Dragon Age - TTLG Forums

mothra on 20/10/2009 at 11:05

you can't imagine how much I want to like it. After TheWitcher and Risen I am addicted to sprawling, epic, decision-driven RPG gameplay, replaying those games only stays fresh a few times (which is a special achievement by the games themselves) and I do hope for something at least......in the medium proximity of those games by DragonAge (unlikely as it is for BioEAware). Most reviewers don't ever have anything to say about Bioware games and seem to have settled for their medium quality because there just ain't any serious competition in the "polished and conservative" departement. That's why those reviews don't mean squat as long as they do not address specific things, balancing, quest/level/story structure and give at least a general sense of quality besides "wow, they sure did write down alot of backstory, dude". MassEffect did many thing but none of them 90% excellent as review fanboys had me believe. I had more the "wow, they did not screw it up completely like JadeEmpire, that's at least something"

I was more addressing what info they withhold than give you. readers should judge for themselves which info they deem interesting and which not.

well, only thing I can do is wait for someone I know to play it for a longer time, something I planned on doing anyway (even if the ad campaign would have been better).

Aerothorn on 20/10/2009 at 17:25

Very confused how this could be the RPG of the decade - I mean, I could see the combat being pretty good and all that, event he gameplay structure being very good....but in a modern RPG - particularly one with as much dialog as a Bioware game - writing is very important, and unless Bioware hired an all new scribe ((http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1895826/) they didn't) I fail to see how this will compare to Bloodlines, or even Arcanum. Having a shit story can be bearable in games that let you largely avoid it, but there's just no escaping the script in a Bioware production.

Also (and this is not aimed solely at Bioware) I am so tired of having the EXACT SAME conversation/companion dialog system in every post-Bioware western RPG. You get a companion, and they're closed off, and then you agree with them a lot and "show them the light" and they swear loyalty unto you and/or fuck you and/or gain a stat increase. It's really demeaning to the supporting cast, basically treating them as intellectual/emotional midgets next to the super-duper-amazing protagonist, and always feels like an artificial power trip to me.

SubJeff on 21/10/2009 at 09:54

Quote Posted by Aerothorn

Very confused how this could be the RPG of the decade - I mean... ...unless Bioware hired an all new scribe ((http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1895826/) they didn't) I fail to see how this will compare to Bloodlines, or even Arcanum.

What an odd thing to say. You haven't tried it so...

This is like saying "Very confused as to how this dish can be the tastiest. I've not tried it but unless there is a new cook I don't see how it can compare to x or y" with the operative part being "I've not tried it".

You're dismissing the writing just like that? Big leap dude.

june gloom on 21/10/2009 at 15:01

Welcome to TTLG.

Koki on 21/10/2009 at 15:28

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

So you still believe I can make a positive post?

Big leap dude.

SubJeff on 21/10/2009 at 18:11

You've never made one. You're the forum's number 1, grade A, Standard Uno spanner so I don't ever expect you to be any less than at total piss-stain. Oh look, you did it again. Congratulations shit-for-brains.

fuck off and suck on a piss teat

wanker

Renzatic on 21/10/2009 at 18:59

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

This is like saying "Very confused as to how this dish can be the tastiest. I've not tried it but unless there is a new cook I don't see how it can compare to x or y" with the operative part being "I've not tried it".

It's more like he's saying "I've never liked this restaurant before, so what makes me think that, despite the hype, I'm gonna like this new thing they're serving".

Also, what's a piss teat?

Zygoptera on 21/10/2009 at 20:29

When was the last time Bioware wrote something even slightly original? Baldur's Gate 2?

It's like going to a restaurant and finding it has great variation!!! there's spaghetti bolognaise and macaroni bolognaise and fettucine bolognaise and lasagne bolognaise and they're all totally different because they use different types of pasta.

Some people really like bolognaise; some people would have a lot more faith in Bioware's storytelling if it didn't look like literally everything from DAO has been cribbed from some other source and if Bioware weren't quite so insistent on serving variation bolognaise every. single. time.

Aerothorn on 21/10/2009 at 21:29

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

It is possible to make educated guesses about a work based on the past work of the creators. For instance, I know absolutely nothing about Uwe Boll's next film, but can say with confidence that it will not win any Oscars. Secondly, Dragon Age isn't a total mystery - we've seen trailers and previews and whatnot.

I didn't say it was *impossible* that this game had a great script. I said it would be "confusing" if it did, since A. it would be be a radical change from previous Bioware work and one would wonder what happened, and B. The trailers/previews would have been hand-picked to show the game as being much worse than it actually is, which, unless they have the world's worst marketing department, seems pretty far-fetched.

Sulphur on 21/10/2009 at 21:43

Quote Posted by henke

I've been thinking about it, and yeah, you're right. Ambition can't really be measured, as of itself, there's always more stuff you could put in a game after all. The only way to measure a game(and it's ambition) is to compare it to it's previous iterations and it's contemporaries. And yes, GTA 4 isn't perfect, it has a heap of troubles and leaves out many of the things that made the previous games great. But it's still the most played game on my 360 and if I can't give that a 10 I don't know what I can give it to. The most perfect game I've played on my 360 is Portal, which was as good as it could've been, for the evening it took me to finish it. GTA 4 kept me entertained for a year, but didn't live up to it's full potential. So which one of these deserves a 10?

In you first post you imply that reviewers are a bunch of idiots for getting this wrong but it's really not as easy as it looks.

Ah, now we're not talking so much about GTA IV any more, but the idea of a perfect 10 and game review criteria. I realise this has already been discussed to death, but what the hey.

I understand that game reviewing isn't easy. Hell, I tried writing reviews for games years ago and the thing that kept giving me pause was having to attach a final score. I know the number at the end is never quite the succinct summary of which part of the bad<===>good scale a game's supposed to land on.

The issue is that reviews simply aren't very good at telling people how fun a game might be. It's a criterion that most of us judge the games we play on, because hey, that's what we play them for. If I'd had as much fun as you did playing GTA IV, for instance, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

And there's the problem right there: I could say game X was more fun than a barrel of monkeys, but you might feel it was about as much fun as having your wisdom teeth pulled. It's far too subjective a parameter to base an entire review of a game on.

What I hate about all those GTA IV reviews is that, even after acknowledging that the game hadn't eliminated all of the series' bugbears, they glossed it over because they felt that the technical execution, vision, and ambition of the game somehow transcended its limitations.

Well, it didn't. Not for me. When I read a review, I need an objective summary of what works in the game and what doesn't. The score at the end needs to reflect this. If the reviewer lets how much 'fun' a game is sway the score, then that number serves little purpose except to let you know how much the reviewer liked it.

And, yes, I realise this is how the majority of game reviews work. The reason I'm irritated about it anyway is that I thought that, with one of the (http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/grandtheftauto4) highest metacritic scores ever, Rockstar had surely removed most of the gameplay/design choices that had made GTA really fucking annoying. (And hey, the reviewers only mentioned the issues they had in passing. The rest was just orgasmic gushing over how good the game was.)

You can imagine my chagrin when, after a lovely introductory ten minutes, they rose up to bite me in the ass yet again.