Ben-DutkaHmm…can't decide if this is good or bad.
If you hadn't already noticed, role-playing fans are pretty passionate. So when an eagle-eyed, self-admitted RPG buff sent us a link to BioWare Montreal studio director Yannick Roy's Twitter page , we read closely. It's interesting.
Roy first Tweeted an image of a design document for the next Mass Effect and based on the size of the folder, one fan said the game must be "years away." Well, Roy responded with a very interesting comment. Check it out:
"Don't worry: we have a large and talented team, we started a while ago, and we are 'borrowing' a lot of game systems from [Dragon Age III]."
He didn't go into specifics but we do know that Inquisition was just recently delayed a year from fall 2013 to fall 2014. It also won't be called "Dragon Age III," anymore as they're dropping the "III" from the title. It's just Dragon Age: Inquisition . As for the new Mass Effect , it will be a new start for the franchise, as BioWare has made it plain that the first trilogy featuring protagonist Commander Shepard is complete.
However, how do you feel about one team "borrowing" mechanics from another team just to speed up the process? I mean, it's basically the same developer and the genres are similar, but does that strike you as a little…unethical, or something? No, not unethical, just…shouldn't they be focused on creating specific mechanics and systems for the next ME, rather than merely quickening the process?
Personally, I prefer the other way around. I loved the game play of ME WAY better than DA. Sure they have a large and talented team, but that can be said the same for Square Enix. I know I'm being skeptical but ME is more successful than DA right?
I'm not worried about it, it has been a fairly common practice so far and it was already easy to see how DA and ME were borrowing from each other even on different engines. I assume they will be on the same engine now so it makes sense. But they should take their time. Tossing something together to get it out is never a good idea.
Though I'm highly skeptical of the new Dragon Age I must say.
I'm pretty leery of anything from Bioware after the last time. Still, if Flemeth showed up then that would be a chuckle.
" DA and ME were borrowing from each other even on different engines." – they were both on Unreal, weren't they? I am pretty darn sure of that.
Were they? Guess I was wrong. I assumed they were different because they were light years apart in performance and graphics, but I thought I heard they will both be on Frostbite now.
Dragon Age wasn't running on Unreal Engine. It was running on a BioWare proprietary engine (can't remember the name).
And yep, the new games will be developed with Frostbite 3.
I don't have a problem with it. I just wish they'd borrow Dragon Age: Origin's ingame DLC system instead of the god awful system DA2 and Mass Effect uses where you need to manually download and install each item.
PC anyway, maybe it's easier on consoles.
What I've seen of DA: Inquisition so far didn't look good to me. Of course the game could be fantastic because I haven't seen or experienced game play. I just didn't like the Art Direction
Every game in existence has code and libraries originally developed for other games. Every single game. It's a given.
From a programmer perspective it is plain ludacris to write everything from scratch. A completely meaningless waste of time.
So that BioWare uses the same framework on several different franchises is really not anything anyone should be surprised about at all. This reply by Roy is really nothing more than stating the obvious for a non techie.
Look at Bethesdas games – same goes on in Fallout and Elder Scrolls. We can *see* it's the same code.
Reuse code as much as humanly possible I say, and get the job done faster and with fewer bugs.
More interesting though, is that I see this as a good sign, content-vise. Cause if we assume that the third DA continues in a clear RPG style, isn't this an indication that also Mass Effect will turn to a more RPG'ish style? That would be wonderful…!
Last edited by Beamboom on 6/19/2013 2:15:27 AM
Depends on what they mean. It makes sense they are trying to save money what with being a developer under EA, but it might not automatically make it a bad thing.
If they are just sharing some assets they created, like say environments, and perhaps some character models that isn't a big deal.
If they are sharing gameplay mechanics that leaves me confused. One of these games is supposed to be a CRPG, and the other while it used to be more an RPG is now more or less a shooter. So how they are going to borrow gameplay from one another doesn't make sense to me. Maybe they would be borrowing the morality system? But that seems a little silly too me as well, because ME was more about black and white options, while DA:O actually had some gray choices.
Ill just have to wait and see, as many people know I don't really care for Bioware anymore, so they are going to have to do something really special to bring me back on board with them. But with the trend of most devs making their games more action based I highly doubt we are going to see Bioware return to its CRPG roots.
"many people know I don't really care for Bioware anymore" – such statements stings my heart every time I read it.
You all should not give up on BioWare that fast.
I'm currently playing Mass Effect and I don't see much difference between it and ME2 in terms of RPG versus shooter. The skill system in ME is slightly more granular than in ME2 (and this makes it superior in a number of ways), but neither system is very deep.
More importantly, the core role-playing experience is equally present in both games (and ME3, from what I have played of it), regardless of how shooter-y the combat may be.
In any event, ME2 is so superior to ME in a hundred tiny ways and a number of big ones that I don't see how anyone can argue that ME is the better *game*.