Wow there is so much good stuff in this post, I feel the need to respond to a lot of it.
Urgelt wrote...
1. "Don't Walk On The Grass." Players are given tight spaces where they can move around like rats in a maze. They see incredible scenes but cannot enter them. It gets worse with every title. Recent titles are all gauntlet designs. Being able to discover new territory and explore it is tightly constrained. The desire to walk on the damn grass is what drew me to BethSoft's Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, and though their stories aren't the equal of Bioware's, they're infinitely more engaging games.
When it comes down to the lack of exploration in the DA games, I can sympathize, especially since my previous experience with Bioware in the RPG genre before coming into Thedas was
Neverwinter Nights. In that game, I really enjoyed the interconnected maps that made up the world. You went to or through various areas but were not restricted to the single road. While I think that the Wounded Coast and Sundermount are wonderfully atmospheric, their linear design leaves something to be desired. BUT, the outdoor landscape featured in
Mark of the Assassin was a step in the right direction. It was still basically linear, but also gave the illusion of freedom and real outdoorsey space. So, I think Bioware can and is improving on that front.
2. "Don't Tweak My Creation." Bioware really only succeeded with one game in allowing players to create content: Neverwinter Nights. Though creation tools were released for Dragon Age 1 and 2, they're crippled, and never led to very much content being generated. Aside: if you want to make insane profits, sevelop the creation kit first, refine the hell out of it, make it intuitive and fun to use and easy to create narratives and places and objects. Then turn your developers loose and watch their productivity soar. As a bonus for your users, release the kit and watch the universe expand even more.
The Mass Effect and Dragon Age games cry out for more worlds, and larger real estate on worlds, which users would happily supply if they had decent tools. Without them, the game becomes a treadmill, always the same every time through with very few and very canned exceptions. And though tools were released for Dragon Age 1 and 2, the dearth of interest among players in using them to produce great mods tells the tale.
I think the main difference between the various series is that NWN was designed with that in mind. There was the fully developed single-player campaign, but also the user created content that could be played in addition to the original game. I spent many hours playing
Adam Miller's campaigns, the hilarious
Penultima series, and others with great enjoyment. The NWN Aurora toolset was fully incorporated into the game, whereas the DAO toolset was only a vehicle for "mods" rather than serious
content and game creation. I don't really think it's fair to make the comparison, since the games have different design goals. The whole aspect of NWN being a DnD campaign you could create, run, host, and play influenced it from the ground up. That was not the case with Dragon Age.
However, I do agree that having a toolset designed for user content creation is a key to longevity. A simple example being Blizzard's own map creation tools for Starcraft. Sure, there is a single-player campaign and online battles you can engage in, but the map tools featured at Blizzcon a couple of years ago were met with almost as large applause as the game itself.
3. "Dumb Down the Inventory Management Interface. Bioware somehow got it into its head that the complexities of inventory management and upgrades were boring to the users, and so they sucked the life out of it. In later games you have no control at all over your companions' inventories at all.
Here's a hint: Baldur's Gate was fun *precisely* because it required so much effort to fine-tune inventory, to distribute the right items to the right people, to make hard choices, to haul around and sell tons of loot.
BG might have been fun for YOU because of that, but that doesn't apply to everyone. Granted, the total lack of companion armor in DA2 was a bit extreme, but I do enjoy the cohesive "look" that they had throughout the game (even if it is a bit silly they wore the same thing for seven years.)
Unfortunately, I am one of those anal people who feels the need to loot everything (no rubble unrummaged, no lock unpicked), consequently ending up with bags full of loot that I then must sort through and sell. In DA2, especially since I now have both of the item pack sets, almost all of the loot I pick up ends up sold, but I do sort through it all first, and empty my bags as often as possible.
Regarding loot, the
junk tab in DA2 is one of the
best loot management tools ever, please keep it! It was a great help to just junk items on the go and then be able to sell all of my junk in a single click.
