakes at BioWare in a recent interview with MrMattyPlays on YouTube.

The former BioWare dev thinks a remaster of the first three Dragon Age games is the best shot the series has at a future, but notes that such an endeavor would face massive challenges compared to the well-received Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

"I'm not sure who pitches that game within EA, that's what it would come down to," Darrah said when asked about the future of the series. "There would need to be someone at BioWare⁠—or, potentially, someone within EA more broadly⁠—that would be willing to go out on a limb and say: 'I want to pitch another Dragon Age game, here's my vision of it.'

"There are more games to be made there, but I'm not sure how it gets started right now."

When asked what he would do were he still at BioWare, Darrah said he wasn't sure how to continue the series after Veilguard, but he knows what BioWare and EA should do instead: "I honestly think they should do⁠—I don't think they will, but they should⁠—a remaster of the first three."

Darrah explained that BioWare had floated the idea of remastering or remaking Dragon Age in the past, but that it had never risen to the level of a formal "pitch," rather a range of remaster/remake ideas to the tune of "Is there a way to bring Dragon Age: Origins forward?"

Rather than EA nixing these ideas outright, it sounds like a fear of EA's response or the work involved kept BioWare from formally spinning them up. One part of this was the eternal struggle for resources between teams at BioWare (mostly Dragon Age vs. Mass Effect), as well as between BioWare and other studios at EA.

Another issue was what Darrah characterized as a general hostility to remastering games at EA⁠—though that seems to have changed given examples like the Mass Effect Legendary Edition and Command and Conquer Remastered.

In addition to external pressure and skepticism from EA, there's also the issue of Dragon Age's tech base. DA 1 and 2 were made on a proprietary engine, and in November of last year, Veilguard director John Epler said that "maybe 20 people left at BioWare" still have expertise in the Eclipse Engine⁠—and that was before EA gutted the studio. Darrah characterized Dragon Age 1 and 2 remasters as "unknowably hard": You'll only understand the extent of the technical challenge once you dig into it.

At this point, with all the firings and staff departures, I'm not sure any reinterpretation of Dragon Age would result in something I would want. The staff turnover and slow death of BioWare has only exacerbated Dragon Age's series-long identity crisis, with each game significantly different from the last in tone, mechanics, and visuals.

Despite a lot of great art direction hampered by 360-era muddy brown graphics, Dragon Age: Origins is still an excellent, approachable tactical RPG on PC, one I'm not sure needs remastering, much less remaking. Its console versions were notably compromised with truly borked controls, but the PC release still holds up.

Dragon Age 2 is a very dear game to me that would benefit from a lot of TLC. It has a distinctive, striking look, one of the best story/cast combos BioWare's ever done, as well as great combat and character building mechanics⁠—everyone always says it was "actionized," but on PC it's literally the same real time with pause combat BioWare's been doing since Knights of the Old Republic. Stop gaslighting me, reviewers and RPG forum guys.

However, its infamous repeating environments and stultifying wave fights make it a caveated classic: I love going to the same spider cave I was in ten hours ago to fight wave after wave of mechanically identical enemies with ridiculously chunky health bars. But the kind of effort it would take to fix those issues is possibly the least likely thing to happen to the series.

Dragon Age is just dead. At least until a future, Microsoft-acquired EA announces their reboot of the series, Dragon Age: Origins - Origins, some time at the tail end of the 2030s.

Roleplaying games are some of my favourites—partially for their ability to plunge me into a fictional setting, not just as an observer, but as an active participant. I get to choose not just how I interact with a story, but who my character is. How they fight, who they love, what they believe in. I can be in active conversation with a world of hundreds spun out of data and numbers.

And then BioWare's Mass Effect came along and said nah, piss on that, all these RPGs and their fancy words. What the gamers really want are three vague personalities! Three is enough for anybody!

