Mass Effect 3

Details, details, and more details!

GameBanshee links to a pair of lengthy articles at OXM which break down numerous details about the enemies you’ll face in Mass Effect 3 and the alien races you’ll be trying to save during the course of the game.

OXM are also featuring a list of eight things to try in the upcoming Mass Effect 3 demo, and some information about the Normandy (your ship and home base in the game). The also have features looking at the game’s “insanity mode” setting, the various companions that will appear in-game, and level design in the game. (Evidently, they decided that this particular eyesore would work perfectly as an example of the harsh architectural style of the Krogan people.)

Oh, and…here’s something about the game’s achievements system.

How to write BioWare fan fiction.

Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider took to the BioWare blog to offer some tips and pointers to prospective fan fiction writers. He also, unfortunately, took some heat on Twitter from various hyper-sensitive sorts about his choice of imagery in this paragraph:

DO pay attention to flow. In creative writing, flow is more important than language. Some writers will abuse a thesaurus so badly you half-expect to find it wandering dazed alongside the highway, dress in tatters and lipstick smeared across its face. They laden their prose with words they fancy because they think it makes their writing more poetic. It doesn?t. It makes your prose heavy, and while there might be some readers who appreciate that, it won?t make you a better writer. Be sparing with your language, and realize there isn?t a sentence so clever it shouldn?t be cut if it doesn?t assist your purpose? which is telling a story. Cut out all your extra that?s and but?s and adjectives and adverbs (I often need this advice, myself). Slaughter your word-babies mercilessly, for that pain will put you in the habit of not over-populating your prose to begin with.

Evidently, some people felt that the imagery of rape was…inappropriate for him to use. The baby-slaughtering imagery passed without comment, however. Oh, Twitter…so selective are you in your outrage!

Star Wars: The Old Republic already has 1.7 million subscribers.

That’s a pretty impressive number, given that the game only launched…what? Two months ago, give or take? That might even make it the fastest-growing subscription MMORPG in history.

I think EA’s projections for the game had pegged the 500,000 subscriber mark as the point at which the game would turn profitable, so it would appear that BioWare’s trust in the Force was reasonably well-placed.

SWTOR has also evidently sold 2 million copies. Make of the discrepancy — between that number and the subscriber base — what you will.

The Mass Effect 3 voice cast!

Well, some of it, anyway:

Relatedly: is there an ethics issue in BioWare’s use of G4TV’s Jessica Chobot as a voice actress?

Worthplaying seems to think so:

The content and timing of PR plans for top-tier games involve similar, if not longer, timelines and are typically decided months in advance. This is done to ensure maximum exposure for the game in question, with little tidbits of news hitting at regular intervals. Whether it’s the announcement of the voice cast, information about a demo or simply a batch of screenshots, the news is rarely accidental. It’s carefully managed.

Knowing all this and knowing that EA has an extremely polished PR team, it is surprising that it would have even allowed Chobot to preview the game as a member of the press. The team had to have known Chobot had worked on the game when she walked into the demo suite with a G4 TV camera crew. While they may have wanted to keep the news of her involvement under wraps until the designated time, allowing G4 TV to film makes it look like EA’s PR team had no issue with presenting someone who worked on Mass Effect 3 as an unbiased journalist reporting on the game.

This just screams “conflict of interest.”

If I might point out two flaws with Worthplaying’s argument, nobody has ever accused G4 of engaging in anything resembling “journalism”, let alone journalism of the increasingly rare “unbiased” variety.

Though I do agree that the optics of this aren’t good. Is it an actual ethics issue? Doubtful. But it doesn’t pass the sniff test either.

Want to try out Xbox Live Gold? Play the Mass Effect 3 demo.

Apparently, testing out the ME3 demo for Xbox will temporarily bump you from Silver to Gold subscriber status, so you can take full advantage of the multiplayer features in the game.

BioWare is advising us to hold on to Mass Effect 3 save games.

Of course, they’ve also told us that Mass Effect 3 will be the end of “Shepard’s story”, so they’re probably saying this to leave open the possibility that future games in the Mass Effect franchise can draw upon player choices made in the first trilogy to define the general shape of the universe and game setting.

Speaking of player choices in BioWare games…IGN’s editors are a bit frustrated about them.

Their arguments about Dragon Age, in particular, make a good deal of sense; it’s been rather disappointing how that series has so far handled player choices and the consequences thereof, with a couple of very glaring incidences where those choices were more or less entirely discarded in the service of an overarching narrative.

