There were surprisingly few disappointments at E3 this year. Most trips behind a closed door revealed something new and exciting, or reinforced enthusiasm for an ongoing project. EA’s demonstration of Dragon Age sadly did not. If the content shown was indicative, it seems reasonable to worry about with the forthcoming old-school fantasy RPG. I’m just hoping it was not.
Rumoured to have been in development for around a decade, the project has been described as a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate, and a fresh approach to traditional fantasy ingredients. Not using any D&D ruleset, but rather an infrastructure of their own creation, it sounds like it has the potential to be the triumphant return of a lost art. But I’ve yet to see anything that’s been convincing of this. Previous videos have come and gone, and almost every time I’ve thought, “Well, maybe it was just that voice actor,” or, “Well, it was just a dialogue scene.” I’ve made excuses. After the poor footage shown at E3, I find myself making more.
It’s important to be fair: this is an epic game, intended to last around 80 hours before planned DLC adds dozens more. I’ve seen minutes of it. It’s hard to have a sense of perspective for the game in full. But at the same time, those minutes have so far consisted of clodding dialogue, embarrassing voice acting, and peculiarly awkward combat. Oh, and of course, the rawk music.
The behind-closed-doors presentation of Dragon Age promised to show us two things: The nature of romance in the game, and the first reveal of a combat scene featuring a dragon. Let’s deal with the “romance” first. I don’t know whether it was a deliberately ironic choice of wording to introduce the clip. What we saw went something like this:
Our hero – one of the Grey Wardens, the group to which players will belong in an effort to fight back against the Blight, and the evil Arch Demon bringing it about – has a present for a lady, Morrigan. It’s a magical book that she has been looking for. She’s going to be very pleased to receive it. Once it’s dragged from our inventory to hers, she responds with some of the most excruciatingly dreadful flirtation I’ve ever seen. The acting is very weak, my face screwed up as I wrote the word “AWFUL” on my pad in the dark. She’s dressed as you might imagine a girl would appear on the cover of a 1980s D&D book, wearing what appear to be a couple of straps of material, most of her breasts hanging out. We can respond to her elephantine attempts at flirting by suggesting we’re open to her ideas. Once we’ve ambiguously agreed to her advances a couple of times, it cuts to a glimpse of an awkward sex scene that saw everyone in the room burst out laughing. Possibly not the desired reaction.
This all took place in a camp – something you can create at any time while wandering the game’s open spaces, a place to recoup, get some sleep, and chat with your companions. And indeed fuck them all, apparently. Because as we emerged from our night with Morrigan, we went over to chat with the slightly more modestly dressed redhead Leliana, who it turns out is apparently our girlfriend. Leliana’s voice makes Morrigan’s seem Shakespearian. The delivery is so deeply weird, stunted and childish. Unsurprisingly she’s upset at our bedroom antics, and protests. But not with any vigour or passion, but rather damply complains that it’s not particularly nice of us to go sleeping with other women right in front of her. Acknowledging that she can’t necessarily stop us from sleeping around, she meekly asks that we either stick just with her, or have the grace to break up with her as we continue our conquests. We choose to tell her that we love her really. She immediately capitulates and welcomes us back into her arms, before you’ve washed the smell of the last woman off you. So romantic! Here my notepad reads, “Pathetic.”
Next we’re shown the battle that led to our having the magical book gift for Morrigan. (I should note here that it became a gag for the rest of the week to say things like, “I wouldn’t mind giving her a book.”) This began with a meeting with Flenneth, the Witch of the Wild. Hundreds of years old, she is the witch of fairytales that have scared generations of children, and an enemy of Morrigan’s. We’ve been asked to kill her. During the conversation we’re offered dialogue choices that wouldn’t result in a fight, but for the purposes of the demonstration the violent choices were made. Also during the conversation I noticed that Flenneth was Captain Janeway off of Voyager, Kate Mulgrew. I asked about this and was told that the cast wasn’t being announced yet. Her having Kate Mulgrew’s voice did seem a bit of a give-away. Her acting was very good. After declaring our intent to kill her, she transformed into a giant dragon.
