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[Poll] How do you view Bioware after SW:TOR?
Yamota
Member UncommonPosts: 6,593
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Yamota
Member UncommonPosts: 6,593
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I've always liked Bioware, and still do. Opinion hasn't changed
!
Well it is a tricky question, for me. Because I don't feel they did a good job on the MMOG part but I still think they are excellent in creating single player, story driven RPGs.
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First DA2, then SWTOR, then the ME3 butchering for the sake of extra sales...
No, BW are not riding high on my fave devs right now.
It wasn't THAT long ago I was proud to say Iliked them as well.
True after the Baldur's Gate series and Dragon Age Origins 1 I thought they were one of the best gaming dev companies around. More focused on creating good games rather than just making profit. Lately I feel they have gone the "profit at all costs" route.
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Same here. I was a Bioware fan during their Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter Night years.
From there, however, the founders of Bioware (commonly known as the doctors and now bigwigs at EA) led Bioware ever more into the shooter/action/console/cinematics/watch-a-slightly-interactive-movie style of gameplay. I believe they had commercial success with that but that gameplay isn't my personal preference thus I didn't play Bioware games any more.
Bioware didn't make a single fantasy title between NWN and Dragon's Age (what was it, for 8 years?) and when I bought Dragon's Age Origins I thought that it showed: they didn't have any competent gameplay designers for those titles any more. Now their competence is about telling a story like in a Hollywood movie, making cutscenes and having virtual romances with NPC henchmen. Well, not exactly my cup of tea. But enough people seem to like these things.
I didn't buy SWToR and didn't vote on the poll. From what I've read there's nothing in SWToR that would fit my gaming habits.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
SW:TOR is a massive failure... to me.
But Bioware's last straw for me as a company? Day 1 DLC for Mass Effect 3.
I'm done. I can't take this shit anymore.
My feelings as Bioware downgraded by EA to a money making second rate developer after Dragon Age 2 has now been confirmed.
On the other hand I never really was a fan of them to begin with. I found the story, plot, world and characters in Mass effect 1 and 2 bland and uniteresting.
Good Poll. Bioware's name on this MMO was one of the reasons why I thought this game was going to be an overwhelming sucess. Its not a horrible game, but its not as good as I dreamed/thought is was going to be. Sad Panda.
Exactly.
The had sooooo much goodwill from the public a while back... corperations out there would have paid millions for the general love and positive public image BW had, and indeed EA tried to. But... instead of valuing it, building on it, and justifying it they chose to cash in on it.
Tragic really.
Not really. Between the fact I haven't enjoyed any of their titles since the 90's (no scripted, voice acted RPG content isn't what I'm looking for, even in single player titles) and that they've been absorbed by EA and it's heavy hand is clearly evident in the creation of SWTOR I think my viewpoint remains unchanged.
They built exactly the sort of MMORPG that I expected them to.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
bioware knows how to create a good game but definitely has no idea what mmo stands for.
I've gotten this vibe from them as well, especially through their arrogance when promoting TOR for all those months, declaring that they knew what MMOs gamers wanted, what the genre needed, how they were the only ones to deliver it. Like they were the saviors of the genre or something. That characterization might be a little bit hyperbolic, but not by much. I tired of seeing tooting their own horn in interviews and basically stopped reading them in the final stretch before launch.
That kind of arrogance and hubris, especially coming from a developer entering the MMO arena and stepping outside their comfort zone for the first time, is always distasteful and unwarranted in my eyes. It definitely decreased my regard for them as a developer.
There would have been nothing wrong with them saying "we're doing our best to make the best and most enjoyable Star Wars MMO we can, and we have some awesome ideas that we think people are really going to like and will set us apart from our competitors. Here's a list of some of the major features we're implementing. We're excited about people finally getting to check it out", and leaving it at that.
Alas, they opted to dial the ego meter up to 11.
As mmo go, it is good SWtor. But still lacking..
How ever as a company, it is unchanged for me..
Ktor1, ME-series, Dragon Age and so on.. Nuff said
AFTER swtor...after!
Maybe it is BW or maybe it is EA 's fault but they delivered a below than mediocre game. Actually not even an mmorpg, if i could find a term to describe the game it would go as a "Single No Pvp No Interaction With Other Beings Desert Like Mediocre Game RPG".
Yes i played the game.
Yes WoW IS better as far as MMOs go and that says alot for TOR's quality.
