• Game Reviews

    What BioWare Has Learned

    Okay, I originally started writing this earlier in the week after receiving several queries, in regards to Dragon Age 3 – Inquistion. So, I didn’t know when I began writing this that Ray and Greg were retiring from BioWare. So I want to start this post with wishing Ray and Greg good luck in their future endeavors. Without Ray and Greg’s passion for game development there never would have been a BioWare and consequently I probably never would have entered game development. For ten years I worked and learned and thrived in an environment that is really impossible to describe. It was Ray and Greg who made that possible. If…

  • Writing Resources

    STARFest – Drew Karpyshyn

    If you are in Alberta near the end of October, there’s an event you might be interested in attending. I’ve been invited to interview Drew Karpyshyn on Sunday, October the 21st at the St. Albert Public Library as part of their STARFest event. If you are a fan of Drew’s work, either his videogames (i.e., Mass Effect) or his novels (such as his best selling Star Wars – Darth Bane series), you should come out and meet him. We’re still working out the details of the interview but there’ll likely be time to ask him a few questions. If you are unfamiliar with Drew’s work, I encourage you to peruse…

  • Game Reviews

    Mass Effect 3 and Day-One DLC

    So a few of you involved in the gaming community are probably aware of some flack BioWare was (is?) getting for releasing day one DLC for Mass Effect 3. For those who are not familiar with gamer lingo this basically means that there was add-on content available for Mass Effect 3 the moment it was released… for which players had to pay extra. This annoyed some people. There’s a decent summary over here along with some user comments if you want more exposure to the incident as it happened. I’ve had a few readers ask me my thoughts on this and given that I’ve finally found a few moments between…

  • Game Reviews

    Good Luck Drew!

    As some of you may know Drew Karpyshyn, one of BioWare’s writers, has announced his retirement. He will be focusing on his own writing projects and I wish him all the luck! You can read Drew’s blog post about this or check out his impressive bibliography. He already has an extensive body of work, including several Star Wars and Mass Effect novels. Also I want to give congratulations to the Mass Effect 3 team for going gold. A huge accomplishment and a long, exciting journey for many on the team. I can still remember when the franchise was just a “what if”… pleased that it has had such success. And…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Creating Emotion in Games – Guilt as Gameplay Mechanic

    The Day My Horse Died There’s a drive from several studios in the videogames industry to start building emotional experiences, hoping to hook player’s into storylines and franchises by using more sophisticated storytelling methods. Many of these, like the detailed movie-eque conversation systems that the Mass Effect franchise use have achieved significant strides in this area. But even in a longer developed industry like movie making, ‘creating emotion’ is still very difficult. Drama can become melodrama — a scene that should make a person cry, might evoke laughter instead if mistimed. And at the end of the day some people just like different things than others — when I went…

  • My Life,  The Lazy Designer

    BioWare-Brent Year 5 (Fall 2003 – Summer 2004)

    This is the fifth of ten posts, one for each year that I worked for BioWare. Conquering the Hordes of the Underdark As summer 2003 turned into fall, the Hordes of the Underdark team was hard at work on the second Neverwinter Nights expansion. We were fast approaching our deadlines and I was able to poach writer Drew Karpyshyn from Knights of the Old Republic and have him join the team. The extra writing manpower, plus all the hard work from the existing team members powered us through and Hordes went gold in November. I am still very proud of the effort we put into Expansion Pack 2 — the…