Written by Kenneth Shepard (no relation).

He’s a super fan and cohosts the NormandyFM podcast.

UPDATE from Kala Elizabeth (on BlueSky):

“This has gotten to a point where I am stressed out because I have been a big advocate of this and the devs have always been a part of the conversation FOR ME. I did TRY to get the wording changed. The person who created the petition told me no.”

This is part of why I have been saying that you can’t really neatly place the blame on EA or bio aware because it’s just a colloidal suspension, if you will:

>On the subject of BioWare, EA said it didn't take the decision to shutter the studio "lightly" in last week's email. Yet, those we spoke with felt the RPG specialist slowly suffocated in the unrelenting grip of corporate mismanagement, with the studio being repeatedly told to redirect its focus away from choice, consequence, and companions to better incorporate live service and multiplayer elements. "A lot of money got wasted going down these roads that didn't lead anywhere," said one person.

>Those we spoke with weren't necessarily surprised that BioWare was eventually marched to the guillotine. One source said the team had been struggling for years and claims leadership at the studio level "slowly degraded" over time as they became shackled by fear. "There was never a desire to take risks. Never a desire to do anything interesting. It was just 'here is what these 14 UXR [User Experience Research] studies are saying, so we've got to do it this way." They note, however, that talented people still remained at the studio.

I'm an ex-BioWarian (there's a whole bunch of us) and I've been doing a series of interviews with people I used to work with from back in the hey day (BG through DA:O/ME1-2). This week, I had recorded an episode with Tobyn Manthorpe about his new independent game Dogs Playing Dead. I had scheduled it to go, and of course, BioWare got shut down. So I re-recorded some of it to include a short tribute.

If you ever played the original BG and read the tombstones, Tobyn's tombstone read "Here lies Tobyn, Who believed in the good of all, Died at the hands of Zombies while asking for directions"

Tobyn's had a pretty neat career since leaving during the Eclipse Engine (DA:O) development, we talk about BioWare, independent games, the state of the industry and the importance of failure in creative attempts.

Tobyn's episode is available at https://tales.dups.ca/p/ep74-dogs-playing-dead-and-bioware-closes

I've got a few more interviews there (this one is the sixth I think) and I'll continue to do them, some maybe people you've heard of but many maybe not. The reason for me, regardless of whether anyone listens, BioWare produced amazing people, none of us had any business doing what we did, but we did them anyway. Most of those people are now all over the world in any number of studios, creative endeavours, tech businesses, whatever. I'm biased of course :)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, there's links on that page to the other episodes to get to know others, and I intend to do a bunch more next year as well.

Hope you enjoy!

Until we all go, BioWare will live, it was way more than a logo on the side of a building for us who lived through the early days.

I thought this was a great essay, a more positive legacy I mean the amount of people who have mourned the closure, another twist of the private equity knife, which the studio developers have suffered under since 2007.

If you enjoy CD Projekt RED games, they might not have existed as we know them today, had CDPR not starting localizing their CRPG line. Lending them a game engine for The Witcher 1, BioWare staff also shared their booth space during E3 2004!

Baldur's Gate 3 is a Larian made sequel to duology BioWare made back in 1998 to 2001

Watch the video, he explains it in more detail and better worded than I can!