As part of our ongoing coverage and commemoration of the closure of BioWare, we've been reaching out to RPG developers to hear what the studio meant to them. Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton got in touch with 16 devs who owe their careers to the legendary RPG studio, and today I can share the words of another, Skald: Against the Black Priory lead developer Anders Lauridsen.
Baldur’s Gate 1 was the first game I truly loved.
I’d played a bunch of CRPGs before but they were older, clunkier titles. Though I was deeply fascinated by the genre, I was also a little too young to grok some of those older titles. Meanwhile I had started dabbling in AD&D (second edition to be specific) and that blew my mind like nothing before it. Like all fledgling DMs, however, I very soon ran into the dreaded “scheduling conflicts” that are the bane of tabletop groups. I had been shown paradise and then had the keys snatched away. I was creatively and intellectually starved. Into this tween turmoil Baldur’s Gate 1 was delivered and I was saved.
I had never experienced anything like it and, to this day, I still think it’s the best of the Infinity Engine games (I still replay it yearly). To me, nothing has so perfectly captured that free-roaming, chaotic, murder-hobo style of play that was [Second Edition] AD&D to me in the late '90s. Halcyon days.
Since then, Bioware has been a constant companion to me and their games are without a doubt one of the biggest reasons I ended up building a career making CRPGs. There’s a lot of Bioware hidden in Skald and a large reason for that is that simply implementing and testing that content just triggers so many happy memories for me and gives me a feeling of fellowship with some of my biggest childhood heroes.
I choose not to be sad for the passing. There is a time for everything. Instead I chose to celebrate the amazing games Bioware has given us and I hope that newer generations keep getting the same joy and inspiration from them for many years to come.
Thank you for all the amazing adventures!
I had a similar experience with BioWare RPGs as a substitute for tabletop growing up, lacking friends who were interested in the hobby until well into adulthood, and I'll wager that's not an uncommon experience.
Hearing Lauridsen say there's a lot of BioWare DNA in Skald made me smile. The game's art recalls those clunkier RPGs the developer initially bounced off, but its mechanics and combat are Baldur's Gate and Fallout to the core. I also gotta say I feel less bad about my own lack of facility with earlier generations of CRPG after hearing that a developer like Lauridsen struggled with them at first.
His enthusiasm is a heartening reminder that BioWare's legacy is more durable than EA's quarterly profits or private equity predation: The things we love about those games have dispersed into RPGs all over the world, and Skald is a perfect example of that.
It has the tight, low-level focus of the original Baldur's Gate, but with a shocking inflection of cosmic horror, plus Larianesque reactive systems I never would have expected from a pixel art game—Larian's own Swen Vincke is a fan of Skald himself. It's $15 on Steam and GOG (half-off at the latter at the time of writing), and I reviewed it on Steam Deck, where it runs like a dream.
