Honestly, I think BioWare lost their heart after Jade Empire. Dragon Age: Origins had some great moments, but I think that's largely due to how it began development around the same time as Jade Empire so some of their better developers and writers were still there for some of it.

I thought Mass Effect 2 was the best Mass Effect, but that's not really saying much.

Indeed, if we get a Fallout 4.5 then I'd prefer it be handled by a studio that actually cares about the IP. Obsidian does because they consist of people who worked on the first two, know people who worked on the first two, and\or are big fans of the first two. They also have a great understanding of the lore. There's no reason to assume that companies like BioWare, Gearbox, Larian and CD Projekt would care enough to deliver a great product, or would be good fits for the franchise regardless of their resume.

The problem I have with DAO is the same problem I have with many of these newer isometric RPGs that run on the basis of "inspired by BG/Infinity engine games!" in that instead of trying to be based on them, they simply try to just BE them, and utterly fail because you can't be BG again, no matter how hard you try, and they just end up flopping the massive pool of generic BG clones. DAO also had the most god-awful world design I have ever seen, the fade, the deep roads, the [censored] forest, are some of the most singularly agonizing and tedious places to get through in any RPG. The Fade is so bad people actually made mods to skip it because its just THAT bad. But it was at least enjoyable the first time I played it, I could never play it again because of the tedium, but was fun once. The biggest insult is that DA2 and DAI seems to have thrown everything that made the lore of DA cool in favor of boring [censored]. The ONLY thing either game added to the lore was the stuff at the end of DAI about the fade, Flemeth, The elves, and Solas, everything else in those two games was trash.

When it comes to Mass Effect, I personally find ME1 had the better plot, and ME3 had the better gameplay, compared to ME2. ME2 just manages to be the DA2 of Mass Effect to me, the worst of everything in the series.

*update*

Maybe this will be the makers of Fallout 4.5?

http://www.pcgamer.com/bethesda-opens-new-montreal-studio/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pcgfb

That's why I said some great moments. I agree that Dragon Age: Origins was a painfully tedious game for the most part, and every time I try to replay it I give up after the big battle at the beginning since most of the middle part of the game is a chore. When it's at its best it surpasses everything else BioWare has done since Jade Empire, though.

As much as this may come out of left field, I think Double Fine would do a decent job. They have the right style of humor, and can make a pretty mean game when they put their mind to it.

Since I've hated every game I've played from them with the sole exception of MDK2.

Ah, yes. DA:O:

• Closed world with hard links between encounter areas pretending to be an open world
• Ridiculously convoluted levels to make them seem bigger. The forest may be only the size of a postage stamp, but you have to run up and down and up and down and up and bloody down to get anywhere.
• Inconsistent terrain. Sometimes puddles can be walked through, other times you have to walk around them. If the bad guys start behind a balcony they can fire over it. If you start behind one and try the same trick, you end up running down into the hordes to melee the Big Bad. Made it impossible to use the terrain effectively since you never knew what effect a feature would have from one battle to the next.
• The game bangs on about how important it is to think tactically. Then when the next big encounter starts it runs a cutscene that plucks my fragile mage from the back of the party and stands him in front of the main damage factory so my character can talk like a Hollywood action hero before dying horribly when the fighting starts. How tactical can you get?
• AI was badly broken: Given half a chance, my mages and thieves would tank while the tanks stood off and shelled. Turning party AI off either didn't have any effect or not for very long.
• Stupid, stupid traps that you had to walk into. Oh look, there's a band of obvious brigands laying in ambush behind a portcullis gate. Shall I fire on them from a distance and make them come to me? No! the tactical thing to is apparently to walk one of my party through the gate so they can be cut off when they dropped the gate.
• Lazy level design. See most of the points above.
• And an incredibly crass attempt to get you to stump up extra cash by having every campfire scene try to sell you some stupid zero-day DLC.

The sad thing is that, prior to DA:O, I used to really like BioWare.

With the recent announcement of Bethesda opening a new dev studio in Montreal, one might think that they are going to split development teams to get FO/TES titles released a bit quicker, which probably puts a nail in the coffin for outsourcing to Obsidian again.

Hopefully not.

I doubt they do that. Bethesda is involved in a lot of other franchises but Fallout and the ES games seem to be their big cash cows and given the similarities between them is imagine there teams share a lot of members

You would think that with the success of Skyrim and FO 4 they would split up into two teams. 7 years between sequels is pretty darn ridiculous, imo.