For decades, BioWare has stood at the forefront of Western role-playing game development. While it's hard to argue with the fact that their spot at the forefront has slowed do💜wn in more recent years, BioWare is nevertheless a name with a great deal of recognition. Several of their games have become legends in their own right, and even a few of their noble misfires had interesting elements.

We'll be ranking every BioWare-developed game ever made, which is no easy task. Along the way, we🦋 will nigh-inevitably slot something somewhere you disagree with, wondering why it's so high, or so low. Never forget,𝓀 your opinions are just as valid as ours - if not more so!

Updated November 13, 2024 by Quinton O'Connor: A certain fourth mainline entry in a certain dragon-centric series recently arrived after so very many years of development, and we're happy to say that it ranks relatively highly.

21 Dragon Age Journeys (2009) 🅺

We begin with a game that... uh... certainly exists. Or rather, existed. We debated whether to even include Dragon Age Journeys, since 𒁃at the time it was developed, the studio wasn't BioWare, but rather EA2D.

That's why you won't see Heroes of Dragon Age on this li꧟st - don'tﷺ worry, it's no great loss. EA2D did eventually become the now-defunct BioWare San Francisco, so hey, we're including it.

Honestly, we've already written more sentences than this short-lived Flash-based browser game deserves. From gameplay to graphics, it felt like it had been thrown together in a blender after the devs added one 👍part of Farmville to two parts of Ru⛄nescape.

Which might have been good, come to think of it. Bඣut it wasn't. Only the first chapter ever saw the light of day, with the second and third chapters canceled. Presumably because Dragon Age Journeys wasn't remotely good.

20 Mass Effec♎t Galaxy (2009) 🐈

A cheaply-made, clearly-rushed top-down shooter for iOS in an age before iOS and Android games could be great, Mass Effect Galaxy lacks any of the spark, gravitas, or creativity that makes the game it ties into - Mass Effect 2 - so 🐟renowned. Jacob Taylor isn't exactly the most beloved character in Mass Effect fandom to begin with, but Galaxy writes him so much the worse.

The plot, such as it is, quickly devolves into a squabble with an alien extremist who isn't nearly as compelling as the other extrꦆemists of his species we can encounter in the trilogy. Mass Effect Galaxy was yanked from the s♊tore a mere three years after release, and we promise, you're not missing anything.

19 𒁃 ꦛ Dragon Age Legends (2011)

We, uh, promise we're almost to the 'real' games. Dragon Age Legends was the second of EA2D's freemium efforts, and while the gameplay was a modest step up from the swamp that 🐎was Journeys, the aggressive monetization pretty much nuked any sense of enjoyment for most players right off the bat.

With a plot occurring right alongside Dragon Age 2, Legends was the tie-in to its contemporary mainline installment that its predecessor had been for Origins. There's actually an OK little story in here somewhere, though your mileage may vary on whether it's remotely worth the effort of looking for its offline version's downl💃oad links, and then marching your way through its uninspired mechanics.

18 𒉰 Shattered Steel (1996)

Hey, there are far worse fates than having the first game your studio develops among your very worst. Shattered Steel, the newly-formed BioWare's inaugural outing, tries to outshine the popular MechWarrior series without bringing anything fresh to the table. In fact, its stage design is a substantial step back from what Activision's bigger-name robot-pilo﷽ting action fr💦anchise was already achieving.

Shattered Steel's story starts off fine, inviting players to ponder the truths behind a nemesis responsible for our species' near-extinct🔴ion. But the delivery just isn'tꦛ there, with the narrative payoff stymied by fairly predictable moments. Coupled with achingly repetitive combat, there's little to recommend. The visuals are kind of cool for their time, at least?

17 Anthem (2019) 🍸

And at the other end of the timeline, we have what is, as of this writing, BioWare's most recent release. By the time the company formally announced Anthem in mid-2017, media outlets had been reporting on it for years; the struggles behind the game's development came into sharper focus, and although 2018 gameplay footage seemed generally fine, there was good reason to wonder how 💝Anthem would land. Many longtime BioWare fans were also upset that the team responsible for the Mass Effect trilogy was 𝔉shifting to a co-op live service title.

All these hesitatio⭕ns would prove well-founded when Anthem launched in February 2019. It was immediately obvious this was hurried out the door in an inexcusable state. The core loop of flying around shooting bad guys is fun in the beginning, but the tedious and overly similar mission structure soon becomes a slog.

Folks♎ were equally right to worry that Anthem's live-service nature would harm its story; 𒀰it's disjointed at best. Anthem ceased further development in 2021, leaving its ongoing narrative forever unfinished.

