Gross Football Lunch – Week 8, 2026 NFL Season

In Memory of BioWare

You can prepare yourself for an inevitable letdown in whatever manner and to whatever extent you choose, but when that letdown comes, you may find all that preparation was a total waste of time. This is the emotional position I found myself in last week, when news broke that parent company EA was shutting down and closing BioWare, the video game development studio responsible for making a disproportionate number of the best CRPGs ever made. Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic are merely the most celebrated titles in their catalog. Every single game that BioWare developed is someone’s favorite game of all time. Hell, even Dragon Age II has shooters. Now, BioWare’s time has come to end, and while their closure was announced abruptly, the preceding decline was long, slow, painful to watch, and wasteful in the utmost.

Electronic Arts, arguably the most loathsome of the video game industry’s many, many loathsome behemoths, acquired BioWare in 2007, right as the studio was reaching the very height of its power. Dragon Age: Origins was released in 2009 as the first game to be published under the EA umbrella, with Mass Effect 2 following a few short months later. Both games were critical and commercial triumphs, with the former igniting a renaissance of party-based CRPGs, and the latter frequently cited as one of the greatest games of all time to this very day. And while the good times would continue for another half-decade or so, these twin triumphs served as a prelude to EA’s self-sabotaging mismanagement.

Really, the cracks were starting to show as early as Mass Effect 2. I fully acknowledge the fact that being the guy who thinks ME2 is the weakest of the original trilogy makes me the weird one, but my most recent replay of the trilogy solidified this opinion. The writing was always a highlight of BioWare’s output; to this very day, video game scripts have a tendency to talk down to the player in order to ensure the player understands what they’re being told to do, and BioWare’s scripts avoided this trap more deftly than most. Mass Effect 2, however, is written like it’s trying to hide the fact that it’s an RPG, in a naked bid to win over the clinical Fun Dip addicts and future child support delinquents that made up the cover shooter’s core audience. Mass Effect 3, released in 2012, sported better writing but also wedged in a micro-transaction riddled multiplayer mode. I don’t think too many fans of the single-player story-driven action RPG series demanded multiplayer, but perhaps I wasn’t asking around enough at the time.

I mention this to point out that, as early as 2010, when the BioWare/EA relationship was beneficial to both parties, you could already see corporate meddling at work if you were paying enough attention, and that this meddling was prophetic. As is all too common throughout the history of nerd shit, EA acquired a company that makes nerd shit, told them that their shit was for nerds and that they should make their shit in such a way that it is for “normal” consumers (and you should not need me to explicate that normal is in scare quotes to point out that these consumers are not real but rather a shared delusional construct of marketing goons, but I’m doing it anyway because I love you and literacy is dead), and eventually, the end products of this executive decree ended up alienating the loyal nerds who formed BioWare’s consumer base while failing to appeal to others.

There were also the deadlines. One cannot tell the story of EA’s demolition of BioWare without mentioning the deadlines. Now is as good a time as any to link Jason Schreier’s essential 2019 Kotaku piece on the widespread institutional problems BioWare faced at that time, shortly after their online co-op shooter Anthem bombed. If you’re still reading, odds are you’ve read this piece already, and if you haven’t, I encourage you to do so. But if you don’t have the time or inclination, let me sum up. Many BioWare games had succeeded despite myriad production problems as a result of outrageously taxing, last-minute crunch. 2014’s Dragon Age: inquisition was the toughest last-minute crunch of them all to that point, and also the last time the studio was able to overcome the resulting tsunami of horseshit.

Anthem was BioWare’s second high-profile flop in a row (following 2017’s Mass Effect: Andromeda), and, after reading this piece when it published in April of 2019, I concluded that BioWare’s time was probably running out, and I started my vain attempts to steel myself for their closure. And, the blunt truth of the matter is that I had already felt I was ready to say goodbye. I was excited Andromeda, and while I try not to let bad reviews tell me what to think, the specific complaints I heard were depressing. They painted a picture of a game that was buggy and bland, another shooter with trace RPG elements to add to a featureless pile of said; they even got rid of tactical pausing! I have no interest in bland shooters, and have even less interest in bland multiplayer online shooters like Anthem. I understand Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a return to form (or something close to it), but I didn’t get around to it yet and now the thought of giving EA my money for the privilege makes me sick. If BioWare has debased itself into another farm for bland shooters, as it appeared to have in 2019, does it even need to exist?

