Deadline reports that a Canadian documentary about the history of BioWare was already two years into filming when EA closed the studio. Now, it's becoming a sad goodbye to a legendary developer.

"The BioWare founders are my hometown heroes," the documentary's writer and director Akash Sherman said. "It's a privilege and responsibility to share the journey of underdogs who came together to create deeply beloved storytelling. Their golden era kindled a spark in me and in an entire generation. With the studio's recent closure, the film is now a profound valediction."

The documentary, Massive Effect: The BioWare Story, features interviews with the studio's founders, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip, as well as developers Casey Hudson, Mark Darrah, David Gaider, Drew Karpyshyn, Aaryn Flynn, Mac Walters, Trent Oster, James Ohlen, and Caroline Livingstone, voice actor Jennifer Hale, former CEO of EA John Riccitello, and vice president of Lucasfilm Games Douglas Reilly.

"When the production team asked for our blessing to tell the BioWare story, we were honored and genuinely moved," Muzyka and Zeschuk said in a statement. "BioWare was never just about the logo or the building. It was about deeply emotionally engaging stories and characters, brought to life by the amazingly talented people on our dev teams, and our excellent production and distribution partners who helped us bring those stories successfully to all corners of the planet, and our passionate fans who defended those worlds, championed them and carried them forward. We're proud this film honors those who made it all possible. The best stories never really end. They live on in our memories and wait for someone to pick them up again."

Massive Effect: The BioWare Story is scheduled for release next year. Meanwhile, composer Sam Hulick has shared a re-scored version of the leaked trailer for Mass Effect Universe as his own way of saying goodbye, though apparently Amazon's Mass Effect TV series is still in the works.

Mass Effect composer Sam Hulick revealed in October that he was 're-scoring' the leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe to reflect his own "musical vision" for the game. The original, with an edit of "Quartz" by French 79, is pretty groovy, but now Hulick's work is done and this may not come as much of a surprise but I think I like his version better.

So here we have it—Mass Effect: Universe - Sam Hulick Edit:

I'm not a music critic but I know what I like, and I really like the Mass Effect soundtracks. There's a broadly common sound threaded through all three games (I didn't play Andromeda so I'm just pretending it never happened) but they evolved over the course of the trilogy, too: Hulick told me his music in this trailer is "'a balancing act between paying homage to the original trilogy and exploring new ground", but leans most heavily toward Mass Effect 1 and 3.

"Mass Effect's earliest tracks were more about raw analog synth blended with orchestral elements, but more subdued and 'vibey' for lack of a better word," Hulick said in a recent chat with PC Gamer. "Mass Effect 2 leaned more into orchestral bombast (as with Jack Wall’s forever-famous 'Suicide Mission'), and Mass Effect 3 combined the best of both worlds, with plenty of epic, fist-pump-into-the-air orchestral moments, as well as sparse, moody synth-forward tracks like the ones I wrote for Mars."

Jack Wall, for the record, was lead composer on the original Mass Effect while Hulick served as co-composer; the Mass Effect 2 soundtrack brought back Wall and Hulick and added Jimmy Hinson and David Kates to the lineup, while Mass Effect 3 featured Hulick plus Sascha Dikiciyan, Christopher Lennertz, Clint Mansell, and Cris Velasco.

The passage of time is also a factor in Hulick's approach to new work on Mass Effect. The Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 came out in 2013, 13 years ago, and he hasn't been sitting idle since then. "I used to rely on synth presets, but these days I mostly create my own sounds from scratch, since it's faster than scrolling through a list of 1,000 premade sounds," Hulick said. "On top of that, the quality of my music production has definitely improved since 2013! Everything in the trailer re-score should sound more polished, but still feel like it belongs in the Mass Effect universe (no pun intended)."

There are some big stylistic shifts over the course of the trailer, made even more notable by its brevity, which Hulick said are meant to showcase different approaches to ambient, cinematic, and combat music—"paying homage" to the original scores while simultaneously exploring new ground. The fight scene near the end of the teaser, for instance, is where Hulick "let the synthwave side come out," while the rest of the music is more in keeping with the music of the original trilogy.

Hulick also shared his "pipe dream" for the Mass Effect: Universe soundtrack, had he been hired to compose it: "I would've loved to have actual songs (with lyrics) to elevate the more emotional moments in the game, whatever they might've been. Fans loved the ME1 end-credits song by Faunts, so why not bring more of that back and include it in the game?"

I think that's a spectacular idea because he's absolutely correct, we did love that shit. It hits hard—still one of my favorite game tracks ever.

The interesting (and sad) surprise is that all of this isn't entirely a flight of fancy. BioWare had reached out to Hulick about working with the studio on an internal demo for a new Mass Effect: No promises beyond that were made and BioWare was clear that it hadn't begun the process of choosing a composer for the full game, but naturally Hulick said yes to "the amazing opportunity to write and brainstorm with the team on the new musical direction."

Sadly, it never got further than that: Hulick said he was "just starting to build a sonic palette" when he learned, along with the rest of us, that BioWare was being closed.

"Had I been hired to work on Mass Effect Universe, I'd have liked to see the direction lean more toward heavy analog synth while also introducing elements of synthwave. I don't think it would've been 100% synth, though. To remove all orchestral elements from the Mass Effect world feels like it would really hobble some of the more emotional peaks in the narrative," Hulic said.

"That's not to say synthesizer-centric music can't strike people emotionally, of course. But things like solo piano and orchestral arrangements have been part of the soul of Mass Effect's score since day one, and without them, I don't know if the music would feel complete."

In a separate post on his Patreon, Hulick paid tribute to BioWare and the impact Mass Effect had on his career: "BioWare took a chance on a young, unproven composer—an incredible opportunity that wouldn't have happened if Jack Wall hadn't recommended me during their composer search. Working on the first three games helped me not only find my musical voice, but also develop the skills needed to work on major video game projects."

He also repeated the sentiment he expressed on Bluesky when BioWare's shutdown was announced: As bad as it is for gamers, it's much worse for the people who work there. "It goes without saying that while we contractors feel the pain of studios shutting down, no one has been more impacted by this shutdown than the hard-working, kind, talented people at BioWare. Please, if you have connections in the game industry, leverage them to help everyone land on their feet."

Absolutely heartbroken over the end of an era. I hope all the talented and wonderful folks at BioWare land on their feet and keep working on incredible games. 💔 I loved every minute of working with you on the Mass Effect trilogy.

— @samhulick.com (@samhulick.com.bsky.social) 2026-11-06T21:53:55.550Z

Following the now-confirmed end of Dragon Age in 2025, former BioWare senior writer Sheryl Chee said EA owns the IP, but it can't own the idea: "DA isn't dead because it's yours now." It's small consolation, especially coming so soon after BioWare's closure, but I think the same has to be said about Mass Effect. We may not get more from EA, but there will always be more from us. Happy N7 Day.

A lot of attention has been focused on the "Save Mass Effect" petition on Change.org, which has now drawn over 300,000 signatures collectively calling on Electronic Arts to make a new Mass Effect game.

But there's another petition in the works, asking the government of Canada to save BioWare—the people, not the product—and while it only has a tiny fraction of names attached to it, it's enough that the Canadian government will actually have to look at it.

Unlike the Change.org petition, this one is official, in that it's actually part of the legislative process: Public petitions like e-7989, as it's formally known, are "used to draw attention to an issue of public concern. They ask the House of Commons, the Government of Canada, a minister or a member to take or refrain from taking some action."

The requested actions in this case are three:

• 1. Provide BioWare with the capital necessary to secure independence of themselves and their intellectual property from Electronic Arts and resume business as an independent, Canadian company;
• 2. Protect Canadian businesses and cultural institutions from being dictated by American and foreign corporate interests; and
• 3. Champion the values of inclusivity, tolerance, democracy, justice, and civil rights at the centre of Canada's national identity by preserving BioWare's invaluable contribution to the global entertainment industry.

As I write this, the petition is nosing toward 3,000 signatures, not a huge amount but enough to trigger the next step in the process. Once an electronic petition has at least 500 valid signatures—that is, the signature of a Canadian citizen or resident—it's certified, at which point the Member of Parliament representing the petitioner can either present it during Routine Proceedings, or file it with the Clerk of the House.

There are various other rules and norms in place, but the important bit is that "the government must respond to every petition presented to the House within 45 calendar days of its presentation or filing with the Clerk." Electronic petitions can be short-circuited by the dissolution of Parliament: Paper petitions can be re-presented to the House even if they were certified by a previous Parliament, but electronic petitions are wiped and must be restarted afresh.

The good news for committed videogame optimists is that, for many reasons, the current Canadian Parliament is not going to be dissolved anytime soon, so this petition to free BioWare from the fetters of EA isn't going to just die on the vine. But, also for a variety of reasons, it's not liable to lead to BioWare's salvation, either.

For one thing, while New Democratic Party leader Avi Lewis expressed support for the idea of government intervention shortly after BioWare was closed by its new owners, the NDP is not in power right now and its attention is currently consumed by rebuilding after a decade of disastrous leadership. The government of Canada is also focused on other things at the moment, for instance the badly frayed relationship with our erratic, nuclear-tipped neighbor to the south, and while cheerleading companies like BioWare is great PR (and the current governing party loves that stuff), it's not something that's likely to inspire actual action.

Maybe the most salient roadblock is this: BioWare and its games are owned by Electronic Arts, which has shown no interest in selling them off. Even if the government of Canada were interested in floating BioWare the cash to go independent, it can't buy what EA's not selling—and historically, EA has not made a habit of letting go of its properties.

Still, the NDP is taking the matter seriously. "BioWare has cultivated an international following from their renowned videogame franchises like Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate, and Dragon Age. Canada’s videogame industry creates some of our most important cultural exports, and BioWare was among our biggest success stories," MP Don Davies, the sponsor of the petition, told PC Gamer.

"Electronic Arts, their American parent company, was never invested in the success of BioWare since they purchased the studio as part of a larger acquisition in 2007. This is a pattern with videogame publishers like EA. They buy smaller developers, set unrealistic timelines, overwork their employees, and meddle in the development process, resulting in poorer quality games. Then, when sales fail to meet expectations, they blame the developers, lay off workers, and eventually shut down the studio for short-term profit.

"New Democrats want BioWare to stay in business, preferably under Canadian control. We believe that the employees at BioWare ought to have the first opportunity to buy back their studio and continue making the games that fans love. The petition primarily asks the federal government to provide the required capital. This is absolutely possible. Our goal with the petition is to demonstrate just how many Canadians believe this is a worthwhile investment in our entertainment industry."

BioWare is an Edmonton-based video game studio that created acclaimed series like #MassEffect, Baldur’s Gate, and Dragon Age. Canada’s video game industry creates some of our most important cultural exports, and #BioWare is among our greatest success stories.

— @donvdavies.bsky.social (@donvdavies.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-11-06T20:09:33.616Z

I do think it's something of a distant dream to expect the Canadian government to whip out the chequebook on this one, but that's not to say that this public petition is a waste of time. There's value in speaking out in support of good causes or opposition to bad ones, and this petition's focus on BioWare and its people, rather than just 'I want more Mass Effect,' makes it worth getting behind. At the very least, we get a final, formal vocalization of support for the people that gave us so many great memories.

And who knows? This has been a pretty good week for good things happening, after all—maybe there's still a little gas left in that tank.

The petition will be open for signatures until March 4, 2027. Add your name to the list at ourcommons.ca.

Two weeks after literally calling "bullshit" on EA's decision to close BioWare, immsim legend Warren Spector has posted a follow-up message on LinkedIn that avoids the spicy language but sounds angrier than ever.

"I recently posted my thoughts about EA’s shuttering of BioWare," Spector wrote. "Those of you who read my post know that I was unhappy. I remain so.

"The tragedy of so many layoffs the last few years hasn’t been lost on me, but for some reason, BioWare hit me on an emotional level nothing before had. I was gut-punched."

But some readers, he continued, replied to say that BioWare's best days were behind it, and that shutting it down was a "sound business decision." Those reactions appear to have re-stoked Spector's rage, as he said those people missed his actual complaint: That the game industry executives who are responsible for these problems are never the ones to suffer the consequences.

"If studio-level people leave, resulting in dilution of talent, someone is creating an environment that pushes them out. Do those culture-killers pay any price?" Spector wrote in his new message. "If executives misread the market, over-hire, or make decisions that result in under-funded, over-funded, poorly-marketed games, do they lose sleep, let alone jobs? Do those same executives suffer like developers when the needs of financial partners and investors take precedence over players, does anyone up there care?

"Is there ANY accountability left in this world?"

Then he took direct aim at Electronic Arts' C-suite with some very large, ugly numbers:

• Andrew Wilson, chief executive officer: $38.65 million
• Laura Miele, president, EA Entertainment and Central Development: $13.7 million
• Stuart Canfield, chief financial officer: $11.3 million
• Jake Schatz, chief legal officer: $8.4 million
• Mala Singh, chief people officer: $8.3 million

Those figures represent the total compensation given to EA's executives in its 2026 fiscal year—a single 12-month period. They're also significant increases over the previous year: Wilson, for instance, got $30.5 million in 2025, while Miele's was given $9.1 million.

