Small niche games Mass Effect and Dragon Age, which only sold a handful of millions. When will nerds start realizing they were always a marketable target demographic
Also, saying Larian “picked up” the formula after BioWare “abandoned” it is patently wrong. They have been making these games for as long as BioWare
No one remembers divinity 2 ego draconis and it’s a damn shame, would love to see larian remake this title.
They need to remake everything before Divinity Original Sin. I’m playing Divine Divinity and it has been the most painful experience just getting the game to display properly. It doesn’t have a proper settings menu with graphics options like resolution or windowed/full screen modes so you’re just fighting with the ConfigTool to get it working.
As a mage, you could bomb high level enemies from afar over and over again and jump multiple levels on one kill. A single mistake got you killed though. I loved that game.
Divinity: Dragon Commander was another Larian gem.
My current character is a warrior mage that has the ability to mind control enemies. He usually doesn’t have too much trouble but those 4? Commander bases I kept getting one shot before before could even use any of my spells, so I am trying g to get a few more character levels.
The game still runs really well, the controls and animations are a little clunky. But there aren’t many games that give you such an experience. I’m not sure how much of it’s lore was retconned, which is another reason why I would like to see it remade. It can just be more or less the same game, but with updated engine, graphics, and lore.
Dragon Age sold well but it was totally unexpected. People thought CRPGs were dead, and then EA tried to make sure of that with Dragon Age II. Mass Effect arguably killed Bioware by giving them the idea that they could pick up more fans if they just made action games with dialog trees. I’m in the minority but that series got worse and worse in my opinion.
You’re in the minority, but you’re also correct.
The quality of Mass Effect 1 and DA: Origins came from how polished their stories were. The gameplay was the weakest point of both games. Don’t get me wrong, I liked playing them, but they do not hold up. Then, or now.
Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2 experienced the exact same quality shift. Less quality on the story side, better gameplay. In DA 2’s case, they might as well have handed the writing off to the interns.
It only got worse after this. We all remember red explosion, blue explosion or green explosion at the end of ME3. DA Inquisition existed, the multiplayer was fun (and similarly the only fun thing, to me, in ME3).
I played every mass effect in a row like a year ago and honestly the gameplay is still good. It’s nothing really that involved and it’s definitely a lot more interesting by Andromeda. But the original was still good honestly.
I liked it. You liked it. I still think Origins is fun.
However, there’s a reason the gameplay shifted from what it was to where it ended. Many people thought both ME1 and DA:O were bad, gameplay-wise. It’s just sad that the story got fucked in the process.
Did anyone think mass effect one was bad? Rudimentary maybe but bad?
Personally? I did. I didn’t finish ME1 until I played through DA:O. Although on my second playthrough, I did grow to love it.
Did you think it was bad or did you just not care for it?
It’s also not like BioWare invented the formula. It’s lifted almost directly out of tabletop RPGs
Adapting tabletop RPGs to a computer game isn’t a one to one process, that adaptation basically is BioWare’s formula.
That’s a tough call. Tabletop rpg vary wildly from table to table, and they gave birth to many radically different kinds of video games. Bioware only dig one kind of these games. They never made a dunjon crawler or a hackn slash for example.
But indeed, they took from this. But even in this one subgenra they still haven’t figured out how it evolved around 2015.
It’s not Dragon Age and Mass Effect that did it, it was the flattening for even wider appeal with Andromeda and Dragon Age Inquisition.
Inquisition was still a decent game but it was not quite same audience that Dragon Age Origins had, that attracted a lot more CRPG fans.
niche audience
Mass Effect, Dragon Age etc
Riiight.
*Schadenfreude
Bf2042
inaccuracies aside, I think Bioware is a great example of a company going super heavy into a small number of “blockbuster” titles over many more smaller, independent games.
Games like BF2042 tried to cast the net so far wide that everything was shallow and unfinished. Their RPGs similarly hurt their loyal followings by spending so much time on ✨content✨ instead of hammering down a good story.
Gaming is one of those few exceptions to the rule “quality over quantity”: Sometimes making a bunch of smaller, finished games beats the over-ambitious “game as a service” that requires years of user investment via microtransactions to recoup the costs for. At that point, quantity BECOMES quality.
I don’t think it’s an exception rather than you’re framing quality as size/budget. Really, a small, quality game is better than a bloated game targeted at the highest quantity of people. With Bioware they also got high on their own fecal fumes and thought they’d have intense success no matter what red flags popped up.
