413 réponses à ce sujet

[Genshie]

Does anyone have any knowledge of lead writers leaving 10-18 months before the release of a title and that title coming out being amazing?  I'm just curious.  All I can think about is how Destiny turned out when they lost their lead writer and the story.. well, the game launched without a story, basically.  People will claim there is one, but I played the game, beat it, and I don't understand what it could possibly be.  I feel like the entire game was just the opening cinematic and setup.

 

 

This is very unlikely since Destiny was written with multiple players playing the heroes at the same time mind set. (In short like an MMO except like a quasi MMO or Bordlerlands just without the funny or any originality) Mass Effect's focus is the player mainly. The only saving grace Destiny has is that it is a pretty decent shooter. That is it.

 

Adding-on: Destiny= PSO2 if it was bad. 

[marcelo caldas]

Blaming ME3 for ME2 being pointless makes absolutely no sense. ME2 accomplished nothing. Trying to hinge ME3's plot on what ME2 did would be like trying to hang your coat on a wall of glass.

"ME2 accomplished nothing" besides being the most fun and replayable game of the series, and setting a new standart to characters, hance ME3's need for Citadel DLC.

[marcelo caldas]

Back on track, I realy fear for ME:A, IMO the whole going to Andromeda thing was a bad idea, a bad idea to fix a bunch of bad ideas. Also bringing a guy from Halo and changing the staff to the guys who did MP and Omega dlc...

But I realy hope they get around it, ME is still the best games I played, and everything is depending on MEA.

[Rahmiel]

For what it's worth, I highly doubt this'll go the way of Destiny. Andromeda has several writers, all of whom are contributing a great deal to its script, and more importantly, BioWare isn't going to go as story-light as Destiny. It just... isn't. A changed story this late in production could be troubling, but just uprooting the darn thing wholesale and shipping without one? It wouldn't fly critically, not for a BioWare title, and bad reviews will upset sales, and so forth.

 

The point wasn't that it will turn out like destiny.  The point is that what was planned as destiny's original story actually sounded like a story!  (since it didn't launch that way, all we have is speculation that it would have been better).  And what we got, is some repeatable throw away piecemeal coles notes.  Destiny and ME:A are two completely different games in different genres, and bioware and bungie are two completely different companies.  That said, I was curious if there was an instance in the game industry where the lead writer of a project left 10-18 months before launch and the product turned out alright.

 

I'm not trying to say, "oh, what happened to destiny is the story we should expect", I'm trying to say, "from what happened to destiny, I'm worried the story we get will be a shadow of what was originally planned."

 

On to your second point.. destiny has sold well and continues (to my knowledge) sell well even given all the troubles it's had.  If anything, it's so bad, and people want it to be so good, that it remains on the tips of everyone's tongue and in the media, etc.  That type of exposure you just can't buy.

 

Am I worried ME:A will turn out like destiny?  No.  Am I worried that ME:A will be a mess or mashup of x number of people's own vision of the game?  Certainly.  But if someone is able to cite a great game that released where the lead writer of the project left around a year before launch.. awesome, that'll ease my worries.

[Ahriman]

 

That said, I was curious if there was an instance in the game industry where the lead writer of a project left 10-18 months before launch and the product turned out alright.

Well, concept-designers and writers end their job first. I don't know exact development cycle of Bioware, but you can look at inXile for example.

March 2012 - Wasteland 2 Kickstarter campaign.

March 2013 - Torment Kickstarter campaign - writers and artists are already free at that point, so Fargo launches second campaign instead of firing them.

September 2014 - Wasteland 2 release.

[Jaquio]

  That said, I was curious if there was an instance in the game industry where the lead writer of a project left 10-18 months before launch and the product turned out alright.

 

 

Well, I'd say Mass Effect 2 but a lot of people in this thread think that it didn't turn out good.  It had a 94 metacritic score though, so it can't be that bad.

 

Drew Karpyshyn left BW Edmonton (and thus work on ME2) to work on a different IP in BW Austin in spring 2009 before leaving the company in 2012.

Chris L'Etoile left BW in late? 2008.

 

So ME2 lost its lead writer and one of its main writers 8-15 months before its January 2010 release date.

[Killroy]

"ME2 accomplished nothing" besides being the most fun and replayable game of the series, and setting a new standart to characters, hance ME3's need for Citadel DLC.

