Well, with Mass Effect 3 it's easy to understand. Mass Effect was supposed to be a series of space opera RPGs, a spiritual successor to "Knights Of the Old Republic" in a unique universe given that they didn't have the Star Wars/D20 liscence to work with at the time. With Mass Effect 2 they turned it from an RPG into a shooter with cinematics and removed a lot of the depth and itemization from the game rather than improving what was there. The third game has a lot of people up in arms because it's supposed to be even more of a shooter than ME2...erttheking said:
Also remember Bioware slotted off a LOT of people over "Dragon Age 2" for reasons ranging from the brawler type combat as opposed to stat based RPG combat like the first one, to the re-used enviroments, to their attitude in asking for fan feedback on whether or not it was okay to remove most character generation from the game and limit Hawke to simply being human with one origin, which received an overwhelmingly negative response, followed by Bioware claiming that the fans approved... which is a great way to start a riot honestly.
After years in development, there are a lot of mixed impressions of "Old Republic Online" as well. After the amount of time spent in development and the sheer amount of hype, a lot of people expected more, even if the game wasn't perfect. The amount of content is very limited, and the endgame is more or less a joke. The biggest defenses made about it being "well many MMOs, like WoW itself, launched with less" but that really isn't a good defense when your considering that it's not up against WoW when it launched. Given the sheer amount of time under development people expected more content especially at the high end which is where most people spend their time. Right now you have a lot of people going on about how once their storyline is done there is little motivation to do anything but sit around in the fleet and wait in queues. What's more in the process of making the game approachable, it shoots out high end gear like a pez dispenser. Part of what fuels endgame players is getting gear that is difficult, or very time consuming to get, and most other players won't ever be able to obtain equivilents to... this gear being used to face increasingly difficul challenges to get even sweeter gear. The thing is that you can obtain top tier gear just by sitting around and having your companions run crafting and crew skill missions, or just zerging the PVP queue since PVP rewards are fairly generous even for the losers compared to the actual cost of high end PVP gear. You can pretty much blow through the the two major tiers of endgame gear inside of three weeks, and you don't really have to do anything.
Fanboys will of course resent the point, but do some websearches for "The Old Republic Endgame" and look at the complaints and how echoed they are accross a lot of places. It doesn't get as much attention as the positive media blitz, but it's been noticed.
The point of mentioning all of these divergent topics is that they come down to problems with Bioware and it's relationship with the fans that got it this far. "Dragon Age", the spiritual successor to "Baldur's Gate" is nothing like what it was supposed to be. "Mass Effect" the spiritual successor to the single player "Knights Of The Old Republic" games has increasingly been turned into a cinematicly driven game combining Gears Of War and maybe a simplified version of Hellgate: London.
Joining forces with EA, Bioware has become increasingly about the business aspects of reaching the biggest possible audience of casual gamers, and that has even come out in "ToR" and it's version of an endgame... which is an endgame everyone can pretty much max out, literally getting top tier gear by just sitting there and clicking buttons and watching timers count down in your crew window which if you do a search some have likened to Farmville....
Probably more of an explanation than you wanted. For those that read this far I'm not really entertaining "yeah buts" or arguements here. This isn't about me attacking Bioware personally, or daring people to defend them, it's me simply stating WHY these issues exist and why Bioware is generating so much rage which would have been unheard of a few scant years ago. Whether you agree with the reasons or not, there they are. Of course I'm condensing a lot of things that could be easily figured out with a bit of research, reading the rants and complaints themselves, and noticing the common threads and issues which go beyond what ONE fanboy is saying. These are the things that create trends because thousands upon thousands of fans share the same sentiments which fuel them to attack Bioware. With all the arguements over the last few years about Mass Effect and it's trnasformation into yet another third person shooter, and the disapproval from vast legions of fans over it (even if there are plenty who support it), it would be more surprising if Bioware *wasn't* under siege during their annoucements.
