Agayek said:
If memory serves, the script for Jade Empire and Mass Effect was fairly different from KotOR, in the details if not thematically, and that's the only games of theirs since the original KotOR as far as I know.
You know, you could argue the same thing about Pixar films, but I find it all comes from a recycling of the same formula. With Bioware's games it always felt like I was playing the exact same game with a different skin on it. I know it wasn't the exact dialogue, but it always seemed like the exact same characters--each of them all-too-neatly stereotyped. Mass Effect even had every race's representative neatly LAY OUT the stereotypes the player could expect to encounter all over the galaxy. "Statement of fact: All Elicoor are very gregarious and friendly towards humans." "And all (insert name of pudgy toad race here) are money-grubbing mistrustful bastards!" And sure enough, all Elicoor are gregarious and friendly without exception and all the pudgy toad guys are money-grubbing mistrustful bastards without exception and you are doomed to confront the same two characters across the galaxy repeatedly. Meanwhile Wrex/Canderous continues to act macho even though he's really dead inside over his race being pushed around and Bastila/Liara studies the very thing that the bad guys are using against the heroes and gets in a romantic relationship with the generically characterized protagonist in her off-hours. Maybe I'm willing to admit that Bastila and Liara are very, very different people personality-wise, with Bastila being headstrong and self-assured and Liara being kind of submissive, but Wrex/Canderous just pushes it over the edge of suspicion for me, along with the mild-mannered but stable and reliable alternate love interest Ashley/Kaidan/Carth.
Thematically, true enough Shepard isn't Revan, but it's the same kind of situation, right? Always there's this confrontation of the self, the admission of great power, and the question of how you plan to use it. With Revan it was insane Force potential, the knowledge that you WERE the Dark Lord of the Sith that everybody's talking about, and the question of how you plan to use all that power. Do you turn back to the light side or do you go back to being evil and bring yourself to Malak's level? With Shepard it was about being a SPECTER, sitting in the same position of power that Saren abused to get where he is and trying to figure out how you plan to use it. Do you become as bad as him and hunt him down like the Dirty Harry of space or do things by the book? I'll grant that there's slightly different spins going on here, but the star map/Prothean beacon pushed me over the edge on hating Bioware's writers. On one hand: bits of a map to the Star Forge, where Malak's hiding out and outfitting his potentially infinite armies. Recovery of each one reveals bits and pieces of a mystical vision which holds the key to Revan's identity and the Galaxy's future. On the other: The Prothean beacon gradually reveals bits and pieces of a mystical vision, which holds the key to the Reapers and the Galaxy's future. The worst thing about it? All of this is lifted further STILL from Baldur's Gate, which at least had Minsc going for it. I only saw the last few hours of Jade Empire in motion, but it was more than enough to make me pretty confident that I know what I'm in for from that game too. Probably something where the hero questions his/her morality and the responsibility that goes with great power while the main villain turns out to be a little too close to home for comfort.
Maybe I'm exaggerating the degree to which they seem to recycle their ideas in some ways, but I can hardly think of them as "esteemed scribes" when THIS MUCH material seems to be re-used between two games. The only difference I can see between Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic is that one's a snappier dresser while the other one's got an ever-so-slightly more interesting plot. Granted, it takes a ton of work to push out the sheer AMOUNT of different situations and dialogues that they do for each game and I can't blame them for the sameness, especially when Square-Enix and Nintendo both are THRIVING on it, but there gets to a point when it feels like quantity over quality, and no matter who it's coming from I find it a bit of a disagreeable habit.
