UPDATE
Are you glad this writer got his “last hoorah” before leaving? Are you glad he missed the madness that came from Bioware later on? Let us know below!
ORIGINAL STORY
Something we’re seeing more and more of in recent years is once-established game developers changing on the inside and becoming something that gamers don’t recognize. That might sound very “doom and gloom” but it’s the truth, and Bioware is an excellent example of this concept. They were once an “underdog” developer that made some of the best RPG titles around, with Mass Effect being one of its “crown jewels.” But, over time, they started to lose the people who made the place special. EA bought them, and now they’re a shell of their former selves.
One of the main people who left Bioware was Mac Walters, who was one of the writers for their sci-fi RPG franchises and was one of the driving forces behind Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. He even admitted in an interview with Minnmax that the game wasn’t on the “roadmap” for Bioware at the time, and they needed to work with other people within the company to make it work without hindering other game development:
“Long story short, that process reminded me a lot of early-days BioWare, because we were a small, scrappy team, a lot of people wearing lots of different hats, a lot of people with opportunity to lead even if it wasn’t in their title, just because that was the nature of what we needed folks to do. There was a lot of camaraderie formed with that team, I think because we stayed small.
After Legendary Edition, because it was so successful to me as a project, in the sense of the team was healthy, we really got along, then of course it was critically and financially successful, it just felt like, this is the bow on all the things I’ve done in Mass Effect, which is like all the things. I don’t want to do any more Mass Effect after this. Why tempt fate?”
Why indeed? And that’s something that needs to be pointed out: the remastered version of the trilogy was not just a huge hit; it reminded fans of what the franchise was when it was made by the “right team.” When the 4th game came out, it wasn’t what fans remembered, and it was panned by pretty much all that played it. While there is a 5th entry in the works, many gamers don’t have high hopes, especially since Bioware laid off plenty of people earlier in the year, and we still don’t have anything definitive on it.
