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Daughters of Khaine

2021-02-25T03:30:45Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Society */

{{Age of Sigmar Faction|Faction=Daughters of Khaine|Logo=Daughters_of_Khaine_battletome_art.jpg|Alliance=Order|Motto=Much bloodier and less NSFW than it appears.}}
{{topquote|She could never take an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. The weak and flaccid parity would make her nearly puke. She wants an eye for a tooth, and a life for an eye.|Helen Zahavi - Dirty Weekend}}
{{topquote|Let's show the gutless pigs how the warriors of Pah-Dishah can fight! By Tarim, we'll give the devils scarlet wine to drink this dawn...|Red Sonja}}

The '''Daughters of Khaine''' are a nation of aelves (though closer to a collection of scattered religious communes than a nation) led by Morathi who combine the Khainite religion with shadow magic.

They are an army, with a few exceptions, of [[PROMOTIONS|armed aelven women and monstergirls in bikinis]]. As they worship Khaine, to them the clash of arms is the height of their religion, holy rites practiced and perfected with all the high-level skill and grace of aelf-kind. As blades flash, they shed their visage of cold and distant beauty, how they tend to be when not in battle, their ecstatic faces lighting up with each fresh kill. In contrast to even other aelves, especially the Idoneth Deepkin, many Daughters of Khaine have lived far beyond the average aelf lifespan, which is already longer than that of other races (except the males - see below).

==History==
===Age of Myth===
Being a theocracy founded by [[Morathi]] and given her character, Morathi is behind or involved in every pivotal moment of the Daughters of Khaine in history. After leaving the Great Alliance because [[Nagash]] outed her true monstrous form, Morathi sought to establish her own dwellings in Ulgu. Her son Malerion cruelly rejected her suggestion of splitting the rule of the thirteen Dominions, for he claimed of all Ulgu as his own. Morathi persisted until, as either a joke or a plot to get rid of her, Malerion granted his mother a small parcel of land in the middle of the Umbral Veil. This was the darkest and most impenetrable region in all Ulgu, so dangerous that only Malerion himself had ever returned from those cloying mists with their sanity intact. Morathi went there and exceeded her son's expectations. She bent the shadows into a protective shroud around her new land and led settlers there.

Her only followers were the aelven witch-cults that had maintained their worship of [[Khaine]]. While Morathi knew Khaine was dead, since the blood rituals no longer rejuvenated her, she supported the religion to get people to help her. To ensure their loyalty, Morathi built a temple to Khaine, naming it Hagg Nar, and over time a city grew up around it. Morathi taught them the secrets of navigating the murky currents. Hagg Nar began as a pitiful kingdom, and Morathi brooded over her mean existence.

As she sought power, she soon found a hint of Khaine's power in her dreams while scrying. Though Khaine was dead, she knew the elven gods were cyclial and could be reborn given enough power. Morathi began a secret quest that was long and difficult, but eventually brought her to the literal heart of Khaine himself. The heart was intact and throbbing with resurgent power, but it was guarded by Kharbytr, the godbeast father of Kharibdysses. Morathi suspected Kharbytr would be resistant to sorcery, and was despearte to claim the heart before anyone else could, so she used seduction instead (yes, really), but angered Kharbytr when she tried to grab the heart. The fight between them was an epic clash that lasted thirteen days and ended when Morathi constricted Kharbytr in her coils. The godbeast dealt her a lethal blow before losing consciousness, but Morathi survived by drawing energies from Khaine's heart to sustain herself.

Heading back to Hagg Nar with her prize, Morathi declared herself Khaine's High Oracle, claiming that she spoke for the god of murder and that she was his voice in this world. With that she solidified her hold over the Khainites and reshaped the society into the Daughters of Khaine. The Daughters of Khaine would often be sent out to hunt for fragments of their missing deity on Morathi's orders (unbeknownst to them, these were snipe hunts for the most part).

She continued this way for a time until Malerion arrived. He said that he and the other aelf gods had had, at last, found the lost aelf-souls from the world-that-was, and they needed her shadow magic and knowledge of Slaanesh in their grand plan. For the first and only time, Morathi spoke of the unspeakable horrors inside Slaanesh and how she'd escaped. Using this knowledge and themselves as bait, the four lured Slaanesh into a trap and started extracting elven souls from the deity.

For her role, Morathi was allowed to take souls for herself to shape into elves, who went into swelling the numbers of the Daughters of Khaine. However, some of them had been [[monstergirls|altered by their time with Slaanesh]]. There were those with [[Lamia|serpentine mutations akin to Morathi]], these became the [[Medusa|Melusae]]. Others had bat-like wings and long tails, these became the [[Harpy|Khinerai]]. Around this time Morathi reintroduced the Cauldrons of Blood and created the Mathcoir, the master cauldron, in Hagg Nar. Secretly, she made it as a repository of power only she could access. To start this, Morathi [[Drow|cursed every male born to the Daughters of Khaine to have part of their soul siphoned away and stored in the Mathcoir]].

Unbeknownst to her erstwhile allies, Morathi had added her own deceptive magics to the undertaking, so that the soul division was skewed slightly out of the agreed proportions, with extra spirits siphoned to Hagg Nar. This subterfuge was subtle, but slowly, inevitably, [[Not as Planned|altered the eldritch balance that kept the Dark Prince perfectly imprisoned between Hysh and Ulgu]].

===Age of Chaos===
As Chaos invaded the Mortal Realms, the Daughters of Khaine marched out from Hagg Nar to ambush them, using shadowshifting magics to reach Realmgates to travel anywhere the forces of Order needed them. Although Morathi and her followers weren't liked, beggars could not be choosers and they were one of the few allies the Sigmarites had during this time. To keep the more mutated members of her coven secret, the spellcasters and priestesses of the Khainites used shadow glamors to make them look like ordinary elves (how this worked when the Khinerai were flying is anybody's guess).

The Daughters of Khaine were bold and fearless in battle - willing to cross blades with any enemy, no matter how numerous or monstrous. Despite heroics by Khainite forces at many battles, the forces of Order were on the backfoot, the final retreat happening after Nagash betrayed Sigmar at the Battle of Burning Skies.

As the Chaos invasions set about their task of destroying and enslaving entire civilisations, the Shadowlands of Ulgu suffered the least after Azyr. Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch all devoted the greater portion of their forces to different realms, the minions that were sent into Ulgu boasted none of the most fearful greater daemon commanders and Malerion himself sent Archaon packing with his tail between his legs. This gave the Daughters of Khaine plenty of time to prey on the Chaos forces that made it to their realm; reavers of Khorne, magic-seeking conclaves of Tzeentch or followers of Slaanesh tracking calls from their god that only they could sense. They reaped a large harvest of Chaos minions, leaving mass graves from all the sacrifices (this would come back to haunt them - pun intended - in the Soul Wars, see below).

But Morathi's trickery with the soul extraction came back to bite her. Taking too many souls caused Slaanesh's prison to drift towards Ulgu and weaken it. This enabled Slaanesh's most faithful servants catch the scent of their missing god/dess. More and more Slaaneshi armies penetrated the Shadowlands searching for their lost god. So began what the aelves of Ulgu named the Cathtrar Dhule - the War of Shadows.

For the major battles of the War of Shadows, Morathi led the Daughters of Khaine from the front. She cast down the Keeper of Secrets Glittus and his Legion of Excess, and the whip-handed Krulla Sha'vhr and her Flayerhost. Battle was not her only recourse, however, for against the unbeatable six warhosts of the betentacled Bovaxx the Despoiler, Morathi's coven of Medusae summoned a gaiste-maze - a shadow labyrinth that still covers part of the Umbral Veil, a dark cloud in which those hordes presumably still wander.

Yet the Daughters of Khaine did not win every battle. As larger and more-powerful armies invaded, Morathi called the first of the Caillich Covens - the gathering of forces from all the sects. This was required to defeat Luxcious, a Keeper of Secrets so powerful that many Slaaneshi considered her a replacement for the missing Dark Prince. The daemon was defeated, but not until after the exalted fiend destroyed the Temple of Druchxar.

===Age of Sigmar===
Luxcious may well have continued her scouring search of Ulgu had Sigmar not begun his war to reclaim the Mortal Realms, drawing off many Chaos forces. The Cathtrar Dhule paused, before once more erupting anew in the bitterly fought War of the Shadowpaths.

The Daughters of Khaine win more allies during this time, for despite their brutality in battle (and occasional team-killing among their allies) they're just ''that'' good at kicking Chaos. The Stormcast, Idoneth and Sylvaneth to name a few ally with the Daughters of Khaine.

During this time, some elves start to [[Heresy|worship Morathi alongside Khaine, which causes dissent]] (an uncommon case of a heresy charge in a warhammer setting that fits the actual definition). Ironically, those who disapprove get [[Blam|quickly silenced]] by Morathi or the Medusae as [[Heresy|heretics]] (usually by a knife in the vitals or getting turned into living crystal by a Melusai).

===Soul Wars===
Prior to the Soul Wars there are increasing build-ups of death magic. Whenever there is a large gathering of Scathborn, the spirits of the dead rise up and attack them. Also, remember those mass graves full of sacrificed Chaos worshippers? Now they're fodder for armies of vengeful skeleton warriors and/or ghosts who attack the Khainites. When Nagash sent vamires and necromancers into Ulgu as a diversion tactic, they were all too happy to exploit these mass graves for armies.

The Daughters of Khaine were also called on by the forces of Order in other realms to help fight off the increasing undead attacks. Morathi herself extolled the Daughters of Khaine to greater zeal, for she remembers the taste of Nagash's pimp hand and is eager to avenge the slight.

===Broken Realms===
The Daughters of Khaine worked with Scourge privateers to get information about the Idoneth Deepkin the same way as their kin in the World-That-Was; lots of torture and mind-invading magic. From this they learn the location of a valued Deepkin artifact, the Ocarian Lantern; made by - and stolen from - Teclis, it acted as a lure for souls. Morathi sent sixty of her best soldiers to get it from its heavily guarded underwater temple; two survived, one now an Idoneth prisoner and the other returned to Morathi with the lantern.

She fused with Khaine's heart and became the goddess Morathi-Khaine. Thus Khaine as he was is gone forever, and Morathi - now Morathi-Khaine - is their goddess instead of just their High Oracle (albeit now split into two bodies, Morathi-Khaine and the Shadow Queen after [[Aenarion|her hubby's soul]] [[Rip and Tear|took exception]] to Morathi's plan while in Slaanesh).

Morathi's first action was to broker an alliance with the [[Idoneth Deepkin]], offering Volturnos the souls of his fellow Cythai elves to sweeten the deal. She then ended her alliance with Sigmar by launching a coup that brought Anvilgard under her rule and renaming it Har Kuron. The Daughters of Khaine/Morathi-Khaine now fight with a newfound zeal as they launched a <s>crusade</s> <s>jihad</s> holy war to expand Morathi's empire. When Sigmar found out, he sent a Stormcast army to re-take Har Kuron, the fighting raging until the Celestant-Prime arrived and offered to parley with Morathi. The two disappear for a night, and when they returned an agreement had been reached. Morathi was be allowed to keep the city, and what she promised in return is unknown. Morathi's also [[1984|slowly re-writing the Daughters' scriptures and records of history to put herself at the center of everything]].