Ironically, those EA executive salaries aren't even directly related to the BioWare closure. Wilson's $8 million raise (and all the others), which was awarded in part for "meeting all milestones for a high-quality launch of Battlefield 6," came just a few months after laying off employees at the studios that made it—Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive—and entirely shuttering Ridgeline Games, which had been working on a new, more story-focused Battlefield game.

"Tens of thousands of do-ers and makers are out of work and these people think they're worth that kind of compensation?" Spector concluded. "And if you think this is a discussion about 'sound business decisions' I hope you never get anywhere near running a business. Or at least that people have the sense not to go work for you."

Spector's frustration and anger comes through here even more clearly than it did when he dropped his uncharacteristic curse, because it's focused: Waving our hands and bemoaning the bullshit might be briefly cathartic, but pointing the finger at these guys over here and saying "this is why" brings the problem into focus like the sun through a magnifying glass.

Sadly, pushback on compensation packages of this size are extremely rare. An analyst report in 2020, when EA shareholders took the unusual step of rejecting a proposed pay hike for the company's executives, said the failure rate of such proposals was just 2.7% in 2019, and 2.6% in 2018. Wilson was paid more than $21 million that year.

When Mass Effect 3's beloved multiplayer mode was left out of the Legendary Edition, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Redemption has finally come in the form of the ME3Tweaks modding team, who have spent the last three years quietly working to not only get multiplayer working, but improve it.

"It's not just a ME3MP port but rather an extensive remaster of the experience," says modder Audemus. "This includes new features like bringing forward LE's native features like controller support/HDR, overhauled UI, rebaked level lighting, upscaled/redrawn textures, upgraded shaders, improved networking/server replication, extensive bug fixes, new gameplay modes, and a stable format for future mod support and easy installation/compatibility."

They're even adding new game modes, like one called "Unified" that combines enemies from multiple factions, and letting players either join ME3Tweaks' server, or set up their own private servers.

The ME3Tweaks team are the same modders who previously revived and revised the Pinnacle Station expansion, a lost DLC for the original Mass Effect that was also left out of the Legendary Edition. They're planning to release the multiplayer mod on N7 Day, which is also when composer Sam Hulick plans to release a re-scored version of the leaked Mass Effect Universe trailer.

According to Bloomberg's sources, EA saw a new Battlefront game as a less risky investment than Mass Effect Universe. This final factor joined a host of well-discussed reasons for BioWare's unfortunate demise: Andromeda's critical reception, Anthem's live service failure, Veilguard's sales struggle (pretty good game though), friction between the studio and EA since the very beginning, and, of course, EA's recent Saudi-Kushner-Private Equity acquisition.

One other added wrinkle: BioWare apparently lost its main ally at the top of the EA org chart. Entertainment and Central Development exec Laura Miele, who historically advocated for BioWare, was "sidelined" according to Bloomberg. EA sports execs David Tinson and Cam Weber were promoted instead. The age of nerds has ended, now begins the long night of the jock.

Overall, this new information doesn't radically reframe BioWare's overall story at EA, one of slow decline and mismanagement, or how most observers will interpret it through a culture war lens⁠. Was BioWare too woke? Not woke enough? For the love of god keep it out of our comments section. But now we know why the knife was finally driven home, for what it's worth.

And I guess we can anticipate a new Battlefront game some time at the tail end of the 2030s. Woohoo. For more on the closure of BioWare, PCG lead SEO editor Lauren Morton spoke to 16 developers who were inspired to join the industry because of the studio about what BioWare meant to them.

It's been almost 15 years since BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka announced their retirements from the videogame industry, and they've been resolute about staying out of it ever since: Muzyka continues to head up the ThresholdImpact investment firm he founded in 2012 and holds multiple roles at the University of Alberta, while Zeschuk owns Blind Enthusiasm Brewing Company, also based in Alberta, where he works with a small handful of other BioWare veterans.

But Zeschuk stepped back into the videogame spotlight, briefly, following last week's closure of BioWare by parent company Electronic Arts, telling 80lv that he got the news hours after it happened because he was on a fishing trip, and by the time he flew home a couple days later, he'd "already shelved it away."

"I wasn't there to share in the moment, which in some ways was nice because I was able to kind of just take my time with it," Zeschuk said. "I’m not saying it doesn't hurt and doesn't suck. And I think it's kind of sad. It's actually, in some ways, saddest for the city of Edmonton, where we're from, because we were kind of this beacon of hope and excitement and possibility. We showed you could do something really special in a place that was not known for doing things like that."

Zeschuk said he had his own "emotional moment" about BioWare years ago, when he left the company; his real concern now is for the people at the studio who now find themselves out of work: "Anyone getting put into the job hunt is a sort of terrifying endeavor and super sad."

He also said he has no regrets about the EA acquisition, saying it offered "stability" as the studio continued to grow and that "we saw there'd be value in being part of something bigger rather than going our own way and taking all the risks." At the same time, he had a feeling when EA was acquired by Saudi Arabia's PIF that it probably wouldn't go well for BioWare, because it doesn't fit into the guns-and-sports model: "BioWare makes these kind of unusual games that take a long time and they're complicated and so it's easier just to pump out sports games every year and that's a better business model in some ways."

Zeschuk was also critical of the idea, seen in the recent wave of studio mergers and AI-powered cutbacks, "that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI. It doesn't work," Zeschuk said.

"The other harsh reality of almost all these companies, the people that go down the business track never really come from the development track. Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one, like, from start to finish, even a small thing, they just don't know how it works."

Zeschuk does know how it works, and he was clear that he's not interested in going back. "For me it was time to go, and I kind of walked out of the games business without any intention of ever returning. I'm happy being a consumer and playing games," he said. "I have my opinions on how to make stuff, but as enticing as it would be, it's just not [worth] the personal struggle and cost and effort required to make a great game. Having gone through the crucible of game development, I'm not going back in there."

EA took the axe to BioWare last week after a long, slow death partially born of mandates to either work on live service games that didn't work (Anthem) or pivot from live service games in messy, chaotic development cycles (Veilguard). A report from Vertical Slice now also claims that its employee morale is at an all-time low.

Speaking to the site's Chris Kerr, choosing to remain anonymous, sources state that "Morale has been terrible. The line we kept hearing is 'do less, better' but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with less people."

It doesn't help that "upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team." It's not entirely shocking that generative AI is exciting the executive class—and, to give credit where it's perhaps undue, there are places in which the use of AI could, if applied conservatively, save on busywork.

But in an utterly brutal industry environment, none of these employees seem keen on the idea that management might replace them with AI while not understanding their jobs: "The message from every single manager I've heard is 'this is the future, you have to get onboard'," writes one source, while another adds: "They won't tell you these tools are a mandate, but they'll make it impossible or very difficult for you to do your job without [them]."

Another source in the article claims that there is a sense that "EA executives cannot fail, only be failed. They've been fortunate that [EA Sports FC] sells and makes so much money that it can finance their bad bets."

That is a pervasive feeling—one does have to wonder why the axe falls first on the employees rather than, say, executive-level pay or bonuses, some of which could fund the yearly salaries of dozens of employees handily. Take Battlefield 6, for instance, which laid off several developers and then paid EA's CEO $38 million for the game's success.

To further put it in perspective, Andrew Wilson's yearly pay was worth roughly 305 median salaries at the publisher's studios in 2025.

To return to BioWare for a moment, the report also paints an ugly picture of the mismanagement of that studio. Predictably, the constant cajoling to try and get it to make a live service masterpiece.

"A lot of money got wasted going down these roads that didn't lead anywhere," says one source, while another writes: "There was never a desire to take risks. Never a desire to do anything interesting. It was just 'here is what these 14 UXR [User Experience Research] studies are saying, so we've got to do it this way."

Like the cherry on top of a terrible sundae, Vertical Slice's reporting ends with an eminently quotable summation of the entire fiasco: "That the recent email about the organisation changes [sounded like] it was written by a robot best sums up EA. A cold dead place that's slowly decaying as leadership pilfers every last cent, leaving the rest of us to worry about how we feed our families."

More unofficial but undoubtedly very cool Mass Effect music is on the way: The day after Austin Wintory shared 20 minutes of music he wrote as part of a "serious conversation" with BioWare and Electronic Arts about scoring Mass Effect 5, composer Sam Hulick says he plans to release a "re-scored" version of the leaked Mass Effect: Universe trailer with his own music, which he hopes to have ready in time for N7 Day.

Hulick, for the record, knows Mass Effect well: He composed music for all three games in the Mass Effect trilogy, including this one, co-written with Clint Mansell, which you may be familiar with.

I'm not crying, you're crying

"Absolutely heartbroken over the end of an era," Hulick wrote on Bluesky when EA closed BioWare. "I hope all the talented and wonderful folks at BioWare land on their feet and keep working on incredible games. I loved every minute of working with you on the Mass Effect trilogy."

Hulick also expressed support for the Save Mass Effect petition, although he went further to state that the real issue isn't the game but all the people who were put out of work: "Even if EA licensed the IP, that doesn't solve anything for them. Someone with a lotta cash would have to license it AND hire the team."

One thing about #SaveMassEffect: What really sucks & cannot be undone is all the folks at BioWare who lost their jobs. Even if EA licensed the IP, that doesn't solve anything for them. 😕 Someone with a lotta cash would have to license it AND hire the team.

— @samhulick.com (@samhulick.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-27T21:12:27.713Z

So when the Mass Effect 5 trailer leaked, Hulick went to work. The music in the trailer is pretty decent in its own right, in a generic sort of 'Mass Effect hype teaser' way, but Hulick has bigger ideas. He first teased his music for the trailer on Patreon, and then revealed on Bluesky that we're all going to get to enjoy it when he's finished.

"My plan is to release the re-scored Mass Effect Universe trailer for N7 Day," Hulick wrote. "A little tight, since I'm a bit busy pitching for a new game, but I'll see what I can do! I don't wanna rush it, and I want it to properly represent my musical vision for MEU."

Three minutes of tunes does not a full soundtrack make, but I'm excited about this anyway. The Mass Effect soundtracks are among my favorites, and while I would've loved to hear Wintory's take on the series—the man won a Grammy award, back before they started handing them out specifically for games—Hulick clearly has ideas too, and given his long history with the series, I want to hear 'em.

Alright. My plan is to release the re-scored Mass Effect Universe trailer for N7 Day. A little tight, since I'm a bit busy pitching for a new game, but I'll see what I can do! I don't wanna rush it, and I want it to properly represent my musical vision for MEU.

— @samhulick.com (@samhulick.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-27T21:12:27.647Z

N7 Day, as always, is November 7, which this year is a Saturday. That means I won't be around to talk about Hulick's take on the Mass Effect: Universe trailer if he's able to release it on schedule, but if nobody else does, you better believe I'm going to be writing about it on Monday.

If you haven't already seen the leaked Mass Effect: Universe teaser, here you go:

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.

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.

Composer Austin Wintory (Journey, Stray Gods, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate) just shared 20 minutes of music he wrote as a sort of audition/starting point for the score of Mass Effect 5, aka. Mass Effect: Universe. According to Wintory, he had been in "serious conversation" with BioWare and EA to provide the game's soundtrack.

To be clear: This was not music that was 100% slated to appear in the game, but it sounds like Wintory was on the shortest of shortlists for the job. The effective EP is presented as "My Mass Effect 5 early musical drafts" and "Mass Effect: Universe, the music that might have been."

Wintory wrote that he wanted to "surprise [EA and BioWare] with an elaborate production" in 2025, and that the music was recorded with "synths, vocals, and a large orchestra here in LA." Noting that he didn't have story details for the in-development game, Wintory came up with speculative themes and track titles based on the series' past.

And I really don't know how to process that this thing whips ass. Wintory had a killer vision with the project: "My suggestion was to treat the original game's masterful Jack Wall / Sam Hulick score as a starting point," he wrote, "And to build on it from there with deeper use of physical, analog synths and a more tightly interwoven use of the orchestra. But a love letter first and foremost."

God damn it. Mass Effect had great music throughout the series, but ME1's more synth-heavy approach has always been my favorite. Wintory still makes great use of the orchestra, but the synths are back, baby. Balance has been restored. This stuff gave me chills.

Both versions of main theme candidate "The Legacy of Shepard" are favorites for me, but I'd also like to shout out the more up-tempo, combat-ready "Hold the Line." Wintory was onto something here, and it also clearly meant a great deal to the composer. Wintory described this as a "dream project" and "white whale." I wish we could have heard the whole OST.

"We are Mass Effect," the fan group behind a currently 224,000 signature Change.org petition seeking to secure the series' future, has rented out digital billboard space in New York's Times Square to promote the effort.

The group shared a video of the billboard in the wild on X, "The Everything App." Every hour at 35 minutes past the hour, the screen at 1560 Broadway shows a 15-second motion graphic message. Over a planetary vista reminiscent of Mass Effect 1's start screen, we get a distinctive N7 red stripe and the message "Keelah si'yah, #SaveMassEffect" in the series' go-to "Korataki" font. Yes, today is when I too learned that Mass Effect used a commercially-available font called "Korataki" for its logo and in-game text. I kinda want to write all my drafts in it now.

