I picked up Star Wars: The Old Republic on December 20 when the servers went live to non-preorders. This is only my third MMOG ever, the other two being World of Warcraft (of course) and Guild Wars. The only way I really enjoy MMOGs typically is to play them with a friend as though it were a two-player co-op game, which hinges on neither of us playing without the other person so as not to create a level gap between our characters. This time I made arrangements to play with Burrie.

If one wishes to play The Old Republic with a friend all the way from the beginning, the players must choose one of the pairs of classes that start together. Jedi Knights and Consulars start on the same planet, as do Sith Warriors and Inquisitors. Smugglers and Troopers start on the same planet, and Imperial Agents and Bounty Hunters do so too. As I wanted to play either a Smuggler or an Imperial Agent because of the simplistic cover system these classes have to spice up the otherwise mostly ripped-off World of Warcraft gameplay, and Burrie wanted to play on the Imperial side with me, we went with an Imperial Agent/Bounty Hunter combo.

I have not been disappointed so far. Playing with Burrie, I get to experience two storylines at once: most of his Bounty Hunter storyline and of course all of my Imperial Agent storyline (we only miss out on a couple of each others’ holocom transmissions that can’t be listened in on). I was so impressed with the Agent storyline in all its James Bondness that I decided to create another character to play on my own when Burrie wasn’t around. I went with a Jedi Knight for my solo character so as to get closer to the authentic Knights of the Old Republic experience. I find the Knight’s storyline to be significantly less engaging and original than the Agent’s, but to be honest just having a lightsaber is enough to make me happy.

Here are some random screenshots from my play time so far. I’ve got my female Twi’lek Jedi Guardian up to to level 25, and my male Chiss Sniper is at level 15 so far. I’ll probably have more to write about the game later, but there’s a lot of thoughts to organise and I need to get a bit further along either storyline until I can filter it all properly. Hover for captions as usual.

On the other hand, ME2 still isn’t very much like Deus Ex at all, and its major strengths can be directly attributed to BioWare’s pedigree. It’s down to the macro-level freedom in the game’s structure, its persistent gallery of mostly interesting and memorable characters, and its constantly branching dialogue trees and generally superb acting.

Mass Effect 2 is much more third-person shooter than Mass Effect 1 was, but it’s still significantly more RPG than Deus Ex ever was. Ironically, the opportunities I see for improvement in Mass Effect 3 would all bring it even closer to Deus Ex. I would make the weapon mods more about choice than upgrades by making some of the mods mutually exclusive. I would open the level design up a bit in the major missions (short, linear, shooty missions are good for the side missions, but I missed Noveria’s more open layout in ME2). I would remove the alignment tracker completely so the choice between Paragon and Renegade becomes purely stylistic. Actually, let me go a bit more into that.

I think the persuasion options are a problem. The basic Paragon/Renegade dichotomy is fun, and choosing whether to be a boy scout or a cynical bastard is much more interesting than choosing whether to be Good Or Evil™. With the additions of special actions that let you interrupt the dialogue at certain points by doing something drastic (and consistently awesome), BioWare has forced themselves to implement a lot of really memorable moments. The problem is that they’re still rewarding you for sticking to one type of choice, since you have to almost always be Paragon in order to earn Paragon points that unlock optimal solutions to the more difficult problems later in the game.

I don’t want to stick to one side. Sometimes, the most awesome solution seems to be the Paragon option, sometimes the Renegade options seems more awesome. By rewarding me for always picking either type, they’re not only eliminating a vital part of the freedom they’ve worked so hard to give their players, they’re also making me choose the least awesome option in many situations. And the really stupid aspect of all this is that the reward for sticking to either side actually makes the choices later in the game less interesting. This was exactly the same problem Dragon Age had with its persuasion skill: once your character is good enough, you can immediately defuse the slightest hint of conflict in the game.

In ME2, enough Paragon or Renegade points will allow you to totally pacify the confrontations between certain crew members – it’s the optimal option, so you will feel punished and nerfed if you haven’t unlocked it in time, but at the same time it actually removes the otherwise interesting need to choose sides.

