After a quick respite I headed to the bowels of West hall and near the end of the Nintendo line to visit the folks at Bioware. A late addition to my appointment schedule I was eager to see what the folks from the North had been working on.
The first title that I was demoed was a PC port of last year’s Jade Empire. The game has received a major graphical overhaul and has received a ton of new effects and graphical details over what Bioware shipped to Microsoft’s last generation console. Bioware isn’t tricking the game out though and is setting the PC Spec’s a bit low so that gamers won’t need a high end PC rig to play thegame.
In making the transition to the PC the Bioware team listened to the fans and implemented a number of changes. The biggest one being an increase in the difficulty of the game as well as tweaking the game’s AI to make it a little harder to get through the game. The new version of the game will include a host of new powers and harmonic combos as well as adding two new styles to the game. The first is the Iron Palm which is a sumo combat style focused on slaps and pushing on opponents while the Viper Style will be focused on landing many fast strikes at once (and was inspired by the movie Five Deadly Venoms).
The developers let it slip that Jade Empire is the first game in a new IP for Bioware and while they didn’t say it directly one could almost deduce that Jade Empire 2 might already be under development for next generation systems.
Next up was the game that kind of changed my perspective of the show and while it’s hard to really get that excited about a non-interactive demo (at least non-interactive from the point that I wasn’t controlling the action) I have to say that I got the same feeling watching the demonstration of Mass Effect that I did last year when I sat through the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion demonstration. It was that feeling that things have changed and that the market is advancing, the fact that normal RPG standards are being advanced, that new perspectives are being created. Maybe I was just a little loopy from the sleep deprivation and caffeine buzz but I really dug what Bioware had to show me.
What made the demonstration different? It was a few things. The first was the cinematic feel of the game and the new way of approaching the old dialog tree that’s become common place in every single RPG. Rather than spitting out a specific line of dialogue you pick which emotion you want to communicate and the game handles the rest for you, coming up with dialog that matches the emotion you picked. The old paradigm of being zoomed in to the persons face was also changed as the perspective the dialogue takes place from is done from an over the shoulder perspective which adds a nice cinematic look and feel to the action.
I also have to give props to Bioware for coming up with a rather unique plot and plot device. You do have a bit of the standard “Save the Galaxy” from the great menace action but there’s an interesting twist. You play Commander Shepard, a new agent in the galaxies Spector program. As an agent of Spector you are tasked with protecting the galaxy no matter what. As the first human Spector agent you represent all humans as the humans have just recently joined the galactic party and you’re the first human that most aliens see. This means that your actions directly impact how all humans are perceived across the galaxy which is new concept that brings a lot of pressure with it as well as a lot of narrative potential.
The action in Mass Effect takes place across the entire galaxy as Bioware is providing gamers with the opportunity to explore the entire known universe with the possibility of new content being added after the game is released. You will explore the planets in a large planetary rover which can be upgraded as the game progresses. Like Oblivion, the game will have a main quest for you to solve as well as a lot of side quests that you can complete at your leisure.
It wouldn’t be an RPG without combat and you’ll have a new squad management system in place that allows you to quickly move your teammates around to achieve optimal tactical superiority using the games system of weapons and special powers. This part was a little more atypical RPG but it still looked good. All in all, Mass Effect has that game of the year type potential but I’m going to withhold final judgment until I’m actually playing the game at home.
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