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Bioware

2020-07-02T16:00:25Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258: /* Mass Effect: Andromeda */

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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.

It is surprisingly good.

===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 2006, 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.

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 a year 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 planet 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, the humans broke free, formed three factions (of which the players are a 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.

==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.

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

2020-07-02T15:58:10Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258: /* 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.

It is surprisingly good.

===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 2006, 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.

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 - who was later 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 a year 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 planet 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, the humans broke free, formed three factions (of which the players are a 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.

==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.

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

2020-07-02T15:57:47Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258: /* 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.

It is surprisingly good.

===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 2006, 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.

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 - who was later 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 a year 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 planet 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, the humans broke free, formed three factions (of which the players are a 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.

==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.

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

2020-07-02T15:55:21Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258: /* 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.

It is surprisingly good.

===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 2006, 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.

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).

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 - who was later 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.
</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 a year 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 planet 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, the humans broke free, formed three factions (of which the players are a 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.

==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.

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.

Albedo

2020-07-02T14:39:41Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258:

{{Oldschool}}

Albedo is the proportion of the incident light or radiation that is reflected by a surface from solar radiation, typically that of a planet or moon. It is also a stage of alchemical progression. In /tg/ relevant works, it's the name of the yandere succubus lieutenant from the anime [[Approved anime|Overlord]]. But you're here for the sci-fi RPG

==Overview==
Albedo is a science fiction role-playing game revolving around a conflict between a multi-racial socialist confederation of worlds and a separatist race of militaristic, expansionist, capitalist bunnies.

Yeah, bunnies. Did I mention it was furry? Yeah, totally [[furry]]. Except there is no yiff. Just political arguments and shooting each other.

The game is based off the awesome comic "Erma Felna:EDF" by Steve Gallacci. According to furry historians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom) the term "furry" arose due to discussion of his work.

This should merit him eternal scorn except for two facts. Nobody remembers this seminal work in the field of comic books and those who do must admit his complicated mix of politics, hard sci-fi and military action is pretty cool.

It has seen a number of editions from various publishers. The most recent one is known as Albedo:Platinum Catalyst (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo_(role-playing_game)

Gallacci served in the United States Air Force where he worked as a technical illustrator. Accordingly his comic (and the games based off of it) are peppered with cutaway diagrams of various advanced military vehicles for those into that sort of thing.

==Albedo Combat Patrol==
Interestingly, as of fall 2018 a 28mm tabletop war game for Albedo is being being kickstarted (and has raised over twice its goal) by Sally 4th called Albedo Combat Patrol, and just like the source material, it's actually pretty cool. The game serves as a prequel to the main Albedo story, taking place during the First Lepine War (a rarely and sparsely described event in the backstory of the comic and RPGs, so there's plenty of creative freedom for forging a narrative), and features multi-part miniatures for both EDF and ILR infantry, weapons, terrain, and eventually, even vehicles. Even with the Kickstarter still ongoing, miniatures for basic troop squads and conversion kits are already available, along with a modular terrain set.

Plus you can use the cat conversion kit to make [[Felinid|Felinids]]. So that's something.

==See Also==
*[https://stevegallacci.com/ The comic, available online on the author's website]
*[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/179272384/albedo-combat-patrol-the-28mm-sci-fi-miniatures-ga?ref=home_recommended Albedo Combat Patrol Kickstarter]
*[https://wargamesbuildings.co.uk/epages/950003459.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/950003459/Categories/Albedo_Patrol Albedo Combat Patrol Miniatures]

[[Category:Furry]]
[[Category:Roleplaying]]
[[Category:Skirmish-Level Wargames]]

MYFAROG

2020-07-02T14:23:59Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258:

{{stub}}
[[File:MYFAROG_Cover.jpg|200px|Right|thumb|A Lone knight standing up to a dragon. Nothing we haven't seen before.]]
{{topquote|I don't know whether to give it to a scientist to examine or a priest to exorcise!|Nostalgia Critic (works on the "RPG" Racial Holy War and here)}}

-or the [[Racial Holy War|other]] [[/pol/]] RPG.

Remember [[Grimdark|Norwegian Black metal?]]

Remember Varg Vikernes?

Remember how he burned down all those churches?

Remember how he [[Inquisition|murdered his record manager and bandmate on the suspicion that he was going to try and kill him (in fairness to him, that wouldn't be out of character for the guy because early Norwegian black metal included a bunch of dudes who were pretty grimderp)?]]

Want to play a game made by that same person after they've been given one and a half decades in prison to justify their actions and further affirm their racist beliefs?

Yes? Then, welcome traveller! Your quest ends here.

('''MY''')thic ('''FA''')ntasy ('''RO''')leplaying ('''G''')ame is a pen and paper game created in 2015 by that same murdering, quickly-aging, racial superiority endorsing, and church-burning (though the latter is fervently denied) Norwegian black metal figurehead.

It turns out he is also a fan of old school tabletop RPG's, but this should be no surprise to anyone who's watched interviews with him, seen his [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChBsOxskMpDmBAsgJ91fKcg youtube channel] or listened to the "Dungeon synth" portion of his discography. Either way, it's one point for all the [[Jack Chick|religious nuts]] shrieking about the evils of DnD back in the 80's. Thanks a lot, ya twat.

The game is what you would expect from Varg - A [[Vikings|viking]]-age pastiche setting in which the evil <s>Jews</s>Sicarri are trying to [[Racial Holy War|exterminate the aryan race]] by flooding Europe-- I mean ''Thulê'' with black people-- er, ''Koparmann''. Also, thinly veiled Christians and Muslims are working to take over the world and kill one of the Aryan gods and stick their guy on the throne instead. Women are [[-4 Str|much weaker]] than men and prone to dying in childbirth - just like in [[FATAL]]. Unlike FATAL, this game lacks spells that allow you to cum acid - which you will want to use on your own eyes, because the entire core rulebook is printed in Papyrus and horrifically organized.

While a Modern Day Mythender-style romp where you smack down Yaweh, Jesus, and his angels could be fun for people [[Fedora Masters RPG|from]] [[That Guy|certain]] [[Imperial Truth|groups]], Varg's warped understanding of history, the English language, and humanity in general severely limit his ability to make a playable game. At least FATAL has the advantage of being free.

As long as you come up with your own setting, the rules are actually fairly decent.

==See also==
*[[Hail and Kill]], a metal-based RPG that takes on the conflict between Christianity and Norse Paganism (and, amusingly, has a character based on Varg in it).

[[Category:Roleplaying]]
[[Category:Heresy]]

MYFAROG

2020-07-02T14:16:55Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258:

{{stub}}
[[File:MYFAROG_Cover.jpg|200px|Right|thumb|A Lone knight standing up to a dragon. Nothing we haven't seen before.]]
{{topquote|I don't know whether to give it to a scientist to examine or a priest to exorcise!|Nostalgia Critic (works on the "RPG" Racial Holy War and here)}}

-or the [[Racial Holy War|other]] [[/pol/]] RPG.

Remember [[Grimdark|Norwegian Black metal?]]

Remember Varg Vikernes?

Remember how he burned down all those churches?

Remember how he [[Inquisition|murdered his record manager and bandmate on the suspicion that he was going to try and kill him (in fairness to him, that wouldn't be out of character for the guy because early Norwegian black metal included a bunch of dudes who were pretty grimderp)?]]

Want to play a game made by that same person after they've been given one and a half decades in prison to justify their actions and further affirm their racist beliefs?

Yes? Then, welcome traveller! Your quest ends here.

('''MY''')thic ('''FA''')ntasy ('''RO''')leplaying ('''G''')ame is a pen and paper game created in 2015 by that same murdering, quickly-aging, racial superiority endorsing, and church-burning (though the latter is fervently denied) Norwegian black metal figurehead.

It turns out he is also a fan of old school tabletop RPG's, but this should be no surprise to anyone who's watched interviews with him, seen his [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChBsOxskMpDmBAsgJ91fKcg youtube channel] or listened to the "Dungeon synth" portion of his discography. Either way, it's one point for all the [[Jack Chick|religious nuts]] shrieking about the evils of DnD back in the 80's. Thanks a lot, ya twat.