==Religion==
[[File:Morathi,_the_Shadow_Queen_from_DaughtersofKhaine_.jpg|300px|thumb|right|"Charge, Daughters of Khaine! For my...uh, I mean, for Khaine's glory!"]]
Unlike some other factions within Age of Sigmar, but very much like others, the Daughters of Khaine are a theocracy. There are many sects of Daughters of Khaine, each worshiping a different aspect of the aelf god of battle and bloodshed. Although the rites and rituals might differ, all the Khainites follow a strict hierarchy in their organisation. They worship Khaine and Morathi is his High Oracle, the one who discerns his will and their overall leader. Though they know about the other gods of Order, they pay no homage to them. Beneath Morathi are the High Priestesses, which include the Slaughter Queens, Hag Queens and Bloodwrack Medusae. They are the keepers of each shrine’s most sacred artefacts, and commanders of the Sisterhood of Blood. The degree of authority held by each of these figures, along with their specific title, varies between the sects, but a single word from Morathi can alter the influence of any other ranking.

Of all the warriors of the temples, the Scáthborn – the Melusai and Khinerai – are closest to Morathi herself, yet they often remain hidden from those outside the cult. The Medusae are made from Aelves converted by Morathi herself; though this is seen as an immense honor Morathi binds them with the most binding of magical oaths, but none among the Khainites would dare question her in this. This is partially due to their forms resulting from daemonic taint which would cause negative sentiment among their allies and the fact that Morathi uses them as something of a secret police. The most public-facing Khainites are the Witch Aelves and Sisters of Slaughter. Their most important shrines are the Cauldrons of Blood, gifts from Khaine himself (at least, what Morathi’s claims each time she gifts one of the great iron cauldrons to the temple of a newly founded Khainite sect). The covenites see it as a sign of their god’s favour that the cauldrons never seem to overflow, no matter how much blood is poured within them following a battle – all assume Khaine himself takes the surplus as an offering.

War covens are the most important organisations to the Daughters of Khaine, their structure laid out by Morathi herself. It is through violence that the Khainites expand their territories, defend their temples and worship their god. Weapons practice and mock duels take up the majority of their daily lives, yet these are not mere military drills, but religious ceremonies, treated with all the gravitas that others might use when reading their most holy of tomes or offering prayers to their god. From their temples in various realms, the Daughters of Khaine scour the Mortal Realms for blood sacrifices. At Morathi's edict, they also search for the shards of their god, scattered across the Realms. They do this for the glory of Khaine and to see him reborn.

[[Just As Planned|But they are nearly all of them deceived]].

Morathi claims to speak for Khaine, and she does wield his unbreakable iron heart, but none know that Morathi’s power is a lie and that Khaine is dead. While their devotions to Khaine could one day lead to his rebirth, Morathi is deliberately preventing that. The reason for this is that she is siphoning the power - either by co-opting it before it reaches the heart or pulling it from Khaine's heart - to reach godhood herself. The prayers that her daughters scream and the ritual offerings they make only serve to enhance her own power, not Khaine’s. Outside Morathi herself, only a handful of the "altered" members of the Daughters of Khaine are aware of this deception, and they, willingly or otherwise, are bound by the most binding of oaths and magic to serve Morathi and keep this secret. Also, the blood surplus poured into the Cauldron's doesn't go to Khaine. It flows back to Hagg Nar through Morathi’s magics, to the Mother of all Cauldrons, the Máthcoir, from which The High Oracle absorbs and repurposes the blood’s energies for her own nefarious gain.

==Society==
Their society is brutal, especially given that it's leader is [[Morathi]] and they worship [[Khaine]]. They serve Khaine with fanatical devotion, which is especially problematic considering that Khaine is the god of murder. While the Daughters of Khaine crave bloodshed and murder, they serve alongside the forces of Order – albeit tenuously. Given their tendency towards collateral damage (and rumors of kidnapping innocents and gruesome rituals), they are less respected allies and more tolerated because they're useful. Their views on the other major groups are varied. As builders of cities and civilizations, the Daughters of Khaine are at odds with the forces of Destruction. While it is said that they have an aversion to the Death faction because of a dislike for anything death-related since they nearly went extinct, it's more likely that this due to Morathi's personal grudge against Nagash for striking her and outing her true from to the rest of the pantheon. Despite their distaste for the other two, the one faction they truly hate is Chaos; they could give the Stormcast Eternals a run for their money in hating Chaos, and prosecute their crusades with particular violence against the servants of Slaanesh.

If you're wondering why Morathi is mentioned so often that's deliberate; Morathi keeps as much of a stranglehold on Khainite society as she can. It would be out-of-character for her to do anything less (she kind of a control freak). All Khainites are either warriors that serve in their religious order, or they are leathanam (see below). Temples are found only in some realms; confirmed realms are Ulgu, Azyr and Ghyran. When they are not fighting, the Witch Aelves and Sisters of Slaughter usually participate in ritualized gladiator matches or shady pit fights. They also partake of a form of bladed dancing for the entertainment of others. Despite being a theocratic society, the Daughters of Khaine don't proselytize or win converts; the adherents are themselves the result of a breeding program, choosing their partners in line with the aims and desires of their leaders.

The female aelves tend to dye their hair with blood and, in a throwback to Warhammer Fantasy, have rituals of rebirth keep the covenite sisters youthful in appearance and supple in body. Even among their ranks, there are some who are considered extremists; the Sisters of Slaughters' are members who graft masks of living metal to their faces with boiling blood. While the aelven members are accepted by others, the Melusae and Khinerai are not. When fighting alongside, they are concealed by a glamour so they too appear to be aelves; this could also explain some of their teamkilling tendencies among alliances with other Order factions, as they're keeping the existence of these mutated elves secret. After Morathi's apotheosis, the Melusai and Khinerai have openly appeared, and are touted as proof of Morathi's divinity.

If you're wondering "where are the men? They have to reproduce somehow", well... remember that leathanam class mentioned earlier? Apart from the Doomfire Warlocks, this class is made up exclusively of '''all''' the males in this faction; the men are disregard menials, worker drones who do the non-fighting stuff that keeps society going in a literal gender-based [[Slavery|slavery]] system (we know what you're thinking. Something, something, feminist fantasy... and we know how [[SJW|certain groups]] would react if the genders were swapped). While the women outnumber the men, this is not the paradise [[/d/|some]] think it would be; Morathi deliberately made only a few male aelves, and then only from the weakest and most broken of souls retrieved from Slaanesh. Even male aelves a Daughter of Khaine gives birth to are literally cursed with weakness as Morathi siphons part of their souls to power the Cauldrons of Blood... and yes, Morathi instituted the rule that the males are slaves. Surprisingly, the women are not misandric or female supremacists towards outsiders except for individual cases. This makes sense when you remember that, as a society, the Daughters of Khaine respect strength above all else and a lot of the mistreatment of their own males is based on their innate weakness... but on the other hand, their males are weak because Morathi deliberately handicapped them, so female supremacy and/or misandry could still be at work. While in theory they worship Khaine, who is male, this was always superficial; when limited to his heart Khaine had no actual say over their actions, and with Morathi merging to become the goddess Morathi-Khaine he might be gone for good.

Among the men, the Doomfire Warlocks are an interesting case. They're stronger due to their mastery of shadow magic, but receive limited training, and Morathi has them branded with mind-control runes ([[Grimdark|while deceiving them into thinking they're protection against Slaanesh]]). They are treated far better than other leathanam and actually join the females in battle, but are still lower status purely because they're male, and are rarely seen by - or ackowledged to - non-Khainites.

tl;dr: They're a matriarchal elven society with penchants for violence, scheming, ruthlessness, misandry and skimpy outfits who originate from a dark realm and follow the commands of a female figure who sometimes mutates her followers to resemble her. [[Drow|Sound familiar]]? (moreso now that Morathi has successfully become a goddess).

==Sects==
The Daughters of Khaine are divided into Sects (previously known as Temples in past lore), in a manner similar to Stormcast Chambers or Sylvaneth Wargroves.

* '''Hagg Nar:''' Hagg Nar lies deep in the Umbral Veil, the darkest region of the Shadowlands. The first and largest of the Daughters of Khaine temples, it was built atop the Hellelux, a geyser of shadow magic that spews shrouding mists. It is home to hundreds of warcovens that are [[Drow|always at each other’s throats for the attention of Morathi, who encourages this “rivalry” as a means of weeding out the weak]].
* '''Draichi Ganeth:''' Draichi Ganeth, which translates as ‘the bladedkillers’, are the Khainite Aelves most commonly seen by other Order factions. Their main temple is found in the northern barrens of Fuarthorn in Ulgu, but their war pilgrimages and lesser shrines can be found across the realms. Every [[Cities of Sigmar|free city]] has seen or is host to a small troupe of the Draichi Ganeth, who look down upon the subterfuge and deception of their sister sects. They are known to the Freeguilds as the Executioners Cult due to their blunt and forward style of combat, as well as their penchant for decapitation.
* '''The Kraith:''' The sect known as the Kraith, also called the Crimson Cult, are true disciples of slaughter, and have earned a reputation as the least compromising of all the Daughters of Khaine. Arrogant and nomadic, they have no true temple home, instead traveling from one war to the next as they believe Khaine’s one and only temple is the blood stained battlefield.
* '''Khailebron:''' This sect has learned well the arts of concealment, stealth and obfuscation. Those who worship at the temples of Khailebron revere the assassin and the unseen killer, and strive to be masters of ambushes and sudden strikes. Where these temples are is known only to Morathi and the Khailebron themselves. Otherwise, they masquerade as wandering performers who showcase an elegant “bladed-dance” for the local populace, while their top killers secretly slit the throats of their targets (including anyone who shows too much disrespect to the dancers).
*'''Khelt Nar:''' Khelt Nar has become the fastest growing of the sects established by Morathi. It began as Ironshard, a single Khainite shrine founded by the High Oracle atop a flat-topped mountain of iron known as the Rothtor. Since then it has expanded to other Realms, including a stronghold in Ghyran, and have been tasked by the High Priestess with clearing out the rampant [[Orruk Warclans|Bonesplitterz]] that plague their territories. Khelt Nar is best known for being composed of deliciously brown dark aelves.
*'''Zainthar Kai''': This reserved sect was born in the Age of Chaos when Morathi (desperate to get a leg up on the Ruinous Powers) decided to infuse a new brood of Scáthborn with three drops of Khaine’s blood. The result is a temple of veritable demi-gods who can call upon the god of murder’s strength in haze of battle, becoming the Shadow Queen’s go-to temple for making her more despised enemies disappear. The temple is mostly led by/comprised of Scáthborn, but there are contingents of Witch Aelves who function as (disposable) work horses.

