For years Bioware could seem to do no wrong. Their games were popular and successful: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, KOTOR, Baldur’s Gate. All hits and all popular. The only under performer they ha din their early days I can think of was Jade Empire and even that was well like by those that played it.
Suddenly, it seems like they can’t do anything right as far as gamers are concerned. Scorn seems to be piled on Dragon Age 2, SWTOR and Mass Effect 3 (let’s note that for the record while I have some gripes, I enjoy(ed) all three of these games). Is it just people’s hatred of EA (another company that at one time seemed well loved)? Or just another example of the Internet eating it’s own. Or something more than that?
ETA: No unboxed spoilers please. I am still actively playing several of these games.
All MMOs get their share of hate, no matter how good or bad they are, and SWTOR has a number of flaws that are easy to criticize. But DA2 … for many people that was one of the biggest gaming disappointments in a long time and even for people like me who got some enjoyment out of it, the story and its ending was unforgivably bad. DA:O gave you a lot of meaningful choices that changed the story - DA2 gave you the illusion of a choice, then things always turned up the same no matter what you did or said. Whatever SWTOR’s flaws may be, at least it feels like your decisions matter compared to DA2.
No idea about ME3, haven’t played it yet. All I’ve heard is that homophobes are giving it low points over at Metacritic, besdies that haven’t heard a lot of whining about the game itself.
Ah, well. If the story’s truly as bad and railroaded as in DA2, then I can wait a long time for it to go down in price. Shame, I loved the previous two games.
Let me put it this way: no matter what choices you make, who you save or who you kill, whether you’re a total Paragon or Renegade… the only thing that really differs about the (much too brief) endings are what color the pretty lights are.
I was seriously disappointed in the ending to ME3 because I had so much invested in the game. First, I played the same character in all three games. Decisions I made in the first game came to fruition in ME3. Second, Bioware did such a great job with the missions in ME3. Finally, this is one of the few “doom is nigh” games where I actually felt like doom was nigh. Walking around Citadel Station listening to NPCs talk really drove some things home. The human woman trying to get her daughter sent to the Asari home world to be with her wife’s family. The Asari who is oblivious that his human friend sold the car she loved so that he would have a decent set of armor to wear in battle. The alliance soldier who requests a transfer so she can fight the Reapers because she doesn’t want to fight the Reapers because her brother joined.
I loved ME3 right until the ending. Once I found out what the Reapers were all about and what my choices were I was not a happy camper. The ending made me feel as though all my previous choices were for nothing. I mean all my choices over a three game period. Given the emotional investment I have the game I was quite upset.
However, I still like Bioware. They make good games and I look forward to what they do in the future.
I think I will pass on the next game that Bioware is making. I love story in RPG, and the way they fumble and drop the ball in ME3 really sours the whole experience for me. It’s not that it’s a sad ending - sad ending I can deal with -
It’s that the ending is meaningless. It’s worse than the ending of Knights of the Old Republic 2, and it’s a mistake I expect Obsidian or other second-rate studios to make, but not Bioware. Things just happen - a new infodump is introduced, there’s no lead up to the choices you are given and there’s this funny requirement that all Relays have to be destroyed.
In fact, the Crucible is one of the worst plot point of the game. But I elaborate why in the Mass Effect 3 thread instead.
As for TOR, you have the usual gripes about PvP balance and end-game content. The game itself is quite pleasant, but there are a number of marketing/business decision which makes people mad:
[ol]
[li]The Asia Pacific server is located in Australia and ping from Singapore, Hong Kong and the rest of Asia is worse to Australia than to the West Coast. We are talking about ~200ms when connecting to a West Coast server and ~300ms when using the ‘Asia Pacific’ server. It’s rather disingenuous to say it has launched for “servers for Asia Pacific” when only the Oceanic region benefits the most. [/li]
[li]The character transfer is only happening in late April, while the Asia Pacific server is launched in early March. Guilds and legacies and names (if someone took the name you want) won’t be transferred over. I reckon that a number of early adopters from Asia and Australia are mad about this, as many signed up to get their favourite names and this advantage is now moot. [/li]
[li]You cannot play the game unless you enter subscription details, such as credit card or the number from a subscription pass. Some speculate it’s probably to inflate subscription numbers for the game’s second month.[/li][/ol]
I haven’t noticed Bioware getting hit REALLY hard, not the way the usual companies that fall from grace do. Bioware mostly gets flak over Dragon Age II. Literally the only complaint I’ve heard about Mass Effect 3 is the ending, everything else is praised to the heavens. As for SWTOR, the complaints are much the same as the complaints people make about WoW. Most people seem to agree that SWTOR is by far the best WoW-clone MMORPG ever made that’s not WoW, this naturally leads to several complaints about lack of some cushiony features that make WoW tick like an LFG tool, but while valid I haven’t seen too much LOUD complaining.
