Frequently when discussing a game idea or a concept, people will often (and foolishly) jump to a gameplay idea of "you should be able to do anything!" I'll explain...
See, the reason you don't want to be able to "do anything!" is because that's impossible. And secondly, restricting what a player does in the game adds quality and minimizes confusion.
Right now I'm playing through BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins. In terms of spell-casting, abilities and leveling it's actually pretty restricted considering comparable games, such as Guild Wars with it's huge library of spells/skills, or Oblivion with it's ability to basically create whatever kind of spell you want (and build your own class).
But in terms of other characters coming in and out of your party, it's WIDE open, and honestly I have a hard time handling it at some points. So far, what I've noticed is that you can actually kick out every non-essential party member at any time during the game, or just refuse to bring them along up-front. You can also overlook bringing them into your party at all, unknowingly. Sometimes that's hard to swallow, even though the freedom is pretty cool.
The amount of variety in dialogue is also pretty ridiculous, particularly when it comes to making choices about quests. It seems like pretty much every quest can end with you killing whoever is offering it to you, or you can go back on your word, change your mind, not pick the quest up at all, etc. It's probably the most diverse game in the sense of quest design I've ever seen. This is also the first game I've ever seen where you can talk your way into an impasse and never start/finish a quest because you pissed the person off that was essential to getting it done!
The amount of story design and programming that has to be done to accommodate that level of choice has got to be ridiculous. Every conversation in the game would have to be designed via a flow-chart or some other equally complete method to efficiently guide the programming, voice-acting and direction of the game. This game easily has over 10,000 lines of unique dialogue (maybe even approaching 20,000), all carefully positioned to properly react to situations like showing up to the same person twice, asking non-essential questions, being a jerk, time frame, other events, dropping quests, etc. The amount of testing that has to back that up has to be ridiculous too.
This is all very surprising drawing these conclusions off a game that has EA plastered to it. EA has recently been the conglomerate video game producer that rushes games out the door and would rather save money on development, then market and make a small profit instead of making a good game and letting everything else take it's course. They appear to have changed their course with BioWare's work as Dragon Age doesn't seem to show any ill effects of EA's presence thus far (except the textures on some of the objects are sometimes really bad). With as much planning and testing that had to be done with this game, it's odd to say that the EA + BioWare combination appears to be working so far.
From the stuff I've heard about Mass Effect 2 they're taking the freedom of choice to a whole new level. I'll be getting that in just 3 days, and I'm pumped!!
We'll see how it turns out.
EA get's a lot of flack for they way they used to run buisness. Now a days with more competition and higher expectations for games they've gone the route of trying to change that image. As much as they haven't been able to change that image they have completely re-hauled the company to the point they are now one of the best publishers imo. They very often have a fairly hands off approach when it comes to the bigger names under the banner such as Bioware. Hell they have no reason to restrict Bioware and they know it. What your seeing is the result of a better direction EA has taken and has been on this route for a few years now. You have EA Partners which is highly succesful and has been used by companies like Crytek, Valve, id, and Harmonix.
ReplyDeleteBasically when John Riccitiello took over as CEO in 2007 he started changing things for the better. EA is now one of the best publishers available imo, and they have some great internal studios as well like BioWare, DICE, and Mythic.