UPDATO MAGNIFICO:

Patrick Weekes has apologized for his earlier blow up:

Looking back on my original post, it’s clear that it came off angrier than I had intended. I’d like to apologize to the folks at Hellforge for taking their joke too seriously and to the people here who were offended by my comments. It’s very easy for me to get so embedded in the process of making games that I lose the ability to make fun of them, and getting defensive and snippy was unnecessary on my part.

…good. Now let’s all move on from this and remember that no matter what joke charts are made, BioWare still makes one mean ass game.

BioWare writer and 2004 San Fernando Soapbox Derby Champion* Patrick Weekes needs to calm his ass down. You see, Mr. Weekes has taken a light-hearted (and undeniably accurate) post from Sol Invictus at Hellforge entirely too seriously.

Senor Invictus, noticing several similar plot elements in BioWare games, came up with a rather ingenious chart to show exactly how each story plays out. For example, every major BioWare title involves the player discovering ancient ruins.

Now by Lord Invictus’ own admission, the chart was written as a tongue-in-cheek gag and that it does not take into account the nuances of each game’s narrative into account, saying:

Please note that the list I’ve created is rather tongue-in-cheek and takes none of the nuances of each game’s narrative into proper account.

Sir Weekes, nonetheless, was not amused. On the BioWare message boards, Weekes dissected the chart and, in essence, called Sire Invictus a literary idiot:

So I’m supposed to believe someone is smart enough to do a big Excel spreadsheet with color coding and stuff but not smart enough to know about Campbellian archetypes?

Yeah, guys, every BioWare game has the same plot! See, things are kind of normal, and then things change and you have to go out and do stuff, and you go to crazy weird places! Aaaaaand so yeah, totally the same story.

That’s asinine.

The core idea isn’t that bad — I sense that someone started out with a good concept, like “Hey, you go to four places a lot,” and then they just decided to add some more filler rows to try to make a real zinger, except that when you actually read the cells, a lot of them are stretches.

In any event, the “intro, four planets, finale” structure is something we have used often for a few simple reasons:

1) It’s easy. It’s not as easy as making the player do everything in order, but you can generally just treat each area separately except for a few variables, which makes logic-testing and QA work a ton easier. What happens on Feros stays on Feros. BioWare knows how to make these games, make them solid and workable, and ship them — and if need be, we can always cut areas, which sucks, but we can do it if need be. Some structures don’t allow for that, which is why you end up with games where it’s clear that the devs ran out of time or money at some point.

2) Players can understand it. In usability tests on one project, we learned that players with more than four things to do at a time in any given area will feel frustrated — they get overwhelmed and have no idea what to do first and get the names mixed up. So you don’t dump twenty small planets on the player all at once. You hit them with a few big things that they can understand: “Go to Feros.” And then once they’re there, they unlock several different things to do that don’t compete with the rest of the universe, because right now you’re on Feros. “Kill Varren.” “Get Power Cells.” “Turn on Water Valves.” “Go to ExoGeni.” (And we even cheat a bit by giving you missions, which are big and obvious, and assignments, which we tell you are less important.)

In testing out our missions for ME2, the single biggest lump of story feedback we’ve gotten has boiled down to Information Flow. When a mission feels clunky, nine times out of ten it’s because we either told the player way too much all at once and expected the player to keep it all straight, or we didn’t actually tell the player enough and so the player is kind of lost. Dividing up our game into four or five large worlds allows us to control information a bit better.

(And to be clear, that four-worlds-and-out thing is a simplification that ignores major critpath events and makes it sound like you only visit four big areas in KotOR, which flat-out isn’t true.)

3) There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a structure, like any other. Humorously snarking that our games have a beginning part that is streamlined and introduces you to the game, a middle that allows you the freedom to go to several places and have adventures, and then a tightly focused ending is like riffing on how romance novels generally start out with two people being attracted to each other but having emotional issues, then gradually building trust, then having a complication that splits them up, and then in the end they get together and are happy. People who create fiction in any form use a structure appropriate to that form. They do it because their audience understands and responds on an emotional level to that structure.

Being a fellow writer, I can understand Weekes’ reaction. Depending on our particular moods or the amount of alcohol we’ve injested by lunch hour (because yes, all writers are alcoholics. All of us), the smallest critique can send us into a frenzy. With that said, this is a MASSIVE over-reaction to what was, in essence, a bloody joke.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that Weekes will be apologizing any time soon. In a follow-up post on the matter, he continues to illustrate the fact that he didn’t get it:

I would, however, like to clear up my emotional state. I’m in no way angry at anybody here or at the people making the original post. I think they were being deliberately obtuse for the sake of their article, and I responded with what I thought was an appropriate level of snark. The deepest level of emotional response on my part was an eye roll at the folks who thought they’d uncovered the Rosetta Stone, since our game structure has never exactly been a secret.

As far as I am concerned, Patrick Weekes owes Invictus mi amigo an apology. The chart wasn’t made with any ill intent in mind and even has a note mentioning that it’s tongue-in-cheek and takes none of the nuances of each game’s narrative into proper account:

Please note that the list I’ve created is rather tongue-in-cheek and takes none of the nuances of each game’s narrative into proper account.

Nobody was questioning the quality of storytelling in any BioWare game and certainly not attacking you. Hell, we happen to rather like your storytelling. So just swallow your pride for a hot minute, apologize for taking things way too seriously, and let’s all move on. Whaddya say?

*Not really. I don’t think.

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