The final laugh would be if MEA turns out to be awesome and there will be no forums to praise it

...

O_O

You missed what I meant so far that you must have typed that post from Andromeda.

The BW peeps told us nothing of substance. Was it really that hard to infer from my post who I was referring to? Afaik Chris hasn't worked for BW for a while, so what the hell would he know about the reasoning behind the forums closing? He said his piece, okay. He also repeated what Conel said, about engaging the community elsewhere which we all agree is sensationally moronic.

Just... you wot m8?

And you do not believe that some people in BW dreamt about closing forums since DA2, when first wave of strong negativity hit the company? (Actually, first serious one was with release of NWN-1, but at DA2 point company got many more fans, hence, wave was bigger)

Well, I believe that that part of the post from Chris was very sincere. And though Chris himself is an ex-employee, he left recently enough and was there when infighting was the hottest. So, the real (or one of the real) answers could be that. Sugar-coated as well but believable.

This thread is on fire and all we've heard so far is "it's not about the money", "it was a hard decision" and "we will still solicit feedback".
 

Not exactly. Did you see that? https://forum.biowar...8#entry20412271

... Sadly, DA2 and the endings of ME3 weren't enjoyed by everyone (I'm not bring this up more, you know what I'm talking about if you were here) and things turned much more negative than they had been in the past. Still BioWare and its fans worked to keep these forums going. It wasn't easy. There were people in the studio, some quite powerful, who wanted the forums closed. Yet, there were also those, like me, who wanted the boards to stay open and after much discussion, they remained....

Guess after so many original team left "powerful group" finally got what it wanted.

Never before have I seen such insanity from a company. Dumping your own, personal forum network for Reddit and Tumblr? I honestly don't even give a krogan's ass about either of those two sites, in any shape or form, and I never have.

 

Since before the release of Mass Effect 3, this very community has been something that I have been a part of, even if my involvement has been subtle; I wouldn't have chosen any other website as a replacement to this one.

 

As much as I would like to blame Electronic Arts for this tragedy, for once, I am afraid that I am going to have to shift the blame over to BioWare themselves. Take a look at the Sporum (Spore forum), for example: Spore is literally the eight year old product of a dead company, and the very existence of its forum is hanging beneath the thin mercy of Electronic Arts. Has Electronic Arts shut down the Sporum? No (and I would hate to see that change, don't get me wrong).

 

If I was to estimate, the BioWare Social Network is dozens (undoubtedly even hundreds) of times more popular than the Sporum, and they are literally shutting it down on us. If Electronic Arts are deliberately keeping a dying forum alive, then I find it unlikely (believe it or not) that they would have been the ones who made the decision to kill off one of their most popular.

 

As much as I don't want to believe it, this decision had to have been within the scope of BioWare's own, personal desires, and, in that, I am disappointed in their decision. This forum shall surely be missed by many, and I can only hope that this is not a sign of a grim future for Mass Effect: Andromeda. 

There is a difference here - Sporum was\is about one game. Not company, game. While BSN is about every game one company produced (and some of those games are not even under EA\Origin). Would EA keep that forum if it was about said "dead company"?

My suspicion about disbanding BW as a company keeping some people as a support team for SWTOR or as a some nameless department is growing stronger.

My guess: EA will dismantle and mutilate bioware once ME:A and dlc is out by this time in 2017. Nothing says love like a corporate mentality interested only in bottom line. Guess bioware wasn't' fast/good enough.

It does look like it, does it? IF (and it's a big IF for me now) MEA will be released at all, or regardless of that release, we are most likely going to see BW closed with some of the formal team left to support SWTOR for the time being.

And this is one final "why" for you, OP https://forum.biowar...ing-our-forums/

A company that can not afford a community does not deserve the trust either.

No, this was not a monetary decision. It also was not an easy one for us to make.

 

We understand that there are people who use and love these boards. And like them, we are sad to see them go. However, many of our players and staff now use other sites and networks outside of these boards, and we want to foster these interactions and support the great fan communities our players have built.

 

As always, we are committed to our players, and will continue to seek out and solicit their feedback. All of you are why we make games and what we love about gaming. This is the end of an era, but we will always, always listen to our players.