The game is what you would expect from Varg - A [[Vikings|viking]]-age pastiche setting in which the evil <s>Jews</s>Sicarri are trying to [[Racial Holy War|exterminate the aryan race]] by flooding Europe-- I mean ''Thulê'' with black people-- er, ''Koparmann''. Also, thinly veiled Christians and Muslims are working to take over the world and kill one of the Aryan gods and stick their guy on the throne instead. Women are [[-4 Str|much weaker]] than men and prone to dying in childbirth - just like in [[FATAL]]. Unlike FATAL, this game lacks spells that allow you to cum acid - which you will want to use on your own eyes, because the entire core rulebook is printed in Papyrus and horrifically organized.

While a Modern Day Mythender-style romp where you smack down Yaweh, Jesus, and his angels could be fun for people from [[That Guy|certain]] [[Imperial Truth|groups]], Varg's warped understanding of history, the English language, and humanity in general severely limit his ability to make a playable game. At least FATAL has the advantage of being free.

As long as you come up with your own setting, the rules are actually fairly decent.

==See also==
*[[Hail and Kill]], a metal-based RPG that takes on the conflict between Christianity and Norse Paganism (and, amusingly, has a character based on Varg in it).

[[Category:Roleplaying]]
[[Category:Heresy]]

MYFAROG

2020-07-02T14:15:49Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258:

{{stub}}
[[File:MYFAROG_Cover.jpg|200px|Right|thumb|A Lone knight standing up to a dragon. Nothing we haven't seen before.]]

-or the [[Racial Holy War|other]] [[/pol/]] RPG.

Remember [[Grimdark|Norwegian Black metal?]]

Remember Varg Vikernes?

Remember how he burned down all those churches?

Remember how he [[Inquisition|murdered his record manager and bandmate on the suspicion that he was going to try and kill him (in fairness to him, that wouldn't be out of character for the guy because early Norwegian black metal included a bunch of dudes who were pretty grimderp)?]]

Want to play a game made by that same person after they've been given one and a half decades in prison to justify their actions and further affirm their racist beliefs?

Yes? Then, welcome traveller! Your quest ends here.

('''MY''')thic ('''FA''')ntasy ('''RO''')leplaying ('''G''')ame is a pen and paper game created in 2015 by that same murdering, quickly-aging, racial superiority endorsing, and church-burning (though the latter is fervently denied) Norwegian black metal figurehead.

It turns out he is also a fan of old school tabletop RPG's, but this should be no surprise to anyone who's watched interviews with him, seen his [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChBsOxskMpDmBAsgJ91fKcg youtube channel] or listened to the "Dungeon synth" portion of his discography. Either way, it's one point for all the [[Jack Chick|religious nuts]] shrieking about the evils of DnD back in the 80's. Thanks a lot, ya twat.

The game is what you would expect from Varg - A [[Vikings|viking]]-age pastiche setting in which the evil <s>Jews</s>Sicarri are trying to [[Racial Holy War|exterminate the aryan race]] by flooding Europe-- I mean ''Thulê'' with black people-- er, ''Koparmann''. Also, thinly veiled Christians and Muslims are working to take over the world and kill one of the Aryan gods and stick their guy on the throne instead. Women are [[-4 Str|much weaker]] than men and prone to dying in childbirth - just like in [[FATAL]]. Unlike FATAL, this game lacks spells that allow you to cum acid - which you will want to use on your own eyes, because the entire core rulebook is printed in Papyrus and horrifically organized.

While a Modern Day Mythender-style romp where you smack down Yaweh, Jesus, and his angels could be fun for people from [[That Guy|certain]] [[Imperial Truth|groups]], Varg's warped understanding of history, the English language, and humanity in general severely limit his ability to make a playable game. At least FATAL has the advantage of being free.

As long as you come up with your own setting, the rules are actually fairly decent.

==See also==
*[[Hail and Kill]], a metal-based RPG that takes on the conflict between Christianity and Norse Paganism (and, amusingly, has a character based on Varg in it).

[[Category:Roleplaying]]
[[Category:Heresy]]

SJW

2020-07-02T13:59:31Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258: /* What do??? */

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{{delete|This is possibly the biggest lightning rod of shitposts on the site and edit wars by/against SJWs, so either permanently protect this accursed thing or make it so nobody can blather on about it ever again.}}
{{Topquote|The only way to win is to not read the crazy, and just fap and/or shlick to the pictures.|[[/d/]]}}
{{Topquote|People love to pretend they're offended.|Matt Groening}}
{{Topquote|Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.|Friedrich Nietzsche}}

== Meaning ==
[[Skub]]'s final form.

'''SJW''' stands for '''Social Justice Warrior''', a term originated in the late '90s to mid-2000's, where it was originally more neutral and meant to refer to ardent or outspoken advocates of social change, usually for 'furthering' civil rights. This generally meant someone who demanded that all races, genders, sexuality... any group where members can't leave voluntarily be represented in media and treated with equal respect.

Nowadays, it has a less-than-savory connotation, especially to people within 4chan (''especially'' [[/pol/]] and /v/ - the lattermost is a partial by-product of the GamerGate shenanigans). The modern usage of SJW refers largely to the (usually but not always) left wing-group of people who demand that media and society be inclusive and inoffensive (in practice, usually only to groups said SJW is a part of and those whose beliefs align with them) before all else, basically trying to police all media and, by proxy, the rest of society. See Identity Politics and Intersectionality (a.k.a "who is more oppressed and needs more help marathon"; the dynamics of this is often called Oppression Olympics).

SJWs also tend to chuck that aforementioned respect out the airlock as they prioritize looking and feeling "good" over actually doing good, like most zealots. They frequently employ simplistic and/or ahistorical analysis that could wring both tears and rage from any fa/tg/uy's inner history buff (and not just the ones with military vehicle fetishes, either). Such piping hot takes also open them up to "easy debunking", often by a mix of opportunists looking for an easy 'gotcha', /pol/acks looking for an easy triggering or (perhaps most rarely) people who actually studied their shit - bonus points if said people are left of center and/or themselves part of said minorities on whose behalf the SJWs pull this shit even as they speak over them. Of course, the debunking may itself be poorly researched - most political discussions set the bar amazingly low, if you hadn't guessed. Many SJWs also practice the double standard of selective outrage (attacking a particular person or group over what they said or did, but glossing over similar behavior from other groups - bonus points if the latter group is one the "rager" is part of and/or claiming to defend).

In short, it's associated with activists that advocate a a view of progressive societal change that non-progressives and sometimes even progressive groups, like feminists and minority activists, perceive to be ostracizing, harmful or unnecessary. This being mostly subjective is why the definition is so [[skub|contentious]] to begin with.

Expect Social Justice Warriors to show up or at least be mentioned anytime some combination of the following occurs:

*A) a popular figure does or says something considered offensive, whether legitimately so or otherwise;
*B) some asshole's trying to shut up people they're being rude to;
*C) someone is ''harmlessly'' being a bit less politically correct than people want them to;
*D) someone is being ''far less'' politically correct than the situation warrants; or
*E) there isn't enough presentation in a work for ethno-social groups that are already infinitesimal to begin with.

On that note, feel free to play a drinking game where you take a shot each time [[Nazi|Godwin's Law]] is invoked, and be sure to bid your liver farewell before hand.

Expect the affected thread and any other nearby discussion to be derailed in short order; this is becoming more and more frequent on /tg/ lately as hobbies like [[Magic: The Gathering|MTG]] and [[Warhammer 40k]] are being subjected to changes that are viewed as "progressive" and generate unholy waves of skub. This often appears in the forms of users being accused of bigotry for either not checking off enough "oppressed minority" checkboxes in character creation, or else portraying certain groups too positively. The sources are generally either the usual crowd of trolls and shit stirrers, or else actual morons who want to show off their 'good guy' badges - aka virtue signalling - and miss the point of their ideals entirely. Naturally, most people who hold similar views prefer to voice them only when appropriate to do so, and outside of the "radical" fringe, they differ from the average fa/tg/uy only by the presence of a few things they think tabletop games could be better at doing.

