Welcome back to Save State, it’s been a long while, hasn’t it? Change can sometimes be a good thing. It can refresh your situation, and give you a completely new perspective on life, the universe, and everything. At other times, change can bring ill omens and punishments for sins other people have committed. In my absence from GiN, I got a new job and moved to a completely new state. Unfortunately, that was also coupled with a fender bender and a house fire the literal day before we were set to move.
Stuff is just that: Stuff. All of my belongings, from video games, comics, Magic cards, or even those web-certified Xenoblade statues from Goodsmile that I had are just things at the end of the day. When you get a call that your house is on fire when you’re two hours away, too far to actually do anything substantive to help, your only real worry in the moment is your loved ones. I immediately had to confirm if my wife was okay, and after determining she was, all I could think about were our cats who were stuck in the house alone as the kitchen and living room burned down around them.
The good news is that both cats are okay. My wife’s cat stayed in the bedroom furthest from the kitchen and breathed in little smoke, but my easily ignitable fluffball of a feline planted himself directly in the living room and didn’t move. You see, for the first six years of his life, I worked from home with my office being in a corner of the living room. Whenever something would happen to scare my cat, he’d run into the living room and hide under my office chair.
Underneath that chair was the exact same place that the firefighters found him during the house fire. He was waiting for me to comfort him like I always would. Thankfully, he was super cooperative with the firefighters as they picked him up and carried him outdoors like that scene of Simba being held by Rafiki in The Lion King. The poor guy was coughing a lot for the first couple weeks, but he seems to have bounced back now.
So, that’s my life update for those of you wondering where I’ve been. My wife and I have settled into our new home pretty well. I’ve cleaned a lot of smoke and soot off of many of the belongings Neal Sayatovich and I pulled from the older smoldering house. The entire experience, while it could have been much, much worse, still sucks a major one. Nobody dying during a house fire is basically all you can really ask for. Not everything could be restored, unfortunately, and a lot of collectibles are probably going to need to be thrown out, but that’s just stuff. The living beings that made my life worth living, my wife and my cats, are still here.
One major thing about these kinds of bad experiences is that it can be easy to get depressed. In those kinds of moments, I do what a lot of other gamers probably do: Reach for old games that gave you comfort when you were younger. I play and have played a lot of different games- and while Super Mario RPG was likely the first RPG I had ever played and beaten, my formative years of gaming were filled with all sorts of things from Unreal to Sonic Adventure to Baldur’s Gate. I found myself compelled to play Baldur’s Gate II on my Steam Deck mostly because my computer was unusable after the house fire. While playing it on the Steam Deck wasn’t the most ideal experience overall, it still satisfyingly scratched that nostalgia itch and caused me to re-learn what THAC0 was all over again.
Of course, there always has to be more bad news even when you’re still recovering from the last Sim City-style disaster to hit your life: BioWare, the company who created several of my favorite titles of all time, has been closed. A lot of gamers who weren’t old enough to play CRPGs in the 2000s wouldn’t really know why BioWare was such an incredible company, but they legitimately had one of the most generational runs of excellent games across the entirety of industry.
In a twelve-year span from 1998 to 2010, BioWare released absolute haymakers of RPGs in Baldur’s Gate I and II, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1 and 2, and Dragon Age: Origins. In this list is many an old RPG-head’s favorites, and several are widely considered among the best Western RPGs of all time. My wife is a major fan of Dragon Age: Origins, and it took until Baldur’s Gate III for there to be an RPG that scratched the same itch as Dragon Age and its highly immersive tale of the Grey Warden who raises an army to combat the dreaded Darkspawn.
For those who love D&D or are even remotely interested in it, Baldur’s Gate II and Neverwinter Nights were excellent, narrative-driven games that put the difficulty selection almost entirely in the hands of their players. Sure, your first character build may not work out, or you may have picked a less-than-ideal story choice that led to a disastrous outcome, but you’ll be able to approach the game considerably more prepared for another attempt. Of course, the later titles would be a lot more accessible with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic mixing the force of a multi-million-dollar IP with BioWare’s excellent character and quest writing with great character building and customization options.
Jade Empire was another streamlining of the process, giving you a variety of different styles to choose from as you fight enemies in real time. This Xbox title featured a similar alignment system to Knights of the Old Republic, though it was more about being an altruistic martial artist or a violent one, as Jade Empire is a mythological martial arts story and BioWare’s first RPG where they weren’t limited by licensing. Mass Effect would probably be the game that propelled BioWare into the mainstream, however, as the RPG elements, dialogue choices, and real-time third person shooting combat was incredibly alluring for Xbox 360 owners at the time. I didn’t know a single gamer who didn’t at least have an opinion on Mass Effect – I recall being elated at the time, as this game developer I had been following for eight or so years at that point was gaining recognition with practically everyone I could speak to.
