In a recent chat with MTV’s Multiplayer Blog, BioWare’s co-CEO Greg Zeschuk revealed that the company is considering developing games for the iPhone due to its “cultural and technical success”.
Stating that BioWare has decided to “take a close look” at developing games for it, Zeschuk went on to say:
“We look at every platform that comes along. Obviously, something that’s as big a cultural and technical success as the iPhone is something you really got to take a close look at. Certainly, there’s nothing written in stone yet but we’ve got a lot of folks looking at it.
“It’s intriguing. I think one of the things that we’ll have to see how it shakes out is what type of consumer buys games on it and what type of experience they’re looking for. You want to always mash the consumer experience with what you’re building. We want to understand what people are going to do with it. Who knows. We’re definitely looking at every platform.”
I guess more people play games on their mobile phones than I, personally, would imagine. I just recently became the owner of a new Samsung Instinct, which is suppose to be a competitor to the iPhone and I have yet to download games, because to be honest with you, it has enough on it to keep me occupied without playing games on it. If I plan on sitting in the Doctor’s office or waiting on my car to get the oil changed and just HAVE to play a game, I will just bring along my DS. Otherwise, the MP3’s on my phone or my iPod for that matter will suffice. I just don’t like playing games on a phone, but more power to those that do and I am happy they enjoy them.
Channel Flip is hosting a video mini series on Mac gaming. Your video host Katharine is kicking off Mac Gaming 101 with native gaming options for the Mac.
Now, much as we all love our various Mac computers here at ChannelFlip, we’re ready to admit that the issue of gaming has long been a thorn in the side of Apple fans.
But the perception that you have to have a high powered Windows PC for gaming on a computer, combined with a lack of publicity for the growing Mac gaming industry, means that a surprising number of people aren’t aware of what you can achieve gaming wise on a Mac.
Some of the games that can be played on the Mac include Unreal Tournament 3, Neverwinter Nights 2, Guitar Hero 3, The Sims 2: Castaway Stories, Fable: The Lost Chapters and World of Warcraft.
Anthony Davis, one of the Obsidian Entertainment Developers, has posted an example of the the new Party Conversation System for Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir. In case you missed the announcement, Storm of Zehir is the second expansion for NWN2.
Davis is a programmer implementing the system in SoZ. Here’s his explaination of how the system should work. Remember that SoZ, like the original NWN2, is based on D&D 3.5. Read the full article
Tony Evans, Lead Designer on the second Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Storm of Zehir, took time to answer a few questions on the upcoming title. SoZ is a “return to roots” which should make hardcore role-players happy. Evans also promises that gameplay has been streamlined to make it more accessible and easier for casual players.
Unlike Mask of the Betrayer which started players out at level 18, SoZ starts at level three capping at 30. Players will find themselves in a war ravaged world where the locals are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. There’ll be many opportunities in Samarach and the Sword Coast to help people recover from their tragedies or to exploit the chaos for personal gain.
Evans promises SoZ features full party customization, dungeon crawling, and open sandbox-style exploration with more role-playing than either the original or MotB. For all the gritty details, read the entire Q&A with Tony Evans on CVG.
Ideazon’s Zboard standard, gaming and Age of Conan models get a thorough review from MMORPG.
While the verdict on the standard Zboard is less than stellar, the gaming Zboard gets plenty of kudos. The board comes with over 50 key mapping templates for a wide variety of games including Battlefield 2142, Call of Duty 4, EverQuest II, City of Villains, World of Warcraft and Bioshock others (there are in total).
However, according to the reviewer, all those awesome looking Age of Conan Zboards are as good as you might hope. Many of the Conan specific keys for: Say, Shout, Tell, Reply, Follow, AFK, Invite, Kick, Auto Run and various emotes simply don’t function. As if that wasn’t enough to give it an unfavorable review MMORPG has one last shot to take at the AoC Zboard.
I also have to say that Ideazon really missed the boat with this keyboard. I was honestly surprised when I opened the set to find the right hand side inhabited by the invite, kick, inventory, etc. keys. It seemed like a no-brainer to me that an Age of Conan specific keyboard should capitalize on the game’s unique combat system. Instead of having those fairly secondary keys on the right hand side, the designers could have placed the specialized keys on the left hand side and incorporated movement and attacks into a more comfortable configuration than WASD and 12345 currently offer. Directional attacks at the very least should have been represented with specialized keys. They weren’t. Boo, hiss Ideazon, boo, hiss.
