Look, you're probably right. It's not just the story - it's everything. The engine is clearly an iteration, the light/dark screen is nearly identical, the basic movement feels similar, some animations are recycled (the characters just look the same standing around), the areas are better disguised but underneath the graphical jazz they are sometimes just two intersecting corridors like KotOR.
Yep. No argument there. Doing a 1.5 version of the Aurora engine was the only way that Jade was gonna happen, and if you're a serious gamer, spotting something running the same game engine is pretty easy. "Whoah -- it's a 3-D Art rendered landscape that is really 2-D because you never go over the same area at two different heights? Which engine could THAT be?"
BioWare likes clear-cut character archetypes - the Imoen/Mission/little sister thing, for example. When you look at KotOR2 for example, it's clear Obsidian was either more creative or had more freedom to create really different characters. Some of them annoyed the crap out of me (Kreia) and others I really liked (Bao-dur). When I play a BioWare game, I sort of feel "not Imoen again!".
That also makes sense -- and I can see it especially bothering someone who games more. Wildflower didn't strike me as Imoission, though, and Dawn Star didn't strike me as a perfect fit, either. You can say that each had elements of the same character, which I buy without trouble, but "elements of the same character" is an implicit issue of buying games from a company that's had some of the same writers since its inception. It's awesome, because it gives the company a flavor, but it's problematic in that it can lead to, well, the same types of characters.
(Heck, I did this in Firefly -- Kaylee is Willow, Simon Tam is Xander with a bit of Giles in there, and so on.)
It's interesting for me, because I disagree in part on the Obsidian stuff, and I think it ties to what I
want out of the game. I remembered talking to certain characters and feeling like I had no direction. It was like I was running into this brick wall where I couldn't tell what characterization was supposed to be conveyed in that scene, or why I would choose any of the dialogue options I was presented with. I saw "muddy" where other people saw "deep".
That could mean that I'm incredibly shallow -- I've got a kid at home, another on the way, and a zillion things to do, so I don't have time for immersive games that other people might like -- but I've always been more interested in playing with archetypes rather than going into deep conversations with art-film logic. You have to be pretty awesome to pull off art-film logic and disjointed moments of apparent contradiction and scenes that don't serve an immediate and obvious purpose, and most of the time, the writing isn't good enough to impress me.
So for me, the archetypes are fine. I don't like all of 'em, but I don't have to have all of 'em in my party, either. (I do remember liking Bao-dur, but I also remember feeling like he wasn't finished as a character.)
I'm not trying to slam BioWare -- or you as a BioWare writer -- maybe this discipline is the sort of thing that makes BioWare so successful and makes average gamers love a BioWare RPG. As a "dedicated" RPG player, it feels a bit restricted to me.
Definitely. In a perfect world, you make a game with wide appeal, but with enough moments of depth and nuance to make the hardcore segment happy as well. I have no idea if
Mass Effect is going to be that game. I have no idea if
Dragon Age is going to be that game. I have no idea if
Revolver is going to be that game. I know that everyone on those projects wants those projects to be mainstream hits and critical successes with the RPG fans, but I figure every game developer out there wants something like that.
Small companies have liberties that large companies don't. I don't think that's ever gonna change. The good news is that large companies have the resources that small companies don't. I hope that BioWare can make the most of 'em.