5. "Climb on the MMORPG Bandwagon." When Bioware announced a sequel for KOTR, I was ecstatic. When they finally admitted they were making an MMORPG, I lost my sense of ecstacy. And, yup, all the things I hate about MMORPGs are in the new Star Wars offering. Farmers. Real-world money purchasing in-game stuff. Cartoonish combat sequences. And over a million people whose starting premise is that they are the One Hero For The Ages (or Villain), all telling each other the experiences they've had which every other player will experience in exactly the same way. You don't have to look far to see how wrong the vision of Star Wars is. In lore, Jedi are damned rare and damned powerful relative to anyone else. But in the MMORPG, everyone has to achieve parity, and there are more Jedi than lore admits is possible, and not just Jedi, but Heroic (or Villainous) Jedi around whom the fate of the Galaxy turns. Hundreds of thousands of them. It turns my stomach, it does.
There are several aspects of MMOs here that I'll address. Farmers and real-world cash for in-game items/currency, either legal or supported by the company itself is a function of MMOs.
As long as MMOs exist, so will they. They are in a constant war with the game companies who ban thousands of accounts every day in an effort of keep up. But they can't just ban them all outright, as some might be legitimate user accounts that were compromised one way or another (either through a person's individual lack of security with their own password, a nefarious individual the player had trusted, a keylogger they unknowingly had, or the company's own servers being compromised.)
The One Hero aspect is a bit more challenging, especially with a series like
Star Wars. In that, all players will expect to be able to be Jedi or Sith, it's perfectly natural and understandable, however little the lore allows for it. Although I only played in the beta and got to level 10 or so, they actually do a good job of trying to maintain the individual story aspect for as long as possible. The writing and voice acting was excellent, and the story had Bioware greatness written all over it. The main issue they will have is holding player interest to and past max level and into end game content, and whether they can keep interest as people hear the same conversations played on their 3rd, 4th, and 5th characters.
The main problem lies in end user knowledge of how things work. As a
player,
I know that the other player I saw run past me into the cave I just left is on that same quest, and in their quest, they are
also the only Padwan that master so-and-so has had in many years and so forth. That knowledge puts a bit of a damper on things, but it is also a function of the MMO genre, and not a problem of the company. There have been
great strides over the past few years to make it seem like players matter in the overall story, and various companies have come up with their own ways of dealing with it. Bioware and Blizzard both have a sort of "phasing system" that takes a specific player or group into a special area where no one else can interfere. Guild Wars manages with all outdoor zone environments being "instanced" and unique to every player/group. Changes can be permanent, and in the case of
World of Warcraft, forever change the way your character looks at any given area in the game.
6. "Want to Play with a Buddy? You Can't." Neverwinter Nights was the last Bioware title that let buddies team up to experience an adventure together. And it didn't work terribly well there, not with the single player campaigns being all gussied up with cut-scenes. In player-created worlds, though, small multiplayer had some traction. Better than nothing. But the trend line twisted in a new direction after NWN. Bioware no longer seems interested in serving the market with buddy play.
Here you are walking a fine line. You can have co-op buddy play, but the main question should be
whether it is necessary or required for certain aspects of the game. For ME3, you must use the multi-player if you want to see certain endings (as I understand it, I haven't played any of the ME games... yet). The fine line here is how to make the multi or co-op desirable other than "hey come play with me in my game for a change of pace," and still having a reason to put development hours into it in the first place. However much I disagree with why they did that in ME3, I can understand it.
Now it's designs are dominated by cramped gauntlets and a "don't walk on the grass" design philosophy that hasn't kept pace with the capabilities of modern PCs, which can do so much more.
...
Think big, plan big. Aim to show that Bioware can still push the envelope in RPG gaming and make a current-generation PC gasp with effort.
This is not going to happen. In fact, none of your entire long post takes into consideration that Bioware is also developing games for the
consoles as well as PC. Other than a high res texture pack, which we got with DA2, it's folly to expect anything loftier than that. They are not going to abandon a large chunk of their audience to make a game that will "make a current-generation PC gasp with effort." It's wasted development time and dollars.
Modifié par nightscrawl, 21 mars 2012 - 06:13 .
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You don't HAVE to do this, yet you do. Thank you!
And if they see something come of that later in the game, all the better. Material reward vs narrative reward.