You mean, the decision to shut up the place where thousands of BW fans interacted on a regular basis and accumulated tons of information is a much more logical decision then appointing 1 (one) community manager that can communicate with said thousands on behalf of BW? And that you prefer BW developers to go anywhere but here?

Sorry, I do not buy it.

Been through three iterations of this forum and I have yet to fall in this famous toxic waste pit. Maybe I gain some super powers.

Reddid is 10 times more "toxic" than BSN ever was! Yet, developers are always there. No, if anything, "toxicity" has nothing to do with closing.

Budget again? Moderators and community managers cost money? I worry about the company Interesting enough smaller companies like Beamdog or Obsidian are capable of it...

Characters are what 4-5m people lost themselves in before. Open worlds are what 20m+ do.

 

Or at least, that's the logic of chasing Skyrim.

The question is - what game they are cosplaying now? With DA2 they used ME2 as an opposite to DAO (and failed in implementation), ME3 was "inspired" by Deus Ex (and failed in implementation), DAI was based on Skyrim (you know the drill).

This time we heard a lot about ME1 "as we always saw it". Since DAI was also "DA as we always saw it" - I worry about outcome.

I think it's as Straykat says: they're hardcore, combat-focused games that people finish to get gamer points for having beaten it.

You might have something here: if the story only supports combat, like in Diablo, for example, and the main goal is to level up your character by fighting more and more difficult bosses with one final super-boss, AND (it's important!) developers did not overdone it, then chances are more people will finish the story.

It also explains why ME2 was completed more times then any other game in the series - you are truly building up your character and your team (and ship as well) for one mega-battle. Everything is counted, everything you worked for is used at the end and needed. You see the result of your work there and that final battle truly is the culmination of the game.

While in ME1 you are more wandering around, your team is there just to talk and comment, but you have the story . And in ME3 part of the frustration with the endings is coming from pointless journey and complete ignoring of all your work on the way (those points you accumulate is the only outcome).
 

 

I was raising it as a counter to your claim that if more people finish the game, that must mean the story is better.

 

You talk about movies and I see it more like books. In the movie theater it is unlikely you will leave or fall a sleep, but if the book is not interesting you might throw it away without regrets. Same with the game - again, STORY driven game - it you are not engaged with the story, you leave that story. And same with the book-writers it indicates the fail of the story.

There were games that I finished despite deeply hated combat system only in order to see the story. And there were games which I did not play through only because stories were too lousy to pick my interest.

Sure, some people are looking only for an interesting combat and do not care about the story, but I do think another type - the one seeking story first and everything else later does exist as well (I am one of them). Can not say if one group is bigger then another, but for "story-type" gamers completion does equal success.

Several things:

Spoiler

1. Most people who play RPGs don't play anywhere close to a hundred characters. I'd be surprised if most of those who played any game by Bioware, Bethesda or CDPR rolled more than even just one.
2. Yes, if Bethesda didn't bother with a main story in their games I doubt most of those who played their games would care or even notice.
3. "Got bored with the story;" what makes you think that was the reason? It's much more likely that they just don't care about story to begin with, as has been pointed out.
4. "Writing failed miserably;"  Dark Souls 3 has a higher completion rate than ME2. And yet, I've never heard anyone praise DS3 for its amazing story, only for the combat. But, based on your logic, according to which the only reason for a higher completion rate is an "objectively" better story, DS3 has the best writing in AAA RPGs of the last decade.
5. Even if you are correct that more people finished certain games because the story was "better," you're making an appeal to popularity. Transformers: Age of Extinction made 1.104 billion at the box office, and to account for that it is safe to assume many, many people went to see it. To put it in perspective, I'll just say Citizen Kane didn't even make up for its own budget and was a massive commercial flop, and even to this day I doubt most people have ever seen it. Are you going to argue Transformers somehow has masterful storytelling?
6. There is therefore no objective reason to think ME2 has a better story than other Bioware games, as you seem to think. But maybe you're arguing that regardless of the quality of the story the important thing is that the most people enjoy it e.g. maximum commercial success? If so, that is also a flawed argument as, yet again, a game's completion rate has nothing to do with its success. Companies care whether people buy their products, not how or how much they use them. If they wanted to make a more successful game, they wouldn't imitate ME2, but rather ME3 and DAI.
7. You're also assuming that just because the main attraction of Bioware RPGs is the story, most people buy it because of the story. More people bought ME3 than ME2, and the multiplayer is likely to have been a reason for that. I've already illustrated that it is perfectly possible for some to buy a story-driven RPG and then complain that there is too much talking. Is it the game's fault that those players weren't attracted to the story, when they weren't even looking for a story to begin with?
8. Define "success," please. I've said a few times already why completion rate has nothing to do with commercial success. You're obviously talking about the "quality" of the game, then... but that is subjective and ultimately comes down to individual opinion. The apparent fact that DAO has the smallest completion rate of any Bioware game doesn't sway me one inch from my position that it is the best Bioware game of the last decade, and that ME2 appears to have the second highest completion rate of any recent AAA RPG does nothing to convince me that its story doesn't suck and that Bioware shouldn't look away from it and to ME1 for inspiration as they make MEA.

