832 réponses à ce sujet

[shyzny]

I could swear I saw someone say on these forums that DA:O was the best selling bioware title. I know it sold pretty well even if that wasn't true or I'm remembering it wrong.

[Marixus99.9]

RPG .. role playing game .. a term that's too broad. A better one for "traditional rpgs" would be PAG .. point adventure game. That's all they are. A point based combat system in a long adventure style story. To see modern video games still limiting themselves to their tabletop predecessors ...

I can understand Bioware trying something new ..

Modifié par Marixus99.9, 21 mars 2011 - 02:50 .

[skyrend]

 Evolving gameplay would mean improving the experience thoughtfully rather than try to bling it out for extreeeeme appeal.  Mike Laidlaw's words would mean more if these "chances" he took didn't seem to correlate so much with cutting corners and rushing the game out. 

[MonkeyLungs]

They aren't going to come out and admit they rushed the game out of the door. This would just be admitting that some of their fans fears before they cozied up to EA were founded in reality.

I think the way it is, is simple: They want more sales. They like to make RPG's but RPG's are not the most popular game genre. They want to get some more fans on board. They know that RPG players are always looking for a new good RPG because it is an underrepresented genre in game releases. They figure that even if they make changes that alot of the core RPG fans don't like it won't impact their sales because even if we moan about the changes we still buy the games. They get added benefit of gaining new customers who want more action. The streamlining of gameplay systems allows for speedier development time which translates to more money.

It kind of sucks though but oh well. Way of the world. Britney Spears sells more albums than Mike Pinto. The masses are not correct, the most popular is not the greatest, and Budweiser is not the best beer in America.

[Sandmanifest]

Ashr4m wrote...

I read a lot of interviews, reviews and looked at what EA wanted, so i thought to myself "hey wh not just help bioware" so i thought it would be helpful to make suggestions for the next Dragon Age:

- Explosions - everybody loves them, just ad lots of explosions! (Michael Bay used this trick, worked well for him!)
- Guns (people like guns, especially FPS players -> big market $$)
- Space Dragons (people like dragons, they also like space, so why not make them Space dragons )
- Girls like horses
- many people like chocolate (a lot of new casual players $$)
- Dinosaurs, everybody likes them, especially when they can talk
- Jets, everybody likes them i once found a picture of a raptor in a jet (thats just pure win!)
- Dialogues are meh, just make them skippable (maybe one choice of anser should be "Explosion" would please the action crowd)
- (many people like "adventure-games" maybe it would be a nice trick to just add "adventure" to the game Title)
- Puppy-Dogs everybody loves them!

Dragon Age 3 will be the best game anyone can imagine!

I WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT TO ANY BIOWARE EMPLOYEES THAT MIGHT BE READING THIS THAT THE ABOVE POST IS PURE SARCASM. PLEASE DON'T

Modifié par Sandmanifest, 21 mars 2011 - 03:39 .

[the_one_54321]

Mike Laidlaw said...
but the bigger problem is that if we don't have RPGs that present a different type of experience, then we kind of encapsulate our potential audience to people who enjoy just that experience, and we drive others away.In of itself, that runs the risk of genre death -- it becomes too referential or too reliant on people understanding that STR means strength which feeds into accuracy which results in damage done, and so on. You end up in a case where, the genre eventually burns out, or falls flat, or becomes too risky to take any risks in development, and so on and so forth, and that's not something I want to see happen.

And your response to this is to apply freatures prevailant in a genre that is already experiencing what you describe as a problem? 

[DTKT]

At least, he honestly mentions the re-using of areas. But, I honestly fail to see what they added to balance that.

[Ryllen Laerth Kriel]

Ashr4m wrote...

