Separating the goods from the greats is never easy, and the best DLCs prove why that is. This list began as a humble collection of five must-play video game expansions, but after careful (see: impassioned) deliberation with my colleagues here at GamesRadar+, we've expanded our rankings to seven.

If you're here off the back of the new Witcher 3 DLC announcement, you're in the right place. There's something magical about the transformative power of an excellent DLC, whether it sees a glorious journey come to a well-rounded conclusion (as per one of the best Witcher games) or a beloved FPS shown in a whole new light. Many games on this list count among the best RPGs, but rest assured: we're thinking broadly for this one, meaning no genre has been ruled out.

We'll be keeping this list updated as more new games deliver post-launch offerings, but for now, join us as we crown the best DLC of all-time.

7. Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser

Base game: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One
Release date: September 8, 2015

Serving as an essential epilogue to Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Trespasser DLC was the final major expansion to come to BioWare's third fantasy RPG. With so many narrative threads still to wrap up in the main story – which left us with a major revelation regarding companion Solas' identity and motivations – the Trespasser DLC allows you to confront the complex elf and perfectly sets up what's to come in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Set against the backdrop of Thedas' political tensions, you also get caught up in a curious plot, and eventually determine the fate of the Inquisition in a satisfying conclusion. It's as necessary as it is enjoyable, with the bonus of being given the chance to spend more time with the loveable companions (and your chosen paramour).

6. Lies of P: Overture

Base game: Lies of P
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Release date: June 6, 2025

Lies of P charmed me as one of the most impressive and best action-RPGs of 2023, and Overture somehow managed to top it. Introducing difficulty levels in what has to be a first for the Soulslike subgenre, Lies of P: Overture sees our steel-armed hero sent back in time to the moment the city of Krat fell apart. The new map areas breathe life and dimension to the otherwise Belle-Epoque gothic vibe of the base game – think snow-capped mountains, mutated zoo animals in a deviation from all those puppets, new status effects, and brand new weapons to craft. It's a beautiful, engaging DLC that adds plenty of narrative backstory to the events of the base experience, and it really should be top of every Souls fan's list to try out.

5. Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwell

Base game: Dishonored
Platform(s): PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Release date: April 16, 2013

Casting you as one of Dishonored's antagonists, assassin leader Daud, Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall manages to both complement the main adventure and stand relatively alone. In fact, with three dense missions that the superpowered stealth assassin can complete in a variety of ways, the greater focus lends this side-tale more replayability – I've probably zipped through this one twice as much as the main game. This expansion allowed developer Arkane room to experiment as well, many of Daud's powers having their own twists on Corvo's moveset, like how Blink actually pauses time while you aim, allowing for ultra-precise assassin moves (can comes with its own charms, for further refining abilities, too). In fact, I'm redownloading it right now.

4. Mass Effect 3: Citadel

Base game: Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Release date: May 14, 2021

Saying goodbye is never easy, particularly when it comes to an RPG trilogy that made you fall in love with its characters so deeply. So, when Mass Effect 3 first came around, it was hard to let go of Commander Shepard and the Normandy crew. Thankfully, a year later, BioWare dropped the Citadel DLC to round off the adventure. Not only did it serve as a fond love letter to the series and its fans, but it also delivered the perfect, bittersweet way to bid farewell to the RPG's beating heart: the companions.

Centered around putting on a party on the Citadel during a much-needed spell of shore leave, you get caught up in an incredibly wild conspiracy involving your own clone (because Shepard can never catch a real break). Packed full of self-aware jokes, meaningful moments, and incredibly entertaining scenarios, it has everything you could ever want from an expansion.

3. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Base game: Cyberpunk 2077
Platform(s): PC, Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X
Release date: September 26, 2023

How CD Projekt Red managed to turn one of the best first-person RPGs into a spy thriller is a feat in and of itself, but Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is proof of how well it works. As both a polished-up "do-over" of sorts that saw multiple in-game systems and processes reworked as part of the major 2.0 update it released with, Phantom Liberty has become essential material that no playthrough would be complete without.

There's new weapons, new characters, and a whole new district of Night City to explore – oh, and a couple of new endings, if collecting 'em all is your thing – and it's more than deserving of being one of the best DLCs ever made for the sheer magic of how it makes Cyberpunk feel the way it was always meant to.

2. Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree

Base game: Elden Ring
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Release date: June 21, 2024

A long two-year wait separated the base game from Shadow of the Erdtree, but the Elden Ring DLC was more than worth it. It offers a uniquely narrative-driven approach, offering a glimpse into the Land of Shadow and how Queen Marika rose to power – and yes, you need to touch a withered arm to make that temporal jump.

It's a suitably gruesome, fascinating expansion that peppers the already rich tapestry of Elden Ring with even more lore-bites, a new host of weapons, a reworked magic system, and some of the cleverest open world design among any of the other best DLCs on this list. It's easy to see why fans call it a vital part of the overall experience, so you don't want to miss this one.

1. The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine

Base game: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Release date: May 21, 2016

Geralt's journey to Toussaint is an unmissable experience that truly completes the base game, and a decade later, I think our Witcher 3: Blood and Wine review was a little harsh on the best DLC of all-time. The lush expansion sees Geralt taking up the moniker of wine baron in a picturesque land – one with a vampire problem on its hands.

It stands out not only for its thrilling storytelling and worldbuilding, as is par for the course for CDPR, but for how beautifully it ties things up for our monster slayer (though you can still engage with the open world and clean up those side quests once the credits roll). Blood and Wine is everything a DLC should be, the definition of a must-play RPG expansion, and I won't hear a word against it.

Summer Game Fest 2026 draws ever closer, and this might be GamesRadar+'s longest Wildcard Wishlist yet. The Summer Game Fest 2026 schedule grows more detailed by the week, with an Xbox Games Showcase and Gears of War special confirmed so far alongside Day of the Devs and a Wholesome Direct. But instead of being rational when it comes to specific game predictions, I've enlisted my most trusted dreamer colleagues in outlining all the new games we hope to see – no matter how out-of-pocket they might be. (I mean, I was right about Resident Evil Requiem's reveal last summer, after all.)

This is our third year of putting our hearts before our heads in the leadup to the showcase season. Here, you'll find everything from announced upcoming PS5 and upcoming Xbox Series X games we'd love to see more of, like The Witcher 4 and GTA 6, to upcoming Ubisoft games that have yet to be revealed despite reportedly entering development. They're all alike in one way: we have no real reason to be hoping for a major update from them at Summer Game Fest this year… but man, would we love to see it. Get the hopium ready, people. Here are the GamesRadar+ team's most-wanted wildcard games of SGF 2026!

1. Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

The leaks are out there now, which means I'm just waiting for some official Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe news to validate it. It's been a busy time for Ubisoft, with Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynched launching mere months from now, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for a rich, gloomy setting, and a game set during the European witch trials would definitely tick that box. After all these years jumping between RPGs and stealth action, it's high time Ubisoft injects some much-needed provincial magic into the mix. I saw Ezio Auditore with the devil!

2. Divinity

Developer: Larian Studios
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

We only just learned of Larian's new RPG at The Game Awards 2025, so maybe I'm greedy to hope for another peek so soon at Summer Game Fest. But can you blame me? The stunning reveal trailer introduces a far grislier side to the Baldur's Gate 3 studio than we've ever seen before, with a man getting burned alive inside a wicker effigy while townspeople celebrate around the pyre with rapturous glee. All eyes are on Larian as it quietly works to bring this sinister medieval fantasy to life, and while I'm more than happy to wait patiently, I really hope the studio doesn't leave too long before our next glimpse.

3. Haunted Chocolatier

Developer: ConcernedApe
Platform(s): PC
Release date: TBC

I know, I know, ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barone) has told us time and time again that he's still wrapped up in Stardew Valley and won't be showing off his upcoming RPG anytime soon. But it would be remiss of me not to include the elusive Haunted Chocolatier on this list, even as someone with admittedly little knowledge of his other works. The combination of its quirky setting, social sim elements, and a greater focus on combat this time around in this "way bigger" game is what grips me about it, and the fact that it's still so shrouded in mystery only piques my interest further. C'mon, Mr Barone - break off a square for us at Summer Game Fest?

4. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet

Developer: Naughty Dog
Platform(s): PS5
Release date: TBC

It's been two years since Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was revealed at The Game Awards 2024, and Naughty Dog has been quiet for far too long. The Last of Us developer's latest looks like a stunning sci-fi adventure, with a brief cinematic reveal trailer the only thing we have to go on for now. It's the studio's "wildest, most creative story yet" according to Neil Druckman, but I'm most keen for a better look at its combat after a glimpse of its third-person melee action. Here's hoping SGF 2026 sees Naughty Dog reminding us of its upcoming PS5 exclusive in style – maybe even with a release window?

5. Marvel's Blade

Developer: Arkane Lyon
Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC

The coolest vamp slayer in the Marvel universe is past due a temperature check, but with such little news of late, I'm not feeling confident we'll be seeing Marvel's Blade at Summer Game Fest 2026. Studio Arkane's upcoming Marvel game has been in the works for years now, and save for some stills shared in 2025, we really haven't learned much since its first reveal in 2023. But maybe that silence is soon to end, should Arkane appear during an Xbox showcase this summer to give the PS5's upcoming Marvel's Wolverine a run for its money? Again, I have no grounds for this supposition except… what if?

6. Mass Effect 5

Developer: BioWare
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

After Dragon Age: The Veilguard tied a bow on Dragon Age for what will likely be a long time to come, I have my sights firmly set on my other favorite BioWare series: Mass Effect. With Mass Effect 5 in the works, there's always a small part of me that hopes we'll learn more about the next space-faring adventure. With only crumbs to go off of so far – which amounts to cryptic teasers here and there – there are so many questions I have about what's in store. As the developer is busy working on the next entry, I don't expect we'll actually see it at Summer Game Fest this year… But hey, there's always N7 Day in November.

7. Cyberpunk 2

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

What else is this list for but to wish for the day CD Projekt Red unveils Cyberpunk 2 for real? We've known about the existence of the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel for some time now, with some rumors (or leaks, considering they came from the IP creator himself) that it will be set outside of Night City in Chicago instead. This is about as wildcard of a wishlist item I could possibly think of, and there's as much likelihood of it being shown at Summer Game Fest as there is of Keanu Reeves breaking into my house to offer me a cigarette. But both are things I'd quite enjoy, so leave a girl to her dreams.

8. Far Cry 7

Developer: TBA
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

While I'm still high on complete fantasy, we need to talk about Far Cry 7. Ubisoft has been especially quiet about the followup to 2021's Far Cry 6, so much so that it hasn't even been revealed yet. The rumor mill suggests that it could be coming as soon as next year, but as Ubisoft goes through a period of restructuring, there's never been a murkier time to be a fan of its top IPs. Still, if a Ubisoft Forward is on the cards for this summer, maybe it's not so wild to imagine a Far Cry 7 reveal after all? Not sure how I feel about the 24 hour time-limit, though…

9. The Witcher 4

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series X, PS5
Release date: TBC

More than a decade after Geralt hung up his swords, The Witcher 4 seems tantalisingly close yet remains just out of reach. Last summer's tech demo suggests CDPR has been quietly making major strides, but since then we've heard almost nothing about Ciri's upcoming adventure beyond a promising series of hiring announcements. Unfortunately, we're not expecting to return to The Continent before 2027, which means a major announcement is unlikely, but a new trailer setting up Ciri's story or her adventure in the new region of Kovir could be the start of a major 18-month hype cycle.

10. The Elder Scrolls 6

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

After a whopping 14 years of… well, not much of anything, I'm still unwaveringly hopeful we'll see The Elder Scrolls 6 make an appearance at another event, even if it hasn't since its very first reveal at E3 back in 2018. Sure, Todd Howard himself has joked that we should all "just pretend" that Bethesda never announced its long-awaited next RPG, but that's far easier said than done. I'd love to see a sneak peek of the setting – whether or not it's truly the ever-rumored Hammerfell or High Rock – or perhaps get an idea of when it's set. Will it take place after or before Skyrim? Will we see playable races we've never seen before, like the Falmer? I doubt it, but hey, a girl can dream – and dreaming is exactly what I'll be doing.

11. Grand Theft Auto 6

Developer: Rockstar Games
Platform(s): PS5, Xbox Series X
Release date: November 19, 2026

With Grand Theft Auto 6 set to launch on November 19 and no further delays in sight, expect to hear a lot more from Rockstar in the coming months. Although the game's two existing trailers have been released with little build-up or fanfare, Summer Game Fest 2026 could be the perfect stage for Rockstar to open the floodgates as the run-up to launch begins. After all, we still don't know much about what we'll be getting up to in Leonida, nor what to expect from GTA 6's multiplayer. Will anything from our GTA 6 wishlist come true at SGF 2026? Time will tell!

12. Persona 6

Developer: Atlus
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

As Persona 5 fast approaches its tenth anniversary, having complete silence on the next proper game in the RPG series is starting to make me sweat, but Persona 6 news might come soon. The fifth game propelled this teen drama series into the spotlight like never before, and as a (mostly) anthology-style series the big question is just how what will Persona 6 do next? Stick with its predecessors urban, Tokyo vibes? Return to a rural small town, like Persona 4? Will they age up teens to college students? Will it still be set in Japan, or span multiple locations? Will it be green?! It could be anything. Which also means, at the moment, it's nothing. I simply have to know what direction they'll be taking, so even a small teaser will do. But, like everyone else waiting, I demand to be impressed. No pressure now.

13. Wolf Among Us 2

Developer: Telltale / Adhoc Studio
Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC

It's somehow been nearly seven years since The Wolf Among Us 2 was first announced at the Game Awards back in 2019. Fast forward to today, and we've seen a few trailers, screenshots, and story details. But after a string of delays and some radio silence, I have no idea what's happening when it comes to Bigby's longwaited return. Even so, I still yearn for the sequel to my favorite Telltale game to finally see the light of day. With Adhoc Studio's – who penned Bigby's return – releasing a fantastic episodic story-driven experience in Dispatch last year, my appetite for Wolf Among Us 2 only intensifies. May Bigby huff and puff this year down.

14. Witchbrook

Developer(s): Chucklefish, Robotality
Platform(s): PC, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC 2026

Witchbrook has been at the top of every cozy gamers most anticipated list since it was officially announced back in 2018. However, it's almost been eight years now and we still don't have a firm release date for the magic centered life-sim. The good news is that after it was delayed last year, the new 2026 launch window hasn't moved from the game's store pages. And, considering that we haven't got any new dev blog entries via the title's website either since December, I have my fingers crossed that we'll see it make an appearance during the Wholesome Direct on June 6. I'm craving to live out my cute pixelated witch fantasy and after a decade of waiting, it's time that we all get our hands on this one.

