I've always felt BioWare gets too much credit for the dialogue in its game. First and foremost, if you ever met a BioWare protagonist in real life, you'd hate him, because he's one of those guys that monopolizes the discussion and everyone has to talk about what he wants to talk about. That's just not realistic. Conversations move and opportunities to get answers or to direct conversation are seized in a moment or lost to the flow of the discussion. The only games that i've played that do a quality job of portraying a real conversation and the power of words are Torment and Alpha Protocol...maybe toss Bloodlines in there, too.
In the three games i mentioned, conversation is every bit as important as pulling the trigger and I just can't say that about BioWare games. Furthermore, in those games, especially Alpha Protocol, your choices will continue to reverberate through your play experience. BioWare does a good job, i think, of making your choices feel like they matter, but gameplay-wise, you really don't experience it all that much. For example, anytime a BioWare game gives you the choice to kill someone, you pretty much know that whatever you choose, that character's role in the story is pretty much done, which kind of makes the choice of whether to spare or to kill him inconsequential - eithey way, that's the last you hear from him. And BW has kind of mastered the art of giving the player a choice that results in the same conclusion either way...which is what brings me to what's missing from BW games.
What's missing from choice in BioWare games is the consequences of that choice. I think the reason for that is that every consequence scripted demands a lot of work, and for a company that can't even be bothered to make more than one indoor texture for their entire game (NWN - why does the inside of this tree look like a castle?), i'm not surprised to see them unwilling to put the time in. You can tell the reason for AP's massive delays was most likely all the scripting of all the possible events and the way things play out and they probably sacrificed a bit of polish on the gameplay for it, but honestly, it was worth it to me. I remember playing ME2 right after AP and thinking about how the dialogue in ME2 just came off as stilted and ham-fisted by comparison (of course, no game does ham-fistery like The Old Republic does ham-fistery - "now you'll see what a Bounty Hunter can do!").
I like TES and Bethesda's take on Fallout for what they are, but what they are is a bunch of games that don't belong in this discussion. Everything involving character, story, and RPGing in a Bethesda "RPG" is wooden and unremarkable.
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