I had a different problem with the implementation of the special actions in that for me, there was never a choice. I knew those actions would always be interesting and rewarding, so every time it flared up a prompt, I would press it. I had no guarantee that skipping eg. a Renegade action would instead allow me to pick a Paragon action afterwards, and I didn’t want to miss a cool special action, so there was never a reason for me not to pull off a special action. From my point of view, it would’ve been a massive improvement if special actions generally came in pairs: then it would be a stylistic choice of whether to go with the Paragon action or the Renegade action at any point.

But that’s the only major annoyance I had with Mass Effect 2. I wouldn’t hesitate to name this my favourite BioWare game so far, though I must admit I’ve never played Shattered Steel (it wouldn’t run on my PC back then) or Sonic Chronicles. I loved ME2′s structure, with the really exciting premise of preparing a ship and a crew for a suicide mission that may well fail completely if you don’t do a good enough job of it. I loved the numerous improvements to the character system and the combat system. I loved the idea of replacing BioWare’s by now stereotypical McGuffins with team members to be found and recruited. Hell, I even loved the two new hacking minigames – they were quick and easy enough not to get in the way, they were pretty decently contextualised, and they were above all infinitely better than ME1′s Simon Says minigame (I played the Xbox 360 version).

At this point, I just want more. I’m super excited to see what BioWare will come up with for Mass Effect 3, but why stop there? If a series like Final Fantasy can reach the 13th goddamn installation, I see no reason why Mass Effect shouldn’t go on forever. I am, as they say, BioWare’s bitch.

I can’t believe how good Dragon Age is.

This post is going to gush a lot. You may want to take it all with a grain of salt because I’m quite the fan of BioWare, and I have a high tolerance for some of the flaws their games tend to have, especially the way they stick so close to the same plot template that you can rightfully accuse them of remaking the same game over and over again. Then again, that goes for Besthesda or id Software or lots of other studios, and I just happen to enjoy BioWare’s template much more than others.

It’s also going to have SPOILERS.

When I say that I can’t believe how good Dragon Age is, I’m being quite serious. Having talked to friends who have also completed the game, it seems like it branches and bends roughly as much as The Nameless Mod, and to be able to say that about a 60-hour blockbuster game is frankly insane. Sure, Dragon Age doesn’t have 2 different, parallel storylines, but its plot structure is much more open thanks to the way its world map works. And unlike other open world games, it seems to often make a slight difference in which order you visit each area.

More importantly, every major plot thread in the game ends with an honest-to-god dilemma, only some of which are spoiled by either having an unquestionably optimal solution or fall into an obviously good/evil choice. Your choices at these points will not only change the denouement at the end of the game, they will usually crop up once or twice throughout the rest of the game.

Though it’s not the reason this game made such a great impression on me, I feel like I should mention that Dragon Age has surprisingly solid combat and character systems for a BioWare game. They’ve finally left the d20 systems behind and implemented a character system better suited for a computer game, where each level-up brings a tangible upgrade to your character. They’re back to a party-based structure with 4 characters, and they’ve balanced the game to require substantial micro-management during fights on the Normal difficulty setting and above. It was while I worked on the Neverwinter Nights 2 module for my BA project that I realised I found NWN2′s combat really engaging if I turned up the difficulty, since it forces you to plan ahead and make constant decisions rather than lean back and watch your characters repeatedly whack the enemy over the head.

I created a warrior despite fearing that the warrior class in Dragon Age would be dull to play, as is the case with most RPGs, but the game’s character system ensured that I would have as many if not as varied options for character development as a mage. Dragon Age takes more than a few hints from innovations made in MMOGs and uses a much more explicit aggro system than BioWare’s previous games, which means warriors get several abilities to manage their aggro. It does take a while to realise it doesn’t help to put your fighters up front and your mages in the back, since enemies can run right past your warriors to get the spell casters, even if you try to block a doorway. Once you get used to it though, it allows you to set up some pretty detailed tactics.