The combat that followed showed off a number of the special attacks and spells that will be available. Combat looks like it will be involved, using the various abilities of your party members collaboratively, the game letting you take over any member at will. At one point a member of our party changed into a venomous spider, who poisoned the dragon to weaken it – having shapeshifting playable characters sounds like a fun time. But for the most part, people seemed to be just slashing and chopping at the air, while the shapeshifting sorceress cast multiple heal spells to revive the frequently falling melee fighters. We were told the dragon was able to perform attacks like sweeping her tail at our party, but mostly people just fell over. However, there were also moments when the dragon would pick a party member up in her teeth and thrash around. This all finished remarkably quickly after our main hero jumped on the dragon’s head and wedged his sword into her temple.
And that was that. I want to stress once more, the above depicts only the few minutes we were shown, and there’s no way of knowing how it reflects on the overall game. I stood in line for as long as I was able to play the 360 hands on, but unfortunately ran out of time. I watched others playing, using the completely different interface the console version will sport, and it looked fine. Pretty enough and as you’d imagine a fantasy RPG would appear. Context presumably adds a great deal, and of course this isn’t an action game – RPG combat with multiple party members has rarely shown full contact fighting. The chances are, this being a BioWare game, that there will be a large, involved and decent story, along with elaborate and intricate role-playing.
But the problem is BioWare are concurrently developing both Mass Effect 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. What we’ve been shown of these is bloody brilliant. It’s mystifying how the same studio can be drawing us in with such exciting prospects for those two, while having Marilyn Manson declare that Dragon Age is to be “the new shit” over every recent trailer, and showing us nothing that gives us evidence for being positive.
I desperately want this to be good. Well, I want ALL games to be good, because then how great would gaming be! But I especially want a BioWare fantasy epic to be good. They’ve been so brilliant at them in the past. But the E3 clips ranged from juvenile to mediocre, which isn’t the impression I want to have at all. I look forward to being proved embarrassingly wrong.
Related Stories:
@ Tei,
“Watergate”? Uh, what?
That does give me an urge to roll up a rogue named Tricky Dick, though…
Captain Janeway is awesome.
@Walsh,
Ah, a fellow traveler who felt let down by the BG series. I followed it from the time it was in early development as Iron Throne, and I thought the final product was “meh” at best. I liked TOEE much better. No accounting for taste.
Jon Irenicus was not boring.
@TheNewShizz : Yeah, but there’s a difference here – Hollywood makes dumb movies yes, but lots of them are genuinely for dumb adults, not for dumb teenagers. Why is that 20 years after the NES, gamers over 15 are still a minority so small as not to be worth marketing to?
Wow at first this game looked good when the very first videos came out, but the combat looks incredibly boring.
For those starving for some good RPG – NWN2 can be had for next to nothing now, and while the original campaign was too railroad for me, you can get lots of good gaming from the expansion Mask of the Betrayer, and the add on Mysteries of Westgate. Storm of Zehir was…ok. Impressive when you think it was created by a 5 man team, but a little light on the stuff I find important (plot, character).
And once again it’s time for Mr. PJ Considerashuns
1 – LMAO at the folks and YOU noble Sir John Walker, Earl of Southern Rockpapershotgunshire for laughing at their face. I hope that they were enshamed to the point of not being able to sleep that night.
2 – Now. Why is it that is so difficult to do a simple romance WITH GOOD SENSE? We know that people in game development get around, and heck, some even marry. Apparently there is some collective fetish of a female going “OMG I HAEV THIS PSYCHO LUV THING FOR U GIMME SEX” in this industry that needs treatment.
3 – Can we blame EA for all that? I don’t believe that for a single moment someone in BioWare didn’t say at least “waaaaaaaait a minute” to the folks at marketing/PR of this game.
And last but not least
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yTVjUY9wMg
LEST WE FORGET
“Quests says:
So the main character can sleep with another character only id he/she finds a SPECIFIC item the other wanted/searched for, and people have to “investigate” to learn of it? Is that how it works, then? I thought it was like a score BAR to fill or something, to be roused with any donated shiny item.
That’s sort of good news no?”
Haha, how does this sound to you as a premise?
No, Hero, you have saved my life it’s true. There was that time when you offered your life for my own. I have witnessed you give money to the poor, raise tiny orphan Tim as if he were your own and smite all evil in your path. You are the very best of men and I do indeed think highly of you. But I refuse to slee – WOAH! I’ve always WANTED that nice book. I’m all yours hot stuff!”
