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Comment by keyringlight | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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