So, it's officially January 26th now and Mass Effect 2 is available for those of you who've rushed out to a midnight opening (there are a couple in Edmonton!) or have your digital copy or some other legal method ;) I won't address those will illegal copies :-\

Hope you're enjoying the game and remember it's a work/school night!

So this week marked my first official week working on Star Wars: The Old Republic as a Story Analyst. As those of you who have checked out The Old Republic's website already know, we've got a broad selection of starting character classes for players to choose from and it's my teams job to go through each of them to check for the quality of the story, the user experience, the writing and the narrative. We're also checking things like cinematics, dialog, et al.

Personally I think I got the best lot out of the gate, I'm doing the Jedi Knight analysis as my first assignment. I wish I could tell you all about it in greater detail, but I'd like to keep my job - suffice to say I think people are going to love it ;)

So, today marks my last day on the ME2 project - what with going gold and all there really isn't much work left for me to do on the beast that is ME2... Monday, however, brings new things and new adventures - I'm off to work on the Old Republic, doing everything I can to make it awetastic ;)

If you happen to be in the Edmonton area tomorrow night and you hear what sounds like the collective sighs of some 400 people that would be the BWE staff releasing their collective pressure valves as we wrap ME 2 and look foward to the Holiday party. I think everyone around here is very proud of this game and we're looking forward to getting it into your hands for January 26th, 2010.

Well it's dropped to -37c today - it's officially too cold to exist. There's a horrible bubble of pollution being trapped at street level due to the cold insulation, all the car exhaust and all the production exhaust that normally floats off into the sky, to speed us towards global warming, is being kept right down here where we can breathe it. Ugh. In other news, it was one hell of a night for BioWare last night at the VGAs - Dragon Age wins Best PC and RPG - I never thought I'd see Mark on stage with Snoop Dogg... I was surprised to see God of War 3 beat out Mass Effect 2 for most anticipated, really surprised actually. But I can link this awesome new new trailer for you :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fuiNpTHzY&

Well, it's -31c today in Edmonton - with an extreme wind chill warning of -50c! So, if Mass Effect 2 ships late you'll all know it's because our whole studio is dead somewhere in the frozen tundra of northern Alberta. I kid - I don't even think the elements could stop us from hitting our Jan 26th street date! So we're just a few weeks away from that deadline now and, as you can probably imagine, everyone is working around the clock - what I like to call, "pants on fire" mode. We're making sure that all the last minute things are hammered into place, that the game is as water-tight and solid as it possible can be before we release this baby into the world. It's been a pretty wild trip seeing how this game has developed since I first joined the project. Overall I think everyone is going to be really happy with the finished product. I'm a huge RPG fan, myself, and honestly I'm a little biased towards RPG games and I'm really not a FPS/shooter fan at all. In fact my biggest problem with ME 1, as a player, was how much of a "shooter" it was. That being said, going back and playing ME 1 today and comparing it to ME 2, we've improved just about every aspect of the game you could want. Everything "feels" better and while some things might be different, I don't think they're different in a bad way. Remember, you've still got a few weeks to get caught up in the ME universe (I highly recommend importing your ME 1 save into ME 2, especially if you're a big story/rpg fan like I am ;))

Hey folks, I'm setting up this account to answer any questions I might be able to help with regarding Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age or any other BioWare titles you may have interest in. Sorry, I can't provide you with technical support, nor can I give you help building your very own NeverWinter Nights persistent world - that being said, I can probably direct you to where you *can* get both of those if you're friendly ;)