No, no, no, no, NO!
Airie this is not. Nor is it Jahera. (By the way, what I liked about those romances was that they COULDN’T happen too quickly. There were requisit time lapses and criterea to meet.)
“I’d like to bury my nose in those exquisite passages.” Oh, we stopped that, sorry.
In The Witcher, despite the cries of misogyny. It does also give the option of settling down with a woman, adopting a child, and raising him. I liked this because it showed that the life of a Witcher isn’t the most compatible with being a tentative parent. You can return every so often, but usually you’re off slaying monsters for gold. He’s a man cursed with being loved by all women, yet unable to conceive. And when he does have a child, the reality is that he can’t be there to raise him, he would rarely see his child or partner. It’s there you can seek some sort of justification for the womanising, maybe he’s just unsuited for love.
Uhm, I think my point is that a well-written character can do these things. He can justify it. We don’t know how the main character in the Dragon Age is. Maybe he has his reasons. Or maybe it’s just a trashy, badly-written mess of an RPG. We shall see.
Perhaps this cycle of disappointment inducing news about Dragon Age is really a Bioware marketing scheme!! When we’re all sufficiently despondent over the title, they release a fairly good game, and in an opposite reaction to the expectation of mediocrity, the web explodes in an orgy of adulation.
It could happen.
I fail to see how this sex scene is any worse than the ones in, say, Mass Effect.
In fact bad writing, bad combat and bad sex scene sounds like every other Bioware game, to me.
Happy to see thoughts like this on that particular E3 presentation, because everyone else I spoke to seemed to think Dragon’s Age looked amazing, and I was beginning to wonder if I was going insane. The people who were in there at the same time as me actually cheered and applauded when they showed off the sex scene. I believe I wrote “For fuck’s sake” in my notepad at that point.
Didn’t think the combat looked that bad and I’m willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt because it’s BioWare, but the more I see, the more I wonder.
It pains me to say the, as Bioware has long been my favorite developer and BGII is my very definition of gaming entertainment. I levied so much as a whisper of criticism at any of his previous work, but times have changed, and digital actors require uniquely talented writers. This is Dave Gaider’s fault. He is a builder of tales, generating strong, nuanced plot after strong, nuanced plot; one would be hard pressed, however, to find less able a wordsmith. For your consideration, his novel based in the Dragon Age universe:
http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Age-Stolen-David-Gaider/dp/0765324083
Look inside. Read a page or two. Cringe. It’s like he took the English language and had it drawn and quartered.
Edit: Oh dear. Josh, I just read the extract, expecting something poor but passable. I have much higher tolerances for bad writing than most people but that was just poor. It lacked flow, and structure and was loaded with clichés.
Great post on the Dragon Age forums which summarises my concerns, albeit with more optimism than I have remaining:
Direct link (Should be top post, I couldn’t find a way to link just a single post)
We want to believe that. We really do, but it’s just hard sometimes.
We have a history, ya know? We’ve stuck by you for years. And we’ve never been happier than we have been with you, even if we do go and play with some of the other boys while you’re working on your next big thing. We always come back, don’t we?
And that’s probably why it’s so hard for us to see you with that other girl. We don’t want to seem like a snob, but she just looks very “lowest-common-denominator” from where we’re standing. We just can’t tell what you see in her? Is it because she’s popular? She probably puts out, doesn’t she? A lot of sales I mean.
But it’s not just her. It’s the way you act around her. It’s like you become a completely different developer when you’re around her: loud, a little obnoxious and overbearing, and really just kind of juvenile. And we wonder what happened to the dev we fell in love with, the mature, funny, and profound dev who makes us wonder what we did to deserve the great fortune of having you around. You try to comfort us when we’re alone again, in our little haven that she probably doesn’t know about. You tell us it’s all just an act, it doesn’t mean you’ve changed. You’re the same Bioware we know and love. It’s just business, and all that.
And we nod and go along with it. It’s not like we’re actually going to leave you. How could we? But even if we shouldn’t, we do worry. It’s just in our nature, and this is a side of you we just didn’t know about, and aren’t entirely comfortable with. And it’s not like we want to change who you are. We love who you are. But this new face just…scares us sometimes.