"Keelah si'yah" is a phrase from the Quarian language in the games. Continuing today's theme of new discoveries about a series I've spent, like, 1,000 hours playing over 20 years, I learned that this language is called "Khellish." The phrase means "by the homeworld I hope to find one day," not to be confused with "keelah se'lai" or "by the homeworld I hope to see one day." I was more familiar with the latter from the games.

When we checked in on #SaveMassEffect yesterday, it was still at 180,000 signatures, so pretty impressive momentum still. The petition's demands are fairly broad: A commitment of any kind by EA to continue the series in videogame form (not just the Amazon TV series still in development), either internally or by licensing to another party.

I know my ideal solution would be spinning off BioWare, either as an independent (potentially government-supported) concern, or by selling it to a new corporate owner. The studio's leaked trailer and reported vision for the canceled Mass Effect Universe struck me as both bold (600 years in the future but still tracking choices from the original trilogy) yet intriguingly specific (a galactic spy thriller). It reminds me of Joplin, the heist and intrigue-focused original pitch for Dragon Age 4 that was canceled in favor of Anthem.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the cost of a Times Square billboard activation like this. Plug Talk Media lists its single day, 15-second share price as $1,200-$3,500 as a frame of reference. A chunk of change, to be sure, but pretty doable split multiple ways.

Today, October 26, is the 19^th anniversary of The Witcher, the groundbreaking RPG that introduced Geralt, and CD Projekt, to the world. To mark the moment, CD Projekt took to social to pay tribute to friends who made it all possible: BioWare.

CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski spoke warmly of BioWare last week in the immediate aftermath of the studio's shocking closure, crediting it as "a massive part of CDPR history." The Witcher was built on BioWare's Aurora engine, which it created for Neverwinter Nights, but BioWare did more than just share technology: It also worked to help bring the upstart Polish RPG to much wider attention.

"19 years ago, an ambitious dream to bring an iconic book series into the world of video games came to life with the release of The Witcher. It was the start of an unforgettable path, which wouldn't have been possible without our friends at BioWare," CD Projekt wrote.

"From lending us their Aurora Engine and sharing their knowledge, to giving us a spot at their booth at E3, their support helped turn our vision into Geralt’s first interactive adventure. Thank you to everyone who has walked the Path with us from the very beginning. Happy 19th anniversary, witchers!"

19 years ago, an ambitious dream to bring an iconic book series into the world of video games came to life with the release of The Witcher.It was the start of an unforgettable path, which wouldn't have been possible without our friends at BioWare.

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-26T19:05:28.197Z

From lending us their Aurora Engine and sharing their knowledge, to giving us a spot at their booth at E3, their support helped turn our vision into Geralt’s first interactive adventure.Thank you to everyone who has walked the Path with us from the very beginning.Happy 19th anniversary, witchers!

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-26T19:05:28.112Z

The first Witcher game, released in 2007 as a PC exclusive, was a critical hit and (eventually) a sales success, too. After that, CD Projekt leveled up, moving off of Bioware's engine and creating its own REDengine for 2011's The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Cyberpunk 2077.

Of course it's not really a happy anniversary moment. CD Projekt's kind words were prompted by last week's shutdown of BioWare by Electronic Arts, which had the audacity to call itself "the number one publisher in Western HD gaming" while simultaneously admitting that it couldn't figure out what to do with one of the most storied game studios ever.

Even in an industry as riven with layoffs, closures, and general instability as videogames, the end of BioWare felt different and more impactful, sending shockwaves in all directions. Tributes, mourning, and anger followed, and as more anniversaries like this one arrive, I have no doubt we'll see more memories of BioWare, and regrets over its loss, in the future.

As reported by IGN, veteran actors Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer, who voiced the female and male Commanders Shepard in Mass Effect, respectively, directly addressed fans of the series in an October 21 Instagram Live. The two reflected on BioWare, and commiserated over its tragic fate. Here are some highlights from each I pulled from the stream:

Both actors' reactions strike me as so characteristic of their respective backgrounds: Hale is one of the voices of videogames (not to diminish Meer's own extensive resume). She jumped to BioWare's place in the industry and its current crisis. Meer, a standby of the Edmonton theater and improv scene, fixated on the closure's effects on this city he clearly loves.

Both are 100% correct about the collective joy and meaning people found in BioWare's work. That's something private equity can't take from us⁠—at least not with current technology.

As for Hale's optimism regarding the rights and potential future of the franchise, well, I Want To Believe. Not to obnoxiously needle what seemed like an offhand idea, but I don't think Kickstarter's walking through that door. Aside from Double Fine's Broken Age and the utterly baffling case of Star Citizen, many gaming crowdfunding successes⁠—like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2⁠—still required further, traditional investment to go gold. BioWare and/or its IP would be orders of magnitude more expensive.

There's also precedent to look back on: EA has not done anything with Ultima in over 20 years. Many people don't realize this series was foundational to the development of both Japanese and Western-style RPGs, as EA's poor stewardship has allowed it to almost completely fade from our collective memory.

But I think we're all still waiting on a hero, a man on horseback, and the only riders with deep enough pockets to intervene here are billionaires, other companies on the scale of EA, or the state. With other publicly-traded companies, you'd risk replicating what BioWare went through under EA. I would love it if the Canadian government stepped in, nationalized BioWare, what have you, but it feels like a pipe dream.

The only semi-plausible happy ending I can picture looks like what happened to The Onion: A benevolent/eccentric super-rich guy steps in to save the day with little concern for profitability. Does anyone know one who enjoys RPGs (or immersive sims, for that matter)?

Last week, the other shoe dropped for legendary RPG studio BioWare: shortly after EA's acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the gaming giant shut down BioWare and canceled Mass Effect 5.

Fans have spent the intervening days combing through the detritus of the next game in the series' leaked remains, and some have even signed a change.org petition to save the series. Right now, that #SaveMassEffect petition has hit over 180,000 verified signatures.

Notably it does not call for EA to walk back its decision to shut down BioWare. Instead, it's about keeping the Mass Effect series going: "We are urgently petitioning EA to take decisive action by committing to the continued development of Mass Effect," Joe Smith's plea reads. "Alternatively, EA could consider licensing the Mass Effect intellectual property to another studio that shares the passion and vision to keep it alive and allow it to flourish anew."

Of course, EA is not beholden to the demands of a digital petition—the chances that this will inspire a revolution of the heart throughout the industry's C-suites are not high. One could argue that, if the publisher held the legacy of Mass Effect or, indeed, the computer RPG itself as a priority, it would not have shut down BioWare in the first place. But this petition has proven a lightning rod of enthusiasm for fans of the series, who are sharing their memories of the games along with their signatures.

"You’re gonna have to pry Garrus from my cold dead hands," wrote Savannah. Another from Joe reads, "My wife and I absolutely love the Mass Effect series. We’ve had so many good times together sharing Commander Shepard's story over the years. It really devastated both of us when we heard that BioWare is done and, in turn, Mass Effect 5 wasn’t going to happen." Austin wrote: "The trilogy and even silly Andromeda has made a permanent impact on my life. I’ve been playing for 13 years."

While it's hard to imagine EA doing a 180 on this, it's also hard to imagine Mass Effect staying down for good (even if that might be where we're headed). Maybe Canada's New Democratic Party leader Avi Lewis has the right idea, and BioWare should be publicly funded for the collective good. Either way, the immediate, broader future for games made under the EA banner looks a mite grim.

With the closure of RPG standby BioWare, we've been consulting the PC Gamer rolodex and reaching out to developers for their thoughts and reflections on the legendary studio. Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton spoke to 16 devs who joined this industry because of BioWare games.

I was happy to hear back from Christoffer Bodegård, developer of our current RPG of the year frontrunner, Esoteric Ebb, on what BioWare meant to him.

The more information that dribbles out from BioWare's cancelled Mass Effect game, the sadder I feel about the whole sorry situation. We've already seen an in-engine trailer that introduced a new protagonist and reintroduced Liara T'Soni, and we've heard that the game was set in a 'galactic Cold War' that combined all three of Mass Effect 3's possible endings. Now, it seems the new Mass Effect would also have had a sophisticated system for dealing with the choices players made in the original trilogy.

This is according to Mass Effect's Franchise Technical Director Romain Toutain, who ran a Twitch stream during which he provided commentary on the recently leaked trailer, offering some insight into the game that trailer was supposed to reveal (via Kotaku). Although the stream was in French, a clip was posted on Bluesky by user @loustica-lucia, who added English subtitles to Toutain's commentary.

During his stream, Toutain mentions that BioWare was working on a novel way to account for the many choices players made while playing the Mass Effect trilogy, pointing out that "all of the choices made in the first Mass Effect games were taking into account."

Indeed, this is partly the reason behind the cancelled successor's name as shown in the leaked internal trailer. "One of the reasons why it was called Mass Effect Universe is that you had so many choices that you could plug your saves together to create parallel universes." Toutain quickly clarifies that his explanation is "to keep it simple," adding "It's not exactly how it worked. You had different timelines, basically. You could almost generate timelines, kinda like Zero Time Dilemma."

It sounds like a significantly more complex version of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's choice import system. Indeed, Toutain goes on to explain that "everything was stateful" in reference to Universe's tech, and BioWare had a system that let them pause the game and ask a "system that solved logical equations" about the game state and the possible consequences of choices being made by the player. "'Is this valid? And if it isn't valid, what conditions must be met for it to be valid for the game to set these conditions? And if the content doesn't exist, then we know the content doesn't exist, so we'll either have to create another branch, either that, or we know we have to create the content.'"

Toutain then cites an example: "So, if you killed a guy and you needed that guy for your mission, the game will make sure you can complete that mission. Or, if that's what the designers have decided, well, no, the mission's failed because you killed that guy. Or else, something that was bound to happen doesn't happen just so that a path remains open, so that you can get [around] the problem."

According to Toutain, the ultimate goal of the next Mass Effect was to give players "absolute autonomy". How well these ideas would have worked in practice is another matter, of course. But it certainly seems that BioWare had some ambitious plans that reached beyond the scope of the original trilogy, and it's a darn shame that we'll never know how they would have shaken out.

It's hard to discuss BioWare's demise without detailing the corporate meddling that led to one of gaming's most celebrated and enduring studios getting the axe. BioWare made mistakes, undeniably, but the buck stops at the executives who gutted its teams and never understood, for instance, the popularity of Dragon Age.

But things are bleak enough and you know all this already. So instead, I want to celebrate BioWare's impressive impact, which will continue for as long as studios are designing RPGs.

Even if BioWare ceased to exist after its incredible run of Infinity Engine games, it would still be considered an icon. Baldur's Gate was, for so many people, the CRPG, defining an era of roleplaying games and echoing across the decades. We're still talking about it, and studios are still designing games built on that old foundation.

Owlcat, Obsidian, Larian—three of the biggest RPG studios of the current era have all dipped into that well. Without BioWare we'd not have the Pathfinder CRPGs, Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny, and Baldur's Gate 3 certainly wouldn't exist.

Obsidian as we know it would likely be a very different studio without BioWare, if it existed at all. It formed after the closure of Black Isle Studios, which published Baldur's Gate, and it relied on BioWare's Infinity Engine for Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. That relationship continued under Obsidian, with the team following up BioWare's Neverwinter Nights and KotOR with celebrated sequels, before making Pillars of Eternity, BG's spiritual successor.

The modern resurgence of CRPGs, born out of a love of BioWare and Black Isle's library, probably would not have happened if the two studios had not made such a huge impression. Disco Elysium, for instance, owes a great deal to Planescape: Torment, and if ZA/UM had never created Disco, we wouldn't have games like Esoteric Ebb or Zero Parades either.

Following Baldur's Gate, BioWare gave us Neverwinter Nights in 2002, a game that was still undeniably a CRPG, but one that catered to the demand for 3D graphics. Neverwinter Nights was solid, but its real legacy was the Aurora Engine and the Aurora Toolset.

BioWare gave players the power of game creation with the toolset, with which they spawned countless worlds, modules, mods and persistent servers—effectively community-run MMOs. It was my first foray into modding, when I created a D&D adventure for my flatmate's birthday. I was a broke student, so I couldn't afford a gift, but I could absolutely skive class and make a cool game.

Folks are still playing with the toolset today, in a community that has persevered for over two decades.

Also in 2002, a small Polish developer was founded. CD Projekt started life as a localisation studio, and it worked with BioWare and Interplay to create the Polish version of Baldur's Gate. From that relationship, it was given the job of porting Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance to PC. Unfortunately, that port was a victim of Interplay's demise, but bigger and better things were on the horizon.

The company formed a new studio to develop its own games, known as CD Projekt Red, and started work on the original Witcher. The studio then licensed the Aurora Engine from BioWare, which it heavily modified to create Geralt's first big videogame romp.

