Franchises made by BioWare have accumulated a lot of Original Sins of its own over the years.
Baldur's Gate series
- One of the most common complaints about Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal is its blatant Power Creep, with the game throwing at you tons of money and magical artifacts at every corner. This however was already the norm in the base-game Baldur's Gate II, where you would end swimming in money either for the sheer amount of golden coins you can find in dungeons or for all the weapons, armor, and items you can sell. Even then, the game offers plenty of legal exploits to achieve further loop, for example, drinking thieving mastery potions to steal powerful weapons from shopkeepers (and bouncers who would happily purchase items even if stolen from them: reanse and repeat).
- While powerful items were not so abundant in the first game, swimming in money was already an established fact. In fact, you possibly even had more purchase power since there were less expensive things to buy from shopkeepers.
- Another complaint for Throne of Bhaal is that the plot feels streamlined if not railroaded, with not much agency upon its developments. This is a misunderstanding as the real issue is that actually you do not have much areas to explore besides those tied to your main quest, not even dedicated sidequest areas (except for the Watcher's Keep), unlike Shadows of Amn where right from the second chapter you can accept several interesting sidequests that bring you in cool places far away. But the main quest of Shadows of Amn too was railroaded and lacked agency: you pass through a dungeon that many players started to consider boring and see one of your companions being forcibly taken from you, you are forced to follow Gaelan Bayle in his home and accept his offer, you still gather money, you join one of the two rival factions (even if that would be in conflict with your character class), you battle the other, you chase the Big Bad through the same places (most of which offer no possibility of going somewhere else), then the final confrontation. The only point where your choices really matter are right before chapter 3, depending on which faction you join for that part of the story, and partially at the end of chapter 4 if you want to skip an optional challenge that there is no gain in skipping. All of this was not particularly noticed because the quests were great, the enemies interesting, the gameplay ultimately fun. Throne of Bhaal on the other hand was less inspired, and the same schema started to show its limits.
- Certain major events of bg1 were railroaded too, for example it didn't matter whatever your choices or actions in chapter 6, you would end up anyway arrested and framed for the murder of the Iron Throne leaders.
- It is interesting to note that the Broken Base complained about the railroading of Siege of Dragonspear, despite it being an interquel (so there was not much room for new stories as the game had to reconcile the first game and the sequel) and having some optional side maps that you could explore freely for additional challenge.
- Throne of Bhaal feels rushed, and it WAS rushed according to Word of God. But the same developers often recalled how both bg1 and above all Shadows of Amn were rushed, with the latter being so patched up at the last moment that nobody at Bioware expected the success it had, and would later say how many things they would have done differently with more time and resources available.
- Romances are a staple of later Bioware games such as Mass Effect or Dragon Age: many players like them, but others totally despise them and think that the company started to turn its following games into dating sims more than role-playing games. However, those were already introduced in Baldur's Gate II, the only Bioware RPG without any of that was just the first Baldur's Gate from 1998 (and even then, again Word of God stated that this was because of lack of time to implement and refinish complex banters and character dialogues).
- Some players complain that goofy encounters such as that of Chincilla or Bondari toggle atmosphere from the game, making everything look silly. But such features were much more prominent in the first game, the sequels were even darker. The fact is that early on the saga was less epic and more about wandering in the wilderness doing bizarre encounters, so blatant jokes and easter eggs were less prominent.
Mass Effect series
- The Reapers lost a lot of their mystique over the series, originally starting as beings with a frightening hatred for organic races (and disdain for "lesser" synthetic ones as well) with motivations that could not be understood and, even if we tried, would probably horrify us more. This decayed throughout the series, naturally being hit hardest during the ending, where they were given a sudden backstory as Well Intentioned Extremists led by a child-AI created from embarrassingly stupid case of Gone Horribly Right. This, however, can first be traced to Mass Effect 2, which gave the Reapers (via Harbinger) more speaking lines, as well as revealing that Reapers themselves are made of organic species whom they've seen worthy of "ascendance." Basically, their implicit motivation was reproduction. That right there brought their motivations down to understandable levels and hinted that they believe they're acting in organic species' best interests. It was forgiven because Harbinger was a Fountain of Memes, and their motivation was deliciously ironic: here we have a species so evolved they can't even mate normally anymore, and for all their talks of having goals "outside of your comprehension", they're guided by their most basic instincts. The third game gave a... different explanation for why they did this that was nowhere near as easy to interpret as something acceptable to most players.