Drew Karpyshyn, author and writer for the Knights of the Old Republic video game, talks about working with BioWare and his Science fiction including the Darth Bane Star Wars novels.
Karpyshyn is very confident in his abilities and short comings as well. He revels in his “functionally ugly” website that he programed himself; as well as his part in bringing gamers KOTOR.
Hmmm… how can I say this without sounding arrogant? It actually felt more like I’d fallen into a position that my whole life had been leading up to. I’ve basically been a Star Wars fan for 30 years, and a role-playing game fan for 25, a video game fan for 20, and a writer/story teller my whole life. Obviously I appreciate how lucky I was to find the opportunity, but it almost felt inevitable once I was in the position.
Karpyshyn fields questions on his work with Wizards of the Coast and on being published. In addition to his Darth Bane series, he’s novelized Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. Read up on this author on Galaticbinder.com.
According to John Riccitiello, BioWare’s MMO is scheduled to be released between April 2010 and April 2011.
It has been rumored that the project is a Star Wars MMO, to be specific, KOTOR which recently laid-off employees who were apparently disgruntled let “slip” to gaming outlets.
In his talk with the William Blair and Company during a conference, Riccitiello mentioned the BioWare MMO is “new intellectual property”, and while one would think that this would kill the KOTOR MMO rumor outright, Eurogamer made an interesting point when they stated that while ” Star Wars and KOTOR are hardly new, they would be new to EA”.
Until we get more info on this, or until anything can be confirmed, just hold tight because as soon as find something out we will be sure to let you know.
EA CEO John Riccitiello has given the upcoming RPG Dragon Age his vote of confidence. At the William Blair & Company’s 28th Annual Growth Stock Conference, Riccitiello stated that there was no risk involved for EA with the title.
“(Dragon Age) speaks to a very, very, very important audience,” said Riccitiello. “This is a core RPG created for fans that love (BioWare), and it’s about dragons. This is not risky. This is an audience that we know, that we can deliver for and generate very substantial profits by doing so.”
I would say that Dragon Age does have a pretty good chance of going over well with the RPG crowd. BioWare has a well deserved reputation for excellence. However, that’s no guarantee that gamers will take to Dragon Age. Players are steadily becoming more selective of where they spend their hard earned cash.
It looks like the controversial DRM for the PC version of Mass Effect is rearing its ugly head once more. Prior to the game’s release, many gamers were upset when they learned that Mass Effect’s copy protection software essentially required internet re-authentication every ten days. After a fierce outcry from the gaming public, EA dropped the authentication aspect of the copy protection, but did still limit the game from being installed on more than three computers. Many assumed that this would be a similar case to BioShock’s DRM, which would allow you to install the game on another computer, provided you uninstalled it from another first. Apparently though, this is not the case with Mass Effect.
Recently, a few consumers have noticed that simply uninstalling the game doesn’t give you an activation back. A thread on Mass Effect’s forums shows the odd runaround one consumer was given in his efforts to find out if this really was the case. Finally, he received this simple answer:
Unfortunately, you will not gain an activation by uninstalling the game.
So essentially, you get to install the game three times. That’s it. Any more than that is probably going to involve you contacting EA Support line, which is probably inviting unnecessary pain.
Of course, this raises almost as many issues as the previous DRM controversy. For one, it pretty much kills the used market for this game, since the disc is basically worthless after three installs. For another, PC gamers tend to uninstall and re-install programs all the time, so this is something that’s bound to affect a lot of people. Besides all that though, this just comes back to how ridiculous it is to treat legitimate customers like criminals. I’ll bet the people who bought Mass Effect on the PC are real happy to learn all this after the game’s been on store shelves for awhile.
You know what they say about payback, and the now-official LucasArts layoffs has led to Kotaku getting all sorts of email from former LucasArts staff revealing all kinda of details on future games — including Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 3.
The information claims that, with the layoffs, the company will be left shorthanded with all of the games they have in the works, which include KOTOR 3, which is apparently an MMO being worked on by BioWare, Star Wars Battlefront 3, “The Official Indiana Jones” game, “another LEGO game based on the Indy universe,” and “a lightsaber game for the wii (sorry, no lighsaber peripherals).”
Talk about juicy rumors.