Voice actors don't always get the credit they deserve. Despite bringing characters to life and then representing games at events, they're sometimes treated as mere footnotes in the development process. A performer on Dragon Age: Inquisition credits two stars of Baldur's Gate 3 with helping to raise the status of such contributors across the board.

"Video game acting is, at times, hard, demanding, and also challenging, and it's also joyous, and it's filled with, literally, blood and sweat and tears, especially if you're on the [performance capture] stage," Alix Wilton Regan, who voiced the female Inquisitor in Inquisition, told GamesRadar+ at the BAFTA Games Awards. "So video game actors, they deserve their flowers, because we help pull the audience in to elevate the writing, the animation, the direction, the tone."

Truer words are rarely spoken. Voice actors give nuance and personality to the cast, deepening the narrative and creating a closer connection with the audience. They can, and often do, help elevate great games into masterpieces.

"I give a massive shout-out here to the Baldur's Gate 3 crew, because they were the ones who made all the other video game actors sit up and take note and realize, 'Yeah, actually, we are loved, our work does have value, and we too deserve to stand up and be counted,' Regan continues.

"I've literally said this to, like, Jennifer English's face, or Neil Newbon. I've been up to Ben Starr, and I'm like, 'You changed the game,'" she adds. Starr, ever the charmer, turned it around on her by pointing out that she voiced the Inquisitor, a huge role in a widely-regarded RPG.

Baldur's Gate 3 might be more pertinent to recent memory, but the third Dragon Age installment was the fantasy adventure du jour for a while there. It's hard to imagine any of these projects without these performers involved, and long may their success continue.

Baldur's Gate 3 was "lightning in a bottle," Astarion actor says, and "proved a lot of things" that big companies "who are just really chasing the money need to learn from"

Owlcat Games' upcoming sci-fi RPG The Expanse: Osiris Reborn might take plenty of inspiration from Mass Effect, but its game design director says "we do not think of ourselves as a successor" to BioWare's series.

The Expanse devs have previously been open about Mass Effect's impact on their RPG, with creative director Alexander Mishulin calling it a "great inspiration," and game design director Leonid Rastorguev specifically pointing to Mass Effect 2's suicide mission as an influence. Speaking during a presentation attended by GamesRadar+, the devs are asked if they welcome those Mass Effect comparisons or if it's one that they'd rather fans didn't make, and while Rastorguev reiterates that, yes, the BioWare series has had an impact, this game is ultimately still an Owlcat creation.

"We actually said before that we really love the Mass Effect series, and it was a great inspiration for us," Rastorguev begins. "But we do not think of ourselves as a successor to the Mass Effect series or anything like that. We are making our own game, Owlcat game, as a start with our approach to narrative, to choices, to combat mechanics, and so on. So, in some parts, yes, we've played Mass Effect, definitely, and we enjoyed it a lot, but it's still a different game. It's [an] Owlcat game."

Game design producer Yuliya Chernenko agrees, even though she thanks Mass Effect for leading her to her job in the first place, as she points to the sci-fi RPG and Neverwinter Nights as "two main games" that "made me join, basically, game development in general."

She continues, noting that Owlcat has already made "a lot of other games," and so "we have our own approach" to development.

It's not going to be too long until players can see what the team has been cooking up, anyway. Although the full game isn't set to launch until spring 2027, it's getting a closed beta on April 22 this year for anyone who pre-purchases the Collector's Edition or "Miller's Pack" version.

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is a Mass Effect-shaped rocket that could finally propel Owlcat into the RPG mainstream: "We'd been feeling a growing ambition to go bigger."

As Dragon Age 2 turns 15, because time slows for nobody, former lead writer on the series David Gaider has taken some time to reflect on the slightly troubled sequel. A victim of publisher demands, the follow-up to Origins didn't quite land how anyone hoped, due in no small part to constantly shifting goalposts.

Remembering the development of Dragon Age 2 in an interview with The Gamer, Gaider recalls the period being a "big jumble," thanks to EA. "I had started plotting out the Dragon Age: Origins sequel. I was going into the whole thing with Solas and the stuff that eventually ended up in Inquisition," he says. "And then there was a sudden change."

That "sudden change" was EA looking for something from BioWare to release during the fiscal year ending in March 2011. Star Wars: The Old Republic had been delayed, and a full game seemed too ambitious, therefore DLC for Origins became the plan.

"I was just thrown because I was like, 'Oh, what do I want to do here?' I guess I could set up the story beats to come, like, set up the exalted march on Kirkwall," Gaider says. Then, another curveball arrived: "It was only as we were starting to put that together that I remember being told, no, it's not expansion-sized. It's a full sequel that we're going to do at the time of an expansion."

Oh dear. This led to a lot of internal scrambling and long hours, as Gaider and the other lead devs pushed to make something worth shipping in a fraction of the type typically needed. BioWare's own design philosophies were part of the problem.

"BioWare as a team did not know how to make a small game. We planned for a big game," Gaider remembers. "And when we're told this is a full sequel, initially for the first four months of work, we're assuming that it was going to be much bigger."

In one instance, he talks about going into a writers' room where all sorts of quest-lines were laid out on sticky-notes, and just taking away chunks. "I had to take out half of them," he states.

This led to a smaller-feeling sequel – no open-world, more concentrated doses of exploration, and less backstory all round – but one that still resonated with some fans. We eventually got a grander, more epic sequel in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Dragon Age 2 serves as the cult entry. I consider it the Final Fantasy 8 of the series, and honestly, there are much worse results from this kind of situation.

Dragon Age and Anthem veteran argues risk-averse AAA games have become "too homogenous" and "soulless," which might lead fans to accept generative AI.

Somehow, the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake still lives. That's according to a new interview with Tim Willits, chief creative officer of publisher Saber Interactive. This is the first official news we've gotten about the remake of BioWare's beloved RPG since it was first unveiled nearly five years ago.

"Yes, it is still in development," Wilits told IGN. "That's all I can say." And, indeed, that's all he did say, choosing not to address the long-percolating rumors – and courtroom testimony – about the KOTOR remake's troubled development.

The KOTOR remake was announced way back in 2021. Developer Aspyr is primarily known for ports and remasters and has built generally well-regarded versions of both KOTOR games for mobile and Switch. But a remake would effectively be an all-new game, something the studio has little experience in.

In 2022, a Bloomberg report suggested that development of the KOTOR remake was in some trouble at Aspyr, and so had shifted to another unnamed studio at Saber Interactive, which, at the time, owned Aspyr.

A few years later, when Aspyr was sued over missing DLC for its KOTOR 2 port, Lucasfilm Games VP Douglas Reilly revealed in a deposition that the KOTOR remake was now being handled by Mad Head Games, which is also developing Hellraiser: Revival. If legal testimony from a Lucasfilm executive isn't enough for you, Mad Head's official site also proudly proclaims that the studio is working on an "unannounced AAA game based on a famous and beloved IP."

Reilly also revealed that a KOTOR 2 remake was still in the planning stages featuring "modern art" and "modern gameplay." The plan was to "keep the story and the characters and [...] the general content of KOTOR II, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kind of things." Presumably, the KOTOR 1 remake – whenever it finally releases – will feature similar upgrades.

This is all separate from Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, which was revealed at The Game Awards last year. That's a brand-new game that serves as a "spiritual successor" to the KOTOR games, and is being led by OG BioWare director Casey Hudson.

KOTOR still tops our list of the best Star Wars games.

Notch another win for game preservation, as a Mass Effect fan has uncovered a prototype version of the cut mission that became the Bring Down the Sky DLC. It represents an extremely specific slice of the legendary RPG's development history, but for those of us who've been waiting nearly a decade for Mass Effect 5, any look at "new" content is sweet manna.

Oddly, this story starts with a YouTube comment. Back in 2010, Mass Effect composer Sam Hulick posted a track from an unreleased piece of DLC, offering no insight into what the expansion was meant to be. But a few years later, one comment declared that "it was a Caleston DLC." This user, offering no sources for their claims, alleged that "a guy said years back that it was leaked on Xbox Live for a short period of time."

This was a "my uncle works at Nintendo"-level rumor, but it was specific enough to get the attention of someone who goes by TheUnsungHero26. "While it sounded outlandish and came from an unverified source," they explain in a ResetEra thread, "it was such a specific claim that part of me believed it... And it turns out it was true!"

Well, true in a way, anyway. "During development of Mass Effect," TheUnsungHero26 explains in a YouTube video description, "BioWare uploaded a DLC prototype to PartnerNet, the Xbox 360 developer-facing Xbox Live sandbox. This DLC was dumped and uploaded to Hidden Palace on October 25, 2025."

That video, which you can see above, showcases a full playthrough of this DLC prototype. It's not the most exciting thing in the world – it mostly consists of a bunch of the same cookie-cutter sidequest areas that always drove me up the wall about Mass Effect 1 – but the fact that it exists at all is fascinating. Particularly since it is, indeed, labeled as Caleston DLC.

The name Caleston is already familiar to hardcore of Mass Effect fans, as it's the original name for the cut planet – technically, a cut moon – that eventually became Therum in the final game. Despite the location's appearance on the galaxy map in this prototype, TheUnsungHero26 explains that "selecting it actually takes you to an entirely different cut planet: a very early version of Bring Down the Sky, when it was meant to be a side quest in the main game."

But it's very different from the DLC that we actually got. "The map is different," TheUnsungHero26 says. "There are no Batarians, instead, the enemies are humans (as per the mission's original plot, which you can read about on the wiki), there's a timer, and instead of three bases, you are looking for three mine shafts with generators to shut down. There's also some oddities, like three crates with unique armor and weapons that were previously inaccessible, and a rachni nest."

It's a bizarre confluence of things – a cut mission, tied to the name of a cut planet, that eventually became DLC – but I'm hard-pressed to think of a game dev story that doesn't involve a bunch of pieces shifting around in ways that only make sense once the project is finished. Saving these sorts of development insights is a big part of what game preservation is all about.

"Now I realize the contents of this probably aren't too exciting to anyone except the most hardcore Mass Effect fans," TheUnsungHero26 concludes, "but experiencing 'new' content for a nearly two decades old game that I hold dear is something special. My hope is we see more pre-release builds of the game dumped, so we can uncover more cut content (of which there is a lot!) Big shout out to everyone who helps make game preservation like this possible."

The Mass Effect series includes some of the best RPGs ever made.

As work on The Witcher 4 continues to press on, CD Projekt Red opens the door to new faces with plenty of experience under their belts – like Dorian Kieken, the studio's new AI director and a hardened BioWare veteran boasting credits on gems from the Mass Effect series.

Kieken worked at BioWare for a solid eight years, as per his LinkedIn profile, starting as a producer on titles like Sonic Chronicles before moving on to act as development director and co-founder of the company's Montreal studio.

He then undertook projects like Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 – DLC included. Since leaving the team in 2015, he's gone on to found his own AI startup: AI Redefined, also known by the acronym "AIR."

Now, he's returning to game development, it seems – and he's not just going to any studio. Kieken is working with CD Projekt Red as the company's new AI director, as he reveals in an online post.

"After eight years of building memorable RPGs at BioWare and eight years of building cutting-edge AI solutions at AI Redefined, it is finally time to bring all of that together in my new role at CDPR as AI Director," he writes.

The new AI lead then explains that he'll be "responsible for the company's AI vision and strategy," and is "so excited" to be there. It's pretty cool, honestly, especially as it's not the first instance of CD Projekt Red welcoming knowledgeable devs recently.

Two months ago, former Baldur's Gate 3 developer Felix Pedulla joined CD Projekt Red as the team's newest senior cinematic designer, with other positions opening shortly after. As for Kieken's AI startup, AI Redefined, he posted late last year that it had been "acquired by CM Labs."

Fingers crossed that Kieken settles in nicely, and the next few years are just as bright for The Witcher masterminds as the past decade.

The Witcher 4 will cost CD Projekt almost $800 million between development and marketing, estimates analyst who also predicts new The Witcher 3 DLC this year

As I watch the Normandy ship appear among the stars in the opening of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition reveal trailer, a familiar sensation takes root. Flashes of Omega and the Citadel follow, and as the music starts to build to an epic crescendo, scenes from the trilogy play out like a fast-paced highlight reel. The adversaries I overcame, the companions who stole my heart, the locations I got swept up in, the choices I faced; it's all there. Watching the trailer and its one minute and 46 seconds distillation of the sci-fi RPG series feels like coming home – a bite-sized reminder of one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've ever had.

Truth be told, I've lost count of the number of times I've rewatched the trailer. Now, it's on my mind more than ever. Today (Feb 2) marks five years since BioWare announced the Legendary Edition with said trailer. Back in 2021, the remastered return of one of my favorite series filled a BioWare-shaped hole that only grew in Dragon Age's long absence. While that's been somewhat filled by Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the presence of Mass Effect Legendary Edition feels more significant than it ever did.

"You were born to do this"

When Mass Effect Legendary Edition first released, longtime fans like myself had the perfect excuse to revisit the trilogy all over again, and by Joker did I. Over the years since, I've stepped back on board the Normandy multiple times – but as elated as I personally was (and still am) to be able to easily return to Mass Effect on current consoles, I was way more excited about what it meant for future players. It heralded a gateway for new generations to enjoy the same RPG magic that I first experienced almost two decades ago, magic that still holds true today.

By re-releasing the trilogy under one edition with all of the DLC and some welcome upgrades and enhancements, BioWare made it easier than ever to tuck into the trilogy for newcomers. It's the same reason I yearn to see the Dragon Age series get the exact same treatment, because as Legendary Edition proved, it not only means new fans can discover Shepard's adventure, it also means it keeps living on without getting lost to time. If Dragon Age: Origins got the same treatment as Mass Effect 1? Making it more palatable for modern audiences without taking away from the original experience overly much? That's the dream, right there.

Game preservation aside, it's also been an undeniably difficult time in the games industry of late, and some major changes have made for an uncertain future at BioWare. With layoffs resulting in the loss of so much veteran talent, and publisher EA's reported buyout ongoing, it's hard not to think that BioWare as we once knew it during the early Mass Effect and Dragon Age era is over. While Mass Effect 5 is currently in development, we're likely going to be in for a very long wait yet, and with Dragon Age: The Veilguard out in the wild, I already sense another BioWare-shaped hole starting to form. But I take comfort in knowing that the Legendary Edition is always there for me, just as my Dragon Age saves are there for me to return to Thedas whenever I need to – albeit through backwards compatibility in some instances.

I'm so thankful Legendary exists for future generations, and revisiting the reveal trailer on its fifth anniversary just reinforces that feeling tenfold. It may only be a short little promotional trailer, but it's become a monument to a series that had such a big impact on my life. Through its characters, themes, and stories, I found myself. I found a community of like-minded fans and fell in love with the way games can connect us and bring us together. And I look at Dragon Age in much the same way.

