BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 one of the best games of all time: Rolling Stone

A cover image for Mass Effect 2. (BioWare)

Edmonton’s video game studio, BioWare, received high praise from Rolling Stone with a spot in its 50 best video games of all time.

The gaming industry is vast and varied, with more genres than you can shake a controller at.

Rolling Stone had tens of thousands of options when it curated its top 50 games of all time.

Industry giants like Nintendo and Sony, plus smaller studios and creators like Team Cherry, ConcernedApe and Larian Studios were some who’s beloved creations made the list.

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Mass Effect 2, BioWare’s 2010 sequel to Mass Effect, ranked 26 on the list, between Resident Evil 4 at number 27 and Stardew Valley at number 25.

The game set players loose across the galaxy in a science fiction-based role-playing game as Commander Shepard, attempting a “suicide mission” to stop an alien race from wiping out most sentient life in the Milky Way.

“The entry was crucial in pushing forward player agency in role-playing games, letting you play as a dastardly Shepard only out for himself, a paragon of justice looking out for the little guys, or everything in between,” Rolling Stone wrote.

“But past that, Mass Effect 2 does a phenomenal job of making you feel attached to its NPC party members — like the assassin Thane, who consciously grapples with his own mortality in contrast to his role bringing death to others.

“Every party member in Mass Effect 2 is complex, and if you make the wrong choices you can lose literally everyone in the climactic suicide mission. Few games can set the stakes and follow through as well as Mass Effect 2.”

Mass Effect 2 was the 12th game developed by the studio, released just three months after the critically-acclaimed Dragon Age: Origins.

The studio was known for science fiction adventures, having previously developed MDK2 and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

While BioWare had studios in Montreal and Austin, the company’s original studio in Edmonton, founded in 1995, handled most of the development of Mass Effect 2.

Development wasn’t the only local talent involved in the game as Edmonton’s Mark Meer voiced the male version of the main playable character, Commander Shepard. Canadian voice actress Jennifer Hale voiced the female version of the character.

A number of other famous actors lent their voices to characters, including Seth Green as Jeff ‘Joker’ Moreau, Steve Blum as Grunt and Martin Sheen as the Illusive Man.

The game was the second best selling game in January 2010, when it came out, with 572,100 units sold, despite coming out on the 26th, according to data from the NPD Group.

Within two weeks of release, the game had sold more than two million copies, according to GameRant. Overall sales for the game are estimated to be around five million.

In 2020, BioWare announced a new entry in the series, saying “a veteran team at BioWare is in the early stages of what is on the horizon for the Mass Effect franchise."

On Wednesday, BioWare announced the new game is still in development, but there have been shake ups since the release of Dragon Age: Veilguard in October 2024.

“Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio,” Gary McKay, the general manager of BioWare, wrote in a studio update.

“We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.”

Rolling Stone’s pick for the best video game of all time was Nintendo’s 2016 Breath of the Wild, an entry in the Legend of Zelda franchise.

Breath of the Wild broke from the franchise’s previous, more linear game design and gave players a creative, vibrant and sometimes dangerous open world to explore to their heart’s content.

“While most games present players with a goal and maybe a handful of solutions, Breath of the Wild offers a world whose physics and rules were meant to be bent (or broken)," Rolling Stone wrote.

“But beyond ways to play, the game’s greatest achievement is building a place players want to be. More than anything else, Breath of the Wild is a vibe, where you can spend your hours just doing whatever it is you want to do.”