I read a lot of interviews, reviews and looked at what EA wanted, so i thought to myself "hey wh not just help bioware" so i thought it would be helpful to make suggestions for the next Dragon Age:

- Explosions - everybody loves them, just ad lots of explosions! (Michael Bay used this trick, worked well for him!)
- Guns (people like guns, especially FPS players -> big market $$)
- Space Dragons (people like dragons, they also like space, so why not make them Space dragons )
- Girls like horses
- many people like chocolate (a lot of new casual players $$)
- Dinosaurs, everybody likes them, especially when they can talk
- Jets, everybody likes them i once found a picture of a raptor in a jet (thats just pure win!)
- Dialogues are meh, just make them skippable (maybe one choice of anser should be "Explosion" would please the action crowd)
- (many people like "adventure-games" maybe it would be a nice trick to just add "adventure" to the game Title)
- Puppy-Dogs everybody loves them!

Dragon Age 3 will be the best game anyone can imagine!

You forgot Ewoks and/or a Jarjar-type character to help market to children and push merchandise on release.

Saturday morning cartoons would be good, the Darkspawn could be like Cobra, fighting the Wardens in G.I. Joe battle sequences where no one dies. Since Alistair likes cheese so much, maybe he could be the Cheese King and all of Denerim could be made out of cheese. The head of the Darkspawn could be an evil, large talking rat who of course wants to eat all the cheese. Then Bioware could release their own dairy products in groceries...yadda, yadda, movies and pyramid schemes.

DA 3 will be the bestest!

On a more serious note, every time I hear Laidlaw interviewed in the past half year I become less and less interested in Bioware as a company.

[Yalision]

God, I hate the band wagon of hate burning unchecked through these forums but I have to say that it seems like a convenient excuse for Mr. Laidlaw (whom I respect very much). I hope he will take his team and the people at EA responsible for providing budget and deadlines and tell them what need to be said regarding quality requirements for his team.

We wanted Origins 2 but were given this instead. And while I enjoyed Dragon Age 2, the fact that it was rushed was evident. Especially in the painfully evident triviality that the Pride Demons came to represent as an uncommon threat, rather than a very dramatic and horrifying plot appearance. Aside from the re-used maps anyway. I LOVED the combat, if not the exaggerated "stab a guy and he explodes" part of it, though.

[Otterwarden]

abaris wrote...

And by what Laidlaw calls evolving, they drive their core audience away.

I wonder if catering to the mass market makes up for that.

That is the million dollar question behind this whole gamble. We have been part of a real life video game here, one where the epic struggle basically is can the RPG genre survive at Bioware.  In my post to Bioware tonight I tried to point out a gaping hole in their new RPG model:

One thing you might ponder about your new RPG model.  Time and time again I came across this argument put forth by defenders of your moves to simplify RP out of the game, that it was just the old guard grousing because they can’t adapt to new things and are living nostalgically in the glory days of Baldur’s Gate.  And clearly, from Mr. Laidlaw’s comments I am to presume that you feel we are holding you back as well:  “We would have probably simplified down to a single character, maybe with companions; probably looked at doing some even deeper changes to inventory management, making sure that... You wouldn't want to confuse people with enchanting or anything complex like that."  So, I would like to just say that this old dragon has learned a new trick:  mercenary hiring on You Tube.

Basically, if they rely too heavily on this dumb down the game model there will be little to entice their core audience.  Yes, it is true that we all intuitively know what STR and DEX means, but that is why it is so patronizing to play a game where you are being babysat with dialogue like ""That's the vault", "Everything we need to know about our family is there", or "Be careful when you tell the Templars about this".

Finally it seems though that reviews are coming in that highlight this glaring fact.  Like this one:

http://worthplaying..../reviews/80426/

"It isn't so much consolitis that consigned the sequel to the pit of disappointment for me, nor is it crying over PC-flavored milk because it doesn't try to harness what the platform is capable of doing. Instead, the wholesale changes reflect a deeper problem in assuming that your audience isn't as smart as it was to enjoy the first game. It makes the only answer that of dumbing down the sharp edges in an effort to appeal to a wider audience."

Modifié par Otterwarden, 21 mars 2011 - 04:28 .

[Dreascons]

Space dragons? **** yes.