@James G: Could you link the thread, please? I can’t seem to access the post. :(
Is it perhaps sort of time to acknowledge that Bioware haven’t made a really good game for years? And possibly ever?
The turning point for me came while playing NWN1’s exceptionally quotidian single-player campaign . I had been carried along for a while by my general enthusiasm for bog-standard fantasy narratives, when suddenly I noticed how formulaic the structure of the game was – all the way down to the actual layout of the levels. And once I’d noticed it there, I started to notice that other Bioware games were all sort of unimaginative too. I think playing a lot of WoW (and / or more or less any given MMO) also helps to sweep the veil from one’s eyes, because you become inured to the window-dressing and start to see the grind for what it really is.
Even going back to Baldur’s Gate 2 – which I’d remembered as being almost entirely fabulous – I found myself feeling rather disappointed. The art in that game remains often pretty sensational, but much of what lies beneath it is largely ‘go here, talk to NPC, get quest, kill monster, get reward, rinse, repeat’.
What strikes me further is that the games which transcend this sort of thing, which manage to genuinely involve and emotionally engage the player in the action of the narrative – here, let me list some of them: Planescape: Torment, Underworld 2, the spectacularly underappreciated NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer – come from the hands of a very small group of people. One suspects that this is because there are indeed really very few game designers who are seriously good at storytelling – leastwise compared to their peers – and once you get beyond your Churches and your Spectors, your Avellones and your Urquharts, the pickings become slim to non-existent. And Bioware simply are not and have never been in that class. Which is not to say that they suck – far from it (hey, in a world which contains drivel like Oblivion, we should be grateful for everything we can get) – it is just that they’re not quite as good as we sometimes think they must be when we are guided disproportionately by the scope and polish of their games.
And the longer Bioware go on making more or less the same game, the more we just … get … bored of it.
Probably am being too harsh. I just hope that Alpha Protocol ends up rocking much harder than it looks like it might.
This reminds me of Dungeon crawl. Transforming into a spider.
You could sting an orc and run away before he could hit you miltiple times, and then you just waited until he was killed. It was a first spell from the book of transformations.
I also liked the shock when an executioner hit me by a sword and the sword chiped only few bits of surface. Then I tried to do stompa. While executioner was able to hit me five times as often than I was able to attempt to do attacks at him… When you are transformed into live stone statue the rules are somehow different.
Of course learning hand to hand combat, at least little, by practising on something less dangerous is advisable, luckily a stone statue can use sword.
It looks like the Dragon age, wouldn’t have a combat as deep as the above. The spider didn’t run quite fast, the wizard didn’t try to attack after they drawn dragon’s interest, and the wizard didn’t desperately try to evade dragon attack after he jumped on him from hopefully blind angle and run away. The wizard also didn’t say: “He haf qwite tough fkin.”, and didn’t hold his mouth. The combat liked like NWN2.
To be blunt, I had a feeling this was going to go terribly wrong from the start.
I’ll list the things I heard about this game, from Bioware (in the order I remember hearing them)…
1. We’re not going to have any really interesting races, it’s going to be standard, traditional races.
2. We’re not going to have any really interesting locations, it’s going to be standard, traditional locations.
3. Hmmm… we feel we need this to be a bit trendier, but w’re not sure how to do this without defying what we said about 1 and 2.
4. Let’s add a great, big evil! D&D never ‘ad the balls to do that, but we’re free of D&D now, free! (There’s a reason D&D never did that, it’s always boring.)
5. Let’s add lots of sex, sex is trendy, sex, sex, sex, more sex, and where we don’t have sex, let’s put in some graphic violence, and more sex. WE’RE NOT RIPPING OFF THE WITCHER!
And now the things I heard not from Bioware, later…
1. The game seems really very dull.
2. The combat looks a bit crap.
3. The sex scenes look terribly awkward.
The latter is the natural conclusion for the former, really. I already know this is going to be a huge flop, and in the vein of John’s article, it’d be interesting to be proven wrong, not so much in that I want Dragon Age to be a good game, but more that I’d be fascinated to see how they could pull a good game out of all this. Because right now, I find that inconceivable.
