Vaginas and Morons - Bioware Engages in War of Words with the Internet

[zakynthos]

Anybody that has criticized the story writing of Bioware games is just plain stupid. Can you criticize the story of Mass Effect 2 when this game has won so many awards? You cannot criticize Bioware for story telling..!

[Vencha88]

A response from BioWare:

Hi Everyone

Below, please see a message from BioWare co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka in regards to the recent attacks on Jennfer Hepler.

Jennifer is a valued, talented employee who has been with BioWare for many years and we hope will be with us for many more. It is awful that a few people have decided to make her a target for hate and threats, going so far as fabricating forum posts and attributing them to her, and singling her out for projects to which she has not contributed (i.e., Jennifer is not even a part of the Mass Effect writing team). All of us at BioWare support and will continue to support Jennifer fully, and are happy to see so many people out there are also supporting her during this difficult time.

- Dr. Ray Muzyka. Co-Founder of BioWare; General Manager, BioWare Label; Senior Vice President, Electronic Arts



Additionally we will be making a donation of $1000 in Jennifer's name to Bullying Canada. Please feel free to also donate to this worthy cause in support.

Thank you again to everyone who has supported Jennifer and BioWare in this difficult time.

[Drakand]

good response!

[Auld]

Good response, but he should have addressed the horrible replies from the Bioware employee(flynn?) as well. If not sanctions then perhaps an anger management course.

[Yazour]

Are their games really being destroyed by the writers?

The single best part of Bioware's games are their Dialogue. The game-play is often rather tedious; just a cut and paste from other triple A titles that assume we are all thumbs. I would support a 'skip game-play button' in favour of more detailed dialogue trees.

[Bluefire]

lol damn Im going looking for a games industry job for my wife now just so I can get that printed on a t-shirt for her.

Im playing swtor atm and yes there are pitfalls in the writing.. but lets face it the UI and the combat engine are LOADS worse than the writing. Hell the stories are the only reason I havent already unsubbed.
I own a fair few bioware titles probably around 50% of their releases and while their writing hasnt improved I cant say Ive noticed it getting worse either..
Its not really the writing that is a problem its the gameplay they try to stick inbetween the writing to make the game last longer..
I played nwn + expansions, completed them all 3 times on diffent toons and then continued to play on in nodes pw...
I played nwn2.. completed it once.. got halfway through the first expansion 4 times.. occasionaly reinstall, have a look for a good pw.. try the expansion again.. Its not the writing that stops me.. its the amount of time I need to spend walking and killing useless mobs that makes me loose interest.

Atm In swtor Im playing an imp sniper at lvl 19.. got my assasin to 31 3 days ago.. class quest lvl 30 elite mob.. and I cant kill it due to companion AI..
I remember the rep equiv quest on my sage... killed its 30 elite at lvl 29 with only minor issues....
Would like to continue the game on my assassin but cant be arsed grinding through heroics/flashpoints/pvp in order to get another level or two in order to kill a mob that poorly designed gameplay is preventing me from killing...

I really dont think its the writing thats letting down bioware games.. sure in some cases its not helping as much as it used to...
Guess they need to hire better writers to carry their coders through ?

[Auld]

Atm In swtor Im playing an imp sniper at lvl 19.. got my assasin to 31 3 days ago.. class quest lvl 30 elite mob.. and I cant kill it due to companion AI..
I remember the rep equiv quest on my sage... killed its 30 elite at lvl 29 with only minor issues....
Would like to continue the game on my assassin but cant be arsed grinding through heroics/flashpoints/pvp in order to get another level or two in order to kill a mob that poorly designed gameplay is preventing me from killing...

Take a friend. Buy some stims. Use a different companion or gear up your companion. Respec.

There are plenty of ways around problems.

[southead]

From her original interview:

I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.

Honestly, why the hell are Bioware employing someone like this who obviously misses the entire point of the D&D genre - who LOVE the tactics, LOVE the fighting, LOVE the cool things in their inventory, and go goey over a nicely drawn map.

May as well throw everything that is good about the genre out the window right there...

