73 réponses à ce sujet

[DiegoRaphael]

 Which franchises are getting better, which are getting worse? The PC Gamer poll results
We’ve compiled the results of almost 22,000 unique responses below. 

Getting better – Most votesThe five franchises with the most votes for “Getting Better”[/b] (all lists in descending order) were The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Team Fortress, Total War, and Civilization. 

Getting better – Fewest votesThe five franchises with the fewest votes for “Getting Better”[/b] were Command & Conquer, Call of Duty/Modern Warfare, Dragon Age, World of Warcraft, and Splinter Cell. 

Getting worse – Most votesThe five franchises with the most votes for “Getting Worse”[/b] were Call of Duty/Modern Warfare, Dragon Age, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Mass Effect. 

Getting worse – Fewest votesThe five franchises with the fewest votes for “Getting Worse”[/b] were Total War, Team Fortress, Civilization, Fallout, and Starcraft. 

What you were most opinionated aboutThe five franchises with the most total votes one way or the other[/b] were The Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty/Modern Warfare, Battlefield, Diablo, and Mass Effect. 

What you were least opinionated aboutThe five franchises with the fewest votes one way or the other[/b] were SimCity, Hitman, Splinter Cell, Counter-Strike, and The Sims 

There were a total of 101840 boxes ticked for “Getting Better,”[/b] or roughly 4.7 per voter.
There were a total of 120415 boxes ticked for “Getting Worse,”[/b] or roughly 5.5 per voter.
Overall, that makes about 17% more votes for “Getting Worse” than “Getting Better.
http://www.pcgamer.c...r-poll-results/ 
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I know that we PC players has lot of other reasons besides bad endings, game streamlining, auto dialogue, bad side quests, alwful jornal and so on to do not like ME so much.
Dragon Age is kinda obvious. Not only all the recycling and etc, bu we lost the tactical camera =/

But do you think these 2 Bioware franchises deserves to be in this list? I think that, for now, they do.[/b]

[LobselVith8]

There is also the awful paraphrasing, the auto-lines, the pre-defined protagonist, and the lackluster story with one-dimensional mages and templars to consider. The lack of significant choices doesn't help, either.

I think that Dragon Age is getting worse, and the information provided about Dragon Age III isn't changing that view.

[devSin]

Dragon Age got worse, but only because I think DA2 was such a bad example for where they wanted to go. It suffered from having a lengthy story with no cohesive central plot, but I think most of the damage was caused by them simply not being able to finish it.

They tried to make a whole game in half the time, and consequently, they were only able to finish everything halfway.

I have no doubt they'll be better able to utilize the available time for the next one, and I'm hoping they're going to make smarter choices about what to tackle and what not to tackle. I also expect for a stronger plot (but still with all the vibrance and character of both its predecessors).

Dragon Age got worse, for a time, but only because they stopped too soon on the way to getting better.

[Cultist]

Dragon Age and Mass Effect are getting worse

[Orian Tabris]

devSin wrote...

Dragon Age got worse, but only because I think DA2 was such a bad example for where they wanted to go. It suffered from having a lengthy story with no cohesive central plot, but I think most of the damage was caused by them simply not being able to finish it.

They tried to make a whole game in half the time, and consequently, they were only able to finish everything halfway.

I have no doubt they'll be better able to utilize the available time for the next one, and I'm hoping they're going to make smarter choices about what to tackle and what not to tackle. I also expect for a stronger plot (but still with all the vibrance and character of both its predecessors).

Dragon Age got worse, for a time, but only because they stopped too soon on the way to getting better.

Bold:

Dragon Age was on the way to getting better, but then BioWare (one might say EA) turned it the wrong way, though they did stop before going too far. They knew there were some aspects of Origins that needed to be fixed for DAII, but then they kind of lost control - my guess, it happened when they started running out of time - in the midst of trying to make it available/accessible to more people.

[Eternal Phoenix]

I haven't touched Mass Effect 3 but not because of the ending. What I did play of the demo showed me that it was really dumbed down. The lack of dialogue choices and focus on action (which I've seen in gameplay videos on YouTube where even parts on the Citadel don't allow for dialogue choices) make it an action-RPG lite to me. The previous Mass Effect games gave you much more control over Shepard concerning dialogue and Mass Effect 1 even allowed you to choose Shepard's religious beliefs.

