The Queue: Saying goodbye to one of gaming’s greats

It’s a sad day in video games, as we mourn the loss of BioWare, which is so crushing there are barely words for it.

That doesn’t mean I’m not going to write words about it, but none of those words encompasses the scope of what we’ve lost.

But let’s get down to business. This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I do my best to answer your questions and sometimes write lengthly soliloquies to my favorite games.

I went to the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in 2008, which was a European version BlizzCon, something Blizzard hasn’t done in quite a few years as they’ve leaned further into digital events. In 2008 it was held in Paris, and I stuck around for a week afterwards to see everything I could. It was a great week seeing some of the best art museums in the world and exploring incredible architecture.

But even that great week probably doesn’t hold a candle to, unironically, all the friends I’ve made along the way. That’s what makes Warcraft great in the end: the people we meet, and the many life-long friendships that have come from it. Playing this game is how I met Cory, and how I know all of you guys. That’s something pretty hacking cool that Warcraft has brought into my life.

Not that I’m bitter about Cory saying that our friendship isn’t as cool as going to one hockey game or anything. It’s fine. Totally fine. Not a big deal. I’m completely over it.

Definitely! I think Forever is a fascinating take on the original World of Warcraft experience, and they’ve made some really smart gameplay changes to make it feel more modern without sacrificing the vanilla vibes. The graphics are much improved too, well reflecting the rose-colored glasses we look back on old Azeroth with.

But I’m also with Red here: I don’t know how much time I’ll practically have to devote to this and keep up with modern WoW, which I also enjoy (despite its issues and devastating narrative decisions).

Though Hearthstone doesn’t have the monumental number of currencies that World of Warcraft has,  I feel like adding currencies just makes a game more confusing. And this is a particularly frustrating currency: you can’t straight-up buy it with cash (not exactly) and you can’t earn it in the game. Instead you earn some Tavern Tender when you buy things in the shop, and you can then spend Tavern Tender on more things. On one hand, this gives you a little extra bang for your buck when you’re buying things. On the other, it will encourage you to overspend just to get rewards you can only buy with Tavern Tender, and I really hate the underhanded feeling of a currency like this.

Take a shot if you saw this coming.

Then just keep doing it, because we’ve lost one of gaming’s greats.

Being acquired by EA is historically not great for the long-term success of game developers. EA is a big company, and they like number go up. Number must always go up. There’s no room for a product with a rough start or (worse!) an outright lemon. And then EA likes to meddle with its developers to push them to do things EA thinks will be successful as well as forcing them into the corporate technology pipeline. BioWare was pushed into making Anthem, a Destiny-alike that was so unlike previous BioWare games that they joked about how it’s not like everyone was just here for the romance (which Anthem didn’t have). Yes, thanks, I was here for the romance, so I guess I’m not here anymore, and I wasn’t the only BioWare fan who checked out for Anthem.

Then there was Mass Effect Andromeda, which was a perfectly fine game, but not a blockbuster success — and the sort of game that was ripe for continued development. The DLC that was teased at the end of the game looked fascinating, but EA quickly cut and ran, saying there was to be no further Mass Effect development. Imagine if they’d taken Andromeda with a Cyberpunk 2077 mindset, and improved the game, and brought more players to it with patches, DLCs, and expansions. It was different from the original ME trilogy, and it had a buggy launch (as many games do), but it wasn’t bad, and it could have been great if EA gave it some more runway.

Then there was Dragon Age Veilgaurd’s decade-long development cycle. It started out as a classic BioWare single-player RPG. Then EA told BioWAre it had to be a live service game, so they scrapped it and started making a live service game. Then EA said no, make a single-player RPG, but gave them no time to restart development from scratch: the team at BioWare had to take what they had for the live service game and try to transform it into a single player game. And all along the way, the game kept getting delayed by six months a time. Never long enough that they could actually sit down and really rework things to suit the completely different game they were now making. Just long enough to extend the mad scramble of trying to get this game out the door.

Dragon Age Veilgaurd wasn’t bad, either, and it’s frankly miraculous it turned out as good as it was with the kind of development cycle it had. But it wasn’t the tremendous hit that EA wanted, and EA again cut and ran very quickly, saying there would be no further development on Dragon Age. They reassigned workers, not just to the Mass Effect project that had ostensibly been in progress since (at least) the success of the trilogy remaster in 2021. They sent BioWare devs to other projects in other studios. People who signed up to make great RPGs found themselves working EA’s big sports franchises, while a small team was left to continue early development of the next Mass Effect.

The next Mass Effect game had ostensibly been in development for around five years, and a game that’s been in “early development” for five years is already a disaster. That’s not to say it couldn’t have been great, but extremely long development time is often a sign that the creative vision is in flux, that the studio (or its masters) have changed their minds about the game as they’re in the middle of building it, and they’ve had to start over once or twice. A great RPG does not necessarily take a decade to build, and long dev cycles don’t necessarily mean a better game. The Veilguard team built at least three games during the decade it was working on just the one, but higher-ups changing their minds meant much of the work they did in those years was scrapped, never to see the light of day.

After Veilgaurd was hastily shut down, I saw the writing on the wall. Veilguard was BioWare’s last chance after the messes that were Anthem and Andromeda. The game would have to be a smash hit to save the studio, in EA’s financially-minded eyes. Instead, we got a decent game. It wasn’t enough.

Then EA sold itself off to entities even worse than EA itself: private equity and the Saudi Private Investment Fund. And they didn’t just buy EA, they bought EA in a leveraged buyout. And they didn’t just buy EA in a leveraged buyout, they bought EA in the largest leveraged buyout in history.

That means they took out a loan to buy EA, and once the deal closed they handed the debt to EA to pay off, thus buying EA with EA’s money. The company was sold for $55 billion, and EA is responsible for paying off $20 billion of that. It’s massive amount of debt to saddle a company with, and the interest payments alone have to be staggering.

When the deal closed, that was the end of BioWare. An EA in such dire financial straits can’t afford anything but cheaply produced, quickly produced, highly successful games. Even before the deal closed, they were talking about cutting staff and leaning into AI. There was nowhere a team like BioWare fit into that equation, and this is just going to be the start of layoffs and closures as they try to balance the books.

I’m pretty sure it’s going to be impossible to balance the books, and EA isn’t going to exist in a few years. The best we can hope is that EA cannibalizes its IPs for quick cash and sells or licenses them to developers who really do want to make those games.

Keelah Se’lai.

And with that tragic coda, I leave you. That’s all for now my friends. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you in the comments section.

p.s. also I have a new dog.