Life… is strength. The gears of this world are tuned for a quick death. Doomity-doom-doom! We is all doooooo-oooomed! The Guardian says for me to be cheerful, and to not repeat what he says all the… oh. I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite store on the Citadel. You simians may merely refer to me as ‘Sir,’ if you prefer a less… syllable-intensive workout. I have seen the throne of the Gods, and it was empty. Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honour matters. There are people like you everywhere. It’s just that not everyone has the words for it yet. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it. Let’s call that finished. You must gather your party before venturing forth.
I’m not even all that much of a BioWare enthusiast. I’m not sure I’m in mourning, exactly. Partly that’s because videogame studios are big corporate abstractions, unworthy of our silly human emotions; the story here is that a bunch of people have lost their livelihoods, after their employers triumphantly thrust themselves into unbelievable debt. And partly it’s because, as with any studio of over 30 years standing, BioWare was a much-caulked and jury-rigged ship of Theseus – paddling around in the doldrums of 2026, I’m not entirely sure what I should be mourning, any more.
Reportedly, there were around 50 staff left at BioWare, mostly labouring away on Mass Effect 5, when EA closed them this week. A lot of those who worked on the studio’s formative games, including the very first Baldur’s Gate, are long departed. The past decade especially has seen a steady exodus of BioWare talent, alongside a barrage of “veteran” start-ups and spiritual successor projects, many of which have sadly now faded and folded.
Within that arc, my own appreciation for BioWare has waxed and waned. I honestly can’t remember enough of Baldur’s Gate 2 to have strong opinions, though I overall acknowledge its brilliance. I probably felt closest to the studio during the heyday of the original Mass Effect trilogy. The original’s Vigil scene still gives me shivers, and who could forget the prodigious act of fan service demolition that was Mass Effect 2’s opening, to say nothing of its legendary “Suicide Mission” (I left Mordin behind).
I will always carry a candle for Dragon Age: Inquisition – a generous and unwieldy return to save-the-world-dom after Dragon Age 2’s leaner city story, which I cherish for its beautiful Tarot art, its bustling hub castle, and its spread of rambunctious and difficult companion characters. I greatly enjoy Ferelden as a setting, all the different yarns the various races spin about the world’s becoming. Still, I bounced right off Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s on-the-nose, corridor-like design, despite Nic’s guarded exhortations.
Anthem? I was keener on that than a lot of you, but I remember it mostly as a conflicted yet promising aviator with nowhere to go – so much BioWare flourish, floundering through a swamp of live service. I thought Mass Effect: Andromeda was a wide, shallow bowl of lukewarm space-gruel lent relish only by its launch bugs. There are other BioWare games I simply haven’t played – Neverwinter Nights (well, apart from the five minutes I managed, before it became clear my computer at the time really couldn’t run it) and its celebrated modding toolkit, the Orientalised fable Jade Empire and, whisper it, almighty KOTOR.
As for my experience of BioWare as a games journalist, it’s pretty brief and polarised. On the one hand, spending three hours with a preview build of Inquisition in a London warehouse, alongside such guiding lights as former PCGamer scribe Chris Thursten, is probably as close to heaven as I’ll get before my inevitable deathbed recantation. On the other, there was that humiliating interview with co-founder Dr Ray Muzyka, when I was terrified our mic wouldn’t record him properly. I resorted to kneeling between Muzyka and the actual interviewer, jerking the dictaphone back and forth in my desperation to guzzle up every last drop of Muzyka wisdom. Not even Khalisah al-Jilani was this cringe. I haven’t been allowed near a BioWare executive since.
The thing is, you don’t have to have enjoyed, or even played many BioWare games to understand the difference they’ve made, and why the newly private EA’s closure of the studio is such a kick in the guts, however presaged by years of interference, mismanagement, and neglect. As regards North American and European sci-fantasy incarnations, at least, BioWare have always been the RPG’s sleeping sentinel. They wrote the genre around themselves, producing and revising a vocabulary over decades that so many other designers, writers and modders are in conversation with – whether courting comparison, or critiquing and even despising.
BioWare are why D&D RPGs took off. They’re the creators of by far the most influential adaptation of the tabletop game’s forbidding ruleset. They are the studio you probably think of, when you think of party-based stories with branching plots. They are the blockbuster joint you think of, rivalled only by Final Fantasy and more recently Larian, when you think of companions who deserve the starring role.
Even their stumbles have thrown open ground for other writers, designers and artists to investigate: that main-and-supporting-band antagonism between critical path and sidequest, for example – between yet another chronicle of destined heroes averting some great evil, and the huggable humour of playing go-between for a knight who’s too shy to hit on somebody. How to reconcile the grandiosity with the closeness is the trad fantasy RPG’s founding dilemma. They popularised in-game romances and, yes, sex scenes that generally feel like the convincing result of hours of careful narrative distillation, and occasionally like a helping of cheesecake unlocked by pawing away at a hidden skilltree.
They are the studio who got us tallying up colour-coded Good and Bad points to shape both protagonist and endgame – so tacky, but undeniably striking as a vehicle for stark shifts and flavourful writing, as demonstrated in reverse by the omnivorous wishy-washiness of Mass Effect: Andromeda. Their morality systems are a place from which to start thinking about other, less videogamey, more organic and conflicting entanglements of Morality and System. They introduced a particular species of videogame celebrity with Commander Shepard, and they presided over a very particular stage in the evolving friction between creators and “audience” with Mass Effect 3’s much-revised ending. While I’d made up my mind to stop covering EA games, following the Saudi-led acquisition, I was curious, if not optimistic, to see what they might have done with Mass Effect 5.
Above all, BioWare were the wizards of words. They had less-good scripts but I don’t think they ever penned a bad one. Looking back over their games is dizzying and deafening, like opening a door in a dark, crumbling house to reveal a crowd of revellers – demons and courtesans and krogans and fops and berserkers, painted glorious shades by secret firelight and dancing in a ring.
So many words! How many words? Tens of millions, surely. Words that conjure words, raising them from the dust: Go for the optics, Chatika! Go for the eyes, Boo! Words seemingly drawn from some personal well of pain and tenderness, easily reduced to authorial self-commentary, that stick in my mind where so much else about the ageing fantasy has lost its charm. Here is Aveline, the aforesaid timid knight, to play us out. “That big man made every step of the story my choice. I loved that. He died of the Wasting in a Denerim ward… those last weeks, I read to him. I had to take his hand to turn the pages, and I couldn’t tell if he was too weak, or if it was the old game. He smiled at that, his big girl… Don’t let anyone tell you how to mourn. And when someone says ‘move on’, you take their hand and say, ‘my choice.'”