Drachjinor wrote...
I'm down with all that. lol VO adds a character akin to a cinematic action game's characters. Awesome.
Gone from three racial types, with different race specific attirubutes, varying backgrounds and origin stories, or starting locations, whatever, a fairly intuitive and moderately extensive character creation system, and NPC reactions throughout the world to whichever race or class you choose to play.
Replays can yield different experiences in the world you occupy and with its occupants depending on race and such. You get a role-play insight into what it is to be a Casteless Dwarf, and how Ferelden or the wider world reacts to you as such. A Dalish Elf. A sheltered Mage of the Circle thrust out into the world.
No, you don't get to do any of that. I
wish you got that because the best part of DA:O was the origin.
What you get is to RP a Grey Warden who use to be a City Elf, or a Circle Mage, or a Casteless dwarf.
There's no unique content most of the game based on your background. No unique quests. You aren't getting exclusive content. You aren't experiencing a different game.
Could you have different reasons? Sure. But you could apply this to anything:
You could play a Hawke who was bullied as a child or who
was a bully; a Hawke who spent a long timed confused about his or her gender and who is defiend by a gender identity struggle, or a Hawke who wants nothing more to be like his or her father (or hate that father for what the family had to go through in Lothering).
Seriously, we could add quite literally an infinite number of these personality descriptors to even the most narrow background. That's what imagination is. That, to me, isn't what an RPG is at all.
In DA:O, you were a Grey Warden. You had
maybe 2 hours of exclusive content after Ostagar for your origin out of a 60 hour experience and I'm probably ridiculously generous with that number.
My whole
point is that what you're arguing we've lost isn't something we've ever had. It was always something related to your imagination. It's not that you
can't imagine it anymore, but that the things you have to imagine it around are sufficiently different that you don't want to or don't like to.
My City Elf dwarf could go 90% of DA:O saying
the exact same thing as my human noble. In fact, since you never have to pick Origin specific dialogue, I believe I could have a character post-ostagar that is 100% identical in dialogue with another post Ostagar character of a different origin.
The difference you see just isn't there in the content.
... for the sake of a voice. You can only play a human (most common species in the setting). Three class options. The character creation doesn't yield much beyond having an option on Tomb Raider to make Lara blonde and changing her outfit from the accepted shorts and tank top standard - to perhaps wearing a spandex all-in-one. She's still Lara Croft, of Kent, England. With her excellent accent. Meaning everyone is playing Lara Croft, which means they're pretty much all playing the exact same character with slight prods here and there to differentiate them from one to the next. They play her every time they play the game. Player input is massively reduced as the studio provides everything.
No, player input is not more or less reduced than in DA:O. You say the same lines in that game. You have characters respond to your lines whether you pick them because you had to lick muck of the streets in Orzammar as a common dwarf or got to screw your servants in Highever.
You play the same person: a Grey Warden recruited by Duncan who invariably stops the blight.
You want to peddle some rhetorical account about what we've lost? We haven't lost anything, other than the fact that you're no longer using your imagination in the exact same way you did for DA:O.
DA:2 could have introduced many news races to expand the setting, and made many of them playable to expand a players understanding of the race and its place in the setting. It didn't... and that... is my beef with the new ME-style direction. Can't see an even trade here from many options to few all for the sake of a voice and some cinematic scenes of a hero I didn't do much beyond prod occasionally giving a rousing speech. Sorry.
Inventing new races does not give you more RP options. We could have
thousands of races. If the content is entirely identical, we could just as well have had 1 race for al the difference it makes. This is my point. I don't know how many other ways to say it.
I understand why you do, but I think your reasons justify action game storeytelling. Controlling Conan on an epic quest somewhere. You can only role-play Conan so many times before you realise your tiny prods here and there don't really change him up all that much in your game. Wouldn't be an issue if DA:O didn't present so many good and varied options, but it did. So I'd be on your side if the game was new and this was the direction they went with VO. Fine. I just think the change-over blows from DA:O to this. *shrug*
This game has the same content as DA:O from what I saw. Hell, Mass Effect and KoTOR and Jade Empire all did. Bioware uses
the same formula for every game. All that changes is how much you want to read into the character with the voice. You hear differnet tones or lines without VO? Okay. I don't. If you're saying the same thing and people react the exact same way, whether I'm a 4 foot tall black dwarf or a 9 foot tall bronze qunari, or some new never before seen race like the 6 eared Zabrloxobox, it doesn't matter,
because the game treats you the same.
My point is that an action game
doesn't give you any variability in choice. Once it does (after a threshold) it's an RPG. Choice and reactivity - that's what an RPG is about, and why I would argue that a game like Alpha Protocol is a superior
RPG to a
game like Icewind Dale.
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lol
