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BioWare On Building a Community For Dragon Age
Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare, sat down with Gamasutra to discuss upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins, as well as some of the features they're working on for release alongside the game. In particular, they are interested in building a framework for players to show off their characters and share stories about the gameplay they encounter.
"We're creating a community site that's going to enable the fans to get revved up about what each other is doing. They're showing their choices and consequences to friends. Even though it's single-player, you can still reveal those choices to each other and have fun doing it. It enables some of that stuff that occurs anecdotally amongst friends at the water cooler: 'Hey, did you play this yet? Did you go this way?' 'No, I didn't run into that. I did it this way.' 'Really? I didn't run into that at all!' You can meet people who are across the world and enable them to see those kinds of things, too, which I think will lead to a lot of fun discussion and collaboration in the community."
Baldur's Gate was amazing.
Baldur's Gate II was amazing.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was ok.
Jade Empire was meh.
Mass Effect was an embarrassment.
Selling out to EA just made it official. They either lost the magic the had back in the BG days or simply don't give a shit anymore.
So let's see, you have to use Microsoft Windows because that's the only platform that runs games, but when anyone else requests games on other platforms that's dumb because no one writes games for those platforms. Great logic!
After that stinking pile of fail Mass Effect, BioWare getting eaten up by EA is of little consequence.
To go from Baldur's Gate where people are still playing the game in new ways to this very day to Mass Effect where BioWare seemed to be entirely focused on putting out silly fake Unreal Engine marketing shots of faces than actual rpg gameplay. One linear story with some token choices along the way that have no effect on the actual storyline.
Interest level in the next project. Zero.
The community is mature enough to create their own sites, and these sites are usually much better and useful then the sites provided by the companies creating and publishing games. Just look at Wikia gaming, Strategywiki, and so on.
The guy must be great!
Your face sucks! :P
No, really, I enjoyed both Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect. I don't know why anybody would only like the kind of RPG Baldur's Gate was and nothing else. Mass Effect was a good game on its own merits and did have some role-playing in it. Some of that even affected the story line--yes, it did. Or would you not count saving or killing a party member a consequence?
Mass Effect fail? LOL
Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. Mass Effect was a great game and created many new fans for BioWare. If ME2 improves on ME few setbacks, it will prove a great game.
My only concern is the economy right now.
The first DLC was pretty good, but the second, Pinnacle Station was terrible and a waste.
But overall, the Mass Effect story is really good.
I agree, Mass Effect was awesome and well worth repeat playthroughs. What it perhaps lost, compared so some RPGs, in the multitude of paths through the game (although there was still a decent amount of choice here) it more than won back through the cinematic presentation, well-directed cutscenes and great voice acting + dialogue. It felt like playing through a great movie. And your choices could have pretty epic effects on the fate of your party and the galaxy - effects which will be carried through to ME2 and ME3, continuing to affect the plot!
Both the DLCs, on Xbox Live, were very competitively priced - you paid less and got more than most DLC available on there. It's a shame Pinnacle Station didn't have more plot, I'd heard it hyped up (though this was subsequently somewhat withdrawn) as more than that. However, the combat in Mass Effect was pretty fun, esp with advanced use of powers. Being able to indulge in combat whenever I want rather than just when the missions allow it is probably worth the amount I paid - it's just perhaps not quite such good value as the more substantial plot-based additions from Bring Down The Sky. I really like the way they simply enlarged the game world with the DLC, rather than tacking on extra missions for those who had completed the game. It would be slightly unfortunate to have to play through the game again to get to the DLC except for the fact that the game is *worth* playing through again!
I've heard that the DRM on Mass Effect harmed its adoption on the PC platform and annoyed a lot of people. On the Xbox the DRM is no more obnoxious than for any other game, thankfully - no phoning home, unlike the PC version and no install limits.
Mass effect may be a decent game, but baldurs gate 1 and 2 are considered by many to be the gold standard of rpgs, the attention to detail and quality in them is pretty darn hard to equal, let alone surpass.
Why would they make it single player only? NWN was an amazing game. I started playing it because it had a Linux port. I kept playing it because of the toolkit and scripting language, and collaborating on a project with friends.
NWN2 (Obsidian, not BioWare) was a huge letdown. Between not adding many of the promised features, the PWC files that needed to be distributed to connect to a server, crippling bugs at launch, and general uglyness of all the character models, I barely even played it.
Dragon Age sounded like it was going to be the NWN replacement, with modern graphics and BioWare's own rules instead of D&D. When they announced it was going to be single player only, it was a huge letdown.
Is this supposed to be some sort of social networking web 2.0 porn site? Because that's what it sounds like.
From early testers, here's the list of missing features and/or limitations: some of these are insane.
From: _______________________________________
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
get your nose out of the air mate, it was a fun game and while not a classic style RPG was a decent Action RPG that had lots of style in its own right.
There's no linux client either. NWN was absolutely the most amazing game not because of the graphics (which were better elsewhere), not because of the single-player story-line (which was mediocre), not because of the game mechanics (which had problems), but because they wrote versions for everybody (Windows, OS X, and linux), they kept updating it until a couple of years ago, and they let people run their own servers as well as opened up the content to the community. There was a huge community of people who just loved making their own 3D models of armor, weapons, creatures and other stuff. I can't believe that bioware didn't make a boat-load of cash on nwn, why haven't they learned their lesson and tried to reproduce it with a more modern game?
Incidentally, I'd love to have an honest to goodness MMORPG that was open source. Heck, I bet all of the community models for nwn could be used since I've never actually found a license for any of it.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
What type of maturity level can BioWare expect when the use a song call "The New Shit" by Manson as a PR tool for Dragon Age?
I liked the BGs; I like Mass Effect more. (I don't love its combat system, but BG's was the weak point of those games for me, too.) I say this as someone who was an old-school FR/D&D gamer and who generally doesn't care for the kind of Sci-Fi that ME's setting/story is.
They're all good games and what appeals to you more is largely, I think, a matter of personal taste.