Tag Archives: bioware

Evolution of a Shepard.

I didn’t read many reviews of Mass Effect 3, didn’t need to, I knew I was going to buy it. What I haven’t seen much of –other than in passing comments– is how incredible the graphics are in this game; I mean, it’s more than a modest jump in improvement, it’s as though they shoved the graphics engine through a Mass Effect relay. That sort of jump.

As evidence, here are screen captures of my Shepard from the three episodes of the game. I remember watching some of the cutscene sequences in Mass Effect 3 and being profoundly impressed by the high fidelity and detail of the signal being sent to my retinas, but comparing these screenshots really slams home the magnitude of the improvement.

I really didn’t mind the ending of Mass Effect 3, but more on that in another post; regardless, I still can’t help but admire the improvements (not just the graphics) which BioWare keep bringing to their section of the genre, improvements which seem to have been generally overlooked or dismissed due to the unfortunate backlash which has occurred.

I hope BioWare continue to stick to their beliefs and make the RPGs that they want to make, because, my goodness, they seem to be getting exponentially better at it with each and every release.

One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be mere rushing on.

Christmas is almost upon us once again, and as this luminescent blue-white pearl which we call Earth continues its ageless pirouette against that infinite star-glittered backdrop of black satin, people across its circumference take time out of the hectic schedule of existence to celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ; which, in this modern age, seems to consist of taking a list of the Seven Deadly Sins and seeing how many one can tick off in a single day.

An MMO launch should fit right in.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has begun its early access event. You may even have chanced upon this news already from some obscure remote corner of your social network, perhaps old Mrs Crumblejowls down at the corner shop, or in the pained synchronised barking of every dog around your neighbourhood. If you hadn’t heard about the launch of SWTOR, then you may want to consider the case that you are, in fact, deceased – confirm this by checking for your pulse, or seeing whether you can walk through doors without having to open them, that sort of thing. If you are indeed no longer of this mortal coil, you may need to recruit the aid of a small boy who can see dead people to sort out your terrible predicament, although be warned: he may actually be too young to successfully complete the registration of your SWTOR subscription.

Many have wondered at the timing of BioWare’s release of SWTOR so close to Christmas, but we must consider that for many this is also a time of remembrance of Lord Jesus Christ. Or Darth Christ as he is in the Old Testament. Strong in the ways of the Force: able to Force heal, move impossibly large objects with his will –such as the stone doors to tombs–, and return as a Force Ghost upon his death, he was a powerful Sith Sorcerer. He was also prone to acts of rage, such as destroying temples (Anakin Skywalker’s later tribute being considered tasteless and excessive). Lord Christ was also unusual in taking on many apprentices at once –up to twelve at one point– rather than the single Master-Apprentice relationship which is more common among the Sith Lords. Opinion is divided as to why he did this, but the most common assessment is that it was perhaps a show of strength on his part, demonstrating his complete belief in his mastery of the Force. Alas, as is always the way with the Sith, one of his apprentices betrayed him in the end. Of course in many of the depictions of him, Lord Christ is seen to be wearing a beard style more common to the Jedi than the Sith. Not only this, but he enacted numerous good deeds during his time, leading many scholars to question his true nature, and whether he may have in fact been a Jedi double agent.

Back to the seven sins. I think Gluttony is a fairly easy score, and thus isn’t a terribly high value on the Sin-o-Meter. Much like Christmas, the MMO family sits itself around the feast of new content and gorges itself to the point of bursting. And as with Boxing Day, there comes a point where the overindulgence strikes back, with players unable to hear mention of the recently released MMO without grabbing their mouth with both hands, cheeks bulging, and making a dash for the nearest bathroom.

Wrath is also in evidence, as people find themselves excluded from the early access, be it due to a lack of invitation, failing Internet service, or the inconsideration of Real Life, getting in the way as it does, like the cat underfoot that wants feeding as you’re trying to juggle pans of boiling water and molten fat as you serve the Christmas dinner. Envy goes hand in hand, with outsiders watching with green eyes those people who have spent months preparing themselves, and now put their entire life on hold for a day or more, so that they can play the game seventeen picoseconds after the servers have opened. It’s common knowledge in the MMO community, of course, that the experience is so much better when consumed fresh, and that most MMO servers go stale quickly a day or two after launch, whereupon the whole thing becomes pointless. Anyone coming late to the party will have to pick through the messy bubble and squeak of content which is left over. Of course it’s all about community at the start, being there at the beginning, sharing the experience; very much like the crowd at the January Sales is all about community, understanding and sharing with your fellow man.

I also imagine Lust is well covered in certain quarters, and that there are some keyboards out there that could really do with a quick run through a dishwasher to loosen the keys again, but thus far we’ve thankfully been spared the twitpic evidence of this.

