EA Plans To Use Mass Effect Chat In Other Games

Via 1up, BusinessWeek has up an article examining Electronic Arts' recent purchase of BioWare. In amongst the discussion of money and diversifying the company, there's a note that we may see BioWare technologies show up in other EA games. "In what would arguably be a more interesting development, BioWare could become an incubator of innovative ideas and technologies that could eventually filter into EA's other properties. Gibeau envisions individual EA teams developing technical and gameplay expertise that could be shared across all of the company's titles. He cites, for instance, a dialogue system developed by BioWare for the upcoming Mass Effect game, which allows players to engage in hyperrealistic conversation with computer-generated characters. 'The dialogue engine is something we will almost immediately look at as an asset for other teams,' says Gibeau." For folks who just can't get enough Mass Effect, Sci-Fi is showing a special on the game right around its launch date later this month.

New Slogan!!

[FataL187]

I can't wait to hear the new slogan at the start of every EA game!

"Bioware's Code..It's in the Game!"

-FataL187

Good old EA

[closetpsycho]

When you can't think of a single original thought, buy someone who can.

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[IBBoard]

Yeah, great quote as:

BioWare could become an incubator of innovative ideas and technologies that could eventually filter into EA's other properties

translates as:

All we can do is push out more expansions and content packs for The Sims, or publish yet another "[insert sport] [insert latest year]" game, or steal the SimCity franchise from Maxis after buying them out, so instead we're going to let BioWare do all that hard work and then publish it under the EA brand with a minor note for BioWare and act as if we

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[Opportunist]

What's good for MS is good for the whole industry. Didn't you get the memo?

Nice.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

I can't wait to see how they incorporate this into Madden 2009.

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[ivormi]

But John Madden isn't capable of realistic dialogue! They'll have to get entirely new sports 'personalities' with phrases that extend beyond 'Boom!', and 'That'll Hurt!'.

Re:Nice.

[steveo777]

"Now here's a guy who, when he ties his shoes, can run faster."

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[Reapy]

In the running game when you are going to dodge a tackle, instead of juking, you can start a conversation with him, convincing him to follow his dreams and go off to become a ballerina.

Or maybe while you are on a time out you find out that the coach has lost his playbook!! You have to find it and return it to him for an overall AI boost! Unfortunately, it is guarded by the other team's mascot. You will have to use your stats you have developed over the season in the preseason minigames to defeat your foe!!

Unnecessary hyperbole

[Puff of Logic]

"Hyperrealistic"? In my view, "realistic" is the goal in many games and has yet to be seriously approached. I've been seeing the "hyper-" prefix showing up more and more frequently in game news and it's getting annoying. I can only hope that it gets relegated to the scrapheap of game journalism words, joining the scourge of 90's game hyperbole: "photorealistic".

That said, Mass Effect looks intriguing. Not hyperintriguing, but intriguing nonetheless!

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[OK PC]

Unfortunately, I can't mod you hyperinsightful!

Re:Unnecessary hyperbole

[Khuffie]

By your terms, shouldn't the subject be "Unnecessary Bole"?

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[Puff of Logic]

By your terms, shouldn't the subject be "Unnecessary Bole"?

Well-played, sir! Well-played indeed!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Hyperrealistic may not mean anything, by photorealism was an important art term [wikipedia.org] long before it ever got applied to CG or video games. [wikipedia.org]

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[rkanodia]

True. For me, when I hear the term 'photorealistic' being applied to computer graphics, I don't think of it as meaning "these graphics literally describe reality as closely as a photograph", but rather, that the intention is to approximate that as closely as possible. Obviously, the degree to which that approximation approaches its ideal changes over time as faster processors and new techniques (shadows, mip-mapping, bump-mapping, motion blur, light bloom, etc etc) are developed. It also changes in diffe

Hyper liberal tripe.

[AgentBif]

Yeah, heh. Man, I hate the extremist spin language people use just to make their opinion seem more important and worthy of attention. Nobody has any patience any more for reasoning or facts to back up an idea, they just heap on the marketing speak to get their message out.

