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It is hard to really discuss the kind of creative person I am because it is hard for me to categorize creativity. I have always been a hands on learner and have been a relatively good writer. But at this point in my college career my efforts will have to switch to being computer savvy because I have recently started to study game design. I really enjoy it but it is very new to me. I have been playing and researching video games for a very long time and know the exact type of games I would like to make. I can honestly say that every game the company Bioware has made except for one is my type of game. Everything that they do is heavily based on interactive and in depth stories with game play that requires a lot of thinking and strategy. But as I have been learning since the beginning of last quarter, creating a game is not possible with anything less than an entire team of people. So I feel that it is safe to say that the entire Bioware team influences me.
What Bioware always does best is creating tension and release for the player in multiple forms. The easiest example to use in explaining this would be a boss fight at the end of a level or dungeon. In the game Dragon Age: Origins, Bioware focuses a lot on strategic combat that is very intense and often frustrating if you do not approach each situation in the right manner. To really test the player’s skills, they make the boss fights very extreme against opponents that are much larger than each of your characters. During them, your characters are constantly getting knocked down at which point they are useless until they get back up, and there health is drained at a rate that seems way to fast. Tense boss fights are an understatement in this game but the sense of accomplishment and release are well worth it when you have won.
In all of Biowares recent games, stories within the games have been taken to the next level. Their use of text and subtext to bring the character through the game is brilliant. Since their games are so heavily piled with dialogue conversations that the player actively has to involve themselves in in order to make it through the games. This makes plenty of room for situational irony and misdirection. Bioware tries to make their worlds as believable as possible so there are those in the game that will lie to you and try to deceive by telling you false things. Dramatic irony plays a very large role as well. There are cut scenes throughout Bioware’s games that show the conversations and intentions of the antagonist that none of the protagonists will know about until often the very end of the game.
In many video games but especially in Bioware games, the player must do a lot of listening, reading and navigating through heads up displays (HUDs) and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) if they truly want to experience everything that the game has to offer. Active and didactic transfer of information to the player is very carefully put into to each game. Most of the time the characters in the game will just tell you what you are supposed to do next in the game or the player might read a sign that has quests on it that explain everything the player needs to know, it usually is clearly labeled in a very didactic fashion. But there are also plenty of situations where the player must use logic and carefully put together clues and hints that are found or observed during in game conversations. This requires the player to actively seek out the answers using their own out of game logic, which is desired and preferred by many gamers like me.
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