KNIGHTS OF THE NEW ORDER
Enter BioWare once again, with Knights of the Old Republic. Unlike Baldur’s Gate, this was a full 3D experience, capable of conveying the awe-inspiring flashes and clashes of lightsaber combat, while still being a ‘proper’ RPG. In fact, it was a bit too much of one, still using and pushing its D&D systems, THAC0s and dice rolls into the foreground, even while pretending to have moved on from such things. It didn’t matter. This was the Star Wars epic the world had been waiting for, the perfect antidote to the
disappointing movies, and an amazing sci-fi adventure unlike anything we’d ever seen before.
If there was any doubt that BioWare was now king of the genre, KOTOR obliterated it. Its best characters became as loved as any in the franchise, particularly snarky assassin droid HK-47, with the spaceship the Ebon Hawk quickly reaching Millennium Falcon levels of popularity. The story acted as a Greatest Hits of Star Wars, with trips to planets like Tattooine and the Wookie homeworld of Kashykk, fights with evil Sith Lords and bounty hunters, the chance to be as good or evil as you pleased, and planets being blown up in failed attempts to destroy your team. It even had a twist that was almost worthy of “Luke, I am your father,” based on the reveal of who your amnesiac main character actually was.
BioWare used this success as a springboard. Apart from an early stumble with its first attempt to create its own world, 2005’s Chinese-themed Jade Empire (a solid game, but one that didn’t catch the market as well,) it created two of the biggest RPG series around. Mass Effect paired RPG-style action with third-person shooting, while Dragon Age began as an attempt to go back to BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate roots, but soon, after the more traditional first game Origins, became another actionRPG hybrid. With the two of them, the company had a firm grip on both sci-fi and fantasy, and the cash to make them as polished as any other game.
BioWare also repeatedly fought for the industry over the right to include controversial content, including sex scenes in the first Mass Effect. These days it seems strange that there could be such a major, mainstream media controversy over such tame cinematics, but it needs to be put into context. It wasn’t long after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had whipped up a storm over the ‘Hot Coffee’ scandal (players finding evidence of clothed sex scenes that had been cut from the game but left on the disc) and many a pundit or worse—for instance, angry anti-gaming activist lawyer Jack Thompson—were still sniffing around, eager for blood. Fox News, for instance, castigated Mass Effect’s sex scenes—which consisted of nothing more graphic than a glimpse of an alien’s blue bottom—describing them as ‘Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas’. Needless to say, the expert brought onto the panel hadn’t actually seen them and was going purely on what she’d been told before coming onto the show, ultimately describing it as ‘a bit of a joke’. Still, the pressure on BioWare was real, and in weathering that storm, the rest of the industry was able to push the boundaries—even if the Mass Effect crew did spend the rest of their series taking showers in their bras and pants. More recently, BioWare has committed to broadening the diversity of their casts.
Fox news castig ated mass effect ’s sex scenes