When season 4 of Arrested Development came out I was baffled by how bad it was. It didn't make sense to me because they had everyone back-- all the producers, the writers and actors. Everyone was back. But what I didn't understand at the time was that they, along with all their respective lives, had changed. They were at different places in life, and their talents had changed. Maybe someone who used to be a writer has found more passion and meaning in something else, and trying to find the synergy from ten years ago just doesn't work-- you have to create a new synergy, and sometimes it has to be with different people. I don't think that means that people get worse at things, though sometimes they do. I think people, especially creative people, grow in different paths. It's probably a lot easier to get back in your old seat, but when a group of people are called upon to do that in a coordinated effort to recreate lightning in a bottle from a different era, a countless number of problems arise.
The concept that comes to mind when one speaks the term "BioWare" just doesn't exist anymore. It hasn't for a long time, I'd say well over ten years. As sacred a cow as Mass Effect is, I would argue that you could see the changes even in the 2007 game. I loved Mass Effect 2, and it might actually be my favorite BioWare game, but even still, you can see that things are starting to get just a little weird.
