88 réponses à ce sujet

[Erika T]

Am I totally misunderstanding this game?  Because I just played it through for the fourth time (and God, was I bored...).. and I realise that nothing I say or do makes a difference.  There's no choice in it whatsoever!

I cannot say no to Felemth and cannot not do what she asks.  Why?  Where's the choice here?  If Bioware wanted to save flemeth, they could ahve allowed me to say no, and get a npc move her there, or anything.  It would have been a fresh change.

No matter what I say to that hunger demon in the deep roads, it will attack me.  What if I really DONT care about the stupid treasure, just want to get out alive, why cant I have that choice?  If BW wanted to make me rich at the beginning of act two, they should have given me the choice to say no to the deep roads treasure and make me rich some other way, like finding something on the way out?

It doesnt matter what I do, the Arishok will attack and kill the viscount.  The only difference I seem to make is that they will go if I give them isabela, but that's about it, and by that time everyone's dead already...

No matter if I side with the templars or the mages, both Orsino and Meredith will turn against me.  Why?  why can't I have either or?  The last two boss fights (Orsino and Meredith) are just ridiculously boring anyway, why have two?  Let's say I side with the templars, if BW wanted to kill Orsino, why cant just some random templar run a sword through him?  Same with Meredith, why does she turn against me even if I am sucking up to her for 5 years beforehand at every possibility?  It doesnt make sense, the story is so poor its incredible.

And these are just the big changes!  The whole DA2 is full of them:  no matter what I do I cannot save my mother.  No matter what I do I cannot kill grace in act 1.   My choices are not making a difference at all!  I cannot decide to disregards the arishoks warning and let part of the city die of poison.  I cant send party members away.  Nothing I do makes a difference at all. 

Incredibly frustrating and takes away from replayability.  I played DAO fully through about 20+times.  (yeah I know i dont have a life.... ). In DAO, I was able to save redcliffe or let it burn.  I was able to decide whether Zathrian lives or the lady or the humans. My choices made a difference in Orzammar.  I could decide the fate of the circle.  I even could decide who will be king!  

Is there anything I do that makes a difference in DA2?  At all? 

[The Angry One]

Alistairlover94 wrote...

Well ya get to shank Anders, but that's pretty much it.

Even then you're doing what he wants.

[Snowship]

DA2 is not about some protagonist changing the world, it's about the story of joe-shmoe "Hawke" a refugee who lived and worked in Kirkwall, did he/she do stuff, yes, was he/she the be-all and end-all... NO!
Meredith/Orsino/Chantry were like; yes you may be favoured in public opinion, but really we're not going to so $#!t what you say, get used to it!





my 2c, PO

[Icinix]

They eliminated the deep choice / consequence system of their previous games.

Even a vast amount of smaller choices inevitably lead to the same outcome. The real change is of course the dialogue and peoples reaction to you. Once again this could be the time constraint, because it's quicker and easier to record a few different lines of dialogue than it is to program / script a whole new set of sequences AND the dialogue.

The sad part is the with your mother, you could actually save her in early builds, they eliminated the choice because apparently everyone reloaded and played it until they saved her. Deciding that it would be more of an impact if you couldn't. In doing so, they took away that which makes their games unique. Go figure.

[Mnemnosyne]

I agree on some of your points. However at least one of the choices you point out you can't make is flat out stupid. You say no to Flemeth? Ok, might as well just shut down the game at that point, cause y'know what? You die. That's it. She leaves, the darkspawn eat you. Maybe if you're playing female Hawke you get to become a broodmother. Fun.

As for the demon, hey, guess what? It's a hunger demon. If you show weakness it figures it can beat you and then it tries to kill you. Kinda makes sense to me. There is an option - not sure if it's available to all personality types, but it's available to some - to tell the demon to back the hell off, and then it does so. Because you intimidated the crap out of it. But if you're all like 'please don't kill me I'll just leave' then it's like 'hmm, might as well kill her, she's obviously weakened!'

You can side with Petrice (if you have an aggressive personality). Then she lives. That's a difference, I guess.

On the rest of them I kind of agree. Honestly I like this game a lot, but at times, the story it tells feels like it would have been better told as a book or a cinematic. I can't really think of very many choices we had throughout the game that I can even imagine would be significant when you import to DA3. The game is fun, but I don't feel like replaying it to see what happens when I do X, cause what happens is gonna be the same thing. I've played one time through for each personality type, I might play a couple more times through to romance additional characters and perhaps see what happens when I rival them, but it won't be as many times as I played DA:O.

That's not to say it's a bad game in the slightest - if I completed it even twice it's already far and away superior to most games, after all - but it does feel like the story that was told might have been better in a different format, sometimes.