The same could be said of Mass Effect 2, although BioWare made it a bit more obvious that the middle part of that trilogy wasn’t supposed to have a wild amount of variance based on choices players made in the original Mass Effect. It became apparent fairly quickly that they were saving up the major choice/consequence payoffs for Mass Effect 3.

Now…can they deliver on that? There’s the question.

Dragon Age anime?

It’s been long-rumoured, but it seems to be moving into the realm of reality now: release is slated for some time this spring.

I pretty much hate anime, just for the record.

Interviews, interviews, and more interviews!

Let’s face it…in the run-up to a big game’s release, key people who worked on (and are working on) the thing will be in the press, possibly quite often. BioWare is not exempt from this trend, and several of its staff have been all over the gaming press in the last week.

Here’s the game’s lead cinematic animator and art director talking about various changes that have been made to how characters in the game are modeled, how they move, and how they “speak”. And here’s a Q&A session with the game’s executive producer about…lots of things. (Here is is again, actually, talking about what Mass Effect 3 brings back to the series that was missing in Mass Effect 2.)

What is this I don’t even…

Mass Effect 3: Mission Command is a just-launched Facebook app that…well…I’m not quite sure what it does. I guess it ties in with your Xbox Live account, if you have one, and involves performing missions that will net you bonus DLC for Mass Effect 3…and possibly some other stuff as well.

Here’s a sample mission concept, apparently: choose whether to agree to continue your romance with Liara T’Soni, or reject her outright. Another mission, detailed in the original article, involves looking for an Easter Egg somewhere on Bing.

I…you know what? I’mma just play the game.

The Mass Effect 3 “Invasion” trailer…longer, better.

This was the trailer for the game that was played at E3 last year. This version is just that much better, I think.

GameBanshee has a round-up of Mass Effect 3 previews.

If you can get their site to load, they’ve actually highlighted some interesting commentary from a half-dozen different sources. Most of the commentary seems to focus on the game’s now-well-documented first hour, and it sounds like all that we’ve come to expect from Mass Effect is present therein.

BioWare blinks.

Personally, I think that re-issuing a “corrected” version of the latest Mass Effect novel, Deception, is the wrong move. But since some irate BioWare fans were evidently burning their copies of the novel in protest over various errors it makes in regard to established canon, BioWare has evidently decided to work with the book publisher to release a new version of the book with some strategic corrections made to it.

I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, it’s BioWare’s canon to write, keep, and/or mangle as they see fit; the fans don’t own the canon, and shouldn’t presume to dictate it to the studio and the writers that do.

On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if not burning our copies of Ultima 8 in the street was a failed policy decision on the part of Ultima fans.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Begin Your Journey

Just a helpful little video to get you started in SWTOR; it details character creation and the first mission on the origin planet.

SPOILER WARNING: Major companion-related spoilers at this link!

You can thank Infinitron Dragon for bringing this one to my attention. Do not click that link if you hate spoilers and have been studiously avoiding them where Mass Effect 3 is concerned.

If, on the other hand, you’re like me and love poring over every leak and rumour, click on through and feast your eyes on a couple of companion design choices that BioWare has made. One of them will, I think, be very cool (and please tell me I’m not the only one who is reminded of Farscape, just a little bit?). The other…well…

The First Age of Update: The link works now.

After much anticipation, an increasing volume of gaming press (and mainline press) coverage, and one apparently buggy demo, the first RPG title from independent game company 38 Studios — Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning — is about to launch. If you’ve been able to pre-install the game from Origin or Steam, it will unlock for you to play tomorrow. If, on the other hand, you ordered one of the Collector’s Editions, you are probably (like me) hoping that there will be a somewhat oversized package waiting for you at home this evening!

Reckoning

As I noted last night on various social networks, I’m even suspending (for the most part) my playthrough of Star Wars: The Old Republic to as to focus most of my gaming energies on Reckoning.

I’m stoked for this game, Dragons and Dragonettes, for reasons I’ve outlined already. It has a lot of star power behind it, to be sure, but I’m honestly less looking forward to the game on account of Ken Rolston’s involvement than I am on account of Ian Frazier’s involvement. Morrowind and Oblivion were what they were, but they failed to connect with me (or I with them). Ultima V: Lazarus, on the other hand, was just something else…to say nothing of the fact that it was probably the keenest use of the Dungeon Siege engine in history, and I include the original game in that statement.

