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BioWare Founders Announce Retirement
hypnosec writes "BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk announced their retirement from the gaming company as well as the video game industry. In two separate blog posts, the founders announced their decision and their future plans. Muzyka writes, 'After nearly two decades in videogames, I've decided to move on to pursue an entirely different set of challenges.' Zeschuk writes, 'I've reached an unexpected point in my life where I no longer have the passion that I once did for the company, for the games, and for the challenge of creation.'"
... overrated and only lives on in nostalgia of nerds who can't see past their nostalgia. Many games of theirs were downright average to say the least and mediocre at worst (neverwinter nights series is just bad, period). Their games always tended to have bad battle systems to cater to the old PC RPG crowd that has no dexterity. Their combat systems were always abstract, automated and severely lacking in interactivity which lead to severe drag/boredom and which would cause us as youths to cheat to skip the boring combat and just get to the story bits.
If you like dungeon crawling and don't want to watch a movie on your PC baldurs gates rpg's are among the worst since their combat systems are wrapped about D&D rules that were never designed to work for videogames. The hybrid realtime combat system just never worked for me, I prefer action based or fully turn based. In between bullshit that bioware invented that so many else copied was awful. It raised generations of gamers on shitty combat systems that they thought was awesome (being that they were among the first games those gamers ever experienced).
I thought mass effect 2 was a giant improvement over party based clumsyness of ME1. I actually want to participate in the game and be the one doing the jumping and shooting, not giving commands to robots from the back row while I just watch passively. I thought ME1 had a nice plot and average characters, ME2 had a crappier plot and better characterization. ME3 was just shite.
If anything bioware is the poster child of the movie-fication of games and the stripping of interactivity OUT of games. Most modern action games have been slowly becoming simpler and it's because of the casual player (who is not dexterous or skilled at videogames) RPG's influence.
RPG's were the original watch-em-up, I bemoan the time when videogames could be videogames with deep and interesting rulesets that were infinitely replayable before everyone started taking videogames in the direction of movies. All that money spent on graphics and voice actors that are juts one time only things and they take up most of the budget of a game. Crying shame.
Civilization is a game that needs no story and its one of the best videogames of all time, most modern games have gotten so far away from being videogames and its sucking the life out of games trying to be story based interactive cinematic experiences.