This can and does often lead to rifts in communities, fanbases and franchises, with creators (most often independent ones) facing harassment and death threats, and any legitimate criticisms are almost immediately lost in the mix of mob mentality - just like most of the internet.

There are plenty of examples, but the average fa/tg/uy is unlikely to care about most of them outside of the few relevant ones discussed further below.

== ...so why is this a big deal again? ==
The crux of the problem is that SJWs act as "moral guardians" to popular culture. Previous moral panics, such as the hysteria surrounding hip-hop, rock music and (most relevantly) tabletop games such as [[Dungeons & Dragons]] ever since each medium's creation, were driven by people who claimed to be protecting their children from the "evils" within certain works, as well as seeing enemies under every rock or choosing to die on hills that are ultimately of no consequence.

To use pen-and-paper RPGs as an example, the mostly-Christian right-wingers of the late 70s believed them to be [[Heresy|a gateway to devil worship and eternal damnation]] because of a misunderstanding. Some of the game developers lifted elements from real-life occultism and black magic practices for themes and stories, which was mistaken for trying to promote these practices - despite Gary Gygax, D&D's co-creator, being a known Jehovah's Witness. The response to this huge outcry mostly consisted of renaming or remodeling a bunch of shit (e.g. [[demon]]s and [[devil]]s were now Tanar'ri and Baatezu and in-universe occult symbols were redesigned). More concerning were a few murders and suicides by known players (the mother of James Dallas Egbert III - James being one of the people who committed suicide - even blamed D&D for her son's death). While it sounds ridiculous in hindsight, DnD had yet to gain the traction it currently has and coupled with some groups considering the murderers and people who committed suicide the face of the games, the games were nearly damned by association.

For more details on that sad, stupid time outlined above, see [[Satanic Panic]].

Where most moral panics in America are often attributed and traced back to said older outspoken conservative Christians, with SJWs it's different - they are generally younger, left-leaning and are either affiliated with new-age religions or atheists (the latter often alongside being anti-religious - ironically, mostly singling out Christianity). While many espouse lefty-hippie ideas of acceptance and inclusiveness, many have turned from simply promoting acceptance of varied interests, lifestyles, and hobbies to policing them for proper behavior and raising hell when they find something they don't like. Maybe it's too objectifying, maybe it's not inclusive or diverse enough, maybe it portrays a group they disagree with in too positive a manner or a group they do like in too negative a manner; either way, it is promoting bigotry and bad behavior and must be changed accordingly. Some extreme SJWs even become bigots themselves, but with different groups targeted and a "tit for tat" approach.

For the modern SJW, replace the religious issues with socio-political ones, pick a random issue somewhere in the Left (sometimes Far Left) using an advocacy dartboard, and you can find someone who is ready and willing to start petitions, run boycotts, and send death threats to the creators of Your Favorite Thing<sup>TM</sup>.

While there are many key differences, they've joined the ranks of still-existing moral guardians before them through a combination of sheer overzealousness, hatred of particular groups, the usual co-opting by corporations who use their ideologies as a new way to promote their brands and the plentiful organizations and other third parties willing to fund attention-grabbing political actions of varying effectiveness to whatever ends they may desire, whether it be for fame, name or revenge.

That said, compared to the Satanic Panic, any /tg/-related controversies that have occurred since then are hardly a blip on the radar (thankfully so) and are mostly centered around sporadic attempts at pandering by game developers trying to milk what is, to them, a new demographic.

==Further Relevance to /tg/ ==
[[File:SJW in WOTC Staff.png|thumb|right|300px|Typical SJW delusions, seeing people who hate women in places where there are none, while simultaneously implying women are idiots.]]
While SJWs mostly focus on comics, movies and video games, they've found relatively little traction on tabletop games - it's widely considered more obscure in comparison to other forms of media, thus not warranting scrutiny OR continued interest to the SJW's inner hipster. Movies are delivered as a finished product that usually cannot be tampered with, so they have to worry more about what's given to them. [[/v/|Video games]] can sometimes be modded to some extent, but are usually more at the mercy of its creators.

However, as with any game that allows GMs and their players to [[Homebrew|make up their own shit and tailor the rules and setting to their own goddamn pleasure]], the consumers are the arbiters of what is canon or relevant in their private sessions; [[Games Workshop|the companies]] simply provide the setting these sessions take place within. The 'worst' a given fa/tg/uy has to worry about is fits being thrown over given models, [[White Wolf|disingenuous pandering]] [[Vampire: The Masquerade|that's often mandated by higher-ups]] (sometimes enforced by devs and writers), and a loss in quality of [[Black Library|franchise fiction]] (as if [[C.S. Goto|a ton of]] [[Matt Ward|terrible franchise fiction]] isn't already out there). More on that later, though.

Any other debates and criticisms surrounding the medium are either nearly as old as the genre itself, or else commonplace enough that it's not even exclusive to the genre anymore. [[-4 STR]] is something of an exception in this regard, given that the term originated with tabletop itself, and there has also been [[Sociopathic diplomancer gets shut the fuck down|at least one tale of an encounter with someone]] who would very much fit the stereotype. This hasn't stopped them from ''trying'', however, to the point where numerous people in high-level positions in the development of not only [[Dungeons & Dragons]], but [[Pathfinder]], are viewed as part of the same ideological mindset, and supposedly believe that THE problem with D&D, is, of course, the fanbase itself.

While this might seem to hold water due to the nature of tabletop and PnP games, more astute fa/tg/uys and ca/tg/irls might have already noticed the aforementioned logical fallacy with this: [[/tg/|traditional gaming]] is fundamentally an insular hobby populated predominantly by its fans, who consist of a much wider spectrum of people than stereotypes dictate. Trying to ''"mandate"'' inclusiveness and force the hobby to fit a completely different audience who has no real interest (key words) is equal to spraying napalm to put out a fire.

Oldfags can only chuckle to themselves; the neckbeards of old saw people try to demonize or similarly alter their hobbies for [[Gary Gygax]]'s entire lifetime, and know that ultimately, this crap is destined to fail just as hard as previous attempts to kill their favorite hobbies off. In turn, many gamers and self-styled movie buffs who don't understand the "players make the rules" aspect of tabletop thus fail to understand the futility of forcing roleplaying fa/tg/uys to join a "fight" that cannot threaten their fun, even in spite of the stereotype of roleplayers who define themselves solely by their hobby.

The main reason this article exists at all is to detail the perceived threat to the hobby that defines the board and (more often) the annoyance caused by forcing unrelated political discussions on a board of people who are ''ideally'' just trying to play some damn games or otherwise mind their business.

Y'know, like most of the internet.

===SJWs and WH40k===
Now, you may hear complaints about wargaming, and how it has too much [[Imperium of Man|imperialism, war crimes]], [[Exterminatus|genocide]], [[Ecclesiarchy|religious extremism]], [[Inquisition|xenophobia, abduction]], [[Cadian Shock Troops|child soldiers]], [[Daemonculaba|injury and death of minors]], [[Penitent Engine|religious mind-rape driven war machines]], [[Slaanesh|rape, drug abuse, sexual exploitation]], [[Warp|supernatural horror]], etc. etc. While not mentioned by name, you can imagine those complaints had [[Warhammer 40,000|a particular franchise in mind]]. Naturally, you can also imagine the lengths they went to in order to [[Derp|completely ignore]] [[Grimdark|the entire air of black vs. black morality within the setting itself]] (with shades of super-dark grey if you're feeling [[Salamanders|gene]][[Tau|rous]]).

The three most common complaints about Warhammer 40,000 are usually: the absence of [[Female Space Marines]]; the [[Sisters of Battle]] having boob plates; and - tied for third - how 40k models and art seldom depicted non-Sisters of Battle women and non-white humans, despite lore containing multiple, numerous easily-found examples to the contrary.

