If I were to say that EA was developing a Destiny clone, most people would consider that reasonable.  EA and Activision have been cloning each other’s games for years.  They are big for a reason, and that means breadth of choice.  They each have  game of pretty much every type.

Now, if I were to ask which dev shop within EA would develop a Destiny clone, who would you pick?

• Criterion
  • Racing games, Battlefield and Star Wars Battlefront 2
• DICE
  • Every FPS from EA for the past 15 years
• Ghost Games
  • Need for Speed
• Visceral
  • DeadSpace, Army of Two
• BioWare
  • Mass Effect, Dragon Age, SWTOR
• Motive
  • Brand new, working on new IP

Pretty much anyone but Ghost and BioWare, right?  This Forbes article (I know) covers a lot of points.

• Anthem looks like a neat idea, and great visuals
• A 3rd person shooter could work…Gears has shown that
• The multiplayer aspects sound a little too good to be true after.  We’ve been burned on a lot of those promises over the years (Division, I’m looking at you).
• Story could work… but not for repetition.  SWTOR has shown that to an extremely large audience.

But most importantly, BioWare?  The studio that prides itself on story-first games?  The one where actual combat mechanics and fighting have always had rough edges?  It’s sort of like if Bethesda decided to enter the MOBA market, just a whole bunch of “what?”

On the good side however, EA uses a single engine (Frostbite) for all their games now, and they have a whole pile of shooters to leverage.  Dead Space was a 3rd person game, so there’s certainly something to use from there.  Maybe this is just a continuation on the Shadow Realms IP – there is certainly a whole pile of overlap.  Maybe this game ends up being good, and reverses the trend of BioWare overreaching for the past 5 years.  I would certainly hope for that, given the history of that developer.

That said, I think it pretty much means that BioWare is out of the true RPG business. Which really stinks, since it was BioWare that really established what RPGs meant for the west for the past near-20 years.

Fingers crossed.