Bioware is (was) actually many studios in a trenchcoat - Bioware Edmonton (“old” Bioware, ME trilogy, Anthem), Bioware Austin (Sw:TOR, DA: I) and formerly Bioware Montreal (ME: Andromeda) and a bunch of other smaller teams.
Though almost all of the veterans have left, so it’s now kinda a Ship of Thesius type situation, Bioware only in name.
I love their tags and vast user game reviews the most, myself:
This game that is 🛁 relaxing, has 🌐 diverse characters and is 🐣 great for beginners has 4.7 stars, from the “players in the Epic Games ecosystem.”
It’s the action adventure game GTA 5, of course.
For the consumer, obviously.
Patents exist to protect the profit of the inventor, specifically because once you have spent the RnD money to make something, someone else can take your finished idea and create your thing without having to cover those costs. Their entire point is to make sure stuff stays more expensive and exclusive for longer.
But the issue isn’t that patents or even software patents exist as a thing, they are important to protect against copying, it’s that seemingly almost anything no matter how simple, vague or universal it is can apply and get patented, and whoever owns those patents then doesn’t have to use or license them, instead they just sit on them waiting to strike with a lawsuit.
Helped you (and Valve) to save some bandwidth. But yes. If it requires a Steam account to play, you bought a license allowing you to access a game and not an actual game you own.
Which is why you don’t have physical copies of those games - you bought a steam key, exactly like you could have done digitally from humblebundle of greenmangaming or myriad of other stores, this one just had it printed on a piece of paper instead of sending you an email.
Heck, even if you want to blatantly ignore every other platform and site you can buy games from, which there are plenty, Valve gives devs a supply of Steam keys they can sell anywhere they want, they don’t even get a cut from those despite providing the bandwidth to distribute the files.
You can play Cold Steel 1&2 as your first if you want a more modern introduction to the world and like the persona style school setting stuff, but CS3 is when the stories of all the previous games start merging together, so it’s very highly recommended to have played Sky, Zero and Azure before that or you will miss a lot of it.
Also there is a 3D remake of the Sky trilogy coming, starting sometime next year with the first game. Though so far it seems to be Switch exclusive.
So not as cheap as the (inflation adjusted) PS2 ($550) or PS4 ($540), but cheaper than the $780 of the PS3. PS1 was close at $620.
Also games back in 1995 were around $50, which is $103 today.
Xen was really rushed and shorter than originally intended in HL1 though, and part of the idea with BM was to flesh it out properly. Might have gone a bit too far, but it was also one of the few places in the project where they could truly come up with something new and unique, and not just redo what Valve had made before them.
I actually didn’t encounter anyone saying Dark Souls and like games being an ARPG. Dark Souls like games are usually called Souls like.
That is because everyone uses the term “Souls-like”. But if that term isn’t used, then they are all labeled as “Action Role-Playing Games”:
A Soulslike (also spelled Souls-like) is a subgenre of action role-playing games known for high levels of difficulty and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulslike
They went to gitlab, it was inevitable. And probably planned - what better advertisement for your name than a round of news and articles about the takedown. And now they are on a private git so for the next round, Nintendo has to actually sue them as well.