34 réponses à ce sujet

[Nefla]

It sounds like you want them to make other kinds of games instead of RPGs. I think pushing the envelope and coming up with extra features without having other aspects suffer would be fine, but recent BW games have been flash over substance, streamlined over engaging, the mission areas in ME3 and DA2 are much shorter than their predecessors and lack interactivity, puzzles, things to discover, branching paths to explore, etc...in DA:O move would at certain times react to you based on what you were wearing or if you had a weapon equipped. This among other things was taken out.

[Mr Mxyzptlk]

There are other ways to make an RPG Nefka, but nobody has answered my question, what exactly are the vital components of a Bioware game that those on these forums are drawn to? As nobody has given an answer I am going to assume it is the character and companions (please by all means correct me if I am wrong)? If this is in fact true then there are plenty of ways Bioware could spice up their games and offer something new without sacrificing this element of their games, hell I am sure there are even plenty of ways that this aspect of their games could be improved as well.

[Nefla]

-lots of dialogue choices, investigate options, character building, etc...
-engaging companions that you can interact with a lot, talk with, have them hate or like you, romance if you want,etc...
-ability to customize your race (taken out) and appearance as well equip your companions
-non combat skills such as pickpocketing, persuasion, and intimidation (all taken out) I like how this was done in FONV with science, repair, speech, etc...and even your skills could be used as persuasion.
-puzzles or things you have to figure out to move forward or gain an item
-long dungeons with multiple parts like every BW game pre ME2
-coherent plots
-in DA:O Templars and other people recognized if you were a mage
-Detailed, varied, beautiful areas that are lovingly crafted and not the same tiny area pasted over and over and over with wood grain texture slapped on anything and everything.

Every "innovation" has generally been to strip cool elements out and try to grab for any random fan base they can half-assedly try to reel in through awesome buttons, exploding enemies, multiplayer, crappy animes, etc...

[Mr Mxyzptlk]

Not sure what the point of your post is but if it is to point out that not only are Bioware not trying new things but also stripping their games of features that previous games had then yeah I totally agree with you, however if it somehow supposed to point out that "innovation and trying new things is bad" then I would say stripping your games of components is not what I call innovation or trying new things.

[Nefla]

I'm not saying trying new things is bad, I'm saying recent BW games have replaced good, fun things that they'd already had with crappy new things that are lazy or stupid and that people are wary of their "innovations." They've not proven that they're out to make ground breaking, amazingly fun games with all the things people loved about story, characters, lore, and role playing but better and with great new features. They have proved that they are cutting as many corners as possible and rushing things out the door, using flashy crap to try and distract from it.

[Mr Mxyzptlk]

Removing features and replacing them with nothing is not innovation (unless you look at it from a production cost point of view) and I have no idea why anyone would call it such, it is simply called "removing features to cut costs".

[Ayslin66]

As much as I disliked DA2, There are a few things in regards to mechanics, that I did like. More fluid movement, shorter time dealing with main quest, and yes, I even sorta liked the battle animations. What was lacking in the battles though, no strategy. The game was super over-simplified to the point each battle was tediously boring. Not to mention re-spawning out of thin-air. *yawns*

IMO: Cut all the fat. Stop spending money on side quest that are pointless, and give us deeper, more rich characters who are better developed. Quest can involve the story, without being pointless FedEx runs and extra VO we could care less about. Integrate side quest into the main story, and mean something so the money can be spent in the heart of it all.

Example. Give us back our "getting to know our companions"

Give us more than half-hearted depth with main characters.

Make our steps matter. I don't want to sweep the city of its criminal element for a few coins. It kills immersion.

You want to improve graphics? Yay! Do so, but remember what made you GREAT BioWare. Story telling, player immersion, and rich deep characters. I know I miss them, and I venture to guess, many others do as well.

That is all.

Kindly,
A

PS: Shepard to Wrex "Let diplomacy play out" 

You have taken that away, too. No chances to use diplomacy. All we do now is enter a situation and battle. It can be very tedious. 

Modifié par Ayslin66, 14 avril 2013 - 10:13 .

[Twisted Path]

Mr Mxyzptlk wrote...

So what is Bioware's "tried and true formula" and how exactly did ME3 and DA2 deviate from it? 

An RPG with a fairly fast paced real-time-with-pause combat system. You make your character, do a tutorial mission and then you're fixed on a path in the first big area of the game, where you work through the main quest and can do side quests until a point where the game world opens up and you travel to three different hub areas in any order you like. Compleat the main quest in each hub area and then you're railroaded into the endgame where you fight to the main villain, beat him/it and win the game. Usually the plot involves you "saving the world/empire/galexy." 

That's been the basic Bioware formula as I see it from Knights of the Old Republic through to Dragon Age: Origins. Um...except for the main campagne of Neverwinter Nights but who remembers that fondly?

Then with Mass Effect 2 they broke from the formula a lot. The game threw away a lot of RPG aspects and became a lot more of a cover-shooter and structurally it got away from the 3 hubs thing and replaced it with missions that you can do in any order. (Origionally the game was going to be even more open, letting you recruit your team in any order, but they changed that because of a disk space thing. I thought that was kind of a shame.)

Mass Effect 2 was a really good game that just about everyone loved. As someone who prefures RPGs over action I was a little disapointed by the direction the game went but eh...it workd great and it's probably the best game Bioware made.

Then with Dragon Age 2 they avoided the old Bioware formula again: the game has you wandering aimlessly from quest to quest that you can do in just about any order in one hub area, and the quests look a lot like the short corridor-missions from Mass Effect 2, which I think they were trying to imitate. Then once you've done the right, random-seeming sidequests suddenly there's a big event and a timeskip and the cycle repeates and it's just an awful, aimless mess.

Dragon Age 2 is bad for a lot of reasons but I think if they hadn't experamented with a new way of going through an RPG's story it would have been more on the mediocre side than the compleat-and-utter-terrible-uninteligable-mess side of things.

Mass Effect 3 is also a big mess, though of course the biggest part of that is how they broke from the tried-and-true tradition of the hero fighting and beating the villain at the end. Instead of the big satesfying battle with Harbinger we were all hoping for the game just...well...broke down and went off into la-la-land at the end.

My point I guess is that both games were probably doomed to be bad but could have been better if they had stuck to the formulas and tropes we've seen in previous Bioware games.

[Big I]

I disagree with the OPs premise. I think that Bioware has continually innovated in their games, even if those innovations backfired.


The framed narative of DA2 was something new. The Mass Effect import system was something new. Voiced protagonists, multi-player and cross-platform components (DA facebook game, ME Datapad), changing the DA art style for DA2, all new things they added to their games.


If you're talking about the theoretical "standard Bioware plot" of go to four places, solve problems and advance the main plot, I'd argue that that started being phased out with ME2.

[zeypher]

Innovation is not bad. Innovating in the middle of a trilogy or a franchise is. If bioware want to try something new and radical sure make a new franchise, but do not do it in the middle of an established series