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EA: "We lost some fans with Dragon Age 2"
- Thread starter subversus
- Start date
Vigilant Walrus
Member
Fredescu said:
Yes really. It's great that fantasy is going through a revival in all sorts of media right now, but I'll be damned if a lot of it ain't crappy elves and annoying dwarfs.
DA2 provided some good characters. Varric the Dwarf and Meril the quirky elf. Those were fresh and cool.
Dragon Age 1s character much like Mass Effect 1 are full of abysmal characters.
Game2Death
Banned
So is the consensus here that the first is really good? I have a PC that could play it.
VisanidethDM
Banned
HK-47 said:
Aaannnnnd... I sort of agree. I loved it at the time, but in retrospective, it's the worst D&D system.
Still, it gave Bioware the entire breath of assets (classes, spells, monsters, abilities, skills, rules, mechanics, items, everything).
The amount of balancing and adapting they had to do on those games was minimal. Compared to inventing an entirely new system with mechanics developed and balanced from the ground up, it was obscenely simple. Even the worst D&D system to date takes a shit on the vast majority of the WRPG systems. Their entire attention span could go to dialogues, story, and encounter design. They were basically sunday night Dungeon Masters designing their adventures.
And I have a share of perplexities on the consistency of their success in doing so.
Right. It's a better game.DennisK4 said:
EDIT: AH FUCK, I thought you wrote ME2 for some reason. I'll leave this anyway:
I LOVE TALKING ABOUT THIS
ME1 - Better ideas and story, horrible execution
ME2 - Rather than make those awesome ideas work, they're scrapped and replaced with a game that winds up being a lot better than ME1 (even though I'd like to have seen what they ended up with if they decided to just fix the problems)
VisanidethDM
Banned
Game2Death said:
VisanidethDM
Banned
HK-47 said:
You can do the same for the entire Origins cast, and you can generally do so using *names* and not adjectives.
Anasui Kishibe
Banned
Game2Death said:
fuck the consensus, game's worth it, go and buy my old padawan
Well, here were the results of 2009's GotY thread: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=19253957&postcount=17Game2Death said:
I suspect the sequel won't make the top 20 though.NeoGAF 2009 GotY Awards said:
LumpOfCole
Member
The two big problems I had with DA2:
1) Repeated environments / textures. I traveled the same areas far too often.
2) How encounters would have reinforcements pop in out of nowhere, making initial tactical placement worthless.
I liked the faster paced fighting in DA2 despite some abilities being quite imbalanced, but key elements were executed incorrectly. As a single playthrough though, I enjoyed DA2 - unlike other Bioware games, however, there is not a chance I'll be playing through it again.
Btw, the only correct romance in that game was Rival Merrill.
1) Repeated environments / textures. I traveled the same areas far too often.
2) How encounters would have reinforcements pop in out of nowhere, making initial tactical placement worthless.
I liked the faster paced fighting in DA2 despite some abilities being quite imbalanced, but key elements were executed incorrectly. As a single playthrough though, I enjoyed DA2 - unlike other Bioware games, however, there is not a chance I'll be playing through it again.
Btw, the only correct romance in that game was Rival Merrill.
MesserWolf
Member
Usual PR stuff....
Words don't cost money and it is really easy to make promises .
Words don't cost money and it is really easy to make promises .
VisanidethDM
Banned
HK-47 said:
SPOILERS
Alister: Disney's King Arthur - lovable heir to the throne who doesn't really want power but will stand up to his duty after having basically claimed everyone else is more suited to it than him. Socially inept.
Morrighan: Morgana (still from the Arthurian myths!) - oh look, the cynical witch who wants a child from the hero for her own agenda. They weren't even trying.
Oghren: Generic Dwarf 03. Peter Jackson's Gimli.
Sten: where do I even begin? Worff? Helt? Any generic fantasy big dude?
Really, I don't need to go on. The 2 most praised characters in the game are pathetically blatant ripoffs.
polyh3dron
Banned
EA said:
GrandHarrier
Member
VisanidethDM said:
To be fair you can't really fault stories for having "similar characters". When you consider the 7 Steps of the Hero's Journey and the Heroic Archetypes you are going to step on alot of toes.