Now if they’d said at the start that they wanted a more interesting fantasy setting, with deep lore, interesting races and whatnot whilst still keeping it in a fantasy setting, they would have set out on the right foot, they might’ve ended up with something like a modern Avernum. But by hanging on the worst parts of ancient (80’s) D&D, and then making it ‘trendy’…
Well, yeah.
All I can say is that I hope Bioware learns an important lesson from this: Boring ideas are boring, boring settings are boring, adding awkward sex and great evils does not make them less boring.
Morningoil: Er, no. Since they’ve made so many very brilliant games.
“Even going back to Baldur’s Gate 2 – which I’d remembered as being almost entirely fabulous – I found myself feeling rather disappointed. The art in that game remains often pretty sensational, but much of what lies beneath it is largely ‘go here, talk to NPC, get quest, kill monster, get reward, rinse, repeat’.”
To be fair, every quest can be reduced to the above. It was the stuff around the basic structure – the drapes if you will – that made BG2 so fantastic.
They didn’t have to let you go ahead and attack whoever you felt like and not give you an instant “game over – stay on our railroad!” screen like almost all games now do.
They didn’t have to add sidequests with their own unique stories, locations, items and characters – some of which you aren’t even told about until figure out how to access them. Compare that to Mass Effects “side quests”.
@John Walker – one of which is the incredibly underappreciated Shattered Steel. Incidentally, they promised a Shattered Steel sequel/expansion literally on the credits screen of the game – they never delivered.
Was it Dragon Age where you were controlling your character almost from birth, growing up in their native village and such before venturing off? That bit sounded great. Have we seen anything of that yet? Was it scrapped?
Probably been mentioned but the KOTOR game is being developed by separate Bioware Studio, they’re not even in the same country so I’d not really expect much relation between them.
I was quite disappointed with the marketing recently but so long as the story is half decent I can endure the rest of the game even if it is crap, not that I think it will be that bad. I just hope whoever they have in charge of the marketing just now gets locked away in a small metal box and put somewhere no one will ever find them.
Some of you are acting as if Bioware was EVER capable of writing a sophisticated plot since at least KOTOR. And, no, I’m not talking about good ones (I find lots of their stories rather enjoyable), but I mean actually having nuance, subtlety, or complexity beyond “ancient evil conspiracies,” “amnesiac protagonist,” “sliding scale of good vs evil,” etc.
As long as the gameplay’s solid, this one still looks like a good buy.
I now challenge you to dismiss Ms Chaplin’s GDC rant about game developers being immature man-fools with quite the same bounce in your stride.
I don’t know if this’ll be a consoler’s dream. Have you seen the combat interface? That shit SCREAMS keyboard shortcuts.
I remember hyping myself up about this game before any media for it or Mass Effect has been released. I hadn’t expected much from Mass Effect, but it grew on me, despite its flaws, and I wanted to play more by the time it finished.
My excitement for Dragon Age has really petered out. If they manage to pull off an entertaining 80 hour campaign, it’ll be great news. From what I’ve seen, though, I don’t know if I’d want to invest that time.
“I don’t know if this’ll be a consoler’s dream. Have you seen the combat interface? That shit SCREAMS keyboard shortcuts.”
I believe they are doing a control scheme specific for consoles. Some wheelish setup like Mass Effect. Personally I’m still very optimistic for Dragon Age. I think the late “rawk music” marketing ploy is aimed at a larger audience, since they know that their core fans will probably like Dragon Age anyway.
As for the game its self, there’s NO WAY they could make the campaign worse than NWN1’s. If they can surpass that (which I am almost certain that they will), that’s enough for me.
It’s funny to see the PC purist crowd finally wake up to the fact that this game looks awful, and then blame it on the convienent console scapegoat.
Stop kidding yourselves. This game looked terrible from the moment it was announced. The only difference then was it was a PC exclusive made specifically for the PC crowd, and because of that oh of course it’s going to be amazing and too sophisticated for those console peasants!!
It was only a few months ago they announced it would be coming out on consoles as well, probably after someone at the company realized they would have to make it multiplatform if they wanted to sell more than 50 copies.
The difference is mostly how they presented the game when it was a PC exclusive (Baldur’s Gate 3!) compared to now (300 meets Witcher meets Army of Darkness if Army of Darkness Took Itself Seriously To An Extent That Could be Considered a Bit Sad!)
