A pack of wolves can end a Baldur’s Gate 1 playthrough a mere five minutes after the tutorial ends. A squadmate you didn’t bother checking in on in Mass Effect 2 can die permanently during a mission you don’t get to redo. And a Sonic RPG on the Nintendo DS can end its story with the good guys saving the universe…then coming home to find someone named Eggman conquered Earth while they were gone. Most people know BioWare as the Mass Effect studio, which is incredible on its own — but that undersells the vast range that built the studio’s reputation in the first place.
Party-based dungeon crawling, approval systems other RPGs are still copying, martial arts combat, even one of gaming’s most infamous flops hiding a superb flight model: All of this and more is in BioWare’s back catalog. These eight BioWare games hold up particularly well today — whether you’re looking for good story, good mechanics, or plot twists you’ll still be thinking about years after the credits roll.
8
Mass Effect 2 (2010)
Why it still holds up: Skip a loyalty mission, and that squadmate can die for good in the finale.
Ignore a squadmate’s personal quest, and you’ll feel it later. Not through a stat penalty, but through who’s alive at endgame…no pressure. In Mass Effect 2, Commander Shepard spends the entire game recruiting a team of specialists for a mission against the Collectors, a mission the game makes clear most of them aren’t expected to survive. These include Mordin the salarian scientist with a moral debt to pay, Legion the geth who’s just trying to understand their own kind, and Thane the dying assassin looking for a moment’s peace. Every hour spent earning their loyalty pays off (or doesn’t) during the game’s final assault on the Collector base. Nobody’s safety is guaranteed; the game is not about to be merciful. Skip the wrong conversation, make the wrong call under pressure, and that character just doesn’t make it — no reload prompt, no do-over, just a permanent gap in your crew for the rest of the trilogy.
7
Dragon Age: Origins (2009)
Why it still holds up: Companions approve or despise your choices in real time, and it’s still one of the sharpest systems in the genre.
Six different opening chapters — human noble, elf mage, dwarf commoner, and more — funnel into the same fight against the world-ending threat of the Blight. Pick a different one, and you’ll get an entirely different window into the world of Dragon Age: Origins, along with very different relationships with your companions. Your party members react to you, your background, your dialogue, and your choices constantly, not just at scripted checkpoints, which means they start to feel like real people. Morrigan approves of ruthlessness! Alistair absolutely does not! Push too hard in the wrong direction and your companions will leave (or worse). We’ll keep spoilers minimal, but this game has an ending involving a deal with a witch that could save your life — provided you’re willing to go along with one of the weirdest rituals of all time — that people are still talking about years after the game’s release. It’s still one of the most unsettling good-outcome, terrible-cost choices the RPG genre has ever produced.
6
Knights of the Old Republic (2003)
Why it still holds up: Its alignment system tracks what you do, not what you say, and few RPGs have matched that honesty since.
At the midpoint of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a routine memory-recovery quest turns into one of the most talked-about twists in RPG history. It works specifically because the game’s alignment system tracks what the player actually does across the whole campaign, not just what gets clicked in a single dialogue choice…so your fall to the dark side (or your fight to stay good) feels very, very earned and definitely not assigned. It’s a twist that other RPGs still get compared to today.
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