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[subversus]

Dragon Age is not a paragon of art direction or balance or writing or QA or anything else compared to Risen. It's an ugly game with ugly npcs and ugly environments and 2004-era technology, wildly imbalanced gameplay devoid of challenge on any difficulty level despite the entire game being populated by about two different enemies repeated 10,000 times and scaled to the player level, painfully homogeneous npc faction populations lockstep with tolkien-era fantasy stereotypes and yet with each of the hundreds of NPCs having about 30 minutes of unbearable droning life story accounts, and game-breaking bugs like dexterity not actually working until a later patch.

If Risen is the direct-to-dvd movie to Dragon Age's summer blockbuster, then it's only because of their respective marketing budgets. The comparison is laughable otherwise.

no, just no.

 

[Cartman86]

Hell, I think everyone has talked about Minecraft at this point. You realize it'll probably outsell many of the games we're talking about in here, right?

That being said the main crew of Giantbomb would probably never review those games. They are only interested in reviewing what they themselves want to review, and while they find some of these games interesting it's really the engineers at Whiskey who would review them. I'm totally fine with that though. They are not a big outlet looking to cover every game out there.

 

[EviLore]

no, just no.

There's just the one fight in the underdark that I had to pay any attention to at all, forget the name but it was an optional encounter I think, several dozen enemies as meat shields for this mini-boss warrior-type enemy that had a bow autoattack that would regularly instakill my party members from full hp, and almost as much in melee. That required some setup to take care of with my intentionally underpowered one mage party.

That's about it, was bored to tears with the rest of the game's combat. The Oblivion-style scaling keeps everything dull and doable throughout.

 

[markot]

Dragon age is weird. Its so... inconsistent. Some areas are really nice looking, others are so awful it makes you wonder if people got paid for it >.>

Game had potential, but its sad to see them kill all the potential for the sequel...

 

[subversus]

There's just the one fight in the underdark that I had to pay any attention to at all, forget the name but it was an optional encounter I think, several dozen enemies as meat shields for this mini-boss warrior-type enemy that had a bow autoattack that would regularly instakill my party members from full hp, and almost as much in melee. That required some setup to take care of with my intentionally underpowered one mage party.

That's about it, was bored to tears with the rest of the game's combat. The Oblivion-style scaling keeps everything dull and doable throughout.

Well, you must be a seasoned BG-player because I heard the same sentiment from BG2 fans. Most encounters were pretty hard for me, especially the Lady of the Lake one where I had to do everything alone. That made the game special to me. Awakening is pretty easy though...

 

[Blue Ninja]

That's odd, we wanted to give more exposure to the people at Larian Studios, but they flat out refused because we are, according to them, too small as a gaming site (though we are the biggest in Belgium, same country as them).

Hm, which one would that be? I'm guessing 9Lives? (I'm from Belgium too)

Larian didn't just develop the Divinity series, by the way. They developed some throwaway kid's titles for some kids TV channel. I assume for the same reason they're now complaining: Divinity doesn't get enough sales.

I haven't played Divinity 2. The premise looked interesting, but the reviews I read prior to release really put me off of it.

 

[Dick Laurent]

i thought i'd start browsing rps after this thread and

http://i53.tinypic.com/vmyeps.png

nice

good thing you cut it off where you did, isn't there a 360 box on the left side right below the cutoff? hehe. could cause a riot, man.

 

[Binabik15]

And yet somehow that doesn't seem to effect reviews or the attention they get.

But for european RPGS, apparently this is enough to dismiss games entirely or call them amateur.

Yeah I mad. I don't feel any of these games mentioned have gotten a fair shake.

Well, buy the press and the gamers will follow, I guess. Look at CoD. I live in Germany, so ALL of those games get attention, though.

It sucks for the devs that international media ignores them, but as long as European sales let Eastern European and German RPG makers survive while a blockbuster bomba seems to destroy an US studio every week, I´m not sure if getting into the hype game and raising the stakes would be better for them.

PS: I thought Dragon Age´s combat to be challenging, not hard per say, but not too easy. Then again, I thought that "dying" in a battle permanently killed your characters until ~20 hours in. Yeah, every time someone "died" I´d reload and start the battle again. Man, those pink ogres were SO much fun that way. With only one guy having to survive much of the challenge is gone. I blame Jagged Alliance and their usage of similiar skull symbols for REALLY dead guys. My badly skilled bowazone that is now fighting with sword and shield doesn´t help either, I guess. Man, I have to finish this.