Here is a handy quick-list of refutations, to make everyone's lives a little easier:

#Warhammer 40,000 originated as an ironic parody of hard-right authoritarianism, born out of the explosion of progressive UK Sci-Fi and Fantasy that erupted as a reaction to [[Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka|Margaret Thatcher]]'s policies of moral regulation and strong executive power (as well as all the other shit that happened in living memory during the 20th Century). Warhammer 40k took the piss out of the conservative UK government in the same way ''2000AD'' did, via satire and cautionary tales - this context has been lost over time with the growing popularity of the game, the growth of the company itself, and how the right-leaning political climate being satirized is no longer dominant in the UK (Margaret Thatcher herself also ''died'' several years go) while its current political climate is an entirely different beast.
#Anyone who actually reads the fluff knows that the Imperium as a body doesn't care about sex or race on that level, because the encroaching forces of [[grimdark]] make any form of discrimination impractical. Women and other minorities regularly participate in every level of Imperial society. The lack of female models is a semi-regular issue that ends up at the feet of GW, who already get enough shit from pearl-clutching moral guardians about [[Hot Chicks|Sisters Repentia and Daemonettes]] to generally want to avoid gender controversy and making "redundant" models. [[Mutant|The discrimination that ''does'' happen in the Imperium]] has some credible backing, in that the Imperium is an empire of semi-justified zealots: mutation is a common symptom of exposure to [[Chaos]] or [[Genestealer|other very bad things,]] so they figure it's best to not take chances.
#:Female Space Marines also have a well-defined fluff reason for not existing: recent lore stated there were in-universe attempts that failed badly enough to warrant discontinuing them. And of the section of the actual playerbase that clamors for female Marines, you can guess how many do so [[Rule 63|with impure intent.]] At any rate, important characters have a higher percentage of female or LBGTQ+ representation than expendable meatgrinder characters. This goes for both old characters like Yarrick (revealed to be gay) and new characters like Arch Magos Exasus (who is non-binary).
#Until recently, GW was also [[Commorragh Slaves|terrible at sculpting female characters in most cases]]; the Sisters of Battle were a rare exception for years, and that's likely ''because'' they're just power-armored humans with boobplate.
#GW so rarely listened to their own customers that complaining wouldn't have changed shit no matter how obvious the problem was. Nowadays there is a MUCH better chance for more fan-interaction, but there you go: anyone looking for change should be taking it up with GW, not Warhammer fans.
#When it comes to racial representation, they've previously said that their idea was for humanity in 40k to be as ethnically and physically diverse as they are across Earth in real-life. GW said the reason for having majority white people in the art was because the early art teams were small and made art of what they knew (the UK is still populated by 95% white people, although interestingly where GW is in Nottingham is nowadays only about 65% white), and this pattern just became an unthinking habit. This is typical of a lot of fantasy work, which is often based on history or mythology from Europe or Asia where lighter skin colors are believed more common. While it is discriminatory, it's 'unconscious bigotry' as opposed to GW being actively malicious. [[Image:5zft MoOz3I.jpg|thumb|right|200px|It begins!]]
#Every Warhammer Fantasy and 40k player knows that GW is simply [[End Times|bad]] [[Abaddon|at]] [[Matt Ward|making]] [[C.S. Goto|writing]] [[Storm of Chaos|decisions]]. Asking for well-written ''anyone'' from GW is like praying for a miracle. Furthermore, some of the most interesting characters in Fantasy were female, and got written out of canon as the years went on, so best believe the fans were already outraged over that.

If you read GW's Annual report: 2015-16, you'll find there were complaints about most of the staff being male even back then. To GW's credit, they answered: "The Company does not consider that diversity can be best achieved by establishing specific quotas and targets and appointments will continue to be made based on merit." (p. 15, if you're bored enough to check). That kinda contradicts with the "principle of boardroom diversity, which was first introduced into the Code in June 2010" mentioned on the same page, but you get it.

On the other hand, it should be noted that GW has been somewhat 'addressing' things, in [[Age of Sigmar]] anyway; several human models have non-white skin tones in their official paint jobs (and most of them look laughable with it, as they're rocking classical European features. Painting grizzly white doesn't make it a polar bear, you know), there's black Sigmarines and at least one black Ultramarine, there's more than one model for a Sigmarine woman, and in the early days of AoS, the most promoted faction other than Sigmarines and Khorne was the mostly female [[Sylvaneth]] led by [[Everqueen|Alarielle the Everqueen]]. Meanwhile, [https://spikeybits.com/2017/10/female-representation-40k.html GW has promised on social media to "improve female representation" in 40k], specifically referring to reducing "boob-plate" in the miniature line and artwork (which may have factored into the decision to cover up - and bulk up - the Sister Repentia in 8th edition).

That said, it isn't all rosy of course; [[Age of Sigmar|Age of Smegmar]] 2e has a female Stormcast Eternal with warning-coloration hair done up in a [https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Trigglypuff Trigglypuff-tier] mohawk on the front cover of the BRB, though that might not be anything other than garish visual design. The Daughters of Khaine ''could'' also be viewed as a caricature of radical feminists, being a violently misandric society where the men are literally slaves to the women... or it could be because they're [[Drow]] with the serial numbers filed of. On the 40k side, [[Gav Thorpe]] wrote a recent book, ''Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah'', with a Magos who "does not identify as male or female". While this makes some sense - the Mechanicus shuns the flesh, which would presumably include gender roles - it generated a good amount of [[skub]] due to this new gender dynamic, the use of recently invented gender pronouns, how they fit into the universe, and whether or not this written in an attempt to pander to SJWs or a sign that Gav Thorpe has become one. It should be noted that, like many GW/Black Library writers, Gav Thorpe's content is by no means 100% great reads, and this might just be a case of him finding a character interesting, political views aside, and writing them very badly.

===What do???===

Unless you meet them face-to-face, '''nothing'''. It's your hobby, and at day's end, any changes you make to doing what you love and loving what you do should be ultimately ''your'' decision. Don't care so much about what other people think, let alone some fanbrats and/or political sheeple who probably don't even give a shit about it to begin with. Anyone who DOES care enough about diverse characters and settings will eventually take matters into their own hands and [[Homebrew|brew some up]] [[Get shit done|themselves]], as they should. Half the fun of Warhammer is [[Your dudes|making your armies your own]] anyway, like most tabletop games, so why wait for GW to change?

The ''wrong'' response (and this is almost always true, by the way), is to insult the fans for liking something they don't like. But hey, whatchagonnado? "Pretending to be offended" can cut '''both''' ways, and complaining about people liking something you don't like is [[Twilight|almost]] [[Drizzt|as]] [[Ironclaw|popular]] [[The End Times|here]] as [[Grognard|complaining about people ''not'' liking something you love]]. And as long as someone makes their dudes "wrong," [[That Guy|''someone'']] will always be yelling. Yet again, ''like most of the internet.''

If you do meet an SJW face-to-face, do to them as you would a /pol/ack; treat them with love and respect while calling out and deconstructing their cause... with a caveat depending how aggressive the SJW in question is (even with a much lower body count than /pol/acks, there are still SJWs who'll resort to violence and some have hounded people to the point of suicide). For the non-violent types, if you're good at debating and knowledgeable about the subject (bonus points if you're from a group they're claiming to champion), call out where they're going wrong and any related hypocrisy. For the violent types, if they resist a calling out, politely disagree and move on (but keep your guard up, just in case; they're harder to ignore and kick out than /pol/acks).

tl;dr Weigh your options and pick your battles wisely, because God knows these chucklefucks won't.

==Do They Have a Point?==

===TL;DR:===
'''It's complicated.''' Many of the points the SJWs raise aren't incorrect in themselves, ''but'' they are often distorted by proponents and detractors alike to further their respective agendas. Regardless of your stance on the social issues in dispute, keep in mind that it's not black-and-white and the goal is change rather than destruction.