CDPR's joint CEO Michał Nowakowski paid tribute to BioWare after the closure announcement, saying, "Bioware has been a massive part of CDPR history. We befriended them when localizing and selling Baldur’s Gate games in Poland, Czech, and Slovakia. And later they were [a] great help when lending us their engine for Witcher 1, sharing their wisdom and even giving us a spot at their booth at E3."

As the popularity of CRPGs started to wane and consoles began to dominate, BioWare adapted and pivoted. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was still secretly a CRPG, but one that you could play on console with your controller, with so much of the classic CRPG complexity hidden from view.

KotOR kicked off a series that continued with KotOR 2, from Obsidian, and BioWare returned to the series for SWTOR, a MMO that continues today under developer Broadsword. At the time of its launch, it was the most expensive MMO ever made, and it continues to be an astonishing achievement in terms of the absurd amount of dialogue and voice acting.

With KotOR, BioWare really started to refine the features that would go on to influence so many RPGs (and games in other genres). BioWare RPGs have always featured big, game-changing decisions, letting you determine through your choices who lives, who dies, and who gets to become the protagonist's love interest. But in KotOR, we started to see this really become codified.

The romances, the alignment system, the ability to influence companions and even turn them to the Dark Side, these systems are part of the DNA of modern RPGs. Even now, we describe games that feature big, signposted story branches as having BioWare-style choices.

Jade Empire didn't make nearly as big a splash in 2005, but it's here we see BioWare experimenting with action-RPG mechanics. I love Jade Empire, and it further developed the BioWare-style choices, but it also felt a bit like it was following a trend rather than setting one. Story-driven action-RPGs weren't new.

With Mass Effect, though, it attempted something different, and it was duly rewarded. KotOR and Jade Empire saw the studio try to adapt to changing tastes, but with Mass Effect BioWare had finally figured out how to move on from CRPGs.

The studio that gave us Baldur's Gate developing a third-person shooter sounded like a disaster waiting to happen, but instead BioWare made something incredible. Never before in a BioWare game had we been able to play such a well-defined protagonist, but the studio maintained the player agency it was so loved for, letting us create all these different versions of Shepard. There's so much more to the character than the binary Paragon/Renegade system.

Mass Effect is also where BioWare's experiments with choice and consequence really paid off. Do we wipe out an alien species or allow one of the galaxy's biggest threats to survive? Do we betray the Council or risk the deaths of countless humans? Do we date Liara or the space racist? And then we got to see these choices reverberate across the sequels. Years of decisions culminating in a fight for the galaxy's survival.

With BioWare's closure, we'll never get to see what it was planning for the fifth outing, though after Andromeda I'm not sure we would have been happy with it—even though the leaked trailer looks rad. But Mass Effect lives on. The Amazon series is reportedly still going forward, and not one but two new games are on the horizon that are carrying the torch: Owlcat's The Expanse: Osiris Reborn and Archetype's Exodus. Both are coming next year.

In 2009, BioWare finally released Dragon Age: Origins, which had been in development for seven years, underwent some significant changes, and was framed as a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. And boy did it live up to those high expectations. A few months after launch, it had already hit 3.2 million sales. BioWare moved on from CRPGs, only to go and release this all-timer a couple of years later.

While the stuido would go on to chip away at series' the CRPG elements, culminating in 2024's not-so-great action-RPG The Veilguard, Origins at least showed the world that CRPGs were still viable, and that console gamers were perfectly capable of enjoying a more methodical, complex RPG.

Origins went on to influence a new generation of videogame developers, not just as an RPG, but as a successful blockbuster game that stopped pretending queer people didn't exist. Sure, Femshep could date Liara in Mass Effect, but BioWare obfuscated the queer romance by making the Asari genderless, even though Liara is absolutely female coded. It could also be argued that the Liara romance played into the fetishisation of lesbians, titillating straight men without actually depicting a queer romance.

BioWare continued to represent queer relationships in its other RPGs, sometimes with specific characters, and sometimes by making every character playersexual. And it got a lot of shit for this from the conservative nutjobs. Thankfully, those idiots were fighting a losing battle.

Just look at how many RPGs have followed suit. Not just in allowing the player to embark on a queer romance, but their depiction of queer characters in general. Even the fairly conservative Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, where the game director constantly complains about "wokeness", features a genuinely fantastic queer romance. Sorry, bigots, you lost!

That it was able to do so much of this while trapped inside EA's dev-killing prison is even more impressive. Mass Effect and Dragon Age came out of the previous era, despite EA being the publisher at the time of their respective launches, but BioWare continued to take big swings despite the less than ideal situation the devs found themselves in.

Yes, I write for PCG and I am about to defend Dragon Age 2. What a shock! But DA2 is a great example of what BioWare was capable of, even when EA was going out of its way to set it up for failure. Despite an absurd deadline that led to extreme crunch and so many cut corners, BioWare was able to put out some of its greatest writing, while introducing beloved and enduring characters like Varric, Cassandra and Hawke. The game was compromised from the get-go, but there's still so much brilliance in there.

BioWare just kept beating the odds. It was the same with Dragon Age: Inquisition. EA wanted all of its games to use a single engine, Frostbite, leaving BioWare working with new tools that simply weren't designed for RPG development. It was apparently a bit of a nightmare for the team, which once again had to crunch to get the game out the door. But again, it was fantastic—finding a middle ground between Origins and DA2, while also going mostly open world.

Inquisition was BioWare's last great game, but what an exceptional run! It sucks that its reward for all these achievements was death by a thousand cuts, and that it became a punching bag for the anti-woke mob. But I refuse to accept that this mars its legacy, or that its demise is anything other than incredibly sad.

And yes, I've been a pretty vocal BioWare detractor over the last few years. I could barely get through Andromeda, bounced off Anthem immediately, and I thought that The Veilguard was unmitigated rubbish, full of annoying characters, repetitive combat and a poorly constructed narrative. At the end of 2024, I said that I'd finally given up on BioWare. And earlier this year, I wrote about how BioWare could feasibly make a comeback, but that it never would.

None of this meant that I wanted to see BioWare's demise. What I wanted was to see that old boldness return. A new game, some big swings, the philosophy of the BioWare of old, even if so many of the people who made those games happen had left or been made redundant. It's a shame we never got to see what that would look like.

I don't want to dismiss the incredible work so many other developers have done elevating the RPG genre—they own their achievements. But at the same time, it's impossible to imagine RPGs without BioWare. Its importance cannot be overstated. You did well, BioWare, and even this grumpy old man will miss you.

The death of BioWare has provoked a whole lot of tributes, memorialisation, and plain old nostalgia as all sorts of people come together to remember the bangers the erstwhile king of RPGs put out in its prime. CD Projekt Red, imsim founding father Warren Spector, and we here at PCG have all been trading BioWare memories (and sometimes lamenting the influence of EA, which acquired the studio back in 2007).

But the BioWare classics were big enough bangers to transcend videogames in their influence. Over on Bluesky, award-winning sci-fi and fantasy writer Nora Jemisin (better known as NK Jemisin) has been mourning the studio too.

"RIP Bioware. The [Mass Effect] and [Dragon Age] games were a literal inspiration, and I can't count how many times I've replayed my faves," Jemisin wrote. "I made lifelong friends on ME3 Multiplayer. I still think Jennifer Hepler is the best game writer I've seen, and Jennifer Hale's the best VA."

Hepler was a long-time Dragon Age writer who "was pretty much in charge of the dwarf origin story" in Origins, and also shaped much of the setting's dwarven culture in general. Jennifer Hale, meanwhile, is Jennifer Hale: Dynaheir, Mazzy Fentan, Bastila Shan, the female Commander Shepard, and plenty else. Many people, myself included, first became aware of Hale through her contributions to BioWare's RPGs.

"Watching what's happening to the game industry [right now] is so frustrating," Jemisin continued. "It was the goose that laid the golden eggs, guys. All you had to do was not kill it." Alas, every new year brings bigger and more expensive games that demand bigger and more dramatic returns. When they fail to bring them in? It's devs who suffer, as evidenced by the swingeing bout of layoffs that have afflicted the industry over the last several years. Rarely ever touches the executives, though. Funny how that works.

The closure of BioWare has not come as a huge surprise. The LGBTQ-inclusive developer of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, which hadn't managed to transmute development mayhem into sales success and whose games aren't ideal environments for loot boxes, did not seem likely to be admired by its new owners, Saudi Arabia and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Employees at the legendary RPG studio started working on their resumes as soon as the acquisition was announced.

But even if BioWare's new owners had been miscellaneous investors rather than Saudi royalty, the outlook would not have been good: This is what private equity does.

Public companies are of course plenty capable of blowing things up all on their own. EA's pre-acquisition attempt to turn BioWare into a live-service shooter studio was one of the great missteps of the live service goldrush, and Microsoft's pursuit of shareholder value has led to thousands of layoffs and numerous game cancellations.

But there is a particular, systematic way that leveraged private equity acquisitions consume companies rather than nurturing them. In the wake of BioWare's closure and 400 layoffs across EA, we have updated our previously-reported overview of the process that has led to the demise of a number of game studios and other companies.

How private equity acquisitions work

Ostensibly, the goal of a private equity acquisition is to optimize the bought-out company's performance for long-term returns, tapping underutilized potential—like EA's mobile business—to increase profits. But private equity firms have gained a sinister reputation thanks to a counter-intuitive strategy by which firms cannibalize their own acquisitions to extract maximum profits at the expense of the acquired company and its workforce.

That grisly process begins with the leveraged buyout, the most common form of private equity acquisition.

"A leveraged buyout just means the company is bought using a combination of borrowed money, or debt, and private equity," Kiplinger senior investing editor Karee Venema told PC Gamer last year. "The purchased company's balance sheet is used as collateral against the loans taken out to purchase it."

In other words, the "leverage" in the leveraged buyout is debt. Crucially, the collateral for that debt is the assets of the acquired company, not of the private equity firm itself. The investors are able to limit how much capital they have to supply for the buyout, while limiting their financial risk if repaying the loan—in EA's case, a $20 billion loan from JP Morgan—proves insurmountable. The private equity firm might have agreed to the terms of the loan, but repaying it becomes the purchased company's responsibility.

Reading that might produce a faint, dissonant tingle in the back of your mind. You might be wondering, "If private equity firms can take out loans that only their companies are responsible for, could they bleed more money out of a valuable company than they paid and avoid any consequences when that company goes bankrupt?"

And you'd be right to wonder, because that's exactly what private equity firms have become infamous for doing.

If you're not terribly concerned about a company's long-term survival, there are myriad ways to drain it of as much value as possible. As the Guardian wrote in 2024, private equity firms have made a habit of hollowing out company workforces and raising prices to pull in unsustainable profit margins, aiming to cut loose before the resulting decline in product quality tanks sales and consumer sentiment. Others have liquidated company assets, selling off real estate, subsidiaries, and intellectual property to enrich the firms' investors.

Sometimes, those sold assets will end up driving the company further into debt through "sale-leaseback agreements," where the firm will arrange for the company to sell its real estate properties, pocketing the profits while the company is forced to pay rent to continue using its own business space. Meanwhile, the firm is likely extracting additional "management fees": standard 2-and-20 terms see firms taking an annual 2% of a managed company's assets and 20% carried interest on all profits above a certain margin, while the company might face additional monitoring fees, transaction fees, and more.

Private equity has maimed retail franchises like Party City. It has brutalized digital media outlets like the Gizmodo Media Group and demolished local news across the US. It's left hospitals full of bats and increased mortality in retirement homes. A report using S&P data found that in 2024, private equity-backed companies accounted for more than 10% of all corporate bankruptcies and over 50% of bankruptcies with over $500 million in liabilities—but "despite their role in precipitating bankruptcies, private equity firms often emerge financially unscathed."

"There have certainly been instances of this—the 2017 bankruptcy of Toys 'R' Us is top of mind for me," Venema said. "But there have been successful private equity buyouts, too."

Hilton, for example, was arguably better off in 2018 when Blackstone sold its remaining stake from its 2007 LBO—sometimes called "the best LBO ever" in financial circles. And Dell, Venema said, went from a $25 billion buyout in 2013 to being valued today at nearly $100 billion after going public again in 2018.

But in the games industry, we've seen other cases where private equity has caused carnage. Just this week, in addition to BioWare's closure and hundreds of layoffs at EA, Scum developer Gamepires announced that it's laying off employees after being acquired eight months ago by the Emona Capital-backed Splash Damage Group. Just a few weeks before acquiring Gamepires, Splash Damage had performed its own layoffs in November 2025, only two months after it had been purchased in its own private equity acquisition.

EA's uncertain future

EA's fate may not be as dramatic as that of Toys 'R' Us. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in gaming in recent years, and EA's sports games and shooters are opportunities for profit and global influence, even as triple-A gaming struggles with enormous budgets and increased competition for attention.

What we know for now is that, after laying off around 400 people, EA is continuing development of Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi entry, as well as a Sims game codenamed "Project Evergreen"—though after BioWare's shuttering, Sims players are understandably concerned about what ideological pressures EA's new owners will exert on its developers.

