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."
BioWare - Downhill Since BG 1&2 (Score:0, Interesting)
Baldur's Gate was amazing.
Baldur's Gate II was amazing.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was ok.
Jade Empire was meh.
Mass Effect was an embarrassment.
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.
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.
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Re:Dragon Age will never have the community of NWN (Score:1, Interesting)
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 Content. The customizability of games these days is therefore an afterthought, if it's there at all.
It's the same thing with getting rid of LAN play, which is all about reducing piracy. If you have to log into their servers every time you play multiplayer, they can validate you and make sure you're not a stinkin' pirate. I can understand the attitude and sympathize with it somewhat, but it's still a symptom of a serious problem with games these days: the design department is subservient to the marketing department. They would rather make an inferior game that brings in more money than a superior game that brings in less.
I'll admit that to a certain extent, they have to do that, otherwise they end up with something like Duke Nukem Forever, trying to accomplish so much without regard to how they're going to pay for it that it never does get made. I just think most game companies these days have lost the thrill of making games for the sake of making them, and now just see dollar signs everywhere.
Re:Dragon Age will never have the community of NWN (Score:3, Interesting)