So once upon a time, I found these really cool game companies that made games I REALLY liked. I spend thousands of hours in Never Winter Nights and it's children. I also loved me some Sam and Max + Monkey Island. But then somewhere along the way, I got Back to the Future and then Tales from Borderlands + Mass Effect Andromeda without a Quarian Arch. I am just starting to wonder if there is an expiration date on every game company I love because burn out is a thing.

I think the big issue is when the original team that made a studio great starts to leave, you tend to lose the soul of what made them great. Like Dragon Age Origins, great game. Dragon Age 2...not so much. And Dragon Age Inquisition is like Dragon Age Origins and Skyrim had a baby. Closing all those evil rifts do make better sense vs. something like settlements in Fallout 4 while you are desperately seeking your child. But it is not the tight narrative game I loved in the past from Bioware like Mass Effect 1 to 3. Then along came Andromeda, and I get why EA put Mass Effect on ice for while.

Somewhere along the line, that game lost its way, and while playable, it just does not have a tight compelling story I expect from the Mass Effect series. For a while there I was saying it was Dragon Age Inquisition with Spaceships but I have been replaying DAI. And when I do a beat by beat comparison, there is way more story to keep you playing. In MEA a settlement is pretty much the end goal on a planet and you are mostly done. In Dragon Age, that just triggers the other half of the quests on a map. Important quests like this town is starving because a dragon is blocking the main road in. And then for completing those quests, I get things like more merchants back at my stronghold. In MEA, I get to unlock colonists but there is little physical evidence that that does anything. Because outside of a handful of specific people you wake up for a quest, none of the people you wake up make a colony more populate or are anything other than a number on a screen.

I think is this is where Bioware stumbled, in a game about would building....where are the results of my efforts?

Now back to Telltale, I do know when they jumped the shark. Its when they announced the Jurassic Park game. The problem is big license cost money, and therefore you have to sell lots of games. However adventure games will always be a bit of niche market (half my friends do not like the Walking Dead series), so you end up maybe breaking even. Add to that the put more than one game in production at the same time, and I can see how it spiraled out of control.

I guess in the end I am just sad there is an expiration date on most of the game companies I love because sooner or later the people that make the content I like will move on.