Statistics do not lie. They're just numbers. What can be misleading, misconstrued or misinterpreted, is their meaning. I have not derived statistics to support an argument in any case. I completed a playthrough of DA2 on PS3, found many aspects to be critically lacking to my mind in order for the game be worthy of anything above an 8/10, and found that to be more or less congruent with the critic reviews covering this game, by and large.Lochias WH wrote...
Statistics do lie. They are aggrigations and generalizations. In any situation, you can derive a statistic that supports your argument.
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Most of the critic reviews i've read which put this game at 85+ are generally consistent in so far as they all but ignore the flaws of the game, quickly sweeping them under the rug, and then rapidly fire out platitudes directed at the faster paced combat, the use of framed narrative, the conversation wheel, and so forth. All of these things which to my mind and many others in the community, were not appreciable improvements at any rate and arguably, in many circumstances a step backward from the combat, storytelling and conversational dialogue of Origins.
Even if you've only played the first chapter of Dragon Age 2, you'd be highly critical of these reviews, as they're clearly avoiding the elephant in the room. They don't even tackle the shortcomings of the game and attempt to give a rationale why they've chosen to all but ignore them. They just dismiss them out of hand as if they didn't exist, and steamroll ahead and award an 85+, with little to no justification of how they arrived at the score in spite of the games shortcomings.
For me the most apparent failures in DA2 have to be the level/dungeon design and reuse, and generally speaking the city of Kirkwall. I think a more articulate discussion is needed for the conversation wheel, characterisation, somewhat lacking use of the much hyped framed narrative, and the ails of combat that still seem to plague Dragon Age in spite of their best efforts to "make something awesome happen".
Whether Bioware recognises these issues or not is more or less irrelevant now, emphasis on the word now. The community raised many of these concerns up to a year ago and the final product is proof it was all but ignored. The statistics unequivocally show that on average, DA2 is a lesser game to DAO in the eyes of the broader community, so it seems Bioware is paying the price for looking inwards. The difference between an 80 and a 90 review score is really very significant if you understand the qualitative differences.
There are a lot of people who are really overselling the importance of sales figures. The first issue is that most of the poorly informed purchases have already occurred, and therefore the likelihood of people purchasing DA2 now is significantly lower than during the week of release, given that consumers know it is an 8/10 and not a 9/10 and what that entails. This trend will only continue with time. Moreover there is the issue of Dragon Age 3. The bad taste left by DA2 will linger with the franchise until Bioware can restore confidence. Dragon Age 2 may very well out-sell DAO, but you really need to look at the sales breakdown over time to gauge whether that was down to informed purchase decisions, or poorly informed purchase decisions.
We won't really be able to gauge the effects of DA2 until DA3 comes around and what that entails.
Modifié par Wivvix, 22 mars 2011 - 12:07 .
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