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BioWare Founders On 2003, Future Prospects 34

Posted by simoniker from the ware's-the-drool? dept.
Thanks to C+VG for their interview with BioWare founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk, discussing "their thoughts on the videogames of the past year [and] potential future developments" for their own company. They lament that "one of the most unfortunate things happening in the industry today is the demise of the small independent developer", and note they're "working on three new games, all set in BioWare-created intellectual properties, right now" (lending credence to the previous rumor that the BioWare-affiliated Obsidian Entertainment may be creating the sequel to Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, which sports an external IP.) The internal BioWare projects include the already-announced Xbox action-RPG Jade Empire, as well as "a PC RPG inspired by our own past work on both the Baldur's Gate series and Neverwinter Nights."
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BioWare Founders On 2003, Future Prospects More

BioWare Founders On 2003, Future Prospects

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  • Okay so Bioware has just announced they're making sequel games to KOTOR and NWN, though I understand that KOTOR is built from a lot of the same code base that NWN used (certainly some elements of the look and feel for the games are the same).

    This really doesn't seem like news, "Games company making sequels based on reasonably popular games".

    At least they're making some nice roleplaying games, unlike Interplay who are too busy knifing some of their best development studios.

    • RTFE (Read The Fucking Excerpt) (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Okay so Bioware has just announced they're making sequel games to KOTOR and NWN
      No they didn't. They announced the exact opposite.

    • Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Drakin ( 415182 )
      What are you reading?

      Bioware has stated they've got 3 projects in the works.

      1 X-Box game, Jade Empire.
      1 PC game, no title known.
      1 other game with no info.

      -all- of them are being done with thier own intellectual property.

      They'll likely use updated versions of the Aurora (NWN) or Odyssey (KotOR) engines for the games, because why make yet another engine. But they won't even be useing the same rules system, they're making thier own.
    • The 2 announced games are original IPs, they are not sequels. I can't say anything about the the other game.
  • i'm a huge fan of the work bioware does - especially the baldur's gate series - since imho they pretty much revived a dying genre. baldur's gate 1 was a nostalgia trip for me to the days of the bard's tale and ultimas and ultima underworlds and all the classic epic RPGs. sure there were a few gems here and there throughout the years, like eye of the beholder, the fallouts, planescape torment, system shock 1&2, but i don't think the RPG genre was as popular as it is these days. i'm not one to point fi
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Erm, Baldur's Gate will run on a 64Mb Pentium 200 with an old TNT card (that's the machine I first played it on). If you can't make those specs, throw your PC out and spend $50 on a secondhand box that can handle it; it's worth it. Baldur's Gate II is superior in every aspect to the first game and doesn't require much more in terms of hardware.

  • BioWare...Eh.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mitleid ( 734193 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @10:04AM (#7827181)
    Is it just me, or does anyone else find BioWare EXTREMELY overated? I guess it would be safe to say I fell into the hype of SW:KOTOR this summer when it was released, and sadly it was one of the primary reasons I went out and purchased an XBOX. Well, I bought the game new days after it was released, and to this day I have never gotten any further into it than maybe 6 or 8 hours. It just hasn't grabbed me. People rave about the open-endedness and the impact your character choices have on the game, but I've found the character development to be incredibly limited and the story incredibly boring. Take a game like Fallout (1&2). Brilliant games. The difference it seems is that between a game like Fallout and SW:KOTOR is that in KOTOR, a character that you choose to develop as a "Thief" is more of a cosmetic gameplay mechanic than anything else. In the end, KOTOR comes down to how strong your character is in battle. In Fallout, if you wanted to play as a "thief" you could, and nothing was stopping you from stealing anything and everything you wanted, sneaking around wherenever and whenever, etc. A game like KOTOR only encourages those possibilities to a certain degree, then brings you crashing back down to earth when it is time to progress the story ...Here we go, another battle that is going to be unbelievably hard unless you have a party full of "fighters"... I don't mean to say that BioWare is a bad developer; I've enjoyed many of their games over the past years, but I honestly have to say I'm not very impressed with their most recent releases (NWN and KOTOR) and I just think they are received WAY TOO MUCH credit; much more than they deserve. It just seems like in the end its all just boiling down to hack and slash. Eh, maybe that's all people want and I'm just missing the point entirely.
    • It's just you. Bioware is an oasis in the desert that passes for the quality and imagination of the game industry.