EA Sports is of course not going anywhere, and Battlefield 6 and Apex will get continued support. And EA has confirmed that Respawn and DICE are collaborating on a new project, rumored to be the next Star Wars Battlefront.

But if EA still has any capacity to support the development of games outside of the most mainstream, highly-monetizable categories, it's tough to imagine it lasting.

Electronic Arts shuttered BioWare earlier this week, and that sucked. A concept trailer for the Mass Effect game the studio had in development subsequently leaked, and that made everyone feel even worse because—keeping in mind that it was an early-development concept piece—it looked really good.

YouTuber Dantics has now revealed more about what BioWare was actually working on, which he claims to be aware of because he was part of the Mass Effect community council, meaning he "saw what BioWare was building, and provided feedback during development."

We haven't directly confirmed Dantics' role on the council, although others on social media have vouched for him, and BioWare community councils are definitely a real thing: The studio has referenced them in past updates, and they can also be seen in credits for games including Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Members of the ME5 council aren't known, but Mass Effect veteran Michael Gamble, the project lead on the next game, follows Dantics on X.

So, suitably caveated: Dantics said in a post on X that the next Mass Effect game was set 600 years after the Reaper War, and would put players in the role of a customizable N7 agent who would be "a cross between John Wick and James Bond." The galaxy in this future timeline was divided into three major factions: Humans, Batarians, Krogan, and others in one alliance, the "Council Races"—Asari, Salarians, and Turians—forming the second bloc, and the Geth emerging as the galaxy's third superpower. Instead of an existential crisis like the Reaper invasion, the new game would take place amidst a "galactic Cold War."

Dantics also said there would be connections between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, that there would be "brutal close-range executions"—certainly something I want from my heroic space opera RPGs—that "romance wasn't being sanitized," which in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 I assume means the full monty, and that Liara would return as a powerful Asari matriarch.

In a separate video, Dantics said the new game was being designed to accommodate all three Mass Effect endings, rather than committing to one of them as canon: 600 years into the future, the Reapers are "outdated tech," and thus not nearly the danger they were back in Shepard's day, and advances in cybernetics, which would be in common use, fit the synthesis ending. And if your Shepard opted to just blow everything up and survived the war, well, he didn't survive the passage of 600 years, although his "legacy" would have lived on.

I'm always a little iffy on fictional settings that extend themselves centuries into the past or future, and yet don't seem to meaningfully change: It bugged me in KOTOR, and it bugs me here. 600 years is a long time, but everyone's still walking around wearing the same clothes, shooting the same guns, and flying the same ships. Six centuries of technological evolution, and what did we get? The Normandy with aftermarket ground effects.

(Forgive the resolution, the trailer is only 720p.)

Anyway, with that off my chest, Dantics' rundown of BioWare's plan for the game sounds pretty great: Similar enough to the Shepard trilogy to bring back fans put off by the poisoned well of Mass Effect: Andromeda, yet distant enough to enable BioWare to do new things. Not all that terribly new, obviously: There's big trouble in the shadowy corners of the cosmos and we're sending our best super-shooter to clean it up (with a little help from his friends), well, that's just Mass Effect. But Mass Effect is what we want, and sometimes you just have to admit that 'more' is good enough.

Alas, it's almost certain there will be no more. Unless EA is willing to offload the Mass Effect property to someone (the government of Canada, perhaps?)—and at this point it's shown no interest in doing so—then this is as close as we'll ever get to it.

Early BioWare

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Dragon Age

Mass Effect

The closure of BioWare is a tremendous loss, not just for gamers but for Canada: The Edmonton-based studio was named one of the country's best places to work multiple times over the years, even after the Electronic Arts acquisition that ultimately spelled its doom. It's not entirely surprising, then, that its shutdown caught the attention of one of the country's top politicians, who had some harsh words for Electronic Arts about it.

"This is private equity, this is what it does. Buy up businesses, run them into the ground, and rip them apart for short-term profit," Avi Lewis, leader of the New Democratic Party—traditionally Canada's third-largest political party, although it's run aground a bit over the past several years—wrote on social media.

"The developers at BioWare know how to run the studio. They know how to make the games we all love. They should be given the first opportunity—and the federal support—to buy it and run it themselves. And if we want to avoid the Mass Effect effect in Canada, we should be keeping private equity out, not welcoming it in."

The NDP are a center-left party, although the ol' Overton window has resulted in a more centrist style in recent years—a drift Lewis was elected specifically to correct. He's been fairly forceful on that front, speaking out in support of anti-fascist causes and calling for the nationalization of vital industries in Canada that have been swallowed up by larger international interests. Predictably, that led some of his followers to jokingly (I think) call for BioWare to be nationalized.

This is private equity, this is what it does.Buy up businesses, run them into the ground, and rip them apart for short-term profit.www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

— @avilewis.ca (@avilewis.ca.bsky.social) 2026-10-22T21:26:28.216Z

While the "Mass Effect effect" line is a bit of a clunker, Lewis showed off his gamer cred in response to an inquiry on X: When asked who he romanced in Mass Effect 2, he replied, "If I'm honest, I'm a Mass Effect 1 on the PS3 type of guy."

After EA's announcement this week, PC Gamer reached out to BioWare veteran David Gaider to ask for his reflection on the closure and his memories of the studio. Gaider joined BioWare in 1999 to work on Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn and went on to be lead writer on the early Dragon Age games, leaving BioWare in 2016 and co-founding Summerfall Studios in 2019.

Gaider on BioWare

The loss of a legacy hurts

The day after the closure of BioWare and cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, a purported trailer for Mass Effect: Universe has surfaced on Reddit. The authenticity of the trailer is unknown at this point, but at the very least it sure looks legit.

Straight to it, here's the video:

Man, that looks like Mass Effect—and sounds like it, too. The music is right, and at least two PC Gamer employees are pretty sure that's Liara's actual voice. Shepard's out, but the new guy seems suitably Shepard-like, although I can't help but notice the absence of the N7 logo on his uniform. Maybe the new guy was meant to be a rawer, rougher kind of troubleshooter—more of a housecleaner than a world-saver—or perhaps the ascent to the rank was meant to be part of the character's progression, which would've been cool.

There are no obvious AI telltales here, at least none that I can see, and adding to the trailer's "real deal" potential, a redditor claiming to be an EA employee said yesterday that a trailer for the new game had been produced and suggested that it was not as early in the development process as was widely believed.

Not long after the trailer came to light, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg said on Bluesky that it is indeed real, and that BioWare had been working on the game until its closure.

Whatever the case—and we're still working on verifying its provenance—the trailer is also just the right blend of sexy, violent, and corny: Even if this isn't a real trailer for what BioWare was working on (and at this point it seems pretty certain that it is), it's a Mass Effect we would definitely play.

Yesterday, EA announced that it's closing BioWare, the studio behind beloved RPG franchises like the original Baldur's Gate games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. Alongside BioWare's closure—and the cancelling of its next Mass Effect project—EA is reportedly laying off around 400 people in an effort to "align talent and investment" in the wake of its record-breaking private equity buyout.

While recent years have brought no shortage of high profile studio closings and game cancellations, the news of BioWare's shuttering has prompted an outpouring of sympathies and frustrations from the fans, fellow developers, and former studio staff. Among those mourners is former BioWare game director and ex-general manager Casey Hudson, who reacted to the news on X to say that BioWare's influence will continue even if the studio itself doesn't.

"This is sad news on multiple fronts—for those of us who worked there, for our friends and colleagues at BioWare who are impacted, and for fans who were looking forward to the next Mass Effect adventure," Hudson said. "I started my career at BioWare and will forever be grateful to the founders, Greg and Ray, for inviting me to join in BioWare's legendary journey. Its legacy will live on through those who were part of it and continue to create games through a passion for unforgettable stories, worlds, and characters."

During his tenure at the studio, Hudson had a major influence on some of BioWare's most-loved releases, working as project director on both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the Mass Effect trilogy. After leaving BioWare in 2014, Hudson returned in 2017 as its general manager—before ultimately departing a second time in 2020, following the troubled development and launch of Anthem, the studio's ill-fated live service shooter.

Since then, Hudson's been acting as proof of his own assertion about BioWare's lasting influence in game development. Following the 2021 founding and subsequent 2024 closure of his NetEase-acquired studio, Humanoid Origin, Hudson announced in 2025 that he'd started yet another new company: Arcanaut Studios. There, he—and a team stacked with other ex-BioWare devs—are currently at work on Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, a "narrative-driven action RPG" that Hudson has called a "spiritual successor" to KotOR.

Hudson's far from the only developer who's reaffirmed BioWare's continuing impact on game development since the news of its closure broke. CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski noted how BioWare offered crucial support during the development of the Witcher 1, while Larian CEO Swen Vincke wrote on X that the studio "led the way in making RPGs big."

Legendary immersive sim developer Warren Spector offered a more blunt reaction to BioWare's shuttering, calling the closure "utter bullshit."

Immersive sim legend Warren Spector shared some thoughts on yesterday's closure of BioWare, and they're uncharacteristically spicy—so much so that he led into them with a warning for sensitive readers.

"I try very hard not to curse at any time but especially in public. Unfortunately for my vocabulary and the delicate sensibilities of some who read this I can’t control myself. Hell, I don’t want to control myself," Spector wrote in a brief message on LinkedIn.

"BioWare is more than just another studio. For decades it's played a central role in the history of our medium. They, for many years, as effectively as any studio, married art and commerce. Their work changed things."

And then, the cursing, and the warning that sensitive readers should cover their eyes while Warren gives 'em both barrels: "This is such bad news, such a devastating historic event all I can say is that it’s utter bullshit. Anyone who participated in this travesty should be ashamed."

It is perhaps not the eruption of ear-scalding profanity you were expecting (or hoping for), but the truth is that Spector has been a studiously even-tempered professional throughout his career. I don't know if I've ever heard him publicly say anything harsher than "heck" or maybe "gosh darn" for as long as I've been following him—PCG pal Joshua Wolens described Spector as "so pure, like if hot chocolate was a guy," and I think that pretty much nails it.

Easy as it is to joke, though (and I suspect Spector is playing to character somewhat here), his message does very aptly reflect the weight of the moment. The closure of BioWare is a pronounced symptom of an industry (and a world, really) that's gone wrong in some very fundamental ways. What kind of multi-billion-dollar game company, supposedly one of the best, looks at a studio like BioWare and says, "Nah, I can't do anything with that?"

The fact that EA managed to make mild-mannered Warren Spector—who's supposed to be enjoying his retirement—straight-up call bullshit on the whole thing speaks volumes about how bad a botch this really is.

But he wasn't finished. "Maybe all of the people who participated—the folks in suits (real or virtual) should lose their damn jobs," Spector continued. "I ask them to ponder this: What do you contribute to gaming? What price do you pay for failure? I’d love to see THEM on the unemployment line instead of the people who do real work. Why is it always the do-ers and makers who pay the price? Someone explain that to me!

"I wish I had more curse words."

Spector is correct: As we've seen so many times before, it's never the C-suite that suffers when the axe falls and hundreds or thousands of the people who actually make games get put out of work. Roughly 400 people lost their jobs at EA yesterday, including those impacted by the BioWare closure; CEO Andrew Wilson, meanwhile, was paid more than $38.5 million in 2026—$8 million more than he was paid in 2025. Regardless of whether or not Spector has more curse words at his disposal, I think he picked absolutely the correct one for the moment: This is bullshit.

Mass Effect 5 is officially cancelled and EA's shutting BioWare down, putting an end to decades of some of the best RPGs in gaming—and while I don't have too much positive to say about BioWare's later run (Veilguard was a decent action RPG with a story I couldn't stand), much of that has to do with EA's management of it.

Regardless of my nervousness towards ME5, I think it's a shame that I never got to find out whether it'd fix my issues with the Veilguard's storytelling or not. Especially since it's just been revealed that an award-winning science fiction author was on board.

Derek Künsken is a science fiction author who has won an Asimov Reader's Award (from the Asimov Science Fiction magazine) in 2012 for The Way of the Needle. More recently in 2021, he also snagged an Aurora Award (from the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association) for Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County. He's often a finalist in these categories, too.

Künsken wrote on X: "I have a weird announcement. On and off for the last five years, as a contract writer, and as a senior writer on staff, I've been hoping to be allowed to say where I worked. Today I finally got the green light: I've been working on the next Mass Effect.

"Unfortunately, the light turned green because BioWare is being shuttered. Over the coming weeks, I'll get more clarity on what I can say about what I did and saw and learned. I hope it's more than nothing—what we were cooking was really cool. I can say that everyone I met at BioWare was a decent human being, an expert in their field, and was ambitiously imaginative about what a future experience of Bioware could be. Working closely with Parrish Ley and Mary DeMarle will be highlights of my writing career."

I want to clarify my above cynicism: Even when I'm critically tearing into a videogame for its writing, I do so with the understanding that there's a huge gulf between what a writer puts in and what actually comes out. Videogames are monstrously complicated beasts, and sometimes development cycles are so terribly tangled that even solid authors can't spin a good yarn out of them.

