BioWare Founders On 2003, Future Prospects

Thanks to C+VG for their interview with BioWare founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk, discussing "their thoughts on the videogames of the past year [and] potential future developments" for their own company. They lament that "one of the most unfortunate things happening in the industry today is the demise of the small independent developer", and note they're "working on three new games, all set in BioWare-created intellectual properties, right now" (lending credence to the previous rumor that the BioWare-affiliated Obsidian Entertainment may be creating the sequel to Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, which sports an external IP.) The internal BioWare projects include the already-announced Xbox action-RPG Jade Empire, as well as "a PC RPG inspired by our own past work on both the Baldur's Gate series and Neverwinter Nights."

Comments

Re:Finally!

[ooPo]

I'd say the true evil to watch out for is companies like EA. They tend to dump a bunch of money into a small company to produce a game. If the small company succeeds, EA moves in and absorbs the talent. If they fail, EA removes funding and they die off unable to sustain the staff they hired on to finish the EA game in the first place.

A great way to absorb all the good, and sue the bad for wasting their investment cash. In the end all we'll have is incremental sports game releases, Sims expansions, and the latest in boring-ass console FPS crap. Is it any wonder emulation is so popular now?

Re:Finally!

[Babbster]

At the risk of being acused of baiting the old flames, emulation is popular because people like to play games and they like to play games for free - I think it has very little to do with current games sucking (many do, many don't). The Internet has enabled people to be cheap and lazy in this regard as never before. After all, it's not that hard to find a working Sega Genesis, Master System, NES, SNES, etc. (go to the video games section at eBay if you need proof). Emulation software and the people willing to distribute ROMs on the Internet, however, allow people to get all of it for free.

Ah, gone are the days of the Commodore 64 "User Group" pizza parties where we actually had to bring our computers, disc drives and monitors with us to do the heavy stealing of 170k games. Oh, how I envied that cool kid with the SX64 and dual disc drives...hex editors, Fast Hack'Em, blank 5-1/4s...but I digress.

There are good games being produced but they cost actual money or take a bigger effort (downloading multiple gigs that can take days and monopolize bandwidth, modding a console, buying/installing a DVD burner...) to steal - except for the PC where it's pretty darned easy.

Re:Great

[Drakin]

What are you reading?

Bioware has stated they've got 3 projects in the works.

1 X-Box game, Jade Empire.
1 PC game, no title known.
1 other game with no info.

-all- of them are being done with thier own intellectual property.

They'll likely use updated versions of the Aurora (NWN) or Odyssey (KotOR) engines for the games, because why make yet another engine. But they won't even be useing the same rules system, they're making thier own.

BioWare...Eh....

[Mitleid]

Is it just me, or does anyone else find BioWare EXTREMELY overated? I guess it would be safe to say I fell into the hype of SW:KOTOR this summer when it was released, and sadly it was one of the primary reasons I went out and purchased an XBOX. Well, I bought the game new days after it was released, and to this day I have never gotten any further into it than maybe 6 or 8 hours. It just hasn't grabbed me. People rave about the open-endedness and the impact your character choices have on the game, but I've found the character development to be incredibly limited and the story incredibly boring. Take a game like Fallout (1&2). Brilliant games. The difference it seems is that between a game like Fallout and SW:KOTOR is that in KOTOR, a character that you choose to develop as a "Thief" is more of a cosmetic gameplay mechanic than anything else. In the end, KOTOR comes down to how strong your character is in battle. In Fallout, if you wanted to play as a "thief" you could, and nothing was stopping you from stealing anything and everything you wanted, sneaking around wherenever and whenever, etc. A game like KOTOR only encourages those possibilities to a certain degree, then brings you crashing back down to earth when it is time to progress the story ...Here we go, another battle that is going to be unbelievably hard unless you have a party full of "fighters"... I don't mean to say that BioWare is a bad developer; I've enjoyed many of their games over the past years, but I honestly have to say I'm not very impressed with their most recent releases (NWN and KOTOR) and I just think they are received WAY TOO MUCH credit; much more than they deserve. It just seems like in the end its all just boiling down to hack and slash. Eh, maybe that's all people want and I'm just missing the point entirely.

Re:BioWare...Eh....

[superultra]

It sounds like quite specifically what you didn't like about KOTOR was the lack of thieving ability. There is that (obviously you never got far enough), but I'll concede that it definitely is not as developed as Fallout. Why? Because thieving doesn't really fit into the Star Wars universe. Star Wars has always been about having huge epic battles, and sneaking around in the shadows is just not what characterizes Star Wars.

As far as the story, if you've only played 6-8 hours you probably haven't seen enough of the story to care. I'm one that believes a game should grab you by the collars within the first hour otherwise it's useless, and KOTOR definitely did that for me. Nevertheless, the story does pick up. Moreover, what was great about KOTOR was the fact that if you sat there and talked to everyone over and over again, the story became much more detailed and full of subplots. If you had just talked to everyone one time and went on your merry little way, you're probably missing a huge chunk of these highly intricate character development subplots.

For me, KOTOR was one of the few games in which character development does occur. Moreover, it's only one of the only games I've played in which I really cared about the NPCs and what happened to them; they really had enough dimension to them for me to be concerned about whether they completed their own personal quests. Which is far more than I can say for Episode I & II. Sigh.