How Frostbite Ruined BioWare

The latest one has been plugged as an "action RPG"

At this point if it has any semblance of a skill-tree, and some sort of loot system, then it gets slapped with the "RPG" tag.

Looking at Battlefield right now I'm not sure if it just ruined Bioware.

There was a decline before Frostbite. Dragon Age Inquisition is a more polished and "BioWare" experience than both MEA and Anthem. Nobody ruined nothing, BioWare just lost too much of the talent that made it BioWare and which made them do technically good stuff. There's some technical improvements of graphics, VFX and controls in their more recent games but the engine-tech, systems and stability has only gotten simpler and simultaneously worse since ME2. DA2 and ME3 may have been rushed but if you look at it, some designers working across those games started doing one-note fetch-quests without cutscenes in DA2 which then became almost the sole format for side-quests in ME3, which then became the motivation of the game in Dragon Age Inquisition. Mass Effect 3 scrapped the idea of a cause-and-effect series of choices leading to a good or worse climax, replaced it with a score (Power/War Assets) which became the system in DAI.

You can tell there was a talent/focus tradeoff at BioWare over the years and now the talent they have leaked and gotten replaced shows to simply be worse than the BioWare that once was. That's seriously what it is. Frostbite is also shit but they clearly made it do great things with the multiple classes, character sizes, the diversity of class combat, the War Table and more in Dragon Age Inquisition, and MEA had the best mechanics for movement that BioWare has ever done, while sporting some pretty sick audio reverbation systems and stuff.

Frostbite did not ruin BioWare, it's a mixed bag but ultimately BioWare's decline started well before transitioning to Frostbite. ME3 had way more glitches than ME2 as well. It all adds up to me.

Greg Zeschuck especially championed BioWare's original personality. That of a carefree make it or break it studio with no worries about having incredible ambition. They were a company making unprecedented games with hires that didn't have expertise in game development. I believe they are still a loose canon with the hiring but rather than being the "company founded by doctors, hiring trashmen and zookeepers for programmers" they're now "that EA studio hiring fans from cons and community managers and journalists who suck up to their legacy" and the people in charge also have old grudges against their audience and publications over failures they made themselves.

Define "Traditional sidequests".
There's maybe a handful of Conversation driven side quests in 3, and for one they're mostly auto-dialogue and interrupt driven and 2 the objective design is completely narrowed down to the point where they don't feel like they have a plot, like, you're just going from one end of the map to the other pushing buttons with ambient dialogue colliding over itself because of how poorly designed it is.

The vast majority of side quests in 3 is fetch quests and no, I do not think of the "ME2 squaddie catchup" missions as side quests. Those are basically the Loyalty quests of ME3 and not ironically they also are where the game reflects on your ME2 Loyalty status with characters. Like Loyalty missions in ME2 just being optional I don't count it as side-questing when it feels like they were as directed and level-y as a main mission. I count "Questgiver gies Shepard a job which you must pursue and return to questgiver" as a side-quest, not a mission.

ME1 has some where it's sort of loose but they were given by Hackett or anon over the comms before entering a system and given an end dialog back on the ship (the hub) at the end of returning from its quest area. The only side quests I remember from ME3 are these

1. All the one-note fetch "prothean obelisk" type quests that take you to the Reaper-scan galaxy map minigame and back to Citadel
2. Dominic Osoba asking for a specific thing that coincides with an N7 mission
3. Aria's Omega Merc Recruitment questline (the best and only meaty side-quest the entire game)
4. "Speak to Tactus" Medi-gel condenser quest
5. Indoctrinated Hanar and Kasumi quest.
6. Offier Noles stuff with Balak.
7. Some Zaeed quest about Volus, and Vorcha in an apartment.
8. Liara Barla Von quest that ties into a war asset quest.
9. Batarian whatever which I think Conrad showed up in?

Grissom Academy, Tuchanka: Turian Platoon, Attican Traverse: The Rachni, Rannoch: Admiral Koris... etc. and so forth. I'd throw the N7 missions in there too, although of course they're a bit short.

As for whether you liked ME3's overall mission design concepts, that's an unrelated topic. 




Counting the raw number of missions is a silly, silly metric. You're comparing something that takes 15 seconds to play with something that takes over an hour to play. (15 seconds because finding the mission targets and walknig past the delivery target on the Citadel are things you're going to do anyway -- assuming you're the type who actually walks around the Citadel. Remember, the reason this type of sidequest was invented in the first place was to provide interactivity in the hub areas.)

I have no idea why you're trying to make a distinction between "mission" and "side-quest." What's the point of it?




By ths definition ME3's N7 missions count too.



OK, yeah, if we arbitrarily rule out any missions which includes the ME2 squadmates, and the Rannoch and Tuchanka sidequests, and the N7 missions even though they fit your own criteria, the list gets a bit short.

Why are we supposed to rule them out, again? And why didn't you rule out Kasumi's mission?

Edit: look,  I get that you're just looking to say bad things about ME3 in a fresh way, but making up tendentious distinctions is not the way to go about it.

I’d call them main quests, considering they are a majority of the game, and affect the ending so much. In me2 anyway.

I’d say te quest is the reason you go to the level. The main quest, find Liara, is the reason you go to Therum. What happens on the way to the quest objective is padding. Entertaining game play padding, but still padding. It isn’t itself a quest.

That's a classic definition of the main/side distinction. But a lot of players resisted calling the ME3 LMs "side missions" because they gave an advantage in the endgame. I thought this was a bit silly, but maybe accommodating this intuition via a third category would be useful? OTOH, this would almost erase side missions from ME3 altogether since there are hardly any missions which don't pay off in WA points.

(Honestly, taxonomy is kinda bullshit anyway. We draw bandboxes around stuff and think there's meaning in it, but the stuff is the same stuff wherever we draw the box.)