To be honest, I have no idea what Bioware is thinking with this game anymore. The messages they’re trying to send with the marketing/what they show are positively schizophrenic and, if this article is any indication, the game will suffer quite a bit for it.
btw you’re a fucking dunderhead
It’s easier to overlook less than stellar visuals when a game is first announced because, you know, they have another year to finalise them, yet.
“wanted to sell more than 50 copies.”
That reads like a trolling attempt, and sounds no better than the point your trying to make with the PC purist blather, frankly.
My only real concern as far as consoles is concerned is the potential impact on control interfaces, but if (For once) seperate control schemes are being implemented for the different systems, then it won’t be a problem. It’s when I’m playing a PC game, access the control screen and have a gamepad graphic shoved in my face that I get a leeetle angry.
Oh well. Now at least we won’t be overly disappointed if this turns out to be shit. Hopefully Risen and The Witcher 2 will be better.
Why Bioware, why?
Don’t be mislead by the change in marketing. DA:O most likely won’t be anything like the newest trailers. Bioware knows they already have all the hardcore Bioware and RPG fans hooked on the game, now they are trying to attract the more mainstream gamers. Most likely due to the game being released on PC and consoles at the same time.
It looks to me like Bioware is rapidly losing hardcore rpg fans with this game. And I don’t know WHO the marketing is for. Did that many fourteen year olds buy Mass Effect? (Clearly not because the Mass Effect 2 trailer was actually appropriate for people who don’t have KISS action figures in their bedroom)
@Pijama
Hmm, link works fine here, but the topic itself can be found here:
http://daforums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=679758&forum=135
However, in case you were missing the fact, the post in question is the block of text I reproduced below the link. You can find it on page 26, at the top.
Tim: “The people who were in there at the same time as me actually cheered and applauded when they showed off the sex scene. ”
E3 has always been a time for learning to loathe your peers.
KG
I think a big reason for all the concern is the sudden crazy marketing tactics that bioware have attempted in order to drawn in other crowds. It’s putting the game in a different light to what it was even 2 weeks ago. If you went to the old website you found a completely different vibe to what the new website portrays. It wasn’t about sex, violence and blood. It was more about great story, focus on the origins, orchestral excellent music etc. And they’ve repeatedly said on the forums that the game hasn’t changed. The marketing has though, horribly to add :(
On the romance scenes, first of all you are not forced into them at all so you do not even need to near a romance scene according to bioware. Secondly, according to bioware, it takes a good few hours of ‘work’ to romance someone, not just giving them a book. For the sake of the new marketing style they showed it off as if that’s all you have to do.
When it comes to the dragon fighting scene I think that fight was really well done, and I can’t see why people can complain if that’s the kind of encounters we’ll get from a rpg.
Considering the insane amount of free publicity Mass Effect got from the mainstream media’s brief and misguided obcession with the entirely PG sex scenes contained within I’m surprised Bioware haven’t hinted your main character will be going down on orks, dragons, giant spiders and elk.
I’ve been trying to pretend I’m not worried about this game for some time now, i can say that the trailers are the parts of the game that they feel are polished enough to show people and that is worrying.
This all took place in a camp – something you can create at any time while wandering the game’s open spaces, a place to recoup, get some sleep, and chat with your companions. And indeed fuck them all, apparently. Because as we emerged from our night with Console Gaming, we went over to chat with the slightly more modestly dressed redhead PC Gaming, who it turns out is apparently our girlfriend. PC’s voice makes Consoles’s seem Shakespearian. The delivery is so deeply weird, stunted and childish. Unsurprisingly she’s upset at our bedroom antics, and protests. But not with any vigour or passion, but rather damply complains that it’s not particularly nice of us to go sleeping with other women right in front of her. Acknowledging that she can’t necessarily stop us from sleeping around, she meekly asks that we either stick just with her, or have the grace to break up with her as we continue our conquests. We choose to tell her that we love her really. She immediately capitulates and welcomes us back into her arms, before you’ve washed the smell of the last woman off you. So romantic! Here my notepad reads, “Pathetic.”
Fixed it for you.
Please, remove my post. It was a joke just for me, but the edit button for some reason was not here.