Yeah, it's shocking, but it's also extremely common even outside of RPGs. I once took a look at the Steam achievements for one of my favorite 4x strategy games, Endless Legend. Turns out that over 30% of the people who've bought it haven't played even as little as ten turns in the whole game, and over 80% have never won a single game on any difficulty (and I've tried the lowest one; the AI just kind of stands there doing nothing waiting for you to win).

 

So I feel less than inclined to consider a game's completion rate as a sign of its quality or even success. After all, people don't pay to complete a game. They just pay to play it, even if they only do so for a couple hours or not at all.

1. My bad! That was the answer to the claim from a different post, that stated "If I started 10 characters, and only played through to completion on 2 of them, I still saw the end game content."

3. We can not tell either way, true, though I would not expect from newcomers to franchise expect no story from RPG.

4. Not familiar with the game. Can it be more people like fantasy over sci-fi? And short engaging story is more attractive to them?

5. Transformers: Age of Extinction is not an RPG, it's a third-person action game, why bring it here?

6. I am arguing only one thing (and was answering one question) - in STORY_DRIVEN RPGs the story is supposed - you know - DRIVE the game. If it does not do that, people get bored and quit - then the quality of the story is not good enough.

7. I'd say marketing, PR and huge success of previous game was the reason for more people to buy ME3. As for "bought the story game and complain about story" - I did the opposite - bought Skyrim and complained about absence of story, when I should not have expected any. So, yes, happens, but I doubt all of the quitters are like this.

8. See p.6. Success for the story is when story-consumers finish the story. If half of your budget is in the story but nobody bothers to look it through, you are making games of different genre and can fire half of your employers.

The main attraction of TES was never the story though. It's the sandbox + fantasy. It's GTA with swords. Go steal spoons, get hooked on skooma, go on a killing spree... that sort of thing.

 

Their lore is interesting (better than DA anyways), but created by a guy who might be on a permanent mushroom trip (Michael Kirkbride). Just try reading his extended stuff especially. I can't even tell if it's actually fantasy sometimes. It's almost sci-fi. Skyrim might be the first time it was a little more presentable.

Would not argue with that. But it is labeled as "RPG". Obviously, RPG does not equal "story" but I was one of those who did not bother to read about "solo-sandbox-medieval-simulator" and hoped for the story. Needless to say, I did not finish the game.

Btw, if people can not finish even Prologue, it means Skyrim misrepresented itself for any group of players. 

Again, I don't think the percentage of people who finish a game has anything to do with "success." There are much more reliable metrics for it, chief among them sales. And by that one, DAI is Bioware's most successful game to date. I would also argue critical acclaim contributes more to a game success than whether people finished it, and DAI also takes that one home, what with it being GotY and all.

 

Even if most people didn't finish a game it doesn't mean they didn't like it. Some of the games in my Steam library have hours upon hours of me playing them and yet I've never "finished" them.

If you created a 100 characters but finished the game with only one of them - you would still be registered among those who finished the game, completed it. And you would be counted as part of that insignificant percentage.

As for "playing for other reasons" - it means Bethesda could safely fired all writers they have, since no one is playing their game for the story anyway, right? (Actually, in case of Bethesda it might be very true)

Sorry, but if someone got bored with the story so much that can not finish it, it means writing failed miserably. Hence, game - if that game is story-based! - IS unsuccessful. Because it's main attraction - the story - did not attract players. 

For story-driven RPGs amount of people finished it is in fact equals it's success.