==Soulbound==
In [[Age of Sigmar Roleplay]], it's established that Daughters of Khaine are selected to become Soulbound when Morathi decides that a potentially stray from the ranks of her faithful is too dangerous or too useful to just dispose of outright. Soulbound Daughters are selected from the overly ambitious, those who secretly yearned for freedom, and even those who had begun to doubt Khaine's divinity, basically serving as a way to remove potential threats to Morathi's control over the faction. Despite their origins, though, Morathi often goes out of her way to maintain a good relationship with "her" Soulbound (in fact, the Binding actually servers the magical restrains that Morathi uses to control the Daughters as a whole), because, whatever else they may be to her, they are both useful as powerful yet neutral arbiters and as ambassadors of her "good intentions" to the other powers of Order.

Normal Daughters of Khaine are unsure of how to regard their Soulbound "sisters", since they are simultaneously very dangerous, but not rivals due to being forever outside the hierarchy of the temples, apparently favored by the High Oracle but yet also deeply connected to and regularly traveling alongside "outsiders" who shouldn't be privy to the secrets of Khaine's temples. They tend to default to "respectful suspicion" when interacting with Soulbound Daughters.

The Daughters of Khaine have the fewest dedicated Archetypes in the Age of Sigmar Roleplay corebook, with only the '''Hag Priestess''' and the '''Witch Aelf''' open to them.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Medusae Shrine.jpg|<s>Boobflash</s> Bloodwrack Shrine in all its glory.
File:Temples of Khaine.jpg
File:Daughters of Khaine Slaughter.jpg
File:Daughters-of-khaine-4.jpg|Dark Elves, now with 50% more [[Snek|Sneks]].
File:I might you never know.jpg
File:Drkelf.png|A typical Khelt Nar aelf.
</gallery>

{{Template:Playable Factions in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar}}

[[Category:Age of Sigmar]]
[[Category:Dark Elves]]

Xeelee Sequence

2021-02-25T01:19:44Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Interim Coalition of Governance */

{{Grimdark}}
{{Awesome}}
[[File:View_of_the_xeelee_ring_by_steve_burg-d4kvuvu.jpg|660px|thumb|center|WH40K is Grimdark? Their universe is a shitty place to live? Oh, that is just fucking '''''adorable'''''.]]

'''Xeelee Sequence''' is a series of [[Hard Science Fiction|hard]] (ish) science fiction novels and short stories written by British author Stephen Baxter, which spans billions of years of fictional history (leaving 40k in the dust with its "mere" 10,000), with plots revolving around theoretical physics, futurology, multiple universes, artificial intelligence, faster-than-light travel, and the usual existential and social philosophical issues that tend to go with such works.

Most relevant to /tg/'s interests, though, is that Xeelee is [[grimdark]]. Like, holy shitballs, final word on the matter, makes 40k look like Sesame Street with butterflies and rainbows in comparison, '''grimdark'''. The Interim Coalition of Governance, just to pick one example, is arguably the most grimdark galactic government in all of fiction, even giving [[1984]] a run for its money, although the Empire of Sol and the Holy Superet Church of Light come pretty close to being a bunch of amoral dipshits. The Xeeleeverse is a place where the concept of hope and humanity has been forgotten so hard that trillions of child soldiers are sent to fight (and get slaughtered) in a war they don't have a hope in hell of winning, and the Coalition knows it and doesn't care. All in all, there is a '''''good reason''''' why the Xeelee used to be the main image of the Grimdark template you see above, for a ''very'' good reason.

==Plot in a Nutshell==
[[File:D8pnzvk-f1122a2a-0f2e-4853-9beb-5806147475bc.jpg|350px|right|thumb|And you thought the [[Old Ones]] were ancient. Credits to [https://www.deviantart.com/frogisis/art/Prehistory-526839392 Frogisis].]]
To make things short and easy, the entirety of the Xeelee Sequence is centered around the cosmic war between the Xeelee, the masters of 'baryonic' matter (AKA normal matter for us non-scientist plebeians) and the Photino [[Tzeentch|Bird]]s, the masters of dark matter. The war stretched through the entire timeline, from the split microseconds of the Big Bang to the heat death of the entire universe. The war started because the Photino Birds as creatures made from dark matter, wanted to make their home a little bit more comfy, and in order to do this they decide to unintentionally [[Grimdark|exterminate all Baryonic lifeforms in the entirety of the universe by reducing all the stars into white dwarfs via accelerated cosmic heat death.]] The Xeelee understandably did not like the idea of some home invader trying to do a home deco around their turf and the battle begin. Yes, you hear us right, the entire war was due to the Photino Birds, for all intents and purposes, searching for a comfier home to live in. Essentially, the war stretched throughout all of time, since almost every major race in the Xeelee Sequence have weaponized Time Travel, and since Stephen Baxter <u>'''KNOWS'''</u> his science better than most sci-fi authors, FTL travel has significant affects on time dilation. Granted, his work relied a lot on speculative physics; for example, The Great Attractor has proven to be much less massive than what was thought when the novel was written and has an even larger mass concentration behind it.

But what about us [[human]]s? We got our asses kicked by two alien races; the Squeem and Qax, and the latter of the two was so traumatic that it turned humanity into one of the most xenocidal forces in all of science-fiction. Seriously, the [[Imperium of Man]] has nothing compared to these assholes, and no chapter in human history was so downright depressing and fucked up as Qax occupation. Humanity has reached to the point that it wants to force the one Xeelee inhabiting the Milky Way to GTFO because they thought the giant Cosmic Ring that the Xeelee was making was a weapon designed to destroy humanity ([[Derp|when in reality the Ring was made by the Xeelee to save ''ALL'' Baryonic lifeforms, including humans, and bring them a new Universe]]). This understandably annoyed the shit out of the Xeelee, so they decided to leave the galaxy. And what did humanity do after the Xeelee left? [[Horus Heresy|It collapsed into a wide scale civil war before being unified by another tyrannical regime,]] [[Age of Strife| and then humanity evolved into different species and fought each other in the period known as the Bifurcation, some humans losing their consciousness in the process of evolution.]] In the following millions of years, the descendants of humans have annoyed the Xeelee to the point that they got fed up with our shit and decide to lock the entire Sol System in a fourth-dimensional prison [[Grimdark|while leaving pretty much 99% of humanity to die off.]] The only humans who are actually doing OK (sort of) are the passengers of the Great Northern, a generation ship that predated all the asshole empires, wound up stuck five million years in the future, and promptly made a beeline for Xeelee-controlled space to hide.

Unfortunately for the Xeelee, dark matter outnumbers and outmasses baryonic matter 9-to-1, meaning that the war was long-decided eons ago. Desperate, the Xeelee decide to create the aforementioned Cosmic Ring to open a gateway to a new universe to escape to. The Photino Birds find this giant Cosmic Ring to be a threat and decide to destroy it, and almost succeed - but in the end, the remaining Xeelee, humans and other baryonic lifeforms managed to escape into the new universe, leaving the old Universe to be conquered by the Photino Birds. [[Grimdark|Those unfortunate chaps who missed their chance would die a slow and painful death as their universe becomes unfit to uphold baryonic life.]]

==Notable Factions==
There are multiple factions that spanned the entirety of the Xeelee Sequence. Here are some notable examples.

===Xeelee===
The main "mascot" faction of the entire series, the Xeelee are the undisputed masters of all Baryonic life. They are made from space-time defects and were born in 10<sup>−43</sup> seconds after the Big Bang during the Planck Epoch, where the four fundamental universal forces (Gravity, Electromagnetism, Strong and Weak Nuclear Forces) have yet to diverge; ergo physics were still fused under the Grand Unified superforce AKA GUT (Grand Unified Theory). The Xeelee are so far up on the technological scale that they might as well be gods. Their most notable vehicles are the Xeelee Nightfighters, and in most cases the Nightfighters ARE the Xeelee themselves. These chumps make the [[Necrons]] look like [[Orks]] in comparison. Seriously, not only do they weaponize Time Travel, they also have the ability to use ''entire'' <u>galaxies</u> as ''literal'' building blocks to create mega structures, such as the Xeelee Ring (or Bolder's Ring to humans). They also use said Galaxies as glorified missile defense systems by ''flinging the entire fucking Galaxy at whoever pissed them off''. They are tough enough to laugh off attacks from guns that shoot neutron stars and ''black holes'' at 99.c the speed of light, and they come in the untold trillions. These guys are one of the apex predators in all of Science Fiction. They are not to be fucked with.

===Photino Birds===
The Photino Birds are the main adversaries to the Xeelee and the undisputed masters of all dark life, with absolute mastery over dark matter. Unfortunately for the Xeelee, dark matter just so happens to outmass Baryonic matter 9-to-1, meaning that the Xeelee are outnumbered and out-[[Dakka]]'d. First encountered somewhere between the late Planck Epoch and the early Hadron Epoch 20 microseconds after the Big Bang. They are acausal, von Neumann swarms of self-replicating dark matter entities who are not bound by the affects of temporal entropy. The Photino Birds attempted to destroy the Xeelee Ring, as they view it as a threat to their manifest destiny on making the universe more comfy for them, preventing the baryonic lifeforms from ever achieving a safe haven in which to live. In a nutshell, these guys are selfish dicks who can't even share the same bed with the Xeelee, and instead try to create a complete mess of the Universe instead. All because the Xeelee held most of the blanket when they try to go to sleep. They are responsible for creating a war (to use "war" generously; the slaughter is so one-sided that some books imply ''the Birds didn't even realize the Xeelee existed'') that makes the [[War in Heaven]] look like a well-accustomed tea party in comparison.

===Interim Coalition of Governance===
[[File:Xeelee_sequence_exultant_greenship_color_sketch.jpg|400px|right|thumb|Artwork of an ICoG Greenship. [[MOAR DAKKA|Possessing more firepower than the entirety of Segementum Solar, ''combined''.]]]]
What can be briefly described as the [[That Guy|Khmer Rouge on Bath Salts with its Head of State as Pol Pot on Acid and jacked up to interstellar levels.]]

The ICoG was one of the major human governing polities that emerged after the Qax occupation, which forcefully [[Grimdark|deleted most of human history and forced humanity into a multi-billion year PTSD]]. The ICoG is identifiable by two things: the first is that they are complete dicks that makes [[Eldrad]] look like a gentleman, and the second is that they are xenocidal as fuck. The ICoG is one of the most oppressive and [[grimdark]] factions in all of science fiction, which is an impressive feat all by itself. The ICoG makes you hate humanity. Seriously, these guys are just ''evil''.