"You were born to do this", says everybody's favorite alien boyfriend, Garrus Vakarian, at the end of the trailer. Sure, the words are directed at Shepard and their ongoing resilience through so much adversity throughout the trilogy. But as the person who embodied Shepard through it all, it feels like Garrus is talking to me. I wouldn't be the same person I am now without Mass Effect. At times, it feels like I was born to play it. It was destined, written in the stars. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to rewatch the trailer again.

Mass Effect 2 had strength in storytelling by not being afraid to kill off its heroes.

Details on Mass Effect 5 are still scarce, but BioWare seems to be ramping up production by hiring for a new lead developer.

BioWare's executive producer and Mass Effect 5's project director Michael Gamble jumped online earlier today to share a job opening at the studio for a production director. "Hi, I'm hiring a very important senior leadership role," Gamble tweets. "They'll report to me and it's gonna be awesome."

Whoever gets the role will be responsible for making sure the studio as a whole is on the same page in regard to high-level concepts, and will already need over 10 years of experience on AAA games and "deep expertise in ARPG and RPG development," according to the job listing. They'll also need "a passion for the Mass Effect universe to serve as a high-impact leader on our next Mass Effect title." EA's job board currently doesn't include any other openings for BioWare specifically.

Mass Effect 5 is now the only game in production at the famed RPG maker after BioWare spent decades as a multi-project outfit, perhaps due to the soft launch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the layoffs that followed in its footsteps.

At the start of last year, we learned the next Mass Effect was still in its pre-production phase five years on from its first reveal trailer, which revealed that Liara T'Soni was back alongside remnants of the galaxy-threatening Reapers. Our only hint as to what the game is actually about came from Liara unearthing N7 armor. Although, whether this is a direct sequel or one set in the distant future is unclear since Liara, and all Asari, are, you know, capable of living for hundreds of years.

OG Mass Effect Shephard actors would be there "with bells on" if BioWare brought them back for Mass Effect 5

It's now been a week since Anthem's demise, but it suddenly seems a whole lot more likely that fans might be able to get BioWare's looter shooter up and running again themselves, even if EA pulled the plug on its servers.

Previously, Anthem executive producer and Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah explained that "Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," and while he's not sure if they'd still work, "the code is there to be salvaged and recovered." As he explained at the time, this would mean the game wouldn't have to rely on dedicated servers, but rather "let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game." In combination with that, had BioWare been able to add AI party members, Anthem could have feasibly been playable in a single-player format, but alas, that was never to be.

Except, as spotted by Kotaku, it looks like fans might be able to pull something of a revival off themselves. Over on YouTube, one user who goes by And799 has shared a proof of concept "Anthem Client as Server testing" video (below). Not only do they show the game loading up and running again, but they even open it in a second window to connect a second player to the session. While things look a bit laggy here, the point is the idea – you can see both characters moving around, totally connected by the user's alternate server. Oh, and did I mention that they posted this only five days after the EA servers were shut down? Fans work fast.

Don't expect the return of Anthem to come from And799 specifically, though, or any time soon, as they note in the video description that "this is just a POC from my research and experiment and does NOT represent the current progress of the private server/revival project that is currently in progress." They also note: "Seems like the majority of the player data are handled through bioware's server instead of blaze and it is required for the game to be able to load offline."

They don't explain exactly what revival project they're referring to here, but looking around online, there's been chatter within the remaining Anthem fanbase across Reddit and Discord from folks hoping to bring the game back, including from one server (known as The Fort's Forge) which they're part of. While it doesn't look like enormous progress has been made at the time of writing, it's obviously very early days, and fingers crossed And799's findings are indicative of the fact that there's real hope of folks actually pulling this off.

Dragon Age veteran defends studio's attempt to make something different with Anthem: "BioWare's always been changing."

Heading into launch, Anthem was often called a "Destiny killer" – though that was a label assigned by press and enthusiasts, not by the devs at BioWare themselves. Yet by the time Anthem launched in 2019, it seemed clear that the devs had missed some key lessons from Bungie's looter shooter. As veteran producer Mark Darrah explains in a new interview, BioWare was still trying to take lessons from the venerable Diablo series rather than Destiny.

"I think it took Anthem a very long time to admit to itself that it was a looter shooter," Darrah tells Destin Legarie. That tracks with a 2019 report from Jason Schreier at Kotaku, where sources at the studio reported that leadership at BioWare pushed back on any reference Destiny at all, despite devs suggesting that they should be learning from the market leader in the genre.

"From a design perspective, the number one touch point for Anthem was actually Diablo," Darrah says. "So it was trying to be like that. I feel like maybe it could have done that. I don't know." But, he notes, Blizzard had a multitude of Diablo games to learn lessons from, and he admits that Destiny might've provided "easier lessons" for Anthem's development.

"First of all, more directly comparable," Darrah continues. "They're both shooters. They're both looter shooters. Whereas, you know, Diablo is what, a looter sworder?" Diablo predates the looter shooter genre by some time, and Darrah says "I think there's always a danger in using something with that level of pedigree as your exemplar because it gets permission to be different by being so much older."

Diablo's DNA is easy to see in pretty much any game that focuses on loot drops – whether that's Destiny, Borderlands, or Anthem – but, as Darrah suggests, it's very much its own thing. Blizzard's game established its identity in an era before players demanded MMO levels of content from their loot games, and the areas that Destiny got right – like bespoke raid and dungeon activities and rewards that define the endgame and remain essentially unmatched in the genre – could've provided good lessons to BioWare in their own game.

Anthem "did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs" says Dragon Age veteran, and he's not sure he or BioWare ever "came back" from its spectacular failure.

The death of Anthem, BioWare's maligned live-service RPG, comes as the Stop Killing Games initiative has put increased pressure on developers to create end-of-life plans that would keep these sorts of games available in the future. GOG's managing director, Maciej Gołębiewski, knows a thing or two about the practical realities of preservation, and he hasn't arrived at a clear answer yet.

"Game preservation is a very complicated riddle," Gołębiewski tells Eurogamer. Giving old games official, legal re-releases – as GOG does – requires tracking down IP holders, patching the games to work on modern hardware, and making sure all this work is commercially viable. "No one can do it for goodwill because this is not how salaries are being paid," he says.

That's certainly true from the perspective of a business like GOG, but sometimes this kind of work is done with pure goodwill – as is the case with the custom community server project for The Crew, the now-dead Ubisoft racing game that kicked off the Stop Killing Games effort in the first place. But certainly, you can't count on fans to bring back every dead multiplayer game, especially when these projects are always at risk of being shut down by IP holders.

"Resurrecting and bringing back multiplayer titles is something that's very complex, something that's very difficult, but it's very visibly becoming a matter of discussion among gamers, among regulators and publishers as well," Gołębiewski says.

The key objective for Stop Killing Games is to, through EU legislation, force publishers to implement end-of-life plans for online games that would keep them playable even after official servers shut down. Some publishers have already started making steps in this direction. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League got an offline mode as part of its final update last year. Knockout City arguably provided a gold standard for multiplayer preservation in 2023, with the devs offering players all the tools they need to host their own private servers.

It seems even Anthem had some form of local server infrastructure during development, but there's no telling how much time and effort it would've taken EA and BioWare to implement that back into the flagging game.

"What is a fair end-of-life cycle for a game?" Gołębiewski muses. "Should it just be buried and killed and no one can access it any more, and people who spent five or seven years working on it cannot really look at their creation any more because the service turned off? There is a very interesting and very complicated discussion that Stop Killing Games probably kick-started out of frustration."

Gołębiewski reiterates that GOG's mission is to "make games live forever," but he – like many in the industry – fears regulatory restrictions might restrict the types of games publishers will fund. That'll leave publishers saying, "'Okay now I need to put up the funds to create it, promote it, and then upkeep it for 10 years, 20 years, because the regulator said so,'" as Gołębiewski puts it. "That might in turn cause there to be fewer cool games for gamers."

But Stop Killing Games is explicitly not asking for decades of support from publishers – the effort wants offline modes or private server functionality to be provided to the community so that players can have access to the important parts of the games they've previously bought. At that point, the game is out of the publisher's hands. Whether that's a financially viable solution for every live-service game is the big question/

"I don't have the perfect answer yet," Gołębiewski concludes, "but it's good that the discussion is taking place."

Anthem fans say goodbye to BioWare's looter shooter on its server shutdown day, mourning the "potential" that was lost: "Such a waste."

Anthem, BioWare's maligned loot shooter, is officially dead. This week's server shutdown rendered the always-online game completely unplayable even to those who already own it – a practice the Stop Killing Games initiative has been fighting for close to two years now. According to producer Mark Darrah, the seeds of the future Stop Killing Games envisions were in Anthem until shortly before launch.

In October 2025, Darrah published a post-mortem video running down Anthem's post-launch fortunes. Near the end, he describes his vision for Anthem Next – an ultimately abandoned plan he believed could've given the game a No Man's Sky-style turnaround. Crucially, this plan would've included locally hosted servers – something that already partially existed during development

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah explains. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game."

These comments have come back into the news thanks to a nearly four-hour compilation video Darrah posted this week. Responding to those headlines, the Stop Killing Games account on Twitter says that end of life plans "for games like this is what SKG is about."

While Anthem is a pretty widely maligned title, Stop Killing Games says in a follow-up tweet that "it really is as simple as the principle of one man's trash is another man's treasure. If you put money into the game, you should have a voice on whether you get to keep it or not. You as the customer should have the final say as to when you're done with a game, not the company."

"Stop Killing Games has actually changed the timeline": As EU petition comes to successful close, founder says "unending overtime" has him ready to "take a break for the next 10 years," but he's sticking around until it's done'

Less than seven years after launch, Anthem is dead for good, and that's especially unfortunate when its executive producer reckons the plans to overhaul the looter shooter "could have" led to a No Man's Sky-level comeback before they were ultimately scrapped.

Speaking to Destin Legarie in a new interview, Mark Darrah – executive producer of Anthem, Dragon Age 1, 2, and Inquisition – is asked about Anthem Next (essentially Anthem 2.0) and what impact that could have had on the longevity and reception to BioWare's multiplayer romp. For context, Anthem Next was officially scrapped in February 2021, although at that point, the plan was to "continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today" (a statement that hasn't aged well at all).

Legarie asks if Anthem Next would have "actually saved" the game, and "would it have been No Man's Sky [...] revolutionary-level updates," to which Darrah says: "It could have been."

Darrah has previously spoken about Anthem Next in his YouTube series discussing what happened with the game (which he's now handily summarized into one mega video compilation, below). He discussed that BioWare's decision to work on what would eventually become Anthem Next was "definitely the right call, and arguably if we had never announced a roadmap, maybe this decision could have happened earlier. The decision was made to set that act structure aside so that the project could focus on what needed to be done, not upon what it had announced beforehand. And arguably, this is what should have probably happened from the beginning."

Later in the video, he noted that Next was "in the process of trying to fix Anthem to make it have a broader appeal, to make it regain its footing as a live service," and shared that he thinks that EA's decision not to continue with that pursuit "was a mistake." With that said, he explained that to save Anthem, he would have suggested a different approach to Next that would have instead involved porting to current-gen consoles and crucially moving to "locally hosted servers."

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah continued. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game." This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.

Alas, we'll never know whether Anthem Next or Darrah's own ideas could have saved BioWare's looter shooter, but it'll forever be a shame that it never really got a proper chance to reach its full potential like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 famously did after their own rocky launches.

Anthem "did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs" says Dragon Age veteran, and he's not sure he or BioWare ever "came back" from its spectacular failure.

As head of the Brunette Blazer fan club, I must admit something before the grand jury of Dispatch fans: I never liked Visi all that much. That said, I still wanted what was best for her at the end of Dispatch, which is why I felt unbelievably gaslit when she ended up turning on my Robert (albeit after killing his greatest foe – which I construe as a parting gift).

My ending was still a happy one, with the Z Team celebrating a victory and Coupe back among our ranks after a brief return to her villain beat. Life went on, with or without Invisigal on-side. When I replayed the game and romanced the "misunderstood" Visi, I expected her good ending to be… well, different. Or at the very least result in a markedly different outcome for Robert in general.

But the truth is, the only difference is who I'm kissing before the credits roll. Despite its multiple ending variants, a hypothetical Dispatch season 2 – which hasn't officially been confirmed yet – doesn't have a lot of cleanup to do after all, even if it makes either one of these endings canon.

Warning: Spoilers and analysis of Dispatch's endings ahead!

Days of futures past

At the end of Dispatch, Shroud gets ousted. This is a fact whether you kill him yourself, let Visi do the honors, or spare him. If he lives, he's sent to jail, but the door is always left open for him to return in season 2 as the villain again.

On the other hand, if Visi goes dark and kills him herself, she picks up Shroud's mask before vanishing. This potentially insinuates that she might take over the Red Ring as the new Shroud, returning back to her villainous roots. The game wants me to believe that this is supposed to be a bad outcome. Respectfully, I disagree.

It's the far more interesting outcome out of two rather similar variants. Assuming the second season of Dispatch features the same cast, developer AdHoc has a big choice to make: does it canonize Shroud's incarceration and potential return as the big bad for a second time, or does it deliver a new nemesis unto Robert? Someone we know, had some degree of trust with, and might even have fallen in love with?

It's a no-brainer to me that the latter is definitively more compelling. However, the ultimate result is the same: someone returns as a supervillain, potentially wearing that damned Shroud mask.

I can see a couple ways how this plays out. Firstly the devs choose one of the above endings to canonize – something that might not go down the best with players, but would make sense from a narrative perspective if the writers want greater control over season 2's story. Alternatively, there could be a moment where players get to make a choice to establish which ending they got last time, and the story can fork out from there.

Or rather, the details might shift slightly. Shroud and Visi are essentially vying for Robert's forgiveness at the end of Dispatch season 1, whether or not they know it. Either Robert forgives Shroud enough to want him brought to justice rather than killed, or he forgives Visi for being a double agent and she takes a non-fatal bullet for him. Either way, whoever is behind the Shroud mask (assuming it plays a part in season 2 at all) will be someone who's done Robert dirty more than once.

Sure, the narrative nuance is still to be expected, as are any differences between whether or not you romanced Blazer, Visi, neither of them, or both. But I think AdHoc studios is in a pretty sweet spot right now, since the first season's endings don't leave the world itself irrevocably changed in significantly different ways.

The same can't be said of Mass Effect 3, which sees one of four pivotal endings play out, and as a result, has left fans utterly clueless as to how Bioware might recognize the player's past choices in the upcoming Mass Effect 5.

Dispatch feels more Telltale Games than Bioware in that regard. Divergent choices influence the immediate response and reactions of NPCs around Robert in the moment, which feels more like roleplaying than curating an ending. It makes for a tightly narrativized world that feels flavored by our actions, since the endings are more like variants than totally discrete outcomes.

