209 réponses à ce sujet

[Melca36]

Zanallen wrote...

Firky wrote...

I don't know anyone who bought but didn't finish Origins, but I think the gamers I know are careful purchasers, RPG fans, and fairly patient, like me.

For DA2 though, about half of the people I know who finished Origins gave DA2 a pass. Out of the half that bought it, about half again didn't like it, half did. I'm probably talking about around 15 people that I talk about RPGs with, mostly online though.

Maybe it proves anecdotal evidence isn't very useful. (But I do find sales and stats quite interesting.)

The reason I am wondering is Awakenings rather poor sales plus that Bioware metric data that said that only 50% (Was that it? Or was it lower?) of people finished Origins. Granted, we don't know how accurate that data is, but it could go a long way to explaining why Bioware made as many changes as they did, despite having such a short dev time for DA2.

At the San Diego Comic Con, the developers said Awakenings sold well.

[Zanallen]

Melca36 wrote...

At the San Diego Comic Con, the developers said Awakenings sold well.

The sales figures that we have access to don't exactly support that.

[Zanallen]

Yrkoon wrote...

Awakening sold rather well for an expansion pack.

Compared to the sales of DA:O?

[seraphymon]

Melca36 wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Firky wrote...

I don't know anyone who bought but didn't finish Origins, but I think the gamers I know are careful purchasers, RPG fans, and fairly patient, like me.

For DA2 though, about half of the people I know who finished Origins gave DA2 a pass. Out of the half that bought it, about half again didn't like it, half did. I'm probably talking about around 15 people that I talk about RPGs with, mostly online though.

Maybe it proves anecdotal evidence isn't very useful. (But I do find sales and stats quite interesting.)

The reason I am wondering is Awakenings rather poor sales plus that Bioware metric data that said that only 50% (Was that it? Or was it lower?) of people finished Origins. Granted, we don't know how accurate that data is, but it could go a long way to explaining why Bioware made as many changes as they did, despite having such a short dev time for DA2.

At the San Diego Comic Con, the developers said Awakenings sold well.

The developers say alot of things that arent necessarily true or are exaggerted.

[Yrkoon]

Zanallen wrote...

Yrkoon wrote...

Awakening sold rather well for an expansion pack.

Compared to the sales of DA:O?

Expansion pack/DLC sales are never to be compared to the sales figures of the main game because the vast majority of gamers don't buy them.

Also:

Zanallen wrote...
Bioware metric data that said that only 50% (Was that it? Or was it lower?) of people finished Origins. Granted, we don't know how accurate that data is, but it could go a long way to explaining why Bioware made as many changes as they did, despite having such a short dev time for DA2.

The fact that 50% didn't finish Origins, means exactly nothing.  It's normal.   Most people don't finish games

Moreover, this is an industry *given*.   And has been for decades. So  if Metric data that states that 50% of Origins' players didn't finish the game  actually  caused Bioware to Overhaul and reboot  DA:O's formula,  then they're misguided Fools.   Personally, I doubt this is the case.  I think budgets and  simple finance issues are the  reason for each and every change we saw in DA2

Modifié par Yrkoon, 27 octobre 2011 - 05:53 .

[Gibb_Shepard]

Zanallen wrote...

I kind of wonder how many people bought DAO, ended up not liking it and then decided not to buy DA2 because of it.

How do you explain the increase of week 1 sales for DA2 then?

[seraphymon]

Gibb_Shepard wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

I kind of wonder how many people bought DAO, ended up not liking it and then decided not to buy DA2 because of it.

How do you explain the increase of week 1 sales for DA2 then?

Im not sure there are any facts. But to me it seems the most obvious its because of the big success and and how well recieved DAO was. People expected the same quality for DA2. So it was all due to marketining and pre orders.

[NedPepper]

This is merely conjecture on my part, but here goes:

Dragon Age; Origins was a game that captured a zietgeist. It became a game gamers decided to buy because there was a lot of talk about it. But the metric data and probably every one on this board knows people who bought the game and stopped playing after the origin because they didn't like it. My own stories I heard: It was too slow. It was boring. It was weird. I know a lot of people who bought Origins, and it's weird how many of them stopped playing right at Ostagar. These people are not RPG fans. So the game sold well, but the non-RPG gamer hated it. The real question is why they bought it to begin with?

