I don't really agree.Asophetes said:
I think they're un-focused and wasteful. While they have a certain sense of proficiency in crafting dialogue, their storylines are shallow and it seems like any single plot point or idea they introduce will be only half-resolved in the course of any particular game. Interesting concepts will be introduced through their various characters, but never fully or even halfway explored, with only a handful of notable exceptions for one or two fan favorites.
Take Miranda's strange inferiority complex over her modified genes. Nothing ever comes of it. There's nothing in the game to indicate that Miranda actually has extraordinary physical abilities or intellect (beyond anyone else in the party), and we never come to understand what purpose she was meant to serve to her father--or Hell, even meet her father to see another side of the story. She just spits it all out at us in a dialogue, pleads with us with doe eyes to save her sister, and we're supposed to take it at face value and just run with it.
Same with Mordin. We never see anything that puts his involvement with the Genophage into perspective. He talks at us, another Salarian who worked with him talks at us, maybe we have Wrex talking at us, insisting the Genophage is the scourge of his people some more, but we never really see the damage. The Krogan homeworld is a dump, sure, but they don't really seem to care. And again, I'm supposed to take all this at face value, and believe that there's some kind of crisis at hand. On the flipside, I never see any indication that Krogans are a particularly threatening species (everybody goes down the same with a headshot for me), or that if the Krogan population were to explode that they would be such a huge problem. I have to take everybody's word for it that they're a bunch of unruly pigs that went on a testosterone-fueled stampede across the Galaxy like the universe's largest collection of tailgaters or soccer rioters, with no legitimate evidence or--God forbid--interactive proof of their threat.
Without some tangible means of helping me understand and explore these relationships, I'm sorry to say, they feel entirely superficial, like excuses for the character to be there in this iteration or for there to be a fight rather than legitimate defining character elements. Okay. So they don't write dialog that makes me want to drive spoons into my ears and strangle myself, and they can keep characters consistent, which is a lot more than I can say for whatever pen monkey got paid to write Final Fantasy 13. Should that really impress me? Should I really be putting them on a pedestal for not trying to feed me pig vomit?
Bioware doesn't deserve to be praised for getting that right, everybody should get that right, and there's no excuse for not doing it. That doesn't make them good, or even above average--that makes them proficient. Being good involves telling a story with little waste, in an intellectually or emotionally provocative manner that explores the themes and questions it raises as fully as possible. I've seen enough games and fiction in general do this well enough that I really don't feel like I need to pretend that Bioware's half-finished ideas and overblown plotting are superior products.