Thus raised out of the depth were the three core character traits of RPG protagonists that would plague the genre for years—blue, sarcastic, and red. Sometimes even kind, sarcastic, and grumpy. Or, if you're lucky, blue, red, and a third thing of your choice. A triumvirate of vibes, each clearly signposted so that you don't have to think about the nuance of what you're actually saying. What a relief!

The common complaint (one I will echo, but not belabour because it's been repeated a thousand times over) is that the dialogue wheel could sometimes be misleading. The classic is Mass Effect's 'Time to shut you up!' prompt, which sees Commander Shepard waltz up and deck a reporter in the face.

This is a pain point, for sure, but not my main point of consternation. The issue is that the solution to this—rewording the prompt to match what your character's going to say or do—highlights the core tyranny of the dialogue wheel: Thinning your choices down to the bloody marrow.

Why is there a layer of separation in the first place? Are we afraid someone might read something twice? The sheer horror!

The illusion of free will

The bugbear I have is this: When you choose something on a dialogue wheel, you aren't actually making a decision. You're pointing a weather vane in a certain direction and hoping it pairs with what you want, like selecting wine via roulette.

The result is a slow-moving ego-death of whatever concept you had going in. The initial idea of your character is replaced board-by-board into a completely different Ship of Shepard, the plucky, gruff, or heroic vision that the game's developers had in mind.

Even games without a dialogue wheel still carry dialogue-wheel elements. Cyberpunk 2077, an otherwise banger of an RPG, is a good example of this. The improvement is that you get to pick the third personality, a corpo, a nomad, or a streetkid, but it's only a nudge in the right direction. V is still inescapably V. Commander Shepard is always Shepard. The Inquisitor is always the Inquisitor.

Don't get me wrong, I actively like some of these protagonists—but my argument is that these games are weaker for trying to meet me in the middle (I'll be getting to Geralt in a bit, but he's a great counter-example).

None of them are my characters, so why bother trying to convince me they are? I get to steer the wheel just a little bit, but I'm swapping between a trio of lanes with no real options for complexity, other than the idea that my gruff hero might occasionally crack wise, or punt an orphan out of nowhere.

Make no mistake: We have, each of us, been robbed of unique character concepts we could've built in many of the stories we've explored this past decade or so. There are thousands of unrealised Mass Effect OCs out there—instead, they're all different flavours of Shepard. I weep for what could have been.

Now, this is an issue in RPGs without this pox upon them, too—it's an inescapable part of the genre. But the point remains that games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon Age: Origins offer more options for roleplay and signpost them less, leading to a greater diversity in dialogue choice. You get the best of both worlds: Full understanding of what your character's about to say, without bias-forming colour coding to tell you which Personality Points™ will shift around if you choose them.

And even then, we've seen in Disco Elysium that pre-determined characters, such as Harry DuBois, are made all the better for a lack of a wheel. Harry's his own detective, but within him are multitudes. If you are still trying to meet me in the middle on this gripe, erring away from the wheel is still the better option.

A dearth of imagination

"But what about voices?" one might ask. And, yes, it might be nice to be able to hear the dulcet tones of your protagonist, but I'd like to offer an alternative: Use your imagination, bozo.

I've seriously never understood this complaint. I always try to figure out what my character might sound like—how they might talk, what tone they might deliver lines in. What the game doesn't deliver to me on a silver, Brian T. Delaney-toned platter, I get to fill in with my brain.

I get that not everybody wants to make a character every time they sit down to play a videogame, and that is absolutely fine. The world is brighter and more beautiful for being filled with people of various tastes, and no game should be made for everybody. But—hey, guess what, there are great protagonist-driven games out there. Some of them are even RPGs!

The Witcher 3's actually a great example of this strategy working out just fine. I don't get to choose a first name for Geralt of Rivia, I don't get to pick his body type, I don't get given a damn thread to pull beyond the occasional choice that steers his story. And you know what? I respect that far more. I'll listen to a story that's been written for me. Just stop teasing me with the idea I can contribute when I actually can't.