- In the first Mass Effect, the Reapers are presented as a threat so wise and powerful that the only way you can win is by not even letting them fight directly — even trying to use or study their technology results in going mad or becoming their slaves. Via the Keepers, it's established that their schemes have been in place for thousands of years and are so subtle and thorough that even the player can't see it coming. Their only weakness is that they must rely on weaker servants to carry out their will, while the Reapers themselves didn't even see Shepard as an inconvenience. By the second game, Shepard and his crew are hacking into, overriding or outright stealing Reaper technology, and had the Reapers (this time in direct control via the Collectors) springing traps for Shepard that fail time and time again. This reduced the Reapers into adversaries which could be outwitted or Out-Gambitted, rather than all-knowing space deities. It was forgiven because the Collectors debuted in the series by killing Shepard, cementing themselves as major threats, and no one could have predicted Shepard returning. Further, it was understood that the heroes simply got lucky using Reaper technology—Cerberus sacrificed countless lives researching it, and the horrific consequences were beautifully shown in the "Retrieve the IFF" mission. In the third game, however, we're flat out told that the ancient, all-wise, all-powerful Reapers are scared of you, and then we're immediately introduced to a MacGuffin which takes away all mystery of how the hell you're supposed to win against such overwhelming odds.
- As pointed out
on 1d4chan, the first two Mass Effect games, while still extremely good, had quite a few omens of the problems that arose in Mass Effect 3; powers being made redundant, story-vital characters and events being left to DLC, a drop in character development, EA butting in where they don't belong, and a decrease in making vital choices. All of these things were present over the first two games but were either barely noticeable or well controlled. The third game was merely the point where these issues really started impacting the quality of the game. - One of the biggest critiques of the third game was that, despite the claims that the campaign would be vastly different depending on prior player choices, the plot still ends up playing out basically identically regardless of what choices were on your save file. But this problem of having to write the story around this idea was pretty evident in 2, which, rather than address a lot of the first game's hanging plot threads, many of which were resolved by player choice, decided to simply move the focus of the story so that the consequences of what the player did were unseen. A good example is that, in 1, the player has the option to let the Council die: obviously, this would have massive effects on the galaxy as a whole, so in 2, the game mostly skates around the question of what's going on with the Council and sets the story outside of their sphere of influence. 3, though, had to go back to the galaxy and 1's plot threads, and the result couldn't help but show, when the player can see for themselves that the consequences of the most powerful governing body in the galaxy being killed were "in a few years, they will be comprised of a different group of Suspiciously Similar Substitutes."
- The Character Focus put on Liara became obvious in the third opus (where a large part of the fanbase treats her as a Creator's Pet) but was already present in the first game, where she was a very exaggerated version of The Cutie, practically worshiper the ground you walked on and had only one obvious way to fail a relationship with her.note . However, in that game, Liara was only nominally important in that her mother was The Dragon, and she was a prothean researcher. Even then, you could choose to deal with Liara as much or as little as you wanted; if you so chose, you could save recruiting her for the penultimate mission in the game and then never talk to her. In the second game, she has a DLC centered around making her one of the most influential people in the galaxy and your second squadmate doesn't talk at all after she shows up, but the DLC is fondly remembered for fun gameplay and some satisfying payoff, so most were fine with the focus on Liara in this case. She also gets shilled in the Genesis digital comic, where, contrasting with the others squadmates (who are described with a neutral sentence), she is described as "as beautiful as intelligent" and "without her help we couldn't have done it", which feels like an attempt to retcon how important she was. In the third game, she's your first alien party member, one of the most powerful people in the galaxy, one of the few characters guaranteed to survive to the very end, and is present in a number of touching/personal scenes regardless of whether or not she's their Love Interest, where the other LIs would have made more sense. Notably, Liara is also the only character to make a cameo in Mass Effect: Andromeda as well. Between all those factors, it became apparent that the developers became really fixated on Liara being such an important character, that it became harder to ignore how much she was being pushed onto the player.
