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!

[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.

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.