And I think we're all as bad for that as each other.
Funny thing is, the more I play DA2, the more it reminds me of KotOR.
And I think we're all as bad for that as each other.
Funny thing is, the more I play DA2, the more it reminds me of KotOR.
I've stated before that there's a lot of truth to the idea that we get the games we demand. If things seem samey and trite and repetitive to you, that's because that's what you want.Originally Posted by Althea
You can't be serious? Racial tension a significant factor in making it a good rpg? Cute-as-penis Elf makes a game better now? Or was it all because of the focus on personal relationships? If so, you might want to try Sims 3. I hear it's the best RPG since Baldur's Gate. Just wow, can't take anything you say seriously anymore.
1. What? The racial tension really added to it, because it did affect characters in different ways, but it was always there and it's something that BioWare have explored. It moves away from DA:O's "oh t3h elvez is so poorz", and shows how - in particular - the humans and Qunari contrast.
2. Merrill is fucking awesome.
3. Personal relationships have certainly done a large part to improve DA2, and it feels less like clicking through hours of dialogue and more like actual conversation.
Oh, right. Just because I like more personal aspects in my stories it means I want to play The Sims.
And few people take my posts seriously as it is, so all I can say is "join the crowd".
Jesus fuck, man. She's saying that it was one of the few RPGs out there that wasn't about HOW A NOBODY FROM THE BOONIES SAVES TEH WORLD. Instead, it's a more personable story with a smaller focus. If you're going to start mocking somebody over their opinion, at least try not to misconstrue it.
I still don't see how characters adding nothing to the story negates the fact that they are entertaining and likeable. For some of us, that can be enough.
And how does Hawke save the world? By killing a power-mad woman untrusted by her subordinates? By killing a man who turned into a demon to fight a kingdoms-spanning organization that trains for combat with and exclusively hunts demons and their ilk? By defeating a foreign military leader who basically goes rogue because he can't succeed in his mission? The world is never in peril. In fact, Hawke's actions spill over and actually cause world-wide strife. Contributing to a civil war--or at best failing to avert one--is a far cry from saving the world.
The end of the game I played ended in bleak turmoil, with friends parting in bitterness and anger over deep-seated philosophical divides regarding religion and civil liberties. Despite my efforts, the world spilled over into bloodshed, with a paramilitary organization breaking from its ruling authority to do battle with an oppressed but powerful minority. How did your game end?
The exact same way, since my actions had no meaning or bearing on Bioware's story.
Bloody hellfire, Nalano defended me.
Is it just me, or does Hell seem a little chilly?
I defend you when I agree with you.
I don't when I don't.
If you want, I can insult you to even things out. Self-involved whinging hussy. :P
Bit overboard with the last bit of the insult, but I'll agree with the rest of it.
Had to end it somehow. I suppose any one of a manner of farm animals would have sufficed.
Edit: Wait, prude! Prude works!
A story is focused on characters.
Characters have next to no effect on story.
These two statements are mutually exclusive. They can't both be true.
It ended with Leilana saying the kingdom depended on finding me. And yes your character plays a big part in starting a civil war including killing major leaders of a large city, so much for a small slice of life story, huh?How did your game end?
DA2 very vaguely tries to do new things. Badly. Finally doing something different after over a decade of stagnation is no reason to applaud Bioware. Not compared to Witcher 2 that came out at the same time and is so much more confident and daring in what it does that it makes DA2 look truly half assed.
It also released without any particularly well-made introduction, was all flashy instead of functional and completely destroyed the rather clever combat system of The Witcher, instead becoming SLASH SLASH SLASH SLASH SLASH.
Prude is appropriate.
So there's a better game than DA2...but that alone doesn't make DA2 bad, it either just makes it less good compared to something else or the other title better than DA2.
Besides, the game starts with us knowing that Hawke is going to be the Champion, so it's his life, but it's an interesting one that's clearly got some prominence. At any rate, Hawke's actions was merely the catalyst for something already brewing. As soon as you make a group submit power to another, there's going to be tension. It was released here and Hawke, in a role of authority, had to deal with it in this case. Unless of course you want to play as one of the darkspawn in a thrilling Deep Roads simulator where 35 out of the 36 hours of game time is spent milling around crafting armour, talking to your friends, building bromances and culminating in a nail-biting final hour where you are part of an army, watching in front of you as this group of 4 tears through you and finally gets to you.
It's evidently not the game you wanted or enjoyed, but you cannot out-right say it's bad as if your opinion is de facto.
Not to mention the fact that The Witcher 2 didn't do much to acknowledge any of the player's choices from The Witcher. You could romance an entirely different woman (Shani or something), but regardless of what happens Geralt will be sleeping with Triss. It didn't do any more or less than what was in Mass Effect or DA (in that regard), but everyone always neglects to mention that, from the first to the second game, your choices aren't unusually forceful. We'll see how things go in TW3.