All that to say: don't sweat Dispatch season 2's potential canonization. This game's story thrives in its subtle differences, each one making our unique experience feel like our own while still ensuring there's no such thing as a truly bad ending. I don't see any of us getting majorly let down by the sequel – as long as beloved Blazer is still calling the shots.

Check out all the new and upcoming PC games set to land in 2026 if you're on the hunt for a post-Dispatch fix

BioWare looter shooter Anthem is officially dead, and looking back, its executive producer isn't sure he or the studio ever truly "came back" from it.

Anthem was never considered fantastic – it was largely thought to be fairly average - but, as highlighted by the swarm of folks paying their respects to the game as it was ultimately shut down, many believed it had a lot of potential that went to waste.

Executive producer Mark Darrah – who held that same role on Dragon Age: Origins, 2, and Inquisition (and was a director on the first two) – has been brutally honest about the game and its development in the past. He previously acknowledged that, a few months before launch, the devs knew they were targeting a Metacritic score in the 70s rather than BioWare's usual target of the 90s, and he now says he believes the game "did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs."

In a lengthy new video released publicly on Anthem's shutdown day (below), Darrah says: "To be honest, I'm not sure that I came back from Anthem. I think that's true of a lot of people."

He explains: "Anthem did permanent damage to the careers of a lot of game devs, to the mental health of a lot of game devs. I think even with BioWare itself, you can trace some of the issues that it's had in more recent years back to this time period.

"I don't think Anthem is 100% to blame [for] everything that's happened since 2019, but definitely there are seeds of damage that continue to grow from that point onwards."

Since Anthem's launch, the only all-new game (so, not Mass Effect Legendary Edition) released by BioWare has been Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Veilguard's development wasn't totally smooth sailing, either – the RPG was previously called Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, and the devs even experimented with a multiplayer concept for it, but obviously, that didn't end up happening. Alas, its sales didn't meet expectations, and EA boss Andrew Wilson concluded that despite the "high-quality launch," the game "did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market."

Now, BioWare is working on a new Mass Effect game, unofficially known as Mass Effect 5. Details are still incredibly light on the ground, and there's no word on how long we might be waiting before it finally releases.

EA hits like Battlefield 4 and The Sims 4 were given time to bounce back from rough launches because they were "too big to fail," whereas with BioWare's Anthem, it wasn't "a given that it was going to be that big."

The day has come – Anthem is being shut down for good today, less than seven years since its launch, and fans have been saying goodbye forever to the BioWare looter shooter.

While Anthem is far from phenomenal – with a Metacritic score of 59 marking it as decidedly average – it's never fun to see the plug get pulled on a game, especially an online-only title that's not being given any kind of offline mode to keep it playable in some form going forward. Over on social media, players have been sharing their goodbyes, with many taking the game for one final spin before its demise.

"Goodbye Anthem. You had so much potential, such a waste…" reads one post. "As one of the most notorious 'Destiny killers,' its shutdown is a good reminder that keeping a looter shooter alive and well for years is a nearly impossible task."

'Potential' is a term that's coming up a lot in these farewell posts. "Last night I logged into Anthem for the last time. Toured the map one last time, did some missions," another begins. "Had some fun. People can feel how they want, but the potential this game had was undeniable. The flying was spectacular."

"A game that could have been great," reads another. "The feel of moving around, flying and shooting? Top notch. Better than any official Iron Man game. I want sci-fi super-suits to feel like this everywhere. But the mission design was a mess. Levels were designed like they were for a regular ground-based FPS."

"I'll miss the amazing world of Anthem," a fan laments. "Did a goodbye round of fort Tarsis and got in my favorite Storm Javelin to do some missions and free roaming. A bitter sweet goodbye."

Looking around online, it seems that at the time of writing Anthem is still kicking despite it being at death's door. Neither EA nor BioWare ever confirmed what time the servers will be shut down, so it's not clear exactly how much time we have left. Make the most of it while you can, anyway.

EA hits like Battlefield 4 and The Sims 4 were given time to bounce back from rough launches because they were "too big to fail," whereas with BioWare's Anthem, it wasn't "a given that it was going to be that big."

Anthem's shutdown seemed inevitable. Released by BioWare in 2019, the game offered a hybrid of the studio's traditional RPG storytelling and loot-driven combat in the Destiny style, but both sides of the game undercut each other at every turn. It earned the worst Metacritic score for any game in BioWare's history, though it has a small cult of fans who latched onto the promise of its combat and flight gameplay. Those fans are now preparing their mourning rituals for the game's impending death.

While Anthem is technically fully playable in single-player, it requires a constant internet connection – which means that once servers shut down on January 12, you'll no longer be able to hop in. With that date now less than a week away, fans are getting in the final bits of playtime where they can, and the Anthem subreddit is starting to fill with players saying their final goodbyes.

"One last flight around Bastion" is the title of a popular post from user RobRagiel, who adds that "I enjoyed it till the end and I have a lot of good memories. It was an honor, Freelancers." The post includes a clip of a brief flight path, demonstrating what's certainly the game's brightest point.

There's currently no official way to buy Anthem on any platform if you're looking to join the players saying goodbye, but used copies of the console versions are abundant and PC keys remain available on grey market resale sites. "I should've bought coffee but eh why not," says EngineerFrosty6633 in a post showing off their new purchase of Anthem, which ran about five bucks – a minor slap of reality among those who remember pre-ordering the game back in 2019.

Another post asks if others are "still pissed off" about Anthem's shutdown. "This is the game that deserves the [No Man's Sky] treatment," Ok_Type3663 laments in a comment. Still another post suggests that fans "petition EA" to develop an offline patch for Anthem so that some part of it can live on, though it seems few have much hope such an effort would have much effect.

The PS4 version of Anthem launched to a Metacritic score of 54, by far the lowest of any BioWare release over the studio's storied history. (BioWare's second- and third-worst rated releases are the PC and Xbox One versions of Anthem, respectively.) Even the game's most ardent defenders wouldn't try to argue that it's flawless, though they've found things to latch onto, praising the combat and particularly the robust flight.

I played Anthem around launch, and I found it a pretty miserable experience from top to bottom even then. The combat, in my memory, was little more than a chaotic jumble of blasts from and against indistinct enemies. The much-ballyhooed flight system ended up just leaving you so distant from opponents that it was tough to even tell what was going on. And, of course, the issues with the game's pacing, structure, and storytelling are very well documented.

That doesn't mean I'm happy to see it die so completely, of course. Anthem remains an important artifact of the modern gaming industry – one of the most high-profile examples of what happens when a beloved studio tries to force itself into a live-service box. It marks a turning point for BioWare's reputation, and the repeated stories we've begun to hear about the development hell Anthem went through are going to have a lot less context when the memories of what the game was actually like begin to fade.

It's also a prime example of the kind of thing consumer rights efforts like Stop Killing Games are engaged in trying to prevent. Anthem sold some 5 million copies, and every player who bought the game – whether they ended up enjoying it or not – is about to have their access to it revoked.

Certainly, I'd never expect a publisher like EA to support a multiplayer game in perpetuity, but equally, there's something sad about seeing a game like Anthem – one which took so many years and so much work from developers to bring to life – disappear like some monument of sand, destroyed when the changing tide inevitably wipes out its foundations.

Someday all of the best online games will be dust in the wind.

As development of Mass Effect 5 continues, there's one important question we're all asking: Will the cast include another Krogan as cool as Wrex? The second, of course, is will Commander Shepard make a return. Jennifer Hale, the beloved voice of the female Shepard, is keen to reprise the role.

"I have no idea," Hale tells the Behind the Voice podcast about whether Shepherd is lined up for the next game. "This is what I say to fans: If you want Shepard in the next game, please email them and tell them, because maybe they'll respond to that."

She reiterates that she doesn't know anything about a prospective Shepard comeback, but she says "I would love it." A fifth mainline Mass Effect game was teased back at the 2020 The Game Awards, though the announcement was really just that, with no further details provided.

BioWare is apparently still handling development on the series, but the current status of Mass Effect 5 or anything else in development there is unknown. Between layoffs and a muted response to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the studio's been going through a rough patch, and EA's recent buyout announcement has raised questions over long-term plans for any of the publisher’s subsidiaries.

Hale's been on the record repeatedly about her interest in coming back to the franchise. In October 2025, she mentioned it'd be a short conversation, and the following December, she doubled-down, alongside Mark Meer, the voice of male Shepard, who's just as keen to become the commander again.

Whether this will yield anything, or if Shepard is even involved in the game to begin with, remains to be seen. Hale's advice isn't the worst though: If you want more Mass Effect, you know who to ask (respectfully).

Mass Effect 5 devs should use Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a "scapegoat" so they can "get what they need" from EA, says former BioWare exec.

As development on Mass Effect 5 apparently continues amid EA's current buyout, one question floating around is whether or not Commander Shepard would make a return. Should they do so, the voices that brought the character to life would be more than happy to reprise the role.

Both Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer, Shepard's female and male voices, respectively, did an interview responding to fan enquiries on Fall Damage, and it didn't take long before the possibility of coming back popped up. "I like to think Shepard is alive in all of our hearts," Meer comments, with Hale responding: "Shepard is alive if you make it so."

She then encourages people to contact the "powers that be" - EA and BioWare - to request some more of the Normandy's finest captain. "We will be there, because we should not go," she adds. "I would be there with bells on if they offered for me to play Shepard again."

Meer wouldn’t be far behind. "I agree, but only under any circumstances," he says in typically tongue-in-cheek manner.

Bringing back Shepard presents some narrative quandaries for the developers. Depending on what you chose over the course of the original Mass Effect trilogy, they may or may not be around any more, and if they return, the devs would be making at least one of the endings more canonical than the others.

In theory, anyway. There's always the conceit of cloning or using tech like cryogenics, or placing events somewhere on the timeline where Commander Shepard is just around normally. The possibilities are there, is what I'm saying. Given the tumultuous state of the industry, I'm happy more Mass Effect remains feasible, and if the trilogy's fateful protagonist remains involved, all the better.

Fans find Mass Effect 5 art of a Krogan civil war hidden in BioWare's N7 Day post, studio lead says "I want you to see stuff. But it's not the time…yet"

Baldur's Gate 2 added romance to the beloved RPG series in a move that was influenced by Final Fantasy 7, after the sequel's writing and design director was "scared shitless" by the JRPG, believing that "this is how a game should be."

During a recent discussion in celebration of Baldur's Gate 2's 25th anniversary with YouTube creator Slandered Gaming (below), BioWare veteran David Gaider – who worked as a designer on Baldur's Gate 2 – admits that "I did not want to write romances at all" in the RPG sequel, but was asked to by writing and design director James Ohlen.

"It was handed to me and I was like, 'James, I'm not a romance guy. Like, I'll give it a shot, I guess, but [are] you sure you want romance?' And he was like, 'Yeah, let's try it,'" Gaider explains.

Elaborating on this, current Beamdog CEO Trent Oster, who worked on modelling for the original Baldur's Gate game, explains that Ohlen "had played Final Fantasy 7," and Square Enix's game had left him concerned. "They had character interaction and romance, and he was scared shitless," Oster says.

"He literally said, 'Guys, these guys kicked our ass. This is how a game should be. We don't know what we're doing.'"

Oster continues, noting that Ohlen was "hard on everybody, but he was a humble guy, and if he thought something was better, he fought hard to get something better in the game." That extended to the RPG's setting, as Oster describes Baldur's Gate 2's setting as "kind of like a rollercoaster through some of the most great places in the realms" in comparison to Baldur's Gate 1, which is "kind of linked to one map."

Talking about the sequel, he adds: "You're in the Sahuagin city, and you're in the Underdark, you're just hitting all these high spots that you've always read about in books, and you finally start to hit some of these places and it was just awesome."

Needless to say, it all worked out in the end – romance has become an increasingly popular feature in RPGs, after all, and it's hard to imagine Baldur's Gate 3 without it.

Baldur's Gate 3 publishing lead slams Square Enix's push to automate 70% of debugging with AI: "The idea that QA people can be replaced at a large scale is stupid."

This year's N7 goodies seem to actually be telling us something for a change. The Mass Effect 5 update, delivered by way of a blog post to commemorate the RPG series' annual day of celebration, is expectedly cryptic. In it, BioWare exec Mike Gamble waxes lyrical about how much the team appreciates us fans and our patience, reinforcing that the developer is still hard at work on Mass Effect 5 and giving no indication that EA's $55-billion buyout has complicated matters. He also shares that the new Mass Effect TV show will take place after the events of Commander Shepard's trilogy ("because after all … that’s YOUR story, isn’t it?") before assuring us that there definitely isn't a hidden meaning in his message.

But the cheeky bugger was lying, of course. You don't need my decades of proofreading to spot the nine italicized letters scattered throughout the blog post, spelling out a mysterious URL fragment. Long story short, a new Mass Effect 5 image is safely in our hands, depicting a Krogan soldier leading an army and captioned "civil war". With a pivotal choice at the end of Mass Effect 3 indicating only one way this many Krogan could be around in the new game, could this be confirmation of BioWare reneging on its commitment not to canonize player choice? Or could it actually be telling us the contrary – that it'll respect our decisions, and find unique ways of doing so?

Someone else might've gotten it wrong

If there's one thing I've learned about Mass Effect's hardiest alien race, it's that Krogans love a good battle. They're built like stocky turtle-oid tanks, born with an innate militarial understanding that makes for excellent soldiers and generals. That's why many Mass Effect 3 players, myself included, opted to cure their genetic disease and enlist the Krogan army as a war asset.

Whether or not you view the genophage as a necessary act of biological warfare, inflicted upon the Krogan by Turians in an effort to control birthrates and prevent another Krogan uprising, deciding to cure it is a pivotal moment in Mass Effect 3. Freeing a race from centuries of forced eugenics feels like one of the less morally-challenging choices in the game – the opposite of which, there are many – especially when the alternative is to deceive your old friend Urdnot Wrex (if he's alive to see it) and be a bit of a bastard. For the greater good, some might argue, but I disagree.

After poring over the new picture of a Krogan civil war for way too long, my first thought was that it could only mean one thing: Mass Effect 5 will show the genophage cured for good, allowing the Krogan race to proliferate, as well as the consequences of not heeding the Turian's warning of an second Krogan war should their combative natures get the better of them. It certainly looks that way in the image Gamble pointed us to.

But if BioWare committed to that choice – something that would have rippling effects through the world of Mass Effect as we know it – what other player-based outcomes could it canonize in ME5?

Between a rock and a hard-headed place

The destruction of all synthetics is another huge decision players can make in ME3, with implications for the whole galaxy that would surely be referenced in future games.

But there's only so much we can expect to see reflected in ME5. As our very own BioWare superfan Heather Wald said in relation to Dragon Age: The Veilguard's limited array of choices carried across from Inquisition, seeing which major choices will be honored in the new Mass Effect game also means that others might not be. So much happened in the trilogy, after all, and it would be a staggering amount of work to accommodate each and every variation of ME3's endings into the next big instalment.