So, Bioware tries to fix that problem by speeding it up action wise. Origin fans bought DA 2, and were going to regardless. Then came the RPG whiners who trolled metacritic and gave the game a zero.

And the decisions made then split the core audience. Bioware is in a very tricky posiiton here. The DLCs have been made specifically for a niche audience. The Bioware forums are just a small vocal part of the people who bought DA2, but it's still just a tiny piece of an already shrinking core audience.

The reality is that the great RPG you guys loved in Origins wasn't well liked by the average gamer. If Bioware would have made Origins 2, a game identical to the first, I honestly believe the numbers would have been the same.

Also, this forum is the only place I hear such negativity. I know a lot RPG gamers who simply don't do the whole posting on a message board....and they LIKE Dragon Age 2. Some, more than Origins.

At this point, Bioware has an idea of what the core audience wants, but the sales will never be like Origins, because Origins was an oddity. It was a best selling game that half the consumers disliked.

Fantasy RPGs like Origins are not traditionally HUGE sellers. I honestly believe it was just an anamoly.

The secret to this franchise going forward is continuing to experiment and to give the people who have fallen in love with the story and the world new and exciting things. Recreating Origins will not suddenly produce numbers like the first game did. I just don't believe it. This is a franchise for a niche audience, and will probably always be so. And there's nothing wrong with that.

[csfteeeer]

Zanallen wrote...

Melca36 wrote...

At the San Diego Comic Con, the developers said Awakenings sold well.

The sales figures that we have access to don't exactly support that.

Expansions rarely sell well on physical copies, most people dowload them, even on more successful games.

Oblivion, for example, sold more than DAO, and yet it's expansion pack sold almost the same on physical copies.

But it's also available for Download, which Bethesda said That Shivering Isle(the name of the expansion) sold very well at.

[csfteeeer]

Zanallen wrote...

Bioware metric data that said that only 50% (Was that it? Or was it lower?) of people finished Origins. Granted, we don't know how accurate that data is, but it could go a long way to explaining why Bioware made as many changes as they did, despite having such a short dev time for DA2.

that doesn't mean anything.

most people don't finish games, even if they're short as hell.

Portal, for example, a game that is called "Most Revolutionary game of the decade", GOTY and a lot of other good things, was finish by about 40% OF THE PEOPLE WHO PLAYED IT, and it's 5 HOURS MAX.

[dheer]

nedpepper wrote...
This is merely conjecture on my part, but here goes:

Wow, it sure was.

It's amazing what people will tell themselves.

[JaegerBane]

nedpepper wrote...

This is merely conjecture on my part, but here goes:

Dragon Age; Origins was a game that captured a zietgeist. It became a game gamers decided to buy because there was a lot of talk about it. But the metric data and probably every one on this board knows people who bought the game and stopped playing after the origin because they didn't like it. My own stories I heard: It was too slow. It was boring. It was weird. I know a lot of people who bought Origins, and it's weird how many of them stopped playing right at Ostagar. These people are not RPG fans. So the game sold well, but the non-RPG gamer hated it. The real question is why they bought it to begin with?

So, Bioware tries to fix that problem by speeding it up action wise. Origin fans bought DA 2, and were going to regardless. Then came the RPG whiners who trolled metacritic and gave the game a zero.

And the decisions made then split the core audience. Bioware is in a very tricky posiiton here. The DLCs have been made specifically for a niche audience. The Bioware forums are just a small vocal part of the people who bought DA2, but it's still just a tiny piece of an already shrinking core audience.

The reality is that the great RPG you guys loved in Origins wasn't well liked by the average gamer. If Bioware would have made Origins 2, a game identical to the first, I honestly believe the numbers would have been the same.

Also, this forum is the only place I hear such negativity. I know a lot RPG gamers who simply don't do the whole posting on a message board....and they LIKE Dragon Age 2. Some, more than Origins.

At this point, Bioware has an idea of what the core audience wants, but the sales will never be like Origins, because Origins was an oddity. It was a best selling game that half the consumers disliked.

Fantasy RPGs like Origins are not traditionally HUGE sellers. I honestly believe it was just an anamoly.