===The long version===
While the term represents legitimate grievances and real issues, as hinted earlier "SJW" has also seen use as a snarl word by people on the right to shut down arguments, regardless of any merit they might have. This snarl creates a crude caricature of modern leftists to smear a rather large body of people (e.g. lumping said leftists with liberals, even though not all liberals are left-wing and may participate in said smears themselves), misrepresenting any position left of the "snarler" as a threat to any cultural aspect you can think of (like say, entertainment and gaming). Sometimes it doesn't matter if the SJWs in question (or their supposed position) are even partly real, or just convenient caricatures up to and including the most blatant trolls. This use of the term is especially true of those on the [[/pol/]] side when they don't want to scare the normies - or at least let the caricatures do the work for them. After all, who's gonna pay attention to someone when they or their views are successfully cast as "[[That Guy|rocking the boat?]]"

Some fiction ''does'' have problematic elements, and all fiction has a certain degree of subtext woven into it (intentionally or not) by its creators and/or the general worldview of the day. For example, in a lot of 1950s fiction, female characters would usually be sidelined to supporting roles such as home keeper, while a male protagonist would be the guy who took charge and get shit done - even in a science fiction setting where many futurists would have speculated that women would take a greater active role in future society. Most times, writers consider the way things are done where they're from to be the way things "should" be, unless they're exploring a "what if" scenario or criticism of an aspect of their society. Tropes built around the worldview of a generation persist into the next and often serve as the foundation for that generation's works - it's part of human nature for people to write what they know, take their worldview for granted and/or follow the leader without considering the implications.

Though such tropes ''can'' serve as useful indicators of the author's beliefs and/or the cultural zeitgeist, many of these tropes also do not age well, becoming discredited in some fashion as society and attitudes towards history change over time; a fair number of MST3K episodes snark at this. Understanding how this process works, and the ramifications thereof, is a perfectly valid approach to identify problematic matters and address them in future works. This has far more practical applications than trying to be as inoffensive as possible merely for the sake of it, which often does the subject matter(s) a disservice - it is frequently an exercise in futility, and besides that, context is key. One series having [[Fantasy Armor|metal bikini armor]] is not a problem (especially if its general tone is tongue firmly in cheek), but when that becomes the norm even in more serious works, especially without justification, then it's become an issue.

Furthermore, acknowledging problematic elements in a work is not the same as a condemnation of its quality or wanting it censored because of that (usually) comparatively small element - this assumption is a classic Hanlon's Razor scenario, assuming malice where at worst stupidity may exist. The presence of certain views or "biases" in a work doesn't mean that the modern reader will instantly like or adopt said views. No one is immune to propaganda, but reading Atlas Shrugged doesn't automatically make you an individualist; being a fan of the Imperium of Man doesn't make you a militaristic theocracy advocate, reading The Lord of the Rings does not automatically make you a monarchist, and so on. Aside from tarring all people with the same brush as being easily impressionable morons, that's mostly putting the cart before the horse and attacking symptoms rather than the actual cause, i.e. what would lead someone to seek reinforcement of that particular worldview via reading or producing fiction, for instance - [[Skub|a nuanced topic that would take up a page on its own and isn't likely to be done real justice here]].

There are numerous reasons why there's "pandering" in /tg/ media, beyond the points discussed above. For one, many companies want to broaden their consumer base by taking in new demographics. As the world gets interconnected and as society becomes more diverse, there is an increasing demand by people who aren't heterosexual white men to see people who aren't heterosexual white men in Western media, be it as the hero, getting the girl/guy, or "just" being more than a sidekick (matters of representation and diversity in non-Western media - such as China's film industry or India's Bollywood - and related questions of double standards/selective outrage in the complaints are [[Skub|something that would warrant several paragraphs, if not their own page]]). Putting all your eggs in the established core demographic basket can be as disastrous as trying to appeal to a new demographic at the expense of that initial base (AKA "biting the hand that feeds you"). For example, the former was a contributing factor in the [[/co/|Comics Crash of 1996]], focusing too much on the established fanbase at the expense of bringing in new ones by (for example) abandoning magazine stands for comic stores, only to lose it all when they failed to appeal successfully to either while driving much of that old fanbase away.

The 'threat' to any given body of work, much less works within the domain of our hobby, does not lie merely in conflicts between people with different political views, but more often in foolish mass-marketing mandates. And when those politics themselves become mass-marketed, the parasitic corporate practices it enables, along with framing the matter as one of a dichotomous nature - be it unintentionally, actively, dishonestly, and/or otherwise - provides further ammo to the "fringe" ideologues involved, supporters and detractors alike, that they may continue their never ending game of philosophical sportsball, and only the most short-sighted and/or fanatical sorts, especially "SJWs", consider that to be a good result.

Thankfully, some solutions are straightforward; there is absolutely no reason that you could not make the the Inquisitor in your Warhammer 40,000 campaign [[Mordecai_Toth|black]]. In the typical Tolkien-knockoff fantasy settings, you can (depending on how cosmopolitan or travel-allowing the setting is) include a few black characters, and the bare minimum requirement is a sentence to the effect of "their parents were from a distant land where humans look a bit different" (though Tolkien himself had ethnic diversity among humanity in his setting; the Drúedain people of LotR were non-white and opposed Sauron, while there were those among the Free Peoples who knowingly or unknowingly aided Sauron). Population dynamics, such as the oft-cited 1:1 ratio of male-to-female, suggest that there needs to be a pretty good reason NOT have a mix of characters (such as an epidemic that only effects males or females). The lack of LGBTQ+ people is often a point of contention, as it is very difficult to calculate the actual number in any population, given the inherent dangers in certain regions and the vagueness of personal gender/sexual identification. Adding said characters if they're written well and fit the story is, in general, a positive and just good business, especially for those who are transparent about the reasoning behind their works.

The problems arise with executives and other figureheads who don't know any better: some only care about lining their own pockets, and engage in the usual out-of-touch appealing to what the kids are into today without understanding the how and why of it; others fail to distinguish between diversity and tokenism as a result of pushing an agenda-based quota; and still others use the work to push their views and beliefs onto others, the latter two groups ignoring that their franchises are sold to people and not reductive demographic abstractions. Then there are the marketers and PR representatives who encourage this behavior in the vain hope that "new demographics" will eat it up no matter what; when this is almost inevitably proven wrong, they will double down on the pandering, which alienates those who support the view represented by not giving them what they actually wanted while further souring those who don't endorse said view.

When further combined with the tendency of sensationalist media outlets to lionize or demonize whoever they have to in order to meet their given slant's quota, as well as the presence of astroturfing and other means of manufacturing outrage in support of or against said slants, you have the recipe for a failed market or a doomed franchise at best. In a worst-case scenario, you end up creating a new set of problematic cliches and stereotypes. That the majority of fiction is political in some shape or form '''''does not''''' absolve writers of their responsibility to skillfully and properly handle what, if any, politics they acknowledge, lest we get propaganda masquerading as entertainment - and the groups they're expecting to eat that kind of slop up may very well be the first to notice.

== See Also ==
*[[/pol/]] - /pol/ is the largest face of the "alt-right", the yang to the SJW's left-leaning yin... if the analogy works when one side has a much worse track record and without the excuse of at least having a good cause to hide behind. Exudes a very similar rage to their perceived enemies, but it has a chance of ranging from hilarious, to the pot calling the kettle black, to "[[Edgy|Hitler did nothing wrong]]", to actual Neo-[[Nazi]]s and mass shooters (lets be honest, it's mostly the last two these days).