“The people who were in there at the same time as me actually cheered and applauded when they showed off the sex scene.”
were they doing so in a “ha ha this is worse than a made for tv movie” way or a “oh man time to break out the good lotion” way?
either way holy fuck what is wrong with them?
On the subject of “zomg, gratuitous blood and violence” — played BG2 just recently, and it’s right from the beginning hack and slash with swarms of goblins literally exploding into bloody clumps of pixels and cut apart with 2-handers. Much like Fallout with Bloody Mess perk on. Compared to it DA is actually pretty tame, just brings more fidelity to the graphics.
Suspect they’re trying to make “spiritual successor” to a game their target audience simply don’t remember all that well anymore.
@tmp, BG2 had gore – but it wasn’t about the gore. Yes if you kill someone with Disintegrate they’ll be turned into dust, or they’ll explode when killed by a crit (actually, that wasn’t in my version of BG2 – possibly because it was the german one. Icewind Dale 2 had the explody-gib-crits though).
I’m just saying it was as prominent part in the older game, to the point where it was given separate switch in the gameplay preferences marked as such. So the bloody bits in this new installment are hardly “dumbing games down for consoletards” or “ripping off the Witcher” as some put it. (and also hardly “the new shit” as the PR is trying to sell it) Ol’ grandpa BG2 could be as tasteless and more, if only the player felt like it.
Before Baldur’s Gate, and maybe even before Shattered Steel, Ray and Greg (co-founders of Bioware) did ahve game called Battleground Infinity. It was an RTS, changed into the RPG we all know and love as Baldur’s Gate today.
My great guess is that Dragon Age: Origins actually does have the story, or at least some of the story, Battleground Infinity should have. And now they have the technology to make the game, they want to make.
And yes, even Baldur’s Gate could be very bloody, if you didn’t turn down the gore option or turned it off completely, like I did. The thing is, though, that characters exploding og being hacked to pieces by a sword in 460X640 pixels don’t look as bloody or gory as characters being hacked to death (in the game, I mean) in high 1280X1024 or higher resolution.
As a regular at the Bioware forums, the developers have said that the you need to play at least 30+ hours to maybe get the option to bed down with Morrigan after giving her a book. And no, she doesn’t just hop into bed with because you’re giving her a book…
I’m concerned about two things for this game a) the marketing and b) the fact that we’re apparently playing an elite soldier, a sort of equivalent (similar to) of the Navy Seals in the US military being send on a mission to raise an army that can combat an end? the blight….
For a) goes that I find the marketing horrible; it might attract new players, but how many old ones will Bioware lose in this process? And many new players will probably think it is like Diablo or Call of Duty where you just run around doing missions, killing things…
And they will complain, and feel cheated….
And rightly so, I find…
Bah. It looks like the whole idea of (appearing) a deep, complex world with similar characters got squashed by other concerns such as the strategic part and how to bed as many females as possible. The problem with that is that (to me) a crappy world and story make for a crappy rpg.
Ha!
A spiritual successor to Bauldur’s Gate my ass! Don’t get me wrong, Mass Effect was fantastic, and KOTOR wasn’t all that bad either. Bioware should be making fantastic games! But I mean come on; this title has generic-uninspired rpg written all over it. I won’t lie, my expectations were pretty low from the start. No cooperative play = a dick move if you ask me. The name is generic. This idea of a blight bearing down on humanity sounds like something ripped out of a Robert Jordan novel. But maybe I’m being unfair. I need to be honest with myself here: I’m expecting too much of Bioware. Mass Effect and KOTOR were good because their stories were good; the characters and the settings were really well crafted. In both cases, the gameplay was quite frankly lacking. But I didn’t mind because I knew after I got through the combat there would be more amazing story-telling. Dragon Age won’t have that; the gameplay will be garbage, and the story-telling will be abysmal. I say this not only because I’m bitter about the lack of cooperative multiplay, but because from what I’ve seen so far, that WILL be the case. I don’t care whether or not the game is good, but I’d rather that it were. I want to be wrong; and when the day comes, and the game is launched, if it pretty good, you all can all glare at me and say “I toll’ja so.” ; /
Here’s the E3 demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1VBRe3XTYk
After watching that, I think most of the complaints listed in this thread are absolutely ridiculous and baseless.