The secret to this franchise going forward is continuing to experiment and to give the people who have fallen in love with the story and the world new and exciting things. Recreating Origins will not suddenly produce numbers like the first game did. I just don't believe it. This is a franchise for a niche audience, and will probably always be so. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Some interesting thoughts, indeed. There's a few things that you need to keep in mind, however -

1) Many who 'disliked' DA2 did so for very different reasons, and by 'disliked', one can mean anyone who thought the game was a disaster all the way through to someone who found a single aspect of the game annoying. There's such a varied group here that lumping them together will not give an accurate picture as to why people preferred Origins.

2) I think Bioware definitely had a bit of luck on their side, but the idea that Origin sold so well on luck alone sounds, to be honest, ridiculous. A game doesn't get stacks of awards, great reviews and sells millions simply on serendipity.

3) Forums do provide only a small snapshot of the general fan reaction to a game, true, but it is wrong to simply assume that this means that it doesn't mean anything. Were this the case there would be no reason to host forums at all, and feedback mentioned here would go nowhere.

4) Your conjecture above implies no mistakes were made in the development of DA2, and that the lesser sales were simply down to market forces. I would submit that to assume that no mistakes were made, or that ones that were made had no effect on the game's reception, is obviously not accurate.

Overall I think you make some interesting points - I just think that they form only a fragment of what went wrong.

[MerinTB]

nedpepper wrote...

This is merely conjecture on my part, but here goes:

Dragon Age; Origins was a game that captured a zietgeist. It became a game gamers decided to buy because there was a lot of talk about it. But the metric data and probably every one on this board knows people who bought the game and stopped playing after the origin because they didn't like it. My own stories I heard: It was too slow. It was boring. It was weird. I know a lot of people who bought Origins, and it's weird how many of them stopped playing right at Ostagar. These people are not RPG fans. So the game sold well, but the non-RPG gamer hated it. The real question is why they bought it to begin with?

So, Bioware tries to fix that problem by speeding it up action wise. Origin fans bought DA 2, and were going to regardless. Then came the RPG whiners who trolled metacritic and gave the game a zero.

And the decisions made then split the core audience. Bioware is in a very tricky posiiton here. The DLCs have been made specifically for a niche audience. The Bioware forums are just a small vocal part of the people who bought DA2, but it's still just a tiny piece of an already shrinking core audience.

The reality is that the great RPG you guys loved in Origins wasn't well liked by the average gamer. If Bioware would have made Origins 2, a game identical to the first, I honestly believe the numbers would have been the same.

Also, this forum is the only place I hear such negativity. I know a lot RPG gamers who simply don't do the whole posting on a message board....and they LIKE Dragon Age 2. Some, more than Origins.

At this point, Bioware has an idea of what the core audience wants, but the sales will never be like Origins, because Origins was an oddity. It was a best selling game that half the consumers disliked.

Fantasy RPGs like Origins are not traditionally HUGE sellers. I honestly believe it was just an anamoly.

The secret to this franchise going forward is continuing to experiment and to give the people who have fallen in love with the story and the world new and exciting things. Recreating Origins will not suddenly produce numbers like the first game did. I just don't believe it. This is a franchise for a niche audience, and will probably always be so. And there's nothing wrong with that.

There is an awful lot of conjecture in there, for certain.

A few things I'd note:

- the common addage that "the forums are just a small percentage of the customers" is true, but "the forums are not representative of the whole of customers" is not; you cannot assume that people on a forum are or are not representative of customers as a whole.  Reason tells us there are more purchasers of DA:O or DA2 than there are forum members, yes... but logic does not tell us that the subset of customers on the forums represent any other specific subset of customers other than the subset that have computers and visit forums; market research will assume that a random sample from a given location (say, a mall or a movie theater) are representative of the public as a whole, even if the public as a whole doesn't necessarily visit malls or movie theaters.  Regional differences account for more than specific locations - so if there were separate North American versus European boards, for example, this might matter... but assuming that people on the forums skew to a certain kind of demographic other than "people who visit forums" is unsupportable without evidence.  I, personally, have seen love and hate of DA2, conservatives and liberals, religious people and agnostics, super-hero fans and people who hate said comics and movies, etc.  I think the forums are pretty eclectic with the only really skewing factors being 1 - people who have access to a device that allows them to post on forums, 2 - a desire to post on forums, 3 - some level of interest in BioWare.  Any other guesses as to how the demographic is skewed is conjecture.