VisanidethDM
Banned
GrandHarrier said:
That's agreeable, but DA:O doesn't even try to break away from the stereotype. It dives in and rolls in the mud screaming "RELATE WITH ME! RELATE WITH ME! I'M THAT THING YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT! I'M ACCESSIBLE! I'M LIKE YOU!".
Besides, you can make "cardboard" characters with charm (think Minsc) and you can make stereotyped characters that validate their uniqueness (think Garrus). And I'm just sticking to Bioware games.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
VisanidethDM said:
Leiliana? A foreign spy who broke away to become a priestess, but finds herself dragged back into the middle of combat, but still struggling to keep her faith?
I mean, it's not unique or anything, but it's hardly cliched. Same with Morrigan and her relationship with her caretaker.
Alistair was Carth 2.0. Sten was boring as wood. Oghram was Jackson's Gimli.
Omotesando
Member
subversus said:
After the hideous Origins, I am glad people picked up DA2 to find out. Saves me from precious time and money.
VisanidethDM
Banned
WanderingWind said:
Leiliana was a good character IMHO. But overall, DA2's cast was definitely not inferior. Bioware didn't change attitude (Fenris is Wolverine, Meryll is Tali), but some characters (and ironically, the "nasty" ones) came out better than most of the DA:O ones.
VisanidethDM said:
it's funny but I can relate to Bioware's villains more than my party members. At least their villains are more or less human and make mistakes. I also like Wynne because she was talking about stuff I have experienced. That's pretty much it. Garrus and Tali are totally overrated.
oh, I also like Jacob because he was extremely normal and therefore resembled a real human (and was labeled "bland" and "uninteresting" because of it).
Vigilant Walrus
Member
HK-47 said:
Ehh no. She was AWESOME. A complete failure. Flawed, pathethic, broken. a relateable elf. I DIED when she had her entire clan killed. her middle name must be WRONG CHOICES because that's all she did.
And that's why she was my love interest, when I got dumbed by the slutty sea pirate, who probably had a surgically removed penis anyway.
Also Alistar was much more than Carth 2.0. Carth 2.0 was Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Vigilant Walrus said:
No, Kaidan was Carth Beta.
GrandHarrier
Member
VisanidethDM said:
Oh I agree. One of my favorite book series of all time is the Belgariad. And that has some of the most tropiest tropes that ever did trope for characters. So its entirely possible. But it can't be all that surprising if and when characters fall flat.
Anyone who expects more from a video game character than generic weekday afternoon cartoon characters is setting themselves up for disappointment. Why bother? Shepard isn't any better than GI Joe's Duke, Saren is certainly no Cobra Commander Its well past time to just accept that and move on.subversus said:
EA, the only people that are 'fans' of you are the people who are oblivious to what you do. You may publish some nice games every now and then, but they certainly don't benefit from your presence.
"Innovations and things we've done"...what a weak apology, lol.
"Innovations and things we've done"...what a weak apology, lol.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
epmode said:
I'm sort of sick of Torment being trotted out in every RPG discussion like this. It's practically the poster child for the phrase "the exception, rather than the rule." And while the story and world were excellent, the actual gameplay was terrible, even for its time. And the world was straight taken from other sources. So to compare a game that has to build it's own world is kinda unrealistic.
The writing in Torment is still unmatched, however, so I'm not shitting on the game or anything. But let's at least recognize that it has a lot of flaws that other RPGs get raked over the coals for.
truly101 said:
The Witcher 2, Bioshock, Planescape Torment, Vampires Masquerade Bloodlines and some other games had a great cast of characters. Your argument became foul almost 10 years ago. I'd add Red Dead Redemption there but these are just cutscenes.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
WanderingWind said:
You need to approach Torment more as an interactive novel than a standard video game. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, either.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Zefah said:
I agree, but it is still classified as a game. And if we're going to hold another RPG to a set of standards, we can't pretend that Torment was any better in those regards.
WanderingWind said:
Because other RPGs arent structured like Torment. Its an evolution of the text adventure in the skin of an RPG. And I hate when people only consider combat with gameplay. And while Torment's world is taken from Planescape, thats a TTRPG, so its made for creating stories. Not to mention matching up to Planescape, probably the most interesting and best written TT universe ever, is a pretty mean feat.