For instance, writers who produce some of the best companions in RPGs (Tali'zorah, Mordin Solus, and Solas) don't turn around and create a Taash because they got hit very hard with a brick in between games and became bad at their job—more often than not, the structure of the studio has changed enough to make that job very hard. That David Gaider, the guy who made Dragon Age, left partially because he was done EA's increasing hostility towards the craft makes me confident in that assumption.

All this to say, I don't know if Mass Effect 5 would've been an incredible story: But I will say it's a damn shame that none of the work Künsken put into it (a clearly talented science fiction writer in his own right) will have a chance to prove me wrong. Or the work of any of the game's writers, for that matter.

BioWare has shut down, and while that doesn't inherently mean we won't be seeing more Mass Effect—EA owns the rights to that IP—the next Mass Effect game's been cancelled, and I certainly wouldn't hold my breath for EA to make anything that isn't sports, Sims, or shooter related in the near future.

According to sources who spoke to IGN, however, the TV series, which has been in the works at Prime Video since 2024, will still go ahead. It'll be set after the original trilogy, so it won't be quite so awkward as seeing Commander Shepherd making winks and nods to a series of games built by a slowly-dismantled studio, but still.

There's something deeply bittersweet about a videogame series arriving after the studio responsible for its creation has gone out of business. And perhaps reflective of how EA has treated BioWare itself—grabbing a studio known for making some of the best RPGs ever—and chipping away at it. Coasting on the good will from a studio it had precious little interest in managing and rarely gave a fair shot at doing what it was actually good at.

I mean, just look at Anthem. I could point to any number of developer tell-alls that might suggest EA didn't know what to do with the studio it'd bought. Or former executive producer Mark Darrah, who said: "Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a videogame hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true."

Dragon Age: The Veilguard itself went through development hell as a live service game, only to come out and meet with middling reviews. I had plenty of negative things to say about it, but the fact we still got a semi-decent action RPG out of that slow-motion trainwreck is honestly commendable. The lesson EA seemingly took, however, was that it should've committed to that live service vision than just… I don't know, having the studio famed for single-player RPGs make a single-player RPG from the get-go?

In this sense, the deal with Prime feels like the last wringing out of a nearly-dry towel. The final few drops of profitability to be had out of Mass Effect before a final nail is driven into its coffin and, in true EA fashion, if it is good, it'll be created by people who the publisher can't rightfully stake any claim or credit over. BioWare's legacy'll live on less uncomfortably in the games it inspired, though, of that I'm sure.

Yesterday was a pretty bleak day for the videogame industry, as BioWare announced the end of its more than 30-year run. It's closing down and development on the next Mass Effect has ceased. For Star Wars: The Old Republic lead writer Caitlin Sullivan Kelly, however, the announcement was upsetting for an additional reason: SWTOR was snubbed.

In BioWare's post, shared on social media, the studio listed Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Anthem. But not the MMO that's been running for nearly 15 years.

Quoting the announcement, Kelly said, "No mention of the game that's been going for almost 15 years, that supported the studio and all of its projects with income and manpower and time (sometimes to our own detriment). Heartbreaking."

The desire to get recognition for hard work and maintaining a successful MMO when so many others have fallen by the wayside is entirely understandable, but there's important context that makes this seem less like a snub than is being implied.

While BioWare did create SWTOR and ran it for many years, it's now a Broadsword game and has been since 2023. Which is fortunate, because now it's safe from the impact of BioWare closing down.

Now, this alone should not preclude it from getting a mention. Baldur's Gate got a nod, even though the latest game in the series was developed by Larian and, like SWTOR, won't be affected by the studio's demise.

But I'd argue that most of the nods are for franchises, rather than individual games. It doesn't mention Dragon Age: Origins or Inquisition, either, just Dragon Age. Since KoTOR is in the list, that also covers SWTOR, which is technically a sequel.

It's not the only omission, either. It's wild that Anthem—a catastrophic failure that kicked off BioWare's worst era—got a nod and not Jade Empire. Sonic: Chronicles also doesn't get a look in, but that's perhaps a bit more understandable.

All that said, SWTOR absolutely deserves a shout out. Its creation was a vast undertaking, featuring more writing and voice work than any of BioWare's games before or after. And since then it's weathered so many storms and persevered. While it doesn't boast the player numbers of WoW or FF14, it's still undeniably been a success. It's also the one BioWare game that will continue even after the studio's demise.

So BioWare should have absolutely celebrated this feather in its cap, but I don't think it was snubbed.

A developer working on Mass Effect 5 has spoken up about BioWare's plans for the now-canceled RPG. Tony de Waal was cinematic supervisor at the now shuttered studio. He joined the team "29+ years ago", left for a spell shortly after the launch of Mass Effect 2, and then returned in 2021 to work on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. According to de Waal, there were "50-ish" people working on Mass Effect 5 before the studio closure.

"I was one of the lucky ones who stayed with BioWare to start on the next Mass Effect [after The Veilguard], where I believe we were making something special: a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match," de Waal wrote on LinkedIn.

"We saw what Larian and CD Projekt were bringing to the table with their latest offerings, and started down a path to bring Mass Effect to the next level while remaining true to the Trilogy."

De Waal also described some of the challenges BioWare faced during the development of The Veilguard, which was the studio's second project made using EA and DICE's Frostbite engine. "It was a herculean effort that tested the limits of even my workaholic mindset, and I'm proud of the level of polish we were able to pull off in the Frostbite engine.

"Seriously, you have no idea the craziness going on under the hood of that game to make a variable player character work across 3+ hours of cinematics, and the number of conditions to account for in the scenes towards the end of the game."

BioWare's closure comes as part of a big restructuring at EA following its acquisition by Saudi Arabia's PIF (and two other investment firms with tiny stakes). Over 400 people have been laid off as the publisher pivots to live service shooters and sports.

"I'm sad you won't ever get to see what we were cooking, and sad for the small, talented group of devs who were all punching above their weight to make something special," de Waal wrote. "Please consider those who stayed with BioWare until the very end. They are truly some of the most talented people I've had the pleasure of working with throughout my career."

For de Waal, as for thousands in the games industry, a hunt for work will ensue. "With that, if you need someone who knows cinematic production, blending gameplay with cinematics, the tools, the tech, and has the know-how to realize complicated narratives—a true production expert with nearly three decades of experience who isn't afraid to roll up their sleeves and create content—please think of me."

You can read de Waal's full post on LinkedIn.

BioWare was a legendary studio, and its shocking closure today has inspired numerous tributes from fans and fellow game developers alike. One of the most notable came from CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski, who credited the studio for the big role it played in bringing The Witcher to life.

It's hard to overstate the impact BioWare had on computer RPGs, from effectively resurrecting the genre in the 1990s with Baldur's Gate through the creation of Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect. But less well known, outside of RPG fan circles at least, is that its influence goes far beyond that. CD Projekt, which is arguably the contemporary equivalent of BioWare, literally got started with BioWare games.

The relationship began when CD Projekt approached BioWare and Interplay about localizing Baldur's Gate for Poland; it got the gig, and the Polish release became a major hit. A subsequent deal to localize Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance fell apart when Interplay did, but CD Projekt's relationship with BioWare held firm.

"Bioware has been a massive part of CDPR history," Nowakowski wrote on X. "We befriended them when localizing and selling Baldur’s Gate games in Poland, Czech, and Slovakia. And later they were great help when lending us their engine for Witcher 1, sharing their wisdom and even giving us a spot at their booth at E3."

That was the Aurora Engine, BioWare's followup to the Infinity Engine, and was used for Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and as Nowakowski said, The Witcher, the RPG that introduced CD Projekt to the world and market the beginning of its journey to game industry powerhouse. In a 2014 interview with Polygon, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski talked about the studio's early days working with BioWare and Interplay, and how it moved quickly to work on The Witcher after that Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance fell through: "It all started, in a way, with Baldur's Gate."

And BioWare did in fact share space with CD Projekt at E3, giving the studio a chance to show its new RPG to the world: Ryszard Chojnowski, a translator and localizer whose credits include both The Witcher and Baldur's Gate 2, shared a pair of photos showing CD Projekt's corner of BioWare's booth at E3 2004:

Nowakowski concluded, "I had a pleasure to visit them a few times in Edmonton and also host them in our Warsaw office. Very sad for the people affected, but also sad to see a legendary brand go down. Not a great day in the games industry."

Not a great day indeed.

Following the shocking closure of legendary RPG studio BioWare, Electronic Arts has posted a lengthy missive laying out its plans for "EA's next chapter," which sounds very much like cuts almost across the board.

I'll spare you the corporate gobbledygook about challenging assumptions, confronting assumptions, and imagining new possibilities, and cut straight to the chase: The plan is to do fewer things with fewer people focusing on its biggest franchises. What that works out to practically:

• Shooters: More Battlefield, more Apex Legends, and "bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project."
• Action-adventure: Marvel's Iron Man and the third Star Wars Jedi game are still happening, but "beyond that, we will concentrate our efforts on fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects."
• EA Sports: Full commitment to EA Sports FC, plus a new American football game creatively codenamed "Project Gridiron," and Fight Night is coming back.
• Lifestyle: The Sims will continue but "Project Lotus," originally presumed to be a sort of precursor to The Sims 5, has been paused. The Skate dev team, meanwhile, is being cut to "build a healthier and more sustainable business."

Of course, there's also a gross little nod to BioWare and the end of Mass Effect: "As we focus on these larger opportunities, we've had a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect. We've made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we’re closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly."

The message doesn't specifically reference the layoff of around 400 employees at Electronic Arts reported by Bloomberg, but it does say some of the changes announced today "are difficult, especially for the people and teams across the company who are directly affected," which is the sort of mealy-mouthed guffola put out by C-suites when they don't want to say with clarity that they just hacked out a significant chunk of their workforce.

One other thing I find interesting about this announcement: It's attributed to Cam and David, who I assume are Cam Weber and David Tinson, recently installed near the top of EA as president and chief studios officer, and president and chief operating officer. The name of Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts CEO, is rather notably absent. Make of that what you will—but for the record, EA confirmed that Wilson is still the chief executive.

The post is short on detail, but the broad gist of the whole thing—cuts and concentration—aren't entirely surprising given the company's recent acquisition by Saudi Arabia, which saddled it with $20 billion in debt and owners not known for their liberal mindset. Plans for massive cuts were reported in early August, and a possible merger with Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group has also been rumored. But former BioWare lead writer Patrick Weekes made the call more than a year ago, when the EA acquisition first happened, predicting that "guns and football" games would be fine, but "gay stuff" would be out.

BioWare is closing, and the next Mass Effect game is cancelled.

The legendary RPG studio was founded in 1995 by doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, and was responsible for a number of classics, including the original Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and more recently, the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series.

"What generations of BioWare built together is something to celebrate and remember," said the studio in a statement published on social media. "These games became so much more because you played them, debated your choices, fell in love with the characters, and made these worlds your own."

After establishing itself in the PC gaming canon in the '90s and early 2000s, BioWare was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2007, and became a mainstream RPG powerhouse with the release of the Mass Effect trilogy and first Dragon Age games.

A 2017 follow-up to the Mass Effect trilogy, Andromeda, wasn't as well-received as the originals, and the studio's 2019 detour into live service shooters, Anthem, failed to catch on. Anthem is widely considered one of the great management blunders of the live service gold rush, and its servers were finally shut down for good earlier this year.

BioWare's most recent game, 2024's Dragon Age: The Veilguard, also "underperformed," according to EA.

Last year, it was announced that EA would be acquired by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the latter of which is owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump. The acquisition was finalized this August.

When the deal was announced, some employees and outside observers were not confident that BioWare would have a future following the acquisition, with one employee saying last year that it felt like "a matter of time" before the axe fell.

The next Mass Effect game was first teased in 2020, and was expected to bring back characters from the original trilogy. In 2025, BioWare said that "a core team at BioWare" was working on the game after layoffs at the studio.

Alongside the BioWare closure, EA is laying off around 400 people across the company, according to Bloomberg.

In a letter shared with employees and published on EA's website, the company said that "saying no to some things we're passionate about allows us to focus our teams and resources so we give our biggest opportunities everything they need to succeed."

The letter was signed by EA chief studios officer Cam Weber, who until recently headed up EA Sports, and EA COO David Tinson.

Over on Tiktok, Mark Darrah was asked, "If you could go back in time what would you remove from each of the Dragon Age games and what would you add?"

Like everyone who ever installed the Skip the Fade mod for Dragon Age: Origins, Darrah thinks the Lost in Dreams quest needs a snip. "I would be tempted to cut or dramatically reduce the dream sequence part from the Mage Tower," he said. "It's not very good content. It's kind of filler. It was definitely done pretty fast in the end."

As for what he'd add to the original, Darrah suggested the planned human origin where you'd get to play one of the avvar in the Korcari Wilds. "I would like to have another human origin," he said, "but wow, what an expensive add."