Regardless of my cynical musings on the launch of a new MMO, congratulations must be made to BioWare for one of the smoothest launches I think I’ve ever experienced. It may have been a regimented and cordoned and corralled crush, like the queue to see Santa in a major shopping centre, but in combination with an incredibly strong server system, it seems to have worked like a charm. I can still remember fully half of World of Warcraft’s subscribers being unable to play the game for a day or two after launch because they couldn’t register their credit card details on Blizzard’s failing website; I should know – I was one of them. BioWare have learned from and improved upon that debacle by several orders of magnitude, and so I’m left wondering what it will do for MMOs if the actual game can do the same with respect to the current market leader’s efforts.

Skip to the end.

The Esc key has a magical meaning in Dragon Age II on the PC; it holds the same transcendent power that the fast-forward button on VCRs used to hold for dry-mouthed pimply youths, jumping and glancing nervously around at every noise – wondering if Mum or Dad had returned home – while they desperately skipped the tedious and seemingly pointless introductory discourse between the impossibly buxom and underdressed housewife and the plumber, so as to get to the bit where an entirely different set of plumbing gets a good seeing to. T’ch, I don’t know, kids these days with their ‘internets’, and ‘digital players’ which can skip straight to the action: there’s just no adventure and peril in perusing porn in the modern era.

At least, that’s what it felt like on my second play through. Having played my perennial RPG favourite of the heavily armoured do-gooding warrior woman the first time through, and having enjoyed the game to such an extent that the nature of the ending had left me wanting more, I decided to have another go on the Kirkwall carousel but this time as a mage. My choice was made primarily because I found the mage class in the game to be really quite groovy, with them having rather a flair for the dramatic when casting spells by whipping their staff around in a curious amalgam of Bruce Lee and Gandalf, and the fact that they didn’t necessarily have to be dressed entirely in bath robes (as evidenced by my post from last week), as though they were about to open the door to a rather burley plumber with a dangerously-bristled horseshoe moustache. In addition, what with mages being generally reviled and untrusted in the world of Dragon Age, it seemed a prime opportunity to test the age-old proverb ‘before denouncing a mage you should walk a hundred miles in their shoes’. Possibly because then, as the punchline goes, I’d be a hundred miles away from them, out of fireball range, with a nice pair of mage’s shoes.

I think the issue came from my immediately launching into the second play-through with the first still being fresh in my mind. As such, and despite my generally accepted poor memory, I could remember the nature of most of the conversations in the game. Therefore, although I genuinely did enjoy the talking more than the fighting the first time through, the second time around I found myself reaching for the Esc key and desperately trying to get the conversation over with so that I could be paid or otherwise rewarded – I was skipping to the money shot, if you will. I went with the sarcastic/humorous option in most instances, and was pleased to find that my character’s uncontrolled scripted responses also gradually changed to a more sarcastic tone compared to the blandly diplomatic responses that my angelic warrior delivered in the same situation, but at the same time I was disappointed to find out that it didn’t really make much more than a cosmetic difference in the vast majority of situations.

I’m caused to wonder again what impact these sorts of issues will have on Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMO which as we all know is trying to introduce the ‘fourth pillar’ of entertainment, story, into the genre. In part, they intend to do this through the use of the conversation tree system for which they have become well known (famously or infamously depending on your view of such things) in games such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Even there, some players just want to skip to the money shot; other players are happy to allow the conversation to develop, perhaps feeling that the anticipation and delay helps build to a better climax when the conversation’s conclusion is reached; and yet other players really do enjoy the game for its immersive story, and truly appreciate the effort that goes into scripting and voicing multiple classes, sexes and ‘moods’ for the player character. The problem with the MMO, as it is with many of the genre’s technical and game-play issues, is what happens when you bring these disparate desires into contact with one another in an attempt to provide a shared experience.

Not only could the shared conversation experience be akin to trying to watch porn with friends and strangers, all of whom want to get the same thing out of it but at different levels of urgency, it’ll also have the obvious shared awkwardness factor that you’re a bunch of people trying to do something together which is usually performed solo, as a general rule. It’s a strangely compelling analogy, because in The Old Republic you’ll still be doing something that is inherently thought of as a solo activity, and you’ll still be doing it solo, it’s just that there will be other people in the room at the same time, all doing their own solo thing too; some will be trying to finish things off as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there, others will be trying to take their time and enjoy the experience, and yet others with no sense of decorum will be doing their best to ruin the experience for others by jumping up and down and waving their unfailing unimpressive epic purple equipment in the faces of those who are trying to concentrate on their own activities. Then there’s the fact that other people will be able to see how you do things: you’ll make a conversation option and then catch someone giving you a look, and you’ll be all ‘What?!’ in a defensive tone, and they’ll be all ‘Oh. Nothing’, and you’ll arch your neck and peer over to look at their conversation option out of the corner of your eye, see that they’re doing it a totally different way, and wonder whether you’ve been picking the wrong conversation options all this time. The next time you’ll try to hide your conversation away from the others, which just makes them all the more curious as to what you’re trying to hide, until you become so paranoid that you find you’re having trouble finishing your conversations, and eventually you can’t even manage to start a conversation with other people present.