For example, the other day Nancy Pelosi was on NPR talking about how they had "overwhelming bipartisan support" for some insurance bill or other. But it turns out that "overwhelming bipartisan support" wasn't overwhelming enough to e

been done.

[twoboxen]

Steam. Actually, that's something I like about steam. I can see when my brother is in a game, what game he's playing, and an easy link to join him. Plus, the chat can be easily accessed from any (steam-powered) game or from a stand-alone window.

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[C0rinthian]

They're not talking about a chat client. They're talking about the player to NPC dialog system Bioware developed for Mass Effect.

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[fbjon]

Dialog system, bah. In my days, all we had was "NAME", "JOB", and "I cannot help thee with that", and we were happy!

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[cthulu_mt]

Yeah, I made the same mistake. They don't clarify that its about NPC dialogue until the end.

Another bad summary...go figure.

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[IBBoard]

Your brother is a computer-generated character? Wow, I'd be interested to know how he gets online! I wonder how family meet-ups work - is it in Second Life or World of Warcrack?

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[Gibble]

If he's computer generated, wouldn't the problem be getting offline, not online?

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[IBBoard]

True, although with getting online then I worry about an in-game character being able to connect my computer to the Internet.

Can you imagine the police knocking on your door because a character in a game tried to hack the Pentagon or a bank from your machine while you were playing? Scary!

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[pdbaby]

Can you imagine the police knocking on your door because a character in a game tried to hack the Pentagon or a bank from your machine while you were playing?

Or started a spirated debate on Slashdot.

I'M ON TO YOU MR NPC

Xbox Live.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Hard to tell who copies who anymore, but it IS a nice feature on both systems. (Of course, on XBL, you'd have to find that game disc...)

cool

[nomadic]

He cites, for instance, a dialogue system developed by BioWare for the upcoming Mass Effect game, which allows players to engage in hyperrealistic conversation with computer-generated characters. 'The dialogue engine is something we will almost immediately look at as an asset for other teams,' says Gibeau.

One of the most incredibly irritating things about computer game evolution is how over the past 2 decades game dialogue has gotten dumbed down. It used to be that you had to actually look at what NPCs

Ugh. Yeah.

[Greyfox]

Hell, Ultima Online NPCs used to be moderately intelligent. You could ask them things in free-text format and they'd respond to what you said. It was not uncommon to see new players fooled into believing the NPCs were actual player characters. Sometime along they way them dumbed them down severely. I always thought they were taking it in the wrong direction. You can write a chatbot that's pretty convincing about its own limited sphere of knowledge. You SHOULD be able to chat with the blacksmith about blacks

Hyper Realistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm excited about this game and all, especially the dialog system. Let's not describe it as "hyper realistic", however. When I talk to people in real life, I don't get 3 choices and they usually don't range from good to evil.

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[Bee1zebub]

They should buy the conversation engine behind the barman in Deus Ex. If you can't talk philosophy with some random guy in the game, the conversation engine isn't good enough. Of course, if I were to try to discuss Plato with a gun-toting grunt, then I would expext him to just kill me, or, if I were on his side, knock me out.

Meh.

[NeutronCowboy]

Again, EA seems to miss the point. What's so cool about the chat system in Mass Effect isn't really the quick selection of a general approach. It's the fact that the characters actually have believable reactions. Watching the videos, I'm amazed at the fact that the characters show actual emotion. And I'm not talking about the standard sneer in Halo, the generic fear, but the fact that eyes shift, bodies hunch, flinch, eyelids move and twitch.... it's the whole package.

Yeah, we're gonna see the Mass Effect s

Disgruntled PC Gamer

[Midnight Voyager]

Good. Now go make the damn game for PC, too. *disgruntled*

And what games are going to have this?

[Opportunist]

I'm fairly sure, all EA games, but for which will it make sense? I can't really see the fun in talking my enemies in the next Battlefield incarnation into stopping firing at me (or rather, if I can it really sucks), nor does it make much sense for any of the sports franchise to get into a lengthy conversation with your opponent during a game.

But I guess when there's no real progress possible anymore, we resort to calling little changes some big breakthroughs. What we'd really need would be something new and