^Crushbug is working at BioWare, i.e. the three games he's talking about are Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Star Wars: The Old Republic (all showing much promise).

>> ^Farhad2000:
Everything at E3 looked like shit. Bad economic times guarantees formulaic and safe games with sequels making the biggest showing.


In bad economic times, even the criticism becomes formulaic and safe.

The games industry has been all but recession-proof. In fact, up until very recently, the game industry seemed to be gaining momentum as people started staying home and curling up with videogames instead of going out.

The real thing that pushes games to be "formulaic and safe" is the same thing that always happens when there's really only a handful of companies with deep pockets competing with one another: they need to invest so much in individual products just to compete, it's hard to justify making a big bet on an unproven concept.

That said, "formulaic and safe" in the game industry usually means betting on the big name developers and development houses. Sometimes that means a sequel factory, other times it means God of War, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Brutal Legend, Resistance Fall of Man, and Halo come out, rather than just seeing the same IP getting dusted off year after year (Hey there Mario, Zelda, Metroid!).

That said, usually there's at least one title that gets announced at E3 that surprised me, and this year there was nothing.

As far as original IP from this year, look to things like Brutal Legend, The Last Guardian, Heavy Rain, Dragon Age, and Alan Wake.

If those don't qualify, what is the last game you thought was not formulaic and safe?

I've enjoyed most of Bioware's games for their writing quality, but the gameplay quality has always been very poor, IMO. You can beat the entirety of KOTOR at the hardest difficulty by merely hitting "Flurry" and "Heal" over and over. All the strategy layers of the game merely give you the illusion that there is anything deep going on.

For this reason I think Bioware is a poor video game company, but a good interactive novel company.

Anyway I was hoping Dragon Age would be the true sequel to Neverwinter Nights, but DA will apparently have no multiplayer.

I started at BioWare just after MDK2 shipped for the Dreamcast so I started on MDK2 PC. Been there ever since and I have touched most of the PC titles that we have put out. I am currently working on Dragon Age.

In reply to this comment by EDD:
Wait. Whaaa??? Are you telling me you've been employed by Bioware for the past 9 years? You're not kidding me, are you? If I didn't misunderstand you then know there's one more person in the world that's envious of you

In reply to this comment by CrushBug:
Man, what a wild ride. Its coming up on 9 years for me there.

Looking forward to in Q1-2 of 2009 (PC): Prototype, Braid, Velvet Assassin, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Trine, Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Burnout Paradise, Borderlands, Bionic Commando, Dragon Age: Origins, Tom Clancy's HAWX.
The better part of these really ought to arrive in 2009, even if delayed. Some have solid release dates set for Feb, as far as I can remember.