Anyway, enough about the combat. What blows me away about Dragon Age is its characters and its plot. Going into it, it all seems pretty clichéd and typical at first; it’s not so much dark fantasy as “Tolkien plus a pathological fascination with blood”. The thing that redeems it is how elaborate the setting is and how well written and acted the central characters are. Most shockingly, the main romance interest for female player characters is genuinely good! Far from BioWare’s usual Boring Man Troubled By Dark Past, Alistair is snarky, charming, interesting, and quite simply a nice guy. As an added bonus, he plays an integral part in the main plot, and his romance ends with a great unexpected twist that really knocked the air out of me. I also tried out one of the female romance options, Leliana, and once I realised that her voice acting was weird because she was supposed to have a French-ish accent in-game, I found that to be a very sweet and well executed story arc as well.

This time around, the party interaction is based on an Approval system similar to the Influence feature Obsidian introduced in Knights of the Old Republic 2 and NWN2. There is no universal good/evil scale this time, which has brought massive improvements to the underlying themes of the game, since all your choices no longer need to fit neatly into Dungeon & Dragons’ Good/Evil/Lawful/Chaotic scheme or KOTOR‘s light/dark side. Your actions are judged by the characters you bring with you rather than the game itself, and this usually works really well. On a couple of occasions, I’ve failed to quite grasp the underlying meaning of a dialogue option and been unfairly punished by a huge approval hit, such as when I asked goth-witch Morrigan why she was still with me – I didn’t mean it that way, damnit.

Towards the end of the game, when the results of all your previous choices start coming together, when characters begin to leave you or betray you if their approval rating is too low, when you finally manage to tie up the plot threads left hanging from your origin story, and when it all culminates in the best set of multiple endings since Invisible War (even Mask of the Betrayer was ruined by the hidden Happily Ever After ending – Dragon Age has no such thing), BioWare repeatedly pulled the carpet out from under my feet, and what had initially seemed like such an unbelievably predictable story now unfailingly kept me up until 4 am on work days.

When I was finally done after 64 hours and 30 minutes of play, I had to talk to everybody on my contact list who had already completed it, and that was when a vague inferiority complex began to creep in. Christ on a bike Dragon Age has a lot of content, especially towards the end. Frankly, I fear that it puts TNM completely to shame. I’ll pick out a couple of examples.

I had 4 armies with me at the huge battle at the end – Redcliffe soldiers, dwarves, elves, and mages – and the fifth slot in the army command interface was blank; so there are a total of 5 armies you can get, right? Wrong. Depending on your previous choices, you may get werewolves instead of elves and templars instead of mages. The fifth army slot is for the golems, if you resolve the Orzammar situation differently than I did.

As far as I’ve heard, almost every character in your party has a plot-related reason to leave you if you make certain choices. One of my party members betrayed me and tried to kill me even though my approval rating with him was in the 30′s – he didn’t even wait until the climactic battle at the end of the game as I’d expected, he turned on me in a world map encounter while I was travelling between areas! Another party member, I never even picked up – I left him to die in the beginning of the game and never heard from him again. Just before the end of the game, and this was a jaw-dropper for me, you can recruit one of the main antagonists of the story into your party after defeating him, though it will cause one of your first companions to leave you in disgust. Your former nemesis then appears in your camp and has dialogue there and everything! I didn’t even get this option because I chose to let Alistair duel him, and when the duel was won, Alistair beheaded him automatically.

Honestly, and I don’t know if you need to have tried to make this sort of game to really understand this, I cannot believe that a full blockbuster game budget has been spent on 7 years of development to make a game that lets you skip or miss out on this much content in order to present you with real, meaningful consequences to your choices. Not only is Dragon Age huge in its own right, but there’s even more content in this game than you’ll see on a full vacuum-style 60-hour playthrough. It blows my mind.

And one final thing. This will probably sound embarrassing, especially in light of the fact I know my mother reads this blog, and if so I apologise, but I have to mention this detail. The voice clips played by your party characters when you select them or give them orders during the game change depending on your approval rating with them and whether you’ve pursued their romances. If you complete Leliana’s romance, every time you select her, she gives off the most adorable “Hey you.” I totally melted every time I heard it. It was the best thing ever. Sadly she stopped doing it when I broke up with her to be with Alistair instead…

Dragon Age is basically a small miracle. It shouldn’t be possible to make a game like this with that sort of budget in this day and age. I implore you to buy this game if you haven’t already. I want BioWare to have your money, in addition to mine. They deserve it for having the guts to pull off something like this.

