The best and worst of Bioware

I come to bury Bioware, not to praise them. Ah, you know what, I'll praise them a bit. The studio was shuttered last week, the inevitable conclusion of a massive buyout of EA that finalised this year, by crooked persons mired in dirty tricks and impossible sums of Saudi state money. The deal involved whatever the hell "leverage" is. Now, the final 50 people left at the studio are out of a job, and the next Mass Effect game they were working on is cancelled. It is an ignoble end for an influential and historically impactful studio that, in recent years, struggled to make the kinds of chunky, choicey RPGs it once did better than anyone else. 

Even when Bioware were good, they were not good at everything. But the studio still did what others couldn't or simply wouldn't. Its back catalogue is stacked with games of the sort that rarely get made today, doing things that simply don't get done anymore. Let's remind ourselves of what we've lost, even if we lost it much longer ago than we think.

Best of the Bio

Renegade and paragon interrupts

Binary choices are easily parodied but it was still exciting when these little symbols would show up while you talked to people - evil red or goodie blue. It meant you could interrupt whatever was happening and feel like The Big Dick. It let you take action when words were failing. Sometimes that meant awkwardly hugging your grieving shipmates in an attempt to cheer them up (sorry for your loss, Tali). Sometimes it meant punching people and establishing yourself as boss (sorry for your face, Zaeed). 

Beginning a game in six different ways

In Dragon Age: Origins there are six different stories to choose at start the game, each with its own distinct player character, storyline, and setting. We are talking hours of game before it all funnels into the same Wardens-save-the-world adventure. Aside from Cyberpunk 2077, few games been brave enough (or expensive enough) to commit to multiple lengthy openings. And even Cyberpunk bugged out at three. Most RPGs usually just let the character creation screen fill in your past with stubs of personal lore. "You were born in the back of a lorry, +1 to balance" and the like. Even Larian don't try to make multiple unique openings. Grand ambition or developmental folly, either way, it was cool.

The kissing

At least here's one trend that caught on. Bioware established romance as a must for any blockbuster RPG worth its frost salts (and not just RPGs).