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> Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some development issues and some nasty bugs at launch. But was still fun.

My wife and I have played through the trilogy twice together. I've played it solo separately once. We're talking about a third joint play through soon, I expect we'll start it before the end of the year.

We made it six or so hours into Andromeda and dropped it, with no desire to ever revisit. Characters, gameplay, and story, all three failed to appeal to us at all. Trying to get into it was a chore, and after three or four feature-films worth of time with zero fun experienced, we cut our losses.

(agreed about ME3's ending, but to be fair we didn't play that until they fixed it, the original presentation does seem really bad from what I've read about it)

> The issues with ME3's ending were blown way out of proportion and was still a fantastic trilogy.

I did play the game and no they weren't. The issues truly started with ME2, but ME3 was an awful game that was an embarrassment to the standard of quality set by ME1. Dragon Age also went downhill starting with DA2 (which again I did play at least some of it though I didn't bother finishing because I hated it).

You're obviously still enjoying their work and that's cool. I'm genuinely glad you still do. But don't act like everyone is just being haters who don't play the games and parrot things that other people say. I did play Bioware's games, and that's why I no longer play them and consider them to be long since dead.

I think the problem is that both ME1 and DA1 are fundamentally different games from those that came after. I think at the time I used to think that ME1 and DA1 were built to a PC game standards, and ME2+ and DA2+ were built for consoles.

Most companies started doing the same around that time. It's easier to port a game designed for a controller to PC than a game designed for keyboard and mouse to consoles.

Bioware was always trying to reinvent the wheel. They never wanted to make the same game twice. It was both their strength and their weakness. Every time they released a sequel, it felt different than the previous game (except maybe ME3).

In my opinion, ME2 was the last unambiguously good game Bioware released. They made a few good games after that, but every game starting from DA2 also had major issues.

> Anthem... man that game had potential but just was not ready to ship. Was a ton of fun to play and I loved the bits of story we got but it really was just a tease of a story sadly.

Anthem came across to me that it had most of its story "filed off" at the last minute. I can't prove it, but Bioware was said to have been working on a Mandalorian game for years and so much of Anthem from the KOTOR-like macguffin that gives the title of the game to the underutilized Cantina in the main hub to the fact that AT-ATs (under a slightly different name) just show up in the middle of plot like you should have already been expecting them feels like Bioware in the very last minute had to pull every Star Wars character and Star Wars reference out of a game that was designed to be a Star Wars Mandalorian simulator.

At least as a player of Anthem, I think it's a tale of weird timing that EA was afraid of losing access to the Star Wars license in the wrong week, and also didn't anticipate that Disney would heavily promote a Mandalorian themed TV show not soon after the expected release date. As an officially licensed Star Wars Mandalorian simulator, just as or just before the first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were premiering could have been incredible. Anthem hints that it was almost that in such weird ways it's hard not to wonder if EA and Bioware just got Anthem's timing wrong.

(It's also not hard to blame Anthem's weird timing for messing up Andromeda by consequence. Andromeda's team got retasked away from story DLC to help Anthem in whatever its last weird rush was, which in my theory is the "removing Star Wars from it" and I still think Andromeda was only one good story DLC from being among the best of the series.)

Interesting theory but there’s not a chance that it’s true. Anthem had been in development for like 6 years by the time the idea for the Mandalorian was even pitched by Favreau.

The weird story absence was due to the studio trying to make it one of those live-service “forever games” that would make them infinite money.

> Anthem had been in development for like 6 years by the time the idea for the Mandalorian was even pitched by Favreau.

People have been wanting to make Mandalorian-focused videogames since essentially the Star Wars Holiday Special invented Boba Fett. (See also all the Mandalorian armored classes in SWTOR.) I'm not saying Anthem was influenced by what would come to be the TV show, I'm saying Anthem was timed with coincidence that if EA's executives had sold Anthem as a Mandalorian videogame it might have been lucky to come out when the TV show did and got a huge audience. It's a weird twist of fate.

Also, yes the live-service pivot also is a reason to expect some under-development of story so that it can come out in later expansions, but also Anthem never really had a clearly defined expansion roadmap, so I think it was more than just the live-service game pivot that damaged Anthem's attempts at storytelling.

I'd say Bioware has been through a rough time for over a decade, between pulling in new directions to avoid being just a factory that spits out sequels and being pushed into whatever area the business/owner side wanted, but after clearing their plate by shipping and drawing a line under Dragon Age I think they need to prove themselves.

Apparently they're working as support for other studios while they do pre-production on the next Mass Effect, and that game needs to walk the line between staying true to the identity of the old games and bringing in new entrants. They're an established operating studio, but I'm not sure that counts for much when the mega publishers can shut down and start studios on a whim, they need to justify staying around whether that's because they make games that sell or because having a workforce in Canada is worthwhile.

Looking at Bioware's history they are also an interesting company.

It does seem like they tried to avoid just becoming the "Mass Effect and Dragon Age" developer but that did not really work that well for them. Maybe that turned out to be a distraction. I think it also did not help that everything they put out was compared to both of those and seemed to have an expectation that it had to be as big or was a failure.

It isn't like they had a constant stream of massive hits. Don't get me wrong I love Jade Empire but how many people actually remember that game exists?

Likely also did not help that their 2 biggest IP's also had gameplay that very different from eachother.

I am (or maybe was until this news) cautiously optimistic about the next Mass Effect.

Regarding ME4 (or is it 5?) the weasel word I keep coming back to is 'potential', it could be great, but whether they can accomplish that is something we can't say on the outside.

It relates to one of my bugbears about how a subsection of gamers have grown to dislike the big productions often for some valid reasons, there's a lot of potential pitfalls in making a game like ME, but a company like EA is the only place that big impressive experience can be done. Right from the earliest previews introducing ME1 they were going into the cinematic style of it and how good it looked, which was an evolution of what they'd done before with Jade Empire/KOTOR (and still seems to be there with parts of DA:Veilguard). While there's (again, potential) competition in the coming years from Exodus by Archetype, and Owlcat's The Expanse: Osiris reborn games, it's hard to see them providing quite what could be done at the largest games companies.