Apparently my old NWN vampire module The Bitter Taste of Blood got inducted into the NWVault Hall of Fame in January. It only took 5 years!

Now I’m… not quite clear on how big an honour this is, but it’s a nice pat on the back if nothing else. It’s a combination of downloads (~6000) and average rating (8.71 / 10) so it’s somewhat of an indication of popularity. Though it may pale in comparison to what I’m about to help achieve over in the Deus Ex modding community, it’s still another nice little star on my portfolio.

Maybe it’ll come in handy if I ever get a job interview with BioWare.

Alpha Protocol (Obsidian Entertainment)
Way up there at the top of my list. Deus Ex meets Jason Bourne as written by Chris Avellone. The Origin/Looking Glass school of game design meets the Black Isle/BioWare school. There is basically no way this can turn out as anything less than a fantastic game. Obsidian have always been stalking in the shadows of BioWare, and even now as they’re working on their first original IP, the project looks conspicuously like Mass Effect in another setting. But is this a problem? On the contrary. Obsidian’s games may generally lack the polish of BioWare’s, but they always add a spark of vision to BioWare’s often formulaic designs, and that’s why I love them. And that’s why Alpha Protocol will be great.

Dawn of War 2 (Relic Entertainment)
I’m not proud to admit that I’m not into RTS games. As a game designer, dismissing entire genres from my repertoire is a massive shortcoming and a crippling limitation of my creative potential. But Dawn of War 2 more than any previous game seems to have asked why people like me don’t like RTS games and then addressed the problem. Dawn of War 2 looks more like a squad-based Diablo – the emphasis is on small-scale tactics rather than base defence and tank rushes, your teams are led by persistent characters with personality and evolving skill sets, and the mission structure is open and dynamic. This is an RTS game designed specifically for me. How can I be anything but excited?

Dragon Age: Origins (BioWare Corp)
Rumours have emerged that the development of Dragon Age has been badly managed, but I remain confident that it will be a good game: BioWare has yet to let me down (even NWN with its lacklustre singleplayer campaign granted me one of my best and most lasting gaming experiences in multiplayer), and Dragon Age looks defiantly old-school and aimed squarely at the hard core roleplayer demographic.

Mass Effect 2 (BioWare Corp)
To be honest it’s still a bit up in the air whether the second game in the Mass Effect trilogy will be released in 2009. Wikipedia puts it on December 31, which seems like an odd release date to begin with (seeing how all the shops will be closed?), so it’s definitely skirting the edge, but who knows? In any case, Mass Effect 2 is bound to be great simply because Mass Effect was brilliant, and alledgedly it’s been planned as a trilogy from the start. Hopefully they’ve managed to fix some of the first game’s shortcomings this time around (the awkward vehicle sequences, the uninspired uncharted worlds, and the silly semi-QTE hacking minigame).

Velvet Assassin (Replay Studios)
This could go either way really. So much of what they’re doing with that game looks great: It’s a stealth game directed by a former key member of IOI’s Hitman team set during World War 2 and framed by an off-beat coma story in a hospital ward. It’s also made in Germany by a studio with an unimpressive track record. Some of their story features sound decidedly weird, but I think they just might be weird in a good way.

Care to share your own list?

As part of an ongoing discussion with Shane about the quality of Mass Effect‘s dialogue, he gave me what is probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received: That TNM’s dialogue is better because it flows more naturally. I don’t think I’d agree with that, but it did get me thinking about the different ways to use interactive dialogue in games.

Bioware’s games always put quite a lot of agency in their dialogue, meaning a lot of the choices you make in Bioware RPGs are made through dialogue options. In Mass Effect, this usually manifests itself in the form of coloured options that are unlocked if your Intimidate or Charm talents meet the requirements. Sometimes you can go so far as to execute an NPC by selecting the dialogue option that makes Shepard shoot him in the face, and often you will use the dialogue to make important decisions concerning the direction of the storyline.