Bioware have invested a huge amount of time and effort into the voiced conversations in The Old Republic, and I have to wonder just how wise that was as an entry into the MMO market, a genre whose fans are well known, trained almost, to skip to the money shot, while ignoring the story. The sad thing is that this may be what the majority of MMO players actually want now because they have become accustomed to the fact that the story is superfluous to the action, and as such it is quite often of a quality that is laughable at best. Just as there is a market for adult entertainment with a real story and quality acting, there is also a market for MMOs of the same sort, but it is a comparatively small market compared to the mainstream way of doing things. At the end of the day it’s quite possible that the vast majority people really are there for the action alone, and any pretence at story is just a compulsory framing device which is to be skipped past with all haste in order to reach the action before Mum or Dad gets home and finds you hunched red-faced over your computer screen with your keyboard in a sock.

Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.

There’s something about Mass Effect 2 not having an obvious key bind for screenshots that is nagging at me. Silly, I know, but it does. It’s like a small dog, yip yip yipping away in the back yard of my mind, bouncing up and down at the fence of my reason and trying to get my attention. The problem is that it sets off all the other dogs of deliberation in my mind. Now I have cause to think about the fact that Bioware have streamlined the inventory system to almost non-existence, something which veers very much towards the console end of the Console – Normal – Fiddly – Needs A PC With Seven Input Peripherals end of the HCI spectrum; that’s a big shaggy dog, hoof hoof hoofing while standing on its hind legs with two huge paws pulling at the fence of reason. Then there’s the general lack of micromanagement required of your team members when in combat: simply point and assign one key or, more importantly, one scarce button resource, for each of the two companions; a scrawny mutt, howling and trying to dig its way under the fence. There’s also the combat, which flatters the fast action of Gears of War with its imitation whilst paying only token respect to the tactical deliberations of Knights of the Old Republic; a sleek dog that spends its time running in ever faster circles around the fence line, barking all the while.

This canine cacophony is driving me to distraction, and so I have to feed the dogs of deliberation, in order to silence them, if only for a little while. So excuse me while I publicly deliver them their food for thought: Bioware are going to bring Star Wars: The Old Republic to the consoles. I know. I know. There’s no evidence for it, and what little evidence there is points against the fact – for example, HeroEngine offers no support for anything other than the Windows platform, as far as we know – and yet the thought persists. Blizzard have always supported the Mac platform with their games wherever they could, and World of Warcraft was faithfully released for that platform, and a fine implementation it was too. Bioware are consistently getting their RPGs onto the console platform with considerable success; wouldn’t it make sense for them to release their biggest undertaking yet on those platforms too, and thus reap the benefits of a wider audience?

Bioware could take MMO popularity to even greater heights, as Blizzard did before them, if they can deliver a top tier MMO to both the PC and the console market.

Ah, peace: the dogs of deliberation are muzzled once more.

Until the next foolish notion lets them out.

The man on top of the mountain did not fall there.

I’m wondering what Blizzard will release as a counter to Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic; it is still my belief that they aim to time their game releases around those of their major competitors in order to cause maximum disruption, and thus not allow said competition a free run at gaining a foothold on the subscriber mountain. Many companies have tried to climb that mountain, and always there has been Blizzard, a few feet above, putting the Boot of Marketing in their faces and firmly but relentlessly pushing until yet another pretender to the title of King of the Mountain falls. Some MMO companies are sensible enough to not climb too quickly and use safety ropes on the way up, and thus when they fall they remain swinging, albeit helplessly, at the lower levels. Many others have fallen to their doom.

With SW:TOR looking to be heading towards an ’11 release date, what wrench will Blizzard throw in to the machine? Will they reserve Cataclysm for the duty, announcing later this year a delay to the expansion in order to ‘further improve the content’? I think that’s entirely feasible given the much-vaunted scope of work that is being undertaken.

Or will they, towards the end of this year, drop the bombshell announcement of their new MMO to be put into beta next year?

I imagine it will be the former, but I do wonder just how seriously Blizzard are taking the competition from Bioware: should they choose to use Cataclysm as their wrench and find that SW:TOR crushes it effortlessly between the cogs and gears of its own intractable machine, Blizzard will have that much more difficult a time regaining a footing with their new MMO against the newly established King of the Mountain.

The recently rumoured details of Blizzard’s new MMO, be they truth or fiction, come to light now, after Blizzard have managed to keep things pretty much entirely under wraps up to this point. Could this be the very first trickles of water leaking through those gigantic bulging, straining walls that dam the potential flood of hype water sitting behind? Did Blizzard themselves make the hole; have they armed the charges at the base of the dam; do they stand poised, detonator in hand, ready to unleash hype hell?

I think 2010 will probably not be a great year for MMO releases, but as far as MMO hype is concerned it’s going to be biblical, and the company that has built the biggest ark will find itself perched on top of the subscriber mountain when the floods subside.