The ICoG spent the lives of countless children, all in a gamble to get rid of the Xeelee from their galaxy and become the dominant lifeforms in the entire universe. They exterminated countless aliens who were in their way, and reduced those who surrendered to a fate worse then death. They commit countless atrocities, not because they are [[Imperial Guard|backed into a corner]], but just so they can sate their wounded and shattered egos, which never truly recovered from their occupation by the Qax. They are absolute hypocrites and liars that makes the [[High Lords of Terra]] look competent. They created such a totalitarian shithole, not because of some pseudo-philosophical [[Communism|bullshit]], but because they are a bunch of spiteful pricks who want to make their people suffer. They want to channel their suffering and hate towards the Xeelee, who are trying to save them from the Photino Birds. And what did the ICoG do once they finally drove the Xeelee out of the Milky Way? Did they usher in a new golden age or do they amend their crimes? Nope they immediately fell into civil war before being unified by another tyrannical regime, which also quickly collapses. Seriously, fuck the ICoG, just fuck 'em. When we mean the combined and concentrated [[Grimdark]] from all of WH40K still pales in comparison to just the ICoG itself, '''<u>WE FUCKING MEAN IT.</u>'''

==Shortlist of [[Grimdark]] Shit in the Sequence==
[[File:2vaeaod7lc461.jpg|400px|right|thumb|It's like the [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism] but the control panel has completely broken off. [[Meme|As they say, there is always a bigger fish.]]]]
This is just a small taste on why the Xeelee Sequence is a pants-shittingly terrifying place to live in.

*It is already a foregone conclusion that the entire Universe [[Grimdark|will die a slow and painful death.]]
*Before the really bad shit starts happening, humanity was fucked up from the start. The Holy Superet Church of Light raised a girl called "Lieserl" as one of their projects, innocent enough right? Well she was infused with nanomachines which caused her to grow to the age of 90 years in 90 days. She was downloaded into a virtual copy, dropped into the sun, to monitor the Photino Bird threat and forgotten about.
*Empress Shira, a girl from a Qax-occupied future, subjugates Earth and makes them believe in a bullshit religion worshipping the sun, in an attempt to not get occupied in this timeline. Well her Empire was the most oppressive and amoral empire yet. For instance, one of her guards found an unauthorized colony of humans living out of the Solar System, and disassembled it, putting all of the inhabitants into stasis pods. Alpha Centauri, one of their colonies, didn't handle the situation any better, unleashing a data-virus on the Earth and hitting it with asteroids, causing tsunamis until Shira gave up. She still didn't prevent Earth from being occupied by the Squeem or Qax. Also, the bad shit is only getting started.
*The entire Human race has its culture and history destroyed by the Qax in order to pacify and turn them into useful slaves. Literally, we mean using nanites to kill plants and destroy fossil records. Qax blow bubbles into the bedrock called [[Hive World|Conurbations]] which are basically hive cities shaped like domes and absolutely MISERABLE to live in.
**Oh did we forget to mention, Conurbations are meant as temporary structures. When the Qax left Earth, no new Conurbations could be built. This resulted in Conurbations becoming unlivable, fucking fantastic.
*The Qax occupation deliberately altered the Earth's biosphere, causing mass extinction and pushing the human race on the brink of catastrophe. The Squeem on the other hand, dropped bio-engineered plagues to extirpate out a large segment of humanity's population, and froze the entire fucking oceans using electricity in a process called "polar cubic ice".
**The Qax leaving did not end happily for humanity. As seen above, the Qax were the ones who made new Conurbations, and also provided food to all the humans. People were homeless and starving, trying to grow food in the nanite-fucked ground, but they couldn't. Also the Green Army deliberately withheld rations from the people.
*Human traitors who sold out their race to the Qax are given genetic engineering to become immortal 'Pharaohs'. The immortality, however, is random especially for their children, as sometimes their kids are [[Loli|stuck being an]] [[Shota|8-year-old ''forever''.]] Or, in some cases, stopped growing in-utero, forcing the mother to commit an abortion.
*The Silver Ghosts also abducted humans to keep as samples for experiments. Alien Joseph Mengele, hurray. One of their subjects, labeled "five" was raised differently from humans. When she was extremely young, some human samples who broke into the facility had the audacity to subdue and rape her. What a warm welcome into humanity.
*When the ICoG exterminated the Silver Ghosts, they kept some of their genetic samples so they could use their skin for augmented purposes. [[Flayed Ones|Ergo, they reduced an entire race into cosmetic farm animals to be harvested and the humans wear them as skin.]] This applies the same to any aliens exterminated by humanity.
*Humanity went on a mass universal xenocide campaign before entering a 500,000-year siege in the Lanikea Galactic Supercluster. You'll be thankful when the Xeelee put an end to humanity's brutal curbstomping of every Xenos species.
*The way the Xeelee exterminated humanity was unbelievably brutal, they planted a Xeelee Flower in every star and covered it in XCM (Xeelee Construction Material). While everyone froze to death, the Xeelee provided booths for humanity to escape into (because they aren't a bunch of fucking monsters, they were trying to stop humanity's murder-rampage), and a four-dimensional prison for them to rot in.
**Going on the theme of humanity's murder-rampage, they sent a Xeelee Nightfighter back in time to interrupt Michael Poole's wormhole project, and also kill humanity by firing thousands of diamonds which weigh several thousand tons. Michael drove the single nightfighter back to the galaxy's center with its tail between its legs, but the Nightfighter made sure that humanity would never spread throughout the galaxy and cause pain and misery for themselves and any other species, which the Xeelee was honestly right for doing.
*When the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] stopped innovating, it's because of [[Fail|incompetence.]] When the ICoG stopped innovating it's because there's no point in this [[Grimdark]] future. It makes no difference if you send child soldiers or mechas against the Xeelee, because they'll kill you anyways, so they just send child soldiers because its cheaper.
**Also, the Guild of Engineers are so wung-ho on standardization throughout the galaxy. That means technology stood static for tens of thousands of years. It doesn't matter anyways, because the Xeelee are capable of fucking up even the best technology a human can make.
*Throughout the ICoG's history, the rate of interservice abuse was so extreme, that the commissaries (Their version of the Commissar) routinely [[Blam|beat their conscripts to death.]] [[Grimdark|Do take note that all these conscripts are ''children''. So expect a ''LOT'' of child abuse.]] It gets to the point of being borderline uncomfortable to read.
**In the short story "Riding the Rock," the Interim Coalition of Governance took over a world and proceeded to condition the children into child soldiers. They took a school, which honestly was like Pol Pot's S-21, and forced the children to do unspeakable things: they beat them to death, forced them to fight, and tried to "breed out their emotions" to prepare them to fight the Xeelee.
**Because the ICoG has time travel if you did an oopsie, every single variant of your past, present and future self will either be tortured to death or get a summary kicked to the jaw for a crime you have yet or have not commit.
**Hama Druz was a bitch to the highest degree. He organized a witch hunt on all the Jasofts and Pharaohs (human collaborators who served the Qax), even though they were the last remembers of Earth and only serving the Qax out of necessity, and most Pharaohs were TRYING TO HELP HUMANITY DURING THE RULE OF THE QAX. Hama, being the racist twat, proceeded every abhuman species which evolved in the universe. Needless to say, most human settlements were less-than-thrilled to join the Third Expansion. Also did we forget to mention, Hama Druz continued the Extirpation, which was ''deleting every bit of old data** like how the Qax did, honestly what the fuck.
*Humans in the ICoG are indoctrinated by birth about the Druz Doctrine and, unlike the half-assed attempts of the Imperium to issue autocratic control, [[1984|the ICoG goes full 1984 and have near totalitarian surveillance right down to control of your timeline.]]
*You'll be living in a barracks ball: a spherical conurbation where you live with your cadre of child soldiers, where you'll ride a Greenship straight to your death, or you'll live on a rock: a filthy and miserable environment where you'll work until you die by the hands of the Xeelee. So many children are expended, their names had to be etched on the wall via nanotechnology. Talk about literally becoming a statistic.
*If you somehow manage to avoid being conscripted into the Green Army as a child soldier, then you will be living in a coalescence, a literal human ant farm built out of faeces with a million people crammed into a space the size of a city block. They make the underhive of a [[Hiveworld]] look pristine in contrast.
**Coalescences half a million years later evolved into even more nightmarish versions, with humans preforming functions with their own bodies such as recycling air, recycling shit. Yes, we mean post-humans swimming in shit and converting it into food.
**These nightmarish environments evolve wherever there is massive overcrowding and nowhere else to go. This can happen to any society, and evolved in Rome, Mars, and on a Xeelee structure called the "Wheel" which is a smaller dollar-store knockoff of Bolder's Ring.
*Many of the ICoG's child soldiers are bred from either vats or 'breeders' from Coalescences. [[NSFW|Breeders are human Martian females that are pumped with so many hormones and genetic engineering that their stomachs balloon-up with the number of babies they are carrying.]] [[FATAL|Breeders are essentially impregnated the moment they menstruate and continue the rest of their lives shitting out <s>babies</s> child soldiers until they expire.]] Human females in the Xeelee are reduced to birthing sows. [[Grimdark|Yes, this is state-sanctioned child rape.]] [[Daemonculaba]], eat your heart out.
*The ICoG forbids <u>ALL</u> forms of heroism as it runs counter to the Druz Doctrine and risks splitting humanity apart due to the dangers of individualism and egotism being a potential byproduct of heroic deeds. So if you wanna be a goody-two-shoes and save someone by ignoring orders like [[Star Wars|Luke Skywalker]] or sacrifice yourself for the greater good like [[WH40K|Sanguinius]], the ICoG would go back in time to arrest you, charge you and than [[Blam|execute you]] if you're the former, or erase your existence from history if you're the latter, or do both if they are feeling particularly spiteful today. The ICoG wants you to die like a bitch, so you will die like a <u>''BITCH''</u>.
*The ICoG's motto is "A brief life burns brightly". They mean it ''literally'', with the average lifespan of a human being measured 16 years of age at most, as the majority of humanity are child soldiers bred to die in the front lines. Combine with the mass state-sanctioned child abuse and child rape, the stripping of identity and the fact that the concept of the nuclear family is pretty much extinguished, you will die a brutal and ignoble death, a death which will be reduced to a statistic and quickly forgotten. They make even the callousness of a [[Death Korps of Krieg|Krieger]] and an [[Iron Warriors|Iron Warrior]] look like a bunch of woodland hippies in comparison.
**On average, the life of a Green Army soldier measured in just 1.7 missions before death, with 10 billion child soldiers dying each year. It was estimated that ''30 trillion'' child soldiers died in asteroid trenches surrounding the Milky Way's galactic core for over 20,000 years, just to make <u>''one''</U> Xeelee to fuck off.
*In one short story, during the Squeem Occupation (The first alien occupiers of Old Earth), a couple of human refugees decided to make a break for it. They modified an asteroid by putting a GUT-drive on it and turning it into a spaceship before escaping the Solar System. The Squeem took note of this and launched a GUT-missile that could tracked them, theoretically, '''forever'''. Since missiles have a better thrust-to-weight ratio, it would eventually catch up. In order to avoid being turned into stardust, the humans slowly increased their velocity, in which the missile would respond in kind, creating an intergalactic cat-and-mouse chase. The faster the ship travelled near light speed, the greater the G-force and inertia. Eventually, slowly but surely, [[Grimdark|the crew of that ship would experience every bit of their bones and organs slowly breaking by the crushing G-force.]] Some of the humans commit suicide whilst others uploaded their minds on a computer. Eventually, they manage to get rid of the missile via baiting it in a black hole's event horizon. Unfortunately, this is the Xeelee and Stephen Baxter knows his shit. The faster you go, the more extreme the time dilation. Ergo, once the humans finally got out of the chase, [[Grimdark|several million years have passed. By this point, the Photino Birds have won and they enter a dying Universe.]]
*In another short story, a Human crew encountered a derelict ship, whose hull is seemingly made out of [[Sons of Malice|human bones.]] Once they entered the ship, they realised that the ship was housing a community of degenerate humans that got lost in space. How did they survive for so long without any agriculture? [[NSFW|By turning their women into a literal food vending machine.]] [[FATAL|Yeah, turns out that the skeleton decoration on the ship's hull were actually ''baby bones'';]] [[Grimdark|they literally reduced infants into ration-packs and farmed meat produce.]]
**Baxter has a tendency for flesh-ships. Near the end of the novel "Raft", the main character gets exiled to the Boneys because nobody else would take him. Well, the Boneys are a fucking ''ball of flayed skins and skeletons'' floating in space. These people live in a mini world made of corpses, and eat discarded corpses from the Raft and Belt societies. The whole place smells like rotten corpses, and it's also described as absolutely filthy.
**Keeping in theme with the flesh-ships, Spline ships are massive asteroid-like meatballs a few kilometers wide. It's said to feel like being swallowed, being in a Spline ship.
*One of the ICoG's distant descendants, the Transcendence came to an endpoint, of which they concluded that humanity = suffering, and that it would instead reach into every timeline of every human that has ever existed, would exist, or could exist and just annihilate them; forcing every human who ever lived to experience all the pain and suffering of every other human who ever lived, over the course of quadrillions of relative years. They consider this as 'paradise'.
*Configuration Space from "Reality Dust" is a bunch of bacteria in the Callisto ice neurally and chemically communicating with each other to form a new universe: an island with a mountain of order, and a sea of entropy. This island seems pretty nice, but the ocean is all black and it melts whoever touches it by the power of entropy. There's a community of degenerate humans in this universe which are basically zombies.
**A character was downloaded into this space, and started doing normal shit like eating the grass. She touched the water and melted her fingers off. She saw one of the "zombies" and explored the forest. There, she found even larger, more depraved zombies in the forest.