[[Category:Meme]][[Category: RAGE]]

/pol/

2020-07-02T13:55:35Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:4197:FA49:F279:3258: /* What Do? */

{{editwar}}
{{Flamewar}}
{{fail}}
{{heresy}}
{{delete| Lets just delete this and, as its eventually gonna become spammed by /pol/'s many idiotic supporters. Besides, we could always redirect this page to skub. If we don't delete this, then please permanently protect it.}}

[[File:QnVjrKW.jpg|thumb|right|300px]]

{{topquote|Gas the kikes! [[Racial Holy War|Race war]] now!|/pol/'s battlecry}}
{{topquote|1=Gentlemen, I had a vision of the future. One day because we won [[The_World_Wars#The_First_World_War|this war]], a man called Adolf Hitler will take power and he will make a lot of people angry about the Jewry. And also romani. And also the blacks. And the non-whites. Except for the Japanese, they're honorable Aryans, I guess. Also there will be a website called 4chan.org, and there will be a board called /pol/, and it will just be about what I have described. Its kind of a [[My Little Pony|one-trick-pony, except the pony is retarded]].|2=[https://youtu.be/Tj-nCjnVDKM?t=2133 The Fresh Sorcerer's accurate summary of /pol/]}}

[[Skub]]'s OTHER final form, and the polar opposite of [[SJW]].

'''/pol/''' is 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" board, nowadays mostly <s>populated by</s> used for incarcerating <s>people who identify as</s> neo-nazis, alt-righters, ancaps, edgy contrarians, and other colorful characters who rant on Jews, black people, women, Marxists, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, and every variety of white depending on the time of day. This also entails dumb shit such as long passionate debates on whether Slavic or Southern European people count as white, or complaints about Jews causing everything from financial crises to World Wars to hurting your toe on a table leg (the phrase "[[Meme|Baton Roue]]" might come to mind).

If you ask /pol/, they'll claim to be the best and most enlightened board that can see through the lies of society, while everyone from the other boards will call their userbase arguably the most obnoxious and [[cancer]]ous board on the whole site and nothing more than a far-right [[My Little Pony|containment board to prevent them spreading their cancer elsewhere]].

People who frequent /pol/ usually refer to themselves as /pol/lacks, but much more terms have been used to describe them by people outside of /pol/ such as /pol/io, /pol/luters, /pol/tards, /pol/yps, tad/pol/es, /pol/esmokers, and /pol/tergeists. The recently coined-term "alt-right" has quickly become for the right what the term SJW is for the left. On that note, some SJWs and /pol/acks aren't above having similar ''fundamental'' attitudes towards both their ideology and people who don't agree with it, which may seem odd - unless you're familiar with the idea of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory horseshoe theory] as it applies to political radical behavior, though that in itself isn't always the case.

==Origins==
...What, the above wasn't enough?

Do you REALLY want to know more about this?

...alright, fuck it. Put on the helmets and bring the bleach, this is going to be real long and real boring.

4chan's userbase is naturally a product of the industrial society, i.e. it bred a lot of NEETs and frustrated people who are largely kept in line with entertainment and porn and economic welfare, and will [[Roman Empire|gladly support any political party as long as their needs are met, inasmuch as they don't bother thinking about anything beyond their immediate well-being]]. Additionally, /b/ in particular had a history of racial supremacy expressed via memetic bigotry (i.e. using "nigger" as an insult, "faggot" as an endearing word, and "jewgolds" or "shekels" as the term for money) since around 2008, prior to the Anonymous v. Scientology clashes that brought them into more of a "spotlight". Most times it was considered little more than a joke by its userbase, just another way of ensuring that people who couldn't demonstrate thick enough skin to handle the typical level of discourse on /b/ would be driven off.

However, as time went on, people who took such things at face value began to show up more and more often - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498 it's been said that] "any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." Eventually, some of the aforementioned idiots began espousing positions that couldn't be dismissed as attempts at humor any longer, but were soon seen for the representation of their values that it really was.

...Then along came the economic housing bubble of 2009, and said NEETs found their bread and circuses were not enough in the face of concepts such as "darkening future" and "imminent poverty". And that opened Pandora's box, unleashing the suppressed anger (normally kept in check by porn, cheap entertainment and welfare) of the NEETizens of 4chan. Unsurprisingly, the first mention of the "alternative right" coincides around the bubble, with this "internal" discontent playing a part in their rise alongside the external 'friction' that social justice represented.

People can get defensive about their opinions about Kirk vs Picard or their taste in anime or opinions about Warhammer fluff or berate others for having opinions which they disagree with, but in the end that's just talking about fiction. In contrast politics is about stuff which actually matters to you in the Real World. Political discussions, especially online, are volatile things at the very best of times. Given that 4chan is '''''the''''' place where reasonable discussion goes to die, it was inevitable that even the calmest attempt at discussing politics quickly devolved into extremist arguments. Trolls and fanatics alike, in many points, became impossible to distinguish from one another - they either forgot whatever original aims they may have possessed, or else simply used those aims as a cover for something they now legitimately believed in and gained validation from.

''If I'm damned anyway, then what is my incentive to be "good"?'' - ''Anonymous reacting to [[SJW|Identity Politics]]''

While they gleefully embraced the Nazi accusations that both sides of a debate would make at each other - and invariably decided to supercharge the politically incorrect arguments with shitposting just to enrage their opponents further - they did all of it with only a marginal knowledge of what the issues they were arguing about even entailed at any given time, if they remotely cared at all. Thus many political arguments far too numerous to count here, from immigration to crime and race, began to take root in /b/ and quickly spread elsewhere; Moot, being the [[Tzeentch|Eternal Planner]] that he is, created /n/ (what /pol/ started as) to corral the arguments.

As you can see, [[Not as planned|it's gone swimmingly for everyone involved.]] Sort of like a multilayered monkey's paw of pure [[fail]].

===Containment Board===
[[File:Pol leaves containment.png|thumb|right|200px]]
As stated earlier, /pol/ is meant to contain the population of stormweenies (named for Stormfront, a website that can be considered a precursor to /pol/, and whose community still overlaps with them) on 4chan. Pretty much everyone, including both Moot and most of /pol/ itself, has acknowledged this; Global rule #3 was once 'Keep /pol/ in /pol/'. The rule has since been changed to a more general version saying not to post flames, racism, off-topic replies, uncalled-for catch phrases and other things that are unhelpful to a board, but since that's what /pol/ shitposting essentially IS, the rule is still the same in spirit. Several boards have a sticky at the front page telling people to keep politics in /pol/ as well.

Though /pol/ isn't the only containment board on 4chan, the other containment boards such as /mlp/ and /soc/ are considered to have better userbases - those users have (mostly) less volatile baggage and the sense to leave it ''on'' those boards. When they venture onto another board, they stay on topic and only ''occasionally'' derail threads or start inflammatory ones (complete with /tg/ [[rage|deriving]] [[lulz|entertainment]] from it), but overall aren't ''nearly'' as insufferable in comparison.

Most attempts to curb /pol/, on the other hand, result in them [[Cancer|spreading to other boards]], where they will try to de-rail the threads on those boards to whatever political event that is galvanizing them and spreading around conspiracy theories. Whenever they are told to fuck off and quit derailing threads, they will change the subject, gaslight, and say whatever it takes to counter any arguments to the point of self-contradiction - in short, anything but backing down or even just going on the defense. This hasn't stopped the board from being deleted twice throughout their history, mind, but the inevitable spread forced it to be brought back both times. Even to this day, you'll still get threads here and there that fall victim to politically-based derailing.

==/pol/ using [[Warhammer 40,000]] as propaganda==
{{topquote|Suffer not the [[xenos]] to live!|Battle cry of the [[Deathwatch]]}}

One of the greatest [[RAGE|headaches]] that /tg/ in particular has with /pol/ is the misuse of the [[grimdark]]ness and xenophobic policies of the [[Imperium of Man]] by /pol/'s [[Neckbeard|Trump supporters]], who apparently believe that he is quite possibly a modern day incarnation of [[The Emperor]], and that the Western world should really become an IRL Imperium with zero tolerance against "Xenos" and "[[Tau|Cultural Marxists]]", with lots of conspiracy theories that Trump is fighting an endless battle against the "Ruinous Powers" of Liberalism supposedly led by [[Tzeentch|George Soros]]. It's basically yet another "Jews secretly controlling the world" episode on top of the usual boogeyman of "The All-Powerful Left" already invoked by many of the "cuckservatives" the alt-right railed against at their inception.