Do you not know what 'plot' means?

[RZIBARA]

So is he out or what?

[Vortex13]

This is very unlikely since Destiny was written with multiple players playing the heroes at the same time mind set. (In short like an MMO except like a quasi MMO or Bordlerlands just without the funny or any originality) Mass Effect's focus is the player mainly. The only saving grace Destiny has is that it is a pretty decent shooter. That is it.

 

Adding-on: Destiny= PSO2 if it was bad. 

 

 

Phantasy Star Online: Episodes 1 & 2: A third person RPG could be played online or offline with up to 4 player split screen. 

 

Destiny: A first person RPS (Roleplaying Shooter) can only be played online and only 1 player per console. 

 

Even Borderlands was able to improve on the multiplayer aspect for the Pre-sequel by going from 2 to 4 player split screen, on top of having more RPG depth and story than Destiny. 

 

/rant

 

 

Back to the main topic, I am concerned about the departure in that if the rumors are true then working conditions at BioWare are not that great. As for what this means for the story quality; I'm unsure. One can assume that the loss of the lead writer at this point could spell disaster for the consistent flow of the narrative, but truth be told I was kind of on the fence about ME:A's main plot before. 

 

Creative leads and writers like Mac Walters and Chris Schlerf were always way too human centric in their works for my tastes. I really wish that someone like Chris L'Etoile would be in charge of things to be honest. At the very least we would get a diverse setting with unique aliens; not Pinocchio wannabes and rubber fore headed humans.

[Dantriges]

I hope that he didn´t leave because there was some infighting within the writing department about creative differences.

[LinksOcarina]

Do you not know what 'plot' means?

 

Do you understand narrative over plot?

[Killroy]

Do you understand narrative over plot?

Do you understand that I said plot, not narrative?

[marcelo caldas]

Do you not know what 'plot' means?

Plot?

[Innocent Bystander]

Do you not know what 'plot' means?

What exactly is your point? Most of ME3 you're not stopping Reapers, you're flying around the galaxy, playing Space Police for races that rather than uniting against common enemy make more problems for you to solve.

If you'd cut out everything that has little to nothnig to do with stopping Rapers, you'd get something like this:

Intro on Earth - discovering Crucible's blueprint - two hour cutscene 'how we built Crucible' - Priority: Earth

Maybe even less than ME2 did.

[Killroy]

What exactly is your point? Most of ME3 you're not stopping Reapers, you're flying around the galaxy, playing Space Police for races that rather than uniting against common enemy make more problems for you to solve.
If you'd cut out everything that has little to nothnig to do with stopping Rapers, you'd get something like this:
Intro on Earth - discovering Crucible's blueprint - two hour cutscene 'how we built Crucible' - Priority: Earth
Maybe even less than ME2 did.

Uniting the galaxy to fight the Reapers is the same as solving your squadmates' daddy issues?

[RoboticWater]

Uniting the galaxy to fight the Reapers is the same as solving your squadmates' daddy issues?

In a sense. Both requrie you to complete missions to gain the trust of certain individuals necessary to complete your mission.

[marcelo caldas]

Uniting the galaxy to fight the Reapers is the same as solving your squadmates' daddy issues?

Fighting a war without trying to kill reapers while building something you do not know what it does... I can't even grasp how this idea passed the initial brainstorm meeting

[Han Shot First]

So is he out or what?

 

At this point it seems like he is no longer with Bioware.

 

There is a lot of speculation here and elsewhere (Neogaf) that he's either left or been terminated, and Bioware isn't saying a word about it. If he were still with Bioware I'd expect someone would have already waded into this thread to say that he's still hard at work on Andromeda.

[pdusen]

I blame ME1. It threw us head-first into the impending Reapocalypse without taking the time to establish a "normal".

 

ME1 should have been us solving some smaller (but still super important) crisis, as a way of introducing the protagonist, the setting and the cast of characters (i.e. the "normal"). Perhaps Saren worked for the Reapers but he was a lot more subtle about it.

 

ME2 would have been fine roughly as is. We're solving the Collector abduction crisis. Only toward the end do we find out that they're just preparing the way for the Reapocalypse.

 

ME3: actual Reapocalypse, but different than how we got it, obviously.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Telling any sort of story without letting us first establish who our character is is never going to work, because we won't have a coherent perspective from which to experience the story.