- fantasy RPGs don't sell Call of Duty numbers, unless you count WoW.  If you think WoW is an outlier, then Call of Duty should be an outlier, and then you have to compare to Madden numbers for "big outliers".... and yet Diablo is one of the best selling games ever, while there are tons of sports and shooter games that do horribly.... so, in actuality, saying DA:O selling well should not count for considering why DA2 sold less well all because of genre is silly, especially by genre.  A better measurement, rather than genre, would be to compare how well sequels sell in general.  And I thnk from Final Fantasy to Madden to Call of Duty show that sequels don't always sell significantly less than their predecessors, though they can - and that will largely depend on quality (or perceived quality, at least) of each given iteration.
- all genres are niche audiences, even the best selling genres; as successful as Call of Duty may be, you'll find more gamers who don't want to play it than do.  Less than majority might not be enough to qualify as "niche" but unless you add in Facebook game players and Wii owners and smartphone Angry Birds people, video games are still a niche audience as a whole;  if done well, any genre can transcend it's audience - the movie Iron Man sold to MUCH MORE than Iron Man comic readers, the movie Lord of the Rings sold to MUCH MORE than Tolkien readers, and even the Superbowl is watched by MANY MORE PEOPLE than football fans.

- if this forum is the only place you hear negativity about DA2, you've not visited much of the rest of the internet - this forum (and that Escapist review) are about the only places I hear the game PRAISED; for the record, of my 8 friends who played DA:O there's only one who joined the forums, and only briefly a few years back; 3 of them don't even have computers to get on a forum (though one of their smartphones probably could if he wanted to); almost all of them played it on consoles (so this wasn't a PC gamer thing - I don't have any RL PC gamer friends anymore, hazards of moving a lot) with one of them playing it on a Mac (that person's only other video games he plays are Madden.)  Anecdotal, sure, but you saying you've not heard negativity outside this forum means you haven't looked very hard - check out X-Play's review and Adam Sessler's semi-frequent references to the chore that playing through DA2 was.  Or here are some quotes:

"Dragon Age II is a great game, but it could have been better had it kept more of Origins’ strong points."  - http://origin.avclub...n-age-ii,53075/ - B+
"In certain key ways, Dragon Age 2 is a step back." - http://www.gamespot....iew.html?page=2 - 80
"CONS: Game lacks "epic feel" of Origins; framed narrative feels a bit gimmicky; PC players lose large battlefield view of combat; final battle falls flat." - http://www.gamepro.c.../dragon-age-ii/ - 4/5
"One can only hope that a future installment will learn these lessons and return the Dragon Age series to the fore with the kind of risk-taking and storytelling that the first game had handily delivered." - http://worthplaying..../reviews/80426/ - 6/10

That's a random sample of some bigger sites, taken from the middle of the critic's reviews (there are some higher (PC Gamer and Escapist) and some lower (PC review at X-Play, Gaming Nexus) but most are in the middling ground (about 70/100 or 3/5).  Overall Dragon Age 2 almost universally gets this response - "a good game, not as good as what came before."

- there were likely people who bought Origins who were very disappointed, and I'd bet good money that a sizable portion (if not the majority) of those unsatisfied customers had bought it almost exclusively on the slick Marilyn Manson gorey ads and Sacred Ashes trailers, all horribly misleading about gameplay (none of those ad campaigns showed ANY real game footage.)

You make a lot of speculation based off of your experiences with your friends.  Anecdotal evidence is largely useless.  I did present mine, yes, but I noted it was anecdotal... but also compared it to hard statistics one can find online and saw that the experiences around me are fairly typical of what one can glean from the internet.

Seriously, I'd give the game a 7 or 7.5 out of 10 myself - and still find myself darkly disappointed with DA2 after the superior game that was Origins.  I think I'm the most forgiving of my entire circle of DA:O playing friends.

Modifié par MerinTB, 27 octobre 2011 - 03:02 .

[Joy Divison]

Don't you know anecdotal evidence trumps statistical evidence we don't like?

[Atakuma]

Joy Divison wrote...

Don't you know anecdotal evidence trumps statistical evidence we don't like?

There is no statistical evidence, just numbers which don't mean much by themselves.