I consider Mass Effect 2 an improvement over ME1. Few things needed to be changed for Mass Effect 3. All they needed to do was add more skills, add more armor, add more weapons and add more planets to explore. They did this for ME3 (not sure about the last feature I mentioned) from what I heard but then they took out all the dialogue choices and added tons of auto-dialogue. Now imagine if Mass Effect 3 had as many dialogue choices as Mass Effect 2, little auto-dialogue (it would only be used where it would be appropriate) and heavy customization. That would have been great.

Of course many say that the real bad thing about Mass Effect 3 were the endings or should I say ending? They say that everything up to that part was great. Well even if the endings were great, the Mass Effect series would still continue descending into action-shooter territory (and please don't say that the series was always an action-shooter because I'll ask you to list other "action-shooter" games with the dialogue wheel, choices and consequences, character creation, character customization and a non-linear story with side quests and leveling up because I would so love to play them. If they have these features then they aren't action-shooters but rather action-RPG's.) and I can already see the next game (spin-off or whatever) dropping dialogue choices altogether. There was a Mass Effect FPS in development before so Bioware obviously doesn't consider Mass Effect "an action-RPG only" franchise.

Dragon Age 2 was completely dumbed down when compared to Origins but could be classified as an action-RPG and it had enough role playing elements to make it a semi-decent experience role-playing wise but you can see how the series is being dumbed down and the role playing experience had NOTHING on Origins or past Bioware games pre-Origins. You were restricted to one race, origins were removed, consequences were virtually non-existence, your choices didn't really impact the plot, you were FORCED to help BOTH mages and Templars in Act 1 even if had raised the 50,000 gold, you still had to complete the mage vs templar quests. Oh and then there were only three dialogue choices, Hawke couldn't really be evil like The Warden could and most quests didn't have multiple endings or ways to solve them. The entire quest-line for Andraste's Ashes in Dragon Age: Origins had more depth, more choices and more branching paths than the entire main quest for Dragon Age 2. It also had a far more interesting story than the entire plot for Dragon Age 2.

It's the dumbing down that's making Bioware games worst.

[eyesofastorm]

The problem with that poll is that it only measures the self-selecting group of people that actually care about games. You can't look at the results and conclude conclusively that *everyone* feels that the Dragon Age franchise is getting worse. There is almost certainly a silent majority out there that don't care enough to vote in such polls and it is almost certain that an undefined percentage of them feel (not very strongly, mind you) that Bioware *is* taking the franchise in the right direction and it is the feedback from those people that Bioware will base it's development decisions on. Moral of the story: Bioware WILL NOT be pressured by fans of their games to compromise their vision and direction that people who don't care very much about their games won't care about in order to appease people who do care about their games... a group that cannot be proven to represent *everyone*.

Modifié par eyesofastorm, 02 août 2012 - 04:50 .

[zyntifox]

eyesofastorm wrote...

The problem with that poll is that it only measures the self-selecting group of people that actually care about games. You can't look at the results and conclude conclusively that *everyone* feels that the Dragon Age franchise is getting worse. There is almost certainly a silent majority out there that don't care enough to vote in such polls and it is almost certain that an undefined percentage of them feel (not very strongly, mind you) that Bioware *is* taking the franchise in the right direction and it is the feedback from those people that Bioware will base it's development decisions on. Moral of the story: Bioware WILL NOT be pressured by fans of their games to compromise their vision and direction that people who don't care very much about their games won't care about in order to appease people who do care about their games... a group that cannot be proven to represent *everyone*.

Problem is, 22 000 is a very large sample size. As a statistician i've worked alot with sampling theory; how fast the convergence will occur to the true population value with a bias sample. I can tell you that even though the uncertainty is quite larger of the estimated proportions with a bias sample; it will still not be that high at that large sample size.
I do sample surveys all the time on bias sample (unbiased sample is very, very expensive and hard to get) and even i never use that large of a sample size.

[DiegoRaphael]

eyesofastorm wrote...

The problem with that poll is that it only measures the self-selecting group of people that actually care about games. You can't look at the results and conclude conclusively that *everyone* feels that the Dragon Age franchise is getting worse. There is almost certainly a silent majority out there that don't care enough to vote in such polls and it is almost certain that an undefined percentage of them feel (not very strongly, mind you) that Bioware *is* taking the franchise in the right direction and it is the feedback from those people that Bioware will base it's development decisions on. Moral of the story: Bioware WILL NOT be pressured by fans of their games to compromise their vision and direction that people who don't care very much about their games won't care about in order to appease people who do care about their games... a group that cannot be proven to represent *everyone*.

But many said the same thing about "the retakers of Mass Effect 3".

