Adam Jensen said:
KingsGambit said:
If you mean "cinematic" RPGs, then not so many. BioWare are still working on Dragon Age 4, because the horse, although dead, hasn't been flogged quite enough. It'll be another SJW EA adventure just like Inquisition and Andromeda.
Maybe not after the whole Battlefield 5 controversy. And with their chief design officer leaving the company, things might improve on the gameplay front as well. But knowing EA they'll most likely just make things worse.
You may well be right, but EA/"AAA" publishers have ground me down and turned me into a cynic. I played Titanfall 2 and I couldn't believe something so good could come out of an EA studio. BioWare is different tho and I think being in Canada might be part of it. Canada is crazy liberal and all Canadian university graduates getting jobs as games designers now are bringing their social justice values into their jobs, and the result was Inquisition and Andromeda.
When Mass Effect was created, it was a world meant to rival Star Wars. It had depth and rules, politics and history. Characters in the first game explained why shields would stop bullets but not chairs, why guns didn't need magazines, why the Normandy could stealth and how the
mass effect worked, the technology that drove the relays (which themselves enabled FTL). They created this living, breathing universe so that we would get sucked in...there might've been minor issues in the plot, but no major holes. Then EA bought them.
ME2, a game I should say that I still adore, was not the sequel we should've had. The Collector storyline was nonsense, killing Shepard and the Normandy only to bring them both back was awful. Liara's "arc" made no sense and happened entirely off screen. We were forced to work for Cerberus, the Reapers were not just sidelined, but "forgotten". The Spectre thing was also forgotten. They took so much of what made the first one good and said ignore all that, make a third person cover shooter with reloading. Forget that other stuff, just add more mooks. Arrival retconned the whole story of ME1 and ME3 negated both ME1 AND Arrival. Then Andromeda retconned everything that was left, not the least of which was the very name of the game, the "mass effect".
All the great stuff established by the first has been dragged thru the mud now. Prior to Episode 7, the Star Wars universe continued for years in the form of books and comics. All built on and continued the adventures of Luke, Han, Leia, their kids and loved ones. Each book, by different authors, respected the continuity and lore. Different authors wrote each others characters and developed them, such as (my favourite) Mara Jade, Talon Karrde, Kyp Durron, Coran Horn, even Kyle Katarn! EA treated Mass Effect (and Dragon Age) like video game "backdrops" instead of lore-filled universes with rules and continuity (kinda what Disney are doing to SW now).
The result was the world of DA:Origins, a world of shades of grey, violence, racism, treachery and more was a liberal utopia in Inquisition. One of the best moments in Origins was when Sten lectured my female Warden on why she couldn't be a warrior, only at the end of the game to acknowledge her victory. I loved returning to the Slums where she began, seeing what they were doing to the downtrodden elves and exacting justice on the Tevinter slavers. All that gone in the name of social justice and Iron Bull's lectures. I don't have it in me to say anymore about ME:A. I suspect the pseudo open-world "collect fuckabout points" gameplay is going to influence their future game design too.
The doctors left, Drew Karpshyn left (and Mac Walters is a crap writer who isn't in the same league as Karpshyn or David Gaider)...I don't know what to make of Casey Hudson's return...it's a good thing, but is probably too little too late. My love of BioWare for many years, from BG to BG2, ToB, NWN, KOTOR, JE and ME has taken many hits; they're an EA studio now, existing only as brand name and intellectual property ownership. They are no longer capable of making a deep, reactive, single-player, story-driven RPG/Action game without MTX/lootcrates. I will be delighted if they prove me wrong, nothing would make me happier, but I just don't see them being able to.