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Next Dragon Age DLC Pack Coming “This Holiday Season”

Nathan Grayson — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:15:27 -0600

In our experience, DLC usually serves as the thin mint after a fulfilling game experience. Problem: At our current rate of progress, we’re on track to finish Dragon Age by next holiday season. But, for those of you who haven’t been diagnosed with chronic slowpoke syndrome, BioWare’s putting a fresh helping of content on your already stacked holiday gaming plate.

The new mini-arc “summons players to a new quest in which they will return to the fateful battleground in Ostagar where the Grey Wardens were nearly wiped out. Players will discover King Cailan’s top-secret political agenda and go behind enemy lines to revisit a place that many feared had been lost to history.”

It’s going for 400 BioWare Points, or $5.00. For now, BioWare’s keeping mum on release specifics, only saying to expect the DLC “this holiday season.”

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re actually off to go fight the Blight at Ostagar right now. Oh man, that King Cailan is so dreamy. We sure hope nothing bad happens to him!

Rumor: Mass Effect 2 to Receive Massive Amounts of DLC

Nathan Grayson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:43:02 -0600

The original Mass Effect rocked our socks. Its DLC, though? Not so much. Fortunately, if a Microsoft Expert Zone retailer quiz is to be believed, BioWare’s making up for Mass Effect’s DLC deficiency in a big way with Mass Effect 2.

According to the quiz, planned content includes “episodic combat via DLC, weapon and armor packs, new downloadable characters for the campaign experience, new downloadable worlds, as well as full campaign expansions for download.”

Here’s hoping that BioWare doesn’t also take the EA Renegade route and peddle things like cheat codes and cosmetic upgrades for exorbitant prices.”Exorbitant,” in this case, meaning “anything other than free.”

Mass Effect 2 Gets Late January Release Date

Nathan Grayson — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:59:38 -0500

BioWare’s finally pegged Mass Effect 2 with a concrete release date and, well, early 2010’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Joining games like BioShock 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, and Max Payne 3, ME2 has relocated from the twilight of 2009 to the dawn of 2010. More specifically, the game’s dropping on January 26.

BioWare and EA have also decided to sweeten the pot with some particularly potent preorder bonuses. Preorder from GameStop and you’ll score two in-game items, the Terminus Armor and the M-90 Blackstorm Heavy Weapon. Or, if you put down money on ME2 at any other brick-and-mortar outlets, the Inferno Armor is yours to keep.

The one thing we can’t procure by preordering, though? More time. Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare’s latest 100-hour jaunt into the realm of swords ‘n’ sorcery, is coming out in November. With Mass Effect 2 now making landfall in January, that’s two BioWare RPGs within three months. What to do? Hmmm.

Guess we’ll just have to spend even more time playing videogames. What a shame.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Looking for Public Testers!

Nathan Grayson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:17:30 -0500

You’ve waited and waited and waited, and you were prepared to wait even longer. Now, though, you can get an early hit of your next MMO addiction. Just head over to the official Star Wars: The Old Republic website, create an account, and – BOOM – you’ll… probably have to wait a bit longer, actually. But only a bit. And then maybe -- if the stars align in your favor – you’ll nab a spot in the game's testing phase.

Be quick about it, though. In case you hadn’t noticed, this game’s got everyone talking, and they’re mostly spouting one phrase: “I want to play this now.” LucasArts agrees with that assessment.

"Testing will be an ongoing process, and spots are limited, so people need to sign up early to give them the best possible chance of getting selected," wrote LucasArts.

So make like the Millennium Falcon and take a lightspeed leap over to the official sign-up page. Vominos!

New Mass Effect DLC Arrives Not with a Bang, But with a Whimper

Nathan Grayson — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:56:59 -0500

BioWare recently released some spankin’ new Mass Effect DLC, but, uh, it seems like they forgot to tell everyone. Titled “Pinnacle Station,” the Mass Effect DLC made a minimal impact upon landing, mostly because there was little-to-no pre-release hype associated with its launch. Oh sure, there were some hints – a wink, a nudge, and even a leak – but not a(n official) word from Microsoft or BioWare.

You’d think it’d be in your best interest to promote a new addition to your two year-old game, seeing as how most people have probably shelved it at this point. But then, we’re not marketing experts, so what do we know?

Anyway, the DLC costs five Washingtons – or one Lincoln – and gets Shepard and co. back in shape for Mass Effect 2 with 13 brand new combat missions.

Go grab it here, if you’re interested.

Can’t Wait for Mass Effect 2? Good, Because You Won’t Have to

Nathan Grayson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:09:24 -0500

After launching to much fanfare on the Xbox 360, the original Mass Effect disengaged its warp drive and sort of just floated over the PC. Granted, we were given a nice, long laundry list of improvements for our troubles, but still, we’d rather have gotten our shiny new game when it was still shiny and new. Fortunately, though, Mass Effect 2’s PC edition is launching day-and-date with its Xbox counterpart, BioWare said in an interview with VG247.

“This time round, doing it at the same time for a [simultaneous-ship], we can control the differences much more smoothly because it’s the same team building it now,” said Mass Effect 2 associate producer Jesse Houston.

“We learned a lot from building the PC version before, and having built it six months later there was a big difference. So we actually took what we learned from PC and put it back into 360. Fundamentally, we want you to have the same gameplay experience, but just with the difference in controls.”

