I will never, as long as I live, understand why Bioware gets so much love. It's one of the greatest mysteries of Life to me. I can't even begin to fathom it and just thinking about it makes my head hurt. I've played Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, The Witcher (not really Bioware, but used thier engine) and Knights of the Old Republic and maybe one or two I can't think of off hand and I hated every single one of them. Not even disliked. HATED. Like a pure seething hatred that brings up flaming, acidic bile in the back of my throat. I never even finished playing most of those games and that is saying something because I used to be one of those guys that ALWAYS finished something, no matter how much I disliked it. In fact, Baldur's Gate was the first game I ever said "Fuck this." to and quit playing.
Every time I'd play a Bioware or Black Isle game, I'd vow "NEVER AGAIN!!!", but then their next game would come out and it would get rave reviews and the masses would heap their praises and I'd get really bored and I'd cave and get it and play it and hate it. The thing was, I'd hate them more and more each time because, even though the games all looked different, it was really just the same damn game over and over again. The same mechanics. The same plot. The same characters. The same quests. The same old same old just renamed and reskinned. Even when they changed to a 3D engine, it still felt like the same game. Like Yahtzee said, if you've played one Bioware game, you've played them all. In fact, when I was playing through Knights of the Old Republic (which I really didn't want to play, but one of my friends said he'd loan it to me and when I told him I didn't have an XBox, he said he'd loan me his so I took his offer because I didn't want to be rude), I knew everything that was going to happen because I'd done it all before in other Bioware/Black Isle games. When I met one of the Jedi women I immediately thought "I bet she goes to the dark side halfway through the game and then I'll have to either save her or kill her." I was so sure of this that I made sure to never give her any good equipment in case she ran off with it when she left and sure enough, midway through the game, she succumbed to the dark side and left. It's the same crap. You almost always play an orphan with amnesia who's adopted father figure is killed by the Big Evil Bad Guy and there's almost always some spunky young girl that's usally a thief or a rogue of somesort that grew up with you. Then there's the bitchy woman and the staunch, noble warrior guy, and the crazy psycho, and the nice girl. The characters were about the only thing I liked about Baldur's Gate, but seeing the same ones over and over in other games, just with different names was irritating. Also, seeing the same quests over and over irked me too. For example, there's usually some Roshomon-syle quest were someone was murdered and you have to talk to a bunch of people and figure out which one was lying. It was cool the first time I saw it in Neverwinter Nights. Pretty lame when I saw it again in Knights of the Old Republic.
Then there's the morality system. I once e-mailed a game critic after he put Planescape: Torment on his "Top 10 Games Ever Made" list and asked him why does everyone love that game so much? I played it and didn't like it at all. He said "Well, it's cool because you can be good or evil in it". I see that a lot. You get to be evil. Well, here's the problem I have with this pure black and white, Good or Evil morality system Bioware games use: the game rewards you for being Good and punishes you for being Evil. If you're a goody-two-shoes, you get lower prices on items, you get more quests, you get better items, and you get more experience points. When I play a Bioware game, I'm a paragon of virtue, not because I like being a good guy, but because I'm a greedy bastard that wants the best loot and the most experience points I can get. I hate that system. I've always hated the alignment system in D&D because it pigeonholes people into Good, Neutral, or Evil brackets and that's simply not how life is. Life isn't black and white. People aren't just Good or Evil. When I play, I want to help people I like and destroy people I don't, but I can't really do that because if I kill people I don't have to, I lose Good points and suffer for it. I used to start off Neutral because I didn't know better at the time, but always ended up Good. Once I figured the system out, I just started off Good. There's too much reward not too.
