While BioWare doesn’t want anyone to call the fourth Mass Effect game Mass Effect 4 and are keen to emphasize that this is a new story for the franchise, Mass Effect 4 won’t be a complete departure from the status quo for the series. At San Diego Comic Con, BioWare used their Mass Effect panel to reveal the first details of the next game in the franchise.
As I’ve been doing this whole way along, it’s time to follow-up the press conference post with some of the videos shown at the press conference. And just like how EA front-loaded their media briefing with all the cool news and videos, all the cool trailers start this post off. So it’s DICE and BioWare upfront with all the bog standard EA crap following. Maybe they’ll pull a Microsoft and learn their lesson for 2015… Nah.
In between Monday’s press conferences for Microsoft and Sony, the usual publishers got their work in. Electronic Arts, twice named the Worst Company in America, was the first to show off their new wares at E3. Actually, no, they didn’t show off much new. In fact, apart from some new trailers, I don’t think the word new should be used anywhere near this media briefing.
You can say a lot of things about fans of BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 but you can never accuse them of not being dedicated to the cause. Last week, Mass Effect fan, Gerry Pugliese, released his year-long passion project, Mass Effect 3: Vindication.
Last week, when talking about Skyrim, I mentioned that a number of games outside the RPG genre incorporated elements of RPGs into their games. These included things like skill points, customization, inventory systems, questing, deep stories, dialogue tree and more of the classic RPG tricks.
This week’s entry into the 7 Best may have started life as being a bit more of an RPG than a third-person shooter but evolved into a third-person shooter that retained the strong influence of RPGs. Of course, if I boiled down the Mass Effect Trilogy to a series of gameplay mechanics and the evolution of the mechanics, I’d be missing the whole point of the franchise. Mass Effect’s strong suit and its claim to fame is the story.
The legal and public relations teams at EA and BioWare aren’t going to be happy but pre-alpha footage of Dragon Age: Inquisition recorded from a screen at DigiExpo 2013 has found its way to the internet.
The video gives us a reasonably good look at the visuals of the game, some questing and some combat. Watch it soon because I don’t expect EA or BioWare to leave this up for long.
I generally don’t preview games based off of PR snippets, trailers and hands-off demos but I think I’ve come up with a way to do it. So, welcome to the Hype Train in which I sift through all the hype behind a game to give an early preview of what is being promised and what to expect.
After the disappointment with their last three products, Dragon Age II, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3, BioWare was suffering from a lack of consumer confidence. With the move to next-gen BioWare is hoping to regain its crown as the king of Western RPGs, starting with the next Dragon Age game, Dragon Age: Inquisition.
There’s nothing a franchise’s fans like to hear more than free-to-play mobile game. Just ask Final Fantasy fans, especially those who actually spend money on All The Bravest.
Not one to learn what damage you can do to a franchise with a terrible F2P cash-in, EA is taking Dragon Age to mobile devices. However, rather than put DA:O on iPad like they did with KOTOR, EA is releasing a combat-based F2P Dragon Age game because we can’t learn from Square’s mistakes.
YouTube user vendo233 undertook a big task in making his own trailer for the planned Mass Effect movie. For these types of fan-made trailers, we usually see video and audio from the games edited together to hype the whole Reaper invasion story. Vendo233 took it several steps further. Not only does he use clips and audio from the games but he edits them to give them a big budget shine, splices in clips from other movies and even does some of his own CGI work to put together an epic trailer.
The lead writer of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Drew Karpyshyn, went on Toronto radio to talk about his time working on the Mass Effect trilogy before getting moved to Austin to work on The Old Republic. In his interview, he talked about the ending to the trilogy that he had originally envisioned and whether it was truly cut by BioWare and EA in favour of the deus ex machina ending in ME3.
et geekera 