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EA took BioWare out behind the woodshed...
E123

EA took BioWare out behind the woodshed...

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EA shut down BioWare this month, so we spend the back half of the episode on what the studio meant to us — from Baldur's Gate through Mass Effect to a Veilguard that never felt like Dragon Age — and why its death is really the story of the triple-A game eating itself. We also grade every game BioWare ever shipped on an A-to-F scale and mostly agree, which is rare. Before that: Peter reports back from a Hawaii urology conference (and a luau with the sitting AUA president), new Frontierer and Master Boot Record, the Iliad, and qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division. Eden has now seen You Can See Everything and cannot stop talking about it, caught the live-action Look Back at a film festival, burned through two light novels and half a Chinese web novel the length of two Wind and Truths, and accidentally killed two Digimon by going to work.

Show Notes
  • Peter's week: the Western Section AUA meeting in Maui, which he's using to bank CME in Hawaii for the next several years.
  • The luau: Peter and his wife spent the whole night chatting with a pleasant, low-key stranger who turned out to be the sitting AUA president.
  • Games: still Vampire Crawlers on iPhone and iPad, plus a just-downloaded No Man's Sky for iPad.
  • Eden is an original-flavor No Man's Sky sicko who misses the quiet, lonely, scary version and resents the base-building and goals.
  • Peter's complaint is the same one: he liked the solitary artifact-and-plinth exploration and bounced when an update handed him a base he never asked for.
  • New metal: Frontierer's Ultraviolet Parasite, the most chaotic band Peter listens to — Dillinger Escape Plan plus industrial noise, exhausting in the best way.
  • Frontierer is the one band that gets an actual "what the fuck is this" from OR staff, where Cattle Decapitation and Cobalt pass without comment.
  • Master Boot Record's Computer Metal is the first MBR record with a real drummer and a guitarist rather than programmed parts, and it sounds like the recent live album as a studio record.
  • Peter finished the Iliad and immediately took a break from classics with There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, read in under 24 hours.
  • Antimemetics: ideas as infectious, malevolent objects, and a division whose whole job is things that slide out of memory — grown out of SCP Foundation serials into a novel.
  • Eden's Halloween: the Barbarian's Ball, with Cassie as the wolf witch from Conan the Barbarian and Eden as the fire she's thrown into, complete with red beard and flame nails.
  • Eden's costume was Guy Fieri-adjacent enough that Amazon spent three weeks trying to sell him the rest of it.
  • Tonight's movie: The Devils (1971), Ken Russell's censored masterpiece, back in theaters in a restored cut — going in knowing as little as possible.
  • You Can See Everything: Nathan Fielder's surprise 174-minute Elizabeth Holmes documentary, seen cold by a non-Fielder fan (Cassie) who has now spent 36 hours Wikipedia-diving every name in it.
  • It works because Fielder is onscreen and unmistakably a participant, so it never pretends to be objective truth, and the back half swerves hard after Holmes goes to jail.
  • Look Back got a live-action version from Hirokazu Kore-eda, 100 minutes against the anime's 52, and it clears the bar — not quite the animated film, but it uses the extra runtime to sit in the silence.
  • Adachi and Shimamura Vol. 13: a previously unmentioned culture festival, nothing happens, read in two sittings, delightful.
  • My Next Life as a Villainess Vol. 1: an otome-game isekai where being nice accidentally makes every man and woman at magic school fall in love with her, and she notices none of it.
  • Female General and Eldest Princess by Qing Jun Mo Xiao is roughly two Wind and Truths long, and Eden is 80% through it: a village massacred by the Huns, a girl who takes her dead brother's name and enlists, and a scheming princess who marries her without knowing.
  • Digimon Corner: Cyber Sleuth finished and loved despite the jank, now on Digimon World: Next Order, plus a V-Pet that lost two Digimon to unsupervised pooping.
  • The retro handheld: a Miyoo Mini Flip, bought to finally play the Game Boy games neither host was allowed to own, which led straight to the WonderSwan.
  • The WonderSwan story: Gunpei Yokoi invents the Game Boy, invents the Virtual Boy, gets fired, and Bandai hires him to build a Game Boy of its own — dual-orientation, three models, almost no market.
  • WonderSwan Digimon: Battle Spirit as a smash-style brawler and Anode Tamer as a deep tactical RPG waiting for the right week.
  • Current hyperfixation artifact: the KaiserGreymon Figure-rise Standard Amplified model kit.
  • Main topic: EA shut down BioWare, cutting roughly 400 jobs and leaving Mass Effect in limbo.
  • The studio's arc is the arc of the triple-A game: Baldur's Gate shipped with almost no voice acting, Knights of the Old Republic was half-voiced, Mass Effect was fully voiced, and The Old Republic launched with eight fully voiced campaigns — and budgets ballooned with every step.
  • The old iterative model is gone: Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX came out a year apart, Quake II followed Quake in eighteen months, and Baldur's Gate 2 reused its predecessor's engine to spend the savings on story.
  • Sequels no longer sell — a well-reviewed one moved a few hundred copies on Steam recently — which kills the cheap-iteration path that produced Obsidian.
  • Peter's line: BioWare was at its best making deep, character-rich, deliberately smaller RPGs, which is exactly why he always preferred it to Bethesda's wide, puddle-deep worlds.
  • Inquisition learned all the wrong lessons from Skyrim, and its dynamic level scaling meant a late-game Inquisitor still had to hit a crab three times.
  • The counterexamples worth hoping for: Owlcat's Expanse game, CD Projekt Red's independence and GOG revenue, and Larian declining Baldur's Gate 4 to go back to Divinity.
  • Casey Hudson's post-BioWare studio says it's building something Mass Effect-shaped, which at current timelines means 2030 at the earliest.
  • Lightning Round grades: Mass Effect 2 an A++, Mass Effect an A/A+, Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights A's, Jade Empire a solid B, Dragon Age 2 an A from Eden and a B from Peter, Anthem a sentimental B from Eden and a D from Peter, Mass Effect 3 a C that the Citadel DLC almost rescues, and Veilguard a C that never feels like Dragon Age.