Excellent OP; well thought out, well reasoned.
For my two pence, I felt that lack of companion armours made a statement along the lines of 'well we're creating this world, not you', which flew directly in the face of all the concepts of choice - I don't care whether someone feels one armour or another is aesthetically pleasing - it's an armour, it's not a dress uniform to look pretty in, it's to go out & kill people in whilst surviving yourself. Whilst in real human history there was a point where pretty uniforms were par for the course, that was because wars were treated as duels writ large, rather than conflicts, and certainly the era of knights, from which fantasy heavily draws, had one purpose & one purpose only - kill the other person first. As a concept, pretty uniforms & what they entail do not mesh well with the typical rogue/thief persona where you fight dirty, for example. Mass Effect 2 had the advantage of high tech - you can excuse just about anything if you have shields. Not so in an environ where magic is heavily regulated and the only thing keeping you alive (or all your limbs intact) is sheet steel, toughened leather, and so on.
To the above, some may say 'but it's a game' - to which my retort is 'so is Minecraft, but don't ask me to empathise with a cube or consider it to provide immersion'. Immersion is a lot of different things to different people, but I'd say top of the list is believing the world you are immersed in, or sufficient willing suspension of disbelief to allow equivalent. DA2 took what ME2 had stretched and pulled harder.
As for railroading, I felt DA2 allowed a load of choice for a video game, but then completely ignored it at key important moments (which includes a significant portion of the later game). Sure, becoming a warden is also railroading, but, if you tried the Mage Origin Story for example, that 'railroading' felt perfectly normal - it got you the character out of a really awkward situation that was likely to yield death or imprisonment otherwise, and that's a short story. So the storytelling that does railroad can work - it didn't in DA2 precisely because on the one hand DA2 gave great freedom, and on the other it took it all away the moment you really needed it. Everything was watered down to 'I love you, you're great' or 'we fight now' - no middle roads, no compromises, no 'I'm bloody annoyed, but you'd better never do that again'. The same is true of locations - nothing is more jarring than someone telling you that you can't go to a place because there is nothing of relevance there, or that it's two different places that happen to look absolutely identical. It challenges the very core of one's belief in the world.
blacqout wrote...What you like doesn't really matter. Fenris has an aesthetic identity, and BioWare shouldn't compromise it by pandering to people like you.
For a person who came into this thread to challenge the OP, you sure aren't making your case well. So, in summary, you're right, everyone else is wrong, and your profound arrogance is entirely justified purely because of your opinion. Oddly enough I'd have had more time for the concept of aesthetics (despite my rebuttal above) had you done so in a polite manner.
What you like doesn't matter either, if your argument has any validity at all to it, but I am guessing basic logic is not your strong point from the above statement. Hint: since every person's opinion is equally valid on a matter that cannot be proven, if you dismiss another's as invalid, you are dismissing your own as equally invalid. Alternatively, please provide a mathematical proof that aesthetics is more important than practicality to all players of DA2.
Retour en haut
Fair point. However, when I'm wandering around DA2 late game with 300 gold and I can't even buy some decent shoes for Merrill, something she laments about every other soundbite, that tends to be more obvious, at least to me.
