The evil ending.
Oof. I expected this day to come but the news has left me winded nonetheless; BioWare, the creator of so many beloved role-playing series and games - Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - has been closed. EA decided it had no place for it under its new Saudi and private investment ownership. So Mass Effect 5 has been canned, and a studio that helped shape an industry and popularise role-playing games over the course of 31 years is no more.
But it's a shock rather than a surprise. BioWare's days were numbered after the fizzle of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, although really, the studio was rocked long before then. The twin blows of Mass Effect: Andromeda in 2017 and Anthem in 2019 left it reeling, and even had Anthem been a success, BioWare would be irrevocably changed by it. We know all this. We've pored over BioWare's many shifts and misfires countless times over the years. Why? Because of how much BioWare has come to mean to so many of us.
There are distinct BioWare eras, and the early era unquestionably belongs to Baldur's Gate. As a series, it's not only directly responsible for the existence of Baldur's Gate 3, it's arguably responsible for the success of computer role-playing games (CRPGS) as a whole. BioWare created the Infinity Engine, you see, which characterised RPGs of the era. Black Isle used it to make Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment (a game you can probably trace the much-loved Disco Elysium's lineage back to, with its deep, philosophical ways), not to mention that Fallout: New Vegas studio Obsidian Entertainment grew out of Black Isle. Baldur's Gate was also the first game The Witcher 3 developer CD Projekt Red would distribute in its early days - a licence without which it might not exist.
At the end of this CRPG era, BioWare released Neverwinter Nights. It was a game intended to be a total adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, in that it not only offered a D&D adventure to play but a toolset to make your own campaigns with. That included a unique Dungeon Master system, whereby players could dynamically spawn enemies and offer guidance, just like a DM might in a live tabletop game. Larian tried a similar thing in Divinity: Original Sin 2, though we haven't seen many other games attempt it since - not unless you count BioWare's cancelled 4v1 game Shadow Realms, that is. With its user-generated content, player-run servers, and DM mode, Neverwinter Nights was ahead of its time, and it's still played to this day.
Onwards, and we race into BioWare's console era, to the creation of games that reverberate with influence even now. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - which gave Obsidian crucial work in making a sequel - and then Jade Empire, the Wushu RPG. Jade Empire didn't make much of an impact but during its promotion, BioWare provided CD Projekt Red with free E3 stand space to show its new game - a certain The Witcher - which was built on Neverwinter Nights' Aurora engine. "BioWare has been a massive part of CDPR history," CDPR joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski acknowledged on X following BioWare's closure.
Yet, all of this was really a precursor to the game and series BioWare would become best known for: Mass Effect. This sci-fi space opera trilogy took the template BioWare had been honing in previous games - party-based adventures featuring emotional storytelling and romanceable companions - and bedazzled a mainstream console audience with it. I remember going from being one of the only people in the Eurogamer office who knew or cared about BioWare - I literally ran home from the office to play Mass Effect 1 when it came out - to being one of its many admirers when Mass Effect 2 arrived. That game changed everything, and I'm amazed by the influence it still has to this day. As one small example, Gareth Damian Martin, creator of the widely acclaimed Citizen Sleeper series, counts Mass Effect 2 among their favourite games.
At the same time, there was Dragon Age - a series I adore but which struggled to find an identity over the years. Its beloved debut, Dragon Age: Origins, was a callback to Baldur's Gate; Dragon Age 2 was a rushed attempt at ensnaring a console audience; Dragon Age: Inquisition got caught straddling a new console hardware generation, and was bloated by its open-world RPG ambitions. As for its most recent entry... I've written a lot about Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Dragon Age has an uneven legacy, undoubtedly, but I say all this with love: it's probably the game series I feel closest to.
I'm also purposefully overlooking some other things - the Sonic RPG BioWare made! Not to mention the colossal MMO project Star Wars: The Old Republic, which was the reason we never got another single-player Knights of the Old Republic game. I remember interviewing BioWare doctor-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka at EGX 2011 before they announced the release date; it was a different era indeed. But the point of this potted history is simple: BioWare has been around for a very long time and made many games that mean many different things to many different people.
You could easily ask whether The Witcher series would exist without BioWare. It's not a stretch to say Larian wouldn't have had the breakout success it has without the brand power of Baldur's Gate. Equally, games like Exodus and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn probably wouldn't exist without Mass Effect as a template (Exodus even has notable former BioWare people working on it). And Casey Hudson's new Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic game is a spiritual successor to Knights of the Old Republic.
Widen that further and would we have romance in role-playing games if it weren't for BioWare? Would we have as many party-based adventures with an emphasis on companions if it weren't for BioWare? Would we have a focus on good and evil influences, webs of choice and consequence, cinematic dialogue sequences? Would we have carried-over save games? Widen that further still: would as many people care about role-playing games if it weren't for BioWare? It wasn't the only studio doing these things, and maybe they would have materialised as strongly anyway, but BioWare established a template that became synonymous with RPGs.
And that word "care" is important, because I've always found the amount of withering scrutiny BioWare faced when announcing or releasing a game brutal - and at times, unfair. Though, I understand where it comes from. Consider the backlash to Mass Effect Andromeda for example: really, it existed because of the love for and expectations set by the Mass Effect trilogy. Or the backlash to various Dragon Age games: beyond the outrage bait of the culture war, it existed in part because the series kept changing and was no longer a CRPG. Even the backlash faced by Anthem came from a place of love, because people didn't want a Destiny game from BioWare, they wanted a BioWare game.
People wouldn't care if BioWare didn't matter to them, which is why it's been so hard to watch the studio be thrown around by EA's whims and trend-chasing over the years. Would BioWare really have embarked on an enormously expensive MMO, in SWTOR, had EA not wanted a World of Warcraft killer? Would BioWare really have decided to throw everything at Anthem had EA not wanted a game to rival Destiny? The game apparently never never had a single, unifying vision - but the flashiness of its flying won over boardrooms. What would Dragon Age 4 have been like had EA not scrapped the original 'Morrison' idea for a live service game - a pivot that resulted in the departure of long-time Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw? In short: what would BioWare have made had EA not so heavily interfered?
Would BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka have been able to hold off EA's execs and advances if they'd stuck around? I expect EA itself was partly one of the reasons they didn't. Really we have only what-ifs and assumptions, and it doesn't change where we are now. It doesn't change the fact that this isn't the ending BioWare deserved, and our thoughts are with everyone immediately affected by the studio's closure.
But hold for a moment and consider what we've had. Consider the reason why you're reading this at all: because BioWare means something to you. Because at some point, you played a BioWare game you connected with, presumably on a deep and emotional enough level that you began to care. Maybe it was many BioWare games; maybe it was a few. Whatever the number, whatever the game, it meant BioWare got through. And this was one of the few studios capable of that, at reflecting our humanity back at us and making us care. BioWare was a studio of stories, and its own story is worth celebrating too. As sad as it is to reach its end.