BioWare - Develop Coverage

Dhruin

Dhruin

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BioWare has presented at the Develop conference and a bunch of sites have coverage and quotes from the event.
There's a general overview of "Creative Game Development: How We Do It At Bioware" at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
VG247 has a full interview with BioDoc Greg Zeschuk. He talks about the differences in the Dragon Age 2 versions, the controversy over not choosing your race, their commitment to review scores, Mass Effect 2 DLC and more:
You’ve made the decision to only have a human lead character in Dragon Age II, and not allow people to choose their race. Can you explain why?
Greg Zeschuk: With all our games, we don’t always want to create a true sequel in the sense that it’s more of the same. You can see it from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2 that you’ve changed up quite a bit of stuff.
We decided to sort of change and create a different type of game at least on the surface. And the interesting thing is that in the case of Dragon Age II, we’ve only shown a little slice of it so far. And everyone’s very excited, right? If you’ll remember with Dragon Age 1, we had the Marilyn Manson trailer and everyone freaked out and we said, “Don’t worry: we’re just showing you a different perspective.”
Over time, I think people will kind of understand what we’re doing and probably really like it.
We like to challenge our players on a sequel. It’s still a Dragon Age game, that hasn’t changed. But it’s going to be challenging and interesting in many ways. We think it’s ultimately going to be a better game, so I think ultimately the fans will agree when they get to play it. That’s the fundamental thing.
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CVG reports BioWare as saying "consoles are the past", as they look to Facebook and mobile and everything else.
Eurogamer reports a similar thing but with a different slant - apparently BioWare is exploring small-scale MMOs.
More information.
 
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If you want to play anything but duck'n cover, yes. Also, the highest setting is definetly harder than anything ME1 had to offer (most because you get swarmed by enemies).
 
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I found ME2 to be much easier than ME - playing veteran, og whatever it's called.

This thing about "challenging players with sequels" is pure bullshit.

He's living an illusion, so he probably believes it himself - to an extent.

What he means to say, though, is that they've streamlined their blueprint - and certain things needed to be cut to match it.
 
With all our games, we don’t always want to create a true sequel in the sense that it’s more of the same.
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Umm, Baldur;s Gate II was a true sequel, and that seemed to work out ok.
 
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blatantninja said:
Umm, Baldur;s Gate II was a true sequel, and that seemed to work out ok.
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*gasp* Shame on you for pointing that out ;-) The emperor has no clothes…and it ain't pretty.
I wish someone had the balls to make the true spiritual successor to BG2. It would be great if someone managed to get a decent licensing agreement with Paizo and develop a Pathfinder CRPG "a la BG". One of my big issues with DA was the simplistic skill system - "streamlining" I believe they call it? PF rules allow all the richness of DnD (skills, spells, new improved feats for all classes that make them more interesting, although some are a bit OTT)…. I think PF was based on OGL so maybe that would make thinsgs easier?
 
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blatantninja said:
Umm, Baldur;s Gate II was a true sequel, and that seemed to work out ok.
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I don't disagree as such but it still showed signs of how they work to this day. BG1 had a better sense of adventuring for me, largely because the wilderness areas really made me feel like I was in a real place. These were criticised in reviews and they ripped them out in BG2.

Same these days. Inventory gets negative comments in ME1, rip it out for ME2.
 
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Yeah, that was one thing I preferred about BG1, just being able to go whereever I wanted from the beginning. Sure, I might get my entire party killed in 3 seconds, but hey, that's how it goes. Reminded me of the old open style play of the Ultima series.

Loved BG2 and liked the story more, but yeah definitely missed the open world.
 
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Dhruin said:
BG1 had a better sense of adventuring for me, largely because the wilderness areas really made me feel like I was in a real place. These were criticised in reviews and they ripped them out in BG2.
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Spot on. extra characters
 
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