Guest_Morrigan_*
Salvete omnes!
Angry Joe just posted the following interview with Cameron Lee:
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=b4Nr0tKgKpU
If someone else has already linked this, apologies in advance!
I already knew that the main story was a 50+ hour experience, but learning that we could get lost in the open world for one hundred hours or more made me weep with joy. 
Thanks Bioware for all of your hard work!
lol
DA2 was a bomb, and deservedly so.
The only thing garnering any praise for it is the obsessive nature of the kind of fans that dating sims attract.
Any thoughts on what might cause the bump in DAOs numbers?
Baldurs Gate and previous ME's being awsome. The most notable thing about DA2 was the initial pre-orders and early sales were good, but dropped off a cliff once word got out how bad the game was. DA:O on the other hand has long slow burn because of good word of mouth from people who played it.
I'm talking about specifically the upward trend in the graph shown.
That's with a controller, though. My understanding is that the big difference will come using KB&M and that you can play tactically continuously with that. I may be mistaken, though.
There's also this mysterious Engage Mode we've only heard a bit about, but it sounded like you could turn the battle system into something almost turn-based like the pause-after-round options in Baldur's Gate. We'll see.
If they do an interview where they say "isometric can be permanent with KB&M, Friendly Fire can be toggled, Pause-after-round is a thing" I think all the old-school cRPG fanatics will cream themselves.
Engage mode is simply the "unpausing the game while in tactical camera mode." We use a different word to differentiate it from simply exiting the tactical camera which returns control of the selected party member to the player. While in engage mode, your camera remains detached from any characters.
So much this. I feel pretty immature when I think about it, but I truly have started associating general bad and obnoxious behaviour with the title "the Witcher." Which is not something the game has deserved for even a second on its own, since I don't own either title. I've sat on Origin thinking of picking TW2 up a few times, but it just never feels right. I'm pretty sure the loud portion of the fanbase who feels the need to put down any- and everything not the Witcher has a great deal to do with that gut feeling.
I mean sure, I know the set protagonist is something I don't dig as much as getting to create my own, but that's hardly a deal-breaker for other games so it really can't be just that.
I find it important to remember that the rivalry (and especially the hatred) exists more among fans. Not that I mean to pass judgment as in "no one should be like this" but it reminds me in some ways of Nintendo vs. Sega when I was growing up. You had your affiliation, and a lot of people were very entrenched in talking one up, and it was almost required to dislike the competitor. If you were an ardent Nintendo fan, you hesitated to even admit you enjoyed Sega's sports games on the Genesis!
People overstate The Witcher and us being at each other's throats rivals. We make RPGs, and do compete with each other. But we'll also drive each other. I enjoyed The Witcher 2 a lot and shared my views of it and even got a thanks from one of the writers here. Since I don't feel there's an over saturation of RPGs on the market, as an RPG fan I don't consider it a bad thing that we're both making RPGs.
I have a feeling if I were to bump into developers of The Witcher, we'd probably go for drinks and laugh about the rivalry we seem to have. Just my two cents.
On a final note: DA2 had its faults. But if I construe people for attacking posters on BioWare's boards for being fans of a BioWare game and how it's wrong that they liked it and think it's still a good game, I'm going to start deleting posts.
And for the record, I wouldn't support someone going onto CDPR's (or any game dev's) forums and telling the fans of their games that they are wrong and that the games are objectively bad or whatever.
Most likely explanation is retail price drops and a second wave of buyers waiting for those price drops.
I'd say there's a good chance that Christmas played a contributing factor, given that the huge drop is the first week after Christmas Day.
I'd be curious, however, if there were significant price drops that occurred before Christmas....
While I do feel DAO is a stronger game, I am curious what the sales charts would look like if the rest of the variables were properly controlled.
Thank you very much for clearing that up. Are you able to (allowed?) to confirm whether it is necessary to press and hold a specific button to have engage mode enabled? Giant bomb made some reference to that being the case, but would be nice to hear either way from a more official channel
At this point the button must be held down. But this is the type of usability feedback that gets done at this point in the project. So it may not stay that way.
Hmm. What was the goal of this Engage Mode? If you need to hold the button down it sounds like it wasn't meant to be used over anything but a very short period of time (or else it'd get cumbersome). I think cRPG players may like being able to move around the battlefield in overhead not tied to a specific character for long periods of time (forever?), but I'm also not sure what would work given whatever current functionality you guys would have. Is there any room for what was done with the ability/item wheel, where you could choose to hold it down or just hit it once and it stays up until you hit the same button again?
