Bioware CEO Ray Muzyka has told CVG that PC gaming’s health depends on diversity and accessibility. He says that making games easy to access need not stop them being “deep” experiences.
“I think there are more people playing PC games and more dollars being spent on the PC space than ever before, but it’s taking a different form… MMOs are one way that’s occurring… And there are more people playing flash-based games and casual games, even core games that are played in a casual way, so maybe [they have] a more core experience and you only play them for short bursts or for half an hour or something.”
“We can still make deep rich experiences but we have to make them easy to access, you have make the control system really easy to use, and you have to make people feel like they’re playing an experience that they can play how they want to play it, whether that is long sessions or short sessions.”
We have to wonder what this philosophy will mean for forthcoming Bioware games, such as Dragon Age. In related Bioware news, we’ve heard that the company are now well on their way into the development of Mass Effect 2, the second part of a proposed trilogy of RPGs.
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I gotta admit, my interest in Mask of the Betrayer and KOTOR 2 is piqued. I’m kinda up to my neck in cool games right now between Christmas goodies and the Steam sale, but once I complete some of these maybe I’ll see about hunting ‘em down. I think my roomate has a copy of Mask kicking around somewhere, actually.
Bundling Mask of the Betrayer (never felt more cool in a game then when killing a god…) with Mysteries of Westgate and a bunch of the best user-made NWN2 modules, then making it playable stand-alone would be a relatively cheap and smart way to get a brilliant RPG out the door.
A bit of work and you could even tie them together in to a chapter-based campaign to allow players to take one character through the whole thing.
MotB was a critical darling, but hugely overlooked as it was also an expansion pack (and one that technically followed directly on from the mediocre original NWN2 campaign, even if thematically they were worlds apart). Expansion packs only get half page reviews in the printed magazines and never get the sort of marketing original games do.
Which is a shame, since any source that gave it the time found how brilliant it was. I remember a couple of sources saying that Mask of the Betrayer was the only RPG to have a story that could match Planescape: Torment’s.
A standalone version would help.
“Error: Neverwinter Nights 2 Gold is Country restricted on your IP.”
Theres not legal way to pay for the game on my territory, so I am forced to download a warez version.
Atari and Direct2Drive don’t seems to want my money.
That stinks.
Since you’re interested, I’d even buy it for you on Steam if that would let you play it, but I don’t know if Steam carries the same DRM. Offer stands if it doesn’t.
Oh, nevermind. It’s not there. >.<
I figured that since they had Alpha Protocol and Dragon Age there, they would've had NWN 2. My bad. Blast it all.
Steam, stock it all ready!
So, uhh… why was this one year old topic/newspost resurrected, exactly?
You’d have to ask Psychopomp to be sure, but I have a feeling that it has something to do with the ‘Visit an Old Article’ feature.
I can only guess that speaking on old topics is encouraged, lest the feature wouldn’t exist.
Accidentally clicked on a (now deleted) spampost on the sidebar, and replied to a post without realizing this was a year old.
Morality scales are as old as the hills in RPG terms (Karma, Reputation, whatever). I haven’t really felt Obsidian have done it better, or that it originated from them.
That said, I agree with you in general. Bioware games are generally pretty much linear, and players only really have any impact when deciding an ending. Even then it’s usually a tiresome good/evil black/white sort of situation, as in KoTOR. Obsidian are slightly better in that regard, but not much. Like you said, where Obsidian really shine is with character development, NWN 2 being a prime example. The party was much more believable than in early Bioware because there was actually room for the player to influence them significantly.
That said, to say Bioware copied it (though copy it they did) for Dragon Age with no success is snobbery, as is saying that characters sans interaction are less than said. It’s perfectly possible to develop a character linearly (Valygar, Sephiroth, pretty much any character from films or books) though I agree that such an approach fails to take advantage of our medium. In Dragon Age, too, the relationship system is used with some success, turning the originally one dimensional characters into something slightly more interesting by the end with the additional dialogue and plot choices available if you build up a good enough rapport (to keep it spoiler free, I’ll just mention Alistair).
Both Bioware and Obsidian have a pretty long way to go with that system before it realises its potential, but I’d say from the latest releases of both they’re equally capable of taking a reasonable crack at it.
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