[DrSlek]

Anybody that has criticized the story writing of Bioware games is just plain stupid. Can you criticize the story of Mass Effect 2 when this game has won so many awards? You cannot criticize Bioware for story telling..!

I can't tell if this is serious...I hope not. Nowadays you cannot judge the quality of a game by the number of awards it gets, or how high the professional review scores were. Reviewers initially "loved" Dragon Age 2 and gave it high scores. Even review articles that were choc full of completely valid criticisms, with little positive to say about the game gave scores of 80+/100.

Many speculate that these unusually high scores on such a widely hated game is due to "paid reviews", though I think the more accurate term would be blackmail. There has been a lot of accusations that EA will blacklist reviewers and publications from recieving review copies of new games before release if they don't score their AAA titles highly. Whether this is true or not, I don't know...but there does seem to be some suspect behaviour going on when a game like Dragon Age 2 recieves such high scores despite being a massive leap backwards for the RPG genre.

Slightly more on topic; I get the idea from stuff I've read on /v/ and other discussion sites that when they say that "gay romances are being shoved down their throats", what they really mean is that there's a lack of choice when it comes to the hamfisted romances that Bioware has become known for these days. For instance, if you're not a total wanker to Anders through Dragon Age 2, eventually he'll make a pass at you. If you knock him back, you lose quite a large amount of rep with him. But of course this is the internet, so everything gets blown out of proportion and suddenly Hepler is part of some homosexual conspiracy or something equally stupid.

My personal opinion: Bioware used to make great games, but started going downhill around the time of Neverwinter Nights. Now they make bad games. They focus too much on narrative nowadays. If I wanted a story, I'd watch a movie or read a book. In video games, narrative should be a vehicle for the gameplay and not the other way around.

[Vencha88]

From her original interview:

I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.

Honestly, why the hell are Bioware employing someone like this who obviously misses the entire point of the D&D genre - who LOVE the tactics, LOVE the fighting, LOVE the cool things in their inventory, and go goey over a nicely drawn map.

May as well throw everything that is good about the genre out the window right there...

Everything you mentioned about playing DND was given life by story, by talking, by sitting around and table and imagining.

She doesn't miss the point if you actually read what she says she mentions was pregnant during the interview, has kids already and would like to be able to settle in and enjoy the story easily without combat padding out the playtime. And she also mentions that by changing the way games handle combat you could introduce more people to games, give them less of a hurdle.

It's not like combat is lacking in gaming or something? It's almost in every single game there is. Combat and killing links pretty much every genre, so someone suggesting that it could be handled differently is doing something wrong?

But even still. One single person who is obviously passionate about writing, and handles, gasp, some writing at BioWare. She doesn't make design decisions, she's not trying to remove every slither of combat from every game she was simply just saying she doesn't have the time nor the desire to constantly kill baddies. And apparently that's worth massing your internet friends, calling her home number and telling her to kill herself.

[Yazour]

I can't tell if this is serious...I hope not. Nowadays you cannot judge the quality of a game by the number of awards it gets, or how high the professional review scores were. Reviewers initially "loved" Dragon Age 2 and gave it high scores. Even review articles that were choc full of completely valid criticisms, with little positive to say about the game gave scores of 80+/100.

Many speculate that these unusually high scores on such a widely hated game is due to "paid reviews", though I think the more accurate term would be blackmail. There has been a lot of accusations that EA will blacklist reviewers and publications from recieving review copies of new games before release if they don't score their AAA titles highly. Whether this is true or not, I don't know...but there does seem to be some suspect behaviour going on when a game like Dragon Age 2 recieves such high scores despite being a massive leap backwards for the RPG genre.

I can't believe peoples attitudes towards Dragon Age 2 (DA2). DA2 was a massive leap.

To understand it we should probably consider previous Bioware games like Mass Effect 2 (ME2). In ME2 the protagonist, Shepard, knows what they are fighting for (or at least thinks they do) from the very beginning. Shepard spends the entire length of ME2 building up for a fight against

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The Reapers.

