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)
Image: BioWare/EA via Polygon
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)
Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts
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)
Image: BioWare/LucasArts
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.
5
Baldur’s Gate (1998)
Image: BioWare
Why it still holds up: Real-time-with-pause tactics precise enough (and hard enough to learn) that a wolf pack can still wipe your party.
Long before Baldur’s Gate 3, and even before BioWare’s incredible Baldur’s Gate 2, there was a party of adventurers leaving the town of Candlekeep on foot and getting torn apart by a wolf pack within the first hour. BioWare built the game’s real-time-with-pause combat directly on AD&D 2nd Edition rules — a finicky and fiendish tabletop ruleset, thanks THAC0 — and refused to soften them for a new audience. It’s the game that proved a party-based RPG could run on a PC with real tactical stakes instead of just menus and dice rolls behind the curtain…and the game’s Infinity Engine became the backbone BioWare kept building on for years afterward.
4
Jade Empire (2005)
Image: BioWare
Why it still holds up: You can swap fighting styles mid-combo…in case you feel the moment calls less for punching and more turning into a demon.
Set in a mythic version of ancient China, Jade Empire lets players swap fighting styles mid-combo without breaking stride — bare-knuckle brawling one second, elemental magic the next, a full spirit transformation into a towering demon the moment after that. The morality system, split between the disciplined Way of the Open Palm and the ruthless Way of the Closed Fist, judged actions rather than dialogue-wheel intentions, years before that became a genre standard. Jade Empire never got the sequel it was clearly building toward, but the combat system alone still feels ahead of where most RPGs’ approach to encounters eventually landed.
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3
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer (2007)
Image: Aspyr Media
Why it still holds up: A hunger mechanic ties morality straight into survival, not just dialogue choices.
Built on BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights license and developed by Obsidian, Mask of the Betrayer is routinely called out as one of the best stories to ever come out of that partnership. Unfortunately, almost nobody played it at the time. But you should absolutely play it today, and here’s why: The premise alone is a gut punch. The player character wakes up cursed with a hunger that can only be satisfied by consuming other souls, turning basic survival into a constant moral trade-off instead of a stat bar to manage. Companions like the spirit-bound bear Okku and the exiled priestess Safiya carry entire philosophical arguments about faith and godhood on their shoulders. Neverwinter Nights 2 is an incredible base game, but the expansion still gets talked about because so few people played it nearly twenty years ago. Finding it feels like coming across buried treasure.
2
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (2008)
Image: BioWare
Why it still holds up: Yes, BioWare made a Sonic RPG. Yes, it was actually good.
In the middle of developing Mass Effect and Dragon Age, BioWare made a turn-based RPG starring Sonic the Hedgehog for the Nintendo DS…written in part by future Dragon Age lead writer Mike Laidlaw. Combat runs on the DS touchscreen, with rhythm-timed stylus taps replacing simple button mashing. The story leans harder into actual plot than anyone could expect from what could easily be dismissed as a spinoff cash-grab in lesser hands. Midway through, the Nocturnus Clan’s own leader betrays his second-in-command by throwing her off a flying island mid-scheme, and the resulting crash sends Angel Island — yes, the actual floating island from the mainline games — plummeting straight into a city.
While it’s not quite a lost masterpiece, it is a competent RPG that just so happened to star Sonic…made by a studio that, it would seem, could not resist trying to mesh those two concepts. It would also seem that nobody involved phoned this one in.
1
Anthem (2019)
Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts
Why it still holds up: Flight controls good enough to free-fall from orbit into an underwater cave with zero loading screens.
Anthem is, by nearly every measure, one of BioWare’s biggest failures — a critically savaged live-service shooter that EA shut down support for in 2021 after a planned full relaunch didn’t happen. And yet even reviews that tore the rest of the game apart singled out one thing: flying. Tom’s Guide’s review listed “awesome flight controls” as one of the game’s only real pros. Piloting a Javelin exosuit means diving straight from open sky into an underwater cave with zero loading screens, banking and boosting with a sense of worth-it cathartic momentum few games have matched since.
Not everything BioWare made held up fabulously. Dragon Age 2’s rushed development cycle is still a go-to example of what happens when a good studio doesn’t get the time it needs. But that’s not a knock against BioWare. The studio’s less-stellar titles provide contrast that make BioWare’s lineup of all-time bangers look as good as they do. These games worked well and changed the gaming industry — not to mention entire generations of gamers — forever. Whether you’re more into CRPGs, space operas, or Sonic, each of these are worth your time today.
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