Now that I have that out of my system, my real opinion:
I don't think simplification of a genre is in and of itself a bad thing, as it is the simplist way of removing assumptions of design patterns that are holdovers from when it was needed for the game to be playable and have become ingrained in the genre. ME2 was a great example of this in action. The problem was they did not put much effort into the simplifications they did do.

The combat system:
I think the additional speed is great, as with the pause and play system, it allows speedy combat that remains stratigic, and helps prevent the mindless waiting to kill that one archer way over there that your ranged combatants can't hit because of a fence. The talent trees are a good idea, but suffer from very flawed balance, the only differnce being mages . Certain builds are completely OP, with others near impossible to play, (the only difference in that respect being mages are no longer the only possible OP class) though they seem like they would be decent builds. My favorite example is my invincible Hawke, with a maxed out spirit healer tree, and whatever sustained spells I could grab (all active at once), and any extra skill points not used to let me use armor into cunning. I would just run around taking almost no damage that would not heal in a second and constantly reviving my companions. The lack of an overhead view and the constant reinforcements made me switch from nightmare to normal over the course of the game not because it was too hard, but because I got bored moving the camera to the one precise angle that would let me cast a spell where I needed it, so no points for that.

Companions:
First of all the armor issue: personally, I thought it was a good idea when I first heard about it, but it was implemented horribly. Any armor not for your class turned into vendor trash that took more time to sell, rather than how I had interpreted the upgrades as companions choosing. Furthermore, some of the companions would want those things-- I doubt Merrill wouldn't want those nice mage robes warrior Hawke just found since she has only had one outfit for six years. With how specific they are on armor, you would also expect them to be picky on the weapons they use as well. Varric gets this, and this truly improves his character. Without Bianca, he is no longer Varric. Why they did not do this for other characters is beyond me. Aviline is an especially bad instance of this, as she rants about you selling her shield when you give her a new one, but no dialogue when you sell it, even if she is in your party. If it is that importaint to her, she should have had it as a similar item to Bianca. Also, the huge difference in how Hawke's armor works just throws a spanner in the works of it being a simplification. If they were truly simplifying, the way to get armor for Hawke would be the same as for companions. Furthermore, there were some things that felt very odd for me to only be learning about the characters after being good friends with them for six years. While the reveal over time worked well, I disliked the only conversations actually with my party outside of relitively infrequnt events was the witty party banter. 

World and Story:
I'm lumping these together because of how intwined they are in the game. To adress the first point everyone hated in this regard, I actually liked the idea of repeating an area but sectioning parts of it off to make different areas, as a great way of being able to make many dungeons without having to take the time to make hundreds of maps--until I found they really only sectioned it off in 2-3 different ways, each having a mostly similar path. If they had made the dungeons large enough to section off in a reasonable assortment of ways, things like exploring the sewer in the dozens of quests there would make you figure out you had hit a section before, and actually feel like one system, but instead they repeat the same mistake from ME. As for the city, again, I was at first impressed by how it truly felt like a city, with various importaint locations and independant events and citizens. At the beginning it felt the closest to a real city I had ever incountered in an RPG, including in TES. That started to break down about the point when I found out I could talk with templars, and even cast spells in front of them without them noticing. I chalked it up to making it so the game was still playable as a mage, but it took away from the realism of the city. When I entered act II and the city had barely changed, with the same people in the same places, the illusion completely broke down for me, with the city becoming a backdrop of a play rather than a world for a story. The dialogue wheel and vocie acting worked well in some parts, but completely failed in others, leaving me wishing for the half dozen choices from 1, and to be able to play my Hawke as anything other than a smartass without it feeling like the game was telling me I shouldn't. I loved how the story wasn't a standard kill the BBEG, but some things dissapeared that were obviously importaint, and showed the rushed dev time, those of you who have played the game will understand when I mention the end of act I.


