282 réponses à ce sujet

[LyndseyCousland]

88mphSlayer wrote...

no you're right

as much as i enjoyed DA2 for what it was, it wasn't a sequel

more like a spin-off

I haven't had a chance to play it much but so far I feel the same.

[Morroian]

Saintthanksgiving wrote...

I would like to know what I should have expected when I bought a game with a "2" at the end of the title. 

Do you expect Final Fantasy XII to be the same as Final Fantasy 1?

Saintthanksgiving wrote...

What I am saying is, if the addition of voice acting to the player character meant the complete elimination of an entire portion of the game (ie. unique origin storylines, deeper roleplaying expierience, a personal investment in the character, REPLAYABILITY)   

The addition of the VO gave me a deeper role playing experience, its not some universal truth that it doesn't.

Saintthanksgiving wrote...

Shrinking of the game world into 5 "encounter environments" is another bizarre turn of events.  Was someone complainging that they had to travel too much?   

WShy does it have to be a result of a complaint. DA2 is a more personal focussed story and thus fits into a smaller environment. They didn't implement this aspect well enough but teh idea is sound.

Saintthanksgiving wrote...

The removal of the inventory items is where the real mystery is for me, mainly because the inventory wasnt really removed.  Character customization and loot have been mainstays of the fantasy rpg genre since its inception.  Dumping that feature for no apparent reason is bizarre enough, but to remove the ability to use Loot while keeping the requirement to collect loot is just dumb.   

But they didn't remove the ability. Could a warrior use a mages staff in DAO?

[Saintthanksgiving]

[quote]elearon1 wrote...

Okay, but the thing is, if you read any interviews, or *anything* about the game before it was released, they were not shy in informing people this was not going to be DA:Origins 2 ... in fact, they were very vocal about breaking people of that expectation. Yet, I still hear people complaining "what else would it be?" You can't complain the company didn't give you what you expected, after they told you they weren't going to.

As for replayability; aside from the Origins stories themselves, I never managed to replay DA:O - it always felt exactly the same whenever I tried. Meanwhile, I've played DA2 twice all the way through and have two other characters in the 3rd act and still going.

I'm not bashing Origins here ... I really enjoyed it the first time through, but it was SO linear that I simply could not bring myself to slog through it more than once. (and I tried, I did!) Sure, DA2 is also linear, but you can change your experience significantly by playing a different personality type

Ok a couple of things here.  Informing your customer that they are not going to pay 60 bucks for the same game they paid 60 bucks for the first time, is lightyears away from informing the customer that you were drastically and fundamentally changing the basic gameplay.  If they had advertised DA2 as "DRAGON AGE: MASS EFFECT WITH SWORDS"   I would have considered myself well informed as to their intentions.

If you are seriously maintaining that DA2 has more replayability than DAO.... I'm just in shock.  Because the tone of Hawkes voice changes when he says the exact same thing in every situation?  Really? that adds replay value?  I must be taking crazy pills.

to everyone else, I am not arguing the merits of the changes, especially the more arbitrary ones like the friendship rivalry system.  I am merely saying that Bioware completely changed a game that was successful enough to merit a sequel, and I am boggled as to why.

Someone mentioned that is important for a company to add new customers... and I get that.  What about the customers they already had?  What about the people that you KNEW enjoyed your product and were waiting to do more buisness with you?  Why were those people abandoned for a group of prospective customers with no loyalty to the brand?  ALSO, WHY WOULD YOU ASSUME THAT NEW CUSTOMERS WOULD WANT SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT?
WAS ORIGINS A BOMB?  DID IT REQUIRE A REBBOT?

[AkiKishi]

If you read the DA2 homepage is says "The sequel to..." Not the "Completely unrelated spinoff of.."

[Saintthanksgiving]

... that last word is actually Reboot..... your computer mispelled it.

There are people who love Fantasy RPG's. There are people who love "customizable character" shooters like Mass Effect. There are people who love both. I BOUGHT a fantasy RPG, and GOT a customizable character "sword shooter."

[Saintthanksgiving]

Someone just quoted me about the voice acting and said it added a deeper roleplaying expierience for them...

Good for you.

i didnt say the voice acting was necessarily a bad thing.  What I said was :  The developer removed a huge portion of the game that a lot of people loved to add the voice acting.  My beef is not with the voice acting.  My beef is with the developer for breaking one of the elements of ORIGINS that made it great.


P.S. I fail to see how adding a voice to the player character deepens a roleplay expierience.  Hawke doesnt sound like me... My british accent is terrible.  My character in origins was a product of my own design.  An extension of my imagination.  I was able to personally PLAY a ROLE in the story.  If I wanted to follow the linear story of an already defined player character... I would have sat down with "God of War" and a Beer.

sorry, I keep saying Im going to remain objective here.