BioWare would follow up with two more Mass Effect sequels, and while the third title left me a little deflated at its conclusion, it still had some of the absolute best character writing they had ever done. The payoffs for nearly every character that players had built a connection to over dozens, if not hundreds, of hours is something that other game developers should take notes from (not the ending, though lol). “It had to be me, someone else might have gotten it wrong” is one of the most impactful phrases in the entire series, not to mention, “Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls, and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer.”
BioWare is damn good at what they do. What they did. Of course, this didn’t mean that absolutely every game was a hit that needed studied. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood should have been a homerun with someone like me, considering I am a massive fan of both RPGs and Sonic the Hedgehog. Unfortunately, what followed was a pretty mediocre DS RPG with some of the worst ear bleeding music you could get on the system. If the best soundtracks on DS belong to adventures like The World Ends with You and Radiant Historia, Sonic Chronicles is likely among the worst when you take tracks like Central City into account.
There are rumors that Sonic Chronicles’ OST was so bad as a result of mismanagement and the need to completely redo the soundtrack from scratch in a single week, but if that’s the case, the roots of mismanagement popped up well before BioWare was saddled with projects that didn’t suit them like Anthem. The later Dragon Age games didn’t quite capture the same magic as Origins, for example. But you can still find diehard defenders of II, Inquisition, and Veilguard. Mass Effect Andromeda also had very similar, “It’s fine” levels of praise, or where players would recommend it but with a caveat or two (I personally think the game’s narrative meandered a bit longer than it should have, but I’d still suggest it to fans of the previous ones).
A lot of the talent who made BioWare what it was had left at some point during the above projects, whether it was from the hiring and firing boom-busts cycles that occur in almost all major Western game development or what, who can say. Mac Walters, the lead writer of Mass Effect 2 and 3, left BioWare and founded NetEase-backed Worlds Untold, which eventually paused operations while seeking new funding. Mass Effect trilogy director Casey Hudson also founded his own studio, Humanoid Origin, which unfortunately closed in 2024 after running into funding difficulties.
David Gaider, the lead writer of Dragon Age, at least produced a game within the last few years in Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. Several other employees left to form Archetype Entertainment around 2019, and their upcoming RPG, EXODUS, is scheduled for release in April 2027 through Wizards of the Coast. Others left sometime later to go work at Blizzard, such as Kevin Martens who co-created Diablo III.
The thing is, these companies aren’t people, no matter what Mitt Romney says. These companies are made up of people, and those people are who make those companies what they are. The BioWare that existed for years for sure had talented people in it. While Dragon Age: Veilguard wasn’t super highly regarded, it’s still a pretty fun title with a decent amount of build variety that I enjoyed. But the BioWare who made Veilguard isn’t the same BioWare I think of when I reminisce about Baldur’s Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, or Mass Effect. The people who made an impact on me simply weren’t there anymore.
In a way, it’s kind of like the house fire I experienced. That house isn’t my home anymore. The kitchen I made meals in for ten years, where I got my first compliment on my cooking from my mother-in-law, simply no longer exists in the same way it does in my memory. The ceiling is on the floor now, and the walls are burned away, revealing pipes and metal wire channels that I didn’t even know were there. The BioWare that’s being closed, the one a lot of us are mourning, isn’t the same company who shaped our tastes and habits with their excellently designed narratives, character moments, character builds, and progression systems.
The people who made that BioWare, the one that only exists in the memories of a wide-eyed child who yearned for immersive experiences to escape a bad home life, all exist elsewhere now. My new dwelling doesn’t have a couch, and I’m missing an office chair as I sit and type this in a camping chair that we had in the trunk of the car. All of the things we lost, however, were just stuff. In spite of this, things will be okay. Hell, maybe with a little bit of luck and a lot of effort, things might even be better than before. In that same vein, BioWare, the company, was just stuff. The actual people who made up BioWare, however, are still around, and hopefully they bounce back and can get back to creative endeavors similar to how we bounced back after the house fire.
The BioWare I think about in my mind doesn’t exist anymore and probably hasn’t for a long time. But those people still do, and for as long as they’re out there, I hope they know that they still have a fan who thought to comfort himself with one of their oldest works during a bad time. If this somehow makes it to any of those people who worked on any of the games in their catalog, know that you made my childhood substantially better and I wouldn’t be half the fan of RPGs if not for many of your brilliant works over the years.
No quippy send off this week. Life is hard, hug your family, hold your pets tight, know that hard times are ephemeral, and the bad doesn’t last forever. I hope to see you in two weeks.
