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Posted by
BuckGB
at 9:55 pm on 02.8.2010 (1 month ago)
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A new Q&A with BioWare's Greg Zeschuk is available on The A.V. Club, during which the co-founder discusses Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, and biosexual elves: AVC: Starting with your Dungeons & Dragons games, you’ve always had an alignment system that would rate all the choices a character made as good and evil, or lawful and chaotic. Dragon Age broke from that by ditching the moral scale, and Mass Effect also has a different system. Do you feel you’ve outgrown the good vs. evil scale?
GZ: When the Dragon Age team came up with a system which… For so many years, it’s been “Okay, you got +1 this, but -1 that…” On a very specific scale, that was a metagame itself. Playing the morality game was a metagame. We sort of further prompted that by giving you prizes if you get the maximum, right?
I think at the extreme level, it’s non-productive. It’s really transparent, and gamers are smart. They see right through it. Actually, with Dragon Age, I really liked the system the team came up with. It reflects what was important about the game, and that was the character relationships. It didn’t really matter what the world thought of you, but it mattered what the person standing next to you thought of you. And I thought that was a very meaningful thing that fit the game very well, because it was a lot about those relationships and taking them to a more realistic level. You had to carefully decide who you’re hanging out with, carefully determine which actions you want to take, who’s going to be pissed off as a result, and who’s going to be happy with you.
In Mass Effect’s case, that’s not exactly what it’s about. It is about Shepard, and it is about what the world and the universe and the galaxy think of Shepard. The Paragon and Renegade [scale] really fit the Mass Effect franchise. At a very high level, Mass is a different experience. Mass isn’t meant to be quite as gray and complicated. It’s meant to be more like, you’re the action star. You’re a thinking man’s action star, or thinking woman’s action star, but you’re an action star, and it’s a big, big, bold production. And so it has a different sensibility. I wouldn’t want it to be overly complex. You almost want the bold, dramatic actions.
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(@ 5:12 pm on 02.8.2010) Location:
Posts: 70
When you can bag Morrigan, dump her for Leliana mid-game, go do Flemeth's quest and regain ALL her favor, then bag Leliana, meanwhile going over and getting kisses from Morrigan before you go bag Leliana, it is just not as impressive.
all thanks to so many gifts, that are everywhere, it is not as if they are hard to come by.
at one point I had Leliana's favor too high, after dumping Morrigan, so I could not romance here because I did not activate her quest. So breaking up with her will activate it, then I can go find another one of those stupid flowers she loves (since there are TWO!) do her quest, give her the flower and then do her.
as far as companions, oooo that one was hard, figure out the first hour who likes what and just dont take a Morrigan to town with you where you will be doing good deeds (reverse for Leliana) and keep her around in battles and you hardly lose an ounce of favor. If you do, hey give her a golden necklace you found in some off some dead body and she is happy again!
I liked the game, but I am on the list now of those of us who are sick of these Bioware guys strutting around as if they re-invented the wheel by making minor tweaks in their morality system or some other "major innovation" in their games.
I enjoy reading a lot, but I would enjoy it less if the authors I read were around the net doing interviews saying "yeah, wasn't that one character I created badazz! and man how cool was it when I did this..."