Alix Wilton Regan is taking on her biggest video game role yet as Lara Croft in the upcoming Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst, but her history in the industry dates back to 2009 with a variety of minor roles in Dragon Age: Origins. Her career was intertwined with BioWare, and she took the opportunity to pay tribute to the studio at the Golden Joystick awards.
"We need to acknowledge how tough things are across our industry," Regan says. "Behind every game are talented, passionate people who have spent years bringing these worlds to life. Right now, too many of them are losing their jobs and their studios. The recent closure of BioWare is particularly personal to me. They gave me two video game roles in Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 3, and helped set me on the path that brings me here tonight."
In fact, Regan's BioWare credits go far deeper than that. She voiced numerous characters in Dragon Age: Origins and 2, and brought Samantha Traynor to life in Mass Effect 3. She also provided the British female voice for the player character in Dragon Age: Inquisition, a role she reprised in The Veilguard.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ on the red carpet ahead of the show, Regan says she's "incredibly sad" about BioWare's closure and was "genuinely very shocked" when she heard the news. "I think the word is slightly dumbfounded, that something so great and so powerful as a studio could have such a fall from grace, and it seems like such an abrupt closure, with no forewarning. My heart goes out to all of the devs that were working on Mass Effect 5."
Those devs are "real people with real families back at home, with real mortgages to pay, and they deserve employment as much as anyone else," Regan notes, saying the studio has left a substantial mark on the industry. "It's a huge loss for video games as a whole. There probably wouldn't be a Larian or a Remedy without what BioWare had established all of those years ago."
Both Larian and Remedy put down roots well before BioWare's games had gone mainstream, but there's little doubt that hits like Dragon Age and Mass Effect influenced games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Control, showing how developers could blend immersive, cinematic stories with choice-driven plotlines and deep gameplay systems. Which is to say nothing of BioWare's own Baldur's Gate games.
With Mass Effect in particular, BioWare was "doing something that hadn't been done before," Regan argues. "They broke the mold when it came to RPGs."
But BioWare is hardly the only studio affected by mass layoffs, project cancellations, and abrupt closures at big publishers, as developers continue to pay the price for short-sighted decisions from executives. In her remarks at the Golden Joysticks, Regan says: "To everyone affected by the challenges facing our industry, we see you, we stand with you, and you are not forgotten."
