And Bioware isn't formulaic? Please! KOTOR, ME, DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS are ALL the same in terms of gameplay. Is it because they're seeing success they feel they can now be critical? Okay, let's see you guys make a innovative game in 20 years; JRPGs are successful because of that fine tuning. They know what works.

ew. i'd take traditional turn-based stuff like FFX and DQVIII over absolutely anything bioware has to offer.

Since you're talking about the battle system, it means you don't understand what Greg was talking about.

Bioware RPGs provide the player with hundreds of choices (some of which are more meaningful than others) and several ways to overcome each situation.  This is starkly contrasted by the typical JRPG where the player moves characters from place to place watching the cutscenes and dialog.  Bioware RPGs provide you with more opportunities to take control of the way events unfold whereas JRPGs are more like a trip to the movies in that you basically have almost no control over anything that happens in the story.

That said, Bioware is not without its own faults.  A lot of its choices boil down to good or evil and nice or nasty.  There's realistic limitation of how many resources you can invest into a project and what the returns are sadly.  When your game features 80 unique quests it becomes non-trivial to add several resolutions to all of them and if you've ever ripped one of the scripts out of a Bioware game (or any game made back in the day with the infinity engine) you'd easily see it's many times the size of any Final Fantasy script thanks to mountains of dialog trees.

Yep, I'd say the responses in this thread pretty much are reacting to the truth in his statement.

Most JRPGs aren't really that successful outside of a select few (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Pokemon).

Also, let me add before I get lynched for my last comment, that I'd rather them do the same old, same old, than try some innovation that turns into absolute crap that ruins the game.

JRPGs aren't without their own shortcomings in this generation, I'll be the first to admit that.  But I think you're overestimating Bioware's "open-world" gaming experience, they're much more linear than you would want to admit.  Sure, there are hours of recorded dialogue, and decisions to be made, but this it what it boils down to:  After hours of dicking around, do you want to be the good guy or the bad guy?

Funny this coming from Bioware. The last 6 games I played from them spanned from a medieval theme to a galaxy far far away, and yet I could have sworn I was playing the same game each time.

Not really no. Even Mass Effect and Dragon Age have large differences in that regard. In Mass Effect, sure that was the case, but in Dragon Age I find myself choosing more towards "how will my party react to what I'm doing here?" If you make one of them angry enough, they will leave your party, and so the question becomes whether or not you care that much about certain party members. There are no clearcut right or wrong choices in that game, just about everything they throw at you is in the gray area. That being said, there's also a substantial difference in the dialogue systems and combat of both games.

I will use my classic equalizer to sort of counter this Bioware representatives comments.

Dragon Quest uses elements from both Western RPGs (such as Bioware was influenced from) and created and innovated the JRPG genre. Yet I notice that this representative, like most, lumped all JRPGs into one category.

Sure, he made an exception to one game that fit his examples, but still he was generalizing. And its quite easy to do the same about WRPGs. Which I don't think he'd like people do be lumping Bioware games in with 'general WRPGs'.