[ashez2ashes]

Is there anything that actuallly makes a difference in the game? I'm deciding whether I should play the game again or sell it back, but playing it again seems rather pointless if all of the choices are the same.

Also, being the champion of Kirkwall feels kind of lame. Its defintily a big fish in a very small pond scenario. Its like I won a small town beauty pageant.

[Mnemnosyne]

Kirkwall is actually the biggest city in the Free Marches and actually one of the major metropolises of Thedas, I believe. I think it's even considerably larger than Denerim, though I'm not certain. It is true that it doesn't really feel this way that much, though. Might have been nice to get a few aerials of Kirkwall in a cutscene or something to really give us a sense of what the scale of the city is, like we got with Denerim toward the end of DA:O.

[Camenae]

Making a difference has been streamlined out of the franchise.

[Fast Jimmy]

I can tell that this is the Dragon Age 2 pity party, but to say people don't care about a game or a franchise is, quite honestly, a little sad. If you've read articles from Bioware employeesor anyone in the video game industry, you'll see that these guys work insanely long work weeks, crazy amounts of overtime and sacrifice time in their personal lives to make sure the games we play are what they are.

Certain employees whose presence on these boards is seen and felt obviously shows how much they care since they actually look at your comments, feelings and opinions. Bemoaning them, in light of all of the above, is fairly childish. As gamers who also have the time to pop on a gaming website's forums on a regular basis, I can't imagine many of our work constraints involve any sort of overtime, 6 or 7 day work weeks, or extremely tight time tables. I am speaking in generalizations, of course, but by and large there are many on here who have more free time than devotion to their work.

Are their problems with DA2? Of course. Were they caused by a time table that was too short to make a Dr. Mario sequel, let alone a fully revamped Dragon Age game? Without a doubt. Are all of us allowed to be frustrated that things happened this way? Absolutely, positively. But does that mean that we get to demean a lot of people's work that they poured their heart and soul in when the reason the product was unsatisfactory to a lot of people wasn't hard work or caring, but rather budgetary and time constraint factors that I'd say 99% of people at Bioware had no control over? No, I don't think you can get off saying that. Not without being totally off-base and without showing your own ignorance in the amount of effort it takes to even make a unpolished game like DA2.

[JW the Great]

You can have the largest impact on your own companions - who you romance, giving Fenris back to Danarius, killing Anders, whether you have enough friendship for Isabella to come back, giving Isabella to the Arishok, Carver/Bethany being a Grey Warden/Circle Mage/Templar/Dead, etc. Much like the Mass Effect series really.

I think this has been done because those types of changes are easier to track and implement for sequels than far-reaching changes like some of those in Origins.

[Nerdage]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

I can tell that this is the Dragon Age 2 pity party, but to say people don't care about a game or a franchise is, quite honestly, a little sad. If you've read articles from Bioware employeesor anyone in the video game industry, you'll see that these guys work insanely long work weeks, crazy amounts of overtime and sacrifice time in their personal lives to make sure the games we play are what they are.

Certain employees whose presence on these boards is seen and felt obviously shows how much they care since they actually look at your comments, feelings and opinions. Bemoaning them, in light of all of the above, is fairly childish. As gamers who also have the time to pop on a gaming website's forums on a regular basis, I can't imagine many of our work constraints involve any sort of overtime, 6 or 7 day work weeks, or extremely tight time tables. I am speaking in generalizations, of course, but by and large there are many on here who have more free time than devotion to their work.

Are their problems with DA2? Of course. Were they caused by a time table that was too short to make a Dr. Mario sequel, let alone a fully revamped Dragon Age game? Without a doubt. Are all of us allowed to be frustrated that things happened this way? Absolutely, positively. But does that mean that we get to demean a lot of people's work that they poured their heart and soul in when the reason the product was unsatisfactory to a lot of people wasn't hard work or caring, but rather budgetary and time constraint factors that I'd say 99% of people at Bioware had no control over? No, I don't think you can get off saying that. Not without being totally off-base and without showing your own ignorance in the amount of effort it takes to even make a unpolished game like DA2.

Heh, I'm one year into a games programming course and the phrase "15 hour days" has come up more than once, there must be easier ways to earn money.

Anyway, is it really surprising that you can't change the major plot points? How would act three have looked if Kirkwall were ruled by the qunari? How would DA3 look if the circles were all working as normal? It's hardly something new, all RPGs have events that have to happen or it would either break the story or there'd be no story, is it so unforgiveable? Just because DA2 is essentially three separate stories bolted together there are more because they all have to lead into the next properly, not to mention into the next game.

