I am grateful they released the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which was a sort of penance for Mass Effect Andromeda.

Speaking of Andromeda, I still rewatch videogamedunkey's hilarious review of it titled Mess Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDjci1ODoBs

One of my favorite game companies ever. But it had already been "shut down" in practice after the acquisition.

As someone who spent so much time in the universe of Mass Effect / Dragon Age, this is hard. I am almost grieving. The latest games of those franchises (Andromeda and Veilguard) could not live up to the expectations. They deserved a better ending.

I wish I had never seen the new ME teaser / trailer [1] out 5 years ago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg-Ctg6k_Ao&vl=en

While we may be saying goodbye to BioWare, we can still enjoy the games through services like Good Old Games (GOG) who preserve the titles - BG1, BG2, KOTOR and more can certainly keep living on.

RIP to one of the best game studios.

> The company is also laying off around 400 staffers, Bloomberg reports, including around 50 at BioWare. The changes follow EA being taken private by an investor group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal that closed in August.

Never thought that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would shutdown the company that created so many childhood memories.

RIP Bioware. I was a designer at Pandemic early on before they joined forces. The last remnant of those times falls.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I think that a lot of Bioware fans just had nostalgia though - their recent work doesn't seem to have been as well received as their franchise initiator games.

Hopefully this opens the door for EA to sell off the Mass Effect IP to a company that's interested in making something other than a live service game.

Damn, I have a buddy who works for them, he was working on the new Mass Effect. He just lost his mom very quickly a few months ago too.

He hosted a friend and I end of last year and gave us a tour of their offices in Vancouver. Hits close to home.

I had never played any Bioware games but after that trip it inspired me to finally get around to playing through the Dragon Age series, and I marathoned them all over the next few months. It wasn't hard to see the very steep decline in quality. Which is unfortunate cause they definitely had a lot of talent but were being sabotaged internally from executives jerking them around with trend chasing (for as bad as Veilguard was, it's surprising they cobbled something together that's at least somewhat cohesive when it was going back and forth between a single player and multiplayer game), as well as people being put in charge of major creative decisions that clearly had not earned that role.

I just hope they sell off the IP rather than letting it stagnate further. There are other game studios out there who could do a lot with it.

Honestly I bet Obsidian is next, and I'm not sure I'll mind. I still love them for the great games they've made in the past, and still I buy their new releases, but they haven't been able to pull off a compelling game since Pillars of Eternity 2. That was 8 years ago.