And, indeed, I think of Reckoning as being “Tibby’s game”. I know it isn’t; a large team of people wrote, built, tested, and produced it. But Reckoning has the fingerprints of an Ultima fan on it, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise given who its lead designer is. It has many other elements as well, not the least of which is its combat system — which, frankly, I greatly enjoy, possibly more so than in any other game to date — and is in many ways dissimilar to that series of RPGs which keeps us all coming back to this site.

But it doesn’t feel entirely alien, not in its little details. And on that basis, I (greatly) look forward to installing it tonight and playing it tomorrow.

This time, Firstknight offers some aerial views, showing just how much he has managed to add in and around the small island that Cove and Minoc are sitauted on in Ultima 9.

Ultima 9 World Map

Beautiful Britannia World Map

Honestly, I was expecting that he’d added a little bit of content in and around Cove/Minoc, that he’d just filled in a bit of available space. I was not expecting to see that he had expanded the continent by a goodly measure!

And this, again, without the use of proper world-building tools!

Here’s a couple more images of the newly-added area. These are in-game shots made with some help from the “fly cheat”, which is why the Avatar appears in them:

Overhead

At an angle

Firstknight tells me that there is still some work to be done on the mountains (they do need some erosion, methinks) and a couple of other things. But he asserts that it does quite handily resolve the issue of the Cove/Minoc area of the game feeling “too small”…and I can’t help but agree!

Iceblade has posted a short update to the Forgotten World website. In it, he praises Firstknight’s recent excellent work on Beautiful Britannia, and details some of the progress that has been made on the Forgotten World side of things:

Currently I’m working to get the activity editor completed with full dialogs and menus, so that there is nothing left obscure from slider bars for action speed to drop-down menus for various gestures. Trigger and object property analysis is close to half way completed with almost all triggers and properties identified. Much of the remaining work is clarifying what each parameter does and then updating the trigger editor for more intuitive editing.

From our last poll, the Stones theme was voted to be most fitting for the Forgotten World version of Cove located just East of Britain. Currently, progress on our editor is slowed due to a bug in the nonfixed object file saving routine, which creates an all new nonfixed file rather than simply editing an existing. Whenever we save the primary map for U9 and load it up in the game, there are crashes at least one if not several select locations. Currently, we are somewhat baffled as to the exact cause the problem, but we are hopeful that the offending issue will be found.

Iceblade has put a new poll up at the site, asking Ultima fans what path they’d like to see in a hypothetical Forgotten World demo release. He elaborates a little bit:

Eventually, our worldbuilding will get to the stage where we will release milestones similar to Archon’s U6P; however, if we were to release a demo map of our designs, what path would you like to see in such a demo? Included in the demo would be the related towns, the dungeon, surrounding areas/islands, and cave systems. I decided against Spirituality as an option because it technically involves so many locations.

So, what would you Dragons and Dragonettes like to explore first, Forgotten World-style? Britain/Compassion? Yew/Justice? New Magincia/Humility? Moonglow/Honesty? Actually, for my money, I’d like to see a functional Moonglow release, because on my most recent playthrough of Ultima 9 it was Moonglow that proved to be the buggiest. If they can fix those issues and release a stable-ish Moonglow as a demo, I would be massively impressed.

Or, rather, even more massively impressed than I am already where this project is concerned.

Final note: Iceblade is also, according to the news post, intending to open up a new section of the Forgotten World website, which I would assume is going to either be a periodically update page or a short article series. In it, he’ll give his thoughts and commentary on vanilla Ultima 9.

Bethesda’s VP of Marketing, Pete Hines, let slip in a recent tweet that the Skyrim Creation Kit is slated to be released tomorrow, February 7th. He also intimated that some manner of surprise would be released along with the Kit, fueling a bit of speculation as to whether it might be an additional quest for the already massive and expansive game.

Then again, it could also be a high-resolution texture pack for Skyrim, something a Bethesda forum member discovered a reference to in some content description records for the game from Steam.

The Skyrim Creation Kit has already won some high praise in comments here at Aiera, with Kevin Fishburne noting that its ability to have mods created with it uploaded, indexed, and auto-patched through Bethesda’s servers is a hugely professional move by Bethesda Softworks, and one hell of a means of showing encouragement to would-be Skyrim modders.