Are BioWare Games Getting Stale?

27 Jan 2010 at 00:00:00 by Tim McDonald

BioWare has created some of the finest games in our industry, and has set them in some of the richest worlds. From the superb Baldur's Gate through to Mass Effect 2, it's one of the few companies which could legitimately inherit long-deceased Origin Systems' tagline: “We create worlds.” Whether the team is expanding upon a known universe, as with the Forgotten Realms and Star Wars, or whether they're carefully crafting something of their own, BioWare's worlds are as creatively intensive as they are expansive.

Despite this, and despite giving Mass Effect 2 the highest score I believe IncGamers has ever awarded anything, I'm going to air my concerns that the company is starting to get stuck in a mysterious rut. Am I mad? No. Well, maybe a little, but I think it's a valid point.

Stop me when this sounds familiar. You do an opening tutorial section, and then are suddenly gifted with the ability to travel far and wide, with three or four main quests available to you. Every time you complete one of these, which will, if you're very lucky, reveal a little of the overarching story, you can return to your home base – usually either a vehicle or a camp – and chat to your party members to further their backstories and sidequests, and maybe open up some sexytime romance options. You finish those main quests, and then – shock! - there's a plot twist and some major story development, before you continue down the endgame path. In the immortal words of Rolf Harris, can you tell what it is yet? That's right: it's a summary of the general pattern that BioWare games follow.

Initially, complaining about this seems to be as utterly ludicrous an argument as saying “Final Fantasy games are long and usually have random battles,” or “Nethack is randomised.” It's not a bad thing, it's the expected thing, and in this case it's a solid game structure: it provides players with an easy way to get into the game, a healthy dose of freedom, the ability to backtrack, the option to swap to a new area and still proceed down the main quest if things get tricky or you want to level, and plenty of time to focus on characters and subplots. It's great.

It's also really, really predictable. Ironically enough, the game that triggered this stream of prose – Mass Effect 2 – is the one that toys with this formula the most. It largely removes the “four-planets syndrome,” which appears to have become a bit of an online injoke which I can only assume really annoys the poor developers, and adds in more large city-based hubs than any other BioWare game I can think of. Even so, when I can predict the exact moment a plot twist is going to happen before I've even started the mission I've predicted it's going to appear in, it seems pretty clear to me that there's a problem.

It's a problem that's tricky to get to grips with, but one of the reasons why it's an issue is because surprise is important in amazing the audience. I was surprised at the scope and scale of Mass Effect 2, and at the astonishing level of improvements. When I'm waiting for the twist to reveal itself, though, its impact in terms of the plot that's delivered is lessened. Mass Effect 2 worked around this by being intensely character-centric; the overarching plot was less important than the characters, your interactions with them, and the results of those interactions. Even so, Knights of the Old Republic's magnificent reveal worked so well because it was totally unexpected. If it came out now, I think I'd have guessed what was going to happen by the end of Dantooine.

It's also a problem that's hard to diagnose, even if the symptoms appear obvious. The plots tend to be fairly different, and even when there are similarities, the narrative structure mostly follows the monomyth – the hero's journey - as you'd expect. Summing it up badly, our protagonist usually comes from a fairly humble background, is thrust into the limelight for reasons that may or may not be immediately clear, becomes stronger as he wrestles with his destiny, suffers setbacks but grows ever stronger because of them, and finally triumphs, potentially at great cost. This isn't what's at fault, because it's used in everything, and yet this is a problem that I can only ascribe to BioWare titles right now.

Is it the mechanics, then? Would adding in a time-based mechanic to character conversations help, opening up different options as time goes on? No, that's likely to overcomplicate matters; the joy of this system is in its simplicity. Perhaps each of the separate main quests should reveal more of the main plot, then, or should the locations be more inter-dependant so they feel less like separate areas and more like a whole? Doubtful. Ignoring the QA nightmare that comes from inter-dependencies in areas like that, this would again make completing each area far more confusing, with less certainty on what's important where, and tying these sections more and more into the plot risks enforcing linearity.

But something has to change, or BioWare titles are going to start to suffer from diminishing returns. The more predictable we find them, the blander they'll become, no matter how rich the world. If you're expecting the plot twist, it's not a shock; if you know when you're going to get plot development or when the romance options will open up, you subconsciously “game” them, and placing bets with yourself as to which character is going to be the traitor makes it all feel a lot less serious. It's a problem that strikes every game when you learn how it works, but with the number of BioWare titles using the same style, it's going to eventually stop being something we poke fun at while we enjoy the story, character, and world details filling in the framework, and something that becomes a far more serious problem.

The Old Republic's nature as an MMO makes it less likely to suffer from this, and Mass Effect 2 is an excellent first step for the other titles. It breaks up the structure into smaller pieces and adds in lots of little complications to both the character relationships and the main game which you can gradually deal with, and – avoiding spoilers as best I can - the “suicide mission” theme ties both of these together far better than has ever been done before. I just sincerely hope that it's not the last step, and that we see BioWare risk disgrace by stepping outside of this structural comfort zone in order to push us out of ours. I don't think there's an easy way to do it, but hey: it's BioWare. If anyone can do it, that team can.

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