The End of BioWare Is a Tragedy for RPGs and the Players Who Grew Up With Them

Somewhere, there is a kid playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the first time. They’re exploring a galaxy far, far away, meeting people who will become old friends, and discovering that the choices they make can change everything. They don’t know which decisions they’ll regret, or who Darth Revan really is. They don’t know which characters they’ll remember years from now, or how much this fictional world will come to mean to them. They certainly don’t know that, one day, the studio responsible for this experience will be gone. They just know they don’t want the adventure to end.

I was that kid once. I’ve played every BioWare RPG, from childhood into adulthood, and the studio helped shape my love for games and storytelling in ways I still harbor with me. I’ve had the displeasure of watching BioWare deteriorate for years, losing the people and creative identity that made it special. I knew this day was coming at some point, but now that it’s here, I can’t shake the feeling that something irreplaceable has been taken from us. BioWare’s closure is the end of a future I kept hoping we’d get to see, and a painful reminder that some of the things we grow up loving won’t be there when we’re ready to return to them.

BioWare Helped Define What RPGs Could Mean to an Entire Generation

I think about Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, and I remember what it felt like to disappear into their worlds. BioWare had a way of making the grandest adventures feel deeply personal. The fate of the galaxy might rest on my shoulders, but I was just as concerned about the people standing beside me. I wanted to know their stories. I wanted to hear what they had to say after a difficult mission. I wanted to believe that, if I made the right choices, everyone might make it home alive Sometimes they didn’t. Wrex’s death still hits me hard to this day, and taught me that if a RPG has persuasion stat or skill, always invest into it.

Really, that was BioWare’s gift, and while we have tons of high-quality RPGs these days, no one really did it like BioWare. They made players care deeply about people who didn’t exist, then somehow made those feelings impossible to dismiss. Its characters could become companions in the truest sense of the word, familiar presences we looked forward to hearing from. Their games had that choices could follow us long after we’d stopped playing. For me, these games helped establish what I loved about RPGs, and they influenced the way I think about narrative to this day. It’s difficult to explain just how much a studio can mean to someone until the prospect of never experiencing anything new from it becomes real.

I’ve grown up since those first adventures. I’ve spent years writing about games, thinking about stories, and trying to understand the craft behind the experiences that stayed with me. BioWare has been part of that journey, even as the studio itself began to lose its way. I kept hoping it would find something worth fighting for, that one day it would make another game capable of reminding us why we fell in love with it. Not another Mass Effect simply because we missed the old one, but something new that could mean just as much to someone else. That hope is what makes this ending so miserable. I wanted BioWare to have another chapter. How cool would have been if BioWare managed to pull itself out the hole it was in, and have a new generation of players experience their own stories to talk about. Instead, we’re left with the games we already have, and the knowledge that there will be no more.

What BioWare’s Closure Means for the Future of Story-Driven RPGs

Before we begin, allow me to paint you the full picture.

BioWare, was cursed, ever to wander. Its glory rotted from within, its greatest minds scattered to the winds, leaving its legacy to rot and wither. It gorged on the corpses of its former triumphs, clinging to the fading memories of its legendary titles. And we, its admirers, watched helplessly as the studio we loved became a grotesque shadow of itself. Now, at last, its long suffering has come to an end.

Reality for a moment: BioWare has been disappearing for years, and as painful as it is to admit, this was a long time coming. The talent behind their greatest games moved on and, overtime, their identity grew increasingly difficult to recognize. Development struggles became a painful part of its story in a big way, and that drove them further into ground. Anthem is perhaps the clearest example of how far things had fallen: a promising idea battered by a disastrous production until the finished game bore little resemblance to the experience so many had hoped for. Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived with the weight of the studio’s legacy hanging over it, and let’s just say, it wasn’t Dragon Age: Origins, that’s for sure.

Now EA has closed its doors, and the next Mass Effect project is gone, too. After years of waiting for a recovery, we have reached an ending that offers no possibility of redemption for the studio itself. But understanding why something is dying doesn’t mean you want it dead. There was a time when the BioWare name made me excited about the stories ahead. Eventually, it became a name I associated with disappointment and uncertainty. Now it’s a name attached to a closed studio, and I can’t help mourning what it once was. We spent years watching BioWare slip away, trying to convince ourselves that it could still turn things around. How cruel that the final confirmation came when there was nothing left to save.

The genre will endure. Other studios have been making wonderful RPGs, and players will find new characters to love and new worlds to call home. But no one can replace the particular place BioWare occupied in our lives. There will never be another first journey through Mass Effect, another chance to discover Knights of the Old Republic without knowing where it leads, or another BioWare game waiting to meet us at whatever stage of life comes next. I can return to those old worlds whenever I want, but I can’t return to the person I was when I first found them.

And now, the studio that accompanied me through so much of that journey is gone. Perhaps the games will outlive the company by generations. Perhaps someone will discover them decades from now and fall in love just as I did. I hope they do. But I wish the people who made those games had been given the chance to give us something more. BioWare helped make me love this medium. I wanted to see what it would give the world next. Now, we’ll never get to know.

BioWare may be gone, but the memories it gave us will endure long after the final credits have rolled. Share your thoughts in the comments below, and let us know what BioWare meant to you.