PPS: I haven´t finished Risen. Played it on my brother´s pc for a few weeks after launch, because my laptop couldn´t handle it except for min res and settings. After killing one of most enemies while being low to mid lvl I felt a bit bored when the EVENT happened and the Inquisitor had you dungeon crawling instead of exploring. I´ll never forget the hit, hun quicksave fight against that one lizardman priest I stumbled over in a dungeon, though, took me at least ten minutes of slashing and running, hehe. I´ll have to play it again on my own pc, can I copy my savegame to a new install?

 

[EviLore]

Well, you must be a seasoned BG-player

Yeah.

 

[MattKeil]

Well, you must be a seasoned BG-player because I heard the same sentiment from BG2 fans.

Although there are exceptions, I think being a seasoned BG player is the surest way to end up hating Dragon Age. It's certainly one of the biggest disappointments of this gen for me, and I agree with all of EviLore's points. The blockbuster/direct-to-DVD movie comparison only works if Dragon Age is equivalent to Twilight.

I liked Divinity 2 a lot. It has a sizable number of flaws and some really goofy decisions in places, but I played the 360 version from start to finish and did absolutely everything there was to do in the game. The writing was funny, the acting was solid, the quests were interesting, the game mechanics were unlike most other stuff out there, and overall it was a cool little game that looked like a mediocre Euro-RPG but was actually a bit of a breath of fresh air. I really hope the 360 version of the expansion gets a release over here somehow, because I would love to play more.

 

[Ceebs]

Dragon Age is not a paragon of art direction or balance or writing or QA or anything else compared to Risen. It's an ugly game with ugly npcs and ugly environments and 2004-era technology, wildly imbalanced gameplay devoid of challenge on any difficulty level despite the entire game being populated by about two different enemies repeated 10,000 times and scaled to the player level, painfully homogeneous npc faction populations lockstep with tolkien-era fantasy stereotypes and yet with each of the hundreds of NPCs having about 30 minutes of unbearable droning life story accounts, and game-breaking bugs like dexterity not actually working until a later patch.

I think I agree with everything in this post. Hell, they released a full expansion pack that added like a single new enemy type to the game. Sure they also added some new models for the old enemies, but a compared to almost every other RPG out there, the lack of variety in what you fight is unforgivable considering the budget Dragon Age had.

 

[Open Source]

I went on some press tours for the first time ever this year, for 3 PSN/XBLA games. In the past, I've usually been stuck doing game designery things in front of a computer, but as a US-based employee of a European-based company, it made sense for me to go.

It's true that it's hard to get a meeting with a lot of outlets, especially if you don't already know people. I would suggest in this case that Larian hire a PR agenc/repy based in the US to avoid this problem.

It also helps to follow up afterwards, basically bugging them until you get your coverage. If you have a product that they know will get hits or that their readers will be interested in, they will need less bugging. If it's something more obscure, they will need more. Again, a PR agency or a rep who knows the business and the people is a great asset.

We got matched with a few people who quite clearly had no interest in the games we were showing (I'm looking at you, 1UP!), and several who did a decent job of feigning interest. Obviously, we didn't end up getting coverage from every outlet. Hell, IGN hasn't even posted a review of one of the games almost a month after release. But we still got a lot more coverage than most products in the same space would have.

We also had to compete with the pre-holiday rush. Some of our meetings got postponed or canceled. Again, being located in the US makes this less of a problem, since we could reschedule.

Although I'm sure that being a big publisher who feeds a site ad dollars does make a difference in how willing the site is to cover you, I have a feeling that most of the time the lack of coverage is a result of factors like the ones I listed above.

PS: sorry for changing the subject from the pros/cons of dragon age

 

[Durante]

It's true that Divinity 2 slipped under the radar more than normal even for mid-budget European RPGs. I tried to give it some exposure here when it was first released, but it didn't help much. What impressed me most about the game was the varied and interesting quest design / story. The original german release wasn't very polished, but I found even that perfectly playable.

Divinity 2 was one of my favourite games of last year, I think with a bit more media coverage (and, probably, a better console port) it could have been more of an international success.

edit: while we're on the actual content topic, what is up with the atrocious human (NPC) modelling in these RPGs. I do wish the Fallout, Two Worlds II and Risen devs would've looked at some actual human beings before modelling their pitiful NPC abominations. Feels like the 1990s at times.

It's interesting that you bring this up in this thread. I generally agree (the human character models are often the weakest point graphically in WRPGs) -- but one of the best graphical features of Divinity 2 was actually the character models. They're much better than in all the games you listed.

 

[Fredescu]

it didn't help much.

Your thread made me buy the game at least!