==Things that make the Xeelee Sequence [[Grimdark|Absurdly and Horrifyingly Overpowered]]==
[[File:LJeEPUd.jpg|500px|right|thumb|Unless you're [[/co/|Marvel/DC]], [[Doctor Who]] or the Downstreamers, this is the most appropriate fate of whoever mess with these fuckers.]]
As you know by now, the Xeeleeverse is not the nicest place to live in; arguably one of the worst settings you could ever conceivably have your unfortunate sorry ass be dropped in. Yet, it is the setting's power capabilities that would truly catch the eye of most of you readers here. There is a reason why the term "Xeeleestomp" is a thing. These guys [[Rape|curbstomps]] [[The Culture]]. Comparisons between WH40K is needed in terms of context. Here is a shortlist that showcase just how overpowered the Sequence truly is:

*Every single faction, even the weakest ones are Type 4 to Type 5 civilizations on the Kardashev Scale. To give you some context, the Imperium of Man is considered a Type 2 Civilization, which means that they control the energy output of multiple star systems, whilst the Necrons and Ancient Eldar are an early Type 3 who controls the energy output of a single Galaxy. In the Xeeleeverse, factions like the ICoG and the Qax - who are Type 4s - are easily harnessing the energy output of ''Galaxy Clusters''.
*Every A.I. and supercomputers in the Xeeleeverse use CTC (Closed Timelike Curve), essentially meaning that they could travel back or forwards in time to achieve unlimited processing.
**The Xeelee themselves one-up this by having the Anti-Xeelee, an A.I. construct made of probability quantum wave functions and is a fixed point in time, meaning that it exists in the beginning, present and end of the Universe, all at the same time.
**The Xeelee' equivalent of a supercomputer is a supermassive black hole. Yes, they use the core of Galaxies as a desktop.
*Every FTL ship is effectively a timeship. Time travel is heavily militarized with ships from various factions going back in time to accelerate the civilizationary progress a hundred-thousand fold or grant their ancestors effective precognition.
*The Space Marines use miniature [[Bolter|rocket launchers]] as standard equipment, whilst other factions use [[Gauss|molecular-disintegrator beams]] and [[Shuriken Catapult|monomolecular shuriken cannons]]. Compared to other Sci-Fi universes, that seems over-the-topped. In the Xeeleeverse, the ICoG's equivalent of the [[Imperial Guard|dudes in T-Shirts]] carries [[Lasgun|Flashlights]] that could turn boats into slag and kill thousands of humans in seconds. Their Flamers act more like Meltas, flash-frying and carbonising people in a near-instant. Their 'Bolter' equivalents are guns that fire GUT-rounds. GUT stands for Grand Universal Theory, or in layman's terms, they are rifles that fire pellets with the mass-energy density of a ''Big Bang'' (approximately 10<sup>-36</sup> seconds at the beginning of time) - ergo, [[Exterminatus|Big Bang Rifles.]] For anti-air purposes, the Green Army ground forces use Monopole Cannons, that fires one-dimensional, space-time defects at near the speed of light as their RPG equivalents. They also have reverse-engineered Xeelee Starbreakers that could rip apart anything, up to and including, entire Stars.
*The average joe in the ICoG wear skinsuits which could affectively negate the melta-level effects of their flamethrowers. Have fun imagining a couple of guys that are almost completely immune to Melta weapons.
*Basic GUT-ship and vehicle weapons from the ICoG involves firing black holes, neutron stars and monopoles at near the speed of light. These black hole cannons mind you, could disrupt the event horizon of a galactic core. The ships themselves could tank a point-blank burn from a Magnetar Eruption and are protected by a Gravastar Shield, which is a pocket dimension that defends them from FTL foreknowledge and other forms of conventional or physical attack.
*Your average tweeb in their mother's basement can make wormholes for shits and giggles.
*The Imperium considers the [[Vraks|Siege of Vraks]] as one of the largest and longest form of trench warfare in their history. The ICoG use ''entire galactic superclusters'' as trenching material on their off days.
*The Silver Ghosts had Quantum Gravity AI that was both acausal and allows it to see the future. Unlike the [[Eldar]] [[Farseer|Farseers]], they are always proven right with flawless precognition.
**They later one-up themselves by creating a Planck Zero AI, which, as its name suggests, lowered Planck's Constant to zero via shoving it in a pocket universe. The A.I. had infinite computational power and could make these computations in zero time.
**When the Silver Ghosts got their shiny skins flayed by child soldiers and hunters, the Quantum Gravity AI was taken and implanted into weaponized humans who could see into the future. In the story "Gravity Dreams," nearly a million years in the future, a boy heard the transmission of a girl in another universe, the same universe of the book "Raft," which was reaching the end of the stelliferous era.
*The Silver Ghosts used teleportation that deliberately increases Planck’s Constant, which in turn, increased the uncertainty principle, which in turn, makes the manipulation of the probability of a given object's place absolute. This range from a single person to entire planets.
*The Silver Ghosts could rewrite the laws of physics. From weakening the electromagnetic force (Thereby increasing the lightspeed constant at the expanse of shaking matter apart) to increasing the strength of gravity by a factor of a billion.
*The Xeelee Nightfighter 'wings' are composed of space-time defects called "Domain Walls" which stretch for tens of kilometres and are constructed from one-dimensional singularities. The materials for the ship itself are called...well...Xeelee Construction Material (XCM for short)(Also called Xeelee Hull-Plate). You know those Big Bang Rifles that the ICoG's basic grunts carry around as mentioned earlier? Yeah, they do as much damage to these Nightfighers as a [[Stubber#Stub Gun|Stub Gun]] could do to Terminator Armour.
*The Xeelee lives off on the event horizons of supermassive black holes. Only extreme gravitational forces or their own Starbreakers could actually harm them. You know the XCMs? Yeah, they violate the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which means all of its atoms share the same quantum state; able to absorb energy with a 100% efficiency. Essentially meaning that using direct energy weapons or exterminatus-level bombs like a Cyclonic Torpedo would do nothing and in fact, [[Troll|may actually ''heal them''.]]
**An example of this is when a human used a literal XCM umbrella to shield himself from an exploding stellar nova.
*Their Nightfighters could stay motionless to going at near the speed of light in a blink of an eye. Their most basic and common weapon, the Starbreaker as mentioned before, are basically black hole lasers that open a wound in space-time - which are also cherry-red in colour due to electromagnetic red-shift - that could blow up a star system for the kicks.
*The Xeelee could reshape and move entire galaxies like lego set-pieces. The construction of the Xeelee Ring was a one-dimensional singularity that was turned into a cosmic string and was big enough to start pulling ''Galaxy Clusters'' into its gravitational well.
*The Xeelee have weapons that could vapourize ''weaponized galaxies''. These are essentially cosmic string anti-air missiles, thousands of light-years wide and moving at over half-light speed to ''bisect entire galaxies''.
*The Photino Birds could use said aforementioned weaponized galaxies as anti-armour weapons.
*The Photino Birds lives off the gravitational and stellar energy of stars. Ergo, they started a mass reconstruction program via the mass accelerated heat death of the Universe, turning every star into a white dwarf, whose long lifespans in the hundreds of trillions maximizes the Birds' comfort and reproduction cycle. This contradicts the Xeelee's way of life as they need the event horizon of a black hole to sustain themselves. Accelerated heat death = no supernova = no black holes. Ergo, war begins.
**The Photino Birds's reproduction is a form of self-cloning or replication. They are in effect, Dark Matter von Neumann swarms.
*The Photino Birds were creating an inertia bomb big enough to shake the Xeelee Ring - a ten million light-years wide construct - into pieces.
*The Photino Birds was making the Xeelee their whipping bitch. Take that into consideration. In other words, they made the strongest beings possibly made out of Baryonic matter flee the universe with their tails in between their legs.
*There are also the Monads which are the 'Gods' of the Xeeleeverse. They live in the 'Bulk', which is the space between universes and are so god damned powerful, they view both the Xeelee and Photino Birds in the same way the Xeelee and Photino Birds view humanity.

==See Also==
*[http://www.stephen-baxter.com/articles.html#xeelee The complete Xeelee timeline]

[[category: Literature]]

Bioware

2021-02-25T00:25:26Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Mass Effect 3 */

{{/vg/}}
[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. There's even some series-essential lore and plot-changing decisions locked away in specific recruitment and loyalty missions (in particular, Mordin's and Tali's missions are absolutely vital regarding the anti-krogan Genophage bioweapon and the geth/quarian conflict. Tali's also set a plot arc for a galaxy-wide threat that could upstage even the Reapers... [[Fail|that got retconned out in the third game]]).

This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience with a trip at the finish line. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy in full force, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before they purge the current galactic civilization.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date, casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen) and left a ship-load of unanswered questions. The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-received but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan"), but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
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This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
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After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
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===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who travelled through the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's Creator God who may or may not exist - this ambiguity a deliberate move by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one whose gone there since those mages has ever come out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]]. According to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, cultural, political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf peasant who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets framed by your younger brother). When a Grey Warden leader rescues you, you've proven your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.

