I'm hoping it's just a Sophomore Slump for both series, and the third entry of both series will get back on track.
..honestly, Bioware has always been light on the truly great story-telling. They've had exceptions, such as add-ons for NWN, certain parts in KOTOR, and some areas in Mass Effect. But you can tell that they just don't have the discipline to pull it off consistently.
Take Dragon Age: Origins. There's reams and piles of scripts poured into the game. And you feel compelled to suffer through all of it, because sometimes there are these gems hidden away on some side-quest, or in a cave off on an island.
But when Bioware avoids that, and creates a more "economic" narrative - then it's just autotypic hollywood action directed towards "sounding" right, rather than actually having a purpose. That's the main problem in Mass Effect, and what dominates ME2. That large parts of the narrative, specially the set pieces that evidently were planned early on - just are not very good, and have absolutely no purpose for driving the story. While the good writing (and writing/gameplay integration) is literally hidden away on a sidequest on a random remote ice-planet. <_< I mean, what are the best parts of ME2? Is it the main plot? Or is it some optional random situation in the middle of a quest - that has no bearing whatsoever on the main event?
In other words - without the masses of random dialogue and locations added on top of the "main project", Bioware simply do not produce games worth playing. And obviously, EA thinks the opposite is true. That more streamlined games launched more often - without all the random stuff - is going to be great. ..Bioware will have to improve leaps and bounds before that becomes true.
I mean, that's the real problem with video-games. In theory, a streamlined and cinematic experience sounds great. But it's not why we play games, is it? It's not what role-playing scenario writers, or video-game roleplayers want to see either.
Meanwhile, any attempts to actually write good "video-game narratives" are met with skepticism, and accused of lacking appeal (even though they end up selling really well, such as Heavy Rain). So how is that working out for Bioware? Like other large parts of the video-game business, creating "mainstream" titles sounds compelling and great on the paper - but they're going to have a hard time actually selling the games in the end.
Or... selling bad movies with little to no interactivity to fans of interactive story-telling. It's simply not going to work. Basically, EA is trading one niche-audience (crpg-players) for another (b and c-movie fantasts).
Retour en haut