Wow. Did not mean to make that giant wall of text. ...haven't done one of these in a while but here it is:
tl;dr simplifications can be done well, and DAII was on the right track, but they were not taken to the point they needed to be to make them good

[Mantaal]

Baldurs Gate 1 --- Baldurs Gate 2 = Envolving.
Dragon age Origins --- Dragonage 2 = Shrinking

You cant take everything good away and say "we are just envolcing the Gameplay"
If Nature did that to us we only had one Leg and half Arm and no Nose anymore

[Vicious]

I'd rather Bioware stuck to their guns than try to cater to their whimpering and generally insane fanbase.

[Gibb_Shepard]

I like most of the improvements in DA2. Anyone who says it is not as tactical as DAO are completely blinded by butthurt fanrage, anyone who says it significantly shorter than DAO are completely blinded by butthurt fanrage, and anyone who says it looks bad are just blind period.

I know where BW were trying to take the series, and when taking that first step in evolving a franchise, mistakes can be made. These mistakes mainly being the lack of companion customisation, copy and pasted dungeons, lack of explorable locations (Outside Kirkwall), limited dialogue with companions, lack of strong emotional bonds with Hawkes family, and a sometimes an unreliable dialogue wheel. These things can be improved upon dramatically in DA3, and some could have been done if they didn't have the deadline set by EA.

The absolutely ridiculous gripes that some have with this game, however, just comes down to extreme butthurt fanrage.

[Altima Darkspells]

Bourne Endeavor wrote...

HTTP 404 wrote...

look at the Japanese gaming industry, they are a good example of gaming companies that don't take risks. Someone tell me they are doing better than they were in the 90s.

Uh, in spite of all the controversy associated with Final Fantasy XIII. It has comparable numbers to Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins. The entries preceding, namely Final Fantasy X and XII respectively, outsold both by a considerable margin; two to one in the case of FFX.

Square Enix may be in a downward spiral, especially with the horrendously lackluster release of Final Fantasy XIV but their sales still rival BioWare's. Coincidently, taking risks is precisely why Square could well collapse. The FF series is a shell of what it once was and their profits are dropping significantly. Most fans of the series want them to return to FFVII through FFX, where the series had its heyday.

Admittedly, excluding the waning FF series. The JRPG market has stagnated notably.

Square Enix is actually taking plenty of risks, lately.  Sure, they stick with what they know, but they've also grown a pair of testicles with regards to other games and even other genres.

The thing about Square is that they don't tend to over-alienate fans (well, until recently, arguably).  Their Final Fantasy games have a very loyal fanbase.  Kingdom Hearts continues to be quite popular, apparently.  Even companies they regularly publish for, like Tri-Ace, have extremely loyal fanbases.

Square Enix is also branching out, especially towards the western markets.  They've already published Supreme Commander 2 (which was meh), which will be receiving a sequel in the next few years.  They're also publishing Deus Ex as well as a new Obsidian game, the sequel to Dungeon Siege 2.

Frankly, at this point, I'm wishing that BioWare was bought by Square Enix and not EA.

[PBerg]

CRISIS1717 wrote...

So basically Mike Laidlaw wants to make rpgs for people who don't play rpgs.

Yep, that seems to be his intent.

[L6-636536]

I lawled when the interviewer drew Muslim and Qunari together.

[MonkeyLungs]

@Vicious:
People are whimpering and insane for discussing DA2 on the DA2 boards? Or are they whimpering and insane because the viewpoints are not just like yours? Nice insults though!

Modifié par MonkeyLungs, 21 mars 2011 - 04:44 .

[MonkeyLungs]

Gibb_Shepard wrote...

I like most of the improvements in DA2. Anyone who says it is not as tactical as DAO are completely blinded by butthurt fanrage, anyone who says it significantly shorter than DAO are completely blinded by butthurt fanrage, and anyone who says it looks bad are just blind period.

I know where BW were trying to take the series, and when taking that first step in evolving a franchise, mistakes can be made. These mistakes mainly being the lack of companion customisation, copy and pasted dungeons, lack of explorable locations (Outside Kirkwall), limited dialogue with companions, lack of strong emotional bonds with Hawkes family, and a sometimes an unreliable dialogue wheel. These things can be improved upon dramatically in DA3, and some could have been done if they didn't have the deadline set by EA.

