Flarnet said:
I always felt good when I saw the "By gamers, for gamers" in the Interplay logo. Bullshit of course, but as Walter Sobchak said: "at least it's an ethos".
That pretty much went out the window when IPLY went IPO, though. At that point, they became "By investors, for investors". After all, no gamer wants a game that's rushed out at the end of a fiscal quarter to make the quarterly report look that much better. Investors want that.
The fact that Bioware doesn't even bother to speak so that pure gamers understand, but instead caters solely to the money people is quite revealing.
One thing I noticed around Christmas time was they put out all this PR garbage as a Christmas special bonus deal, including an MP3 song declaring they make games that "Don't suck". It's odd on many levels, since if you really make games that don't suck, you don't have to keep saying that you don't.
There's also a huge difference between saying, "We make great games." and "We make games that don't suck." "Don't suck" could mean average and mediocre, after all, whereas the "Great Games" pretty much locks in what you're saying. Then again, given the amount of excuses they've made for how half assed NWN was when it shipped, they might, deep down, know that at best their game is mediocre since they've had to make so many excuses for missing things.
Anyone should know that a cloak isn't that hard in 3D. 9-12 bones, 12-16 double sided polyons, and a few textures should be enough to make a decent cape if nothing else. A hooded cloak would require more polygons, perhaps some boning depending on the head movement. Adding a clasp that goes around the front wouldn't be that much of a bother either. I think that's the best example of where they really just didn't bother with the art for the game at all, since you're talking about something that's pretty easy.
Beholders and other non-human monsters would take more time, but given how important those creatures are to D&D, and the time they had, and the developers working on it, it's basically a poor excuse.
What's really sad are all the people I've seen who claim Infogrames rushed NWN out the door, and that's why it's not that good. Considering they had four years of development under Interplay/Black Isle and another year or so under Infogrames, I fail to see how this game was rushed at all. It really boils down to BioWare either having extremely poor time management skills kin to Ion Storm under John Romero's watch, or they just took their sweet time making it while soaking Interplay for cash. Either way, the buck stops with them.
It reveals that they don't expect their audience to follow the scene with a discerning eye, but instead expect their audience to sit tight (at most join their fabulous online community and ask for more +6 weapons) and then swallow everything when, and only when, they decide to release information in a preview somewhere.
Well, I think it's good that BioWare's actually attempting to make something with their own ideas, rather than ride the license. It will be interesting to see how they do with something they can't count on their license to sell.
I don't think Baldur's Gate would have sold well at all if they didn't have that D&D license. It wasn't nearly as robust as games that came before it. The interface was klunky, the pathfinding was atrocious, it was buggy, it was ugly, the multiplayer was pitiful, and so on. Really, the only hype point for that game was that it was a D&D game being made by the publishers of Fallout. Interplay also pushed Baldur's Gate pretty hard in terms of PR and advertising. I wonder how much they would have pitched it if it were some new thing with no wonderful license or name to point to.
So far, the only CRPGs they've made or talk about all have licenses they can exploit. BG, BG2, BG2:ToB, and NWN were all Forgotten Realms licenses. Knights of the Old Republic is the Star Wars license. Those two licenses have produced the occational flop, like Force Commander with Star Wars and Descent to Undermountain with Forgotten Realms, but they still make enough money to keep using that license over and over again.
Of course, now BioWare has that name recognition working for them, which is probably why they're trying to make their own IP. If they can make a half assed game like NWN and have it sell really, really well, which amounts to them basically selling it on their name alone, then they can afford to branch out in original areas.
There's two routes they can go here:
- We have a brand new, never-before-seen license to make, so it better be good.
- We're BioWare, people love us, so we can make it the same old crap.
I'd like to see them follow the first route, but judging by how they keep saying everything about NWN was better than their previous games, I suspect they'll end up doing the latter. Maybe if they'd actually admit, publically, that NWN's campaign was fairly pitiful and definitely no where near as good as their previous games, there'd be room for hope. We know for sure they knew they made an error or dozen with the NWN campaign.