I think most people will agree with me that the final fight in ME2 was ****. We would all have been extremely disappointed with it if we weren't pissing ourselves laughing at the stupidity of it. But the game did have a distinct structure. Just as all the games Bioware did previously: Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1, SWKotOR. Intro -> Build up -> Reveal -> End Fight. Dragon Age 2 set out to change that pattern. I think they were right to try.

Hawke, DA2's protagonist, is quite different to traditional main characters in that he/she is not a cliché hero (though you can try and play it as such). Hawke is exactly what fans of Bioware games have been asking for; a grey character in a grey situation. Hawke is not out to save the world. Hawke is just trying to get by, and maybe get rich and famous along the way. DA2 is a game built for the Hans Solo fans. Solo doesn't go looking for fights, he is just looking to get paid. The key change here is that Hawke is a Civilian, not a Soldier or a Jedi, and as such has no duty. This leads the entire game to take on a different structure. Adversity -> Growth -> Adversity -> Growth -> Adversity -> OMG!

It is easy to look back at it and remember the awful repetitive use of uninspired zones and dread playing through them again, but you also have to remember the good parts, like the dialogue of Merrill and Isobela, the Qun (whether you agreed with it or not), the tragedy of

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losing your family, particularly your mother, and how about justified terrorism?

Some of these things were ground breaking to see in a computer game.

I think this change from the normal isn't a leap backwards (to what?) but a leap forwards. DA2 changes the rules of computer game heroes and I think it has matured the genre more than most people care to believe.

I challenge people who neg DA2 to go back and play it with an open mind. It is not the type of game you can really review at the end,

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not least because it hasn't ended yet,

but during the course of the game when you are in the moment. And that is what DA2 was about: The Moment.

[Nekosan]

Atm In swtor Im playing an imp sniper at lvl 19.. got my assasin to 31 3 days ago.. class quest lvl 30 elite mob.. and I cant kill it due to companion AI..
I remember the rep equiv quest on my sage... killed its 30 elite at lvl 29 with only minor issues....
Would like to continue the game on my assassin but cant be arsed grinding through heroics/flashpoints/pvp in order to get another level or two in order to kill a mob that poorly designed gameplay is preventing me from killing...

Unless you skipped a pile of content on a previous planet then you should have no problem at all killing your class quest mobs (especially that early), perhaps you should have a look at how you're playing the class or what companion you're using.

[TRB]

Anybody that has criticized the story writing of Bioware games is just plain stupid. Can you criticize the story of Mass Effect 2 when this game has won so many awards? You cannot criticize Bioware for story telling..!

"the story" and "the writing" are not exactly the same thing.

I'm playing ME2 again right now [just finish shadow broker DLC part] and some of the dialogue options are stupid.
and its always so obvious that there is a 'nasty', 'nice' and 'ambivalent' response selection in almost every conversation.
It shouldn't be that obvious.
its even worse in SWtoR.
Dragon age 2 [there is a creative title, right?] and SWtoR were so bad they are 2 of 3 games I uninstalled before finishing.
outside of the main story SWtoR is really boring.
DA2 is just terrible all-round.

[Marius]

Many speculate that these unusually high scores on such a widely hated game is due to "paid reviews", though I think the more accurate term would be blackmail. There has been a lot of accusations that EA will blacklist reviewers and publications from recieving review copies of new games before release if they don't score their AAA titles highly. Whether this is true or not, I don't know...but there does seem to be some suspect behaviour going on when a game like Dragon Age 2 recieves such high scores despite being a massive leap backwards for the RPG genre.

I liked Dragon Age 2. I thought it was a great example of innovative storytelling. I really liked the family story over ten years.

I guess that means I'm being paid out by EA.

[DrSlek]

The narrative of DA2 was only a massive leap forward if you completely ignore decade old games like Deus Ex, which also contained controversial ideas such as justified terrorism, and also contained the loss of a family member, or any number of other games which have contained a "grey character" and done it better than DA2. The gameplay itself was as far from a leap forward as you can get, with copy/pasted dungeons, waves of enemies, overly simplified button mashing combat, all taking place within a rather bland and strangely empty city.