Those polls about the ending here on BSN got around 50~70k votes. And votes from all plataforms (and you could vote more then once).Retake Mass Effect movement on Facebook i don't think it ever got more than 100k followers, and again from all platforms.And it seems that the noise these minority made, was enough to make the devs do the Extended Cut.

This poll however, is done by a single site about a single plataform. And it got 22k unique votes.For me at least, it should be take on consideration. There is a damage done to how Bioware is being seeing by these selecting group of people that cares about games.

[EpicBoot2daFace]

BioWare is getting worse.

[Orian Tabris]

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...

BioWare is getting worse.

As far as BioWare's idiotic obsession with multiplayer goes, yes, yes it is.

[Ophir147]

And that concludes our segment on "Things everyone already know!"

Coming up - - - crude stick figure simulations of the olympics!

Modifié par Ophir147, 03 août 2012 - 02:14 .

[wsandista]

Who would have thought?

[Brockololly]

eyesofastorm wrote...
Moral of the story: Bioware WILL NOT be pressured by fans of their games to compromise their vision and direction that people who don't care very much about their games won't care about in order to appease people who do care about their games... a group that cannot be proven to represent *everyone*.

Even if there is some "silent majority" of people ok with BioWare's direction, then that should be backed up with the sales numbers. Except did DA2 outperform DA:O in terms of sales or how long people stayed engaged with the game or what percentage of people finished DA2 compared to DA:O? BioWare should have some sort of exit survey for when people either finish their games or send them out to people a month post release or something.


But BioWare is simply part of EA now and as such, they're going to simply chase after whatever other popular game sold well and try to mimic that. So they'll most likely be chasing that Skyrim money with DA3.

The problem is that BioWare is possibly catering to no one by trying to cater to everyone. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Trying to appeal to more casual people and their existing long time fanbase. And with Origins, they were specifically catering to that longtime fan for a long time of Origins' development and then of course with DA2, they tossed those people under the bus.

At the end of the day though, if you have a core group of hardcore or dedicated fans that you end up alienating in sufficient quantity or you turn a once loyal fan into a cynic or skeptic, that's going to be possibly negative word of mouth that can infect and seep over to the more casual people. To the extent that a perceived negative reaction by the truly core or dedicated fan can poison the well for causal fans who may be swayed to not bother with a game based on how the core fan reacts.

[zyntifox]

Brockololly wrote...

eyesofastorm wrote...
Moral of the story: Bioware WILL NOT be pressured by fans of their games to compromise their vision and direction that people who don't care very much about their games won't care about in order to appease people who do care about their games... a group that cannot be proven to represent *everyone*.

Even if there is some "silent majority" of people ok with BioWare's direction, then that should be backed up with the sales numbers. Except did DA2 outperform DA:O in terms of sales or how long people stayed engaged with the game or what percentage of people finished DA2 compared to DA:O? BioWare should have some sort of exit survey for when people either finish their games or send them out to people a month post release or something.


But BioWare is simply part of EA now and as such, they're going to simply chase after whatever other popular game sold well and try to mimic that. So they'll most likely be chasing that Skyrim money with DA3.

The problem is that BioWare is possibly catering to no one by trying to cater to everyone. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Trying to appeal to more casual people and their existing long time fanbase. And with Origins, they were specifically catering to that longtime fan for a long time of Origins' development and then of course with DA2, they tossed those people under the bus.

At the end of the day though, if you have a core group of hardcore or dedicated fans that you end up alienating in sufficient quantity or you turn a once loyal fan into a cynic or skeptic, that's going to be possibly negative word of mouth that can infect and seep over to the more casual people. To the extent that a perceived negative reaction by the truly core or dedicated fan can poison the well for causal fans who may be swayed to not bother with a game based on how the core fan reacts.

Pretty much sums up my thoughts about it all.

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

For all of the cries of Dragon Age 2 being a "dumbed down sequel for the mouth breathers" or some such nonsense, I think it's actually ****** poor at being an accessible game for people who don't know a thing about the franchise/didn't play Origins.

I have numerous issues with the game re: roleplaying, character systems, quest design, etc, but putting all those personal issues aside, I believe it still had significant accessibility barriers that cost it a lot of sales. What was intended as "streamlining" was really simply cutting/reducing features, or superficial presentation changes.

Less flexibility in customization (classes, items, etc), voiced PC/paraphrase, "crafting", etc.

At the same time, Dragon Age 2 introduced features absolutely critical to the game such as the personality system, and that goes without documentation or without explanation. Or the game does things which look complex and confusing to beginners, but serves no purpose for experienced fans (Attribute function changes depending on class).