Bioware, after this huge blunder will think thrice about what ppl expect from an mmorpg, oh ....wait, i will tell them so they can save time and money....they expect an MMORPG!!! DAH....
I'm never going to buy any of their games again, heck in my opinion they owe me for a CE of swtor, I bought a mmo, so I thought, and got some weird "not a singleplayer / not a mmo" product, probably the worst "mmo" I've ever tried, honestly, it makes WoW seem great.
The only way I'll ever play a Bioware game again, is if I pirated 1 (well they owe me for 2), but I'm against software piracy, so I'll never touch one again...
Heck I'll buy a SOE mmo before I touch anything with Bioware written on it,
'No not really.'
But I have to qualify that because I haven't thought much of them in years because they seem to have forgotten the story is about me, the gamer, and not about them -- the writers of fully-voiced, second-rate fan-fic who are so poor at developing a game from the technical and interactive standpoints that they have to shove you on rails from which you cannot escape and are padded with running and mmo-like grinding to flesh out the 13-hour main campaign. But what's really set me off is how they've gone out of their way in recent years to deliever smaller games they force me to buy DLC garbage to make a more complete game.
The last straw for me was they cut content from ME3 and they only way to get the full game as originally written is to pay for the 'collecters edition' or pay an extra $10 to 'download' DLC get the full game as written and then gutted. It's bad enough they've been throwing crappy books out there. Jacking up tthe prices by $10 a pop...
But locking the Prothean's behind a paywall is totally BS. Taking a main part of the game and taking it out then forcing you to pay for it... OMG. And for those who still think they have to be BioDrones and try to protect BioWare because you're getting something and the game wasn't deliberately content-crippled because you're under the impression you'er actually 'downloading' the DLC. You're not. You're only downloading a small file (126K) which includes the activation key. The DLC is arealy seamlessly integrated into your game already, you just have to activate it. By giving them an extra $10.
So, this happened in DA:O, to a lesser extent, and left a stink in my mouth. And now ME3 is savaged and I'm so stinking tired of the BS it I haven't bought a new BioWare game since DA:O and only managed one play through plus the origin stories. That was it. Everything else is bargain bin.
Even ME3 will be bargin bin, at best, because I'm boycotting this kind of greed. I shouldn't have to pay an extra $10 to get the game as coded through some BS content denying scheme I have to pay on top of the $60 box price.
After TOR: No change. I still like the way they make games. I enjoyed TOR and I think it has good potential.
After ME3: (though it hasn't released yet) The blantant day one DLC cash-grab has soured me. Day one DLC like Arkham City's is one thing. This is another beast entirely.
And I don't even play the ME series.
/sit back and watch closely
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
What Bioware ?
Bioware was closed 2007
Perhaps you are confusing it with EA ?
I remember. I posted there from the Baldur's Gate days. We'd talk about the TOSC expansion. We'd talk about why Xan was less fleshed out than most of the characters (he was a last-minute addition to the game because they were a mage short).
When they had the Disc 4 bug.. They kept us informed every day. How they were fixing it. Where the patch was. When it was coded. When it went to QA. When it was going to the patch server... Now they're just a bunch of arrogant jerk-offs who act like they're Gods gift to CRPGs. Whcih their not. There a are a lot of companies out there making much better crpgs.
I will say this, I think the real problem was they listed too much to the BioDrones. The ones who give them the 'you can do no wrong' mirror and will buy/defend any piece of crap because 'it's BioWare"... So when people like would complain about their second-tier engines, poor graphics, lack of freedom, how we could see the dialog choices were all 'false' and meaningless and they needed to work more on stories and branching and less on voicing we'd get shouted down...
Agreed. The consant and grinding attacks by the Biodrones and the Star Wars fanbois on anything that they consider critical of the game has, ironically, done SWTOR no favours at all.
In all honestly, I probably won't ever look into a future BioWare MMO. Since Oct. 08, I've been told by both BioWare and the community not to worry. "This game is not a single-player game. We're making a MMO."
SWTOR is nothing more than a gigantic co'op game with heavily instanced samples of multiplayer PvP / Raiding.
THEY SOLD OUT.
My opinion of Bioware changed before SWTOR, when they partnered with EA and started churning out the same games with different skins and abusing DLC. The writing and originality got worse while the EA manufacturing started. I really expected exactly what we got, which to me is 1 month worth of fun. It may be worth the box price, but it isn't worth a monthly sub.