[bEVEsthda]

csfteeeer wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Bioware metric data that said that only 50% (Was that it? Or was it lower?) of people finished Origins. Granted, we don't know how accurate that data is, but it could go a long way to explaining why Bioware made as many changes as they did, despite having such a short dev time for DA2.

that doesn't mean anything.

most people don't finish games, even if they're short as hell.

Portal, for example, a game that is called "Most Revolutionary game of the decade", GOTY and a lot of other good things, was finish by about 40% OF THE PEOPLE WHO PLAYED IT, and it's 5 HOURS MAX.

So 50% actually do mean something. Was any game as big or as long as DA:O ever finished by as many as 50%?
Any way, so 50% is a smashing success.

[bEVEsthda]

Atakuma wrote...

Joy Divison wrote...

Don't you know anecdotal evidence trumps statistical evidence we don't like?

There is no statistical evidence, just numbers which don't mean much by themselves.

Are you, perchance, a creationist and don't believe in global warming?
Yes, I know, we aren't supposed to discuss those things and I won't. Just got curious on your personal position.

[JaegerBane]

Atakuma wrote...

Joy Divison wrote...

Don't you know anecdotal evidence trumps statistical evidence we don't like?

There is no statistical evidence, just numbers which don't mean much by themselves.

I think you really need to explain what you mean here.

[Atakuma]

JaegerBane wrote...

Atakuma wrote...

Joy Divison wrote...

Don't you know anecdotal evidence trumps statistical evidence we don't like?

There is no statistical evidence, just numbers which don't mean much by themselves.

I think you really need to explain what you mean here.

All the numbers tell us is that DA2 sold less than Origins. It doesn't tell us why or how profitable each game actually was.

[FedericoV]

Yrkoon wrote...

Expansion pack/DLC sales are never to be compared to the sales figures of the main game because the vast majority of gamers don't buy them.

Tell it to AC2/AC:B fans. Or to COD fans. Or to FM fans. Or to EA sports fans (Those "one release a year" games are basically bloathed and overglorified expansions set). Imho, you are using old concepts to justify the poor perfomance of Awakenings since it does not support your romantic vision of DA:O's reception.

Good old expansion set like Tales of the Sword Coast does not exist anymore. Now we leave in the age of brands and franchises and the concept itself of expansions does not make a lot of sense anymore (DLC have taken the place of them in many ways). A lot of people buy games just because of their popularity and the brand, then they do not even play/finish those titles (if we think that only 20-30% of gamers finish the game they begin).

Awakenings wasn't an expansion set. It does not expand the main story of DA:O (the fall of the Archdemon). It was a game in itself with a story and new NPCs, worth something like 25-30 hours of gameplay (longer than most games on the market). It used and expanded the same combat mechanic of DA:O. It could continue the story of your PC if you accepted the DR but that's more of a sequel thing than a proper expansion set.

Nowaday if a franchise is really popular, then the sequel should sell nearly as well, whatever the devs said. Digital downloads? Maybe on PC. But look at the drop on consolle, wich is the crux of the matter and wich is much more radical than the drop on PC. Look at metacritic review/user score on consolle vs. pc for DA:O. The difference is hard to dismiss.

That maybe can even offer an alternative explanation to the changes made to the chore game and even to the rushed nature of DA2. Have they screwed it big time? Yep. But that does not mean that their motivation were wrong (at least, from a business perspective).

Modifié par FedericoV, 27 octobre 2011 - 06:06 .

[MerinTB]

Atakuma wrote...

JaegerBane wrote...

Atakuma wrote...

Joy Divison wrote...
Don't you know anecdotal evidence trumps statistical evidence we don't like?

There is no statistical evidence, just numbers which don't mean much by themselves.

I think you really need to explain what you mean here.

All the numbers tell us is that DA2 sold less than Origins. It doesn't tell us why or how profitable each game actually was.

That one piece of evidence doesn't mean much in a vaccuum, no.

Luckily we're not in a vaccuum.  We have critic reviews, consumer reviews, and the two games themselves to compare.

Lower sales.  Lower critic scores.  A fairly sizable outcrying of Origins fans, at best, liking Origins better or, at worst, refusing to even buy and try DA2.  Articles written about negative reactions to DA2, and developers acknowledging (even if occasionally downplaying) the "divided response."

