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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare.

One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.

If I was absurdly rich I’d buy up lots of underused and/or abused IP and start a game studio around it. I feel like that would be a good business if you have the capital to handle game dev costs

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I assume the acquisition is mostly about the sports games and Battlefield but EA really is sitting on some fantastic IP: Bioware, Westwood, and Maxis were all great studios.

The Sims also still prints money and there's a new version due soon-ish. But, basically, yes agreed.

I think "were" is the correct tense. EA's dictates for SimCity (2013) ended up crashing that franchise entirely, and a decade into The Sims 4, EA has admitted it's planning on endless expansion packs for Sims 4 rather than making a Sims 5, with the community largely debating whether or not the best Sims game is Sims 2 or Sims 3.

Right, they have plenty of good and dormant IP, they're just uninterested in or bad at executing on it. Cities Skylines (1, not 2) did well, for example.

The Sims 4 was a shockingly awful product, being a retool of an in-development Sims MMO after the dramatic failure of the always online SimCity (2013) it lacked (and probably still does lack) the majority of features from the previous installation, such as an open world.

For those who want to play it. Mass Effect Legendary Edition plays great on a Steam Deck or medium pc, but also has 4k reolution. It’s €6 at the moment.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328670/Mass_Effect_Legen...

Part of the EA autumn sale. More discounts here:

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/EA/sale/ea-autumn-s...

> RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare. One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.

Maybe I started with BioWare too early, but everything after NWN felt incredibly empty... in that 'world breaks if you look left or right of the main plot' Call of Duty way.

Which is fine, but always gave me an itch that I was really strapped into a plot-on-rails amusement park ride rather than a world.

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