BioWare On Building a Community For Dragon Age 34
Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare, sat down with Gamasutra to discuss upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins, as well as some of the features they're working on for release alongside the game. In particular, they are interested in building a framework for players to show off their characters and share stories about the gameplay they encounter.
"We're creating a community site that's going to enable the fans to get revved up about what each other is doing. They're showing their choices and consequences to friends. Even though it's single-player, you can still reveal those choices to each other and have fun doing it. It enables some of that stuff that occurs anecdotally amongst friends at the water cooler: 'Hey, did you play this yet? Did you go this way?' 'No, I didn't run into that. I did it this way.' 'Really? I didn't run into that at all!' You can meet people who are across the world and enable them to see those kinds of things, too, which I think will lead to a lot of fun discussion and collaboration in the community."
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Jade Empire was pretty fun too, so your taste in games obviously ain't that great anyhow.
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Bioware continues to release really solid games.
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Selling out to EA just made it official. They either lost the magic the had back in the BG days or simply don't give a shit anymore.
It sounds like a cool game and I might buy it if it were available on a Mac even if it is EA. I've had too many bad experiences with EA titles to really trust them.
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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was perfect.
Jade Empire was amazing.
Mass Effect was fun, for a RPG/FPS.
There, fixed it for you...
You say KotOR was ok? and it won like 30-40 Game of the year awards? are you sure we are talking about the same game?
And while Jade Empire was not perfect, it was still extremely fun(from the guy who is playing it for a third time...)
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You're entitled to your opinion, but clearly a lot of people don't share it.
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Mass Effect fail? LOL
Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. Mass Effect was a great game and created many new fans for BioWare. If ME2 improves on ME few setbacks, it will prove a great game.
My only concern is the economy right now.
The first DLC was pretty good, but the second, Pinnacle Station was terrible and a waste.
But overall, the Mass Effect story is really good.
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I agree, Mass Effect was awesome and well worth repeat playthroughs. What it perhaps lost, compared so some RPGs, in the multitude of paths through the game (although there was still a decent amount of choice here) it more than won back through the cinematic presentation, well-directed cutscenes and great voice acting + dialogue. It felt like playing through a great movie. And your choices could have pretty epic effects on the fate of your party and the galaxy - effects which will be carried through to M
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Eh. (Score:2)
I liked the BGs; I like Mass Effect more. (I don't love its combat system, but BG's was the weak point of those games for me, too.) I say this as someone who was an old-school FR/D&D gamer and who generally doesn't care for the kind of Sci-Fi that ME's setting/story is.
They're all good games and what appeals to you more is largely, I think, a matter of personal taste.
Really, the gamers want this? (Score:3, Insightful)
The community is mature enough to create their own sites, and these sites are usually much better and useful then the sites provided by the companies creating and publishing games. Just look at Wikia gaming [wikia.com], Strategywiki [strategywiki.org], and so on.
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Well, quite. The official forums form a useful first port of call for all players, and if the idea is to brag about your 1337 character build, then presumably you want the biggest audience for your ego.
When the Forum Nazis take over, then 3rd party sites become necessary, but proactive fragmenting of the community seems a little premature.
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The official site is good for news and updates. It is the first place where one should go if he needs the news from the source.
On the other hand, for forums, guides, maps, trading, and other similar stuff the non-official community sites are just better.
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
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To me it sounds like... a forum. Just an ordinary forum.
Is it suprising that BioWare is apparently re-inventing the wheel? No, because in another BioWare interview they talked about inventing adventure games. I mean what they were describing was simply an adventure game, but they were making it seem like some totally new concept.
I don't know what their problem is.
Dragon Age will never have the community of NWN (Score:5, Interesting)
From early testers, here's the list of missing features and/or limitations: some of these are insane.
From: _______________________________________
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That's uhm, wierd.
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It's like Neverwinter Nights, only less so!
Let's face it; the golden age of PC gaming is over. It peaked with games like Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights, when you could buy one game and with the community built around it end up with fifty games' worth of extra content. Then the companies who made the games saw that and thought, "There's a market here. Forget letting the community create the content; let's make it ourselves and charge for it." Thus free community content morphed into paid Downloadable C
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Neither Morrowind nor NWN can match the modding capabilities of FPS games. Also, NWN was pretty lame as a game.