Comments on: Dragon Age: Origins ‘Dev Walkthrough’

By: FreezerBag

FreezerBag — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:26:38 +0000

Gah! They’ve done it again.

I swore off Bioware games after BG2, never play them again I said. And I own every thing they’ve realised since.

And now, somehow, they’ve actually made me want Dragon Age: Pointless Subtitle. These walkthroughs look really good, I can’t wait to play it now.

By: kuddles

kuddles — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:46:36 +0000

I think you misinterpreted my point, Velleity. BioWare is putting in the effort, but that’s exactly why every line can’t be voiced. Your character didn’t voice their lines in Bloodlines either, for the same reason: having a different voice recording for every line of dialogue for every potential race and gender would be too expensive.

By: Man Raised By Puffins

Man Raised By Puffins — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:00:58 +0000

Final part is up on the Dragon Age website for anyone interested, shows a bit more combat and the Ogre fight again.

By: Quirk

Quirk — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:14:59 +0000

@Velleity: Writing dialogue is on a whole different level of difficulty and input to recording it. It’s kind of like the difference between writing a play (a task requiring just one person), and producing one (many more people needed, and huge bags of cash). Fallout simply didn’t have recorded voice acting for the dialogue. Most games back in the day didn’t. Dialogue-heavy games that do record every line of dialogue are putting vastly more effort into the game than their predecessors did, because games are now big-budget productions. Asking them to produce n versions of their play’s lead character instead of one simply is not going to be feasible at any reasonable quality.

By: JulianP

JulianP — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:24:05 +0000

BioWare just can’t seem to function properly without Black Isle’s help. Baldur’s Gate is still, sadly, the best BioWare has to offer.

By: Lord_Mordja

Lord_Mordja — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:33:25 +0000

Oh god…

That guy in the second video is hilariously evil. He might as well have been cackling maniacally the entire time.

By: Carlton

Carlton — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:27:58 +0000

@CrashT
Yeah, that’s been bothering me since Mass Effect. They seem to have these all powerful moral centers to every game…

Also, I think the big thing that rubs people the wrong way is the fantasy angle. God knows that the fantasy RPG (both MMO and single player) has been done as much if not more so than the WWII shooter.

By: Velleity

Velleity — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:21:15 +0000

@kuddles Bloodlines managed to have different dialogue for each of the clans (though admittedly most were pretty damn similar) and Fallout changed based on stats. If older games, from smaller companies, can manage to put at least that much effort into it, why not Bioware?

Personally I’ll follow this just ’cause I’m hungry for a RPG, but it’d take something special to get me to not whine about the plot in any given fantasy game. But that’s just me and my personal biases I guess~

By: CheatingApe

CheatingApe — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:13:23 +0000

They should stop trying to compete with film makers and do what they do best – make good games. It’s so patronising to be guided through this role-play nonsense. It makes squat all difference to game content whatever choice you make so why pretend it is anything other than a space filler? It isn’t so don’t. Maybe in another ten or so years they will have a good dialogue system together that doesn’t seem so intellectually dull. Pleease!

By: kuddles

kuddles — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:52:41 +0000

@Adam: You have to remember that in order to accomplish that task in Mass Effect, you only had the choice of a male human or a female human and you couldn’t choose the voice. Dragon Age gives you the ability of character classes/races similar to DND games, so the cost of doing every single dialogue line choice from everything from a half-elf evil Rogue to a grizzled warrior would be too prohibitive.

By: ulix

ulix — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:50:26 +0000

I’d have to whole-heartedly disagree with you, Mr. Horrorshow.
While the graphics aren’t breath-taking, they aren’t horrible either, they are okayish, but more important is the artistic design, which looks very promising in my humble opinion.
Voice-acting is top-notch. Funny how many said the voice of the king-guy was rubbish the last time a video on mass effect was posted, and that he didn’t sound like a king at all, etc. etc.
Some said maybe it was supposed to sound like that, that he was supposed to sound like a bloody amateur who’s full of himself. Turns out they were right.
The world seems interesting enough, from the very very few informations one could gather yet in the few videos released.
Different human factions and realms with detailed histories and conflicts, an evil force threatening everything (maybe?), what else can you expect? Its gritty setting is definitely (or seems to be) a step up from the often cheesy space-opera setting of Mass Effect (I loved Mass Effect for what it was – a cheesy space-opera).

My 2 shillings…

By: Pidesco

Pidesco — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:11:25 +0000

Like previous Bioware games, the dialogue still seems to range from drab to incompetent, the dialogue options will probably be as meaningful as previous Bioware games, and the dialogue animations are as awful as they seemed in the previous videos. Also, the faces are a real step down from Mass Effect.

Hopefully, the combat will make me forget the combat systems in Bioware’s console games or else it will be hard to find something to interest me in Dragon Age.