Slashdot Mirror
The History of BioWare
It seems somehow appropriate, given the day, to link over to a historical perspective on the developer BioWare. Eurogamer took a look back at the house the doctors built to give us some insight on where the company came from, and where it's going. "The modding community had always rallied around Baldur's Gate, so Neverwinter Nights wisely shipped with the game's toolset available and ready for use by fans. Improved quests were soon blooming all over the internet, like so much role-playing lichen. BioWare also supported the game with their own official expansion packs, and later through smaller downloadable modules, while the game brushed seductively alongside the world of the MMORPG with a hefty multiplayer component that enabled players to join up across the internet to tackle the main story."
Mass Effect has turned out to be disaster that even the mighty marketing budget of Microsoft can't save. The game has turned out to be a massively buggy mess that has huge framerate problems and other graphical issues. Outside of the silly close ups of faces the game actually looks like a last gen game.
But the real problem with Mass Effect is it is mind numbingly tedious. There is a mass of dialog that you end up just plowing your way through with effectively no impact on the actual outcome of the game. After all these years Mass Effect is like a giant leap backwards in the genre. I remember reading the howls of outrage when the first hands on impressions came back stating almost exactly what reviewers are slamming the game for now. BioWare really should have spent less time trying to make the game pretty and taking part in the whole console graphics war thing and just focused on making a good game.
There are lots of people fretting over the losses of Bungie, Bizarre, and BioWare. Microsoft will do just fine without BioWare, whatever talent they had years ago is long gone.