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Company News Responsibility does not rest easy at BioWare

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
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Tags: BioWare; Dragon Age

Link to reading at GamaSutra: <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4146/building_experiences_the_bioware_.php">Building Experiences The BioWare Way</a>:
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<blockquote>Greg Zeschuk has played and made a lot of RPGs [and] seems to have reached the point where his duties require a considerable amount of playing BioWare games as a player, not a full-time developer, to give high-level feedback and observations to the team. It's a responsibility the executive probably doesn't mind.
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The studio is finishing up work on two major games, Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, due this November and Q1 2010 respectively.
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[...]
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<b>How has the pseudo-merger of BioWare and Mythic worked out?</b> GZ: It's been going really good. We had a great time working with the guys with Mythic. We've been out there already a few times. It's kind of funny, because we're literally almost across the country. They're way in D.C., we're up in Edmonton. But we've been there a few times, and it's going really well.
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[...]
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GZ: That's a good observation. You do need to really engage with the games that we make. To be fair, I think Mass Effect is the kind of game you can play pretty quick. And the interesting thing about Dragon Age is it's actually very bite-sized -- even though it's a giant buffet. You can still play it in bits and pieces.
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[...]
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<b>In Mass Effect, although I really enjoyed it, with a few big exceptions, my critical path through that game is basically the same as everyone else's. It looks like Dragon Age puts more emphasis on that.</b> GZ: It does. I was asking Ray a couple days ago -- I did this one big event one way. I ask, "How did you do it?" He says, "Oh, I did all the ways." "So, how many are there?" "Nine." And to think they're actually really dramatically different. They do have a meaningful change.
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[...]
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This is all stuff we've ruminated over at BioWare. In Jade Empire, there was a really good example of that. We had a really intricate quest line for one of the characters, very obscure and incredibly cool. But we realized almost no one found it. So we said, "Okay, just don't make the great stuff obscure. If you have great stuff, at least make sure it's out there and that people can find it."</blockquote>
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Incidentally my marriage with my Indian wife is also going awesome. I've been to the country a few times and saw here once or twice. It's going really well.
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Am I saying that with a straight enough face?
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Thanks <b>Rohit_N</b>!
 
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Obscure quest-line for a party member in JE? Only thing I can think of is finding the location of the inventor god's lab, exploring it and making stuff, then finding out your mad genius is the inventor god in mortal form.


It wasn't *that* obscure. Just prone to glitches and dead-ends, thus making everything un-completable.
 

poocolator

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So instead of one, very well-written, story, we're going to have nine shitty ones? Grrrrrrrrand! They should have done the Bethesda thing and procedurally generated a storyline, but more open-ended (read: meaningless sandbox drivel). At least then they'll have an excuse for making a shitty RPG.
 

Gragt

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Elzair said:
Well, I have not played the game, but I have read a bit about it. My guess would be that he is talking about finding out DawnStar is Master Li's daughter.

Wasn't it revealed in the game? I remember I could tell Li at the end that Dawn Star was his daughter, but I'm not sure anymore ... but I distinctly remember that in a typical Bioware fashion this big secret was pretty obvious except for the people directly concerned.
 
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Elzair said:
Well, I have not played the game, but I have read a bit about it. My guess would be that he is talking about finding out DawnStar is Master Li's daughter.

That's not obscure at all, though. That just comes up with a bit of effort.



With Kang (the mad inventor) you had to ask at certain time periods, do certain things just to open the 'Workshop of the Gods'.


And from there, there existed about 5 ways you could accidentally shut the whole quest down.


And if you didn't finish it before a certain point (not even the final dungeon, just some arbitrary time earlier), it cut off as well.
 
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POOPOO MCBUMFACE said:
I bet they're referring to the fucking inventor aren't they

It's the only thing that qualifies.



You ask me, I thought the way you could slowly turn Dawn Star into a Closed-Fist mindset was far more fulfilling.


If you acted like a typical douche (how most idiots play Closed Fist), she'd just think you were a jerk. But act friendly, while slowly poisoning her outlook on things, and by the end she'd be a totally different person. Her conversation trees are way diverged from a normal game at that point, she belittles the princess constantly, she really doesn't even care if you enslave Death's Hand at the end of the game.
 

Xor

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You could do the same thing with the princess, and probably with the carth-type character as well, but only with one of them per playthrough. It was probably the only remotely interesting part of the entire game.
 

hakuroshi

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Well, you could have princess with any one of the others I think depending of PC gender. Not that it matters, but it was slightly funny to hook with the princess as a female PC and rule the empire as a lesbian couple...

The big secret of Dawn Star was handled stupidly - it was obvious almost from the beginning and had no influence whatsoever on storyline except a few dialog lines.

So yes, it must be mad inventor... but it's hardly "intricate" or "incredibly cool". "Obscure" I grant.
 

denizsi

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In Mass Effect, although I really enjoyed it, with a few big exceptions, my critical path through that game is basically the same as everyone else's. It looks like Dragon Age puts more emphasis on that.

GZ: It does. I was asking Ray a couple days ago -- I did this one big event one way. I ask, "How did you do it?" He says, "Oh, I did all the ways." "So, how many are there?" "Nine." And to think they're actually really dramatically different. They do have a meaningful change.

I think he made a mistake there. There can not be just nine ways, it has to be at least 10. See:

(1) run & gun & kill
(2) run & gun & talk
(3) run & gun & talk & kill
(4) run & gun & talk & sex
<s>(5) run & gun & talk & rape</s> That would probably be too inappropriate for BW
(5) run & gun & talk & sex & kill
(6) sneak & gun & kill
(7) sneak & gun & talk
(8) sneak & gun & talk & kill
(9) sneak & gun & talk & sex
(10) sneak & gun & talk & sex & kill

With the exception of sex, this is the way it has always been with Bioware. Not that it's different with pretty much anyone.
 

Severian Silk

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Greg Zeschuk said:
GZ: It does. I was asking Ray a couple days ago -- I did this one big event one way. I ask, "How did you do it?" He says, "Oh, I did all the ways." "So, how many are there?" "Nine." And to think they're actually really dramatically different. They do have a meaningful change.
Note that the evidence he cites is merely anecdotal. That's equivalent to "A friend of a friend told me..."
 

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