Wait, where is the most obvious one?!

0001. Poor Console port with console UI for PC.

Actually, taking in consideration that the FallOut and Skyrim are also open-world yet have low completion rates, it only means the story means even less for these games because players are too busy with checking things out to be bothered with the main storyline. Now, with MEA, this doesn't mean it'll have as low completion rates. Likely, it's completion rate will be similar to the other ME games, as long as the data's pulled in 2018, allowing for a couple years to lapse before data's collected.

I would say Fallout and Skyrim are not ALSO open-world but FIRST open-world and only then story (actually, story is not even secondary there). I would love to see DAI numbers, really. ANd without it expect something less then ME1 for now.

And this has what to do with Andromeda? Spam elsewhere.

You can not see any relations unless "MEA" is in the title? I can do that, but since many people did get the point may be it's more simple to explain it personally to you.

They declared MEA will be a lot about exploring without the game being a space-simulator. Yet, their own metrics - as well as metrics from other games! - clearly show that if we talk about RPGs, more compact games are more successful.

Probably (no, obviously) it is too late to alter MEA game-format. Still, I wanted to post it here just as a reminder to the public and to the developers that they do in fact posses the formula of a good story-telling game and might as well use it some day again. Would not mind if MEA-2 repeats success of ME2.

And on the other side, FemRyder is the first default Bio character that I've ever even considered playing.

Which doesn't make you wrong, though. I think that most gamers have awful taste.

Which bring us to the question: who do they try to appeal in advertisements - majority or minority with acquainted taste?

Though I have to admin, PR department of BW was always a mystery to me.

Anyway shoot me now for saying that to be fair humaity is a 50% (roughly lets not argue) split between the sex's and so why not have a female head up the early teaser?  And this is meant to be advertising to draw in gamers who may not know everything there is to know about ME:A because they don't hang out on BSN  spitballing 'what if's' for the last god knows how long 

 

I think what we will end up with, if there is a choice between siblings to be the protag, is either a helmeted genderless human on the game cover or both 'faces', moody lighting with a tag line something like 'which path will you choose'

Don't you worry - nobody is going to shoot you, they all will be busy shooting me for what I am going to say.

I do not like the face from the trailer and I think it is as "anti-promoting", as it could be for the game with shooter and space-adventure elements in it. Here, I said it. Shoot me now.

I can even explain why I think so. In ME both default Shepards - M and F - looked bad-ass. You looked as the box\poster and you immediately felt the mood of the game, that rash, thrill, blood, stars and fire. Now with that Sara-like puny little mouse with the look of a shy ugly-duckling-least-popular-school-girl with a voice of a frightened teenager - all I can expect is "Life is strange" at best. Good game, sure, but has nothing to do with either shooters or space adventures. 

I am still curious about mRyder, but hope BW is going to stick to their idea and simply do not reveal faces and genders of protagonist on the posters.

I don't have source but i heard somewhere bioware say it will be like DA:I both and I think in trailer Krogan drop it's our protagonist. Bioware just show female protagonist first. I don't care what they show I just want they make me default male Ryder as good as Shepard because I suck at making character.

It was in one of the recent interviews (can not find the link   ). They did mention the balance (ME was all about broShep) but said this time they will try to use DAI approach not revealing protagonist gender on boxes and posters.

I kind of like the endings... or at least, I could have lived with them. My skepticism comes from the fact that it doesn't END. lol. They had to drag it on, and now I question them. The former was a labor of love and this comes off more like a pure "product".

So, I am not the only one with that feeling. Can not see any excitement on developers behalf. It does feel like they are just  "making another game", all in a day's work. So hope I am wrong!

Usually, when there's new territory, there's hucksters and people strong-arming other people into giving them what you want.

Sure, but on one condition - it that contested new territory are easy to reach by anybody. That "crime-thinking" way of sci-fi media sure makes things hot and steamy but never had any sense! You'd think the people sent on that journey were carefully selected and no crime-lords could pass, but - no! Crime syndicates should ever prevail!

Most definitely....but it's kind of a hollow victory seeing my Shep take a breath at the end knowing I probably won't even get a codex entry from MEA about my exploits in the milky way

Just install "Happy End" mod and enjoy your Sheppard's recovery

Did she mate with Hawke?

Did who?