Bioware

2021-02-25T00:23:46Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Mass Effect 3 */

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[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. There's even some series-essential lore and plot-changing decisions locked away in specific recruitment and loyalty missions (in particular, Mordin's and Tali's missions are absolutely vital regarding the anti-krogan Genophage bioweapon and the geth/quarian conflict. Tali's also set a plot arc for a galaxy-wide threat that could upstage even the Reapers... [[Fail|that got retconned out in the third game]]).

This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience with a trip at the finish line. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy in full force, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before they purge the current galactic civilization.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date and casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen). The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-recieved but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan") but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
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This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
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After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
</div>
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===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who travelled through the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's Creator God who may or may not exist - this ambiguity a deliberate move by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one whose gone there since those mages has ever come out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]]. According to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, cultural, political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf peasant who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets framed by your younger brother). When a Grey Warden leader rescues you, you've proven your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.

Bioware

2021-02-25T00:22:59Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Mass Effect 3 */

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[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. There's even some series-essential lore and plot-changing decisions locked away in specific recruitment and loyalty missions (in particular, Mordin's and Tali's missions are absolutely vital regarding the anti-krogan Genophage bioweapon and the geth/quarian conflict. Tali's also set a plot arc for a galaxy-wide threat that could upstage even the Reapers... [[Fail|that got retconned out in the third game]]).

This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience with a trip at the finish line. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before the galaxy breaks apart and descends into chaos.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date and casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen). The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-recieved but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan") but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
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This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
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After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
</div>
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===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who travelled through the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's Creator God who may or may not exist - this ambiguity a deliberate move by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one whose gone there since those mages has ever come out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]]. According to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, cultural, political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf peasant who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets framed by your younger brother). When a Grey Warden leader rescues you, you've proven your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.

Bioware

2021-02-25T00:22:37Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Mass Effect 2 */

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[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. There's even some series-essential lore and plot-changing decisions locked away in specific recruitment and loyalty missions (in particular, Mordin's and Tali's missions are absolutely vital regarding the anti-krogan Genophage bioweapon and the geth/quarian conflict. Tali's also set a plot arc for a galaxy-wide threat that could upstage even the Reapers... [[Fail|that got retconned out in the third game]]).

This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience that happened to have quite a bad ending. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before the galaxy breaks apart and descends into chaos.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date and casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen). The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-recieved but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan") but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">
This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
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===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who travelled through the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's Creator God who may or may not exist - this ambiguity a deliberate move by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one whose gone there since those mages has ever come out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]]. According to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, cultural, political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf peasant who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets framed by your younger brother). When a Grey Warden leader rescues you, you've proven your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.

Bioware

2021-02-25T00:16:05Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Mass Effect 2 */

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[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. There's even some series-essential lore and plot-changing decisions locked away in specific recruitment and loyalty missions (in particular, Mordin's and Tali's missions are absolutely vital regarding the anti-krogan Genophage bioweapon and the geth/quarian conflict. Tali's even set a plot-thread for a galaxy-wide issue threat that could upstage even the Reapers [[Fail|if the third game hadn't retconned it]]).

This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience that happened to have quite a bad ending. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before the galaxy breaks apart and descends into chaos.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date and casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen). The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-recieved but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan") but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
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This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
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After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
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===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who travelled through the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's Creator God who may or may not exist - this ambiguity a deliberate move by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one whose gone there since those mages has ever come out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]]. According to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, cultural, political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf peasant who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets framed by your younger brother). When a Grey Warden leader rescues you, you've proven your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.

Bioware

2021-02-24T23:57:14Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Dragon Age: Origins */

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[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience that happened to have quite a bad ending. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before the galaxy breaks apart and descends into chaos.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date and casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen). The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-recieved but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan") but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
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This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
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After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
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===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who travelled through the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's Creator God who may or may not exist - this ambiguity a deliberate move by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one whose gone there since those mages has ever come out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]]. According to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, cultural, political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf peasant who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets framed by your younger brother). When a Grey Warden leader rescues you, you've proven your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.

Bioware

2021-02-24T23:50:26Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises */

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[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience that happened to have quite a bad ending. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before the galaxy breaks apart and descends into chaos.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date and casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen). The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-recieved but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan") but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
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This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
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After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
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===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who entered the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's version of God - whose existence is being kept deliberately ambiguous by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one who goes there comes back out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]] and according to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, history along with political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets back-stabbed by your younger brother), you prove your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.

Bioware

2021-02-24T23:45:46Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:1865:1A69:89F1:EFA0: /* Anthem */

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[[Image:Orig 320200 1 1257581825.png|750px|center|thumb|Remember, class, templates are the beginning of truth, not the end of it. (In other words, take it to the Discussion tab, James!)]]

A major computer game studio primarily driven by two lead designers; their names are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.

One of the most popular RPG game makers of modern day, making titles such as Baldur's Gate , Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. At one point they were working on making a [[Warhammer Fantasy]] MMORPG. Have been brought under the heel of EA Games, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and new staff were brought in to fill the gap, but for now there's still life left in them.

They're currently working on games like Dragon Age 4 and weighing up the future of the Mass Effect franchise.

The company is possibly full of xenophiles, going by Star Wars: the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and family is a recurring theme in their works (especially daddy issues).

==The Rise of Bioware==
Founded by three Canadian doctors in the 90s, Bioware didn't start out publishing RPGs. In fact, it ''started'' doing medical software, before the founders decided to act on their mutual passion for games. Their first game was a [[MechWarrior]]-style simulator game, with the serial numbers filed off. But the founders were all fans of tabletop RPGs, and their second game began life as an independent RPG, but publisher Interplay saw potential in it for hosting their next D&D game, and it became [[Baldur's Gate]], Baldur's Gate became history, and Bioware became renowned as the savior and shining new light for the CRPG.

==Bioware Games==

===Shattered Steel===
A MechWarrior 2 knockoff with less customizability and weirder enemies. No one, not even diehard Bioware fans and video game history nerds, cares about it, so moving on.

===[[Baldur's Gate]]===
The game, the legend, the start of it all. The title that single-handedly saved the CRPG genre from its gloomy slide into irrelevance and [[Blizzard|Diablo-clones]] with smart writing, clever dungeon design, and attempts to actually let the player role-play instead of just throwing in tons of mindless hack-n-slash. Uses a cutdown version of [[AD&D|Second Edition AD&D]] rules, and is generally regarded as one of the best things about the [[Forgotten Realms]] setting. A recent "Enhanced Edition" remake brought it more in line with the sequel, graphics and gameplay-wise, and is well worth a look for the curious.

===MDK2===
This, this is an outlier to everything Bioware was making at the time, considering they were focused on making RPG's with a tight connection to their tabletop counterparts and this is a Run 'n' Gun Third Person Action Adventure Shoot 'em Up. They didn't even make the first MDK, that was Shiny Entertainment (who were also responsible for the Earthworm Jim games).

It is surprisingly good, though it's a bit contested whether it stands up compared to its predecessor. In either way, it sold quite well.

===Baldur's Gate II===
The second game, the even more legendary legend. From dating your adventuring co-workers to taking the piss out of the situation in dialogue, if you love Bioware's stuff it probably has its origin here. Also a pretty badass follow-up/finish to the saga of the first game, and using a fuller set of the game's rules. Don't play it first, you'll fucking ''ruin'' the original for yourself. Recently got an "Enhanced Edition" too, following in the footsteps of the first.
====Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear====
Brand new expansion from the developers of the Enhanced Edition, complete with the ''entire'' cast from the original 20-odd years later. Composed entirely of skub; see the main article for details.

===Neverwinter Nights===
On the one hand, the story and characters are generally regarded as forgettable at best. On the other hand, a pretty good recreation of [[Dungeons & Dragons|3rd Edition]] rules in video game form, and enough fan-made modules and content to make that last complaint rather moot. If you want to try the official stuff, read a summary of the core game and play the "expansion" stories instead (''Shadows of Undrentide'' and ''Hordes of the Underdark''), which start from level one, tell a continuous story, and have Deekin, who is one of the best things about the game.

===Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic===
One of the first [[Star Wars]] RPGs ever made, KOTOR received widespread praise and acclaim for its complex story and well-written characters, including one of the most famous twists in gaming history. Gameplay-wise, a mostly-fun conversion of [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules into the Star Wars universe. Faggots will complain about "binary moral choice" systems because that's the trendy thing to do right now, but it broke ground at the time for actually ''incentivizing'' roleplaying and staying in character in a way few other games had before. Sure, the villain's a bit lame, the finale is just an endless swordfight against armies of piss-easy droids, the level cap's way too low considering the levels you can accidentally essentially waste before you can become a jedi, but on the other hand, ''holy shit I can slice through an army with a lightsaber''. To this day, often held up as one of the best things about the Star Wars brand as a whole.

===Jade Empire===
Kung-fu ''[[wuxia]]'' action brawler glued to a pretty sweet story with ''another'' great video game twist that plays with the "formula" mentioned above more than the chart would suggest. Bioware's first original role-playing setting was something of a sleeper, not selling in great numbers compared to previous efforts, due in part to cutbacks and restraints, but in the present day is well-regarded by most players. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl. If nothing else, it's a rare RPG that lets you [[Fist of the North Star|punch someone's pressure points until they explode in a shower of gibs]].

===Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood===
...Yeah, it happened. Story's okay, the character writing is a highlight, and the gameplay mechanics are at the very least quite creative, but the soundtrack is a goddamn ''abomination'', balance is a distant dream on both sides of the screen, and there's just not enough content to justify its existence. Better than the average 3rd party ''Sonic'' title, but... well, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. And the plot ends on a blatant sequel hook that will never amount to anything.

Behind-the-scenes development drama is the chief culprit: Bioware started out on the title as a bit of a passion project for one of the founders, but after working with Sega turned out to be a pain, Ken Penders kicked up a lawsuit against both SEGA & EA, and ''Dragon Age'' started looming on the horizon, they ultimately rushed the whole thing out under the door partway through to fulfil their contract and breezed away, never looking back.

===Mass Effect===
A cosmic horror story-space opera with much potential; handled properly from start to finish, it could have been to video games what Star Wars is to movies and Star Trek is to television. Despite being a flagship franchise of Bioware, the series ended up being a microcosm of the company's gradual rise and fall.

====Mass Effect 1====
The first game in the series was excellent, with top-notch characters, setting and story. The player character is Commander [insert custom name here] Shepard who can be customized to hell and back. Humanity is new to the scene and wants more of a say in the galactic community; [[Skub|some aliens support this, others think humanity is too greedy/selfish/domineering/impatient/etc]]. Shepard is undergoing assessment for joining a group of galactic peacekeepers called the Spectres, when a race of robots attacks, prompting a galaxy-wide adventure where the player gets to experience a whole new sci-fi setting, fight aliens, slavers and monsters and bang someone on your loveboat, the Normandy. There is MUCH more to the situation than meets the eye (the mission where we see the entire story shift from an action Space Opera to a [[Yog-Sothothery|Cosmic Horror Story]] is EXCELLENTLY DONE).

