BioWare Mondays
If you didn’t happen to make it to PAX East, and therefore weren’t able to catch the BioWare Mass Effect post-mortem panel live…never fear! BioWare have uploaded a recording of the whole thing to YouTube. Polygon also has some comments from people who worked on the Mass Effect games that they were able to capture during PAX East, which amount to a heartfelt “goodbye” to the series and its star, Commander Shepard.
Mass Effect is now, apart from the fact that Casey Hudson is still its executive producer, out of BioWare Edmonton’s hands; future Mass Effect development will now take place at the Montreal studio. We don’t know much about it, other than that it won’t star Commander Shepard and will be powered by EA DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine.
In other Mass Effect-related news, do check out GameInformer’s review of the Citadel DLC, and these comments from BioWare’s Live Producer concerning the nature of Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer modes. Have we reached the era of game-as-a-service?
There hasn’t been a lot of Dragon Age 3-related news in recent weeks, althoug David Gaider did make some waves with his recent comments on the impracticality of sexism, his discussion of Dragon Age 2’s flaws, and also spoke out about the subset of players who don’t want female characters in their games. Which, I have to admit, is a mentality that utterly baffles me, both as someone of the male persuasion and as someone who came to gaming via Ultima.
Moving on!
Star Wars: The Old Republic may have added a boatload of new players by going free-to-play, but it hasn’t ever done all that well in Asia…and as a result, BioWare have decided to close their Asia-Pacific servers and migrate users thereupon to US-based servers instead.
BioWare Austin are still pressing toward the April 14th release of Rise of the Hutt Cartel, however. They have continued to release “Making Of” videos for it, dole out previews of it, and plan in-game events to welcome it. The game’s fortunes seem to be looking up.
The problem with including sex in games that tie the action to the story is that games are inherently interactive and any discrepancy between the amount or types of sexual activity (or violence) could be interpreted as an offense to the player. In film and other media the lack of interactivity silences most critics, as it’s interpreted as an artistic statement more than a series of questions and possible answers. It’s easy to criticize or be offended by games as they can be more affecting and powerful than other media and are generally less respected. I say let players do whatever the particular game’s mechanics can easily allow and don’t worry about the press. Just allow players to do what they want in a fluid and intuitive way.