KOTOR also shot itself in the knee by giving you no reason to include anything but the Jedi in your active party.
[snip]
In KOTOR you max out your Jedi skills and craft yourself a new lightsaber every now and then. And that’s it

I certainly agree it was a shame that non-jedi characters were comparatively weak, but to be fair that’s consistent with the Star Wars universe where the jedi really are superior fighters. It would have been cool if there was more incentive to bring different characters to different worlds. Still, I used HK47 pretty much all the time from getting him and while a jedi would have been a better party member for combat, I didn’t feel like I suffered from it.

About the character customization, I felt there was a fairly wide range in the choice between focusing on force powers or lightsaber combat as well as the dialogue choices and the resulting dark/light side shift which affected which force powers you could use effectively. Also, there was a clear choice between being heavily melee or caster oriented in that the heavier suits of armor restricted the use of a lot of force powers. It worked for me, but I understand if it might not have for everyone.

I personally trust Bioware to give me a game I’ll have fun playing. I can’t say any of them fall into my favourites category, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each one. Even Jade Empire, which I was pretty disappointed with for numerous reasons, felt like it was worth the purchase and playthrough, so I’m positive about this so far.

* The game now has a subtitle (Origins)
* The logo has been updated to reflect this
* They will reveal more news later.

It’s interesting to see how Chris Priestly (Bioware PR guy) over at the bioware forums is surprised that the fans was unimpressed by this news.

Where you see companions with personality, someone else might see blatant stereotypes. Oh, so that’s the character with a mysterious past or dark secret? (If they don’t all have a mysterious past, as it feels like in some Obsidian titles). Oh, she’s the Girl Next Door (with a dark secret!). Right. And that one’s the Dangerous One. And so on and so forth. And when so much of the dialogue hinges on this too obvious characterisation, the sprawling convo trees might as well be about renaissance art for all that I might care.

And then there’s the choice on consequence, which, IIRC, is a bit hit and miss in Black Isle titles, if not outright manichean. I remember it was worst in Baldur’s Gate, where being altruistic always seemed to pay off.

And Jonas? We must either like Bioware games or be dubbed insipid action fans? There should be a law akin to Godwin’s rule about strawmen like that.

Templates get stale after some time, even if they’re excellent templates. Not even Bioware is safe from repetition.

Let’s take a closer look at those 5 pillars of Bioware games:

1) Sprawling dialogue trees: Yes, they sure know how to make solid rpg dialogue trees. But I still found myself clicking through them with KOTOR and Jade Empire. There’s only so much text I’m willing through sit through. BG2 and Planescape, I read every single line and it was just great. I guess it’s got something to do with the characters you meet. I just didn’t like most of the people I met in KOTOR and JE. Didn’t find the characters too interesting.

2) Yes, they can do that. BG2 and PS:T were great. But KOTOR and Jade Empire I found lacking in that department. The party members were too stereotypical and the system that was at work was too obvious. Especially in KOTOR:

Land on a new planet. Talk to everybody in your party about their past until they won’t tell you anymore. Maybe do a quest associated with stuff they tell you. Land on the next planet, everybody will have new dialogue options and tell you more about their past. Rinse, wash, repeat.

KOTOR also shot itself in the knee by giving you no reason to include anything but the Jedi in your active party. Ok, so I have a bunch of really cool characters on my spaceship and I can talk to them and learn about them. Great. But they don’t really feel like party members, because I never use them in gameplay. They could be just another bunch of NPCs for all that matters.

3) Splendid character customization and progression: Hmmm.. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. BG2 and PS:T yup. (Baldur’s Gate more than Planescape though).

But KOTOR and JE? In KOTOR you max out your Jedi skills and craft yourself a new lightsaber every now and then. And that’s it. Sure, you can invest in other skills and equipment. But why bother? Same with Jade Empire. There’s a metric ton of different martial arts styles to choose from. And most of them are completely obsolete.

Character customization should affect gameplay. If there are hundreds of different combinations of skills and pieces of equipment, I want them to be meaningfull in terms of gameplay.

4) A good amount of freedom: Both KOTOR and Jade Empire felt very linear to me. The only freedom you had was to behave like a saint or a complete dick in some situations. Other games give you far more freedom in what and how to do it.

Again the problem here was, that the underlying mechanics were too easy to spot. A room full of enemies: I can hack the robot, poison/electrocute them by hacking the security system or just run in and kill them all. I mostly ended up doing all, just to farm the most XP.

5) Very decent choice/consequence

The Witcher had decent choice/consequence situations. Recent Bioware games less so. Mostly because decisions usually had instant consequences and very obvious ones too in most cases.

I guess the problem with recent Bioware games is, that they just got too good at what they’re doing. They had perfected their templates to a degree, where everything worked and was polished to a reasonable amount, but was just lacking a certain kind of soul. You can spot the templates they’re using at first glance. Especially if you’ve played a few of their games.

Having said all that, I’m still a huge fan of Bioware and I only have the highest hopes for Dragon Age!

1) Sprawling dialogue trees
2) Companions with personality
3) Splendid character customization and progression
4) A good amount of freedom
5) Very decent choice/consequence

“Oh please no! Not another excellent game like all the other excellent games from Bioware! Please start making linear first-person shooters or sci-fi strategy games like everybody else, Bioware!”

We’ll see… Next BG styled game? :-P Or next Jade Empire dumbed game? :-((( Or next KotOR style game? :-|

This talk of races and such reminds me of hearing that Tolkien, later in his life, began regretting the notion of making a whole race (in his case orcs) evil. I think it took nearly half a century for his fantasy imitators to catch on to those same problems with the idea.

There’s also the bigger problem of having imitators at all who are effectively stealing someone else’s ideological toolkit in order to mechanically recapture a sense of nostalgia and place.

I agree with M John Harrison here.

And digging up an old topic, I can’t disagree with anything anybody’s already said on the “amnesiac hero” trope in the thread, but there’s other ways to build, and break, immersion. And in the delightfully meta-minded gaming community, being introduced to your avatar as an amnesiac hero is likely to break immersion instantly. Probably combined with a swift roll-of-the-eyes. And then people who have an honestly good reason to write an amnesiac protagonist have to go explain themselves, saying, “We’ve got a good reason for it! Honest!”

As far as I know, only Planescape and Escalon did amnesia right. And that’s because they used it as a plot enabler, not a plot device.

There is no chance that Dragon Age will use the Mass Effect combat system anyway so one needn’t worry. The combat is going to play a lot like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights. I’m actually a bit tired of that game mechanic myself; it’s just detached enough that you have minimal involvement in the fight, and just fast and sloppy enough that you aren’t making any complex decisions. When it works, it’s awesome, it gives you a box of tools and you’re inventing a solution to an encounter or you die. When it falls flat, it’s a tedious, drawn-out march to the next story point.

Walking from one goblin encounter to the next in some forgettable abandoned mine, or playing through Masquerade: Bloodline’s sewers? I wouldn’t choose either.