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cdstephen

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    New York
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    College Student
  1. I liked Scourge more than Revan in that novel for some reason.
  2. The problem is that there aren't enough low levels for them to segregate levels like that.
  3. On a side note, it'd be nice if they used R.A. Salvatore every now and then.
  4. Reminds me of Friday updates. Those were the days....
  5. Hopefully writing more novels will help him grow as a writer. I can imagine how working for a video game company, where everything has to be formulaic for the gameplay, could limit his writing capability.
  6. My guess would be that he wants to work on his own projects now instead of only video game based projects. Even if there was something bad at Bioware he doesn't like, hew wouldn't say anything about it as to not sever ties with them.
  7. One of Bioware's lead writers, Drew Karpyshyn, announced on his website that he is leaving the video game scene. For reference, he's had a hand in KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and TOR. He last involvement with the company will be finishing the TOR book he's working on, and as such most likely won't be involved with the Jedi Knight storyline anymore (the one he was primarily focused on). Source: http://drewkarpyshyn.com/c/?p=369#more-369
  8. Hence why I said "good for the publisher" and bad for the consumer. I fully understand it's good business, and if I were in the company's position I might do the same thing. I just feel ripped off when a game comes out with DLC they could have put in the game but decided not to because they can make more money keeping it out. If it's extra stuff like costumes or random side missions that don't really affect anything, I don't care, but if it's something like extra maps for an FPS, new companions for an RPG, or that sort of thing, then I feel like my 60 dollars isn't going towards a complete, full game because it's likely they intentionally took content out of the game and put it up for additional sale. Kind of like if they sell you French fries, but for salt you have to pay extra. Feels meh. Unfortunately, even though from a purely financial standpoint this is good business, from a PR standpoint this is bad business. A satisfied customer is a customer who will pay for your products again, because they trust the company and believe it to be reliable. However, if one is to screw over the customer in such a way that it enrages them, then that's lost profit. It might be good for the short term to take content out of a game and mark it as DLC, but if enough of the fan base gets pissed about it, then those are lost sales down the road. Given that there are a lot of people on the internet who WOULD get iffed about this sort of thing, especially since games cost a whopping 60 dollars, this can become an issue (much like how there are various people who refuse to buy EA games for various reasons, primarily due to Origin I believe). Also, SWTOR is set up such that you have to pay monthly for content that they give out. Which means if you subscribe from day 1, and stuff like the color customization system, armor sets, quests, storylines, the Legacy system, etc. are taken out of the game to be released later, then you are paying money for a less complete game. Already there are SWTOR fans who are frustrated with how there are various features missing from the game (guild features, the Legacy system, armor customization, etc.) piled on top of the bugs that are inevitable with any MMO. Frustration can lead to cancellation, which leads to a lost profit. I'm not necessarily saying that Bioware intentionally took out some content to be released for later; it's possible that they didn't have enough time to finish all the content because EA or the management of BW put them in perpetual crunch time ever since this game was announced for a spring 2011 release when it seems more fit for a spring 2012 release. Long crunch times lead to stressed developers, which lead to ineffective work, bugs in coding, and unfinished content. Another possibility could be that the developers were incompetent enough such that they weren't able to finish all the work in time regardless of the amount of crunch time, leading to not only a host of bugs but a lack of features. Another possibility is that they intentionally took content out and slated it for a March 2012 release to compel people to subscribe for a few months longer before they cancel so they can experience the upcoming content. I personally would like to believe the first one, with the crunch time and such, is true because the second possibility would lead to more and more issues with the game down the road as the developers themselves would be bad at developing, while number three would mean that they could potentially pull the same trick over and over, thus giving us less content per month than they actually could if they wanted to. This is all just speculation and atm it's impossible to know for certain unless a developer speaks up about any issues during development or the state of the game months after launch suggests one of the latter two possibilities.
  9. I just liked Mass Effect 1 a lot better than 2 because I felt ME2 strayed too far into "action/shooter" territory for me, and also the story felt a lot better in Mass Effect 1 with the mystery about the Reapers and Saren. Mass Effect 2 was good, but it's story seemed to be "gather allies, gather more allies, then kill Collectors". I just couldn't get into Dragon Age: Origins. After I completed one of the faction's storylines (Mage Tower I think) I just quit because it got boring. The thing about DA2's design comes from my friend who was obsessed with DA:O. It's just my feeling that the quality of Bioware's games hasn't been improving quite as much as I hoped. That could just be rose tinted glasses though.
  10. Despicable is still despicable. Just pointing out that there are many indications (including evidence within the game itself) that Bioware kinda dropped the ball in terms of developing features and content for this game. My suspicion is that EA may have rushed the game to come out in Christmas, since you can tell that a lot of the content (Kaon's resolution, new operation, dailies on Corellia, guild features, Legacy system) is coming out in March, content that one may have reasonably expected to be in the game. This may have put the developers in a perpetual crunch time, causing them to make mistakes in their coding and cutting out a lot of features while at the same time taking shortcuts (redoing the same design over again, for example). It makes me wonder whether becoming part of EA was a good decision on BW's part in terms of the quality in their games. Meh.
  11. More stuff? Intentionally holding back a product to release for later simply because you want more profit for the same amount of work is despicable imo. It's why I hate many games' DLC system, where they released DLC very close to launch and expect us to pay for content they could have just added in the game. Good for the publisher, bad for the consumer, and the developers are too underpaid/mistreated to care. Mass Effect 2 gave us much less of an exploratory game and made it more themepark while streamlining a lot of RPG features (some changes were good imo, other changes weren't imo), while Dragon Age 2 showed lazy design in terms of dungeon creation. We can see the same type of laziness in SWTOR in terms of making the layout of space stations exactly the same, and leaving out features that seem rather obvious and wouldn't be relatively hard to implement, like moving boxes around, making it so you can have more than 2 windows open at a time, allowing for string searches in the GTN, etc. Just because a game developing company has different departments doesn't mean that the same attitude in terms of laziness and oversights in their development has to be isolated in only one department
  12. Dragon Age 2's design might be an indication of something
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