Mass Effect 5 Already Has One Big Advantage Over Dragon Age, But Can BioWare Deliver?

screenrant.com:

After the long-awaited release and subsequent underperformance of, developer BioWare is now looking towards the next game in the series, the prospective. Unfortunately for BioWare, a string of disappointing or underperforming titles, starting with in 2017, followed by the particularly disastrous, and then, most recently,, has left fans with some doubts regarding the studio's capabilities in developing another game that can live up to the best of what the series has to offer.

While there have been promising updates for , the development troubles of the studio's last few games don't inspire much confidence., released in 2019, came as part of an industry-wide push for live-service games, a format which BioWare, a developer of mainly single-player RPGs, was not well-suited for. And while didn't fail quite as badly as 2024's, it was still a disastrous release for the studio. Similarly, also suffered from that same live-service push, which was hugely responsible for the game's troubled development, and contributed heavily to the issues in the game's full release.

While there are plenty of reasons to doubt BioWare's capabilities at this point, the next game at least has one advantage compared to -it's (presumably) not going to face the same kind of development issues. Despite having been in development in one form or another since 2015,, or, as it was titled before being renamed, infamously had its original concept scrapped in favor of an attempt to turn it into a live-service title before pivoting back to being a single-player RPG, eventually resulting in

There are a lot of plot holes that Mass Effect 5 needs to resolve which have yet to be answered by the mainline games or Bioware itself.

While it's impossible to know how any past version of might have been received, the game's troubled development did undoubtedly contribute to both the long wait and the game's overall quality, which in turn contributed to its underperformance. Live-service games, meanwhile, have