I’d just say they’ve barely budged from “can do no wrong.” I don’t really see a backlash so much as a few valid complaints leveled at it here and there.
Wasn’t there kind of a lukewarm reaction to the store-boughten campaigns for “Neverwinter Nights”? I haven’t played it, but I thought the general opinion was that they were sort of “meh” compared to Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2.
On a side note, I was mildly disappointed that you couldn’t really divert the main storyline very much in Dragon Age 2, but in retrospect, that’s not really any different from Baldur’s Gate 1 or Mass Effect 1.
I loved DA and you would be hard pressed to create a DA2 that I wouldn’t play to the end. You could almost slap DA2 on a Mario Cart game and I would have played it, but somehow they managed to make a DA2 so boring that I couldn’t finish it.
Which explains why I played DA:O again and again, but once I’d finished DA2 I basically went “meh…”
In DA:O, even your choice of race and gender was important; different combos had different possible choices, including different possible endings. In DA:O, there’s a few details which can manage to be different but it’s only a few details; there’s no “big choices” available.
I think there’s a general perception that they’ve sold out, having started as a group of artists who produced a uniquely well-made story, and now being primarily driven by profit. Many people suspect that the endings of ME3 are all shoehorned into the same basic outcome because that scenario is Bioware/EA’s desired setup for future, (and generally presumed to be inferior) games that have nothing to do with Shepard.
Many people think that some of the decisions in ME2 and 3’s gameplay were meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And also that the business model is becoming, “How can we manipulate people into buying more stuff from us,” rather than “Make something great, and people will pay for it and tell their friends about it.”
The day 1 DLC is a major indicator of this shift. Especially since Bioware evidently told people it had been developed separately, and then the code revealed that it was integrated into the original game, and the “DLC” was really more of an unlocking of what logically should have been a part of the base game.
Basically, Bioware is going through the issues depicted in the movie Big Night, and the first 95% of ME3 was their magnificent feast, while the last 5% is the beginning of spaghetti and meatballs and eventual bankruptcy.
Well then, the false rumor that the DLC is on the disk is one element fueling the rage over a day 1 DLC. But the mere existence of day 1 DLC is enough to make plenty of people mad.
The reaction to DA2 was warranted. The game was bad, and being a sequel to one of the most-liked RPGs of all time is a pretty good way to inspire some backlash.
I think the backlash against TOR and ME3 is mainly due to hatred of EA and issues outside of the game itself (Origin, DLC, customer service, etc.) Sure, the games have problems and aren’t perfect (and aren’t up to the same quality as earlier Bioware games) but they’re still good.
As for the Day 1 DLC, I think this is the video that got most people up in arms:
Showing that you could “unlock” the From Ashes DLC character by simply changing a line of code.
Bioware later said the reason is that the disc did include some framework (the model, some sounds, code for the extra character slot, etc) but the DLC contains the actual extra mission and extra dialogue.
I wouldn’t say the backlash against Bioware is sudden or new, per se. Like any big game company, they’ve had their share of good and bad games over the years. The way I recall it goes something like this;
Baldur’s Gate: All-around classic
Baldur’s Gate II: Even better than the original
Neverwinter Nights: Lackluster campaign, but the XPacks were better, and lots of great fan-made material eventually
Knights of the Old Republic: One of the best Star Wars games of all time
Knights of the Old Republic 2: Rushed out and it shows, but you can’t really blame them because it was outsourced
Jade Empire: What is this? I don’t even
Dragon Age: This generation’s Baldur’s Gate
Masss Effect 2: Great followup to the original
Dragon Age 2: OK on its own merits, but disappointing as a followup to the original
The Old Republic: Haven’t played it yet
Mass Effect 3: Ditto
The idea of day 1 DLC doesn’t perturb me all that much - as I understand it, the idea of it is to encourage legitimate purchases of the game since you can’t add DLC to a pirated copy (without engaging in further piracy, I guess), and to encourage pre-order sales since they got it for free.
Looking at Bioware’s timeline, most of the “not sucks” projects were released before EA’s buyout, or must have been well along in development before that point. It seems that most of the “meh” products were started under EA’s watchful aegis.
I hate to point at timing, considering how subject it is to coincidence and perception bias, but it sure looks like the extra ingredient is EA. Who, IMHO, has been concentrated suck since the turn of the Millennium.