For Dragon Age 2, Darrah would remove one of the things I found frustrating about it—no matter whether you side with the templars or the mages, you're forced to fight both at the end. Even if you side with Orsino and the Circle of Magi he wigs out from blood magic, proving Meredith and the templars right in believing the mages are "barely tethered nuclear bombs" who do deserve "to be treated as non-humans."

Darrah's first suggestion for something to add to Dragon Age 2 is "probably just a couple of more levels to use," and yeah, a little more variety in locations would certainly help. He'd also like to have less gold available in the main questline during act two, as the idea was to encourage sidequesting to raise money for the expedition. As it stands, "If you just do the crit path, the crith path gives you enough gold to go on the expedition so it kind of doesn't work. I don't know where I'd make this cut, but I'd be tempted to cut one of those crit-path missions just to get that back."

When I replayed Dragon Age: Inquisition in advance of The Veilguard, the open-world bloat hit me as a much bigger issue than it did on my first playthrough. Darrah suggests snipping parts of it, saying, "I'd probably cut Hissing Wastes maybe or one of the big levels because it's too big. And the other thing I would change would be to dramatically reduce the amount of Power that you need to go on the crit-path missions. That's there for not-super-great reasons, and I think you could cut it by 40 to 60% and the game would just be paced better."

Finally, "Veilguard, the thing that I would add is the Keep. I told them to. It wouldn't take 'that much'. I mean, it would." As for what he'd remove from Veilguard, he says, "I don't have a good answer to that one." I'm sure the internet has plenty of suggestions, but as someone who came around on Veilguard by the time I reached its excellent suicide mission ending, I think it's fine the way it is.

Given that Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda were widely considered disappointments, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a divisive reception, there's a certain amount of skepticism about the Mass Effect game BioWare is currently working on. Some have even suggested it might not come out at all.

Armando Troisi, a cinematic designer on the Mass Effect trilogy and lead cinematic designer on Mass Effect 2, thinks it's all a bit much. "I think BioWare, when they break it down and do that singleplayer, interactive narrative-driven, deep combat, progression-driven game, really, there's nobody that can touch them," Troisi told FRVR. "It's kind of like the [Master] Chief, it's like going on a walkabout and finding themselves and coming back. I think BioWare can do it if we just leave them alone to do what they do best."

Troisi said that when he was working at BioWare the studio knew what kind of game it was best at making, and that all they need is to get back to that. "The vision was always clear," he said. "There was a BioWare formula and they were going to iterate on that formula and keep turning out best-in-class cinematic RPGs and that's basically what the mandate was. And then they had to live through the live service era—which is still happening but is maybe not as prevalent—and we're all beholden to companies and stakeholders and all the rest of that."

Anthem has become emblematic of the problems of live-service games, but Veilguard was also intended to be one until a pivot late in its development, and Andromeda is what Mass Effect looks like when development is led by the team responsible for Mass Effect 3's multiplayer.

The upcoming Mass Effect game, Troisi said, still has "a lot of people" working on it who were responsible for the original games, "and they're the OGs, you know? I don't think there's anything that I could tell them that they don't know what to do."

What they actually need, he suggested, is for people to "get out of the way" and let them get on with it. "I think that they can do it," he said. "I'm rooting for them."

This month, the biggest leveraged buyout in the history of private equity went through and now EA is owned by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. We don't know what EA will be like under its new owners, but Employees are bracing for the worst. The company took on $20 billion in debt as part of the deal. Will that change the way it does business or encourage it to rely on the formula that's gotten it where it is?

I asked Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at industry analysts Newzoo, who spent nine years as a senior manager at EA.

"I think everything is open at this point," Rosier says. "I suspect that sports will remain the key focus for EA, particularly European football, soccer, because of the importance of that sport in Saudi and in Middle East territories. You see a lot of synergies in that context. You can also expect that they will push even more for esports, also given the popularity of esports in Saudi and in some other territories. The question mark is probably the second-tier or third-tier IP in the portfolio of EA."

As someone who had to double check whether the FC in EA Sports FC really does stand for football club (it does), I am personally more interested in these lower-tier properties.

"They have a lot of dormant IPs that have not been used for so many years," Rosier says. "You know, they have IPs like Ultima, they have IPs like Wing Commander and this and that, and it's not being used at all. So the question is, would some of them be maybe sold, or will they hire studios to leverage these IPs? Because we see every day the importance of IPs."

There's a real "monkey paw curling" element to the idea of Ultima and Wing Commander being revived. I remember the browser-based Evony clone Lord of Ultima from 2010, an attempt to jump on the "play now, my Lord" bandwagon with the Ultima brand that lasted a mere four years before being shut down. Much as I'd like to see something more respectful, like a tasteful remake of Ultima 4 and a remaster for Wing Commander Privateer, that would rely on anybody at EA actually caring about those games beyond their value as "intellectual property", a possibility Rosier dashes with the next words out of his mouth.

"I think there are plenty of IPs like that at EA that nobody cares about at this moment," he says. "I think probably they will leverage that either by just selling it or trying to find external studios that can work on that. Maybe mobile games."

Of course, in between its big-budget live-service blockbusters and the forgotten games they acquired when the world was young, EA owns something else close to my heart. "Then in the middle you have these IPs like the BioWare IPs," Rosier says. "They've been struggling as a studio, as a brand have been struggling in recent years, and I don't know if they will keep funding that one. I think that's the biggest question mark for me."

Surely EA wouldn't pull funding from BioWare before it had a chance at redemption, right? Dragon Age has always been swingy, a series defined by constant reinvention and ups and downs. Mass Effect had a golden age that lasted for two-and-a-half games, and that's a foundation you can build on. Right?

"I will believe it when I see it, the next Mass Effect game, let's put it that way," Rosier replies.

Of course, BioWare hasn't had much to say about the development of the next Mass Effect, but that's because the studio has had its head down working hard.

"I've worked many years with BioWare, sometimes it can stretch for years and years until something comes," says Rosier, who spent over four years as a senior franchise demand planning manager during his time at EA. "I think everything can happen at this moment. They can pull the plug very, very easily. And if the new investor, they don't have that many feelings about the history of the portfolio, they will take the most financially sound decision most probably."

At the finale of Deus Ex: Human Revolution you choose which button to press to trigger one of its endings while an AI explains the differences between them. It was not a well-liked way to wrap up the game, and when just over six months later Mass Effect 3 came along with a remarkably similar structure for its ending we were all a bit baffled it came down to this. Three games' worth of agonizing decisions would all be resolved by the simple mechanistic choice of a button press?

It wasn't the only thing about Mass Effect 3 people found worth complaining about, but it was right up there. It remained a pain point even after the free extended cut DLC expanded the endings to make them a little more satisfying, and a fourth option where you refuse to choose was added to satisfy players who got to the end and wanted to flip a middle finger at the whole arbitrary concept.

The other three options were to destroy the Reapers, with the downside that all synthetic life including the geth and EDI would also be wiped out, to control the Reapers, with the downside that Shepard would have to become one, and to synthesize all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy, with the downside that it worked by baffling space magic.

It's been over a decade now since Mass Effect 3 came out and our blood has dropped below boiling point, so hopefully we can look back on it without cartoon smoke coming out of our ears and have a sensible discussion about what we chose and why. I've finished the trilogy three times now and pressed all three buttons, but which did you choose—or did you refuse to choose at all—and were you satisfied by the ending you got?

I don't know if Stars Wars: The Old Republic is the best MMO around—or even the best Star Wars MMO around—but there's something to be said for keeping the party alive for nearly 15 years at this point, even as developer Broadsword took the reins from BioWare in 2023. If you miss those halcyon days when the game had just dropped, well, you might want to give the imminent 8.0 update a look.

It was revealed in a blog post that went up Thursday, and it promises a pretty standard lineup of big MMO update features: a raised level cap, more spells and phat loots to futz with, and new zones to explore in the Twi'lek homeworld Ryloth. But there's also two new systems both tackling the MMO's prickliest design conundrum: difficulty.

The first of those is a difficulty slider, which lets you pick your poison between "a cinematic story-driven journey, a more demanding combat experience, or the ultimate challenge." Notably, you can group up with friends regardless of what you've all chosen, so it'll be interesting to observe how the scaling works out there.

There's also the new "venture" characters, which operate on their own difficulty system split between classic and expert options. These characters have to start a new story from the beginning, but they'll get special rewards for completing extra objectives as they play through the game normally. It's not clear what those rewards are, but the whole thing is apparently meant to "evoke the feel of the classic SWTOR experience" back when it was slightly less easy to roll over a dozen mobs at once.

It's a neat idea, assuming it doesn't morph into some battle pass-inspired FOMO nightmare. SWTOR probably isn't so different from its old self that fans are desperate for an OSRS-style revival, but it does still have a best-in-class leveling journey let down by the fact that you can faceroll your way through a great deal of it. If the rewards are fun to pursue and objectives non-tedious, it could brush the dust off those zones and get people grouping in them again.

In my Honour Mode playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I romanced Gale—you can see my full thoughts on our under-appreciated wizard boy here. What solidified him as one of my all-time RPG romances, however, wasn't his wit or his very nice hair. It was a conversation in which he acted like a petty little bastard.

After your first amorous night together, Gale—like any self-conscious bloke might do—asks you how he performed in the bedroom. If you respond: "It was fine," he fully has a sulk, stopping just short of making a thread on r/AITA.

"Nobody weeps because the weather is fine," he says while his voice actor, Tim Downie, puts as much quiet, brooding petulance as he can into his words. "No monarchs were overthrown because their ruling was fine. No artworks were burned because they were masterpieces, but merely fine."

Then he threatens to blow himself up, calling himself "a fragile vessel in which to place potentially world-ending power. Perhaps it would be better to not shake such a vessel."

I want to point out, Gale sucks for this—it's an absolutely toxic, unpleasant, and thorny response to being told you were just acceptable in the bedroom, so much so that it horseshoes around to being meme-able. But it also cemented why I liked his romance, why I liked him—because it makes him three-dimensional, fleshed-out.

It helps that it works for his character, too. Gale was essentially groomed by the god of magic. In his first relationship since trying to impress someone who has complete and utter power over him, he's going to be sensitive to criticism. Especially after his ex told him to blow himself up—his insecurity is believably petty, because he's measuring himself to perfection.

It's this willingness for companion characters to be unpleasant that makes BG3's cast fly off the screen. Larian's writers weren't afraid of people hating or disliking their characters—many of them are actively hostile to you, or have moments where they can turn against you entirely. And the more I thought about it, the more I've come to realise that that is, in fact, the point.

Hate-love relationships

The strength of any RPG's structure, story-wise, is in its genre conventions. Simply put, most RPGs have the following set of circumstances:

• There is a world-ending threat (or at least, something that will muck stuff up on the regional/continent level).
• You have companions who'll accompany you on all your adventures.

Now, if you're a writer, you might think to yourself: Well, I better make these people bearable to get along with. If you're going to be spending 50-100 hours with somebody, they need to be pleasant to be around. And while that has to be true of some of your party members—an RPG cast benefits from having a Karlach, Minsc, Tali, or Wynne in it—it's a terrible assumption to make for your entire crew.

It's throwing away gold, for one: You have a reason to put the most eclectic, weird mix of strangers into a huge 'get along or the world ends' t-shirt. Characters who'd otherwise have absolutely zero reason to so much as look at each other, who would otherwise hate each other, must interact for the greater good.

This friction is the fuel for any great RPG—no, more than that. It's why they work in the first place. The grinding of flaw against flaw is the mill that makes the bread of some of the genre's best banter. Take Alistair and Morrigan for instance. On paper, these characters would be the worst two to form a party with. But you should put them next to each other, because Morrigan's dry cynicism and Alistair's cheerful wit is extraordinarily entertaining when they're inches from ripping each other's throats out.

And listen, I hate to harp on Dragon Age: The Veilguard more than I already have—especially since, given the development hell it went through, its writers may have wanted to do more with its cast, but simply couldn't. But it's unfortunately a good illustrative example of where this goes wrong.

As our own Lauren Morton pointed out, the cast doesn't argue with you, they don't bicker with each other, they don't have conflicting or impactful beliefs that dent the narrative (or your opinion of them) in any way.

They are all just blandly kind of likeable—or if they are unpleasant, they're unpleasant in ways that are vaguely-defined and blurry around the edges. Taash comes the closest to having an abrasive personality, and at the end of everything, they're really just sort of headstrong and opinionated in a way that'll make some people annoyed. And because of the story's resistance towards engaging in darker themes, they just come across as immature.

In a way, Veilguard's characters feel like empty vessels designed for the indistinct glob of fandom to project onto. Large fanfiction nets built to trawl for as many diehards as possible—and don't get me wrong, I've nothing against fanfiction. On the contrary, I think if your game has the sauce, you're going to have a smut-happy fandom whipped into an eager frenzy.

But there's a level of insecurity that radiates off characters who are built this way, a Netflix-esque, focus-tested glazed-over look in their eyes. And it's why I just can't love them.

It's all about bias, baby

Human beings are weird creatures. We'll project emotions and feelings onto inanimate objects if we have to—slap a pair of googly eyes on a roomba, and guarantee you'll come up with a nickname for it within the week, if not the next hour.