All of that is about as complete a picture as you can have short of having the EA/Origin network requesting DA:O and DA2 players to fill out a survey - and even THAT, as far as market research goes, will only be a small piece of the overall puzzle.

And, I would argue rationally, all of the evidence available points to DA2 generally being a less well-received and generally viewed as a good if inferior product.

[MerinTB]

FedericoV wrote...
Nowaday if a franchise is really popular, then the sequel should sell nearly as well, whatever the devs said. Digital downloads? Maybe on PC. But look at the drop on consolle, wich is the crux of the matter and wich is much more radical than the drop on PC. Look at metacritic review/user score on consolle vs. pc for DA:O. The difference is hard to dismiss.

Metacritic scores:


DA2 - PC: 82/4.2 ; 360: 79/4.4 ; PS3: 82/3.9
DAO - PC: 91/8.3 ; 360: 86/7.6 ; PS3: 87/7.6
Diff % - PC:90/50 ; 360: 91/57 ;    PS3:94/51

What exactly are you trying to say about those scores? 

DA2 scored 90% of the DAO score for PC with critics, but DA2 scored 91% of the DAO score for 360 with critics?  That's not statistically significant.  They effectively had the same drop in overall critic scoring, using Metacritic - about a 10% drop.  The PS3 had a roughly 6% drop, which is in probably just in range of being statistically significant - but it's not that big a difference. 
Considering Origins was a PC game that got a rushed, poor port job to consoles and DA2 was built on the consoles with poorly implemented PC features for PC gamers, those numbers SHOULD be very different if your point is PC gamers preferred one and console gamers preferred the other.
But averaging them they all dropped by about 9% in critic reviews.  All dropped.

There is a bigger variation on user scores at Metacritic - and for a second, let's just assume (and I think it is a dubious assumption) that we should take the Metacritic user scores at face value - the difference between the drop in PC user scores vs. 360 users scores is about 7%.  That is kinda big, so it would seem important ... but the PS3 user score drop is roughly identical to the PC user score drop, an insignificant difference of 1%.
Again, if your assurtion is that PC gamers preferred one and console gamers the other, the difference in drop should be much higher than 7% IMO, or at least both consoles should show a similar drop.

Coming back to reality - I don't think those Metacritic user scores around Dragon Age 2 are reliable.  Best to ignore them.

All in all, though, I think the important thing to note, overall, is that regardless of gaming platform - all reviews dropped.

But look at the drop on consolle, wich is the crux of the matter and wich is much more radical than the drop on PC

Not with ratings on Metacritic.

Or do you mean with these sales numbers?

vgchartz
DA2 -  PC: .14 EMEAA ; 360: .80 ; PS3: .44
DAO -  PC: .40 EMEAA ; 360: 2.17 ; PS3: 1.34
Diff % -  PC: 35        360: 37       PS3: 33

Cause, again, the percentage drop between each version is roughly the same.  35% drop for (limiting to the numbers we have that we can compare - vgchartz has no North American PC sales numbers for DA:O) the EMEAA PC sales from DA:O to DA2.  37% drop for the 360.  33% drop for the PS3.
The PC sales drop is right between the drop percentage of the other two.  Statistically they more or less dropped the same amount.
If DA2 is more console friendly, targetting consoles more, if it's mostly PC gamers with their panties in a bunch...
why aren't the percentage drops showing a much larger variance?

---

Math.  Numbers don't lie.

There's no statistical, percentage proof that one platform saw a greater dislike / critical panning / loss of sales than the other two for DA2.
Especially ignoring the User Reviews from Metacritic, which even if you took those, the biggest difference is 7% less of a drop for the 360 in users eyes than for the PC users.  7%, from 50% to 57%.  And, again, I think VERY FEW people will argue that those user scores for DA2 on Metacritic are actually valid.

[Zanallen]

Merin, he was referring to the differences between Origins and Awakening.

[JaegerBane]

MerinTB wrote...

Atakuma wrote...

All the numbers tell us is that DA2 sold less than Origins. It doesn't tell us why or how profitable each game actually was.

That one piece of evidence doesn't mean much in a vaccuum, no.

Luckily we're not in a vaccuum.  We have critic reviews, consumer reviews, and the two games themselves to compare.

