20 Jul 2026 8 min read

An Evening At the Inn Issue 9 - I Miss the Days of BioWare Clones

Welcome back to the inn, travellers. It's been a busy couple of months, and it's about to get even busier as we head into what I've started calling "hell month." That September-October window where a billion games release.

As I said last time, don't expect An Evening At the Inn to stick to a regular schedule at this point (although I'm aiming for one a month at the moment). If you follow me elsewhere, you likely saw the announcement already, but I've accepted a position as a Jr. Producer at Strange Scaffold – the indie studio behind El Paso, Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, and much more. I'm absolutely thrilled to get more into the development side of the industry, and I'll be able to talk more about what I'm doing soon.

In the meantime, everything's been cleared with the respective parties, and outside of obvious conflicts of interest, I'll still be writing – but with a much larger focus on features, original interviews, and reviews.

Anyway, for this week I saw The Odyssey, like most people it seems, and it made me pick up a game in my library that I'd never gotten around to – Rise of the Argonauts. And, well, it made me have a lot of thoughts.

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From the Innkeeper

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

The fall of BioWare is a well-documented tragedy. The RPG maker is among the most influential developers in the history of video games – and an often forgotten aspect of that is just how many clones followed suit.

There are dozens of games and studios that directly aped on what was sometimes called the "BioWare Formula," that complex mish-mash of intimate party building, crunchy leveling mechanics, and highly distinct locations that each weave their own story.

Rise of the Argonauts is one of these games, and I spent my entire weekend playing it – a good 20 hours or so, which I don't often do these days. Yes, it's janky as hell, the performance is crap, and some of the writing is groan-worthy. But, man, there's just something about that game that I find gripping.

Thanks for actually having screenshots of this game GameSpot

Rise of the Argonauts is basically if you made a BioWare game set in the world of Ancient Greece and Greek Mythology, following Jason as he puts together a dream-team of heroes known as The Argonauts – and tries to revive his dead wife in the process. This is a game that feels dated in the best way, a true byproduct of the Xbox 360 era – and clearly directly inspired by Jade Empire. The structure of the game is the same in how you travel to three distinct locations, the party system feels almost exactly the same (but less detaileD), and it hilariously uses a lot of the same voice actors.

But there are a couple really compelling choices Rise of the Argonauts makes that really give the game a unique personality. Chief among those is the levelling system. By achieving deeds (essentially in-game achievements), you unlock them for "committing" to the gods. Each god (Ares, Athena, Apollo, Hermes) is essentially a skill tree, and by committing deeds to each god you can gain skill points to unlock various skills. At the same time, choices you make in dialogue often have markers assigned with each god, instead of morality markers. It's a surprisingly brilliant way to adapt the "moral choice" system of BioWare games directly into the Ancient Greek setting, fleshing out Jason as a character by which gods he devotes himself to the most.

There are also some wildly interesting segments of this game, where you can tell the development team was having fun. In one section, you debate a villain in the senate for a good ten minutes. In another, you track down lost souls and uncover how they died, reading their last rites to the gods.

By taking the core formula BioWare was known for and using it as a foundation, games like Rise of the Argonauts were able to come up with smart iterations or unique systems to help build it out. I'm not about to claim it's an all-time classic, but boy, if playing this game hasn't felt revelatory in some regard – like looking through the mirror at how things used to be.

We've lost a lot as the industry has skewed toward expensive AAA productions and live service games, and part of that has been imitators. I used the term "BioWare Clone" as complimentary as possible – games that, yes, do wholesale adapt the overall structure that BioWare was known for, but more often than not add in little tweaks or remarkably brilliant ideas. The Outer Worlds, Bound by Flame, Greedfall, Alpha Protocol, Elex, Kingdoms of Amalur, Pathfinder: Kingmaker – all of these draw heavily from the well of BioWare.

The games from Spiders were perhaps the most obvious BioWare clones, but they had a lot of spirit. It's genuinely upsetting what happened to Spiders this year, and the studio being liquidated means we've lost yet another piece of that BioWare legacy.

Similarly, Obsidian Entertainment has seemingly been relegated to Fallout duty, squashing any hopes of seeing more Outer Worlds, Pillars of Eternity, or something that builds on the studio's non-Fallout legacy.

As the stakes for making games have increased, alongside budgets, we see more games striving for entirely new systems, massive open worlds, or cashing in on a trend – rather than meaningfully, thoughtfully building on something that came before. There are exceptions, of course. Baldur's Gate 3 quite brilliantly builds on the legacy of Dragon Age, but that game was also made possible through tremendous funding and a lengthy Early Access period. More and more, it feels like the "AA" space is completely vanishing, leaving no room for those mid-size projects like Rise of the Argonauts.

If anything, it feels like indies are the space that is going to carry on the BioWare formula the most, partially because so many former BioWare developers are working in that space now. Aether & Iron was written by some of the writing team of the Mass Effect games, Studio Reset was just recently founded by BioWare alumni, and Mike Laidlaw's Yellow Brick Games put out Eternal Strands. Even indie RPGs like Demonschool, Crosscode, The Banner Saga, and Wartales have some elements derived from that classic BioWare design. And that's not to mention the potential of AAA successors like Exodus and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn.

So even if I don't have hope for the survival of BioWare itself, I do have hope that the studio's spirit and sensibilities will live on. But as the industry is ground into dust while budgets continue to balloon, it's hard not to feel like RPGs have lost something in the process. And it's equally sad that games like Rise of the Argonauts are essentially impossible to play unless you manage to have an original console and a physical copy.

Around the Realm

Kate Sanchez talks to the developers of Soulframe about the importance of community

Francesco Cacciatore talks to the creator of Esoteric Ebb about their experience as a Dungeon Master

Connor Makar writes about the wild leaks for Kingdom Hearts Missing Link (look at your own peril)

Kaile Hultner on Final Fantasy XIII and radical idealism

Kenneth Shepard talked to queer men about homophobia in the Love and Deepspace community

The Back Page

The recommendation this week is for Moss: The Forgotten Relic, an adorable game with an even more adorable hero. You might remember Moss as the VR game with the cute mouse, but The Forgotten Relic retools that entire experience into a third-person adventure game – and astonishingly with very few caveats.

It's gorgeous, heartfelt, adventurous, and the perfect little game for handheld.

Since it's late in the month, here are the major RPG releases for August 2026.

August 4 - Beast of Reincarnation
August 6 - Lies of P: Complete Edition (NS2)
August 7 - Expeditions: Samurai
August 20 - Mortal Shell II
August 20 - The Witch's Bakery
August 26 - Brigandine: Abyss
August 27 - Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy
August 27 - Star Wars Zero Company
August 28 - Elden Ring Tarnished Edition
TBA August - Final Fantasy XIV Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

I don't have any big or fun pet updates this time, so instead enjoy a picture of Screech looking quite stoic (with my Lego cat in the background).