In the worst-case scenario, doing this actually shatters the illusion of roleplay entirely. Take Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I found it interesting that I could play a non-binary Qunari with he/him pronouns, because the Qunari themselves come from a binary-gendered society. From a worldbuilding perspective, someone choosing to stick with the language they grew up around, while having a differing sense of self? It felt like something I wanted to explore.

Then, when it came time to explain how he viewed gender to a romantic partner, I was given a boilerplate response that didn't even come close.

An attempt at inclusion held me, and the cool, gnarled relationship I'd envisioned for my character's backstory, at ruthless, corporate-approved arm's length. And while I'm sure EA's constant back-and-forth on live service nonsense didn't help, or their alleged resentment of writers, I'll place plenty of blame on the dialogue wheel, too.

But I digress. You don't have to care about my fee-fees to see the problem here, right? I was unpleasantly surprised by the dialogue wheel in a way that kinda sucked on a personal level. But the truth is that even when the stakes aren't high, these kinds of incongruencies rise from pre-voiced protagonists all the time. All of these RPGs suffer from being shackled to the dialogue wheel's tyranny.

It's clearly fallen out of favour, mind. The Veilguard felt like the death rattle of my least favourite RPG mechanic, bar it showing up in the next Mass Effect game. And to be clear: I feel dearly for the beleaguered devs who somehow pulled a semi-decent action RPG out of corporate development hell, then got laid off for their trouble.

But the dialogue wheel, as an industry trend? I am glad it's dead and gone. I will consign it to the deepest pits of Tartarus. I will lock its ashes into an urn, wrap it with chains, and send it to the bottom of the briny depths. I shall personally eject its bland, personality-draining existence into the sun. Should it return, I only hope I will be there, bloody blade in hand, ready to plunge my hatred into its very heart.

Electronic Arts pulled the plug on Anthem in early 2021, finally putting an end to BioWare's ill-advised foray into the looter shooter genre. The game itself continued to run, though, quietly trundling along like an empty subway cleaving through the pre-dawn hours of a cold, forgotten Tuesday. But the ride is almost over.

"We have an important update to share regarding Anthem," Electronic Arts announced today. "After careful consideration, we will be sunsetting Anthem on January 12, 2026. This means that the game will still be playable online for the next 180+ days. As of today, you can no longer purchase in-game premium currency, but you can still use your remaining balance until the servers go offline.

"We deeply appreciate your dedication, passion and support over the years and we’d like to thank you for that."

First things first, yes, the Anthem servers are actually still up, so you can hop in and play it if this reminder of its existence has triggered the urge. I had no idea—to be perfectly honest I hadn't given it any thought one way or another over the past several years, but I was a genuinely surprised to hear that servers are still running and everything remains functional.

I even got it into my head to give Anthem a fresh try, to see if it was really all that bad or just the wrong game at the wrong time. Alas, it turns out the only way to get it these days is to sign up for EA Play, a Game Pass-style subscription service. EA Play is included with PC Game Pass so you can also take it out for a spin if you subscribe to that service, but I don't, so I guess we're filing that one under "nice idea" and moving on.

An FAQ about the shutdown is mostly a repeat of what's in the announcement, but there are a few notable points. If you own Anthem you'll be able to continue playing until the shutdown on January 12, 2026, but it will be removed from EA Play on August 15 so if you're getting it that way, that's your end date.

EA also confirmed that "the sunsetting of Anthem has not led to any layoffs," a bizarre thing to say that perhaps reveals a certain urge to downplay EA's contributions to the catastrophic state of the game industry—especially when it comes to BioWare, which has reportedly already been pared down to the bone.

The FAQ also addresses offline play by noting that there is no offline play: "Anthem was designed to be an online-only title so once the servers go offline, the game will no longer be playable." More grist for the Stop Killing Games initiative there.

It's kind of a shame. I won't go so far as to say that Anthem 2.0 showed promise, but Anthem's in-game flight was really good and it would've been interesting to see what BioWare could have done with another year of proper support from EA. Would it have been a success? Probably not, but it would've been interesting.

The failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the toll it took on BioWare, has been well documented, but a new report by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg dives deep into what went wrong leading up to the game's release in October 2024—and the short answer is, just about everything.

Initially envisioned as a smaller-scale, conventional RPG, a mandate from EA forced The Veilguard to shift to a live service game in October 2017, marching orders that were apparently delivered the night that former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw left the studio. But the disaster of Anthem two years later led to shaky nerves and second thoughts, and in 2020, following the surprise departures of veterans Casey Husdon and Mark Darrah, the multiplayer angle was dropped.

Instead of a full reset, though, the development team was told to rework the game on the fly, in a window of just a year and a half. This caused even more headaches, and not just because it wasn't enough time to make meaningful changes: The team would make decisions based on that tight window, then be stuck with them even when the game was pushed back by a few months—something Darrah, the executive producer on the Dragon Age series prior to his departure, alluded to in a YouTube video in March.

The response to an early build of Dragon Age: The Veilguard that went to playtesters in 2022 was not great, according to the report, primarily because the game's multiplayer roots, which demanded replayable missions and characters who couldn't die in order to ensure they were always there for future playthroughs, resulted in a lack of BioWare-style choices and consequences. The release was pushed back so the team could squeeze in a few big decisions for players, but apparently developers struggled to make the pieces fit with what was already in place.

Mass Effect developers were brought on in 2023 to help get The Veilguard finished, but, reflecting comments made in April by former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider, that led to tensions: The Mass Effect team reportedly overhauled some parts of the game, including the finale, but while at least some of those changes proved popular with players, they also pissed off leadership on the Dragon Age team, which had previously been told there was no budget for such things. A late-stage rewrite of the script to make the game less "snarky," on the other hand, largely missed the mark.

In the end, so did Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The initial reaction was quite positive but it tailed off quickly. EA said the game "engaged approximately 1.5 million players" in its launch quarter (not exactly a sales figure, but as close as we got), which was nearly 50% lower than the company's expectations. It almost immediately pulled the plug on the game, then implemented layoffs, including among senior Dragon Age and Mass Effect veterans, and even seemed to have regrets about cutting The Veilguard's live service components.

A small team—a few dozen employees, according to the Bloomberg report—is still at work on the next Mass Effect game, but as others (including our own Fraser Brown) have previously suggested, the future of that game, and BioWare as a whole, do not seem secure. Industry analyst Doug Creutz told Bloomberg that he "wouldn't be totally surprised" if EA closed down BioWare, noting that it's been more than 10 years since the studio released a hit game.

Above: PC Gamer's Robin Valentine said the Dragon Age: The Veilguard reveal trailer from June 2024 looked more like something from a hero shooter.

You ever get sick of trashmob fights? I admit it: sometimes I just want to run from A to B without massacring half a village, cutting down group after group of bandits, goblins, and imps who have only really been placed there to stop me from getting bored.

I am, apparently, joined in this philosophy by David Gaider, former BioWare lead writer and creator of the Dragon Age setting, who apparently spent a fair bit of time at the studio trying to stop people sprinkling those kinds of things everywhere. Even better, the game he used to support his point was none other than Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.

Speaking to PCGN, Gaider recalled Bloodlines' Ocean House Hotel level, a regular spook-a-thon that emotionally scarred me at the tender age of 15 or so. "There's a whole plot that takes place in a haunted hotel," said Gaider, "where, unlike the rest of the game, there's no actual combat, but it's tense from beginning to end."

Apparently, Ocean House sunk its claws pretty deep at the studio, to the extent that it was "all anybody on the BioWare team could talk about" for a good while. That level gave Gaider "some ammunition" to push back on demands for more combat: "Whenever the level designers would be like 'we have to sprinkle some popcorn fights everywhere because players get bored,' I was like 'no, they don't! That doesn't need to be a thing!'"