Conversely, in Deus Ex (and by extension TNM) the dialogue has far less agency but far more reactivity. The dialogue options are pretty limited, usually used to let you buy items from NPCs or ask about optional subjects that are irrelevant or incidental to the plot. Instead, the options that affect the plot are placed in the gameplay, and the dialogue automatically changes to reflect these choices. For example, probably the most important choice in Deus Ex until the endgame is whether or not to save your brother, and this decision is made by either fleeing out the window like a coward or staying in his room to fight like a man. For the rest of the game, the dialogue will occasionally change to reflect whether or not Paul is still alive.

The enormous advantage of Deus Ex’s ethos is that the dialogue is a lot less detached from the gameplay. Sometimes, the dialogue in Mass Effect and other Bioware games has a tendency to feel like another game tacked onto the actual game. It has a hint of the same detachment from the gameplay that cutscenes suffer from. To counter this, Bioware often makes your dialogue choices influence the gameplay by eg. making enemies hostile or spawning or removing them depending on your choices. Arguably, however, actions should speak louder than words, and in Deus Ex they do.

A disadvantage to Deus Ex’s method is that it’s generally completely impossible to interpret the player’s intentions with sufficient nuance to inform the dialogue. The example I usually employ is the Battery Park Station hostage situation in Deus Ex: If you mess up the mission and get the hostages killed, JC will act completely brash and unconcerned about it when questioned by his brother, even if the player is feeling a bit remorseful or ashamed about the whole thing. The game can easily tell that you failed to save the hostages, but it has no idea why. If you make the game monitor the situation closely enough, you can make a more educated guess (if the player directly shot at the terrorists’ explosives or even threw a grenade down there to clean the station out, it’s a safe bet he didn’t mean to save the hostages, for example), but this can get very complicated very fast.

Deus Ex is pretty uncompromisingly reactive in its use of dialogue, but Bioware’s games often let the dialogue change a bit depending on the player’s gameplay choices. As with most aspects of game design, I think the best solution is a compromise. In TNM, we’ve maintained the Deus Ex ethos, but mixed in some dialogue options for nuance. I’m sure it can be taken even further though, and given the chance, I’ll be experimenting with that in the future.

• 8 New Tilesets
• 15 New Music Tracks
• 14 New Ambient Sounds
• New Creatures (over 100 new appearances)
• Horses (63 Different variants, plus mounted Humans, Elves, Half-Elves, Halflings, Gnomes, Half-Orcs and Dwarves)
• New Placeables (nearly 350)
• New Doors ( 15 Generic Doors + 71 Tileset Specific Doors)
• New Visual Effects (over 100)
• New Armor Part Appearances (lots)
• New Weapon Part Appearances
• New Item: Portable Encampment
• Added new nwnplayer.ini file settings, so that red/green color blind users don’t get killed by traps unexpectedly
• Added new nwnplayer.ini file setting to not display the hit points rolled on the level up summary gui

And that’s just the new content, there are tons of minor adjustments and improvements in addition to that. A lot of it is community created content, of course, but to think they’d spend the time finding, testing, and implementing all that stuff six years after the game was released…? That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do PR.

Mass Effect has a great system in place for giving you missions no matter where you are: Every time you open the galaxy map on the Normandy, I think the game checks a list of conditions and if it finds that you meet the requirements for a particular side mission, Joker will patch a call through from the admiral and you’ll get a mission. It’s pretty much perfect for giving you the Asteroid X57 mission made available to you in the newly released Bring Down the Sky downloadable content. And yet they don’t use it. Instead, a new tag just pops onto your galaxy map with the name of the asteroid. No quest is given to you, no reason for why you should travel to the Asgard system in the first place. When you land on the asteroid, you get a cutscene with a distress signal – in spite of having a perfect system for delivering such content, Bioware still managed to make it seem tacked on, and I think that’s a shame.

