Mass Effect 4(Untitled)

RobXIII said:

How long will it take this problem to self correct fully? Who fucking knows.

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I think the correction is already happening through indie studios. The old "AAA" model of dumping tens of millions and years into a single title is largely over. Indies have shown smaller teams can ship strong original work without the overhead, and 2026 made that clear as their share of breakout sales grew while AAA hit counts stayed flat. AI is accelerating it by letting small groups prototype and code faster without needing large specialist teams for every step.

Utnayan said:

"Bioware is no more but its impact on queer representation will live on forever"

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ShakyJake said:

The old "AAA" model of dumping tens of millions and years into a single title is largely over.

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Basically the entire year of 2026 disproves this claim.

GTA 6 - $2 billion
007 First Light - $300m budget, has made about that much back, some of it is govt subsidized
Wolverine - $300m budget, has made probably $150m or so? (2.5m or so copies sold in Sept, PS5 exclusive)
NBA 2k27, MLB, NFL, NHL, etc - tend to be profitable
Control Resonant - $70m or so budget, made back its money after a week
Gears of War eDay - $500m budget, probably has made under $50m
Saros - $100m+ budget, made less than $30m
Galactic Racer - ?
Forza Horizon 6 - ?
Lego Batman - ?

i'm only looking at western games stuff like Crimson Desert, Resident Evil, Fire Emblem, etc are from Japan/Korea. Saros is a legit bomb, costing $100m+ and made less than $50m.

The biggest flops have been studios that have been shut down because everyone knows their costs were out of control, like most Microsoft studios, Sony studios, EA studios, etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see some of these IPs get outsourced to China where game developing is booming, and they use (cheaper Chinese LLM) AI heavily. Pretty soon there will be more chinese video game devs than western, and we barely see any of their games out here in the west - black myth wukong, wuchang, upcoming phantom blade zero.

Phantom Blade Zero might be the sleeper game that wakes people up to how far china has come

Just throwing in popular tropes from last few years, surprised he didn't say it will have dark souls and metroidvania elements lol

Surely that Lego Batman game was profitable.

yeah, thats pretty hilarious. just buzzwords of standard game shit. detective vision, glory kills, etc.

the 600 year thing is also hilariously stupid. they have any idea how unrecognizable the ME universe would be in 600 years?

Remember Mass effect 1 takes place in 2186.


Andromeda also is a 600 time skip. but that at least makes some sense for the long distance colony ship.

Pretty much the only option they could have:

Far enough in the future that someone built teleport gates between Andromeda and Milky Way to allow Andromedan races in the Milky Way. (Also, Andromeda already took place centuries (500+ years?) after ME3 due to travel time.) I'm not upset about teleport technology, the Mass Effect Relay system was always a trap, bottling up lazy organic species into a handful of systems the Reapers could clear out without travel times themselves - someone would have recreated it without the limitations eventually.

Also far enough into the future they could handwave away just which ending was picked in ME3 and say the species grew into the setting of the sequel regardless.

Of course, this also means that even the choice you made at the end of ME3 wouldn't have mattered for ME4. The downside of giving your players 'choices' while also only having the budget to write and produce one world state, kids.

Wombat said:

Of course, this also means that even the choice you made at the end of ME3 wouldn't have mattered for ME4. The downside of giving your players 'choices' while also only having the budget to write and produce one world state, kids

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The classic Bethesda “we want all choices to matter, so no choices matter” strategy

Gsme devs are weak now - man up and pick a canon ending. You’re not going to make everyone happy regardless, so pick an ending and construct a satisfying continuation based on that

spronk said:

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Just throwing in popular tropes from last few years, surprised he didn't say it will have dark souls and metroidvania elements lol

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the more I think about this. and those buzzwords.

it makes me think Wolverine and starwars outlaws killed bioware. EA saw those games crash and burn, and realizied ME U was the same fucking game.

Bioware missed the QuickTime event input and thought they'd be fine

Wombat said:

Of course, this also means that even the choice you made at the end of ME3 wouldn't have mattered for ME4. The downside of giving your players 'choices' while also only having the budget to write and produce one world state, kids.

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What Bioware was good at was maintaining the illusion of player choice mattering when it never really did. That illusion got a lot thinner when they got tied down into doing sequels. Obsidian had no choice but to make the light side ending canon for Kotor because otherwise there would have been very little galaxy left to play Kotor 2 in. If there had been a sequel to Jade Empire they would have either had to make the open palm ending canon or do the typical Bioware copout of just setting the "sequel" somewhere else entirely so the first game doesn't actually matter except for the occasional callback.

With Mass Effect the entire galaxy was the setting so they couldn't just set the sequel somewhere else forcing them to rely on people not looking too closely.