Then there's the story. People always praise Bioware and Black Isle's stories. I disagree. I think their stories are pure, forgettable, generic fantasy tripe. Kids have low standards when it comes to writing. When I was a lad, I loved He-Man and GI Joe and The A-Team and Knight Rider and comic books and all that crap just like every other young boy my age. Then I grew up and rewatched and reread all those things I loved as a youngster and realized that they were shit. Pure shit. The thing is, when you're a kid, you don't care if something is well written or not. When you get older, you're supposed to mature but in our soft, easy society, a lot of people aren't maturing. Take nerds for example. Full grown men with the mentality of children. They collect toys and watch cartoons and read comics. These are the guys that think Bioware writing is good, but it's not. It's generic and cliche and they reuse the same story over and over and over again. The worst aspect of their stories are their villians. I can't for the life of me even remember the name of a single villain in any Bioware/Black Isle game. I remember what the villain from Baldur's Gate looked like because I remember the cinematic, but I couldn't tell you his name or certainly not his motivation. The thing about the villains is that they are so generic. They're just Evil Bad Guys that want to take over the world solely because they're Evil Bad Guys and that's just what Evil Bad Guys do. You're the Good Guy, so you have to stop him. Why? Because that's simply what Good Guys do. Great villains have great motivation and they have complex personalites. They aren't just some evil guys that wear black, spiky armor and look cool.
And then there's the mechanics. The worst feature of Bioware's games. The first several Bioware and Black Isle games used the Infinity Engine which was horrificly tedious to use. Everything took soooo long to do. Walking was slow. Looting was slow. You'd get attacked by monsters you couldn't see. NPC pathfinding was atrocious. The simple act of walking across a room could turn into a fiasco. Then there was the quests, most of which had you running around, delivering items back and forth across the land like you were working for UPS. Instead of using Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars as liscenes, Bioware should've made "Fed Ex Adventures!" because that's all you were. A delivery man.
Wizard: "Go see the old crone and get the enchanted amulet."
You: "Ok."
Old Crone: "You want my amulet? I'll give it to you, but first I need a magic mushroom from the brownies in the forest about 12 miles from here."
You: "Alrighty. I'll be back!"
Brownies: "You want our mushroom? You must first kill the black dragon that's been harassing us and bring back it's claw."
You: "Where's the dragon?"
Brownines: "Ask the old hermit. He knows where it is. You can find him on the other side of the mountains. Way, wayyy on the other side of the mountains."
You: "Sigh. I'll be back."
Hermit: "You want to know where the dragon is? I'll tell you, but first, I haven't seen my daughter in ages. Please take this note to her. She lives on the other side of the world."
You: "Goddamn it."
And so on and so on and so on. It gets to the point that you forget why you were even doing all the crap you were doing in the first place.
The one aspect of their games that was almost enjoyable was combat. I like tactical, turn-based combat and the idea coming across a group of monsters and using various spells and abilties to battle them sounds good in theory, but in practice, it was usally a mess, mainly due to the bad pathfinding and stupid AI of the NPC's. I'd constantly find myself reloading and reloading over and over again because one of my companions did something stupid when I wasn't looking and got killed. It was either that, or the combat was way too easy. I was playing through Baldur's Gate 2 and I noticed that the elementals I summoned were lasting a really long time, so I started resting and summoning as many as I could and I just steamrolled through everything after that. Then there was Neverwinter Nights were my monk didn't get hit one time afer level 7, I think it was. I'd just stand there in the middle of of a swarm of enemies that couldn't touch me.
I'm sure I could go on, but this is long enough and very few people will actually read it, but it feels good to vent. Bioware sucks. I hate them. I haven't played any of their games since they sold out like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, so maybe they've actually changed their formula up, but I doubt it. From what I've seen, it's the same story, the same characters, the same 'A. Good Response B. Neutral Response C. Evil Response' dialouge options, the same tedious crappy combat, the same dumb AI NPCs, the same fetch quests, the same lame villains.
And in case you're wondering what RPG's I do like, well the two that always immediately come to mind are Vampire: The Masquerade- Bloodlines and the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun. Both games with good, original stories, grey morality, great characters, fantastic worlds. Combat was OK, though could've been better. One thing I really loved about Vampire is that you got the same experience points when you finished a quest no matter how you did it. This really encouraged you to play however you wanted to, which is how a good RPG should do.