For 2007, it's pretty gosh darn good; visually it's a bit rough nowadays, and the gameplay is not what you'd call polished, but it's good fun still. A good bunch of the biotic powers can be wildly powerful and do really weird but cool things and there's a lot of powers available to most classes. It's often lauded as the most RPG-like of the Mass Effects, though it doesn't have too much in the way of choice - it's more of a "gain points to get more powerful" than a "customize your playstyle"-kind of RPG. Roleplaying-wise the game is a little weird at times, but very lovable - many characters do the "telling-you-what-you-already-would-know" thing a lot, but since it was the first introduction to the setting, it's justified. The characters are well-established, but arguably doesn't really become great until the next two games. The DLCs were middling at best, and many side-mission were a bit barebones - BUT, for the time, this game is awesome, and introduced the world to the wonderful Mass Effect setting. Listings suggest there's a remaster on the horizon, but aside from nicer graphics and shorter elevators, both of which are already in the PC version with mods, it's unclear what could even be done to the game.

Also famous for the nearly-indestructible-flying-almost-impossible-to-control-never-run-out-of-ammo-but-only-hits-shit-15%-of-the-time-and-then-gives-you-no-XP armoured exploration vehicle of absolute, undiluted [[awesome]], the MAKO.

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudementary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'' for the time, being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming rare even for the time.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies. You're forced to work with an extremist organization from the first game, who are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions were you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively. This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat.

Combat and RPG mechanics took quite a swerve; now there is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than powers. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack).

====Mass Effect 3====
Mass Effect 3 is the most divisive of the three games and was host to some pretty impressive [[Neckbeard|nerd-protests]], but was overall a decent experience that happened to have quite a bad ending. The game starts with the Reapers invading the galaxy, leaving it to Shepard to do the impossible (again) and find a way to stop them before the galaxy breaks apart and descends into chaos.

The game expanded the previously streamlined combat and developed it to a fine point, and the game took another face-lift graphically. The story was overall decently received with a lot of YMMV discussion about how it was handled. Some did not like how some of the plotlines from earlier games were handled, how they were ended and whether or not they even mattered in the first place. Character development takes a bit of a back-seat now that Shepard has been on-board therapist for his entire crew since ME1 and 2 - and somewhat surprisingly, the one who gets the most focus is Shepard themselves, who visibly grows closer and closer to his/her breaking point.

A multiplayer mode was added, which, while originally controversial, turned out to be pretty fun and challenging.

Most of the problems with the third game were because most of the development team for the first two games (including several of the writers and head writer Drew Karpyshyn) quit partway through developing the second game or did not return to work on the third game. Their reasons for this were internal strife with Bioware as [[EA|they were subsumed into EA, conflicts of interest and disagreement over the direction they wanted the story to go]].

But all of this is not what you wanna hear about. You wanna hear about the ending, one of the most derived events in modern gaming history. Without going into too much detail, the ending(s) for the game were immediately seen as some of the worst writing in a game to date and casually ignored most of the choices prior in the trilogy (something the devs had promised wouldn't happen). The result was a several-month long campaign to have the ending changed, which eventually led to Bioware releasing a DLC that added to the original endings. It was well-recieved but many felt it still did not do the games justice - but at the very least it was free. DLCs for the game are considered a mixed bag - Some are quite mediocre (like Omega), while others are considered better than the base game (Citadel). On that note, two story-essential arcs were initially rendered DLC ("From Ashes" and "Leviathan") but they were later integrated into the main game at no extra charge.

A bit of a whimper to end on, but no end to a good journey has ever been perfect.

====Mass Effect: Andromeda====
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This is literally [[Chaos Spawn|what happens if Mass Effect had a child with the Immaterial God of Autism while consuming lead-laced mushrooms, then said spawn got raised by an SJW]]. Expand at your own risk.

tl;dr: It's like Halo with the Mass Effect name plastered on but without subtlety, good writing or good animation.
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After years attempting to essentially build ''No Man's Sky'' inside the Frostbite engine, the old devs got shuffled away, new devs were brought in, handed a pile of assets, and ordered to slap something together and shove it out under the door in a year and a half to recoup costs. Naturally, this went about as well as the last time they tried it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an intergalactic travel/space soap opera plot shoehorned into the story of the original trilogy. You play as a member of the Ryder family, made (in)famous by Alec Ryder, a former war hero and Pathfinder for humanity who was blacklisted from the military for making the illegal AI SAM. There is also his deceased (spoiler - actually terminally ill and cryogenically frozen) wife and his adult children, who are male/female twins the player chooses from for the player character. Alec and a group of rich individuals pooled money and resources to build Ark ships and a knock-off the Citadel called the Nexus to go colonize the Andromeda galaxy (also to escape the Reapers, but that's classified in-universe. At the meta level, even though there are closer galaxies, the devs chose Andromeda because it's the most well-known galaxy besides the Milky Way). During the six century journey, massive amounts of [[Not As Planned]] occur - everyone arrived at different times, the multi-species quarian ark went M.I.A. and humanity arrived last with the human Ark sustaining damage and the non-PC twin rendered comatose. The Earth analog planet chosen for humanity to settle turned out to be uninhabitable for humans, when exploring it you made contact with hostile aliens and after an accident Alec dies saving the player character, who gets SAM implanted in their head and becomes humanity's new Pathfinder.

Throughout the story, the Milky Way races deal with all the socio-political and mental baggage they brought with them from the Milky Way while trying to establish new homeworlds. Along the way, the Initiative meets and interacts with alien races or their technology native to Andromeda. The first are [[Halo|Forerunner]]-expies called the Jaardan who don't appear in the game, but built artificial planets and may have left behind a [[Eye of Terror|semi-solid energy cloud]] that attacks anything near it, is attracted to certain types of technology [[Grimdark|and can shatter planets]]. The second are overemotional furless lizard-cat people with genetic memory called the angara, who struggle to trust aliens after their first contact (with the following race) went badly. The third are the hostile aliens encountered earlier; [[Doctor Who|Dalek]]/[[Halo|Covenant Empire]]-expies called the kett, rocky-looking aliens who worship a scientific genetic assimilation process around which they built an expansionist, eugenicist cult. They're one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] and their leader the [[Archon|Archon]] is the game's [[BBEG]], the ultimate example of the kett's poor writing and arguably Bioware's most poorly-written antagonist. Unlike evil races of games' past (such as Mass Effect's geth and Dragon Age's Darkspawn), the kett aren't really analyzed or given anything more. No seriously, think about this; the Darkspawn were based around the concept of being a "living plague" and "bad guys (the player) wouldn't feel bad about killing", and they had more characterization and deeper lore than the kett.

The characters are almost all two-dimensionally nasty (such as practically every kett), lacking (such as Addison) or divisive (such as Peebee). Even the rare exceptions (such as Vetra) are watered-down versions of characters from the original trilogy, and were it not for that lack of good characters, the soap opera feel might have been forgiven. The few interesting characters barely get fleshed out, such as Bain Massani, son of the bounty hunter Zaeed Massani from the original trilogy's second game DLC, and a few characters from the original trilogy make hard-to-find cameos. Some interesting plot threads with characters and factions are hinted at, such as the disappearance of the quarian Ark ship (later resolved in a novel) and how not all kett support The Archon, but few get resolved and even fewer get resolved well.

The voice acting varies from good to terrible, though the latter outweighs the former along with several poorly written lines; such as the infamous "my face is tired", "I think I really pissed that one off. Maybe because I shot him in the face!" and "...I swear, we're the galactic good guys". There are also many glitches, bugs and instances of sloppy animations such as infamously bad facial expressions and running. Good animation is there (good luck finding it under all the derp though) and the environments while lacking in uniqueness are visually appealing and very open. The combat engine was functional and it probably would have made a good multiplayer, but that's arguably a kiss of death for a CRPG series. And since this is a Bioware game written after 2014, the writers made the mistake of pandering to woke culture and identity politics, especially since at least two key members of the dev team, including a leading writer, were avowed [[SJW]]s - but as was typical of the 'checklist' approach to representation, [https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/underwhelming-gay-romance-options-in-mass-effect-andromeda-disappoints-many-fans/ some people STILL complained] and got [http://blog.bioware.com/2017/06/06/mass-effect-andromeda-patch-1-08-notes/ even more tone-deaf pandering in response].

As far as actual gameplay goes, Andromeda is halfway decent, though quite uninspiring and mediocre at times. One of the few positives is that it takes a more open-world approach similar to the first Mass Effect, as opposed to the less appealing corridor-heavy sequels. The crafting system from the third game returns, along with a mining system that allows wider item access to party members. The combat is fairly solid, if lacking the usual ME polish, with a good amount of depth added by a short-range jump pack and the inclusion of previous classes' abilities and passive skills based on the specialization tree chosen. Even without the controversy, neither gameplay nor story is strong enough to carry each other, and far from up to the usual Bioware standard where it matters.

In closing, the game devs tried to push and capitalize on progressive narratives in a ham-fisted way, neglected to tend to the actual game, and failed miserably on both ends. In addition, the game was ''so'' widely panned that [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio it caused EA to liquidate the game's development studio, not even 6 months after its release] and [http://mashable.com/2017/08/19/mass-effect-andromeda-story-dlc-officially-cancelled/#nrgDvEJVpmqH caused EA and Bioware to discontinue all support for the single player campaign and focus on multiplayer]. EA, already in the midst of subsuming Bioware, has pretty much given up on its lifeless corpse ''not even half a year after release'' due to the game being so subpar and fierce backlash from fans and critics alike.
</div>
</div>

===Dragon Age===
The Dragon Age series is a more blatant example of this degradation.

====Dragon Age: Origins====
The original, Dragon Age: Origins, was a game six years in the making, which shows in good ways (immense depth and craft to the situations encountered) and bad (wonky graphics that looked worse than ''Mass Effect'''s, despite coming out nearly two years later.). While far from being the grimdark spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that Bioware hyped it as, the story of Dragon Age: Origins was above average and possessed an interesting character creation mechanic where your background changed numerous parts of the storyline.

The premise is that your character is a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians in the world, and the story takes place on the continent of Thedas ('''The''' '''D'''ragon '''A'''ge '''S'''etting) in a nameless world. Start your adventure by picking your race as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf, then your class as a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue. The story begins with an explanation of the Blight and the Darkspawn who both caused it and arose from it according to Scriptures from the in-universe religion Andrastianism (a deistic religion centered around a woman called Andraste, whose essentially a combination of The Virgin Mary, Jesus, Muhammad and Joan of Arc). Darkspawn are Orc-like beings similar to Tolkien Orcs who were mutated by a contagious supernatural corruption (which may or may not be a divine punishment) and are also described as a "living plague". This living plague is said (and confirmed in future games) to have originated from a group of mages who entered the Fade (a spirit realm like the [[Warp]] but easier to enter and safely leave) who entered the Golden City (Dragon Age's version of Heaven) then tried and failed to overthrow the Maker (Dragon Age's version of God - whose existence is being kept deliberately ambiguous by the writers). The mages actions turned it into the Black City, a place so dangerous no one who goes there comes back out and [[Malal|even demons avoid it]] and according to the Chantry (Dragon Age's Catholic Church analogue for the religion Andrastianism) this was a punishment from the Maker.