Not that it always worked. During his time on Dragon Age: Inquisition, Gaider recalls wanting its Val Royeaux masquerade ball to be totally combat-free. "I just couldn't convince everybody. So you kept having to duck out of the masquerade, go have a fight, then come back into it." To be fair, I've been to parties like that.

"Players need to be kept interested, absolutely," concedes Gaider, but adds that he thinks "it's always underestimated that part of that can be story—politics can keep people interested. What the player doesn't need to do is just fight, even if it's an RPG." Frankly, I agree. When I look back on the stuff that's truly gripped me in RPGs over the years, the nameless bandit fights tend not to rank.

Peter Mandelson, the oleaginous right-hand of Tony Blair's Labour Party in the late '90s, once remarked to a colleague that the party had no need to focus on its traditional voter base, and could safely dedicate itself to chasing more affluent, middle-class, conservative voters. After all, said Mandelson, its base had "nowhere else to go". Don't worry, I promise we'll get to Dragon Age.

14 years of Conservative Party rule later and you might think that kind of reasoning has been proven bankrupt, but only if you underestimate the powerful minds of the world's corporate executive class. It's not quite as consequential as the direction of British politics, but it turns out that EA had its own version of that thought process when it came to running BioWare in the 2010s: a notion that RPG fans would gobble up whatever you chucked their way so long as you could plausibly call it an RPG. Instead, they thought, BioWare should focus on making games that appeal to people who don't usually play RPGs.

So says David Gaider, creator of the Dragon Age setting and BioWare veteran, in a recent chat with GamesRadar. Per Gaider, EA bosses used to refer to RPG stalwarts as living "in the cave." That'd be the nerd cave, you see, where the nerds lived. "You made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG."

With EA bosses convinced that the nerd cave would spill out its denizens to any game with BioWare on the box, their philosophy became that "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."

Which is how you ended up with the decidedly more "action-y and slick" cinematic focus of games like Mass Effect 2, 3, and Andromeda, as well as Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition (and, hey, probably Veilguard too). Gone were the crunchy stats and behind-the-scenes dicerolls from BioWare of yore—this was the era of spectacle. And, to be fair to the execs for just a second, some of those games were bangers. BioWare did thread the needle on at least a few of them.

But Gaider wasn't thrilled as things were increasingly pushed in that direction and away from BioWare's roots. "I was always trying to push it to our traditional mechanics," he says, "and that wasn't very welcome in the EA sphere."

Gaider left BioWare in 2016, first heading to Beamdog (of Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition fame) and then to his own studio at Summerfall, currently working on an "unholy roguelite deckbuilder". That meant he dodged the release of what might be the ultimate expression of EA's action-obsessed executive philosophy: Anthem, which was not a good game. Not even the nerd cave turned out for that one.

Former BioWare writer David Gaider, who worked on the likes of Baldur's Gate 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and the first three Dragon Age games (not including Veilguard), recently spoke out about an issue he dubbed "anti-fans" in an interview with GamesRadar.

We've seen it happen time and again: A subset of players and content creators catch wind of some detail they don't like in a project and make it a personal mission to spend the lead up to launch bashing the game as much as humanly possible.

Sometimes they'll claim victory with sales flops like Concord or Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and otherwise pretend like nothing ever happened when a targeted game reviews and sells well, like Assassin's Creed Shadows.

"The difficulty is if, suddenly, you end up with anti-fans. Then they turn from what you want, fans who would go out and spread word of your game and get people interested," said Gaider. "But if you get anti-fans, they sort of do the opposite. They're very determined, suddenly, to see your game fail as sort of a lesson to others who would make games of the same type, right? And that, honestly, these days, there's some element of that present in almost all fandoms, but it's always sort of been there for RPGs in particular."

Gaider went on to explain how he's seen "fandom" culture exacerbate this problem. "More and more fandoms are making the things that they're fans of integral to their identity, and if it's integral to their identity, anything that affects it or insults it, insults them," he said. "So they are so invested in making it what they imagine that, like I said, if they turn into the anti-fan, suddenly it's their personal investment in seeing that fail, or seeing the developers who made that decision be punished."