The person also said that the layoffs shouldn’t impact The Force Unleashed or Fracture. The Force Unleashed has “passed approval with SCEA and is ready to ship,” while Fracture, on the other hand, is “an absolute piece of garbage.” Of course, I’d probably hate anything being made by the company that just fired me, so his or her word might not be the best to go on in that regard.
If you’re like me, you probably heard that Sega was releasing a Sonic RPG and immediately started banging your head against a wall. But then you, once you discovered that BioWare was developing it, you probably stopped, put some ice on your skull, and settled into a state of guarded optimism. That’s about where I sit with this game: it looks great, but they could still screw it up somehow. This trailer kind of sways me to the more optimistic side, but we’ll have to see. At any rate, it’s still nice to see the game actually runs smoothly in motion.
We’ve all heard it over and over recently from many pessimistic sources in the games industry. They cite software piracy as a major culprit, claiming an incredible percentage of games are stolen. We’ve heard how PCs are so much more expensive to upgrade than consoles and with the seemingly infinite combinations of hardware, software and drivers is it any wonder consoles look so promising to developers? With each successive generation of systems, consoles have become more sophisticated and now rival the performance capabilities of midline PCs.
PCs are hard to write games for. Again and again, developers complain about the time and money involved in creating games for systems that have no standard specifications and have a wide range of performance capabilities. Consoles represent a base configuration, sure they may or may not hare a hard drive and even when they do the size might vary but its nothing like PCs and its use of different hardware, OS and drivers. There’s no guarantee that a game will work for every build out there even if the machine meets the minimum system specifications.
All these are legitimate complaints, but I think there is one very important reason why the cries of PC game death are false. PC games have an appeal that is uncommon among the proprietary game consoles by offering a training ground for future developers. Gamers modify PC games adding increased value for other players while granting the titles a longer life span if the mod scene takes off after release. Developers even plan for and encourage game owners to create new content and change existing code. What console offers this sort of tool? Some games come with tool sets packaged with the game, while others are free to download. Its become common for development teams to challenge amateur game makers to enhance or create new game content through contests, some - like the Make something Unreal contest, offer substantial prizes to the winners.
I should qualify “PS3 appearance” — it’s the lack thereof that’s noteworthy.
BioWare head honchos Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk spoke with Wired about Mass Effect in the wake of its release on PC. By now you should know what’s different about the PC version of the game, so I won’t bother rehashing that.
A key topic was of course the controversial SecuROM DRM that was (purportedly) announced to be shipping with the game. Zeschuk claims that BioWare never made any official announcement about SecuRom, though. “BioWare is always committed to its fans and we always listen to them,” said Zeschuk.
“There was certainly a lot of speculation and rumors about what was planned for Mass Effect in terms of DRM but we hadn’t officially given any word about the DRM plan until we made the one official statement in our community and overall the response was very positive. We really appreciate our loyal fans that buy our games and keep us in business, but frankly we’re appalled by piracy and its advocates — those people aren’t part of our community.”
Since that crisis has been averted, PlayStation 3 owners might be wondering when they might see Mass Effect on their system of choice. When asked if there was a PS3 version of the game in the works, Muzyka replied, “Mass Effect is an Xbox 360 and PC title.” He didn’t, however, say that the Mass Effect series is only on Xbox 360 and PC.
BioShock for the PS3 may be great news for some people and a testament to how well the game was received, but it is a while off and these for BioWare news that we can actually “use” look no further that the release of Mass Effect for the PC.
Having arrived in stores yesterday, Mass Effect is also available for purchase online and can be downloaded from major digital distribution sites. Including a new tactical heads-up display, higher resolution visuals, an enhanced inventory system, fully optimized controls designed specifically for the PC, individual squad control and a new decryption mini-game.
“Bring Down the Sky,” already available for the Xbox 360, is just the first in a series of planned downloadable content that will further expand the Mass Effect story and universe for the PC and will soon be available free of charge for registered BioWare community members to download. “Bring Down the Sky” contains an uncharted world that introduces the deadly Batarian alien race, and is approximately 90 minutes of additional gameplay.
When Mass Effect came out, I was really wanting to play it but had so many unfinished games going on my 360 that I decided to put off purchasing it until I could devote the time needed to such a game. Then when the news broke that it would be coming to the PC, I was even more excited because I would actually rather play it on the PC. I guess what this means is that I finally have something new and cool for my PC that will give me a much needed break from MMOs.