Modifié par CrustyBot, 03 août 2012 - 09:51 .

[Cultist]

eyesofastorm wrote...

The problem with that poll is that it only measures the self-selecting group of people that actually care about games. You can't look at the results and conclude conclusively that *everyone* feels that the Dragon Age franchise is getting worse. There is almost certainly a silent majority out there that don't care enough to vote in such polls and it is almost certain that an undefined percentage of them feel (not very strongly, mind you) that Bioware *is* taking the franchise in the right direction and it is the feedback from those people that Bioware will base it's development decisions on. Moral of the story: Bioware WILL NOT be pressured by fans of their games to compromise their vision and direction that people who don't care very much about their games won't care about in order to appease people who do care about their games... a group that cannot be proven to represent *everyone*.

Check first 10 weeks of sales for origins and DA2. Seems like your minority proved to be a majority.
Dragon Age 2:
14th May 2011(10th week after release), total units sold(XBox) 700,570
Dragon Age: Origins
09th January 2010 (10th week after release), total units sold(XBox) 1,374,720
Same goes for PS3, only PC DA2 managed to get a bit more, as for PS3 - results there even more humilating for DA2. Now, that is Dragon Age: Origins, with no data about ultimate and signature editions.
Now let's see how sales gone during this weeks:
Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Origins
as you can see - after initial release, people decided to buy the game - fourth week +41.2% sales increase, ending with 33,838 units sold on week 10. And Dragon Age 2 - initial success from hyped fanbase...and then disappointment with permanent decrease of sales, bottoming 4,819 units on week 10.(that's for XBox only)
They can have their way all rught and pursue their vision of brand new arcade jRPG slasher.  They just should not blame people for not buying their game afterwards.

Modifié par Cultist, 03 août 2012 - 10:40 .

[SiIencE]

I must agree though,

The thing is i started with DA2 (basicly first contact with Bioware afaik) yes sure i heard/read about DA:Origins/Mass Effect but that was all. DA2 was fun and then i started wondering 'if DA2 is fun, what would DA1 be like?" Also i got a Mass Effect 2 download key with DA2. And since i liked DA2, ME2 couldn't be bad and it wasn't, but i wondered what ME1 was like.... The thing is i ended up liking DA:O and ME1/2 more then DA2 and ME3.

So yes it's getting 'worse', and it's the simple things like being able to talk to whom whenever you want instead of 'we're busy BS/is this the right time or some smart ass remark (which can be fun though)'

I don't know what made BW change so much and take out the best parts. Some games should stay as they were or improve not be dumbed down and simplified. And where you continue with your shepard in ME you get some idiot in DA2 in a stupid small world (addons did add some nice scenery though but still).

[zyntifox]

Cultist wrote...

eyesofastorm wrote...

The problem with that poll is that it only measures the self-selecting group of people that actually care about games. You can't look at the results and conclude conclusively that *everyone* feels that the Dragon Age franchise is getting worse. There is almost certainly a silent majority out there that don't care enough to vote in such polls and it is almost certain that an undefined percentage of them feel (not very strongly, mind you) that Bioware *is* taking the franchise in the right direction and it is the feedback from those people that Bioware will base it's development decisions on. Moral of the story: Bioware WILL NOT be pressured by fans of their games to compromise their vision and direction that people who don't care very much about their games won't care about in order to appease people who do care about their games... a group that cannot be proven to represent *everyone*.

Check first 10 weeks of sales for origins and DA2. Seems like your minority proved to be a majority.
Dragon Age 2:
14th May 2011(10th week after release), total units sold(XBox) 700,570
Dragon Age: Origins
09th January 2010 (10th week after release), total units sold(XBox) 1,374,720
Same goes for PS3, only PC DA2 managed to get a bit more, as for PS3 - results there even more humilating for DA2. Now, that is Dragon Age: Origins, with no data about ultimate and signature editions.
Now let's see how sales gone during this weeks:
Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Origins
as you can see - after initial release, people decided to buy the game - fourth week +41.2% sales increase, ending with 33,838 units sold on week 10. And Dragon Age 2 - initial success from hyped fanbase...and then disappointment with permanent decrease of sales, bottoming 4,819 units on week 10.(that's for XBox only)
They can have their way all rught and pursue their vision of brand new arcade jRPG slasher.  They just should not blame people for not buying their game afterwards.