[Saintthanksgiving]

in hindsight I apparently DO have a beef with the voice acting, but dont let it take away from my core message. My REAL beef is with the departure from ORIGINS.

[Rockpopple]

Dragon Age II is a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins. Not only does the story of Hawke pick up during and after the events of Origins and the references to those events told throughout II, but it takes place in the same world and lore as Dragon Age: Origins. You really can't get more sequelly than that.

Personally if Dragon Age II was yet another Blight where another nameless Dwarf/Elf/Human/Mage bands his friends together to slay the dragon, I dunno, for me if I knew that was the recurring formula, I'd think the series was getting stale in a hurry.

[Saintthanksgiving]

I dont really hate the plot of DA2. It is the thing I dislike the least actually. Without going into spoilers, DA2 seems like it was an attempt to be an Empire Strikes Back type of thing. It was horribly done and half finished, but the idea behind the action seems like a decent plot. I was hoping for some continuity from Origins through Awakenings into DA2 that might culminate in DA3... I guess it is headed that way... I just dont like the vehicle they chose to get there.

[GammaRayJim]

ozonemania wrote...

In defense of Bioware, I'll put this to you...

Bioware needs to aim for new player sales, not to people already 'loyal' to the franchise. The only way they can grow their fan base is by reaching the new customer. That means a whole lot of things, but namely it has to be accessible, something you can jump into and get into the thick of things in less than an hour or two. It also has to take advantage of current technologies and trends in gaming design to be seen as relevant.

New customers are paramount -- I'm not saying that existing fans are not important -- on the contrary. But for growth, as a strategy they would need to please existing customers enough to get a seal of approval, but really be aiming for new customers.

With the ever accelerating lead times and time-pressure on new game development and releases, there is a limit on how much resources they can put into a game for release in balance with a game's shelf life. Of course we all say we don't mind if BW takes longer to put out a better product, but why spend 3 to 4 years developing a game that has a shelf life of 6 months, when a 1 to 2 year time frame yields the same shelf life? This is part of the reason why I see the DLC model as the most viable method of delivery of new content.

Most of you probably don't realize that when DAO came out, there were just as many gripes about that release as this one. Many new players failed to get hooked and didn't become a 'fan'. Two years later, DAO and expansions/mods have made the game much more than what it was at the beginning. You are viewing DA2 through a lens of long-term play and exposure to DAO. Most players don't, and I think evaluating DA2 on it's own, outside of that scrutiny, the game holds it own very well.

That you are here, 2 years later, still talking about DAO means you are among a very small minority of all people. I am quite sure that BW looked at all the barriers that prevented ppl from becoming a loyal DAO fan, and DA2 certainly addressed many if not all of them.

I think it's also fair to say that as fans, we wouldn't be complaining if we didnt' care. The overwhelming majority of people here seem to have good intentions, although there are some that take pleasure in being a troll.

Anyway, I say this as a balance... I am not a BW employee or anything but I can appreciate the challenges that this game has in relation to its fan base.

I can agree that gaining new customers is good business strategy but where are they? They are certainly not here on the forums. I read a lot of these post and topics and I have come across two people who said they bought and played DA2 first and then DA:O. DA:O sold over 3 million* copies(probably higher now) according to EA/Bioware this one DA2 a little over a million* and those were mostly the pre-orders. Taking a chance and alienating 3 million* cutsomers is a huge risk IMO. I agree with the OP that tweeking things, making upgrades that add value and not "junk" make sense. Fine you want to increase the speed of the battles/attacks great but don't leave out the isometric camera or the strategy parts of the game. You want to tell the story from a different perspective great but write a damn good story. You want to have unique looking characters great but give me a few different outfits to choose from...hell ten years go by and eveyone is still dressed the same. RPG is about immersion to me and if the story and mechanics prevent that then it is not an RPG to me. It's an action game and I enjoy playing those too I like 'em better when they are sold as action games though.

*numbers rounded off for the sake of argument and not exact, point being DA:O out sold DA2, and DA2 sales are dropping dramatically.

[erynnar]

Dragoonlordz wrote...

Elhanan wrote...

I am uncertain as to what I would call the primary issue, but would have to sy that this is not it, Change will occur, or the game becomes stagnant.

It is the fiddling and changing that breaks things and not the leaving it alone. The fear mongering 'the end is nigh' approach of 'stagnation' is nothing more than a fallacy. Change should only occur after such stagnation, not in fear of it. The fans asked for changes after DAO, small things akin to improvement through baby steps and not wide sweeping changes.

This^.  I am so sick of being labled the "afraid of change-PC elitist."  I was expecting baby steps too. What I got was...

[Mad-Max90]

The friendship/rivalry system would have been more well received if there wasn't any glitches to the system, and the overall experience of the game was better to most people posting, myself included, we seem to forget good changes if they are drowned out by such bad experiences in the game.

