Alas poor Bioware, I knew him Horatio

Bioware is doing a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG. sigh

Dhruin posted this bit of sad news awhile ago http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2111&highlight=sonic

I still think they might just be Super Sonic fanboys.

Is it EA that's starting to make their voice heard prehaps?

Übereil

Ubereil said:

Is it EA that's starting to make their voice heard prehaps?

Übereil

Click to expand...

No - this predates that by quite a bit.

I just hoped it would be the first of April ... *sigh*

This is their Nintendo DS debut as well ... something we heard about a while ago ... and many of us thought - KotOR DS?!?!

Ah sorry about that, I only heard about the Sonic thing yesterday. Bioware used to be one of my favorite game developers, see my favorite RPG's below. Thank goodness the Europeans still give a damn about good RPG's, I recently finished The Witcher and am currently working my way through Gothic 3. Oh well, it was a good run Bioware.

I don't see this as a death-knell for Bioware, simply a diversification. They wanted to get into handhelds, which was a significant tooling and resource increase for them. Their business model (at least then) required partnering with someone to make this happen for consoles, and likely also for handhelds. Hopefully after this experience they can do some original IP.

When I first learned about this in july of 2007 I was like this
and like this too

But then, after some serius thoughts about it, and after viewing some info on the Sonic Universe, both on the official site for Sonic and on Wikipedia, I must say that I'm certain that Bioware will deliver a great roleplaying game with their Sonic RPG DS game (for kids mainly, but I'm sure grown-ups like me are allowed to play the game, too ).

And yes, the good doctors of Bioware are indeed (secret) Sonic the Hedgehog fans.
So it was of course naturally for them to do a sonic rpg game when asked. As I said above, the whole Sonic Unverse is really diversified if you look into it and screams to make a classic Biowarian tale of comradery, deceit, betrayal and lots of fun combat to rescue the princess of something like that.

That said, Bioware also wanted to break into the handheld market. And their business strategy seem to be to use existing IPs to break into (rpg) markets and then go about making their own IPs when they have a solid foothold in said market.

Let me all remind you that one of the best rpgs for 2006 (I think) also came out for the DS, and that was (and is), ofcourse: Lego Star Wars. I enjoy playing a kid's game at the moment called 'belief and betrayal' as much as I enjoy playing The Witcher or Baldur's Gate.

/aries100

Even if Bioware is gone from the grown-up RPG scene, there are so many new & good developers who have sprung up that I'm not sad at all. Eschalon, Witcher, MotB, hopefully AoD, hopefully Broken Hourglass, plus the other new Polish team that I just read about. I'm thinking 2007 was the first good year for RPGs in a while, and it looks like 2008 or 2009 could be a great year. I'm pretty happy, no Bioware needed.