Here's what I don't get - games like Final Fantasy and fucking POKEMON have been around for ages, and been selling millions of copies every iteration and none of them have been particularly ashamed of their RPG, stat-based roots, so why is it that BioWare is constantly trying to dilute their games into something they're not in order to tap into some massive audience? (Especially when you consider DA:O was probably their best selling game... ever, which, even though it was no Baldur's Gate 2, still an RPG... about the same place on the spectrum as say... KoTOR - another huge hit by BioWare)
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Dragon Age II |OT| The Revenge of Shit Mountain
- Thread starter EviLore
- Start date
Punchy4486
Banned
Kinspiracy said:
I know plenty of Dudebros that played Fallout and Oblivion...
Kinspiracy
Banned
the walrus said:
I'd be interested to see the quotes from them in which they claim their intent is to dilute their products. Perhaps they just don't want to make the same game over and over. Pokemon is the Madden of RPGs. Safe, reliable, predictable.
HeadlessRoland
Banned
the walrus said:
Because they are trying to appeal to a larger demographic. The larger the demographic the dumber the average member of it becomes. They are targeting those who "couldnt manage to play DA:O for longer than an hour". If you want to target that crowd you need simplify everything with the "Push button do awesome" mentality.
I bet if they bundled Ritalin with the game sales would EXPLODE.
Punchy4486
Banned
Kinspiracy said:
If they don't want to make the same game over and over, why are they making Dragon Age more like Mass Effect?
HeadlessRoland
Banned
Punchy4486 said:
Or why are they reusing the same armor/weapon models,dungeons etc.
Kinspiracy
Banned
HeadlessRoland said:
Actually, the simple way was to not have to worry about pressing buttons. Simple was the cpu handling every single auto attack for you.
Kinspiracy
Banned
Punchy4486 said:
Outside of a few aesthetics, the two games feel nothing alike to me. And based on complaints about DA1, DA2, ME1, and ME2 it's clear that Bioware changes too much, too often. So your argument doesn't really hold water. At least not in the face of what the majority of complaints are about.
Punchy4486 said:
To be fair, Bioware have kind of made the same games over and over.
Random person gets mixed up in larger conflict. Said random person falls in with some sort of group that gives them powers or some such so they can take on the big bad. Said random saves the world/galaxy. It's been the same since KotOR as far as I remember. Mass Effect 2and DA2 seem to be breaking from that plot structure a fair bit.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Is this when someone posts that BioWare story chart?Inorigo said:
lastplayed
Member
Aaron said:
Who was that in ME2?
HadesGigas
Member
lastplayed said:
Well, Kaidan was still in ME2 I guess.
Jacob had the troubled past but seemed pretty aloof about it, though don't know how different he acts if you played femshep.
lastplayed
Member
Jacob wasn't whiny at all, and they all had troubled pasts. Miranda and Jack were the whiniest ones in that game. 
Major spoiler warning here but something that pissed me off when you venture into Deep Roads expedition for the first time
don't take Bethany (or Carver?) with you, they'll die from being tainted by the Darkspawn. Fucked me off to no end as the Deep Roads were a giant pain in the ass to get through.
panda21 said:
Nah, the original is a pretty good game. DAO is the last game of its kind, and will probably never see a game like it for quite some time. Good CRPGS are being made, but they are nothing like Baldurs Gate. Bioware is pretty much done with the hardcore RPGS. ME2 and DA2 is what we will see from Bioware in the future. Blame Kotor honestly for starting this trend.
Einbroch said:
That's what I tought... Than I used Anders, he is the best healing mage of the game with this regeneration aura. The haste spell is very powerful too. (+50% Attack speed on whole party)
Archers are better than mage anyways better CC and aoe and crazy damage with auto-attack.
If you want any challenge don't play archer/ use varric in hard/nightmare.
Rogue seems to do a lot of damages but need a lot of micromanaging.
bomb_jack said:
Also major spoilers, but in response
There is a way to take them with you to the Deep Roads and keep them alive. From what I saw in the Massive Spoiler Thread on the Bioware forums, there's a couple different things that can happen.
1) If Alistair isn't king, nor a drunken loon he'll show up and help Bethany/Carver go through the joining and become a Grey Warden, in order to survive the taint.
