Lenas wrote:
Hyperbole much?
Actually, there's no hyperbole here; more importantly, none of these comments should detract from whatever experience you derive from their games. That said, after playing
The Old Republic, the original
Mass Effect, and
Dragon Age, I think Bioware's partnership with Electronic Arts has produced a similar sort of evil to the Activision-Blizzard monstrosity. More importantly, this evil is being fueled by a market model that works for a specific type of encapsulated experience game which is not an MMO or an RPG or any combination of the two. The Riot Model, which works quite well as a micro-transaction based fund source for
League of Legends, has produced/emerged from a disturbing trend in Bioware's production model. In fact, it's rather evident in the language you're now repeating, Lenas.
Bioware has monetized development time in a new way. They don't actually ship new games. For instance, the assets for Burn the Sky are on the physical disk for my 360 pre-order copy of
Mass Effect. All I actually downloaded from Bioware 90 days after release was an executable modified to access that content.
Dragon Age was $30 over asking price if you wanted all the content physically on the disk, too. This is especially frustrating considering Shale is almost 60% of the entire Dwarf involvement, and the Warden's Keep is the primary source of Warden lore in the first game.
Awakenings is slightly more problematic, because tons of its assets are already present in the Gold edition of the basic game; I'm not talking just art.
Now, mind you, I'm a big fan of paying for a good narrative: books and literature are my devoted avocation; however, I find the modularity of Bioware's emerging approach (which I blame almost entirely on EA)[and Activision-Blizzard's shift in a similar direction] to be a net negative for the kind of game experience that ultimately binds us together. Regardless of what most of think about a given game or a given engine or a given implementation of x, we're ultimately all here because we like interactive digital storytelling. The above change in economic model plus the mainstreaming of Bioware's creative core (they're writing books and movie scripts and not video games anymore) ...
Well, that's just everything wrong with video games today.
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