[Beerfish]

With the champion being involved in so many quests in the game one can easily justify that you did make a huge difference, could be for better or worse. There are so many fires that the champion puts out or starts, any one of a number of them could have forced a different result.

[Cutlass Jack]

The Angry One wrote...

Alistairlover94 wrote...

Well ya get to shank Anders, but that's pretty much it.

Even then you're doing what he wants.

Always happy to help a friend.

[FaeQueenCory]

Considering Hawke has been lauded as "the most influencial person in TheDAS'... He had 0 influence over ANYTHING that was important to TheDAS...
It annoyed me too... I started a second playthrough.... because of the patch and this mod that was released that allowed for my companions to have equipment...
Still haven't finished act 1... It's.... just too mmogrind-y and not enough rpg... well, RP...

The Warden influenced the world.
Hawke saw the world change... while everyone else around him influenced that change.

Modifié par FaeQueenCory, 17 avril 2011 - 03:15 .

[Amagoi]

And knifing Anders' loses a lot of it's punch when you realize that his corpse can still come back.What a drag.

[Fast Jimmy]

Alistairlover94 wrote...

This. Anders is the most important person in Thedas.

Not sure if this was sarcasm or not, but honestly... the case could be made.

[Fast Jimmy]

Alistairlover94 wrote...

I meant choices. Of course Mike Laidlaw cares about his own game, you can tell by his constant berating of fans who preferred Origins over this in his interviews. He only cared about the "AWESOMEBUTTON", and not choices.

For example, let's compare the final battle in Origins to DA2. In Origins, you could decide who should slay the Archdemon. In DA2, if I side with the Templars, I still end up having to fight Meredith. And I still had to figh Orsino if I sided with the Mages. Why? 

DA2 presents the option to refuse a quest, the quest still ends up in your quest log. You have zero influence whatsoever over the choices in this game. While in Origins, you did.

/rant

I completely agree with you on the plot. If you've seen any of my recent posts, you'll see I'm no fan of it, nor the way both previous plot points and choices were glazed over. But I don't think it is fair to say people, in particular Laidlaw, don't care about choices. Instead, I think Laidlaw would love to create a game where choice is at the front and center, but wasn't able to pull it off. Not due to lack of trying, lack of caring or lack of talent, but simply from lack of time.

Dragon Age: Origins was released November 2009. DA2, while in loose talks and discussion, wasn't green lit until a few months after that. So, within under 18 months, under 70 weeks. Bioware had to completely redesign and reconfigure their combat and interface system and their graphical and animation style and programming. If you know anything about how gargantuan of an effort that was in and of itself, let me use some arbitrary but probably realistic numbers.

Of those 70 weeks, easily 40 of it was spent programming, designing, drawing and animating the game. A few glitches outside that were fixed in early patches, this was done succesfully. So that leaves 30 weeks to write hundreds of pages of dialgoue, record them, do QA on the game, reintegrate feedback on the game, get final sign off, implement a marketting strategy, get to production and then distribute. While I know a lot of these actions were being done concordently while developing the gameplay mechanics, it is more accurate when you look at the man hours involved with each section.

So 30 weeks to get enough story and dialogue to fit a 800 page book, polish it up and get it out the door. If J. K. Rowling could get a Harry Potter book out in 30 weeks that was just as good as the book that usually takes her over a year or two to write, she would quickly become richer than Oprah. Oh, and if you add in the fact that a lot of the Dragon Age team was at the same time making content for DLC from Origins during this time, it only makes it even more impressive. It would be like Rowling is also writing the entire script for the next Potter movie, while also putting out the 800 page book. But she can't. Its just physically not possible. The same thing with DA2... its just not possible to get a game that can meet and exceed all expectations in the time they were given, with all the directions their resources were being pulled.

So to say they don't care... I think you can only make that statement when (if...? hopefully not, but...) DA3 comes out, after a design cycle of two and a half years and no ridiculous constraints to push it to market before its time. If, at that point, the game is still static and gives no sense of choice or takes past actions into consideration, then I will be the first one on these boards to say Bioware has failed and lead the march to have the entire company disbanded for the good of RPGers everywhere.

But Bioware has been putting out great, quality games that have each topped the last since the early 90's. I think they are allowed one mulligan before we start throwing them under the bus for all time.

Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 17 avril 2011 - 05:17 .

[Krahen0]

It's strange really. BioWare should know that making decisions that matter is what we want to do in these sorts of games.

[The Angry One]

After hearing that BioWare wanted the CoD audience, I have to wonder if this affected choice in the story.
I've never played CoD but from what I hear it's story modes (that nobody plays) involve casting you as mooks who are pushed along by world events, outwitted by their companions and used as patsies by their superiors. Sound familiar?