But the Krogan presence in Mass Effect 5, something all but confirmed at this point, could also be explained in the context of an un-cured genophage.

Even with their limited numbers, Shepard's betrayal in procuring a fake cure in Mass Effect 3 could have sparked a civil war between those Krogan who wanted a cure and those who defected and joined forces with the Citadel. This would prove an intriguing setup for a galaxy wherein the Krogan become even more hostile to outsiders than before, turning them into a powerful adversary for whoever our new player character might be.

The fact that the Krogan's ongoing existence in Mass Effect 5 could be the result of either choice outcome has given me hope that BioWare is going to let us carry that decision across. The parameters are flexible enough that a Krogan civil war seems possible no matter what you chose to do in Shepard's final act, which makes it all the more exciting to theorize on how BioWare would actually implement it.

Again, this is pure speculation, but I'm glad to have more than a seconds-long video of someone walking (thanks, 2023) to chew over this year. Though, I mean, an extra little something wouldn't have gone unappreciated…

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BioWare made it pretty clear that there was a secret lingering in its N7 Day celebrations, and fans have finally figured out the hidden message. The result? A piece of concept art teasing a Krogan civil war. That's a bounty for lore nerds, but for people who wanted to see a little more of the actual video game part of Mass Effect 5, today's news has been a bit of a disappointment. According to executive producer Mike Gamble, though, it simply isn't yet time to show more of the RPG.

"For everyone yelling at me because we didn’t use N7 Day to provide a whole bunch of info…" Gamble laments in a tweet. "I mean, I get it. I’m a fan too. I want you to see stuff. But it’s not the time…yet. Has it been years since announce? Yes. Have we been busy? Yes. Are we NOW 100% on mass effect? Also yes"

That tweet came somewhat before fans found today's presumably final bit of Mass Effect 5 news. Hidden in Gamble's blog post were a series of italicized letters spelling out "URL KROGAN." It took a while for fans to figure out the precise meaning, until the Mass Effect Twitter account provided a clue: "https://www.masseffect[dot]com/[ERROR A20N7S12]"

That combination of letters and numbers constituted a cipher, with N, appropriately enough, meaning 7. Turn KROGAN into that cipher and you get 411826207, which led to this page on the official Mass Effect website, featuring a high-quality piece of concept art featuring a group of Krogans in battle, with the caption civil war underneath. That perhaps hints at a story we'll see told in Mass Effect 5, but there's only so much info you can pull out of an image like this.

But this kind of teaser is all we've seen of Mass Effect 5 going back for years now, and that's not much for a fandom that's been waiting nearly a decade for a new entry in the series. Hopefully we'll be getting more substantial news soon with BioWare now fully focused on the game, but I can't blame fans for being tired of vague teasers.

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It's November 7, which means it's time for your tiny annual update on the status of Mass Effect 5. As malaise over the big EA buyout takes hold, BioWare is taking this N7 Day to say that the upcoming RPG is still in development and offer a tiny – I emphasize, tiny – handful of teases about what to expect.

"Like you, we’ve heard the rumors lately," executive producer Mike Gamble says in a new blog post, gesturing toward the EA buyout news that is very much fact rather than rumor. "You’ve made it clear you care deeply about what’s next. So let’s start by setting the record straight: the next Mass Effect game is in development, and EA and BioWare remain committed to telling more stories in this universe."

Gamble says that "the team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect. We have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out. We’re excited by what we’re building, and we promise you: when we’re ready, it’ll be a lot of fun to show."

Simply dropping the word "romances" into the blog alone will be enough to send a fanbase rabid for alien booty calls into overdrive, but there is one more teaser in here – a series of italicized letters that spell out either "URL KROGAN" or "URL MASS EFFECT KROGAN N7" depending on what's meant to be italicized here. I assume there'll be some web page you need to append these terms to in order to see some secret teaser, similar to the 2023 Epsilon videos, but it doesn't seem anyone's yet discovered the key.

Gamble also offers a quick update on Amazon's Mass Effect TV series, confirming that it'll fit within the existing timeline, similar to the Fallout show, and tell a new story set after the original trilogy.

We've now spent a lot of years waiting for news on the next Mass Effect game, and morsels of information have been few and far between. This is still something of a crust of bread tossed to a fanbase starving in the desert, but with anxieties running high about what the EA buyout will mean for the future of series like Mass Effect, any assurance is appreciated.

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November 7th marks N7 Day, a celebration of all things Mass Effect, even if most of the universe's population doesn't realize it. To mark the intergalactic holiday, BioWare is once again loaning out Commander Shepard's ship for people to use in No Man's Sky. (He won't be needing it any time soon, anyway.)

"To celebrate N7 Day, we are again collaborating with our friends at BioWare and EA to run the Beachhead expedition," a blog on the space sandbox's website reads, "and offer the No Man's Sky community another opportunity to claim the legendary SSV Normandy SR1."

The iconic ship was first shot out of a mass relay and into No Man's Sky's orbit straight after the release of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, and it's since come back to the game a couple of times, last year included.

"We've welcomed many new Travellers to No Man's Sky since the Normandy's last appearance in the Euclid galaxy, and we hope this news comes as a welcome surprise to our fellow Mass Effect fans," the blog continues.

You can complete the Beachhead Expedition and grab the Normandy from now until November 18, at which point the game will cycle through this year's other expeditions every two weeks until mid-January 2026. So, go get it while you can. And if you can't, well, the Normandy's sure to pop back up at some N7 Day in the future.

"We remain THE BIGGEST Mass Effect fans and I can't describe how happy this makes us," Hello Games founder Sean Murray tweeted.

Speaking of, we haven't seen the long-awaited Mass Effect 5 in years, but BioWare put everyone's worries to bed by reconfirming that "the next Mass Effect game is in development, and EA and BioWare remain committed to telling more stories in this universe," earlier today.

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Who you date, who you murder – it's all up to you in Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Though, a former EA employee says BioWare's latest Dragon Age installment isn't quite as graceful about it as Larian's D&D masterpiece.

Speaking to FRVR in a new podcast episode, former EA designer Alex Hutchinson speculates on what will happen to what the publisher calls its "player-first values" after a group, including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, recently moved to buy it for $55 million. Hutchinson thinks that "maybe" the country, in which LGBTQ people and activities are criminalized, will negatively impact BioWare's proud history of including queer options in its games, but the Dragon Age developer is already hurting itself.

"You look at, say, Baldur's Gate 3 and the last Dragon Age," says Hutchinson, "and both very LGBTQ+ friendly, but one handled it perfectly, and one fumbled it."

"Baldur's Gate 3 just supports you and any decision that you make," Hutchinson continues, "but it doesn't feel like it has an agenda. But it lets you – which is, I think, exactly how to handle all of those issues. Like, embrace people's cool choices, but don't front-load it." Speak for yourself – I'd like my lady orcs to date other lady orcs under the bright light of day.

According to Hutchinson, though, EA's new owners likely won't mind my preferences – or anyone else's romantic desires. He says their approach to LGBTQ content will "just be sales-driven."

"If it makes money," he says cynically, "they'll let you do it forever."

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Prolific video game actor Jennifer Hale - who's been in everything from Bayonetta 3 to Halo - has said she'd return to Mass Effect almost instantaneously should developer BioWare ask her to.

As one of the two actors to bring Mass Effect's Commander Shepard to life, Hale obviously had a big hand in making the character and the trilogy as a whole so special, but it seems the iconic series had just as big an impact on her as it did on the fan base.

Speaking to IGN, 'FemShep' said she "would be there before they [BioWare] finish the sentence," even though the famed studio hasn't picked up the phone to call her just yet.

Mass Effect 5, or whatever it ends up being called, is obviously in development right now, but the ending of the initial trilogy makes it a bit hard to simply return to Shepard. One possible finale does show our Commander battered but still breathing under rubble - though another theory points to a possible connection to Mass Effect Andromeda, which was set hundreds of years after Shepard's first adventure.

Still, that doesn't rule out Jennifer Hale's comeback to the universe, as she said she'd play "anyone." Krogan, hologram, bug, rotting corpse - it's all fair play. "I love that universe. I'm ready. Anytime."

"Everyone out there, the more you tell them what you want, maybe the likelier it is that it'll happen," she said, calling on fans to also poke BioWare about it.

Earlier in the year, we learned that the next Mass Effect was "still in pre-production" amid more layoffs at the studio. Things haven't gotten any more optimistic since, as EA is taking on $20 billion in debt to help fund a $55 billion buyout to private equity firms, meaning the publisher might probably cut corners somewhere. Here's hoping the developers stay unaffected through it all.

Jennifer Hale says she didn't see a single line as Mass Effect's Commander Shepard until it was time to record: "It was all cold reading on the spot"

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has given his insight into why it seems like EA was so quick to move on from Anthem's failure when it gave plenty of time to studios like DICE and Maxis to fix games that also didn't do well at launch, like Battlefield 4 and The Sims 4, respectively.

In the latest episode of his 'What Happened on Anthem' video series, Darrah broke down the two big incentives for EA to invest more in fixing a game like Battlefield 4 as opposed to Anthem.

"Battlefield had this track record of selling way more than 10 million copies, so it was seen as, to some degree, too big to fail," said Darrah. "It was seen as already a giant franchise, so the effort was seen as bringing it back to something it was already shown to be. As opposed to something like Anthem, which was new. It wasn't clear or obvious or a given that it was going to be that big."

So, that's one reason for the apparent discrepancy. But, according to Darrah, "an even bigger factor was simply the structure of BioWare." The studio was never known for Anthem. It was known for Dragon Age. Baldur's Gate. Mass Effect. If a new experiment like Anthem fails, BioWare can just go back to one of its tried and true IP.

Conversely, with DICE circa 2013, "your choices are either to fix Battlefield 4 or shut the studio down," Darrah said. "And through much of its recent history, EA has been very reluctant to shut down studios. Whereas with BioWare, because you have two or three or sometimes even four games jockeying for resources, when something isn't working as well as you wanted, there is always someone else that is desperate for those people, so there's always a greater pressure drawing those resources away."

There's probably no greater authority on the failure of Anthem than Darrah, at least not one so willing to talk at length about the topic. His multi-part video autopsy examines fundamental issues with the game's botched multiplayer, lame story, and now, EA's reluctance to give BioWare the time and resources to turn things around.

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah, who worked as executive producer behind Anthem, reveals that he believes the multiplayer shooter deserved its negative feedback – in fact, many of its reviews apparently brought up valid points.

Darrah, whose portfolio boasts BioWare bangers like the Dragon Age series, recalls Anthem's shaky release and how its Metacritic score fell short of the expected 70 or so after. "Anthem launches February 22nd, 2019, and the reviews are – I won't even say mixed – they're bad. They're bad. The Metacritic at this point is sitting at a 59, which is certainly lower than the 70s that we were targeting," explains Darrah.

"There's a general theme in the reviews, especially the negative ones," he continues. "For the most part, the negative feedback is that the loot is too repetitive, that the activities that you're doing in missions are too repetitive, and the story feels very disjointed, resulting in the overall pacing not being very good."

Surprisingly, however, the former producer actually says he agrees with the not-so-stellar reception Anthem received.

"I pretty much agree with all of this feedback," as Darrah admits. "These are legitimate weaknesses of the game." Why, though? It has to do with Anthem's genre and structure. "In a game like a looter shooter, because you are doing missions over and over again, because you are grinding for gear, the quality of that gear experience, the amount of variety you can experience in the missions – these are mission-critical features."

On the other hand, the story isn't necessarily as important in such games. "Things like the story, they don't really matter that much in a looter shooter because typically, you're going to grind through the story, and then you're going to end up in a repetitive grind for gear. But if you feel like you're doing the same thing all the time in combat, if you feel like the gear that you're grinding for isn't worth the trouble, if you feel like the endgame is lacking or incomplete, then the entire experience collapses."

The ex-developer goes on: "Some of the reviews don't pick up on this, but the reality is that, from the perspective of things like balance, like loot design – even from the perspective of activities – in combat, Anthem isn't really significantly worse than things that BioWare has done in the past. But the lens through which it's being judged is different because in a Mass Effect or a Dragon Age, the combat is there to be enjoyed, but it's to be enjoyed within the framework of this greater overarching story."

As a gameplay loop, it's different. "You aren't expected to do the same mission over and over again. So, the fact that a mission might feel a little disjointed or a mission might feel a little repetitive doesn't matter as much if you only experience it one or two times before you're moving on and continuing the growth of this narrative arc. Whereas in Anthem, that's not the case. You're going to do most missions several times."

Darrah states, "The point is the narrative grind. The point is what you're doing over the long term to make your character stronger to fight and play in the endgame – and to be clear, the narrative in Anthem is worse than the narrative in previous BioWare games." Compared to titles like those within the Dragon Age or Mass Effect series, the Anthem story feels a tad bit… lackluster, and it has a lot to do with delivery.

"The game doesn't really understand how to effectively tell a story in its medium," as Darrah concludes, "in the fact that you are playing with three other probably randos who are making your experience worse." Hey, he said it, folks – not us. And it's not the first time, either. Just last month, the Anthem executive producer detailed how the game's storytelling failed because it was "treating everyone as if they were the same protagonist," too.

"Bankrupt EA" was on the list of fears at BioWare as it weighed up Mass Effect servers, says former exec: "There's a point at which you are optimizing for an unlikely or virtually unfathomable situation."

CRPGs in the classic style are pretty common these days, from massive revivals of beloved series like Baldur's Gate 3 to throwbacks from storied developers like Pillars of Eternity and even fully indie projects like SKALD: Against the Black Priory. But once upon a time, the genre seemed all but dead – thanks in part to retailers who believed nobody wanted to buy them.

That's according to Josh Sawyer, delivering a keynote address at the GCAP 2025 conference (as transcribed by our friends at PC Gamer). Sawyer is now studio design director at Obsidian, and these days is probably best known as lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas, but his early credits include beloved CRPG classics like Icewind Dale.

Icewind Dale and its sequel were both built on the Infinity Engine, a piece of technology developed by BioWare that was initially used for Baldur's Gate. This engine gave shape to the traditional, isometric role-playing games that the term "CRPG" now conjures, but despite how beloved these games were (and still are), by the mid-'00s they had very much fallen out of favor.

"The reason we stopped making Infinity Engine games was because retailers told us no one wanted to buy them," Sawyer says. "We asked if we could see the research and they basically told us to trust them."

As Sawyer explains, this was a period where brick and mortar stores were still the only place for most developers to sell their games, and retailers were very picky about what they stocked – and, since they often had the power to make publishers buy back unsold stock, they had a lot of leverage on the types of games getting made. But then, Sawyer continues, digital distribution changed things, giving studios of all sizes fewer barriers to getting their games into players' hands.

