Korusus wrote...
Allan Schumacher wrote...
Wider audiences from formerly focused franchices possibly return quick cash but not sustainable for the franchise or its developer. From what I can tell based only on observation, franchises do best when they focus on an audience. If Dragon Age is supposed to have more than three, they need to pick a focus and stick with it.
What are your thoughts on the Elder Scrolls games, as well as the Fallout franchise?
Both are franchises that, in my opinion, move significantly away from their core roots with later installments, and have seen significant growth in sales numbers.
Skyrim, in particular, seems to be a game that for the most part is quite successful with both "core" and "new" fans and make no mistake, Bethesda aims to make the games openly accessible to appeal to new fans. It explains a lot of the simplification the series has introduced which the adamant hardcore speak out against. You see this in Fallout as well, though you could argue it's different because Bethesda inherited the franchise.
I am one of those adament hardcore that speak out against the simplification in TES, but I will say this to Bethesda's defense. They understand what the Elder Scrolls series is...a free-roaming, sandbox, first-person, be who you want to be series. It always has been. Dragon Age 2 and DA:O are so radically different that there's not been time to build a core audience or even to develop expectations. Is Dragon Age a button-mashing-awesome series? Or is it a party-based tactical camera style series? I have no idea because BioWare themselves don't know. You removed the tactical cam from the second game for goodness sake...that would be like Bethesda removing first-person.
I disagree with Schumacher as well. Skyrim feels at its core very much like Morrowind, even if the setting in Skyrim itself is more ‘generic’ and less exotic.
I rather see a gradual evolution at work here in the direction of greater accessibility and playability, in the course of which some of the gameplay mechanics were tweaked and changed. But these mechanics were always secondary to the core of the Elder Scrolls games (highly customizable player character in a sandbox environment in the Tamriel setting).
In other words, the lighting and the plumbing have been (partially) replaced and improved, the furniture has been reshuffled and some of it is shiny and new, but it’s still the same house. Just modernized and overall nicer.
To illustrate: Just a couple of weeks ago, I showed a friend Skyrim (Elder Scrolls 5), and he instantly grasped that it was a further evolution of Daggerfall (Elder Scrolls 2), a game he had played a lot back in the day (he sort of missed out on Morrowind because he prefers more ‘generic’ fantasy, and Oblivion because he was too busy playing Everquest II). He’s now happily playing Skyrim, by the way.
At the same time, I think DA2 is NOT a radical departure from DA:O.
It is still a party-centric RPG with a customizable player avatar, a linear structure, lots of (tactical squad/party-based) somewhat repetitive combat, side-quests and a highly fragmented and limited game-world, coupled with mediocre graphics, well-written dialog and characters (relative to most other videogames, I don’t think the DA devs are likely to win any Pulitzer Prize soon) and a relatively simple story keeping it all together.
A lot of the supposed weak points – highly linear structure, mediocre graphics, lots of repetitive combat, limited gameworld – are shared by both DA:O and DA2. The differences are mainly in degree, rather than kind, with DA2 being more linear, more repetitive and graphically / visually less varied and more claustrophobic.
If there are big differences between DA:O and DA2, I would say these lie in two areas:
A significant
reduction in the options available to the player, which in DA:O to a high degree mask the lack of actual choices, and the
absence of one or more clearly identifiable enemies.
DA:O had lots of races, multiple origin stories, decision moments etc. which gave the illusion of freedom and agency. DA2, on the other hand, dispensed with this and even went out of its way sometimes to drive in the point that the player effectively had no options at all.
DA:O had Loghain and the Archdemon. DA2 had, well, erm…Somebody forgot that while an adventure story does not need a villain, it does need an opponent. Perhaps ‘opposition’ rather than ‘opponent’ is a better word in this context.
Very good writing, directing and acting can make something impersonal – for instance, the Eiger mountain itself in the German movie Nordwand (North Face) – the opponent, rather than a person (Loghain, Count Dracula, Sauron, Dr. No, Gargamel the wizard) or organisation (the Gestapo, KGB, Al-Qaida, the IRS).
It seems to me that DA2 writers may have intended the ‘complex’ and ‘tense’ situation in Kirkwall itself (you can even make them more abstract by describing it as 'events' or 'fate') to be the ‘opposition’.
Just like the main protagonists in Nordwand in the end fail to overcome the ‘opposition’ of the mountain, so Hawke, in the end, fails to overcome the tension between the factions in Kirkwall / the general course of events and leaves the story.
Big problem: DA2 is not a story that is passively experienced, as in a novel or movie, but one in which the player actively participates.
Finally, I feel bad execution overall acted as a very important ‘player disaffection multiplier’ here. I think many people would have been more accepting of DA2’s absence of a clearly identifiable opposition and player ‘victory’ at the end if the graphics and visual design had been much better, if there had been more ‘options’ (from multiple races, origin stories and voices to being given more ‘decision moments’), if the tactical camera had been preserved, if combat encounters had been more varied and satisfying, etc. etc. etc.
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