According to Gaider, this type of hostility is pushing a lot of game developers to minimize their public presence. That can have the adverse effect of making it harder for developers to interact with non-hostile players or find needles of genuine criticism in the hay bale of angry culture war comments.

Unfortunately, the media and cultural environment that produces this behavior doesn't seem likely to change any time soon. We're even already gearing up for our next flashpoint. Alongside genuine concerns about Marathon's genre shift from Destiny and well-earned criticism of Bungie plagiarizing from the artist Antireal, a subset of players appears to have become invested in it failing financially in the mean-spirited way Gaider described.

With the somewhat-middling debut of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a game I sort of blandly enjoyed for 60 hours but certainly never in a 'this is a great Dragon Age' way, as well as the solemn layoffs following its muted fanfare, I think we can pretty much light a candle for the whole series. As well as the BioWare we knew and loved, mind. As PC Gamer's Fraser Brown puts it "The Veilguard was the very shiny, very pretty nail in the coffin."

It was the last real shot the studio had at convincing anybody it still had the juice after the stumbling of Mass Effect: Andromeda and the trainwreck of Anthem, but some of us were still holding out hope. Mark Darrah, a studio vet who worked there for over 20 years before leaving the studio in 2020, has revealed that the bones of BioWare were actually being Weekend at Bernie's-d for much longer than that.

In a grim tell-all on his YouTube channel, Darrah explains that 2017 was really the year that BioWare was fractured. Following a double-whammy of Dragon Age devs being peeled off to work on Andromeda, then Anthem, the team was then given marching orders to make a live service game. Marching orders that we know were later rescinded.

Didn't stop EA trying to blame the game's underperformance on a lack of 'em anyway, but what can you do.

"I wish that had never happened. I wish that pivot had never occurred—I wish that had never happened," Darrah emphatically states. Still, "EA said, 'make this a live service', we said, 'we don't know how to do that, we should basically start the project over'."

This marked the second age of "leadership discontinuity on Dragon Age," says Darrah—with this all going on while the team's core leadership is tied to Anthem. "This ends up causing massive amounts of changes to the project, to the team makeup, to the culture.

"In this time, Dragon Age is pursuing a goal that ultimately it doesn't want to be pursuing. But it does its best, but in doing its best, it changes the nature of the project in fundamental ways. So as we come to the end of 2017, we are in a state where almost everyone is on Anthem, but Dragon Age [is] running without most of its core leadership."

Darrah damns these changes and leadership decisions without qualification, in a way that's a little heartbreaking. "In the process of this change, EA and BioWare have dramatically damaged their relationship with myself, but also with a lot of other, more senior members of BioWare. Because they've said things are going to happen that didn't happen, they've made assurances that did not come true."

Now, obviously, this is only one person's view on the subject—a reality Darrah makes room later in the video to discuss—but it really does seem like BioWare, in particular its Dragon Age team, was the victim of a slow kind of corporate vampirism that saw it become a husk of its former self.

"As we come out of 2017," Darrah continues, "BioWare is a different thing. It is focused on making a live service in Anthem, it has lost one of its studios in Montreal being taken away," studios that—earlier in the video—Darrah was praying would return to the Dragon Age team, not be merged into the wider EA hivemind after Andromeda's debut, "and now it moves into the future in this new state."

Ultimately, Darrah concludes that: "EA buys studios, and then consumes them, and they start to lose their culture into the overall EA culture. To me, it feels like 2017 is when EA finished digesting BioWare, which they had bought nine years earlier, in 2008."

It's a grim picture to paint—and one to be taken with a grain of salt, given Darrah left in 2020. But it certainly tracks with similarly-damning words from other BioWare veterans about the state of BioWare post-Dragon Age: Inquisition. We kinda held a wake for one of gaming's RPG giants last year, but it turns out its bones might've been picked dry for eight whole years before that.