Both versions of Mass Effect 2 launch this spring. Which is a shame for Microsoft, really, because we would’ve bought 360 Xbox 360s if it meant being able to play this game. Oh well, we're sure they’ll catch us the next time we’re willing to spend $72,000 on a single game. Yep. No biggie.

The Game Boy: Single-Player and Multiplayer -- Two Tastes That Go Great Together?

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:30:45 -0500

Every gamer has a story. A story assembled from countless in-game experiences, a collage of victory, defeat, heroics, and villainy. There is, however, a schism in the way these stories play out. Ask someone who’s lived out their gaming days in solitude and they’ll tell you of superhuman feats, epic dramas, and non-player characters who may not have been real boys, but were certainly close enough that Geppetto would’ve been hard-pressed to tell the difference. Pose the same question to multiplayer-centric gamers, though, and you’ll get an earful of teamwork, commitment, practice, and good old fashioned competition.

Neither side, of course, is wrong to enjoy games for their respective reasons. It’s merely a case of different strokes for different folks. However, what happens when single-player and multiplayer modes get married and pop out a child? Well, if you ask developers like BioWare and Splash Damage (who are working on fusing multiplayer and single-player with Star Wars: The Old Republic and Brink, respectively), they’ll tell you such all-encompassing modes are just The Next Big Thing. And they may very well be right about that.

Forgive me, then, for objecting to this holy matrimony.

Now, I’m not saying that Brink and Star Wars: TOR are going to be bad games, nor am I claiming that they won’t knock our collective socks off. However, I’m not so sure aspects of both single-player and multiplayer games can dance together without stepping on one another’s toes. Why? Well, let’s break it down.

Central to my fears are the goals that single-player and multiplayer modes seek to achieve. Single-player games – at least, as they are today – strive to guide players through an experience. BioWare games, especially, focus on story and well-developed non-player characters. Meanwhile, multiplayer games revel in competition, chaos, and adversity. Fail in a multiplayer environment and the developer’s certainly not going to kiss your bruised ego and make it feel better. That’d only get in the way of other players’ good times. Suddenly, you’re no longer some big damn hero; you’re just an unskilled rookie. This fact alone makes many multiplayer tropes inhospitable to the types of experiences many single-player games try to carry you through.

The biggest problem, I think, is that single-player games attempt to empower only one player, while their multiplayer counterparts try to treat everyone fairly. Thus, single-player modes lend themselves well to a story in which everything is yours. You’re the main character. You’re the star. The fate of the world rests on your shoulders. Generally, then, people fly solo in order to immerse themselves in an escapist fantasy – to escape from the suffocating realities of our mundane, unfair, unpredictable world and be something more than an average-Joe human being.

By adding multiple human beings into the mix, however, the opposite affect is achieved. Odds are, if you’re throwing down with real people, you’re bound to encounter someone better than you. Or, if you’re part of a team, you have to worry about having teammates’ backs, not letting others down, and – if you’re in a guild or clan – keeping in people’s good graces, or even committing to participate in events at scheduled times. That stuff? It’s work. Plain and simple. Fun sometimes, sure, but tedious at others. Moreover, many of the aforementioned multiplayer game elements unintentionally remind you that you are just a normal, everyday person – mostly because they mirror the mundane things you likely do on a day-to-day basis, except now you’re doing them while wearing midriff-revealing armor and doing the same canned dance animation all the time.

The stories that come from multiplayer-centric games, then, aren’t developer-driven; they’re based on your interactions with the game world and other people. Sure, they tend to skew a bit more toward the ordinary instead of the extraordinary, but in a way, they’re much more personal than single-player stories, even though you’re not the muscle-bound, infallible hero of each tale. As such, an orchestrated, single-player-style story only serves to constrict the environment in which such micro-stories can occur.

Honestly, though, I don’t believe multiplayer to be inferior to single-player. I merely think they’re diametrically opposed experiences – both enjoyable for wholly different reasons. And therein lies the reason I’d rather not see single and multiplayer joined together: In hacking the two apart and then sewing them together into some kind of Frankenstein monster, we risk deemphasizing the things that make each mode of play great.

Perhaps, for once, we should keep chocolate and peanut better separate – lest we soon discover that they’re actually water and oil.

Mythic Lending BioWare a Hand on Star Wars: The Old Republic

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:05:38 -0500

With Star Wars: The Old Republic making such lofty claims as being the Death Star to World of Warcraft’s Alderaan, many people forget that the upcoming MMO is actually BioWare’s first. Fortunately, the renowned RPG factory is no longer orchestrating the colossal space opera all by its lonesome. “Yeeeehaw,” we can only imagine Mythic screaming, shortly after the two developers’ recent merger. “BioWare, let’s blow this thing and go home!”

“Oh yeah, without a doubt,” BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk told Eurogamer when asked if Mythic would be lending some of its considerable MMO know-how to Star Wars: The Old Republic’s development.

Moreover, Zeschuk added that the two merged-but-still-somehow-independent companies have a lot to gain from swapping notes – not just for The Old Republic, but for Mythic’s games as well.

“I think we always have lots of opinions to share, Ray and I,” he said. “We've both played Warhammer, and actually I've still been playing it on and off for a while, so I think for us it's not too much a popularity boost as just the fact that we can probably bring perspectives to the table that will be new and perhaps helpful to the guys from Mythic in the same way from an online perspective they can certainly share with us.”

And so, the two companies lived happily ever after, developing games about endless slaughter in pursuit of loot and power. *Sniff* Brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it?