2) Supposedly the same can happen with Nathaniel
3) If you have Anders with you in the party, he might also help with turning them into a Warden. Specifics were not mentioned though.
Though I think you still lose them as party members, don't recall if it was mentioned specifically or not.
1) If Alistair isn't king, nor a drunken loon he'll show up and help Bethany/Carver go through the joining and become a Grey Warden, in order to survive the taint.
2) Supposedly the same can happen with Nathaniel
3) If you have Anders with you in the party, he might also help with turning them into a Warden. Specifics were not mentioned though.
Though I think you still lose them as party members, don't recall if it was mentioned specifically or not.
Dice
Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
Well I love Mass Effect 2 so far. The facial animation while speaking could definitely be better (how is it that Jade Empire was more believable?) but I guess I'll consider it a fair trade for the fact the characters move around, sit down, lean against stuff, take imposing posture, etc. That's a massive improvement over alternating between 100% calm and generic battle stance. This is reflected not just in body position, but real people don't always look right at each other when they're talking, and they don't always do that here. I feel like they didn't just hire actors to voice the characters, but also watched their movements.
It also has cinematography for dialogue, which is (as far as I can remember) actually present for the first time in any RPG I've seen. Usually in games it's just a flat forward face shot of them talking or if you're lucky a 2/3 angle, but this picks way more interesting angles as the characters will move around and such. It also carries the personality beyond this; as I was walking away (in free-control mode) from my slightly combative meeting with Aria, Shepherd goes "maybe I'll come back later" and she goes "maybe I'll be here" which is both hilarious and sells the character as much as possible.
I'm starting to think I would like Vanguard more than the Infiltrator I picked, but I'll give it some time and try to figure out more tactics. Part of it is that I'm not used to activating powers on the fly with keyboard and Vanguard seems more suited to pausing to direct and activate it.
It also has cinematography for dialogue, which is (as far as I can remember) actually present for the first time in any RPG I've seen. Usually in games it's just a flat forward face shot of them talking or if you're lucky a 2/3 angle, but this picks way more interesting angles as the characters will move around and such. It also carries the personality beyond this; as I was walking away (in free-control mode) from my slightly combative meeting with Aria, Shepherd goes "maybe I'll come back later" and she goes "maybe I'll be here" which is both hilarious and sells the character as much as possible.
I'm starting to think I would like Vanguard more than the Infiltrator I picked, but I'll give it some time and try to figure out more tactics. Part of it is that I'm not used to activating powers on the fly with keyboard and Vanguard seems more suited to pausing to direct and activate it.
Gorgon
Member
Kinspiracy said:
Well, the problem is not the wheel, it's that the dialogue system is shit. You basically have only 3 options that amount to
1) I'm a goody-too-shooes
2) I'm trying to be funny and sarcastic at the same time but failing misearbly
3) I'm a though mudafuka
Now, I didn't play the first game and I've only played the demo of this one. My impression is that this system is one of the most retarded dialogue systems I've ever seen. In fact, in recent WRPGs, the only thing that beats this retardness is Oblivion, and that one didn't even try to be much in the way of a dialogue system to beguin with. It's amazing that even Bethesda actually managed to make a meaningful dialogue system with Fallout3, many times having plenty of choices as a reply in which the differences between choices were subtil and demanded consideration from the player. Its sad that a company known in the past for it's roleplaying quality is becoming more and more of a joke.
Was the dialogue system in DA:O this bad? I seem to recall from what I've seen that it was substantially better.
II CETRA II said:
ANYONE can build worlds with tons of lore and history. Quite honestly, the worlds of Mass Effect and Dragon Age are some of the most derivative and unimaginative I've ever seen. No amount of word count and entries in a codex are going to change that. Quantity isn't quality. It seems however that many people look at RPGs and assume that if it has 1000 pages worth of fluff in a codex than it has to be amazing world building.
Gorgon said:
It's not that it simply has "1000 pages worth of fluff", it's that so much of that fluff is well thought out and adds a level of richness to the universe that helps make it believable. Such as the many different ways that the discovery of a Mass Relay effected all the different types of technology in the ME universe. Or the various lineages and stories about the Grey Wardens in DA:O. That's the case for me anyway. Obviously you disagree, and that's totally okay.