Initially, they "helped" him the only way they knew how: shitposting about [[anime]], Pepe the Frog, and [[Touhou|Momiji Inubashiri]] in a MAGA hat. One of their most widespread propaganda involving 40k was the complete stereotyping of all Muslims as [[Ork|ultraviolent savages who reproduce by the thousands and have no other instinct than to kill, maim and pillage]], Mexicans being cast [[Tyranids|an all-consuming swarm migrating to America to consume all of its resources]], and that every single one of them should be subject to [[Exterminatus]]. AS if that wasn't insulting to all parties real and fictional, eventually they finally "invented" a shitty forced meme where [[Heresy|they put Donald Trump's head on images of the great God-Emperor of Mankind]]. Not many people find them funny, even in the rare case of the Photoshop job being decent, and the Trump buzz started to fade anyway as reality promptly ensued and people realized he was largely more of the same checkers-level propaganda volleys designed to sway voters (if "[[Derp|uber-rich American politician claiming to be the champion of the poor]]" sounds familiar to you, anyway).

The new wave of French elections brought a more horrific wave of shitposting, with [[Extra Heresy|Marine le Pen being photoshopped into Sister of Battle pictures]]. However, Le Pen lost the French election by [[Fail|a 30% margin]], much to the [[Butthurt|chagrin]] of various /pol/tards. This was possibly compounded by the fact that Le Pen's campaign partly ran off the idea of a 'Frexit', only for Le Pen to abandon the entire idea post-election; between this and the Trump supporters in the userbase becoming nigh-indistiguishable from the more stereotypical ones, it proves for the umpteenth time that relying on any kind of political figurehead for overall validation is a universally bad idea.

Given 40k had its start as a ''satire'' of dystopian fiction and a bitter, ironic reflection of right-wing 80s Britain (see also: [[Rogue Trader]]), other right-wingers latching onto 40k-memery as a vehicle for demagoguery, propaganda and appeals to emotion, and further conflating it with modern politics is perhaps a schadenfreudish circle finally come complete. Without the original context, they see nothing more than an unironic heroic fantasy that validates their beliefs, rather than the proper mockery that it constitutes. Needless to say, many in /tg/ find such inclusion of real world politics in our 40k to be a sad, idiotic and pathetic phenomenon that should be punished by summary [[Exterminatus|SAGE'ing]].

==Ideology and Methodology (such as it is)==
While the full history of the SJW phenomenon is way too complicated to describe on their page and is usually less relevant to /tg/ (at least far less so than interactions with other boards on the site), suffice to say that while SJWs are the product of modern civil rights movements [[Ultramarines|who blindly adhere to the LETTER of a given progressive political creed's code of conduct without understanding the spirit of it]], /pol/acks essentially aspire to become the uber-racist, sexist, [[Chaotic Stupid|hyper-reactionary]] [[Marines Malevolent|card-carrying degenerates]] they think the other side believes them to be.

That this is (again) close to the same way some SJWs would come to conduct themselves - down to and including the general rudderlessness, the ''typical'' response to anyone who doesn't share their opinion, and the general prevalence of bullshit artists as figureheads - may explain why /pol/, by and large, seem so eager to join them in the race to the bottom. However, the horseshoe theory only holds water if you have the most basic and binary grasp of the political spectrum; everyone likes to think their "side" is the most rational.

Admittedly, badly implemented and ham-fisted progressive policies tend to alienate the people not supported by them, just like any other political policy, and it's not uncommon for social justice narratives (or ANY kind, really, but specifically these) to be astroturfed and exploited by politicians and corporations alike, as well as the grifters out for social currency. Thus, some people feel an instinct to rebel against a status quo that supposedly coddles and encourages "white guilt" and "political correctness gone mad", while others seek out the "rightful" social positioning they couldn't get elsewhere - and still others are looking for fresh marks after their recruitment pool in other activist circles went dry. From these groups, the edgiest and the craziest form the core of /pol/.

However, any analysis going beyond the surface for more than five minutes would recognize progressive lip service to be just that - lip service designed to appease 'SJW' demands rather than actually meet them. In addition, the "horseshoe theory" school of thought seems slightly more merited upon recognizing that, when they're not using it as a thoroughly cynical ploy to draw attention and stir shit, /pol/acks will use eerily similar rhetoric to signal their own virtues of traditional values, being "rational" thinkers, and otherwise acting in defense of "freedom", at least when they're genuinely believing anything beyond what directly benefits them. The words "refuge in audacity" should come to mind for the [[TVTropes|tropers]] in the audience, albeit in a far more disingenuous sense - the right to offend and be irreverent is elevated to a sacred cow, which is about as self-defeating as it sounds.

That said, most /pol/tergeists have no idea how anything actually works - even the basics of their own most common political beliefs are notoriously flimsy (if not OUTRIGHT blatant) myths and lies, often more than the SJWs they denigrate. The average /pol/ user tends to conduct themselves and their approach to politics across the board with all the nuance and subtlety of any given sportsball fandom, even '''before''' the slow bleeding of the glorified sportsball spectacle that is modern mainstream politics into the board itself commenced. While 4chan at large is and always has been something of a self-sustaining shitshow even at its best, /pol/ is (ostensibly) despised even by the rest of the userbase because they take their views to the logical "conclusion" and render themselves little more than bizarre caricatures.

Example of such nonsensical claims include: Stalin being a Jew (he was Georgian and a major anti-Semite to boot; the Jewish influence, of course, was mainly from Trotsky, which makes it all the more ironic); the first reports of Nazi death camps came from the Soviets (it came from Poland); most welfare recipients being unemployed black people (evidencing a misunderstanding of "majority" and "disproportionate number", as most people on welfare are white and only use it for 3 years or less); and the British Empire started declining by 1800 (their Golden Age was from 1816-1915, with Jews very well represented). And the coup de grace theory to rule over them all is another theory, "The Khazar Theory", that the real good Jews are actually all white people (Jacob's sons), while all the stereotypical Jews are [[Mongols|Khazar nomads' descendants]]. [[What|Yes, this is your brain's sound when it shifts without the clutch.]]

This is indicative of one of the biggest problems with /pol/, even more than not staying in their containment board: its denizens suffer from a board-wide Dunning-Kruger effect, believing themselves expert authorities on a multitude of subjects that individually take years of study at minimum, and shitpost and overuse bad memes as a substitute for wit and intelligence, ignoring that even the most casual Googling could debunk most of their narratives. Even Stormfront (which was run by an actual member of the Ku Klux Klan at one point, if it somehow still isn't) had ''slightly'' more principle; gods help you if you enter /pol/ from Israel.

Whenever a meme becomes popular on /pol/, they will begin forcing the meme on every other board, rapidly driving it so far into the ground that it will come out on the other side of the planet before the day is out. The memes they spam tend to be childish insults that will only impress people below 18. It says a lot about their board when getting merged with /mlp/ during an April Fools' joke '''improved''' it.

'''TL;DR:''' Even ignoring their disgusting traits AND putting aside "keep /pol/ in /pol/" talk, /tg/ remembers first and foremost that /pol/ is a containment board for a ''very good'' reason.

===Connections with the Christchurch Mosque Attacks===
<span style='font-size:125%'>{{BLAM|This section concerns the attacks on the Christchurch Mosques in New Zealand, the consequences of which affected the entire board, and by extension /tg/.}}</span>

Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old man who attacked two Mosques in Christchurch, NZ, apparently identified as a "/pol/ack" and made a <s>detailed</s> barely literate manifesto mostly in the form of a "Q&A," containing absolutely zero original political thought and nary a trace of coherent ideology besides repetition of the basic White Nationalist complaints of a Western demographic upheaval (the "fourteen words," basically). It is all the more pathetic because he characterizes the poorly-formatted PDF as a ''magnum opus'' of three years' worth of political growth; one critical point of [[Derp|critical fuckstupid]] is his admiration for Communist China, known for its violation of basic human rights, especially free speech, against the Muslim Uyghurs of and even its Han (the dominant Chinese ethnic group) citizens.