    • Re:BioWare...Eh.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by superultra ( 670002 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @10:46AM (#7827405) Homepage
      It sounds like quite specifically what you didn't like about KOTOR was the lack of thieving ability. There is that (obviously you never got far enough), but I'll concede that it definitely is not as developed as Fallout. Why? Because thieving doesn't really fit into the Star Wars universe. Star Wars has always been about having huge epic battles, and sneaking around in the shadows is just not what characterizes Star Wars.

      As far as the story, if you've only played 6-8 hours you probably haven't seen enough of the story to care. I'm one that believes a game should grab you by the collars within the first hour otherwise it's useless, and KOTOR definitely did that for me. Nevertheless, the story does pick up. Moreover, what was great about KOTOR was the fact that if you sat there and talked to everyone over and over again, the story became much more detailed and full of subplots. If you had just talked to everyone one time and went on your merry little way, you're probably missing a huge chunk of these highly intricate character development subplots.

      For me, KOTOR was one of the few games in which character development does occur. Moreover, it's only one of the only games I've played in which I really cared about the NPCs and what happened to them; they really had enough dimension to them for me to be concerned about whether they completed their own personal quests. Which is far more than I can say for Episode I & II. Sigh.
      • Well, I won't deny that a thief-based character is my preference when it comes to role playing games, but that aside I just found KOTOR to be a bit to restrictive in regards to the character development in general. Eh, maybe I just need to sit down with the game and quit worrying about how I think the game SHOULD be played and just play it... But that's just my opinion; I'm not saying KOTOR is a bad game; in fact I find it incredibly polished and thorough. I just didn't feel BioWare deserved so much credit

        • Re:BioWare...Eh.... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Slider451 ( 514881 )
          But RPG pioneers, I still have a hard time declaring them as such.

          If you'd played Baldur's Gate I the year it came out, when the RPG had been declared a dead genre by all the major game critics, you wouldn't be saying that.
      • Amen, Brother!
        I had serious doubts about buying this game, even after reading many rave reviews and all... It's Star Wars, right? The same universe in which the new movies suck horribly? :)
        But the first day I played, I was up till 2:30am, trying to do "just one more thing". It's been years (probably Fallout) since I've done that.
        You're right about the SW=battles there... I was giddy when I first started kicking ass as a Jedi :)
        The thing about the character classes - why make such a stupid distinction? Compl

  • xbox fantasy rpg (Score:1, Redundant)

    by *weasel ( 174362 )
    all i want is a good xbox fantasy rpg. something like kotor, but in a fantasy setting. and morrowind just didn't do it for me. (a little -too- open-ended. the main story didn't pull me in whatsoever). and i'm beginning to doubt fable actually exists.

    that jade empire thing... meh, i like my fantasy a little more generic. i know, i'm not hardcore, something must be wrong with me, etc, etc. but i don't care to 'explore' a world that tries to deviate from the tolkien-archetypes for no reason.

    If the story de
    • Hmmm... and I thought Kotor was so great precisely because it didn't have all those cliched elements.
      I loved Fallout2 because it was futuristic (and had many realistic guns). System Shock2, you guessed it, in the future. Even old games that tried it, like Buck Rogers RPG, now that was fun. The only challenge is to balance those games... after a while, you get the feeling you're just looking at a sea of stats, since you have no idea of how a poly-alloy armor is different from a titanium/chrome bodysuit.

      Have

      • Re:xbox fantasy rpg (Score:3, Interesting)

        by *weasel ( 174362 )
        i rented KOTOR, loved it. plan on buying it with holiday cash.

        but it got me right into the story because it -did- have cliched elements. you -knew- the universe. Jedi are predominantly good, wookies are predominantly good, rhodians are questionable, etc. The story set up who you are, what you did, what the call to adventure is, what you 'should' do next, and where you shouldn't go. it left things open but you knew where to go to move 'forward' when you were done exploring a given area.

        what i'm complaini
  • Forgotten Realms, I'll be happy. NWN and Baulder's Gate were and still are cool games, and from what they said in the interview there will be another Forgotten Realms game(they said based on NWN and Baulder's Gate), hopefully they will put out a Linux port for it too.
  • The Baldur's Gate series are some of my favorite games, so I'm thrilled at the mere rumor of a sequel coming out of BioWare. However, recently Slashdot mourned the passing of Black Isle Studios [slashdot.org]. At the time, I got the impression that no more Black Isle meant no more Baldur's Gate. Apparently, I was wrong. I think this is because I've never really understood the relationship between Black Isle and BioWare. Could someone enlighten me as to who was responsible for what?

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