Lower sales.  Lower critic scores.  A fairly sizable outcrying of Origins fans, at best, liking Origins better or, at worst, refusing to even buy and try DA2.  Articles written about negative reactions to DA2, and developers acknowledging (even if occasionally downplaying) the "divided response."

All of that is about as complete a picture as you can have short of having the EA/Origin network requesting DA:O and DA2 players to fill out a survey - and even THAT, as far as market research goes, will only be a small piece of the overall puzzle.

And, I would argue rationally, all of the evidence available points to DA2 generally being a less well-received and generally viewed as a good if inferior product.

Well put.

[MerinTB]

[quote]Zanallen wrote...
Merin, he was referring to the differences between Origins and Awakening.[/quote]

I was responding to all the talk about sequels and console vs. pc in sales.

[quote]
Nowaday if a franchise is really popular, then the sequel should sell nearly as well , whatever the devs said. Digital downloads? Maybe on PC. But look at the drop on consolle, wich is the crux of the matter and
wich is much more radical than the drop on PC. Look at metacritic review/user score on consolle vs. pc for DA:O. The difference is hard to dismiss.

That maybe can even offer an alternative explanation to the changes made to the chore game and even to the rushed nature of DA2. Have they screwed it big time? Yep. But that does not mean that their motivation were wrong (at least, from a business perspective).[/quote]


I did skim over this part -

[quote]Awakenings wasn't an expansion set. It does not expand the main story of DA:O (the fall of the Archdemon). It was a game in itself with a story and new NPCs, worth something like 25-30 hours of gameplay (longer than most games on the market). It used and expanded the same combat mechanic
of DA:O. It could continue the story of your PC if you accepted the DR but that's more of a sequel thing than a proper expansion set.[/quote]

- as it seemed a pointless argument he was making.  Who cares what this one person's definition of an expansion is?

Awakening is an expansion in the sense of Throne of Bhaal or Heart of Winter.  They don't make many expansions anymore in the industry, but Awakening was one.  By definition of the company making it, and by comparison to expansion of the past. 
Expansions usually (but not always) need the game it's expanding to play.  DA:A needed DA:O, you could not play it without DA:O installed.  If nothing else, that clearly makes it an expansion and not a stand alone game.

He can arbitrarly call it a bluebird for all that matters - each individual person defining language in their own way is meaningless.

The kind of grey are he wants to talk about comes from stuff like the Dawn of War original series, where Winter Assault needed Dawn of War (clearly expansion, and labeled as such) but Dark Crusade and Soulstorm DIDN'T need the original game, were stand alone products, and weren't labeled as expansions.  But the difference of what you got in Winter Assault versus Dark Crusade wasn't THAT MUCH in gameplay, not any more than Awakening changed Origins.

In any case, even looking at Origins vs. Awakening for Metacritic scores:

DAO     PC: 91/8.3    360: 86/7.6     PS3: 87/7.6
DA:A  -  PC: 82/7.1  360: 80/7.9 PS3: 80/7.2
Diff %: PC: 90/86 ; 360: 93/103  PS3: 92/94

Again, the ratings drop for critics is virtually identical, statistically, for all three platforms.
User reviews are an interesting range - 360 users, by this metric, liked Awakening BETTER than Origins (or, for that matter, DA2.)  But, again, whilst the DA:A reviews are not likely to be subject to the same shennanigans as the DA2 user reviews at Metacritic, I'd still argue they are not that important.

Finally, if he meant SALES drop from DA:O to DA:A being vastly different between PC and consoles - I have no numbers.  vgchartz doesn't have sales numbers for DA:A on the PC, so we cannot do a comparison.

Short of USER reviews for DA:A (or DA2) on Metacritic, the very least relibable numbers we have access to, I don't think FedericoV has anything short of his own opinion and personal conjecture to base what he's saying on.

Which, again, was this -
[quote]
Nowaday if a franchise is really popular, then the sequel should sell nearly as well, whatever the devs said. Digital downloads? Maybe on PC. But look at the drop on consolle, wich is the crux of the matter and
wich is much more radical than the drop on PC. Look at metacritic review/user score on consolle vs. pc for DA:O. The difference is hard to dismiss.[quote]

Modifié par MerinTB, 27 octobre 2011 - 07:37 .