R.I.P. Bioware
It's been on life support for awhile, but I think the plug might finally be pulled.
I was browsing X yesterday, and new information regarding Dragon Age Veilguard was released. This time, they were showing off the character creator, which went over as well as you’d expect from a AAA game developer in 2024. Some key takeaways from the character creator are pronouns, top surgery/double mastectomy scars, and so much inclusion.
Now, this doesn’t come as a surprise to me, AAA (and non-AAA) developers have been cramming this stuff down our throats for years now. Just remember last year’s forgotten RPG from Bethesda: Starfield, or from a few weeks ago the disasters that were Concord and Dustborn. So, some screenshots went viral on X discussing how inclusive the Veilguard character creator is.
I first saw LearningTheLaw post the video “showing off” all the features of this creator, and I suspect that this will be the nail in the coffin of an already weak franchise. In this video, the person is happy that you can play as a “non-binary” character and can choose between various pronouns, as well as show off top surgery scars for the sake of “trans inclusivity.” I for one was already probably going to avoid this game, but this makes it official.
And it isn’t just the guys complaining, women who actually play games are complaining about this crap too. This pandering is geared to those who were never going to play this game and turns off those who might have actually played it. Here we have Savvy calling out how you are supposed to be able to create yourself in the game but cannot give your character proportions that are accurate to your actual body. And below this, we have thatstarwarsgirl calling out the pushing of the obvious agenda, story, and gameplay be damned.
And finally, another post I saw, this time from Grummz calling out the fetishization going on here. Veilguard isn’t the only game doing this these days, but hopefully, it will lose enough money that the owners of these games realize that they need to put profit above their twisted ideology.
But I am not expecting that soon in Bioware given this is the game director:
So, until the lesson is learned, play your backlog, read a book, watch a classic movie, or just go outside and enjoy nature. There’s more to life than being sat in front of a TV or computer monitor all day playing a crappy game designed by people who hate you. So, enjoy life, these people can’t and there’s no reason that being a geek means you have to consume this terrible slop that they’re producing.
And once again, I am disappointed in a company I used to like. Years ago, I would have said that Bethesda and Bioware were my favorite developers, I loved the Elder Scrolls series, I loved the Fallout series, I loved the KotOR series, and I loved the Dragon Age series (among others). But Bioware is a studio that I would argue hasn’t produced a good game since 2012 with the release of Mass Effect 3, and others might say 2014 with the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition (I wasn’t a fan of that one, myself). And much like we saw with Volition, you can’t just go a decade without producing a good game and not get shut down, I wouldn’t be surprised if the news comes from Bioware soon that it’ll be gone, just a memory that hopefully hasn’t tainted their great classics too much.
Bioware: 1995-2024?