Of course, digital distribution has created issues of its own – most notably the fact that there are now so many games launching every day that it's tough for any one of them to get noticed. But it's also meant that fans of niche genres, whether that be CRPGs, point-and-click adventure games, or even match-3 hentai puzzlers, have more options for what to play than ever before.

The best RPGs out there today owe no shortage of debt to the CRPG classics that came before.

While crunch seems to be less of an issue at major studios these days – whether because of genuine improvements to working practices, outsourcing, or simply good PR – it sometimes feels like just about every classic game of past generations was built out of downright inhumane work schedules. BioWare's classic D&D RPG Baldur's Gate 2 is no exception.

The first Baldur's Gate, which was published by Interplay Entertainment, had been a massive hit, well ahead of any internal expectations. Naturally, that meant that BioWare was soon at work on a sequel. Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn aimed to be bigger and better than its predecessor, with a massive scope encompassing well over 100 hours of gameplay. Of course, planning a game of that scale and actually finishing it in a reasonable time are two very different things.

"I went to Brian [Fargo, Interplay CEO] about six months before BG 2 was supposed to come out and asked him, 'so how important is it that BG 2 ships for Christmas this year (2000)?” Feargus Urquhart, who oversaw Baldur's Gate 2's development as part of Interplay division Black Isle, tells our friends at PC Gamer. "He said, 'Well, we might not all have jobs next year if it doesn't.' My response was, 'Ok, well I guess I’m spending a lot of time in Edmonton over the next six months!'"

At BioWare's Edmonton office, Urquhart set up a bunch of whiteboards detailing the game's quests, with two spots to mark the quest's readiness for release. "The first was the designer says the quest is done and ready to test, the second was QA says the quest has been tested and has no bugs. If QA found a bug, they would put the X back under the designer column," Urquhart says.

With the deadline looming, quests started getting cut, including some that the devs hated to part with. "There was this spider cult quest, and we got rid of the entire thing," designer and writer David Gaider says. "There was a bit of uproar because everybody loved it so much."

"The crunch at the time was brutal," according to designer and writer Lukas Kristjanson. The company was bringing in Domino's Pizza for dinner every night, which ultimately created a sort of rebellion from the team – I guess there's only so much cheap pizza you can endure one day after another. The studio then upgraded to Thai food.

"Suddenly the game felt like this hacked-up monstrosity that was still full of bugs," according to Gaider. "By the time it shipped, I think everybody on the team was like, 'This is going to be horrible.'" Obviously, that wasn't what ended up happening. The game got glowing reviews, and is still regarded as one of the best BioWare games ever. But we've still got to reconcile the quality of the classics with the conditions they were often made in.

BioWare has made many of the best RPGs of all time, and a certain other studio would make sure Baldur's Gate kept itself stapled to the top of the list for a whole new generation.

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah says that EA could potentially look to sell off its "huge repository of dormant IPs" following the $55 billion acquisition.

Assuming the acquisition is approved, EA is going private, with investment firms Affinity Partners and Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) buying the company in a deal expected to close in the first quarter of FY2027. With that, however, EA will be taking on $20 billion of debt in order to help finance it.

Responding to this news in a video on his YouTube channel (below), Darrah, who previously served as executive producer on Dragon Age 1, 2, and Inquisition, as well as Anthem, discusses the possibility of EA selling some of its IPs in the aftermath of the buyout.

Selling IPs isn't something that EA has historically done, and "the reason for that," Darrah suggests, is "in large part because the individuals who would be responsible for making those decisions, for looking for those opportunities, are actually incentivized to not take risks. They are incentivized to not be the person who sold an IP that then turned into a billion-dollar franchise." Doing "nothing," he adds, is what "keeps them from getting into trouble."

Times are set to change though, which could lead to those incentives changing, for example "to shed costs or generate revenue if at all possible," especially if it was a case of trying to "generate revenue to pay down as much debt as we can as quickly as we can" to ensure that the company isn't in "a dangerous position."

Darrah continues: "People who have spent their careers trying to keep their heads down and not do anything that might get them in trouble in the future might suddenly find themselves in a situation where what they really need to do is sell as much as they can.

"EA has a huge repository of dormant IPs that are just sitting there dormant," he continues. "It seems unlikely that the new resulting structure is going to be eager to suddenly revive a bunch of those IPs. So, one option might be to sell the whole lot of them for $100 million if you could get it, because $100 million can come off the debt. You might even see them toying with the idea of shutting some of their existing studios. Maybe they shut them down, but maybe they look for opportunities to sell off entire studios or entire groups."

But what IPs could potentially be sold? Darrah reckons that keeping EA Sports intact "makes a ton of sense," but it might not for EA Entertainment – the side of the company that deals with the non-sports releases, such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect. "You could imagine potentially all of EA Entertainment being sold off to another group with deep pockets, like, say, Sony. This deal has been in the works for a while. It is conceivable that EA's new structure was intentionally conceived with this action in mind."

Alternatively, he suggests, "you could imagine that what happens is this new EA plucks all the parts it wants out of EA Entertainment and then sells off whatever is left over," meaning we could see a "collection of studios that either haven't shipped a game ever, or in a long time, and studios which have had a lot of trouble, or studios that make games that are expensive to make, or studios that simply make the kind of games that this new company isn't interested in making anymore. And rather than shutting those studios down, it makes a lot of financial sense to try to sell those off."

Obviously, Darrah doesn't know if that's going to happen – and it doesn't mean that "suddenly the Dragon Age IP is going to be up for sale" – we'll just have to wait and see what EA's approach is.

Former Dragon Age director says it's "hard to imagine" BioWare pivoting from "very progressive messaging to having the reverse" following EA's $55 billion buyout, and public perception not being "apocalyptically bad" if it did.

Ex-BioWare veteran Mark Darrah – who served as a project director and executive producer on Dragon Age 1, 2, and Inquisition – has been discussing the potential impact of the proposed $55 billion buyout of EA, noting that it's "hard to imagine" the DA and Mass Effect studio shifting from "having very progressive messaging to having the reverse."

Assuming that the acquisition goes ahead, EA is going to be owned by investment firms Affinity Partners and Silver Lake, in addition to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), and speaking in a new video on his YouTube channel (below), Darrah suggests that there could be "changes at EA in terms of structure, in terms of the games that they're making."

Specifically, he notes, "when you look at the investments that the Saudi group has been making before now, they've been buying a lot of sports-related things." With that in mind, "EA Sports makes a ton of sense, fitting into that portfolio of investing in a lot of sports franchises" and so forth. That's on top of the fact that "EA Sports is where most of the cash is thrown off from the game making business. 75% of EA's money last year was made through live services, a ton of that were the Ultimate Teams from FIFA – or Football Club – and Madden."

However, there are also EA's other games. Even though The Sims has been "a good revenue source," for example, Darrah asks whether the series fits "into potentially the messaging desires of the three groups that are involved in the acquisition? Potentially not, but it's potentially not super out of position."

EA also has studios "that haven't shipped anything in a while, or have shipped things that didn't do very well," with Darrah adding that "the groups working on the Marvel games and, of course, BioWare, are, I think, going to be in a different position."

He continues: "If this is a PR move for the Saudi government as much as it is a financial one, the studios that don't have much of a track record, what you might do is just come in and put your thumb on the scale and push their messaging in directions that you want, in directions that make you look good, or at the very least steer them away from messaging that makes you look bad. But for the studios that have more of a track record, especially a track record that maybe doesn't line up with your own political views – again, BioWare – you're going to look at that studio and wonder how you make them fit into your new structure.

"It's hard to imagine that you have BioWare pivot from having very progressive messaging to having the reverse because it's what the government wants. It's hard to imagine that the public perception of a game that comes out of BioWare even if you do do that isn't apocalyptically bad," he suggests. "So in that case you either have to decide that you're willing to just leave it alone, or you have to think that they don't fit anymore within the goals of this new organization."

Darrah admits he doesn't know "how active this Saudi investment fund has been in pushing its politics into the groups that it invests in," but even so, he believes that "it is going to be a factor going forward."

Ex-BioWare veteran says EA's $55 billion buyout is "likely going to mean layoffs and studio closures and a dramatic reduction in people" thanks to that looming $20 billion of debt.

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has been sharing his thoughts on the $55 billion EA buyout, suggesting that the $20 billion of debt that the company will take on if the deal goes through is – like many fear – "likely going to mean layoffs and studio closures."

Although the acquisition is "subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approvals and approval by EA stockholders," it's expected to close in the first quarter of FY2027. The buyers are investment firms Affinity Partners and Silver Lake, as well as Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Speaking in a new video on his YouTube channel (below), Darrah notes that he's "not a financial analyst," but assuming that the acquisition goes ahead, he thinks EA taking on so much debt will leave it "in a dangerous position," as "if interest rates go up or a game does a little bit worse, you only have about $100 million of leeway in order to keep your head above water."

This means looking for cost-saving measures to deal with the debt, and while Darrah notes that "there are savings that come simply from the act of going public," those won't amount to the hundreds of millions that are really required. "Especially for a company as historically financially conservative as EA, you're going to be looking for additional cost savings," he continues. "And for a company where the majority of your costs come from people, that is likely going to mean layoffs and studio closures and a dramatic reduction in people."

The former BioWare veteran also discusses the potential of EA selling IPs, noting that, historically, it's not something that the company tends to do largely since "the individuals who would be responsible for making those decisions, for looking for those opportunities, are actually incentivized to not take risks." However, the deal closing could cause these incentives to change, which he suggests could lead to being "in a situation where what they really need to do is sell as much as they can."

And EA certainly has plenty to work with on that front. "EA has a huge repository of dormant IPs that are just sitting there dormant," he begins. "It seems unlikely that the new resulting structure is going to be eager to suddenly revive a bunch of those IPs. So, one option might be to sell the whole lot of them for $100 million if you could get it, because $100 million can come off the debt. You might even see them toying with the idea of shutting some of their existing studios. Maybe they shut them down, but maybe they look for opportunities to sell off entire studios or entire groups."

Darrah believes that keeping EA Sports intact "makes a ton of sense," while it may not for EA Entertainment and its non-sports releases. He adds: "You could imagine potentially all of EA Entertainment being sold off to another group with deep pockets, like, say, Sony. This deal has been in the works for a while. It is conceivable that EA's new structure was intentionally conceived with this action in mind."

Wrapping up his thoughts, Darrah says that "in the short term," the acquisition going ahead "almost definitely means a bunch of layoffs in game studios, but also in financial and PR roles. EA is going to shed a bunch of people. That is definitely bad."

Meanwhile, in the medium term, "it might mean studio closures, or it might mean studios being sold off, or IPs being sold off, which could be a good thing."

However, in the long term, it's "it's probably good for whatever EA still exists after all the dust settles, because by being a private company, they are able to approach their financials in the way that best suits the way the business is being run." What the company might look like at that point is another matter, though. "There is hope to be had here, but it's going to definitely be painful before that hope is going to come to fruition," Darrah concludes.

EA tells employees worried about layoffs after $55 billion buyout that there will be "no immediate changes" to your jobs, and I think "immediate" is the key word here.

EA is officially going private as part of a $55 billion dollar deal led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's investment firm Affinity Partners. The deal will be partially financed by EA taking on $20 billion in debt – and as the industry wonders how the publisher will deal with that financial burden, BioWare fans in particular are terrified of what might await the beloved RPG studio in the future.

"The transaction will be funded," a press release explains, "by a combination of cash from each of PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners as well as roll-over of PIF's existing stake in EA, constituting an equity investment of approximately $36 billion, and $20 billion of debt financing fully and solely committed by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., $18 billion of which is expected to be funded at close."

You may have heard about leveraged buyouts funded by private equity in the past, and this is essentially how they work. An investor, or group of investors, puts up some amount of cash to buy a company, while the rest of the purchase price is funded through debt taken on by that company. In grossly simplified terms, once the deal closes, EA will have a $20 billion mortgage on itself.

No one yet knows precisely how EA will pay off that debt, but other leveraged buyouts have often been swiftly followed by money-saving efforts that, well… calling them "aggressive" would be a substantial understatement. As Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier notes on Bluesky, the EA deal "could mean mass layoffs, more aggressive monetization, and other big cost-cutting measures."

EA's success is propped up by massive franchises like its annual sports games, but the company also owns no shortage of beloved IP. Would the risk of another Titanfall happen when there's $20 billion in debt to pay off? Would a new Skate, whatever issues it might have, ever have been greenlit?

But nobody's more frightened of the possibilities than BioWare fans. The beloved studio has produced some of the most beloved RPGs of all time – the likes of Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age – but it hasn't had a bonafide hit in years. Finally getting to launch a single-player RPG last year seemed like a victory, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed financial expectations.

"It's over, Commander," as one thread on the Mass Effect subreddit laments, and you'll find a lot of similar sentiments in other comment threads across the internet. The general feeling among fans seems not to be fear about what might happen to BioWare with those financial concerns in mind – they're acting as if the studio is already dead, that Mass Effect 5 is already canceled, and they're mourning accordingly.

Goodbye BioWare, we had an exceptional run, even Andromeda. 💔

— @maisey.bsky.social (@maisey.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-01T00:51:08.201Z

If BioWare gets added to the pile of Origin, Westwood, Bullfrog, Maxis, and Pandemic, it will really help cement that EAs most meaningful legacy might be shutting down some of the greatest and most foundationally important teams in game development history. That's like killing the Avengers.

— @len.bsky.social (@len.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-01T00:51:08.215Z

I knew the future of Bioware was bleak, but I didn't think it was gonna be *this* bleak.

— @luke-garou.bsky.social (@luke-garou.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-01T00:51:08.187Z

Even if BioWare does survive whatever EA does in the future, there's one more concern with the company now owned by investors tied to Saudi Arabia and the US conservative political apparatus. Would BioWare's historic depiction of LGBTQ+ content remain intact? That's a concern even former Mass Effect and Dragon Age narrative designer Trick Weekes seems to share on social media.

Buyers: So your games... guns and football, yes?EA: Mmhmm, mmhmm, mostly guns and football, yep.Buyers: No gay stuff? No politics we're not going to like?EA: Haha, definitely not! Hey, could you give me one sec? I just need to shut down a studio real quick.kotaku.com/report-saudi...

— @trickweekes.bsky.social (@trickweekes.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-01T00:51:08.084Z

Of course, none of these concerns have yet come to fruition, and it's too early to tell what the future of EA will look like – frankly, it's impossible to predict what will happen because we've never seen a deal like it.

"$20,000,000,000 of debt financing is a shockingly large number to have to service," as games market analyst Mat Piscatella says on Bluesky, "while also transitioning from a public to private organization and all the implications that has on the people that work in it. We've obviously never seen anything like this at this scale in the industry before."

At least the best BioWare games will always be there.

Someone high up at EA must've seen the writing on the wall in the months before Anthem launched, as former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah says the devs were told expectations were for a Metacritic score somewhere in the 70s - not bad, but a far cry from previous BioWare games.