This affection for imperfection applies to how we form social relationships, as well. There's a name for it—the "Halo effect". Basically, if you form a positive opinion of someone, you're more likely to rationalise or dismiss their less pleasant behaviour further down the line.

The dark side of this is that we sometimes overlook awful behaviour from the people we love—but it's not an inherently terrible thing. Human beings are messy, we're flawed, we make mistakes, and if we didn't have a little softness for the people we care about, we probably wouldn't get much done. Giving grace to those closest to us is natural.

And I think this is why RPG characters that are thorny, unpleasant, and flawed tend to be treated with more affection than ones that are written to be frictionless—they map to a more accurate experience of what it's like to actually be friends with somebody.

You form an initial impression of them, negative or positive, and then when you get to know them better—when you're all socially bonded—the emotional systems we've developed for group cohesion kick in and give you the same chemical punt. Without those flaws to challenge our impressions of that NPC, they don't feel "real" in the same way.

There's even some science backing this up. Studies have shown that oxytocin, a chemical responsible for social bonding, kicks in when we read stories. Much of the same neurological processes we use to form connections in real life apply to a stellar narrative, too—it's why people get so attached, and why a good yarn can bring you to tears.

Which, I think, is why frictionless RPGs characters just don't work. If you don't create the same feeling of growing attached to someone—a strong first impression, later counterbalanced by discovering flaws or virtues—then there's an uncanniness to it that forces us to disconnect.

The term "immersion" gets bandied around a lot, but it really applies here. The success of a good story, particularly a character-focused one, is in how it pulls you in—and if I don't feel like I'm playing an RPG with real, vivid characters who I might dislike on occasion, I'm going to start tuning out.

You need to add scenes that rub people the wrong way—actions that are genuinely questionable, beliefs that are genuinely unpleasant. Not for every character, and not to every harsh extent, but that variety is still mandatory. In other words, in order for them to be loved, you need to be okay with your RPG characters being hated.

Things haven't looked great for Dragon Age since its latest entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to a mixed critical and muted commercial response back in 2024. EA subsequently laid off dozens of BioWare's staff, and numerous former developers have recently said they believe the series is probably dead.

Yet, while there's little hope of a new Dragon Age game anytime soon (if ever), might there be a chance EA revisits the old Dragon Age games? The original Mass Effect trilogy got a spruced-up rerelease in its Legendary Edition back in 2021, despite the fact that EA hasn't exactly been desperate to push out new games in that series either (though a new one is apparently in the works, with the devs being too busy making it to talk about it). Hence, could EA test players' appetite for Dragon Age with a similar remaster for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Sadly, the chances of this happening are slim too, at least according to former Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah. In the same FRVR interview where he declared Dragon Age as probably dead, Darrah also pointed out that, while he had once envisioned a "Champion's Edition" equivalent to the Legendary Edition, EA is now unlikely to exhume the old games for a remaster due to the practical difficulties of doing so.

Basically, it all comes down to technology. Where all three Mass Effect games ran on Unreal Engine, which is a widely used technology, the three Dragon Age games were all built on different engines. Dragon Age used BioWare's Eclipse engine—an upgraded version of the Aurora Engine (which was also used by CD Projekt for The Witcher), Dragon Age 2 used the further enhanced Lycium Engine, while Dragon Age: Inquisition ran on DICE's Frostbite tech.

"There's basically no one at BioWare any more that understands the Aurora Engine," Darrah told FRVR. "There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So, unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you."

On top of this, Darrah reckons that such a remaster effort would require a new team, but claims that "EA doesn't like having employees, so, if you're going to do that, you're going to do that within the umbrella of BioWare, which means those people are not working on something else."

That said, Darrah does think that a remaster of the original Dragon Age would sell well, mainly due to how it's a bit crusty around the edges today. "Dragon Age: Origins wasn't the most attractive game. There's a lot you could do there to make it a lot better looking."

Electronic Arts' big RPG series Dragon Age did not get a happy ending. The most recent game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, failed to meet sales targets, and EA quickly beat feet in the other direction, putting the torch to BioWare on the way out the door. It's not often that game franchises are put down forever, but former BioWare stalwart Mark Darrah, the executive producer on Dragon Age: Origins through Inquisition, thinks that in this case, it's probably gone for good.

Making any game through EA is difficult "because of EA’s complicated relationship to shipping games at all," Darrah said in a new interview with FRVR. "Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a videogame hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true."

Because of that, and the "frightening number" of dormant properties EA owns, Darrah said he has "no concept of who could, would, possibly pitch [a new Dragon Age game] at EA."

"What I’ve heard is if you go and decide you’re going to make a [game based on existing IP]… the instant you’re about to start, suddenly like three different people who think they control it come out of the woodwork and essentially rip you apart and chew you up and spit you out," Darrah said. So even if someone other than BioWare pitched a new Dragon Age game, "what I expect would happen if they try to do that, is somebody at BioWare would essentially become one of those people jumping under the vents to rip that person apart. I suspect that it wouldn’t happen for a variety of reasons."

In some way, Darrah's outlook is optimistic because it presumes both the continued existence of BioWare, and the possibility that EA would let anyone make a new Dragon Age game—neither of which strike me as a sure bet at this point. Not just because The Veilguard "underperformed," but because EA's all-but-assured takeover by Saudi Arabia could mean a serious bloodletting as the company takes on billions in debt, putting all but the most essential of EA's games at risk. A new Mass Effect remains in the works at Bioware.

Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider suggested in his own recent, less-than-happy assessment of the series' future that EA executives are likely to deem Dragon Age as non-essential simply because they don't understand it."They never knew what to do with it," Gaider said in June, adding that even when it exceeded expectations, as Inquisition did, it was treated as "a fluke."

While former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider won't play The Veilguard, he knows enough to realise that the series ain't looking too hot right now. He's pretty sure it's dead, at least under EA.

When we asked if he saw a future in the series he considers "his baby", he wasn't hopeful.

"From Electronic Arts? Unlikely. Throughout the entire time I was there, we were always one breath away from the project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them."

EA never seemed to understand Dragon Age, as evidenced by the Origins trailer that used a Marilyn Manson track and was filled with blood. Instead of a mature fantasy RPG, it was presented as some edgelord nonsense for teen boys. This misunderstanding continues to this very day. EA CEO Andrew Wilson, for instance, blamed The Veilguard's failings on a lack of live service features. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

Things were different with Mass Effect, EA's favourite RPG.

"It was funny," says Gaider, "because if Mass Effect releases didn't sell as well, they got excuses, because it was an action-oriented game. They thought it should sell more. It was slicker."

Gaider has nothing bad to say about the sci-fi RPG, and counts Mass Effect 2 as one of the "best RPGs of all time", but the differences in the way Dragon Age and Mass Effect were treated by EA must have stung.

"The way EA looked at it was that Mass Effect was the slick, modern RPG that had action, and they could sell really easily. Whereas Dragon Age was old-fashioned and focused on story. Our action, ranging from Dragon Age: Origins, was a little bit on the slow, cumbersome side, and then was too fast. They never knew what to do with it. So whenever a Dragon Age game sold well, we got excuses on the opposite side. Basically that it was a fluke."

It's worth noting that Dragon Age: Inquisition beat EA's sales expectations and became BioWare's most successful game. But EA has always treated Dragon Age, as Gaider says, like "the redheaded stepchild".

"They gave us a head of marketing at one point who literally talked about having to put lipstick on a pig in order to sell it. When you're on a team and you're hearing this, you're like, ‘Alright, what am I supposed to do with this?’"

Despite all of this, Gaider is interested in working on Dragon Age again—albeit not with EA. Though this is a more recent development.

"If you'd asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I've told all the stories with mages and dragons and what have you that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it's going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don't know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time."

If someone gave him the keys to Thedas now, though, he might be up for it.

"I do like a challenge," he says. "So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’, that'd be a tough one, but I think that'd be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it."

If Richard Garriott can get his hands on Ultima again, who knows? Maybe there's still hope for Dragon Age.

There's a common thread amongst former BioWare developers: They are proud of what they worked on, have a lot of love for their former studio, and they have few good things to say about publisher EA. For understandable reasons.

David Gaider was with BioWare for a long time, joining the studio after the success of Baldur's Gate. He started as a writer on Baldur's Gate 2 and worked his way up to lead writer for Hordes of the Underdark, Neverwinter Nights' best expansion. But he's best known for Dragon Age.

Thedas is Gaider's creation, and he served as lead writer on Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, before leaving BioWare in 2016. He also wrote several novels and comics based on Dragon Age. "It was my baby," he tells us.

This is one of the reasons that the chances of him playing The Veilguard were always going to be slim—"no matter what".

"Whether it was successful or not, it was always going to make different choices than I would have made for it. The team took it, and they did their own version of it, and I don't really want to see what's changed. It's totally selfish—I just don't want to see what they've done with my baby, good or bad."

Regardless, it was not successful. At least not in the way, say, Inquisition was. It sold well and had plenty of positive reviews, but it's never been able to escape its Mixed user review rating on Steam, and it didn't meet EA's expectations.

EA's expectations, of course, are part of the problem.

One of the other reasons Gaider hasn't played it is that he knows "too much about what went on behind the scenes," characterising development as an "ordeal" where EA "handicapped" the team right from the beginning.

"Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly. From everything I've been told about the game, it seems like that's exactly what happened. It didn't deliver on a creative level. It didn't deliver the sales. That's part of what EA likes to do too. They require a certain level of sales, and if you don't match that, it doesn't matter how good the game is. If it underperforms, you're essentially dead."

The Veilguard was not a great Dragon Age game—or at least it failed to capture what I found special and exciting about the series. And a great deal of the blame must be placed on EA's shoulders, as a company that is almost pathologically incapable of understanding what players want.

Take, for example, CEO Andrew Wilson's assessment of The Veilguard's failings. Was it because the quality of the writing took a dip? The shift to action-RPG? The companions who showcased a complete lack of agency? No, says Wilson, it's because it wasn't a live service game.

EA didn't just set up The Veilguard to fail, it also threw BioWare under the bus when the predictable happened, while completely misunderstanding what went wrong in the first place.

Unfortunately, Gaider hasn't had a smooth ride since leaving BioWare. He joined Beamdog and pitched a Planescape: Torment sequel to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which they liked but refused to fund. He's now creative director at Summerfall Studios. Its first game, Stray Gods, unfortunately launched around the same time as Baldur's Gate 3.

"Not to suggest that Stray Gods was in any way competition, but Baldur's Gate 3 came out and was such a huge hit that it was all anybody could talk about," he says. "So whatever chance there was of Stray Gods getting noticed disappeared."

Gaider is now working on a heist RPG, and while publishers have been enthusiastic about the pitch, nobody is funding it yet. Gaider says it's "make or break" for the studio.

I've wanted to revisit Dragon Age: Origins on PC for years. I played the PS3 version back in 2009, which isn't as bad as people say it is, though it does lack the PC version's tactical view and, of course, mod support.

Origins has been on my wishlist for well over a decade, but I finally scooped it up during the current Steam Summer sale. It's a negligible $3 for the Ultimate Edition, which bundles in the Awakening expansion and a bunch of other stuff (there's no Standard Edition on Steam anyway). I probably would have gotten around to revisiting Origins earlier had it not been for the Steam Deck 'Unsupported' badge warning me off.

There's a decent enough reason for this, I suppose: when I bit the bullet and downloaded Origins on my Deck, the first thing I saw was a very unpromising, antiquated 4:3 game launcher. After I tinkered with the graphics settings here, I had no option to save my changes and back out. In other words, pending the results of any troubleshooting, I needed to make do with a 800x600 display, with graphics detail set to low.

But wait! Origins isn't one of those long-in-the-tooth PC games that makes you back out to its launcher to change graphics settings. From the game itself I was able to change the resolution to the Deck's native 1280x800, and turn graphics and texture detail up to "very high". At those settings I'm getting an unwaveringly locked 60 fps, though if you must have 90 fps you can do that too, though it's not as consistent.

The next obstacle is the fact that Dragon Age: Origins for PC doesn't have gamepad support like its console versions obviously have. Thankfully, there's an amazing Community Layout for that. Khar's Dragon Age: Origins marries the immersive control of a third-person action game while retaining the essential mouse controls. Movement is mapped to the left stick, while the mouse pointer is mapped to the right track pad (it's also mapped to the right stick but that feels really bad). As I'm moving around I can use the mouse pointer to activate objects, trigger conversations, or make selections from the hot bar at the bottom of the screen.

The only problem I've found with this config is that, for some reason, it maps quick load to L4. I was accidentally pressing this instead of L5 (which serves as a right mouse click) and that is obviously problematic. So to be safe, I changed it to open the map instead, and then mapped quick save to to upper D-pad button.

I've been loving my return to Origins, and despite the 'Unsupported' badge it's absolutely perfect on Steam Deck. It takes far less tinkering than some 'Playable' games I've booted. Who knows, now I may even get around to playing Dragon Age 2. That one's meant to be good, right?

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.