Considering how things have worked out in the long-term for Bioware, they are probably not a good example to follow though.
What are you even talking about.
Bioware was a huge success througout ?
Commercially, yes. They did so by increasingly abandoning anything Baldur's Gate. Which lead to Dragon Age Origins initially being pitched as a "back to the roots" project, despite its measly 3 character classes to chose from, and several more cases of "streamlining". However, that remained that, one project. And contributed to veterans quitting as far as back then already.
Why yes, indeed the original Bioware staff left EA Bioware pretty quickly, and obviously for a reason.
Dragon Age was already only finished during EA ownership and EA changed many things about DA:O, like removing multiplayer, adding a console version which in turn made the interface for PC worse, or separating parts of the game into a DLC, just so EA could get your personal data. Which is why I never played that specific part of DA:O, since I refused to give EA my private data.
But yes Dragon Age wasnt so great.
They had three classes and only ONE of them (Mage) offered any actual variance in how you could build your character. Warrior just picked either Twohanded or Shield, and Rogue just picked Archery or Dualweapon, and then picked all skills of these respective combat styles. So they would always be the exact same in the end. Only Mage could actually pick from many different spell trees and thus you could build your Mages in all kinds of ways.
By the way all three classes also suffered from the problem that you would pick two of four subclasses. Thats not really the point of subclasses and by the way thats not even more variance than picking just one subclass. Because there are four ways to pick one option from four options, and four ways to pick two options from four options.
Additionally all subclasses only added four more abilities.
Apparently it only got even worse with the expansion when all classes would pick all their four subclasses, which completely removes the whole point of subclasses. I already didnt bother to get the expansion though.
So yes DA didnt have much of a rulesystem. It was pretty horrible and kept shooting itself into the foot pretty badly.
I like even the d20 rulesystem from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic better. Sure, it even had less party members (3) and you had very poor control over what they would be doing. But it had far less issues, like the skills (another problem in DA:O) actually work properly, and it allowed to freely pick what force powers your Jedi could have, and of course you can easily have an all Jedi party.
Also of course the story of SWKotOR is just so much better than that of DA:O.
Thats why I've replayed SWKotOR about a douzen times or some such, and keep replaying it every once a while until this day, though it gets harder and harder to run it. While I played DA:O only once.
So yes, technically you're right, DA:O was a failure on many levels. But it didnt get out until after Bioware had been bought by EA. And I dont think Dragon Age: Origins would have hurt Bioware too much. As far as I remember, even in the state it came out it was still pretty successful.