At this point, with Anthem being pulled offline in January, it's safe to say the general reaction to the live-service shooter has been one of great disappointment, and it seems toward the end of the game's development, even BioWare wasn't entirely surprised.

Darrah has released two videos in a series on 'What Happened on Anthem' in which he provides insights into, well, what happened on Anthem. He's attributed the game's failure to a multitude of issues, from a "misunderstanding about multiplayer games" to fundamental storytelling problems.

In the latest video, Darrah adds yet another contributing factor to the pile, saying a lack of dedicated processing resources prevented players from being able to view detailed information about loot and and look at their loadouts while out on the field. Unfortunately, it wasn't until it was too late that BioWare realized "this was going to be a big problem. A lot of bridges were burned on assumptions that proved to be false."

"By September, October of 2018," just a few months before Anthem's launch," we kind of all know that this game is coming in on fire, really hot. And part of the process of this, is that the leader who controlled the umbrella under which BioWare fell, shifted the target for Anthem.

We didn't really have a Metacritic target before, but now it was very clearly being stated that we were targeting a game in the 70s. Historically, BioWare games always had a target of 90, of being in the 90s."

Darrah also points out that a target above 90 can be "really troublesome" and "really hard to achieve" because "in some cases, it's beyond your control."

"If I make a great game, and I get three reviews, two 95s and one 75, that single 75 is enough to drag me down out of the 90s. There's just not a lot of room up there. So, unless you get a ton of 10/10s, holding your score above 90 is really hard to do."

Six years later, Anthem now sits at a 59 Metascore, likely a reflection of discontent toward performance issues, a lack of endgame content, and ultimately the decision to end development and shut down the game, as much as it's a reflection on the game's core design.

BioWare veteran says "flying is Anthem's best feature" but also its "worst feature" because it broke the game, and reckons Monster Hunter is a great example of how to add "really crazy things" without the broken part

EA's failed live-service shooter Anthem is officially shutting down in January, and former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has some capital-T Thoughts on what exactly went wrong.

A big theme threading together Darrah's Part 1 and Part 2 episodes on his 'What Happened on Anthem' YouTube video series is BioWare's "misunderstanding about multiplayer games," and he expands on that idea in a new video with a focus on Anthem's storytelling missteps.

From Darrah's perspective, one reason Anthem failed is its insistence on making a multiplayer game where all players are the same protagonist, creating an "accidental 'our'" in which no single player feels complete ownership of various components of the game, specifically the story.

"Ultimately it comes back to the fact that ownership of the various parts of the game in a multiplayer context wasn't adequately considered," Darrah said, pointing to Gearbox's Borderlands series as an example of a game that addresses that issue by "considering this to a greater degree.

"If the party starts to break apart, the storytelling spreads amongst all of the other people."

Darrah also seemingly referenced Final Fantasy 14 (he called it "Final Fantasy 13" but must've misspoken as there's no multiplayer element in that game) and how "it's really trying to make the story mine" by "treating me as if I'm the protagonist" while "everyone else that I bring along with me is coming along for the ride.

"Now, they might be having that exact same experience from their perspective, so it's 'me' for everyone. But the advantage of that is you're able to tailor the storytelling to each person based upon what they're experiencing, whereas this accidental 'our' that Anthem ends up with means that the game is treating everyone as if they are the same protagonist. It is certainly possible to do 'our' for storytelling, it can be done, but it needs to be done with intentionality."

Darrah argued that Anthem's "bad edge cases," apparently referring to instances of players not feeling any sense of possession of the game's narrative, become "standard cases" due to an economy that encourages "certain repeat behaviors."

"Consider, when I'm in a story, whose story is it? When I'm in a world, whose world is it? When I have a piece of gear, whose gear is it? When I have a character, whose character is it? Is it mine? Is it ours? Is it yours? Am I coming into your game? Is it the community's, or is it just a static thing?" said Darrah.

"Each of these possible answers can result in really interesting gameplay, but if you don't ask the question, you're going to end up with an accidental answer, and in the case of multiplayer experiences, accidental answers is exactly what you don't want to end up happening."

Darrah took over as Anthem's executive producer in 2017 and was with the studio when the game shipped in 2019, leaving the studio late the following year alongside general manager Casey Hudson. That's all to say, if anyone can provide an insightful perspective on Anthem's failure, it's this guy. This also lines up with the very common criticism that Anthem's storytelling simply wasn't compelling enough a foundation to carry a live-service game intended to run for years and years.

BioWare veteran says "flying is Anthem's best feature" but also its "worst feature" because it broke the game, and reckons Monster Hunter is a great example of how to add "really crazy things" without the broken part

2019 action role-playing game Anthem has one foot in death's door now that developer BioWare plans to shut its servers down for good in January, but former BioWare producer Mark Darrah doesn't seem particularly surprised.

He discusses his involvement with the game's development in a new YouTube video, in which he describes BioWare's tendency toward dysfunctional decision making – especially when it comes to online servers.

"If you try to launch a mission in Anthem and you don't have a full party, it doesn't ask you if you're sure that you want to launch with an incomplete party. It asks you the opposite question: It asks you if you want to wait and fill out your party," Darrah says.

He acquiesces that, "to a minor extent", this irritating system could limit the number of servers with only one person in them, but, "Did it make the game slightly annoying to every single person who tried? Yeah, absolutely."

It didn't matter to BioWare – the developer is like a doomsday prepper. Darrah continues to say that, "Interestingly, almost this exact argument" – that preventing disaster is always worth the sacrifice – "was made about Mass Effect multiplayer, because [BioWare was] worried that the matching servers or something like that was going to bankrupt EA if enough people tried to connect to it at the same time."

Ultimately, Darrah thinks "it's important to encourage people to group up, but there's a point at which you are optimizing for an unlikely or virtually unfathomable situation."

As Anthem faces shutdown amid Stop Killing Games movement, producer says maybe we want to "sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don't just vanish one day."

Anthem had the might of EA and the talent of Mass Effect's team at BioWare behind it, so why didn't it work out? Well, former EA executive producer Mark Darrah says a lot of the things that are wrong with the game "come from a misunderstanding about multiplayer games."

In a new video posted to his YouTube channel, Darrah reveals a lot about his time working on the game. "This was the team that made Mass Effect. Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3. They've been together a really long time," he explains.

"They have a particular way of working together. And for most of that time, they worked for and with Casey Hudson. This is a team that knew how to make single-player action RPG storytelling games."

It certainly seemed odd when the developer, known for Mass Effect and Dragon Age, both single-player RPGs, announced it would be making a live-service multiplayer title. Naughty Dog actually scrapped its Last of Us multiplayer game specifically because it didn't want to transition to a live-service company.

"When you look at some of the things that are wrong with Anthem, they come from a misunderstanding about multiplayer games and live-service games versus single-player storytelling games. The way that storytelling is structured in Anthem doesn't understand that there are other people along with you that can mess up the storytelling."

This is a big issue I've often had with a lot of MMOs and multiplayer titles. How can I be the chosen one who's going to save the world when there are a dozen people queuing up in front of the same NPC as my character?

As well as the storytelling, "The economy doesn't take into account that it needs to be able to last for a very long time. That balance matters in a live-service game a lot more than it matters in a single-player game."

Darrah notes that these issues were eventually discovered, but "because, in classic BioWare style, the game was only coming together in the last few months, they weren't obvious in the code until it was often much too late to fix it."

Darrah also claims that developers in Austin were "screaming" about these issues for a long time, trying to draw attention to the end game, too, but "because the leadership had become dysfunctional because these communication channels have been damaged between Edmonton and Austin, that wasn't really being heard."

That's not the only thing he blames leadership for. He also says that while the core leaders were clearly skilled, since they'd made Mass Effect 2, BioWare's highest-rated game, "there was a conflation of expertise in game making, which they had, and understanding games they had played, which they had, into a belief in an expertise in game-making for a kind of game they had never made but had played."

All of this, combined with the scale of the project and the fact a lot of things simply weren't written down meant that by the time Darrah joined, he had to make a lot of assumptions about how it all worked.

But hey, at least we can all agree the flying was great.

In the meantime, check out the best online games that are still alive and kicking.

Anthem, BioWare's now-dead live-service game, got its fair share of flak at launch, but there's one thing pretty much everyone who's played it can agree on: the flying was awesome. Mark Darrah, a veteran BioWare dev who was tasked with getting Anthem over the finish line after a troubled development cycle, agrees that flight is the game's best feature, but it also made creating everything else way, way harder.

"Flying in Anthem is amazing," Darrah says in a new video breaking down the game's development. "It feels great every single time. It feels like you are throwing yourself into the void and then catching yourself before you fall to your death. It feels good. It lets you move around the world. It lets you explore this really large, really interesting space in a really cool way."

But, Darrah adds, "there are a lot of problems with flying. Not with the feature itself, but with the way that it impacts everything else in the game." The work of the environment artists means a lot less when players are speeding away miles above it all. Enemies need to have ranged weapons to hit players. Cover matters less.

"And because we're a multiplayer game," he continues, "that can become a big problem because it's going to impact the amount of world we need to have streamed in because your party of four could be in four totally different places and you are going to have to keep all of that world in memory all at the same time."

Given how integral flight ultimately felt to Anthem, it might come as a bit of a shock to learn that it wasn't always a part of the game. In fact, it was an "on again, off again" feature. "The team was having a lot of difficulty figuring out how to design combats with flight in place," Darrah says, "So, the decision made by the creative director was to remove it to try to encourage them to design combat in some environment with the idea being that once they figured that out, they could then be readded."

Darrah believes that "flying is Anthem's best feature, but I think you can also argue that in a lot of ways it's Anthem's worst feature because the consequences of flying aren't adequately taken into account in the game design. The game isn't integrating flight adequately into the creation and design of the other parts of the game around it. So when we are adding very innovative things into our games, that's awesome. That's something that we should be trying to do because that's how the industry pushes itself forward. But when we're doing that, we have to be prepared to commit to the amount of work that is required in order to adapt the other features that we're keeping to this new innovation.

"We can't build a game without flight, build systems without flight, and then add flight on top because those systems aren't going to properly take flight into account. And flight is the place where this happens on Anthem. But you see this in other games that add brand-new, interesting features, which is that often they maintain status quo on the features that aren't this new innovation, and sometimes that doesn't work."

Darrah acknowledges that "this isn't to say we shouldn't try new things," but "innovation does have consequence," and there are better ways to build a new feature than BioWare's process with Anthem's fight.

"Another way to go, and this is the way I think that the Monster Hunter team acts, is to introduce our innovation from the edges and then integrate it more and more deeply into the game over subsequent innovations. One of the advantages of doing it this way is it lets us be incredibly experimental. Try really crazy things, but isolate them to a large degree from the overall game experience. But then if they are enjoyable, if they are successful, we can move them ever closer to the center of the gameplay experience."

Of course, that requires you to get the opportunity to create a follow-up – a luxury Monster Hunter has gotten multiple times over, but Anthem very much did not. Still, flight ended up becoming Anthem's defining feature, so who knows what things might've looked like if BioWare had taken a different approach.

As Anthem faces shutdown amid Stop Killing Games movement, producer says maybe we want to "sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don't just vanish one day."

BioWare shooter Anthem is heading towards its permanent shutdown on January 12, 2026, and while its former executive producer is "surprised it made it this long," he acknowledges that perhaps we want to "sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don't just vanish one day" for the sake of game preservation.

Speaking in a recent interview with YouTube creator MrMattyPlays (highlighted by PC Gamer), former BioWare dev Mark Darrah, who served as an executive producer at the company for almost 24 years, is asked for his feelings on the shutdown of Anthem. "I mean, I knew it was going to happen eventually," he begins. "To be frank, I'm surprised it made it this long."

He goes on to suggest that "Anthem could have been built in a way where this wouldn't have been necessary," mentioning Destiny 2's peer-to-peer technology, before adding: "We didn't know how to do that, and we frankly couldn't afford to do that. But we could have done something, but it would have been an uglier game, probably would have had more latency issues. It would have been a worse experience second-to-second in order to get something that basically wouldn't need to ever be sunset."

Given the trade-off Darrah suggests would have had to have been made, the veteran dev asks: "I think we all need to think about is that the world we want?" However, he believes, "Kind of I think maybe it is, that we want to be in a world where we're willing to sacrifice some fidelity, sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don't just vanish one day."

Of course, this is a hot topic given the ongoing Stop Killing Games movement, which aims to challenge the whole idea of games becoming totally unplayable because of their devs or publishers deciding to shut them down. Darrah says, "I do believe in game preservation, and we're losing a lot of stuff right now. Things are disappearing. I mean, forget Anthem, which was at least out for almost seven years by the time it'll go down. [...] Like, what about Concord?"

He continues: "My feeling on Stop Killing Games is that let's acknowledge that there are consequences to basically mandating that things not go away forever, but maybe those are consequences that we want to pay, that we want to accept."

Darrah elaborates with an analogy, noting: "We don't let chemical companies just flush their toxic waste into the nearest stream. There are consequences to us not letting them do it. It costs them money to not do that. But we've decided correctly as a society that that's a cost we're willing to make them pay."

Admittedly, Darrah doesn't know what the best solution is at this point when it comes to games, but he agrees, "we probably need something."

I visited a video game archivist trying to preserve some of the world's most forgotten history against all odds, and sometimes even other gamers.

It turns out that Dragon Age: Origins was never intended to evolve into a whole series of RPGs, as former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah reveals it was supposed to be "a standalone game."

In an interview with YouTube creator MrMattyPlays (below), which has been highlighted by PC Gamer, Darrah explains that this initial idea also meant that "a lot of threads" were placed in the 2009 game which ended up being a challenge for the devs to deal with later down the line when the series expanded.

"Dragon Age: Origins originally was intended as a standalone game," Darrah begins. "You can see this, if you play Dragon Age: Origins, knowing that it was intended to stand alone… There's a lot of threads that are cast out that kind of had to be abandoned because there could be werewolves all over the world. There might be a civil war happening underground in Orzammar."

Furthermore, he adds: "There's a bunch of stuff that was great to put out in a game that you never had to come back to, but then when we did come back to it, you had to sort of recover from that."

But why did the RPG end up spinning out into a whole series? The answer may not surprise you – money. "It's pretty much financial reasons more than anything," explains Darrah, before adding: "And I think that the franchise has been much more forward-looking ever since then."

Well, at least knowing that we weren't robbed of a whole series might offer some consolation to Dragon Age fans, who from the same interview have been given the crushing news that the idea of a remastered Dragon Age trilogy was apparently turned down, along with a Dragon Age: Origins remake. You win some, you lose some.

Even after EA let Dragon Age: The Veilguard out of multiplayer hell, BioWare reportedly still had to rush to target "as wide a market as possible," which feels like the opposite approach of great RPGs.

