Bioware and the Art of Conversation

Bio..who?

Chances are, if you're an RPG fan, or even if you're not, you've heard of Bioware. They have developed some of the most high profile games of recent years, such as the Mass Effect and  Dragon Age series. However, the game that really put them on the map, so to speak, was one of their earliest; 1998's Baldur's Gate. 

Baldur's Gate

Baldur's Gate is a game based in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons, so Bioware had quite a bit of source material to pull from, and it was from this rock solid foundation that they crafted an RPG that would completely change the playing field for the genre. 

Baldur's Gate was one of the first RPGs to offer the player meaningful choices beyond how they decided to equip their character and manipulate their statistics. Although the story was still quite linear, the player could now dictate if they wanted different characters to travel with them, and in turn these characters would offer new quests, adventures, and conversation options; you couldn't possibly see everything in one play-through. 

Talk, Talk, Talk

The mechanic that set Baldur's Gate apart from other RPGs at the time was the conversation system. When you click on a Non-Player Character (NPC) to initiate a conversation, instead of a linear back and forth taking place, you may be presented with several different choices of response. Each response could garner yet another unique response from the NPC, creating what is called a conversation tree, and at the end of some branches could lie a quest or a hint on how to move forward. Bioware is widely considered to be the first developer to really evolve this branching conversation system in a meaningful way. Of course Baldur's Gate was only the first iteration of this system. I will explore how they refined it later on!

Resources

Baldur's gate for pc reviews. (1998, November 30). Retrieved from http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/baldurs-gate

Insert a Coin to Continue...

What is this all about?

Ah, that timeless question; Continue? Quite possibly one of the first choices ever posed to a young gamer, in those musty old arcades. Besides the choice of whether you wanted to pay the arcade another fifty-cents, there hasn't been much meaningful choice making in video games until recently, with the popularization of the Role-Playing Game(RPG) genre. What will be provided in this blog, is an exploration of the genre as it pertains to choice, player agency, and the evolution of choice-making and how it impacts storytelling. It will include my opinions, and the opinions and findings of other researchers and developers in the industry.

Of course, every RPG--and there are thousands-- can't be covered within the scope of this blog, but it will attempt to cover major players when it comes to choice-making, such as Mass Effect, The Witcher, and others. And if you were worried that the venerable (but still very much relevant) pen and paper games would be left out, don't be, they will get the spotlight as well; we wouldn't be here without them. So join me, as we explore this time-tested genre, and one of the most exciting aspects of it; crafting your own legend with the power of choice.

A Bit About Me

I'm Cameron, a university student currently studying Arts and Technology at The University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson, Texas. I'm mostly focusing on character rigging and technical animation, but one of my passions has always been gaming and game design. And of course, my favorite genre since I first picked up Final Fantasy VII as a kid, has always been the Role-Playing Game.

NEXT TIME: A Little History Lesson