Even '''/pol/ itself''', for all its numerous faults, practically worships the concept of the free exchange of ideas: A common point of contention with SJWs, perceived and otherwise, is freedom of debate and free speech at all costs, especially when it's offensive...at least, up until the point where their '''''own''''' views are challenged, of course. Then they suddenly decide that maybe censorship isn't so bad after all, which explains quite a lot about the board's fascist sympathies.

Said manifesto referenced several questionably tasteful memes (prominently, "remove kebab"), and the fucking degenerate actually went so far as to shout out those memes in public and play [[/v/|video game soundtracks]] and songs that /pol/ has turned into memes, while actively shooting people and live-streaming it. Sick fuck. Naturally, this means more conversations about the impact of the Internet/social media and technology in general and its role in the lives of disaffected millennials (and doing it full justice is a tall order and a half); the level of disconnect displayed, even by the expected standards of radical politics, that would allow a person to take a life while joyfully shouting silly sayings from the Internet like he was at an anime convention is disgusting and hard to fathom.

His goal, apparently, was to cause more hysteria and retribution: in his manifesto, he specifically spoke of wanting to stir up shit regarding ''inter alia'', laws regarding the rights of free speech and bearing arms which, in his mind, would lead to civil war and an ultimate victory for his ideology, such as it is. He imagined himself becoming a full martyr for the cause, or else incarcerated and (if the latter) perhaps later to be broken out of jail by a movement inspired by his "noble actions"...and yet few people online seem to consider his actions or their results desirable, even among those who would inevitably be even ''remotely'' 'sympathetic' to his cause. The only ones who would wholeheartedly support him were likely deadset on their ideology to begin with.

This, along with his choice to attack extremely soft targets (including women, children, and mainstream, non-radical places of worship), is enough to demonstrate that he was not a political actor in any real sense, but rather amounts to the perpetrator of an incident far more serious and tragic. Rather than a "proper 'domestic [i.e. white] terrorist'" (say, Timothy McVeigh), he comes across more as an aimless man on a demented rampage.

By virtue of being a white man in a European culture instead of, say, a member of a rival sect in an Islamic country, his attack on a mosque actually makes international headlines for more than five minutes; with his point well out the window, his pathetic attempts at justifying his attack only harmed his cause in the imagination of the general public and even amongst his peers. Needless to say, the consequences of his actions were quite serious: political groups of which he was a member or tangentially related to are being attacked by the government, despite their having no part in the violence, and the blood was not yet dry when the PM said that New Zealand's already highly restrictive gun laws "had to change". Most directly relevant to /tg/, their neighbor Australia [[Exterminatus|banned access]] to 4chan, 8chan and ''even fucking LiveLeak'' for distributing video of the massacre, which indirectly fucks over that entire sector of the userbase(s), likely due to the fact that the shooter, Brenton, is an Australian.

As if that wasn’t enough, the level of irony to Tarrant’s actions defies reality. Tarrant was fixated on mass migration in his manifesto, but thanks to his attack, New Zealand (and possibly other western countries) will accept EVEN MORE migrants from the Middle East and Africa in an effort to show that they’re tolerant of said migrants despite Tarrant’s attack. Way to go.

Though /pol/, with its vulgar and juvenile approach to issues of demography and race, is a tempting target to assign blame for his actions, 4chan might not be the genesis of his personal dissatisfaction; if the manifesto is to be trusted (itself a dicey proposition) he had apparently become interested in racial questions while touring the world and seeing the demographic changes which are afflicting Europe first hand. The problem is that when shitposting manchildren drink their own Kool-Aid and take up their guns alongside to murder innocent people, the average reasonable person can make a connection between the violence and the [[Star Wars|wretched hives of scum and villany]] said bad actors frequent, and so here we are.

This isn't entirely news to these folks, of course: "screw your optics, I'm going in" was how the last significant /pol/ terrorist put it, before attacking a defenseless synagogue which had no remote relation to any of /pol/'s 'concerns'. The inherent cowardice in that aspect of ''that'' attack and the most recent one are only one of the ways in which they are alike, but one of the most telling, not least because it begs the question of why the phrase "the last significant /pol/ terrorist" is even applicable.

Any reasonably well-adjusted person from anywhere on the political spectrum can see that the culture and posters of /pol/ are what give it its unfathomably bad name, which by extension affects already-considered-malignant *chan subculture such that one would be hard-pressed to assert otherwise. Inasmuch as /pol/acks even take their own putative ideas seriously, they don't tend to do themselves any favors - on- OR off-line. In addition, despite 4chan supposedly not being the birthing place for the ideals of Mr. Tarrant, the fact that it can now be tangibly tied to such people AND the resulting Australian lockdown on 4chan/8chan/etc. is certain to impact perception of the board and anyone seen as aligned with them - likely for the worse.

==What Do?==

{{editwar}}

If you encounter a /pol/ack, treat them with love and respect, and politely but firmly tell them to live. Set the better example. They are human beings suffering from hatred and ignorance. Set a good example of what a human should be like. If you are not capable of remaining calm, avoid and move on. The Overton Window is extremely skewed against them, and as such they are easier to ignore and kick out than [[SJW]]s.

Keep in mind that some are otherwise good people who are hurting and tired. Their hearts may be in the right place, they are just going about it the wrong way. They need to be challenged amicably, given empathy, and be shown that the world isn't a burning cesspit. To say that these people do NOT deserve to have their views debated and only deserve ostracization (let alone ''violence'') only pushes them deeper into an inescapable corner, with no choice but to join truly dangerous groups for social acceptance or survival. Lastly, to uniformly dismiss and hate them all is to spit on the legendary efforts of stellar individuals like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis Daryl Davis], a black man who went out of his way to befriend and deradicalize KKK members in real life, ''face to face''. It is no better than calling Daryl a white supremacist to his face, [https://www.facebook.com/daryl.davis.104/posts/10217755060641033 something which actually happened].

It's a bad idea to challenge /pol/ users on their home turf echo chamber. If somehow encountering one outside of 4chan, gauge the user to determine if said debatee is 1) good but misguided, 2) a believer that's not beyond redemption, 3) a true believer that's beyond redemption or 4) purely a shit-stirring troll. Avoid the latter two, and guide the former two away from their influence. Remember: Amicability and empathy. [[This Guy|Be like Daryl]].

==See Also==
*[[SJW]]s, the (mostly) left-leaning "contrast" to /pol/'s alt-right twattery, subjected to constant, though often inaccurate, comparisons due to hypocrisy and similar but better justified zealotry. Some major distinctions are that SJWs have much more influence in the media and their goals are generally noble and idealistic, though they go about accomplishing those goals the completely wrong way, which can make them just as dangerous and more obnoxious.
*[[/k/]]
*[[Board-tans/pol]]
*[[Racial Holy War]], for what the rest of 4chan thinks would happen if a /pol/ack made an RPG.
*[[MYFAROG]], for when a /pol/ack actually made an RPG.
*[[Nazi]], what these guys ''wish'' they were.
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBpijRDDOxQ An appropriate response] to the forced Trump meme.

==Gallery==
<gallery class="center">
File:First_visit_to_pol.gif
File:1477229948688.jpg
File:Never Relax.jpg
File:1491144651231.png
File:1475903382909.jpg
File:Global Rule -3.jpg
File:Shitpost.png
File:1490344868585.jpg
File:1518620305269.jpg
File:1517880145411.png
File:Srgfd.png|All anyone needs to know.
File:1495590391196.png|Same as before but adapted to new memes.
File:5680446+_b10ddaacb84c03cf89b71c1f1327e25b.jpg|Cap doing what Cap does best.
File:Back_to_pol.jpg|The appropriate dismissal of all /pol/tards.
File:1481725926368.jpg|Some guy on Stormfront planning on using /pol/ as ''agitprop''.
File:1488601566861.jpg|/pol/tards delude themselves into thinking that it's only liberals who dislike them.
</gallery>

[[Category: Meme]][[Category: 4chan]][[Category: RAGE]][[Category:Pure Evil]]