But the mission itself is splendid. At first I was quite disappointed because it seemed like another generic un-charted world with a few small run-of-the-mill bases dotting the landscape. But as it unfolded, I realized it was actually pretty comprehensive. There are optional objectives, cutscenes, new content (a new alien race is the biggest new thing) and it all ends in the main facility which turned out to be a unique structure with a great level design – the final combat in that facility is very memorable. It has everything you expect of Mass Effect including one of the game’s best (though not most original) moral dilemmas which earned me enough Renegade points to finally get the achievement.

Bioware say it offers about 90 minutes of gameplay, and that’s about what I spent on it. Of course it has as much replay value as the rest of the game, so multiply by two if you want to try both the Renegade and the Paragon options. In summary, it definitely feels like more bang for your buck than the pathetic Oblivion DLC.

I have a hard time describing how good it is. On one side, I’m coloured by the immediate after effects of completing a good game, so I can’t really say for sure if it’s actually better than both Knights of the Old Republic games, but on the other hand it sure feels like it right now.

First of all, the storyline was perfect. The plot structure was impressively open until the end, the branches felt significant, the choices were often difficult, the characters were compelling and interesting, the acting and writing was thoroughly sublime, every piece of dialogue was somehow littered with terrific animations and cinematic camera work, and the intrigue was mysterious and exciting.

But KOTOR lives up to most of that (except the animations and the camera work). One of the things that elevated Mass Effect above KOTOR in my opinion was its far more realistic approach to the science fiction genre. Of course Bioware was tied down by the Star Wars license on KOTOR – though I doubt they were sorry to work with that license at the time – but honestly I think I’m starting to get kinda tired of Star Wars. At least after playing Mass Effect and being reminded how interesting sci-fi can be when you take the sci part seriously. In ME you can’t just touch your ship down on any planet you come across and walk right out the door, you’re dropped onto planets with no oxygen in a 6-wheeled all-terrain vehicle for you to explore in, and every bit of advanced technology is explained in the expansive codex you’re equipped with. Most of this stuff is a great read, especially the descriptions of the planets you pass on your travels.

So much for the story, but the gameplay is where Mass Effect is really set apart from the KOTOR series. I’d almost become so used to the “click-and-sit-back” combat of traditional western RPG’s that I’d failed to notice how boring it actually was. I’m not a big fan of strategy and top-down tactical combat, I prefer to aim and shoot like any action gamer – not that I’m particularly good at it, but I’m much more entertained by it than simply pressing “Attack” and waiting for my avatar to dispose of the enemies.

Mass Effect has taken a page out of Ghost Recon’s or Gears of War’s book and replaced the typical RPG combat with something more tactical where you have to aim your own weapon and command your team members around with a nicely simple interface. I haven’t actually played a Ghost Recon game (yet!) but from what I’ve heard about it, Mass Effect is definitely closer to that sort of tactical combat than Gears of War’s macho frag fest. I’m afraid newcomers or RPG die-hards might be scared away by Mass Effect’s action, and I know some action gamers find it quite inferior to games like Gears or Halo, but personally I enjoyed it a lot – it was the perfect mixture of action and tactics for my tastes.

That was just a brief overview of what makes Mass Effect a clear Top 10-game in my opinion. It does have weaknesses – the uncharted worlds could’ve done with being more fleshed out, possibly at the expense of their impressive numbers, the scavenger missions were so excrutiatingly anal that even I chose to ignore them, and the vehicle parts were generally substandard – too linear and too… half-assed. The MAKO controls were counterintuitive and it sucks that enemies can shoot at you long before you can even make them out on your monitor, let alone fire back at them. It would’ve been nice with hit-animations for the enemies, but I understand the game already has a ton of content and asking for even more animations is probably not quite fair – but at least some blood particles or something then, just a bit more feedback on my hits.

Overall, an excellent bid for an action-RPG with emphasis on RPG instead of action (as opposed to the otherwise also quite nice Bioshock), and definitely currently the best reason to buy an Xbox 360. It’s also the first Xbox game I’ve played that actually incorporates the achievements in the gameplay by giving you gameplay-bonuses for some of them. It’s a damn tragedy the game isn’t out for PC and may never be – it deserves to be played by more people than own an Xbox 360.