I agree to some extent. I do think that DA:O sold alot of copies just by word of mouth and i think DA2 lost sales for the same reason. But, you would expect week 4-8 to have higher sales than the average sales per week due to christmas. But even though those figures are inflated it's probably not sufficient to explain all variation. I've made seasonal adjustments before when modeling for sales forecasts and on average 20-30% of the sales in that month can be explained by the "decembber effect". This obviously varies depending on the category of the product where food always increases the most. Haven't done sales forecast on games though so can only speculate.

What you want to look at is the rate of decline in sales after making seasonal adjustments. And you can clearly see that the rate of decline in sales of DA2 is alot higher even after seasonal adjustments.

Edit: I can calculate the seasonal adjustment required for both games to have the same decline of sales if you are interested. - And yes im a bit of a nerd when it comes to statistics

Modifié par Cstaf, 03 août 2012 - 10:59 .

[element eater]

im surprised that total war is voted for in getting better i think theyve been going realy dowbnhill since METW2

[Renmiri1]

Call me crazy but I liked DA2 much more than DAO.

Yes, I can see that the world got smaller and that the interaction with NPCs got restricted. But the story is so much better, IMHO. Dragon Age Origins is your typical "lets kill evil lord" fare we have been getting for 40+ years since Lord of the Rings. DA2 on the other hand is a true human story about prejudice, persecution, going from rags to riches... Combat system is also much better, DAO combat was almost unplayable to me.

Alas all the budget cutbacks in world exploration and that silly dungeon reuse tainted the game so much that most people hated it. The game got worse in a lot of aspects but it got better in some. I hope DA3 brings out the best in both.

[Foolsfolly]

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...

BioWare is getting worse.

Short answer: QFT.

Long answer:

Dragon Age: Origins - despite problems and ugly graphics I found myself playing and replaying a swords and sorcery RPG again. Something I honestly though I'd out grown (turns out it's just a genre that a lot of RPGs churn out generic gunk with the occasional shining example that it still works well thrown around every few years.)

Mass Effect 2 - Very easily my favorite overall BioWare game. I loved everything about this game. Even the sometimes mediocre DLC made me happy (Firewalker, Arrival, and all the skins and guns and other horse armor).

Dragon Age 2- Not good. Not terrible but way too damn close to terrible for a company that delivered Origins and ME2 just prior to this game. It did somethings well, I loved the personality system and the friend/rivarly meter was an improvement over like/dislike. It had good characters and they were all well acted and realized... of course all those well done characters were on your team. Otherwise you were awash in bland forgettable characters whose motivation tended to be "I'm crazy! Don't ask why!" Ultimately a step back from Origins and ME2.

Mass Effect 3 - I'll never say it was a good choice to limit the squad so much like they did here. Or to make the DLC preorder character so damn important to the lore and at least one companion character, two whole species, and really important to one of the main missions. But dispite these stumbling blocks at the beginning of the game (before it even released people were complaining about these things) the game really started to pick up. It felt for a few hours in the middle of the game that it was better than ME2. And then came the series derailing ending and suceeded in killing my instrest in ME anything.

...

...BioWare tries to be better. But it's been hairy for theme ever since ME2 dropped. The last thing of actual quality they dropped was the DA2 DLC Legacy. Mark of the Assassin was really boring. There wasn't enough story for the run time. It had nice enviroments and for the first time ever I'd like to see Orlais. But boring DLC.

[Melca36]

Renmiri1 wrote...

Call me crazy but I liked DA2 much more than DAO.

Yes, I can see that the world got smaller and that the interaction with NPCs got restricted. But the story is so much better, IMHO. Dragon Age Origins is your typical "lets kill evil lord" fare we have been getting for 40+ years since Lord of the Rings. DA2 on the other hand is a true human story about prejudice, persecution, going from rags to riches... Combat system is also much better, DAO combat was almost unplayable to me.

Alas all the budget cutbacks in world exploration and that silly dungeon reuse tainted the game so much that most people hated it. The game got worse in a lot of aspects but it got better in some. I hope DA3 brings out the best in both.

You do realize they're changing the combat for DA:3 don't you?

Its not going to be slow like Origins but they are bringing back tactics and it will be less hack and slash.

I would not expect it to be like DA:2 because it did not go over well. 

I do agree their intention is to bring out the best in both.

[Foolsfolly]

Oh and predictably the KOTOR MMO isn't having the legs EA wanted it to have. Last I heard about that game it was hemorrhaging players and will soon be free-to-play (or already is I'm not really keeping tabs on the MMO).