The entire ME series made the player an outsider from the start, thus denying us any meaningful engagement with the plot throughout.

Add to that the tedious gameplay (except for ME1, which broke up the story with fun exploration) and we're left with a boring trilogy.

[Rahmiel]

Well, concept-designers and writers end their job first. I don't know exact development cycle of Bioware, but you can look at inXile for example.

March 2012 - Wasteland 2 Kickstarter campaign.

March 2013 - Torment Kickstarter campaign - writers and artists are already free at that point, so Fargo launches second campaign instead of firing them.

September 2014 - Wasteland 2 release.

 

See, that's the concern I think everyone has.  Whether or not this departure is simply due to a job being completed and someone moving on.. or whether or not he's been let go because they're going in a different direction or he wasn't fulfilling the vision they had for the game.  You know?

 

But we'll find out in time.  I'm also really curious if this series can survive the shift to andromeda.  I'm all for exploring and new stories/enemies, etc. but having a new setting in the future of the mass effect universe.. I don't know if I can attach to that.  If there's no significant improvement in the technology used in the universe, then what's the point?  I don't want that stagnant feel that star wars has with KOTOR.  Just sucks how in Mass Effect 1, you're introduced to the whole galactic stage, and now in ME:A, you're learning a new galaxy.  But the technology has to be far superior if it's been over 100 years or more, imo.

[Han Shot First]

 

But the technology has to be far superior if it's been over 100 years or more, imo.

 

Not necessarily...

 

The protagonist might be a first generation colonist who was born in the Milky Way. If the colonists get there on a ship travelling at FTL, while they take cryosleep naps, it will take them at least a couple centuries to get there.

[Killroy]

In a sense. Both requrie you to complete missions to gain the trust of certain individuals necessary to complete your mission.

Riiiiiiiiight.
Running errands for squadmates so they can get over their daddy issues before taking on the nonsensical "suicide mission" is the same as curing the Genophage to unite species after a millenia-long feud.   
 

Fighting a war without trying to kill reapers while building something you do not know what it does... I can't even grasp how this idea passed the initial brainstorm meeting

I never said the plot to ME3 was good. I only said the plot to ME2 was pointless(and the game itself pure filler) and that ME3 can't be blamed for that.

[FKA_Servo]

"ME2 accomplished nothing" besides being the most fun and replayable game of the series, and setting a new standart to characters, hance ME3's need for Citadel DLC.

 

If by "new standart to characters" you mean superfluously huge cast of characters that don't get enough development to merit their inclusion in the first place. It's also where the overarching storyline started running around with its pants around its ankles.

 

Mass Effect 2 was a lot of fun to play, in that they tightened up the gameplay considerably, but Mass Effect 3 was more fun to play than Mass Effect 2 for the same reasons. As a sequel to ME1, ME2 is awful. Its replayability is likely due to the fact that it's 95% composed of sidequests that are (mostly) more fun and interesting than the 4 main story missions railroading you into working for the galaxy's least interesting shadowy organization.

[RoboticWater]

Telling any sort of story without letting us first establish who our character is is never going to work, because we won't have a coherent perspective from which to experience the story.

Not as long as there are distinct characters to latch onto. Shepard, much like generic protagonists in books or movies (think Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, etc.) is mostly blank and an easy pair of pants to fill in.
 
As long as the player has a well developed cast with distinct perspectives to identify with, they can engage themselves with the story.
 

The entire ME series made the player an outsider from the start, thus denying us any meaningful engagement with the plot throughout.

That's just classic hero's journey: absolute nobody ventures from the normal world to a more interesting one. Many of the most successful stories are told through this same outsider's perspective.
 

Add to that the tedious gameplay (except for ME1, which broke up the story with fun exploration) and we're left with a boring trilogy.

And I'm not even going to start on this one.

Riiiiiiiiight.
Running errands for squadmates so they can get over their daddy issues before taking on the nonsensical "suicide mission" is the same as curing the Genophage to unite species after a millenia-long feud.

Yes.
The scales are different, but the concepts are the same. In ME3, you're trying to save a race and in ME2 you're saving an individual; however, the emotional stakes are the same. For most players the reasons why they're helping Mordin and curing the Genophage or helping Tali and resolving the Geth conflict are the same. They care about the individuals involved.