Do you know why there aren't any rules in D&D for, say, mowing a lawn? It's because it's impossible to include rules for every single thing ever. This is why half the stuff you do in a pen and paper RPG is up to the DM to make a ruling on. He/she may use your strength score, your dexterity score, perhaps with a dice modifier, or perhaps he/she will just make a decision on the spot without any statistics or dice coming into play. You can't cover rules about everything in a pen and paper RPG because the entire purpose of a pen and paper RPG is to come up with your own solutions to problems, often thinking outside the box that is the rulebooks. And furthermore, if it were possible to have rules for everything, how would one expect the players to remember all the rules? The players would be constantly flicking through an infinitely large rulebook for every action, making the game infinitely slow, making each round infinitely long and therefore you wouldn't have a game any more.
But when you've got a single player video game adaptation which is based entirely on rules, there is no DM. The player can only do the things put into the game. In other words, the options are limited. So when the player can only do a small set of actions explicitly put inside a product by the developers, they must all have rules governing them. But when you have rules between characters and the environment (including other characters) that don't use the statistics of the characters within those rules, you've basically got another genre for portions of the game.
What? QTEs are clever now?
I dunno man. I mean, surely quality is relative, right? If Dragon Age II is in the bottom 30% of CRPGs in terms of quality then wouldn't that make it bad? This is a difficult one.
No game should really be praised for having consequences in a sequel. What if I only play one of them? It means I pay my money for a product and don't get to experience the consequences of my actions. I kind of felt robbed at the end of Dragon Age: Origins when it finally acknowledged half the stuff I did in the game... but after the game ended. It reminded me of Fallout fans claiming Fallout had the best "C&C" even though most of the consequences were merely ending slides.
Last edited by Wizardry; 11-04-2012 at 10:13 PM.
Heh, reminds me of when I played at the Games Workshop. The Lord of the Rings table top was relatively simple compared to WH40K which I never played.
True enough, but it does beg some questions - is it in this bottom 30%? What is the range of quality between the best and the worst and are those marked by specifically fantastic/terrible games? And so on and so forth. Fundamentally, I think it goes back to the argument that a few of us have made, myself included, that even if parts of it are sub-par (or flat-out awful) if the overall experience is a positive one, then it isn't necessarily 'bad'. If you take those awful films that rank in So Bad It's Good territory, do you say that they're bad films or bad entertainment? You'd say the former, but you wouldn't care because for you, it was entertaining.I dunno man. I mean, surely quality is relative, right? If Dragon Age II is in the bottom 30% of CRPGs in terms of quality then wouldn't that make it bad? This is a difficult one.
The problem from this comes from when you start to accept mediocrity. I don't believe that's necessarily the case here in DA2. Plenty of people were happy enough to play through the game and enjoy it to some degree, but then many, many people, including those who enjoyed it, had a lot of feedback. Evidently enough to cancel an expansion, which I can't imagine was a decision made lightly. The game has also had less DLC than Origins and of those, they supposedly tried to fix issues in the main game. So, if anything, they're listening.
Now as it goes, I was able to pick up The Witcher in a sale and will be looking to play that and its sequel at some point, but even if they turn out to be better than DA2, which I'm sure is a distinct possibility, I doubt that will make me turn around and go "Suddenly, I don't like DA2 any more." It might make me realise some things were done badly or were simply done better in The Witcher, but in terms of actual enjoyment, I thought DA2 was good enough. That, for me, is enough to not say it's bad, on the whole at least.
No idea what you're on about. The rythmn-based attack system of TW1 worked brilliantly, in my opinion.
Huh? Anders is the flashpoint for the entirety of the third act. Isabella for the second. The fate of your sibling in the first tees up Hawke's actions for the entire game.
Beyond that, Merril is a character study of a blood mage dealing with that power. She's contrasted by Fenris who is profoundly anti-mage, and they both feed back into Anders who is uncomfortable with blood magic but in favour of the mages... Varric narrates the whole bloody thing, as well as being the mechanism through which the first act kicks off. Aveline is just trying to keep order in her city while everything kicks off around her and reacts as such...
Even if you take the thesis that the 'main plot' of the game is the Mage/Templar thing, three of your characters take a major side in that fight. Only one directly impacts it, sure, but the others inform it. They reflect and demonstrate. That the game doesn't beat you across the head with that is to its credit.
The thing is, these days I'd normally rather play a game which did one interesting and new thing really well, with the rest of it being mediocre, than play just another 8/10 all-over rinse-and-repeat game.
DA:O was great, so were the BG games, but honestly I can live with only have one of those every five years or so. If DA:2 had been another 80-hour Bioware-by-numbers save-the-world epic I'd have burned out half way though.
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