Jamie Sarkonak: BioWare abandoned what made it great

In this photo from 2008, BioWare Head writer Drew Karpyshyn (left) and Mike Laidlaw show off a Mass Effect game on screen. Photo by Bruce Edwards/Edmonton Journal

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EDMONTON — Though it was just announced on Wednesday that the legendary Canadian game studio BioWare was shutting down, it did not come as a shock. Many of us already mourned it years ago when it was clear that the company had become a Ship-of-Theseus simulacrum of the original.

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Back in its era of peak performance, BioWare delivered a steady stream of hits. The company’s 1998 Baldur’s Gate packed the rules and lore of Dungeons and Dragons into a game similar in calibre to Blizzard’s Diablo and Warcraft. The sequel, Baldur’s Gate 2, still tops best games of all time lists. Another notable early entry was 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and subsequent MMO in 2011.

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Later, BioWare proved it could bring its formula for rich characters, story and combat to its own original worlds. In 2009, Dragon Age: Origins updated fantasy adventuring for modern tech and grew into a trilogy by 2014 Game of the Year winnerDragon Age: Inquisition. But it was the Mass Effect science fiction trilogy, with releases in 2007, 2010 and 2012, that catapulted the studio from maker of niche role-playing games into a AAA developer.

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The studio was highly effective at multi-tasking.

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The great pull of a flagship BioWare game in those days came down to the writing: the epic story arc at the centre of a given franchise would play out differently depending on the player’s choices in the game. Some choices could mean the death of an entire people; some could kill off a beloved character — and there were many of those, because they had their own flaws, motivations and unique relationships to the protagonist which would grow and change for better or worse as the story progressed. Player agency truly mattered.

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For the Canadian fans, there was extra pride in BioWare’s success because the beating heart of the machine was in Edmonton. The studio’s three founders, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuck and Augustine Yip, met at the University of Alberta while studying medicine and taking on related programming projects.

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They drew much of their staff from local sources. The lead writer of the first two Mass Effect games, Drew Karpyshyn, grew up in an Edmonton suburb and was working on a Master’s degree in English at the University of Alberta when a writing position at BioWare was advertised in the faculty newsletter. He got the job, and minus a three-year break that he took to work on a book series, he remained with BioWare until 2018.

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Preston Watamaniuk, lead designer of the entire Mass Effect trilogy, studied political science and history, and then worked a garbage route in Edmonton for several years before getting his start at BioWare. He was still with the company as of the shutdown announcement.

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The lead writer of the Dragon Age trilogy, David Gaider, was running a hotel in Edmonton when he actually turned BioWare down for a writing job — he noted to an interviewer in 2023 that the pay was low and the office was sketchy, as it was in its early days — but changed his mind when the hotel was sold shortly thereafter. He left in 2016.

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James Ohlen, the lead designer and co-lead writer of Baldur’s Gate, co-lead designer and lead writer of Baldur’s Gate II, and co-lead designer of Dragon Age: Origins, ran a comic-book and gaming store in Grande Prairie, Alta., five hours north of Edmonton, prior to being drafted by BioWare. Eventually, he’d go on to found BioWare’s Texas studio. He left the company in 2018.