At this point Bioware is nothing more than a label, most of the creative figureheads who were responsible for the old Bioware games left the company and some of the games you listed were even made by teams who were never part of Bioware befor EA bought them. It's hard to criticize something that doesn't even exist anymore.

What the games developed by "Bioware" in the last 10 years show is that EA don't really care about brand sustainability. They put the label Bioware on new studios who are unrelated to the original one and neglect quality control.

While I can appreciate what you are trying to say with your comment, it is basically blaming EA for wanting to expand one of their acquisitions. Which .... is what every publisher does when they acquire a new studio. And most successful studios that run for an extended period of time see huge shifts in their employees anyways, with massive amounts of new workers who eventually become creative leads. Successful studios can often be categorized into generations even, with a lot of the new workers becoming the main driving forces behind studios. You're kind of seeing this now with Naughty Dog for example, where people who had worked for the company are now becoming the heads of the company.

Your basically saying that all of that is inherently bad, when it isn't, in fact it's pretty normal in the gaming industry. Saying that a studio should have been kept close to it's original staff for the sake of identity is misguided really, it's normal for studios to have huge shifts in focus and game development. A bigger problem is most likely who was hired at Bioware and how the studio was managed, and while some of that is probably on EA a lot of it isn't (Bioware employees and ex Bioware employees have reiterated time and time again how much control they have over their own studios). 

In addition, Mass Effect Andromeda was given 5 years of development time and a massive budget. Dragon Age Inquisition was considered "good". Dragon Age II was a creative decision by Bioware that didn't pay off. And If I had to guess, Anthem was probably an idea proposed by Bioware themselves, with the express purpose of cashing in on Destiny-like games as to appease EA, due to the fact that their games weren't making their owner a lot of money. Which isn't a fault of EA but rather Bioware, because the types of games they make rely way more on the quality of the game in order to make a profit, and their past games failed, so this was probably their way of getting back on good terms. Having some pressure from your publisher is a real and understandable consequence of consistently fucking up. The only thing that I think can be traced back to EA in terms of quality control is probably ME3 and maybe the MMO Star Wars game, but those are funnily enough some of the oldest examples of Bioware fucking up. Unless you are implying that EA should have just outright cancelled Andromeda before release, or restarted development. Both of which are so unrealistic and would take them out of so much money that it isn't even funny.  

Well, I was planning to pick up the game, and this doesn't change my mind. It just means I'll wait till I can get it for $30 or so.

Yep it's a mess from both ends, what I would like to see Is rather than making a knee jerk  reaction and  Bioware closing they look at the management that got them here, to often the guys who make the games are made scapegoats for upper management decisions, if the guys making the game have done their part and made a technically competent game why should they get it into the neck for  issues like lack of content and story that are linked to management, another worrying trend is this 10 million talk , it wasn't that long ago that a successful game was measured if it was a series /franchise  by how it performed against it's predecessors or more generally it's peers. now we are seeing series that historically sold in the 2-3 million range suddenly expected to make  3 or 4 times that, a classic example was tomb raider upon reaching  6 million it was viewed as underperforming by SE even though historically the series sold in that 2-3 million range because they had an even higher forecast , while tomb raider did great not every game is so lucky, not satisfied with a healthy profit and satisfied customers and growth over time, these games are now under pressure to be chained to or morphed into whatever is seen as the next big money thing or left to rot and the unfortunate thing is the traditional gamers voice is getting smaller each and every year and we are the ones who are missing out and missing out now no polished MEA no DLC and who knows how many great games and series in limbo.

So..... Do I have to play my cards right, or wait a month and hope for poor sales?

Erm.. iv played and see many remasters and remakes that are 99.9% the same game with only visual improvments. Yet they still get okay review scores. CD3 is an entirely different game built from the ground up keeping faith with CD1 gameplay.

13+ hours for a game this generation is far from a short game. I can name plenty of games that come out with less than 10 hours and reviewed better. Also keep in mind that CD3 offers a MP mode and Co-op modes with different agents to level so the game can be easily more than 13 hours.

Less than 10 hours for a completionist run on an open-world game, and reviewed well this generation? Go ahead, name plenty of games please, I'm curious.

Huh, I'm not too sure. I think you could potentially link lack of content and story to Bioware's developers themselves, in fact I think that's very likely. Unless by "upper management" you mean the people on top of the development chain. But if you're saying that the technical team developing Bioware's games are technically proficient, and that those people should be kept, then I'd agree I suppose. 

As far as your Tomb Raider example, while I completely see your point and agree with it, what Square Enix did was even more fucked up then the average publisher. Square Enix had a huge management problem, some of their Japanese games were in development hell, and as a result they decided to "blame" their Western studios. What I mean is that for that fiscal year they relied WAYYYY too heavily on their Western divisions to pick up the slack. So despite the fact that Hitman Absolution sold 3.6 million in 5 months (making it the fastest selling Hitman by far), despite the fact that Tomb Raider sold exceptionally well, and despite the fact that Sleeping Dogs did great for a new IP ... they still fell short of their expectations by $100 million+. That's somewhat similalr to what you're talking about, how publishers want to inflate their expectations and make an unreasonable amount on their IPs, but I think it's even more fucked up in this case because it was basically just to excuse their poor management and it ended up leaving a huge friction with their Western studios (Hitman studio eventually left Square Enix's control because SE fucked them over with a bullshit marketing scheme that ruined their potential to find mainstream success, the studio developing Deus Ex had their Western Final Fantasy game cancelled and ended up having Mankind Divided again fucked over by SE, the studio SE contracted to help make Sleeping Dogs shut down). That same fiscal year, Square Enix's 2nd biggest money maker Dragon Quest, ended up having it's worst debut in series history ... a debut that was so bad compared to the franchises regular debuts that I don't even think the fact that it was a subscription based MMO could have made it nearly as profitable as they were expecting. The only other games they had that year were Bravely Default (which sold very well but was Japan exclusive until much later, making it's potential for turning back their fiscal year very limited), Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (which I believe only had it's Western release in that fiscal year, essentially halving the sales profit that was contributed for that fiscal year), and a Final Fantasy spin off which only had it's Western release contribute to that year (and even then the Western releases only sold 300k lifetime, let alone what it must have sold that fiscal year). The West was carrying Square RIDICULOUSLY hard and they were expecting too much. 

I agree with what you're saying overall. We shouldn't expect every game to sell 8+ million. The funny thing is that I would not be surprised if EA actually made a profit on all of Bioware's recent games, even the ones that were panned and didn't sell a lot. I would guess that at least Andromeda cost them a lot given it's advertisement push, huge development time, as well as the fact that it was mostly sold at a discount, but who knows. I think what EA really needs to do, is scale back on the staff of Bioware. Yeah, it sucks, but I think they need to be scaled down and really work on a quality singleplayer game for 3-5 years. They're currently at somewhere between 500-1000 employees, and that's simply too much for a company that is consistently in dire straits. I think going for something smaller and more manageable, and making their releases big in quality but not huge in investment amount would carry them a long way. 

So is it safe to say R.I.P. BioWare?

Three... and dragon age inquisition won quite a few game of the year awards...