Tag Archive for 'BioWare'

BioWare Brings Companions, Epic Combat to ‘The Old Republic’

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on December 4, 2008
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An Edge magazine preview of the new Star Wars MMO The Old Republic has new details on how BioWare’s first attempt at a massively multiplayer game will differ from the competition in atmosphere and play style, including the use of companion characters.

“This is a faster-paced system that focuses on making the player feel like a hero,” said Creative Designer James Ohlen. “Four players all beating on one enemy; that’s not what you think of as heroic. It’s usually the heroes who are outnumbered, and that’s the kind of feeling we’re going for.”

BioWare is trying to integrate the epic, personal, and ascending narratives of their single player titles into the MMO genre, where individual players are normally cogs in a massive machine and one hero among thousands.

Lead Writer Daniel Erickson said that players would have to make big, character-defining choices and live with the consequences, but could not say if or how those choices would change the game world.

The Edge mentioned companion characters as one BioWare mainstay making its way into the game. A single ally can fight alongside a player character, and these allies have opinions and backstories.

Their role is to continually comment on, and presumably try to influence, your behaviour. Greg Zeschuk (BioWare’s president and co-founder) describes them as “the lens through which you see the world,” and they won’t hesitate to make their feelings known, good or bad, and will even abandon you if you’re constantly doing things they object to.

The article also gives early impressions of the new game’s art style.

The game takes a few visual cues from the new Clone Wars aesthetic introduced by the recent film and TV series: characters have simplified body structures, bright flat colors and the odd exaggerated feature. Each asset is hand-painted rather than using photo-sourced textures, giving everything a slightly unreal and highly distinctive sheen.

This is the same approach that Blizzard took with World of Warcraft. They compensated for aging graphics with unique art and design that kept everything fresh. Its the most economic plan for MMOs because it allows for stunning visuals and an expansive user base to play on low-end machines.

Stardock CEO Returns to PC Gaming’s Complicated Basics

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on November 17, 2008
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Stardock CEO Brad Wardell is devoted to reviving the classic era of PC gaming in all its excess. Stardock is currently developing Elemental: War of Magic for a 2010 release, a turn-based fantasy strategy game intended as a spiritual successor to the 1995 game Master of Magic.

Wardell talked about upcoming Stardock projects in a recent interview with Gamasutra and commented on the responsibilities of companies who take on old franchises.

“If you’re making a game that ends with ‘3,’ or Something: The Sequel, it should be similar to the original game,” Wardell told Gamasutra. “Don’t go off and say, ‘I have my own artistic vision.’ Okay, good — so call it something else. Don’t ride the coattails of the people who came before you to launch your own artistic vision.”

In the interview, Wardell also expressed interest in revisiting Toys For Bob’s Star Control II and Simtex’s classic series Master of Orion, last updated in 2003.

The CEO told Gamasutra that Stardock is building up a second full internal development team, and is tossing around various project ideas. “We’d like to do a roleplaying game too,” he said, pointing to BioWare classics like Baldur’s Gate II and Knights of the Old Republic as examples of the route he would like to take.

It would be “the same style of isometric gameplay — not first person — where I have a party that I’m interacting with,” he explained.

“I think there are a lot of people who want that. They want to have a party again. They want to have a Minsc-type character in there. You can’t have that interesting banter if it’s just one guy running around.”

Stardock earned a benevolent reputation among PC faithful after developing the excellent Galactic Civilizations II and publishing Ironclad Games’ Sins of a Solar Empire, both without any form of controversial copy protection or DRM. Their next published game, Gas Powered Games’ Demigod, comes out in early 2009.

It’s good to see a growing publishing house stay true to its roots and out to serve a small but ravenous audience of old school PC gamers.

The elaborate gameplay, structure and length of games like Baldur’s Gate II and Master of Orion got left behind by modern developers intent on mass appeal, and revivals like Gas Powered Games’ Supreme Commander fail to produce significant numbers.

Yet there’s something absolutely immersive about incredibly complicated gameplay, as anyone who tried out Steel Battalion’s unique mech controller will say. The spell system and character dynamics of Baldur’s Gate II brought that world to life, and the complicated micromanagement of Master of Orion gave the game’s universe political and economic verisimilitude.

If Stardock is truly pledged to bring back this wrongly abandoned aspect of PC gaming, then we should all be excited to see what they come up with.

BioWare Pushes MMO Storytelling With ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’

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on November 13, 2008
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It came as no surprise that Electronic Arts, LucasArts, and BioWare put World of Warcraft on notice when they announced Star Wars: The Old Republic late last month.

Every MMO released this year has tried to distinguish itself from Blizzard’s monolith in some aspect, and with The Old Republic, BioWare is focusing on storytelling, their realm of expertise.

