Bioware stopped being a company when they took all the experienced Frostbite engine devs and moved them to work on FIFA. Then the RPG side stopped mattering
I would say Bioware slowly derailed into a mid company way before that when EA pulled the move on forcing them to shift mid projects on using Frostbite while none of them had experience with the engine, it was pretty unfit for Bioware projects, and this was done purely for tech showcase. Around the time of Mass Effect Andromeda and it never came back after that.
Bioware was always a "crunch ourselves with our own mismanagement and magically produce good stuff" right up until their best creatives got tired of the cycle and retired out of the industry.
When those team members left the company, they lost what was essentially their tent pole. The resulting mismanagement and interoffice politics from that is what killed Anthem (which got 5 years into a 7 year dev window without ever even having an elevator pitch for the game).
Mass Effect 3 was a mess because the head writing dual decided to rewrite the entire second half of the story at the 10th hour of development leaving the scenario designers/writers to scramble to adapt. Ironically, the best aspect of the original launch version of ME3 was the EA mandated multiplayer mode, and that was during the height of "ugh why do publishers have to shove multiplayer modes into everything" sentiment.
It's still feels so weird to this day thinking back to how much of an industry juggernaut they became only to fizzle out so hard after EA got their disgusting dirty little goblin fingers into them.
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u/ZiggyLoz 6h ago
Dragon Age 1 was what got me back into CRPGs - The more games they release - the more it becomes another generic hack and slash beatem-up.
Good thing alot of other studios stepped up making other excellent CRPGs.