What is clear now, in the sobering light of BioWare’s actual closure, is that I processed this by adopting a cynical attitude towards the whole of BioWare’s output. Were they ever that good in the first place? Sure, I may have loved the original Mass Effect trilogy to pieces, but doesn’t the third game’s shitty ending diminish the whole series? Is Dragon Age: Origins still fun, or is it a relic of the late aughts? Is Baldur’s Gate 2 bullshit? Do we even need BioWare now that Larian Studios has emerged with an updated take on BioWare’s old, stale formulas? (The answers are, in order: Yes, no, it’s a little bit of both, not at all, and if we didn’t need BioWare anymore I wouldn’t need to write an essay to process my grief.)

Listen, I know I’m making this about myself in a way that’s distasteful. Some 400+ people lost their jobs as a direct result of the closure, and hundreds of others have come and gone from the studio, and it’s certain that some of them entered having landed their dream job and left having been chewed up and spit out by a parent company that refuses to stop playing with its food. All of that sucks mondo ass, and none of it has anything to do with me. What’s worse is the fact that BioWare’s closure is but the latest in a long list of high-profile studio closures and layoffs that have smashed the entire video game industry to bits, another casualty of capitalist greed.

But the reason I am compelled to write about these layoffs and this studio closure is to mourn the loss of art that has moved me, personally. As it happens, I was already playing through Baldur’s Gate 2 for a third time as the news broke. I’ve been making a point of playing it the way I play Baldur’s Gate 3; slowly, deliberately, and with supreme attention to detail. Baldur’s Gate 2 set the stage for all of BioWare’s RPGs to come, and now that I’m finally playing it carefully, I can see that this game is absolutely gorgeous. The story’s content and structure are perfectly wedded, the characters are detailed and memorable, and the gameplay rewards thoughtful play. I didn’t intend for this playthrough to turn into a wake, but now that it has, it is a perfect reminder of what continues to draw me to BioWare’s output, and the many games and studios that followed in their footsteps.

If you worked at BioWare before and are reading this, you have my sympathy, and I wish you the best of luck in getting back on your feet. You deserve better than what your bosses gave you, and I hope you find it. Thank you, for everything.

Week 8 NFL Nihilism Pool

Bye: 49ers, Giants, Saints, Texans

In accordance with the Gross Football Lunch mission statement of giving you, the reader, the the greatest available quantity of the dumbest possible crap in the smallest possible container, last week saw me rebrand this space as the NFL Nihilism Pool. I thought this would be a one-week bit, but as it turns out, I got my shit rocked so thoroughly last week that I can no longer have any confidence in any facet of my personal ball knowledge. Really, calling my background information on the sport of football ‘knowledge’ feels like a reach at this point; it’s more like a loose collection of half-baked priors from 2023 or so mixed with a hefty dose of fumes from the spray I use to clean child piss off of home furnishings.

At any rate, these top assignments are lopsided enough that I don’t think they require much justification. Double digits on the Rams at this point is rich, and likely to end in humiliation most weeks, but the next time the Chargers show up against an opponent with a losing record will be the first. 13 points against the Ravens might also seem rich, but if the last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that the select few pundits who warned us that the Ravens’ roster wasn’t actually all that good in the preseason – even with and especially without Lamar Jackson – were on to something. It’s all too easy to envision the Bills struggling and making this game more interesting than it should be, but so what? A win is a win.

Sometimes, it behooves the sports prognosticator to choose fun, and tonight’s Panthers/Packers tilt is the perfect opportunity to do so, even though the Packers have pulled their shit together after a rough start, and the Panthers got their shit rocked last week. But, let’s face it, even in the biggest Panthers’ fan’s wildest imaginings, there was no version of this year’s Panthers team that was good enough to be immune to a devastating home loss against their last-place rival. The Packers remain bereft of defense and owe all of their success to assorted Jordan Love heroics, and a blowout home loss to the least intimidating division leader this side of the Giants is absolutely on the table. Did you know that Packers fans had the audacity to complain about the refs favoring the Lions last week!? How can you not pull for their opposition?

It has come to my attention (as a result of my wife razzing me near-constantly for my ability to mope and complain about rooting for an undefeated football team) that the Minnesota Vikings Emotional Health Self-Audit must be conducted as soon as possible. I have therefore scheduled it for next week’s column, provided we don’t lose any more of my favorite dev studios in the next week. Let’s call it 50/50. Anyway, the Vikings haven’t faced a real test since they played the Bears in Week 2, the Lions have Brian Branch back to give their defense an immediate competence upgrade, and Kyler Murray’s level of play seems to have topped out at Occasionally Approaching Effectiveness. Come back next week for bloodletting about how Kevin O’Connell is a two-bit Brian Flores merchant who has doomed us all.

PU! All five of these games are stinking up the joint. If you watch a single second of any one of them for any reason other than AFC North hatewatching, you should probably call the number. Even if you don’t gamble, you should call the number, or at least see if you can get in with your psychiatrist for an early med check.

Enjoy the games, everyone!