The joy I'm getting from DA:DW is knowing that half of Bioware will be looking at BG3 and telling the other half "See! told you we should have stayed turn-based!"
BG3's success will undoubtably be upsetting the apple cart at Bioware, and making a lot of them question their choices for this game. It's gonna be a unholy mess that will be pushing action based combat and LGBT agendas at a time when both are starting to go out of fashion.
Hopefully this will be the failure which kills Bioware off.
Elden Ring hit 20 million at the start of this year. I think it’s safe to say that action combat is not, in any way at all, on the way out. Baldur’s Gate 3, which hasn’t even kind of hit those numbers, doesn’t show action combat is on the way out in any form whatsoever. Was massively outsold by Cyberpunk 2077 and Diablo 4 too. What Baldur’s Gate 3 however does show is that the type of game BioWare had abandoned, most likely because they believed it couldn’t sell enough, can hit the numbers BioWare wants given its outside everything they’ve ever made.
It is however funny that BioWare is off chasing what they’re chasing, which has kept this game (some version of a Dragon Age 4 anyways) in development since 2015, (still with no release date) and in the meantime someone basically made a old style BioWare game and got a bigger hit out of it than BioWare has ever had. And they did it with turn-based combat, so it was even less action oriented than the RTS influenced gameplay BioWare did in ‘98.
Even if this game fails, I can’t see it killing BioWare. They might get smaller. But EA could also just come in and say: Hey, these people over here just at a hit by doing what you used to do; go back to doing that. And if that doesn’t happen, someone at BioWare pitching that idea to whoever seems likely. Hell, they probably pitched that type of game once the BG3 numbers started coming in and kept going up.