- Shamus Young points out in his retrospective about the series that the problems with the third game's writing — and by extension the ending — can be traced back to as early as the second game. Due to the shift in writers, the second game introduces a completely new plot only tangentially related to the Reapers, compensating with Rule of Cool, Worldbuilding and introducing new characters. When Mass Effect 3 made a similar shift back, it had to rush in order to make up for lost time and suffered for it. He also points out that Shepard themselves is symbolic of these problems; in the first game, Shepard made themselves "special" by doggedly unraveling the mystery of Saren and Sovereign and literally becoming the only person who knew the Awful Truth. In the second and third, they're "a hero, a bloody icon" that has plot forced upon him/her because they're now The Chosen One.
- Young also discussed the increasingly all-consuming importance of Cerberus. In the first game, they were depicted as a black ops group gone rogue, and their presence was limited to side quests. In the second game, they were given a substantial jump in importance, both to the plot and in the setting, that felt incongruous with their apparent incompetence in the first game. But it at least made some sense; you were embroiled in a different sort of story from the last game, excusing the change in antagonist and tone, and it wasn't that out-there that Cerberus might have its own little corner of the galaxy. In the third game, though, despite the fact that the plot is supposed to be about the Reapers, Cerberus is still being a Spotlight-Stealing Squad and fighting you more often than them, the Illusive Man is still dragging you into unrelated speeches, and this random bunch of paramilitary racists that spent the whole first game trying experiments that didn't work and getting shot en masse by Shepard can apparently pull together a better army than nearly every other faction while in the throes of galactic war.
- Many have criticized the kett for being one-dimensionally evil, despite the geth, Reapers, and batarians being similarly straight up evil in the first game, only gaining depth and sympathetic traits in later installments. The difference, besides their raising the bar, was that the former two had the coolness and enigmaticness to remain impressive and reduced the latter to irrelevance, while the kett (who were allegedly supposed to be "empathetic") are neither particularly interesting nor particularly deep, and their motives are fairly shallow overall.
- Andromeda was frequently criticised for the quality of its character and facial animations, to the point where it is frequently blamed for tainting the game's reputation before it had even released. Mass Effect had never been amazing when it came to character animations. You can think of the Memetic Mutation caused by things such as the overuse of Going Through the Motions, or Male Shepard's Unintentional Uncanny Valley attempts at smiling, as a precursor to the mockery Andromeda would receive. The difference was that the original Mass Effect trilogy still always put its best foot forward when it came to marketing itself, while Andromeda didn't exactly obscure the lack of polish pre-release, and it simultaneously served as a handy symbol of the behind-the-scenes development troubles caused by outsourcing the animations to a support studio.
- The structural issues of the trilogy, as pointed out (again) by Shamus Young, can trace their origins all the way back to the Baldur's Gate series. Both series started out with simple plots revealing world-changing consequences to be followed up in future games, only to have the second game put the overarching plot to the background in favor of a darker, more personal conflict with a new antagonist, leaving the third game to hastily wrap up the main arc. But with Bioware still a relatively new studio at the time of Baldur's Gate, expectations were lower; at the time it was virtually unheard of for any role-playing video game to have the level of continuity between new installments as Baldur's Gate did. The gameplay of the Mass Effect series also strayed further from its role-playing roots with each new title, while Baldur's Gate built upon the first game's mechanics, making the gameplay deeper rather than simpler.