Developers from BioWare Austin talked about how they will address this chronically underserved aspect of the genre at a round-table discussion, covered by Joystiq. Most of all, they want to treat the player as seriously as if this were a single-player experience.

“You will never in the game go into a cantina and poke a random person to see if you can solve their problems and they’ll give you money,” said Lead Writer Daniel Erickson. “You will never have some stranger on the street ask you to save their cat. You do large, heroic things.

“I always tell my writers,” Erickson continued, “to imagine if the very first response you could ever choose to any quest they might pitch is, ‘Excuse me, I’m saving the world. Is this important?’”

According to BioWare, The Old Republic contains more dialog and content than all its past titles combined.

“If you roll a Jedi character and you play them from the first level to the last level, and then you roll a Sith and you play them from the first level to the last level, you will not see one repeated quest, line of dialogue, or piece of content,” said Erickson. “It is a 100% different story experience.”

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Impressive Top 15 List of RPG Characters

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on September 21, 2008
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Characters are the heart of any story, and twenty years of computer and console gaming have yielded plenty of memorable ones.

Last month Ian and Reid at ConfuseReviews.com compiled a list of their fifteen favorite RPG characters, with barely five slots going to BioWare’s ilk.

Part of [the depth of RPGs] comes through in the characters you meet in any adventurous stat-building type game; sometimes cheery, sometimes spooky, often dreadfully bland but occasionally intriguing characters who make the grunt work of RPGs and the fight after fight after fight seem worth it. The characters are what make the stories work — they’re the role part of role-playing.

It’s not bad as Top # lists go, including a good mix of nostalgia-inspiring heroes like Frog from Chrono Trigger, barely remembered niche weirdos like Cassius Curio of Morrowind, and a few unknowns like Stan the titular king from Okage Shadow King.

The game’s main character, a ludicrously trodden-upon boy with the worst parents in the world, ends up with evil king Stan possessing his shadow as part of a bargain to “save” his sister. The rest of the game unfolds as a quest to smite the lesser demons that have arisen since Stan’s banishment and taken sections of his former power, so in essence he becomes a whiny has-been of a demon lord trying desperately to be taken seriously as he slowly regains his former glory.

I’ll definitely have to play that one.

BioWare Unveils Two Trailers for ‘Dragon Age’

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on July 13, 2008
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BioWare released two trailers for their upcoming computer RPG Dragon Age: Origins this week.

The first trailer shows the beginnings of a rain-soaked battle between humans and an army of monsters. The second starts off the same, but includes some more combat sequences.

Neither trailer shows any gameplay or story features, and the graphics look incomplete. More information on BioWare’s new game should come from this week’s E3.

Dragon Age: Origins is scheduled for an early 2009 release on PC and is the first in a new franchise for BioWare. Billed as the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, the game is set in an open, epic fantasy world with a strong party element, and will hopefully be more complex than the studio’s recent console games.

BioWare Founders See Narrative As More Than Just Story

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on April 26, 2008
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Another interesting interview with BioWare folk sprang up this week, this time with the two doctors who founded the well-known studio, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

Muzyka and Zeschuk see multiple narratives within every game. “The story, VO, and the character interactions for us is an important one, but it’s not the only one,” said Muzyka in the interview.

“There’s also you as explorer, exploring new areas with that sense of awe and excitement,” he continued. “Or you and combat as you as a combatant and progressing your abilities. Or developing your skills assuming your personal identity, growing your character, or interacting with other players in your online guild or community.”

Both Muzyka and Zeschuk are incredibly smart industry veterans with opinions worth listening to. In this interview, they comment on dealing with Fox, their upcoming MMO, Nintendo, film and, most interestingly, narrative and storytelling.

“It’s not narrative in the game that’s the thing,” said Muzyka, discussing games as a medium for art. “I think it’s the emotion, that whatever play experience you’re having, whether social interaction or gameplay interaction, or in the game having combat, it’s the emotion you’re feeling that makes you feel connected to it.

“That’s why art resonates,” he continued, “as you start feeling something for the characters or the experience.”

BioWare Writers Discuss Their Craft

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on April 20, 2008
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BioWare writers Mike Laidlaw and Drew Karpyshyn discussed dialog, working with user-created characters, and world-building in an interesting interview with CVG.

“Getting to the same level of quality as film is good,” says Laidlaw, “but just trying to make a film isn’t the right direction. Interactivity gives us something no other medium has.”

Karpyshyn agrees: “We’re finding that the technology is finally reaching the point where it’s starting to feel very realistic - we can actually have interactive conversation where you talk with people rather than them just talking at you.

“I like to use the analogy that we’re at the point where Hollywood was in the early ’30s where they’re just starting to add sound, they’re starting to get the technology locked in place. It’s all about our skill set, coming up with our own conventions, our own language of telling stories, something film has developed over the last century.”