As for your role-playing rant; In video games role-playing is always limited. You are always working with the illusion that you're choices are having a meaningful impact. In the end the game is still going to come to one a few of the conclusions the developers have planned out. Some pull this off really well (Crono Trigger). Some don't (Dragon Age: Origins. The all text epilogue sucked, IMO.) If you want strict role-playing so bad go play D&D, or one of the many vastly superior pen-and-paper role-playing games that are available.
The dialogue system in DA2 wins over DAO automatically simply because the main character actually speaks and doesn't stare lifelessly into the screen like a doll, or communicate telepathically with NPC's and companions.
Hell, every option literally could be 1) Caring, 2) Sarcastic, and 3) Meanie but so long as my character speaks I'd enjoy it more than DAO.
I'm also not a super hardcore fan of RPG's, just someone that likes to influence the dialogue a bit and watch the story unfold.
Hell, every option literally could be 1) Caring, 2) Sarcastic, and 3) Meanie but so long as my character speaks I'd enjoy it more than DAO.
I'm also not a super hardcore fan of RPG's, just someone that likes to influence the dialogue a bit and watch the story unfold.
cartman414
Member
X-Frame said:
If you care mostly about your character speaking, you picked the wrong genre.
Shake Appeal
Member
What's the approach to dialogue in this one, actually? Have they sidled any closer to Mass Effect's retarded and insulting dialogue 'wheel'?
Shake Appeal
Member
Lostconfused
Member
Closer? They copied it entirely. Even then they couldn't do it right so now the third Bioware game to use the dialog wheel has the worst implementation of it.Shake Appeal said:
There were a few spots where it was better, and you were given more than three meaningful choices to advance, but those spots were pretty few and far between. For most of the game it still boiled down to Good/Evil/Neutral, with 'Lazy' replacing Neutral at the junction point of certain major quests. You often got more than three options to choose from, but most of the time the extra options were essentially just taking the role of the left 'Investigate' side of the dialogue wheel, and I don't think you ever got so many choices that the wheel wouldn't accommodate them.Gorgon said:
There were some issues with selecting the proper tone, too; half the time if you were talking to Alistair or Oghren you could choose the dialogue option that sounds like lighthearted, sarcastic ribbing (ie: What both of them speak in 95% of the time) and then it turns out you were actually making some biting insult that gets them all upset. I'd like to think DA2 will have less of that problem, between the general idea of the dialogue wheel, the icons indicating what sort of comment you're about to make, and the voice-acted PC making things seem less incomprehensible, but I don't have enough confidence in the game's writers to honestly believe that.
In any case, I definitely don't think DAO did it better, at all, though the entire comparison is more of a case of Who's the Fastest Cripple?
Lostconfused
Member
The real difference between a dialog wheel and a tree is that the wheel lets you choose the general direction of whatever the hell it is some character on the screen is going to ramble about and the tree lets you choose what the character you are playing will "say".
Shake Appeal
Member
This should be by design in any good conversation system. The results of your conversation choices should be at times and to some extent unpredictable, just as they are in life. The way ME2's 'conversations' shepherd (lol) you through one of two predefined scripts (unless you decide to play the game badly/less than efficiently) is the worst thing about them.Coxswain said:
Lostconfused
Member
They are both dialog trees but the way they are implemented effects your perception and experience of the dialog tree.Fredescu said:
I can take a good guess at what the tone is by being able to read the entirity of what the character is saying. I never know what the hell the main character will say when using the dialog wheel.
If a game wants to have both sarcastic dialog and some small degree of morality (or at least the option to be an asshole), without the red fist icons and so forth, you will guess wrong. This happened in DA:O. There is no way to tell the difference between a comment intended to be evil, and one intended to be sarcastic. If you do an asshole playthrough, you will find yourself on multiple occasions choosing an evil sounding piece of dialog only to have the NPC commend you on your funny joke.Lostconfused said:
I guess those icons could be both in a wheel or a word for word system, so I don't care too much one way or the other. I will say that I really enjoyed Alpha Protocols dialog system which often provided you even less information that the ME wheel did. I don't think a wheel automatically makes for a bad dialog system.