Dragon Age series
- In a way similar to Mass Effect, 1d4chan also point out that this applies to Dragon Age, as well, only to a much sharper degree; every base breaking aspect of the second game was present in Origins. There was pointless DLC, divisive or unlikable characters, and the first expansion pack Awakening was visibly rushed and had loads of Game Breaking Bugs. Thing is, it was all kept in check there, and plenty of work was put into Origins to ensure it came out good. Dragon Age II was every problem with Origins made blatant due to EA forcing Bioware to bum-rush the game out the door. As good as Bioware is, a game of the same quality level of Dragon Age: Origins being completed in less than a year just wasn't going to happen.
- One area that Dragon Age: Inquisition received criticism for was its Story Branch Favoritism in regards to races, where an Elf player character had the most involvement in the story, as well as romance options in the game. Origins always had this problem too, as a Human Warden Cousland background had the most diverse set of options for them in terms of the endings, outcomes, and romanceable partners. However, Origins had the player origin mechanic to make this less impactful, allowing each race and/or class combo to have their own unique storyline. For example, a Dwarf would have a lot of involvement in the Orzamar plotline than they would as an Elf or Human due to having two different background options (commoner or noble), while an Elf Warden would have unique lines and reactions depending on what background they came from such as the City Elf versus being a Dalish Elf. By contrast, Inquisition has no mechanic like this except for war table missions, meaning that an Elf Inquisitor gets more focus in the story than any other race, while Dwarves and Qunari have practically no personal involvement, and even a Human Inquisitor gradually gets pushed to the side in favor of Elf lore.
- Speaking of elves, Dragon Age: Inquisition got some flak for depicting human characters as more capable of recovering ancient elven knowledge than elves themselves, with Morrigan presented as the Elvhen/Eluvian Expert for the Inquisition over a Dalish Inquisitor, elven companion Solas, or even DA2's Merrill, with some thinking it's justified since Morrigan was unknowingly raised by the ancient elven goddess Mythal, and others feeling this begs the question of why Mythal feels that human women like Flemeth and Morrigan are more worthy to inherit her ancient elven knowledge and godhood than any elven women. However, this has been present since the Dragon Age: Origins Witch Hunt DLC, which involved human mages Finn and Morrigan uncovering more about ancient Elvhenan lore as a side hobby than any Dalish have uncovered after centuries of dedicated study. Moreover, Morrigan's ability to safely restore an eluvian is never questioned by other characters or the narrative, while Merrill is endlessly browbeaten by and failed at the same. However, while these started out as fairly minor stories and side characters in the earlier games, with Ancient Elvhen history and lore being pushed to the forefront in Dragon Age: Inquisition, many players found it to be an unavoidable and obnoxious case of Screw You, Elves! gone too far.
- Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition were criticized for the number of unlikable companions the party had, ranging from Carver being seen as annoying for Wangst reasons, to Sera being a Hypocrite with a strange view on the world. Origins had issues like this as well, Morrigan and Oghren being the most infamous examples, to the point of "Morrigan disapproves" quickly becoming a meme. The reason characters from Origins were still considered great, however, was that each one had Hidden Depths that allowed the player to see them in a different light. Morrigan had moments that showed her having a certain degree of naivety in her views, on top of being able to witness her character arc develop naturally as the game went on, while someone like Oghren was given moments to show that his drunken antics were from a feeling of failure due to his past, all of which helped them feel more real and relatable. Later games tried to make the characters more complex with darker pasts and more in-your-face personalities, but instead caused them to feel less real, more static, and never developed outside of their one specific character quest.
- Inquisition is frequently criticized for its large volume of fetch quests, but Origins has plenty of those too. It's possible that they're more criticized in Inquisition because of that game's large open zones making quest objectives less straightforward and the controversial "Power" mechanic requiring players to complete set amounts of side content to progress with the story.