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah says the studio should use Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a "scapegoat" to get the resources it needs for Mass Effect 5.

The next Mass Effect game is BioWare's only big project known to be in development, and Darrah reckons this perceived focus on one, single game will make its development cycle "less messy" than previous titles, which in the past have "cannibalized" each other, in his words.

In an interview with MrMattyPlays (thanks, PC Gamer), Darrah straight-up advises the Mass Effect 5 team to point to Dragon Age: The Veilguard's lengthy development, which endured a shift from single-player RPG to live-service multiplayer and then back again, as an example of what not to do.

"To be frank, the Mass Effect team is going to be able to point to The Veilguard and say, 'We should steer away from some of these things, because look what happened'," Darrah says. "I would honestly encourage that team to scapegoat Veilgard as much as they need to to get what they need from the organization, whether it's true or not."

Darrah adds that, "the problem with being single project is you have this sort of boom and bust thing happening, where you get really big, and then you have to slim down.

"Now, EA seems to be trying to move to some sort of model where people flow within the overall organization a lot more. So maybe that will be fine. Maybe that'll work out great, but it remains to be seen."

Darrah left BioWare in December 2020 alongside longtime Mass Effect director Casey Hudson after more than two decades with the company. With Mass Effect 5 having been announced in 2020 but presumably kicking into full development post-The Veilguard, that means Darrah hasn't had his hands in its development, but his insights as a BioWare veteran from the very beginning nonetheless carry a lot of weight.

One thing's for sure: Both the Mass Effect series and BioWare as a whole are in desperate need of a bounce back after Andromeda and The Veilguard, respectively, and all eyes are on Mass Effect 5 to see whether it sticks the landing.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is "a strong signal" that players don't just want live-service games, BioWare veteran says, but GTA 6's success will be a real indicator of the industry

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah says that this year is even "more brutal" for the games industry than last, and as companies continue to chase live-service wins, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is "a strong signal" of what players really want.

In a new interview with YouTube creator MrMattyPlays (below), Darrah is asked if he has any concerns about the current state of the games industry and the "economy for games" amid ongoing challenges for developers to find investment for their projects, layoffs still painfully prevalent across multiple companies, and publishers continually chasing live-service wins, for better or worse. "I mean, last year it was 'survive till '25,' and this year has definitely put the lie to that because it's more brutal this year than last year from everything that I can see," he responds.

Darrah argues that in 2024, we were "seeing the small money, like the people that invest in the very early starts of projects and studios, and that starting to come out of the shadows again. But then this year seems shakier than ever."

He points to live service games, and says that the reason we have "so many" is ultimately "because a successful live service, a Fortnite, makes all the money, and Microsoft and EA and Ubisoft and Sony and all these companies would be perfectly happy – in fact, they would be more happy – if they each had five live services that made all the money and no other games.

"But we don't want that," he continues. "I don't think anyone who plays games really wants the industry to look like that. But business, from a business perspective, that'd be awesome. You know that [...] you only have to worry about five games at your publishing organization, and then one will start to slowly decline, and then you go and you start to hunt for the one that's going to replace it as it eventually dies. I don't want the industry to look like that. And I kind of feel like maybe people are starting to signal with their wallets that they don't want it to look like that either."

One great example of this, Darrah continues, is this year's French JRPG masterpiece Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which has been a massive hit for Sandfall Interactive. "I think Clair Obscur in a lot of ways is a strong signal, because it's a game made pretty cheaply with good but not over good visuals," Darrah says, pointing out that it "sold great," before addressing another upcoming popular game – GTA 6.

"Every time I talk, as I'm talking, I just see like the GTA 6 logo rising out of this fog in the back of my mind," he jokes. "I think that's going to be what decides, honestly. Ask me again after GTA 6 ships because… if GTA 6 doesn't sell 70, 80 million copies or whatever GTA 5 sold, then that's going to signal something. But if it's basically, you know, if it's the most successful launch of all time… We'll see."

He then goes on to talk about the problem with publicly traded companies – like "so many of the major publishers" are – constantly finding that "the line needs to go up," even each quarter, and that's getting harder with dev times getting longer.

Darrah continues: "We've seen a lot of studios started by people who left AAA companies – BioWare, but others as well – who got investment, big investment, and then this year, late last year, they're gone. That their money went away. But I think that Clair Obscur, again, maybe is the way, because they had external investment. I can't remember from whom, but I think [...] they were less dependent on that.

"So maybe that's the promise. Maybe we'll just have a rebuilding period. Maybe it'll be really long, and maybe we'll get like a bunch of indie people who over the next five years grow into AA, and then that's what will form the next AAA."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead says "prejudice against turn-based RPGs isn't completely gone," even if fellow JRPGs like Persona and Dragon Quest sell millions of copies.

Dragon Age fans are understandably distraught over the news that publisher EA apparently rejected developer BioWare's offers to remaster the fantasy RPG series, so they're venting their frustration by covering Scotland in vague threats in the pixel art map Wplace.

TheGamer noticed that, after former BioWare producer Mark Darrah recently revealed EA apparently squashed the developer's hopes of making a Mass Effect-style remaster collection for Dragon Age, some fans have headed to Kirkwall, Scotland – Dragon Age 2's moody setting – to release tension. Or, they're doing so in the pixel canvas world map styled like r/Place, wPlace, and leaving behind anti-EA sentiment. And pro-yaoi sentiment.

"Fenhawke <3 yaoi <3," one artist said alongside sweet portraits of elf Fenris and protagonist Hawke, who are going to get married.

"Anders did nothing wrong," another creative scribbled about the mage who – spoilers! – is a mass murderer with a lobotomy.

"Fuck EA!" says another, more righteous wPlace designer, to whom other Dragon Age players write "so true" in response. It also appears that someone has begun painting a "THANK YOU BIOWARE" mural, but it's either unfinished, or my browser won't load the entirety of wPlace. The sentiment is there.

Anyway, I can understand why some Dragon Age players feel they have no choice but to express themselves through art – even Darrah said in his interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays that he feels like, "basically," EA is "against free money" here.

"EA's historically been [...] kind of against remasters," Darrah said. "It's strange."

BioWare considered paying a team to "do a remake" of Dragon Age: Origins, former executive producer reveals, and "there were lots of pitches" around upgrading the old RPG

With Anthem finally due to fully shut down in January, it's an appropriate time not only to look back at what went wrong, but also, why was this thing even green lit in the first place? Thankfully, we have former BioWare executive producer and Mass Effect veteran Mark Darrah, who was with the company through Anthem's conception, development, and release, sharing his insights into the game's very beginnings.

In Part 1 of a new video series titled, 'What Really Happened to Anthem' (timestamped here), Darrah dives deep into the dynamics at BioWare in the early 2010s and the motivations for pitching Anthem, explaining that the Mass Effect leadership team had grown tired of working on just that series and wanted to do something new.

"At this point in time, it's [codename] Dylan and what it is presenting, what [Anthem general manager Casey Hudson] is pitching to EA, is BioWare as a new thing. It's BioWare doing storytelling but doing it in a live-service, always online, brand new business models, brand new way of thinking about the way we do storytelling. 

"A lot of this early vision from Casey doesn't actually really make it into the final game, but it's why Anthem was able to generate this much momentum within the organization – because what Casey was essentially pitching was 'what if BioWare game but it could do FIFA numbers? What if you could tell a story with your friends? What if we had an onboarding that allowed you to try the game but seamlessly move into paying for the game?'

"Maybe not free-to-play, maybe free-to-play, maybe some sort of cliff where you paid for money, but something that brings the business model forward. Whatever you, an executive within EA, are imagining, maybe this game can be that game. Are you tired of BioWare taking a long time to make games that only sell pretty well? Well, do I have the game for you."

Looking at it through this lens, it suddenly makes a whole lot of sense why Anthem got the green light: EA wanted money, of course. FIFA is one of the most lucrative video game franchises of all time, landing just behind Minecraft according to Wikipedia, so it's not surprising to hear EA's ears perked up when Hudson apparently mentioned FIFA numbers. I'm sure there was more to it than just that, but I'm also sure EA likes money.

Of course, Anthem did not do FIFA numbers, selling short of EA's expectations and ceasing development entirely in February 2021 despite an attempt by BioWare to massively reboot the game. Both Darrah and Hudson left BioWare just a few months prior in December 2020.

"It isn't Destiny. It isn't Borderlands. It isn't Mass Effect": Ex BioWare lead says Anthem's vision for "the future of storytelling" struggled to come together because it had "no one really clearly saying what it is"

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has said Anthem's failure can be partly attributed to EA's reluctance to compare the third-person online shooter to existing successes.

In Part 1 of a series of videos titled "What Really Happened to Anthem," Darrah gives his perspective as someone who was working at BioWare when the game was conceived and through its launch. Anthem released as BioWare's entry into live-service in 2019, Darrah left BioWare in 2020, and the game will no longer be playable at the start of next year following an unsuccessful launch and consistently low player counts in subsequent years.

The downfall of a game as well-funded as Anthem will always be multifaceted, but in Darrah's mind, a big part of it came down to marketing. Specifically, he saw an opportunity to bill Anthem, at the time codenamed Dylan, as something of BioWare's take on a looter shooter like Destiny or Borderlands.

"One of the things that seemed really strange was that the project didn't seem willing to name its competitors," Darrah said. "Dylan was conceived in a pre-Destiny world, but the game that seemed to be slowly arising from this churn seemed an awful lot like Destiny or maybe Borderlands.

"And it seemed very strange that the project seemed very unwilling to say this game is Borderlands but with mech suits and flying, or this is Destiny with flying, or something to that effect.

"By being hostile towards drawing those comparisons, you were actually preventing decisions from being made, because a system that needed to be like Destiny's, because you're not Destiny, had to start in out in the wilderness and then make the long arduous trek through a million different iterations before finally arriving at what it obviously needed to be all along, which was Destiny," Darrah added.

"It is actively saying what it isn't. It isn't Destiny. It isn't Borderlands. It isn't Mass Effect. But it has no one really clearly saying what it is."

Darrah hasn't been shy to pull back the curtain on life inside BioWare during Anthem's development and release, having previously said that the shooter's development had a big connection to Dragon Age's pivot to live service and that his team was "jerked around" because EA stopped caring about its tentpole RPGs when it started focusing solely on Anthem.

Late last year, long after Anthem's dubious legacy had been cemented, EA CEO Andrew Wilson hailed Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a return to form for the studio, but a few months later he said it underperformed sales expectations by about 50%.

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Brian Fargo, Interplay Entertainment (formerly Interplay Productions) co-founder and CRPG mastermind, foresaw the success of Baldur's Gate 3 and its predecessors… years before they came to fruition, even.

Speaking in a new interview with MrMattyPlays on YouTube, Fargo reveals that he yearned to work on a Baldur's Gate game after leaving Interplay in 2002. Just a few years prior to his departure, Interplay had acted as publisher to the original Dungeons & Dragons game, which was headed by BioWare. "When I left Interplay, the first thing I wanted to do was a Baldur's Gate." The Fallout and Wasteland mastermind says he "tried for a decade."

Fargo admits that both he and Feargus Urquhart, fellow Interplay veteran and co-founder of Obsidian Entertainment, "were both killing ourselves to get [Baldur's Gate], and after a decade plus, I just gave up." The industry lead explains why – and his reasoning was simple. He had a feeling Baldur's Gate would succeed. "I knew that it could be huge. I always used to say, 'you're sitting on something that's going to do at least $50 million worth of business.'"

The IP ended up in Larian Studios' hands as they developed the threequel, with Fargo calling the Divinity: Original Sin masterminds the "perfect choice." He continues his praise, stating, "I always knew that it would do fantastic, and the more time that passes, even the bigger it sells."

He certainly isn't wrong – two years out of early access, and Baldur's Gate 3 is still flying high. Back in 2024, the turn-based RPG already boasted over 10 million players.

There's more Baldur's Gate yet to come, too – although Larian isn't making the sequel itself, Dungeons & Dragons stans don't need to worry. Hasbro has stated that it's "talking to lots of partners" about the next game already and is working on a separate new D&D title, too. In other words, there's plenty in store for fans of the Forgotten Realms and RPG lovers alike – and it's safe to say Fargo's decades-old premonitions were on point.

Fallout "was a sequel" to Wasteland, says Interplay co-founder, and "we did everything we could not to be sued by Electronic Arts" after the devs "had to pivot out" of the follow-up

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is well known for having a small core development team, but they were also helped out by a lot of outsourced talent, which one BioWare veteran reckons we can thank for the in-house devs at Sandfall Interactive being able to remain so focused on "building that core."

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah – who has credits on Dragon Age 2, Inquisition, and more – has this week released a whole video on his YouTube channel discussing outsourcing in games (below), in which he talks about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's approach, from what he can observe from the outside. As he points out, although there were (very aptly) around 30 people working on the RPG from within Sandfall, "they did fairly significant outsourcing" as you can see in the game's credits.

However, this outsourcing was also "very targeted, very focused," Darrah believes, with teams outsourced to do "a bunch of their animation," as well as quality assurance (with an outsourced team that Darrah says "seems to be larger than the core team"), compatibility and performance testing, not to mention "audio and music localization," and their publishing partner.

As Darrah points out, the devs notably didn't outsource things like "level art," or art in general, if the game's credits are anything to go by. He says, "To me, what it looks like is they chose things that they were able to encapsulate very effectively. Because of the nature of their combat, the combat design and the combat animation aren't as tightly coupled as they are in a real-time game, so they are able to outsource combat animation, outsource gameplay animation, and have a wider acceptable range of what comes back."

He continues, explaining that if Sandfall Interactive got "something back that looks cool, they can make that work," while a game with a real-time combat system might struggle to "integrate" an animation with the actual game design.

Darrah says that he'd expected to see "co-dev partners and entire teams building levels" before looking at the RPG's credits, "but instead what I see is very focused, very clearly delineated areas of outsourcing, which is amazing. Which would have allowed them to have a much greater degree of success with these partnerships, which allowed them to have that super tight team in the center of the game, that everyone knew each other, everyone knew everyone's strengths and weaknesses, everyone was able to synergize together into a very cohesive unit."

Furthermore, in regard to the outsourced devs, Darrah suggests that they were brought in where Sandfall was "able to largely isolate them from the rest of the development." He acknowledges that he doesn't know that this is definitely what happened, as it's possible that the outsourced devs were also "tightly integrated to the team," but based on what parts were outsourced, he believes that "the game team was very focused on building that core, and then they were grafting on the capabilities and the skill sets and the specialization of these outsourcing partners."

However it happened, the devs were clearly onto a winning formula, anyway – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is still the best-rated game of the year so far on Metacritic (if we exclude the two Switch 2 Zelda upgrades that have stolen the top spots).

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 devs reveal the game's most underappreciated actor: a water bottle that stood in for one of the best bosses