Shake Appeal
Member
It's only a downside when you've been coached by ten years of pandering videogame design to think you should always have total foresight and control over every decision you make in a supposedly complex and reactive world.Fredescu said:
Here is what playing an RPG post-2004 feels like to anyone raised on RPGs before then:
"Hey, player 1, did you know the good option is highlighted in blue? You did? Okay, but seriously now: good is blue. Remember that. Okay, now, do you see the blue option? If you click that, then something good will happen! And it will be unequivocally good! Have no fear, player 1: if you want to play as the good archetype, simply select the blue option! Great! You did it! But wait a moment, player 1, are you really sure you wanted to press the blue button? Remember that it means something good will happen for you and your party! You did?! Fantastic! You earn 10 good points! By the way, you can tell the points are good because they are blue! But if you want to change these for some red, evil points at any time, just press 'A' in front of the respec shrine. We won't hold it against you. Everyone makes mistakes, player 1! To dismiss this help text at any time, please insert 1600 BioWare points."
It's not what I care most about, but it's my preference in RPG's to have everyone voiced, especially the main character. It was really weird playing Origins at the beginning because of that.cartman414 said:
I disliked the way Origins did it since after a while and with sometimes 5 full sentences to choose from I stopped reading them all and just picked the first one that seemed fine.
I want to get on with the story and gameplay, not sit there for too long reading sentences and then after I pick on my character still stares awkwardly at the screen. Feels to me like the other character just talk to themselves.
But I do understand why you and others would much prefer the way Origins did it (and I suspect older RPG's too?).
I don't think that's a difference; it's not as though you get to actually choose your dialogue. If you want to choose the 'nice' option, you're still going to be saying the exact same thing whether you select that phrase word-for-word or pick 'nice' and then hear that phrase spoken aloud. You don't get to pick, "Well, I'd like to be a jerk here, but I'd rather insult his shoes instead of his hair." You're stuck with whatever the game gives you, one way or another.Lostconfused said:
In life, it is entirely and exactly predictable that I will know whether I'm going to say something sarcastically or seriously, and whether I'm going to come across as being gentle/nice, nonchalant, angry, or what have you. This is the step where Dragon Age fails, but you could then make the argument that you also need to take into account the other person's reaction.Shake Appeal said:
In that case, in life, conversations are more unpredictable when you simplify things to the level of simply what I say and how I say it, but are generally not unpredictable when you take into account the subtleties of expression, body language, and so forth. Video games are a long way off from properly modeling the latter (Bloodlines is the only game I know of that's even tried), and until it can be done, a good conversation system will not try to model that sort of reaction in anything more than a simplistic, general way (ie: This woman does not like sarcasm).
A conversation turning out unpredictably because you didn't notice an important detail about the way your conversation partner behaves can be good. A conversation turning out unpredictably because of shit you had absolutely no way of knowing beforehand (say, "If I say these exact words, am I going to say them in a way that makes me sound like an asshole, or not?") is complete and total garbage. Edit: So I'm not just stating that as if it's a fact, it's garbage because it become indistinguishable from a game populated entirely by robots who, no matter what you say to them, determine their reaction with a random number generator.
The wheel itself has absolutely nothing to do with the way the world reacts to you. It's just an input device. A game can be designed for you to be sure of the tone of your delivery, and still be uncertain of the response. That sort of thing certainly happened in Alpha Protocol.Shake Appeal said:
Shake Appeal
Member
No, but preconditioning and reducing people's expectations of the roles they will play to a binary switch that has little effect on anything beside the ending cutscene does.Fredescu said:
The way people play RPGs nowadays is to decide in advance what sort of character they want to have at the end of the game, and then to methodically -- and unquestioningly, uncritically, without ever really thinking -- select the correct options to achieve said character as prompted.
The very fact that people talk about how they are going to do a "good" playthrough or an "asshole" (never really evil) playthrough is indicative of how emotionally and morally stunted our videogames are. No one ever talks about making complex, contextual decisions because we are rarely, if ever, presented with them, and when we are they're railroaded to fit 'roleplaying' mechanics unworthy of the term.
So we go from this:
To a situation where I could play Mass Effect 3 in another fucking language and still max out my Light Side bar. Sorry, "Open Palm". Or whatever the fuck it is.
ElectricBlue187
Member
I'd rather blame Bioware for dumbing down their games and going all corporate with the lame preorder bonuses bs and the overpriced DLC. Something like Awakening and Lair of the Shadow Broker? Sure. But the rest of this shit is ridiculousvocab said: