Mass Effect Amasses 70+ Hours Of BioWare Gameplay!
I'll cop to it, I'm a BioWare fanboy. Admittedly, most of that is carried over from the searingly blissful hours I spent playing the Baldur's Gate series, and I'll be the first to acknowledge that the small dip in storyline quality we saw in Neverwinter Nights worsened with some of the rote "I am Evil/I am Good" character development in Knights of the Old Republic - a bit simplistic but fitting for the universe...and not nearly as fitting when the same superficial dichotomy showed up in the otherwise lush world of Jade Empire.
Okay, I guess being able to offer objective criticism makes me specifically not a fanboy. But I'm close.
It was my love for the sense of exploratory wonder of the BG series that put BioWare upon a pedestal in my eyes, and while I've been juicing my shorts in anticipation of its next big RPG, Mass Effect, some of the BioWare PR has been heavy on the old "We let you be good or evil!" line, which has begun to sound stale...and which I've learned to interpret as "You get to play one of two story lines, and we're going to make that sound cooler than it actually is."
So I was pleased as punch to hear Ray Muzyka describe the main game (sans episodic content, which is a whole other angle) as a 70 hour or longer experience, especially because that length comes not from the core story, but from exploration and independent questing. This may not necessarily resolve my fears of a shallow dualistic character development system, but it gives me hope that, at the very least, it will be a campaign worth losing myself in:
"I mean, it really depends on just how much you want to do on the uncharted worlds. I think it’s going to be about 40 hours or so for the main story, so it’s going to be a good-sized BioWare RPG just for the core part. Off the beaten path, there’s probably another 20 or 30 hours or so of stuff, or more, depending on how much you do and what order you do it in and all of that. It’s this non-linear exploration of uncharted worlds."
An RPG with a solid spine of a story and non-linear exploration that's more than just a question of which of the six available settings to choose first? That's what a BioWare RPG should be!
BioWare Talks Mass Effect: Part 1 [TeamXbox]
[Via: Digg]
tiny dancer
Posted to Video Games on 13 February 2007
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: bioware, mass effect, ray muzyka, rpg
i was a bioware fan back in the baldur's gate days, but i never got an xbox, and don't plan on getting a 360, so tho this game looks amazing... i can only sit and watch. hopefully sometime down the road it'll get ported like jade empire. but i would like to see what they have cooking for the ds.
No mention of how hot the main character looks? I find your lack of gayness disturbing.
I am so ashamed... if it's any consolation I was too busy constructing my life-sized, fully-functional Kratos sexbot.
the given version of shepard is hot...but with the amount of physical, character customization the developers promised...ala Oblivion's but more in-depth...i bet you i could make mine more masculine, more rugged, and bigger, badder, and hotter than the one they keep showing...
when are they going to show screenshots of a female commander shepard though?
please keep us posted until they finally do...hopefully her default version will be just as gorgeous as the male's default avatar...
i really, really want to make a lesbian romance, that's why...and they have to start showing me what i'm going to be working with....