I'm an old, old Bioware gamer. I played Baldur's Gate when it was still new (and crashed frequently), and I've played every RPG sold by Bioware over the years.
Except Mass Effect 3. Except Dragon Age 3 when it comes out. Except for Star Wars: The Old Republic. You see, Bioware drifted away from what I was interested in doing with my gaming time.
Every single decision Bioware has made since Neverwinter Nights was produced - and some decisions affecting that title, too - has pushed me further out of the nest. Let me mention the trends.
1. "Don't Walk On The Grass." Players are given tight spaces where they can move around like rats in a maze. They see incredible scenes but cannot enter them. It gets worse with every title. Recent titles are all gauntlet designs. Being able to discover new territory and explore it is tightly constrained. The desire to walk on the damn grass is what drew me to BethSoft's Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, and though their stories aren't the equal of Bioware's, they're infinitely more engaging games.
2. "Don't Tweak My Creation." Bioware really only succeeded with one game in allowing players to create content: Neverwinter Nights. Though creation tools were released for Dragon Age 1 and 2, they're crippled, and never led to very much content being generated. Aside: if you want to make insane profits, sevelop the creation kit first, refine the hell out of it, make it intuitive and fun to use and easy to create narratives and places and objects. Then turn your developers loose and watch their productivity soar. As a bonus for your users, release the kit and watch the universe expand even more.
The Mass Effect and Dragon Age games cry out for more worlds, and larger real estate on worlds, which users would happily supply if they had decent tools. Without them, the game becomes a treadmill, always the same every time through with very few and very canned exceptions. And though tools were released for Dragon Age 1 and 2, the dearth of interest among players in using them to produce great mods tells the tale.
The small, cramped real estate in those games which players have to explore also tells the tale. Given the capabilities of modern PCs, capabilities which are being exploited by other game studios to good effect, small and cramped real estate is a symptom of poor developer tools. Bioware's own staff struggled mightily with them to produce barely enough content to justify marketing it.
3. "Dumb Down the Inventory Management Interface." Bioware somehow got it into its head that the complexities of inventory management and upgrades were boring to the users, and so they sucked the life out of it. In later games you have no control at all over your companions' inventories at all.
Here's a hint: Baldur's Gate was fun *precisely* because it required so much effort to fine-tune inventory, to distribute the right items to the right people, to make hard choices, to haul around and sell tons of loot. Neverwinter Nights eased up on that only a little bit, and that was all right, but the games which followed have carried the trend to an unpleasant extreme. Now it's all tactics all the time; inventory hardly matters at all, except possibly as a vanity thing for screenshots. It makes the games lifeless.
4. "Restrict Player Choices and Consequences." In Mass Effect 2, in Dragon Age 2, this trend reached its futile culmination. No matter who you side with, the outcome is very nearly the same. Oh, but your choices can influence the fate of companions. Not in any straightforward way, mind you. If you forget to buy a toothbrush on Tuesday, they drop dead from a missile hit three years later. Logic is strained. Supposedly, discovering through multiple play-throughs how improbable player choices result in even less probable outcomes is a draw, urging the player to play again and again, right? Not so much, Bioware. Not so much.
5. "Climb on the MMORPG Bandwagon." When Bioware announced a sequel for KOTR, I was ecstatic. When they finally admitted they were making an MMORPG, I lost my sense of ecstacy. And, yup, all the things I hate about MMORPGs are in the new Star Wars offering. Farmers. Real-world money purchasing in-game stuff. Cartoonish combat sequences. And over a million people whose starting premise is that they are the One Hero For The Ages (or Villain), all telling each other the experiences they've had which every other player will experience in exactly the same way. You don't have to look far to see how wrong the vision of Star Wars is. In lore, Jedi are damned rare and damned powerful relative to anyone else. But in the MMORPG, everyone has to achieve parity, and there are more Jedi than lore admits is possible, and not just Jedi, but Heroic (or Villainous) Jedi around whom the fate of the Galaxy turns. Hundreds of thousands of them. It turns my stomach, it does.
Hint: you can't pretend you're the savior (or destroyer) of the galaxy if you aren't unique, or nearly so. It's a source of enormous cognitive dissonance to have more than a million of the buggers running around and bragging. I think MMORPGs can be produced that would be fun to play, but not with this starting premise. For an RPer, it's a disaster.
6. "Want to Play with a Buddy? You Can't." Neverwinter Nights was the last Bioware title that let buddies team up to experience an adventure together. And it didn't work terribly well there, not with the single player campaigns being all gussied up with cut-scenes. In player-created worlds, though, small multiplayer had some traction. Better than nothing. But the trend line twisted in a new direction after NWN. Bioware no longer seems interested in serving the market with buddy play.
When BIoware announced Dragon Age as the successor to Baldur's Gate (and Neverwinter Nights), I imagined people would create community servers, go adventuring together, use a brand-new spiffy game engine with superior graphics. We got the superior graphics. That's all we got. It's a lot like expecting steak for supper and being served oatmeal.
Bottom line: Bioware was once a company that pushed the art of game design to amazing heights, given the capabilities of earlier-generation PCs. Baldur's Gate is *still* fun to play. That game catapulted Bioware onto the world stage of gaming and earned it enormous respect. Though it's presented in chapters, within chapters you could do anything at all that you took it in your head to do, almost, and you could even do it with a buddy. NWN spawned an enormous mod community whose enthusiasm kept the title alive far longer than is normal for a PC game. What happened?
Now it's designs are dominated by cramped gauntlets and a "don't walk on the grass" design philosophy that hasn't kept pace with the capabilities of modern PCs, which can do so much more. Player modding is almost dead. Playing with buddies *is* dead. There's no reason to play through a Modern Bioware title more than once, then put it on the shelf and forget about it, except for the Star Wars MMORPG which has the exact same flaws (to me, fatal flaws) as other MMORPGs and breaks very little fresh ground.
I honestly think every single trend I've mentioned emerges out of a struggle within Bioware to develop useful creation tools, a struggle which has not been going at all well. Less inventory to manage means less for Bioware staff to do with crappy creation tools. Gauntlet designs means less real estate to create. No buddy system means less game engine work. Restricting player choices to meaningless companion outcomes means less stress for people trying to use bad tools to produce a game. Bioware seems to have decided to limp along on lousy creation tools for single-player games while banking on its lucrative future being with MMORPGs. I'm just waiting for a Bioware announcement that it will take Mass Effect in that direction.
As for Dragon Age, it's a damaged franchise. As others have so often asked, how many times can you see the exact same cave before you're sick of it? Good stories can't overcome lousy creation tools.
You asked for customer input. Here's mine. Put Dragon Age 3 on hold. Spend the next two years, or more if you need them, working hard on developing the next generation of content creation tools. *Then* make the game. No more need to squeeze down designs and produce cramped games. Think big, plan big. Aim to show that Bioware can still push the envelope in RPG gaming and make a current-generation PC gasp with effort. While you're at it, get excited about reviving buddy play, modding,and small community servers, and release great tools with the game.
And if you're determined to keep pumping out MMORPG titles, then for the sake of RPers everywhere, don't try to write stories which place more than a million players in the role of Savior or Destroyer. Tone it down a few notches; let people be ordinary adventurers. No galaxy needs a million Revens. It would be great if you could do something about farming and real-world money polluting in-game acquisitions, too, and if you take Dragon Age in the MMORPG direction, don't cartoonize the animations more than they already are. Keep it sort of real, eh?
Good luck to you.
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