16 Sonic Chronic🧔les: The Dark Brotherhood (2008)

There's a decen🗹t game somewhere in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, 🌺BioWare's sole outing for Sega's blue mascot, but it's hidden beneath a thick layer of purely average content. Despite its BioWare pedigree, the scope of The Dark Brotherhood's plot doesn't extend much, if at all, beyond what you would find in something like Sonic Adventure. Nor do enough of its remotely intriguing concepts come into view until you've run a gauntlet of ridiculously easy battles and cheesy one-liners.

Sonic Chronicles both looks and sounds good, however, with bright, poppy character art and some of the best-looking backgrounds on the Nintendo DS. Progression is largely accomplished via stock fetch quests, and the RPG nuts-a💙nd-bolts are disappointingly bland, so we still can't recommend it.

15 Mass Eff📖ect: Andromeda (2017)

When BioWare Edmonton's talented Mass Effect division shifted focus to the game that would become Anthem, it was up to BioWare Montreal to deliver the goods for Mass Effect's future. In their defense, this was a huge responsibility for a fairly new studio, even if they did learn the ropes a bit through the crafting of a few pieces of the series' DLC. Alas, Mass Effect: Andromeda does more wrong than right. Relative to its predecessors, Andromeda has a shakier story, fewer lovable companions, a great🎃er sense oꦬf bloat, and some truly woeful technical hiccups.

Those hiccups may have doomed poor Mass Effect: Andromeda from the start - videos of the game's less-than-savvy presentation went viral on YouTube in the weeks leading up to release, and combined with the tepid reviews, this middling quasi-sequel crashed and burned like an ill-fated Ark ship. Even its planned DLC follow-up got t🤡urned into a novel, and BioWare would spend years soul-searching for the series before announcing the next Mass Effect - which is still years away.

14 ๊ Dragon Age 2 (2011)

Drag💖on Age: Origins debuted to considerable success, so it was only fair that a sequel should get the go-ahe🍌ad from BioWare's new owners, Electronic Arts. Far less fair was the amount of time the Dragon Age devs were given to get that sequel rolling: roughly 14 to 16 months. Conversely, even if you set aside the time dedicated to crafting the universe's broad strokes, Origins had several years to make the magic happen.

And so it goes that Dragon Age 2's magic-centric story is crippled by its rushed creation,𒁃 with an especially swift resolution that rings hollow as a result. A common criticism of Dragon Age 2 is that the entire game is set in the city of Kirkwall and its surrounding areas; we contend that this was always a cool idea, but it was the developers' harsh deadlines that reduced what could have been the slow and steady transformation of a troubled town ﷽into mere lipservice.

Still, DA2 does have its fans, and not for nothing; the companions are strongly written, and protagonist Hawke can be pretty darn hilarious.

13 ꦗ 🌌 Neverwinter Nights (2002)

The two best things about BioWare's Neverwinter Nights both have nothing to do with the game itself - the modding community was fantastic, and Obsidian Entertainment's sequel was a major improvement. Th🔯e 2002 entry, named after the first MMORPG set in the same famous Dungeons & Dragon region, is ultimately more focused on giving players a ton of multiplayer options than telling a sweeping tale.

As a result, while the overall chapter-based structure makes progression feel rewarding (various things one does in an early chapter can carry forward into the next), the campaign is largely a miss. Dialogue is trite, truncate🌄d, and clearly driven to push you forward as quickly as possible. The D&D-based combat's implementation feels a little undercooked, too, though still moderately compell🔥ing.

12 ♊ Star 🧜Wars: The Old Republic (2011)

First, the good. Star Wars: The Old Republic's CG trailers are routinely exquisite. In the years before Disney revved its engines on new live-action content, this was Star Wars at its prettiest. Some of the origin stories for BioWare's MMO can be quite enjo🅘yable.

The colorful a🌳esthetic sort of clashes with what the single-player Knights of the Old Republic duology brought to the table, but they're easy on the eyes, especially at higher graphical settings. Some of the expansions have been solid🥂.

We don't exactly love the way The Old Republic controls, and we've never become full-blown fans of its battle system. Nor have we found most of the more recent expansions to live up to th🌸eir legacy, especially at launch, when they're barely a few hours in leng𝓡th.

The cash shop isn't quite as pervasive as it can be in other free-to-play games, and you can upgrade to a paid subscription, bไut it's hard to shake the feeling you're missing out if you aren't spending. BioWare Austin gets credit for⛦ righting this ship from a (very) rough launch - we're just not over the moon of Endor with it.