Friday, August 7, 2015

Frustration

Gamescom, one of the biggest game conferences, is finishing up today.  Overall, it was pretty cool to watch from afar.  Going into it, I was mainly interested in SWTOR, what with the expansion launching in about 2.5 months.  They had some time during the EA press conference, and two four hour Cantina sessions.  So what did we learn about Fallen Empire?

Nothing.  We got about a minute long in-game cutscene trailer and that's about it.  Everything else coming out it can be summed up as:  "We aren't talking about that right now."  Sigh.  We were supposed to find out about how companions would work, according to the Community Team.  Guess that isn't happening.  Normally, that'd be ok.  I'm a pretty easy going person.

However, Blizzard decided to announce their Legion expansion.  Guess what?  I know way more about Legion than I do about Fallen Empire.  Legion probably won't even launch for 8 months.  Remember, Fallen Empire comes out in mid-October.  That's what is frustrating.  Blizzard talks, BioWare does not.  I'm not asking for story spoilers either, just how the systems are going to work.

Mark Jacobs (DAoC, Warhammer Online, Camelot Unchained) once said something like "The longer a game has an NDA, the more you should be worried."  Well, I'm getting worried about what we're actually going to get with Fallen Empire.

If they STILL can't talk about it, how little confidence do they have in what they are doing?  Are things still in that much flux this close to launch?  What kind of half-baked systems are we going to end up with?  These are my worries.  I'm sure the story/questing will be good.  It's everything else that I worry about.  Again, the disparity between Blizzard and BioWare is concerning. They laid out their Artifact system for all to see and told us exactly how it would work.

I don't want to have to rely on data miners to get information about the game.  But they are the only ones sharing.  Maybe BioWare will release a Developer Blog today and prove all this wrong.  I can dream can't I?