Not surprisingly, writing an open-ended narrative is extremely tough. “Fortunately at BioWare,” said Karpyshyn, “we’ve kinda got used to it, but that’s why it requires a full team of four or five writers for one of our games.”

There’s a lot of fascinating tidbits in here. The BioWare writers reveal how they create characters, from the protagonists to the quirky barkeep, and how they develop their appearance alongside their dialog.

One of the most interesting things they reveal is that the team spent nine months planning out the details of the “Mass Effect” galaxy before deciding on characters or plot. Hopefully that means the sequel will get here sooner.

PREVIEW: BioWare Fine-Tunes ‘Mass Effect’ for PC Release

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on April 13, 2008
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Although the PC port of “Mass Effect” was recently pushed back to May 28, it’s still worth getting excited about, especially if you have yet to play through the game. BioWare promises to offer a polished version of the role-playing game originally released on the Xbox 360 last November.

BioWare has yet to say if the PC release will include any additional content, but the gameplay is being improved. Combat will take on PC shooter controls, and your two cohorts will be managed with a reformatted heads-up display, revealed just last week. In addition to better organizing party management, this HUD allows you to issue separate move orders to your party members.

'Mass Effect' PC HUD

Inventory management, which was a pain in the ass on the Xbox 360 version of “Mass Effect,” should be much more fluid in the PC release. Items that were once lumped into a long list will be sorted by type and grade.

BioWare is also improving the game’s already impressive graphics for the PC release, says 1UP’s Jeremy Parish. Textures look more detailed, colors more vibrant. Character animations may need improving, according to 1UP’s preview.

Performance-wise, “the development team wants the game to run smoothly, even on a lower-powered system,” writes Parish, “although they won’t say precisely what they consider ‘lower-powered.’” Because the game will be installed, load times are much reduced (although I’m somewhat frightened by how much hard disk space the extensive dialog will take up).

I’m glad BioWare chose to focus on gameplay for the PC release of “Mass Effect.” The original was a great game bogged down by a clunky interface and party control, both of which should work much better with a PC. This more polished version of one of last year’s best games should hold us over until the promised “Mass Effect 2.”

EDIT: The PC version of “Mass Effect” will also include the “Bring Down the Sky” DLC and its 90 minutes of additional gameplay for free, reports Shacknews. There’s one more reason everyone who bought the Xbox 360 release should have held out: Xbox users had to pay 400 Microsoft Points, just over $5, for the content.

BioWare Announces KoTOR 3, Pandemic a New LotR Game

Published
on February 15, 2008
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Looks like the first products announced by developers BioWare and Pandemic since their acquisition by Electronic Arts are franchise titles.

BioWare announced at an Electronic Arts event that they will develop ‘Knights of the Old Republic 3.”  The second game in that series was made by Obsidian Entertainment. BioWare is hard at work on the forthcoming “Dragon Age” and possibly the unannounced MMO game.

Pandemic announced at the same event that they are going to be working on a Lord of the Rings movie tie-in just as soon as “Mercenaries 2″ is finished.

While the future of BioWare and Pandemic under Electronic Arts is uncertain, this first announcement does not bode well for creativity. Electronic Arts is notorious for sticking to franchises, and I would have felt a lot better about some new intellectual property, especially from BioWare.

BioWare, Pandemic to Create 10 New Franchises Under EA (Don’t Panic)

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on January 8, 2008
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Accompanying an announcement that BioWare and Pandemic, acquired by the company in October, had now been fully incorporated, EA revealed yesterday that the two developers would be producing 10 new franchises based on six owned properties.

EA did not lay out a timeline for when these new games would appear. BioWare continues to work on Dragon Age, Sonic RPG for the Nintendo DS and presumably the Mass Effect sequels and their mysterious MMORPG. Pandemic likewise is still working on Mercenaries 2: World In Flames and Saboteur.

A blurb by Joystiq’s Jason Dobson on the announcement related EA’s corporate annexing to the borg. “At least it seems as though the assimilation hasn’t freed the developers of independent thought, though granted it does take some time before the implants take hold.” I saw similar comments anywhere BioWare was mentioned on Evil Avatar. I have to disagree.

Given time to calm down after the initial startling revelation, I was struck by one simple fact: EA is a business. As a business, their goal is to make money. Not to stifle creativity. Granted, EA has done as much by pumping out generic titles (Madden), hording licenses (Madden), and turning fresh meat game designers into enslaved husks, but I cannot see this happening in this case.

BioWare and Pandemic are successful studios, critically and financially. BioWare especially, a company I have a great respect for, has made hit after outstanding hit in the past few years. Why would EA want to damage two clearly profitable studios?

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