With the PC launch of Mass Effect just over a week away, it seems appropriate to give PC gamers a look at what the story of Mass Effect has to offer. I don’t think many people will argue that it’s the most utterly original piece of fiction you’ll ever see, but BioWare does execute it damn well. I found myself really engrossed, enough so that I even went and read the prequel novel, and now I’m sitting here awaiting the sequel with baited breath.
Even if you have played Mass Effect before, the trailer above is worth watching. It gave me goosebumps, even knowing exactly what was going to happen throughout the game.
AND! You get a brief look at the game’s controversial sex scene.
While you wait for Mysteries of Westgate to finally be released, Ossian Studios has offered up another article on the background story of the first Adventure Pack for Neverwinter Nights 2. This last spotlight features the church of Lathander.
In the decades of the brutal domination of the Night Masks over Westgate, none have been able to stand against the organization. Even the combined efforts of the church of Lathander and the church of Ilmater have met with failure. The Church is now actively recruiting those brave enough to face the Night Masks, offering the favor of the Morninglord and more earthly rewards such as relics and riches.
This is the last MoW spotlight before the game’s launch. However, players can look forward to an inside perspective on the LA press conference next week.
As Microsoft has been revealing more and more information about their top-tier titles for 2008, a few glaring omissions to their lineup seem to hint at some news they may not be revealing. For starters, they’ve been curiously silent about Halo Wars this year, indicating the game may have been pushed back into 2009. Along with this, it seems like Alan Wake is getting delayed again, and probably competing with Duke Nukem Forever for the title of “most delayed game.” Finally, the complete lack of information on Mass Effect 2 is being viewed as a sign that EA is indeed taking the franchise multi-platform. Good news for PS3 owners, but also a sign that EA may be further tightening its grip on BioWare. Of course, all these companies could just be waiting until E3 to make their huge reveals; but I’m already betting on the worst.
The release of Ossian Studio’s Mysteries of Westgate draws near. WarCry has published the highlights of the recent Press Event on the Neverwinter Nights 2 Adventure Pack.
The big news is that players will finally be able to grab MoW in June. The mod has been finished since September, but waiting for Atari to complete the new secure authentication system. The system will be released to NWN 2 players with the v1.13 patch and MoW should be available shortly after.
Twenty Sided has an article up on how have flawed main characters can be fun. The example used here is the lead character from BioWare’s Jade Empire. For those of you who have always wanted to play it but haven’t got around to it; you might want to skip this article. However for those gamers who understand the inside joke, this is a fun piece of truism.
Personal, I like a little roughness in both my NPCs and player characters. It makes them more realistic and easier to relate to. It also helps to build tension in a story. If everything single obstacle is too easily surmounted, I tend to lose interest quickly. This especially applies to RPGs and games with RPG elements.
The unstoppable Kratos retains a human touch as he mourns the loss of his family. Similarly, the new Viking: Battle for Asgard features a less than perfect main character as well. Not all player characters are as clueless as the lead character in Jade Empire, but it’s nice to have three dimensional characters that have some room for growth.
When it was announced that the upcoming PC versions of Mass Effect and Spore would make use of a ridiculous security feature that would automatically re-authenticate the users CD key every ten days — and lock the game entirely if for some reason it couldn’t do so — gamers responed almost unanimously with outrage. Boycotts of the game were organized and many people stated they would illegally crack the game than make use of a frustrating security feature. Well, luckily EA has seen the error of its ways and realized that it’s not a good idea to treat your paying customers like criminals. As such, both Mass Effect and Spore will no longer require authentication on a regular basis. Instead, you’ll authenticate your copy once after installing it and each time you choose to take the game online or download new content, like most other PC games. You’ll still be limited to having the game on three computers max, but the new system will allow you play the game without the disc in the drive and without being online. So basically, they reverted it back to a security program that’s more in line with that of other popular games out there. And yes, this decision comes from listening to all the complaints from gamers. There will probably still be a fair number of people pirating the games — that’s to be expected — but at least most of them won’t be out of spite.
You know what they say about payback, and the 
PC gaming is dead!
BioShock for the PS3 may be great news for some people and a testament to how well the game was received, but it is a while off and these for BioWare news that we can actually “use” look no further that the release of 
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