Jamie Sarkonak: BioWare abandoned what made it great

EDMONTON — Though it was just announced on Wednesday that the legendary Canadian game studio BioWare was shutting down, it did not come as a shock. Many of us already mourned it years ago when it was clear that the company had become a Ship-of-Theseus simulacrum of the original.

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Back in its era of peak performance, BioWare delivered a steady stream of hits. The company’s 1998 Baldur’s Gate packed the rules and lore of Dungeons and Dragons into a game similar in calibre to Blizzard’s Diablo and Warcraft. The sequel, Baldur’s Gate 2, still tops best games of all time lists. Another notable early entry was 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and subsequent MMO in 2011.

Later, BioWare proved it could bring its formula for rich characters, story and combat to its own original worlds. In 2009, Dragon Age: Origins updated fantasy adventuring for modern tech and grew into a trilogy by 2014 Game of the Year winnerDragon Age: Inquisition. But it was the Mass Effect science fiction trilogy, with releases in 2007, 2010 and 2012, that catapulted the studio from maker of niche role-playing games into a AAA developer.

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The studio was highly effective at multi-tasking.

The great pull of a flagship BioWare game in those days came down to the writing: the epic story arc at the centre of a given franchise would play out differently depending on the player’s choices in the game. Some choices could mean the death of an entire people; some could kill off a beloved character — and there were many of those, because they had their own flaws, motivations and unique relationships to the protagonist which would grow and change for better or worse as the story progressed. Player agency truly mattered.

For the Canadian fans, there was extra pride in BioWare’s success because the beating heart of the machine was in Edmonton. The studio’s three founders, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuck and Augustine Yip, met at the University of Alberta while studying medicine and taking on related programming projects.

They drew much of their staff from local sources. The lead writer of the first two Mass Effect games, Drew Karpyshyn, grew up in an Edmonton suburb and was working on a Master’s degree in English at the University of Alberta when a writing position at BioWare was advertised in the faculty newsletter. He got the job, and minus a three-year break that he took to work on a book series, he remained with BioWare until 2018.

Preston Watamaniuk, lead designer of the entire Mass Effect trilogy, studied political science and history, and then worked a garbage route in Edmonton for several years before getting his start at BioWare. He was still with the company as of the shutdown announcement.

The lead writer of the Dragon Age trilogy, David Gaider, was running a hotel in Edmonton when he actually turned BioWare down for a writing job — he noted to an interviewer in 2023 that the pay was low and the office was sketchy, as it was in its early days — but changed his mind when the hotel was sold shortly thereafter. He left in 2016.

James Ohlen, the lead designer and co-lead writer of Baldur’s Gate, co-lead designer and lead writer of Baldur’s Gate II, and co-lead designer of Dragon Age: Origins, ran a comic-book and gaming store in Grande Prairie, Alta., five hours north of Edmonton, prior to being drafted by BioWare. Eventually, he’d go on to found BioWare’s Texas studio. He left the company in 2018.

That’s not the full cast, but you get the picture. Early BioWare was a product of northern Alberta genius. A bunch of hometowners with a passion for games somehow converged at the right moment to create something for the whole world to enjoy.

Then began the decline. In 2017, BioWare returned to the Mass Effect franchise with a fourth title, Mass Effect: Andromeda, a separate story from the original trilogy set in an entirely different galaxy. It was far from the polished product that fans were used to: the game was packed with glitches on release and its uncanny-valley facial animations distracted from the story. Andromeda also lacked one of the great sources of humour in the previous installments: the morality system and corresponding dialogue choices that allowed one to play as an absolute jerk. Players and reviewers alike noted the flat, unreactive dialogue.

The gossip that followed pointed to a litany of problems throughout development: understaffing; burnout; technical problems; outsourcing to Russia, China and India; choices made too late; wasted time; complications from working across three studios (BioWare by that time had Montreal and Austin locations in addition to Edmonton); personnel and leadership coming and going. While there are no official sales figures for the fourth Mass Effect installment, the estimate from gaming data website VGChartz is three million copies. For Mass Effect 3, that figure was 6 million. Andromeda was a flop.

This became a chronic condition at BioWare. In 2019, it released Anthem, an unremarkable multiplayer sci-fi shooter that struggled to attract a playerbase and had been crippled in the womb by many of the same forces that afflicted Andromeda. The game’s servers were shut down in early 2026, rendering it impossible for anyone who bought it to play it.

A final push for survival was made with Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024. It was highly anticipated by BioWare fans, who were by now starving for a story-rich adventure on par with the hits of the 2000s and early 2010s. It had been a decade since the last good BioWare game was released. Oh, how they yearned. But the flop was tectonic.

Veilguard quickly became known for nauseating social preaching that grated violently on its weary audience. Instead of transporting its players to another world and giving them a break from real life, it beat them over the head with COVID-era gender politics. Players had to select both a gender and their pronouns in creating their representative in the game, with an option to add mastectomy scars to their chest. They could also come out as transgender during the game (which prompted the player’s character to literally state, “It was a relief to figure out I was trans.”)

And if even one didn’t want to engage with genderfluidity, it was unavoidable. A whiny nonbinary companion character was used as a springboard for the writers to lecture players on proper misgendering etiquette. There had also been a female-to-male transgender character in 2014’s Inquisition, but the jarringly modern term “trans” was never inserted into the script, and the matter wasn’t treated with the intense sanctity it got in Veilguard.

Politics and social conflict were never impairments in the old BioWare games, by the way. They were the best part. Some characters were bigoted, some factions hated others due to past genocides or wars. It gave the stories depth and believability — and made them all the more satisfying if you managed to mediate a resolution. It wasn’t loathsome because it wasn’t being imported directly from the front lines of the culture war … which changed in Veilguard.

Had one been able to erase the woke aspects of the game, it still would have been a disappointment. Character dialogue was saturated with tired Millennialisms: the kind of ironic, self-referential, modern, quirky language that was exciting when the first Deadpool film came out. The overall vibe was unserious and immature, like it was targeted at Disney adults. Its greatest strength was that it seemed finished — an improvement from the previous two titles.

While some people still enjoyed Veilguard, many couldn’t stand it, causing many more not to bother buying it: in its first two months, it did half as well as expected. There was no surviving 10 years of misses. BioWare was done.

Some blame has been placed on Electronic Arts (EA), BioWare’s parent firm, for slowly sapping the life out of it since it was purchased in 2007. And there is sense to that, seeing how EA has bought and shuttered nearly two dozen studios over the years. But it’s also clear that BioWare changed over time, and as new names moved up the ranks, product quality went down. It’s entirely fair to blame capitalism on the studio’s failure — because the market, in the end, didn’t want nu-BioWare games.

The legacy of old BioWare, on the other hand, is still in overwhelming demand. A Belgian studio named Larian took up the mantle of Baldur’s Gate and made a third installment in 2023, which swept awards and sold upwards of 20 million copies.

Mass Effect fans can look forward to a spiritual successor to their game, too: Drew Karpyshyn is the lead writer for an upcoming sci-fi epic called Exodus, which is being developed by an Austin studio founded by James Ohlen, which in turn has the backing of Dungeons and Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. The trailers look promising, and the world is already expansive — a companion novel series by author Peter F. Hamilton is available at bookstores, priming the ground for the game’s 2027 launch (fingers crossed).

If only BioWare wasn’t so emblematic of Canada: once well-respected and economically strong for its small size, but now hollow from its unstomachable efforts to push a social mission to an unreceptive audience. Had it stuck to what made it exceptional in the first place, it might still be alive today. Instead, the very best parts of its legacy were exported and are now thriving somewhere else.

National Post

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