More because it spawned out of the combat system as opposed to something specifically to play the entire game from that vantage point.
But it's been said that playing from tactical view continuously will be an option on PC, hasn't it? Is Engage Mode separate from that? I'm getting myself confused here, I think.
BioWare as a studio has never made a Super Nintendo game.
I am sorry to jump on you about this Allan but this seems to me like DAI was designed as an action game with DA2 as the game model to follow.
We have had Mike Laidlaw continually saying that DAI was to be a best of both games, yet DA2 seems to have the majority of systems in DAI and Origins only gets a small amount just to keep the Origins fans quiet. I not saying the Bioware team have not put a lot of work in to the system but it does show that the best of both approach was just marketing talk.
It also makes me wonder how much of the other RPG features that Mike said were going to be the best of both were designed after DA2 with a slight bit of Origins added on.
First off, there's no need to apologize. Because you're not sorry (why would you be)?
As someone that has been pretty openly critical of the game's design in my entire duration of the forum, I honestly think the only thing that is valid for you is either full on admission that "we're doing it exactly like DAO did it" (we're not), or to learn about the actual game when it's released.
My recommendation is "Wait for release, and find out what people think of the game." There's a chance you may not like it, but I'd rather you skip on a game you wouldn't like than to buy a game that only makes you more angry and unsatsified.
Fans of both games have had problems with the dialogue wheel and paraphrasing, Bioware have said they have fixed the problem so why don't they show us and put to rest that problem, why don't they show us the crafting and companion armour that they have so we know where we are with that.
Because internally, we *just* considered our marketing to have started with E3. You can disagree with it, but the line from marketing (that I learned just this past Friday myself) is "there's more to come down the stretch to release."
If we fail to show you this stuff by the time we release, it seems reasonable to avoid purchasing the game until you are able to find out. Doubly more, if you think we're adding stuff "just to keep the Origins fan quiet" I get the feeling that you feel we're jerking you around that you possibly feel outright disrespected. It's unfortunate that you feel that way, but if that's the case then you'll have to decide what's the best thing for you to do in that case.
As you and I have had this conversation before (several times), here's a good reason for us sharing the DA2 stuff over and over and over. Because it makes darn sure we aren't misrepresenting some of the big things that some people would be excited about. You may be upset because it seems like we're catering specifically to DA2 fans or whatever. There's another angle altogether too, though: we aren't lying to you about there being some things that you hated from DA2 returning for DAI. It's MUCH better, in my opinion, in the wave of inquiries when we mention a return to some of what DAO did, to NOT let people get their expectations up regarding things like the dialogue wheel, voiced protagonists, and so forth. Unless you're suggesting that we should have kept quiet in regards to those specific questions, at which point I'll have to agree to disagree. Note that some of the DAOness is also narratively speaking as opposed to a focus just on game systems. Because that's another one of the areas that DA2 received some criticism too.
You are free to dislike the game and the marketing specifically. If you feel that the game is going to be much closer than DA2 than DAO then let that inform and influence your action. As stated, if you're uncertain: wait. At this point anything we do or do not show isn't really going to change that much (aside from some stuff like UI iteration).
We could show you the crafting and companion armor and stuff. Does it matter if it gets shown today or if it gets shown in July? Or even August? Or are you asking for it now because you're excited for THAT stuff and not the current stuff (note: a lot of people are excited about the current stuff too)? You've been asking for it for years now; has your interest level changed at all?
As it is, I'm not sure if there's much more to really discuss further is there?
Races, Crafting, Customization, Tactical Camera, 200+ Spells & Talents, and possibly more has already been mentioned. See this thread for details that might have been missed:
http://forum.bioware...know/page-1?hl
Of note, he wants to see it not just be told about it (which is fine).
Personally I'm under the impression he's more leaning toward a complete Ruleset breakdown, similar to what I vaguely remember from the buildup to Origins official release. Hopefully he'll correct me if I'm wrong, especially because I just got done speaking about how BSN likes to jump to conclusions.
I wasn't following DAO's marketing until I was hired (June 2009 - I have a policy of not following games I have already decided to buy), so I can't be sure. And at that point the branding had just changed and the E3 videos had Marilyn Manson in it 
So I'm not sure what was all revealed before then.
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