Polish site Bioworld interviewed Mike Laidlaw from Bioware about their upcoming DA2 DLC.

On of the questions was about the Witcher 2:

Q: As I am from Poland I have to ask you what do you think about The Witcher 2? Did you happen to play it and if yes - what do you think about it?

ML: I played it and I think it's fantastic. It's a great story and the engine is simply stunning. I think that the Witcher works out very well in the niche of "lone wolf" games, that exist beside those party-based, to which we are sticking to, with Dragon Age for example.

The whole short interview (in Polish only :-/) can be found here: http://bioworld.ea.pl/bioware/mike-laidlaw-o-nowym-dlc-dziedzictwo/

In My dream fantasy CDP take Bioware's voice actors, UI and party based system and couple it with everything else from The Witcher 2 (story, characters, plot, game mechanics, the world and its environments , graphics, red engine etc etc) to make a great rpg.
We can still dream right ?

Classy, so long as the quoted statement was all there was to it. Whaaaaat? UI, sure, but the voice acting was so much better in this game than the overdone VA from recent Bioware titles, and the whole lone-wolf image would kind of be ruined if he was always rollin' with a posse.

So yeah, I respectfully and vehemently disagree :)

I may not like what he did to Dragon Age but Laidlaw has always been respectful.

Fixed that for you

Um no, as an Ex-Bioware customer, he pretty much had it right the first time. EA was responsible for the ridiculously short dev cycle for DA2, but it was Laidlaw that decided to completely reinvent a well recieved CRPG (DAO) in his image because he didn't like DAO (or many astpect of it at any rate) and wound up alienating most of the existing customer base of DAO in the process. That's all on Mike.

-Polaris

Bioware always professes their games as "team-based", but the last one of those they made was KotOR. Just because you have a team doesn't mean it's team-based. Not only do the members in your party give you so little in combat, but the player is the one that takes all credit for it. If you don't believe me, look at the beginning of ME2. That's all Shepard, no one else. No one does a god damned thing because they're ineffectual and Shepard is the hero. To be team-based, it must attribute heavily to gameplay. I never felt the need to control my squad in ME because it was so damned easy besides.

No, thank you. With The Witcher 2, CDPR has proven that they take their voice acting extremely seriously; both the English and the Polish VO's are far superior to most of the talent Bioware employs - the exception would be Mass Effect, which is done well in its specific style, at least.

yes , its true, Witcher 2 is pretty good in the voice department. I was recently playing witcher 1 so thats why poor V.A quality was fresh in my mind.

I do think Triss' voice actress sounded too regular American nothing special and needed a bit more... something.

Team based- DAO and Da2(despite its vast problems) were pretty team based. Well maybe it comes down to what you define as "team" I mean you being in charge of more than one character (apart from conversations) and getting them to work together in battle.

Yes, Triss was a bad choice, the original Witcher Triss was way better, even though she wasn't too close to the Triss of the books, too.

But to be fair, the female Hawke voice of DA2 is even worse. I tried to play a female Hawke two or three times and I just couldn't, that oozing sweetness was too much for me, so I stuck with male Hawke, who was okay. The opposite goes for ME, where they have an excellent female Shep, but the male Shep is quite bland, even with a pretty face attached to it (the default was scary ugly).

It goes down to taste and who's in charge, really. I'm afraid that the dEAvil marked the end of BioWare's glory days, but CDPR's have just begun. :)

But they don't need BW features in their games, they carve their own path.

As it comes to ME voice actors, they have competence but no character. Every race has a far too similar feel about their voice with the exception of the Quarians (who are gypsies) which means that everyone blends together. They try and understate everything in order to ground it more, which would be good if they weren't telling a story about space aliens piloting mile long ships and blowing the crap out of everything. The only thing that sets characters of the same race apart is their archetype.

With the Witcher 2, it is a bit overstated, but at least even the common man has his own identity. You don't need a massive amount of dialogue to get a feel about them. My particular favorite is the book-keeper dwarf in Flotsam. He has no importance whatsoever, but they felt the need to give him a unique voice that really resonates in turn with who he is. No massive amounts of talking required. Even various humans with side quests all have distinguished messages, like almost everyone in King Henselt's camp has character portrayed only through voice.

What I'm basically saying is that Bioware's voice work is usually flat. You have some stand-outs like Bastila/Female Shepard (they're the same person), Garrus (though he's using a voice modifier), Carth, and Vao but the rest of them really try nothing to set themselves apart even given their archetype.

I agree. I was always so bored of the style of dialogues in ME, that after about 30 min of playing I hardly paid attention to them, just clicking them away as it didn't really matter which dialogue path I chose.

Wouldn't be a Witcher game if it was teambased.

Geralt's a lone Wolf (literally). Call it Blue Stripes: The Game and conquer turn-based war games.

I'm actually happy hearing that the folks at Bioware do play The Witcher 2. Maybe they can finally see where they went wrong.

It's a clever answer from Laidlaw, too. I must give him that. He's basically hinting towards "it's good, but it's no real competition because it's a sub genre", or "you cannot exactly compare these two because they're different subgenre".

But clever or not...he's dodging. He's hiding. He's evading. And we all know why. And it makes me even happier. Harhar! :D

If you mean that the board like VA was a perfect match to his board like expressions, then yes, it was ok ;)