The absolutely ridiculous gripes that some have with this game, however, just comes down to extreme butthurt fanrage.

Your gripes are ok because you are just pointing out mistakes but everyone else is just griping ridiculously? And of course you totally understand the evolution of the game Bioware was going for because of your intimate knowledge of the internal mechanisms that happened to force the game to be released after 15 month dev cycle?

[jalford1980]

 What about people like me, that love rpg, spend half their time in menus(which I still did da2), are competionists(took me 53 hours first play through of da2), but Hate traditional rpg combat. Only reason I ever played them is for the character progression and story.(and I've played them for 20 years)

Now da2 comes along, I get story, stats, progression, and combat that is actually fun....finally! Am I'm some cod fanboy that they are catering too? No, I hate cod. I'm just someone who is happy to see bioware taking a chance.

And that chance they took, set us up for an epic conclusion in da3. I can't wait!

[Gibb_Shepard]

MonkeyLungs wrote...

Gibb_Shepard wrote...

I like most of the improvements in DA2. Anyone who says it is not as tactical as DAO are completely blinded by butthurt fanrage, anyone who says it significantly shorter than DAO are completely blinded by butthurt fanrage, and anyone who says it looks bad are just blind period.

I know where BW were trying to take the series, and when taking that first step in evolving a franchise, mistakes can be made. These mistakes mainly being the lack of companion customisation, copy and pasted dungeons, lack of explorable locations (Outside Kirkwall), limited dialogue with companions, lack of strong emotional bonds with Hawkes family, and a sometimes an unreliable dialogue wheel. These things can be improved upon dramatically in DA3, and some could have been done if they didn't have the deadline set by EA.

The absolutely ridiculous gripes that some have with this game, however, just comes down to extreme butthurt fanrage.

Your gripes are ok because you are just pointing out mistakes but everyone else is just griping ridiculously? And of course you totally understand the evolution of the game Bioware was going for because of your intimate knowledge of the internal mechanisms that happened to force the game to be released after 15 month dev cycle?

Yes they are.

And it was stated by Inon Zur that EA wanted DA2 out as quickly as possible to capitlise on DAO's success.

[the_one_54321]

jalford1980 wrote...
What about people like me, that love rpg, spend half their time in menus(which I still did da2), are competionists(took me 53 hours first play through of da2), but Hate traditional rpg combat. Only reason I ever played them is for the character progression and story.(and I've played them for 20 years)

Now da2 comes along, I get story, stats, progression, and combat that is actually fun....finally! Am I'm some cod fanboy that they are catering too? No, I hate cod. I'm just someone who is happy to see bioware taking a chance.

And that chance they took, set us up for an epic conclusion in da3. I can't wait!

Have you played Fable I, II, or III? 
Why are you looking to BioWare for that kind of game design? 

[Altima Darkspells]

jalford1980 wrote...

 What about people like me, that love rpg, spend half their time in menus(which I still did da2), are competionists(took me 53 hours first play through of da2), but Hate traditional rpg combat. Only reason I ever played them is for the character progression and story.(and I've played them for 20 years)

Now da2 comes along, I get story, stats, progression, and combat that is actually fun....finally! Am I'm some cod fanboy that they are catering too? No, I hate cod. I'm just someone who is happy to see bioware taking a chance.

And that chance they took, set us up for an epic conclusion in da3. I can't wait!

We're glad you enjoy those things.  Did you also enjoy all the cut corners that basically cheapened every one of those aspects for most people?

I'm not sure BioWare took a chance.  Seems to me they took the successful formula from ME(2) and tried to jam it into Dragon Age.

As for your last point, I'm not speaking for everyone, but when I buy a game, I expect the epic conclusion to be in the game I paid for.  After all, I did not enjoy the way KotOR 3 went--oh wait.