The Darkspawn are normally roving bands, but sometimes they rally under one leader, an archdemon - ancient powerful spirits taking the physical form of dragons, and when this happens it causes an invasion/natural disaster/epidemic called a Blight. During the first one, after much trial and error the Grey Wardens were created and successfully stopped the first Blight by killing the Archdemon leading it and have been a revered order of protectors ever since. However, history along with political and religious differences have divided the peoples of the world and do so between each Blight, and things seem to be coming to a head in the first game. You play through the intro which establishes who you are and what your lot in life is and varies based on what you made your character, then the life you knew gets upended in various grimdark ways (ranging from being the elf who killed a human noble for raping your friend to being a Dwarf prince who gets back-stabbed by your younger brother), you prove your mettle and get inducted into the Grey Wardens to stop the Darkspawn in the human kingdom of Ferelden. Things later go really pear-shaped when the king's general/father-in-law abandoned him to die in battle then framed the Grey Wardens for his death, making Ferelden's best hope outlaws or exiles. While the nations are threatened by a Blight and most of the realms are engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen to unite the shattered lands and slay the current archdemon once and for all.

The character development was good - there are some squadmates who are optional but have fully-fleshed out stories and character arcs. Evidence that things were starting to fall apart were obvious right when you met the questgiver who forced you to buy a DLC pack if you actually wanted to do the quest, but only after giving you the sales pitch. The "expansion pack" Awakening wasn't too bad either, at least if you ignored the fact that it had been visibly rushed and was loaded with gamebreaking bugs.

====Dragon Age II====
The most tragic game on the list. A perfect storm of wrongheaded design and corporate mismanagement, Dragon Age II was dead on arrival - the story veered from one plot thread to the next without any rhyme or reason while being completely disconnected to the previous game, most of the characters were either idiots, one-dimensional, or just plain unlikable, and both clearly put trying to be "different" and "unconventional" on a pedestal over being good. [[Star Trek#Films|'Cause it worked sooo well in ''Generations'', right?]] Gameplay was the worst kind of busywork, consisting of [[Dawn of War 2|running through the same not-even-reskinned maps over and over again]], pressing the same buttons to do the same things to the same generic enemies as they teleport in out of nowhere. All these problems might've been ironed out as development went on, if not for the fact that their [[EA|corporate overlords]] had them rushing the game out in '''less than a year''', in their endless quest to have ''all'' their properties work like the Madden and FIFA games they're used to bankrolling. And when, thanks to ''their'' interference, the game under-performed, EA promptly scrapped the expansion they were building to wrap up the dangling, jangling plot threads.

The game can be skipped entirely without missing anything; the narrator appears again in the third game and summarizes all of the important parts in one conversation. It's actually sort of the point of the story that despite Hawke and company winning every battle they were subsumed by greater forces, everything in their lives falls apart anyway, and nothing they did had any lasting effects.

====Dragon Age: Inquisition====
Dragon Age: Inquisition picked things up... a little. It's certainly the best Bioware game for a while, but a lot of that is because literally everything about the game is risk-averse. Both the story and the gameplay are assembled from pure fantasy cliche and the [[grimdark]] city-based environmental art style prevelant in the previous two games has been replaced with a glorious [[noblebright]] mostly-outdoor setting. The storyline is based on the player character accidentally becoming the [[Mary Sue|Chosen One]] by accidentally picking up a shiny green orb which allows them to fix tears in the fabric of reality. The villain has some interesting implications about the lore of the setting, but the writers never really actually commit to any of that lore, preferring to have it remain as hearsay, and the villain becomes boringly one-dimensionally evil because of that. Gameplay-wise, Inquisition started as an MMO, and you can still feel the MMO influence; you explore about ten wilderness zones which are very large and pretty but have very minimal interaction, spend most of your time running fetch quests, and only hit story beats every three levels or so. Combat is a game of managing cooldowns and throwing particle effects everywhere.

That said, unlike some of the past games from Bioware's decline-and-fall period, Inquisition is actually fun to play. Most of the characters in your party are well-rounded (except for Vivienne and to a lesser extent Sera), there's a ridiculously large amount of party banter, and the romance quests actually feature involving character development instead of being something to add to the checklist. There's even some series-essential lore locked away in some of the romances (in particular, Solas's romance reveals absolutely vital information about the history of the Elven race). The gameplay, cliched and MMO-ey though it may be, is actually involving and fun at times, and the quest to hunt down all ten High Dragons is pretty awesome (as well as being pretty much the only way to get value-for-money from the game's otherwise superfluous crafting system; pretty much every piece of gear you can craft is outclassed by the loot you find from monsters, except for crafted items which use Dragon Bone, which are hilariously overpowered). Certainly not a great game, but it's quite good if you aren't overly sensitive to cliche.

While the main game doesn't add much to the setting's lore (such as the lore around the BBEG), the DLC missions add '''a lot''' of lore to the setting. The first is a mission to help a Dwarf realm plagued by earthquakes and Darkspawn where you learn more about the origins of the Dwarfs and Lyrium (the setting's equivalent of [[Warpstone]]). The second is one where you fight the fanatical followers of a tribal war god while trying to unearth the lost history of the Inquisition (it reveals more about the nature of the human vs Dalish elves conflict). The third takes place after the main game and has the biggest implications of all in the setting, where you start by dealing with political blowback against the Inquisition and end up in a counter-espionage move against qunari assassins and conclude by meeting an elven god whose plans to help the elves endangers the world.

====Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises====
Bioware and EA have announced that there will be a fourth Dragon Age game, called the Dread Wolf Rises. It will revolve around the elven god introduced in the previous game and their his plans for the elves and Thedas. The developers estimated its release to happen three years time from the game's announcement.

However, Dragon Age 4 has already generated massive amounts of [[Skub]]. Several key developers - including Narrative Director John Epler - made announcements on social media about identity politics, stating this game's story [[SJW|will be “political” and that it will be “celebrating our diversity and differences.”]] Even more worryingly, they've dropped lots of buzzwords surrounding EA's push to turn all their series into "live service" model games, supported for years, and right after their previous attempt to do so (see "Anthem" below) fell flat on its ass and died on arrival.

Terrified fans predict this could be the moment when EA finally puts poor Bioware's neck in the guillotine...

===Star Wars: The Old Republic===
{{Main|Star Wars: The Old Republic}}

TL;DR: Bioware aimed to develop an MMO combining the setting and story of KOTOR with the sprawling, open-world appeal of WOW. Delays caused by production caused Bioware to rush development of other games in order to meet fiscal targets. The game itself became more controversial with time as expansion stories seemed to take TOR further away from KOTOR than its 100-year timeskip had already done.

===Anthem===
Anthem is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bioware. Everyone in Bioware was on this project, with many people saying this is the company's do or die game. The game was initially slated for a 2018 release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but this date was moved to February 2019. It is a [[Setting Aesthetics|science fantasy]] game, where humanity has numerous civilizations on a single planet. If all the science fantasy schticks, the armored duds, the emphasis on color and the grind gameplay makes it look a bit like a Warframe/Destiny clone, don't worry - that's exactly what it is.

The story takes place on the planet Coda. Coda was created by mysterious beings called The Shapers, who some humans consider gods; they planned to make the world in nine days but vanished on day three, leaving everything incomplete and hostile, especially for humans. After a brief period of enslavement by aliens, the humans broke free, formed three factions (the Dominion, the Guardians and the Freelancers - the PCs are part of the Freelancers) and began fighting each other. This is where you and your ability to infinitely farm resources and quests for NPCs come in.

Development was rough, with rumors swirling that EA is deliberately putting Bioware in a no-win scenario where no matter what happens, the C-suite has an excuse to exercise more control over or liquidate the studio; given the amount of resources put on this project, if Anthem fails EA will actually take a major financial hit, so all in all Bioware may have become expendable by this point, while if it is a success it could mean supporting and making more games like it instead of the kinds of games fans love and want more of. Worryingly, several members of the dev team left during development, including the lead writer Drew Karpyshyn.

Early "VIP" showcases were a mixed bag - great combat and movement, but otherwise not too impressive. The game didn't really gather any momentum in the hype side of things, and by the point of release, Anthem received mediocre scores at best: with the game having 61 Metascore and 4.1 User score to date. The game has seen been left almost dead in the water; a roadmap to fix the game was introduced and promptly dashed. As of 2020 there's been increasing talk of remastering Anthem, but between fearing a failed remaster, the possibility of forcing people who already brought the game having to pay for the remastered version, and the fact that the both Warframe and even Destiny 2 have done better and are even free-to-play, the chances of a successful revival are very slim. Then in early 2021, Bioware/EA threw in the towel and cancelled the plans for remastering Anthem.

==Associated Games==
Often grouped with Bioware's games, and highlighted as the pinnacles of Bioware's talent, these games were actually made by other, completely-independent, studios: Black Isle Studios and Obsidian, both of which included lot of the same staff. These games used engines developed by Bioware and were licensed by shared publishers, which resulted in graphical and interface similarities. Thus, many players believe that they were made by Bioware when this was not the case.

* [[Planescape: Torment]]
* [[Icewind Dale]]
* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords
* Neverwinter Nights 2

Both of those last two were rushed out for Christmas, NWN2 with only around nine months development, resulting in whole chunks of the game missing and bugs out the ass. Obsidian wasn't allowed to patch either, though much of the lost content has since been restored by fans.

==The Decline of Bioware==
In 2007, Bioware was bought by [[EA]] and since then their games have been slowly declining in quality. It began between the release of the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age: Origins (note how EA isn't shown in the opening credits for ME1). More on this can be found in the entries for those two franchises. Simultaneously, their games since have been characterized by rushed output, bullshit predatory business practices, and terribly prevalent DLC.

Then the founders all left because it just wasn't fun anymore with the glowing eye of Jon Madden/Sauron looking over your shoulder and trimming away all the fat until only a skeleton was left. Followed, in the next few years, by most of the senior writing/production staff. Unfortunately, the people who stepped in, or were put forward by EA, to fill the gaps this mass exodus left tended to be incompetents, and it's shown in their later games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda (see above for more details). They also have developed a rather nasty workplace, pushing their staff extra hard to work long hours to the point where it's causing them emotional and psychological harm. And, of course, EA relentlessly pushes for them to stop making the kinds of popular, deep, well-written single player RPGs that made them famous and that their fans want to play, and instead focus resources on heavily-monetized and monetizable looter shooters or multiplayer modes along with sprinkling in identity politics here and there to pander to the Anglosphere's current zeitgeist.

They haven't yet been sucked bone dry and thrown on the pile like so many other studios "acquired" by the Men From Redwood City yet, but everyone knows it's coming. [http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/mass-effect-andromeda-is-officially-so-bad-it-killed-a-studio With EA liquidating their Montreal-based Bioware studio, it looks like the clock is one minute closer to midnight for Bioware.]

So in short, if you want a good Bioware game, look to the past.