[flexxdk]

DA2 in a nutshell:

BioWare simply broke what was fixed and fixed what was broken. (In a sense, of course. Not everthing that was fixed was broken (and in reverse) in the first place. Some things were optimized and some things were downgraded.)

'nuff said.

[neppakyo]

erynnar wrote...

Dragoonlordz wrote...

Elhanan wrote...

I am uncertain as to what I would call the primary issue, but would have to sy that this is not it, Change will occur, or the game becomes stagnant.

It is the fiddling and changing that breaks things and not the leaving it alone. The fear mongering 'the end is nigh' approach of 'stagnation' is nothing more than a fallacy. Change should only occur after such stagnation, not in fear of it. The fans asked for changes after DAO, small things akin to improvement through baby steps and not wide sweeping changes.

This^.  I am so sick of being labled the "afraid of change-PC elitist."  I was expecting baby steps too. What I got was...

*hug* Same here erynnar! And same expectations as well.

[CitizenSnips]

While a voiced protagonist and a new inventory system are somewhat inexplicable changes made to the second installment of this series, this game suffers from the bigger problem of simply not having the development time it needed. The heavily recycled dungeons and bland maps, even though the entire game is set in one location, are symptoms of this problem. The developers tried to make too many changes to the series in far too little time and ended up pushing out a product a large majority of both professional and consumer reviewers consider inferior to the original.

[erynnar]

SilentK wrote...

Hmm.. yeah... one way for friendship, one way for we don't agree but I still respect you and then one way for down right hate. That could be really interesting =) and I'm right there with you on not having the faintest idea how to implement it =)

YES! The three way would be great, if it could be done! I felt the same way Sabri, that some of the rival things were just nasty to your companions..especially Merrill.  A "friend," "don't agree with you but respect you," and "dislike/hate/outta here." would make me love the friend/rival thing much much better.

[Saintthanksgiving]

I was really hoping to get a developer comment in here somewhere.  The impression that I got from DA2 was that the developers didnt even like DAO and resented having to retain ANY of the RPG game elements.  

The current inventory system says to me that the intention was to completely gut the Origins style inventories, but at some point someone must have realized that "PC Elitists" would go bonkers, so they slapped a bow on a garbage can and hoped no one would notice.

I feel the same way about character creation.  I need DLC to alter my characters appearance?  Should I be kiddy like a kid on Christmas that I get to pick my characters FIRST name?  How are you doing me a favor by removing choices from character creation?  Why is the elimination of content seen to be an improvement?  Did people complain that choosing to be an elf or a dwarf took too long?  Did someone have a nervous breakdown trying to choose what color their face tattoo should have been?  

WHAT A GROUNDBREAKING DEVELOPEMENT IT IS TO HAVE EVERYONES CHARACTER LOOK LIKE EITHER THE DEFAULT MALE, OR FEMALE, HAWK.  TRULY THE NEXT LEVEL IN GAMING.

[Saintthanksgiving]

giddy... like a kid.... you get the idea.

[Marionetten]

scyphozoa wrote...

DA2 was incredibly experimental, and there is nothing wrong with that.

How I wish some of you would stop acting as if retrofitting Mass Effect into Dragon Age was this experimental and artistic voyage of unequaled proportions. It was just an attempt from BioWare to appeal to a broader audience by dumbing the formula down. An attempt which failed miserably. What worked for Mass Effect 2 did not work for Dragon Age II.

Modifié par Marionetten, 25 avril 2011 - 03:25 .

[Kilshrek]

Actually to get a dev to comment on anything game related right now is to give a small spark to a fuel rich environment. It's rather wise of them to not come in and stir anything since whichever way their opinion goes, even a neutral one, will be taken out of context or twisted out of its original meaning or just plain misunderstood. Sad but true.

What is not cool however is all the DAO bashing, especially when it comes from devs. Just like ME 2, but the critical success of ME 2 let them say whatever they want about ME 1, even though it honestly was a good game. Sad but true, again.

Modifié par Kilshrek, 25 avril 2011 - 03:30 .

[Marionetten]

scyphozoa wrote...

ooh, blanket statement generalizations, those are always accurate!

About as accurate as pointless buzzwords such as experimental, innovative or artistic.

Dragon Age II is none of that. It's just a failed business decision courtesy of EAWare.

[Saintthanksgiving]

creating something that people love is the primary objective when you are creating something that you expect people to pay money for. Completely sidestepping your suggestion that DA2 is some misunderstood work of artistic genius, if you plan on selling things it is a good idea to make stuff people like. When producing a consumer product you would rather be closer to Stephen King than Chuck Palahniuk.

I also agree with Marionette... there is nothing new or groundbreaking about stripping content out of a game, covering it with buckets of fake blood and street fighter combos, and calling it "Epic"