264 réponses à ce sujet

[Il Divo]

I'd say this goes well beyond 1 level, and it's something that can and will happen all throughout a typical old school D&D campaign, if you play it by the book. Tons of monsters and traps have instant kill abilities vs one failed d20 save roll, also books give you very little means or resources to scale challenges to level of players (monsters don't have challenge ratings, most of encounter tables are universal, etc).

 

If you just don't prefer that, then there's not much to argue against, because I'd say that's hardwired to the spirit of classic D&D (look at the early modules, like Tomb of Horros or Temple of Elemental Evil). Personally I am only bothered by this, if a game doesn't complement or support these rules, and forces you a narrative unsuited for them. This is the case of Baldur's Gate. I love the series, but I'd never do a D&D campaign similar to Bhaalspawn saga.

 

Old school D&D rules don't do a typical game / movie / book plot, which centers around fixed protagonist well, because of these unfair and random deaths. In a good campaign dying isn't a game over but a setback, since usually you just do another character and story goes on. You "lose" only when you fail to do some campaign objective (like as an example, one campaign I played long time ago, players as a party failed to stop Elemental Prince of Ice, which resulted a new ice age for the realm. Tons of player characters died, retired or turned to NPCs before that final defeat happened after couple of irl years of playing).

 

I don't have much 2.0 experience, beyond old school cRPG's, but this is all sounding pretty similar to the Call of Cthulhu d20 system - it's pretty much expected that after a couple of adventures, something will happen (usually insanity or death) that forces you to retire your characters. 

[Dean_the_Young]

There's a word for companies who only care about how many copies of their products they can sell. The word is "greedy".

 

And?

 

That's kinda their job. Literally.

 

If they didn't want your money, they wouldn't sell you the game. If they wanted to be a charity, they wouldn't take your money as a condition for giving you the game.

[Mikael_Sebastia]

I don't have much 2.0 experience, beyond old school cRPG's, but this is all sounding pretty similar to the Call of Cthulhu d20 system - it's pretty much expected that after a couple of adventures, something will happen (usually insanity or death) that forces you to retire your characters. 

 

That sounds about right. I have no experience of Call of Cthulhu d20, but I've played ton of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and excellent newer Trail of Cthulhu by Pelgrane Press. If d20 version is anything close to them then that's a spot on. Goes well beyond occasionally random and unfair, since every encounter with Mythos is supposed to be deadly and unfair.

 

Makes long running campaigns a bit difficult, or rather in my group(s) they had tendency to turn into a horror comedies, because of the ridiculous death tolls. Not that it's intrinsically bad, couple of funniest games I've ever played have been like that, but not very purist approach to the lovecraftian canon.  Like as an example, in one campaign, this one player was playing Bertie Wooster type of English nobleman, and another player played his Jeeves like butler.  Somehow this butler managed to die in almost every session, and it become a running gag that this nobleman always hired a new butler at replace him and whom also met a horrible demise quite soon after. Nobody was intentionally suicidal, but it just happened over and over. Ofc, more than once it was a little indirect hand of his master which caused that. Like a group hears strange growling coming from a cellar, so ofc this noble blurts "Jeeves, go see what that ruckus is".

[prosthetic soul]

And?

 

That's kinda their job. Literally.

 

If they didn't want your money, they wouldn't sell you the game. If they wanted to be a charity, they wouldn't take your money as a condition for giving you the game.

Customers don't need a certain business.  Their business needs us.  They would literally be out of a job if not a single one of us bought their games.  How do you think this works otherwise?

[Sanunes]

Customers don't need a certain business.  Their business needs us.  They would literally be out of a job if not a single one of us bought their games.  How do you think this works otherwise?

 

So because I haven't bought Bethesda or Rockstar games they are going to lose their jobs?

 

Not every company appeals to everyone and a company can change and attract a new audience and since BioWare is still making games I am pretty sure they have a big enough audience to stick around.

[Il Divo]

Customers don't need a certain business.  Their business needs us.  They would literally be out of a job if not a single one of us bought their games.  How do you think this works otherwise?

 

That's exactly how it works, but that doesn't make what Dean's saying any less correct. 

 

It takes absolutely nothing for any of us to jump on our computer, talk about how evil EA is, and how Bioware needs to break away to return to the golden age of RPG's. But here's the reality of the situation: none of us here has any investment in Bioware's success or failure, beyond getting a good or bad game. If Bioware follows the advice of everyone on here, and still makes a game that they don't like or that doesn't sell (or both), who loses? Not us, since we just play the game. It's the guys who have capital invested, unfortunately. If they follow our over the top rhetoric and make a bad product, I don't think any of us are going to be jumping out of our seats to keep them in business. 

[Dean_the_Young]

Customers don't need a certain business.  Their business needs us.  They would literally be out of a job if not a single one of us bought their games.  How do you think this works otherwise?

 

The same- but without introducing the bizaar conceit that they don't or shouldn't want our money. They wouldn't have a job if not a single one of us bought their game, and a fine way to do that would be to not be 'greedy' and not try and sell games for money.

 

Bioware is in the market of luxury goods, not necessities. It sells products that people don't need but do have a certain amount of disposable income to trade for it. If you are posting on this forum, you are one of those people who not only finds the trade worth it, but continues to talk about it rather than just about anything else rather than posting on said internet forum.

 

There's also the aspect that Bioware needs customers, in general- it doesn't need you, in particular. While they certainly would be out of a job if not a single one of 'us' bought their games, you are not 'us.' Nor is every single person on this forum, even if we did all agree that Bioware shouldn't be out to make games with a business model with an eye for profit.

 

Which 'we' don't.

[Revan Reborn]

Bioware was an AAA developer. BG was not some indie project  - any more than Fallout 1&2 were indie projects, or PS:T was an indie project. The gaming market was different back then in terms of what size a studio had to be to make an AAA game. 

 

Bioware didn't merge with Pandemic. They were owned by the same fund, but the acquisitions were separate. It was the fund that flipped Bioware to EA. The financial issues came earlier, from around the time of JE and the fact that they did take their time with DA:O, electing to make a game while not making any money. 

 

And I wouldn't cite Bestheda as a studio that releases quality. Just because their game is a massive seller doesn't mean it's a quality release, and this is a company that releases a broken game a mod kit and says "good luck". 

Hardly. To be a AAA developer you need a major publisher backing you in order to be considered part of the main stream industry. BioWare didn't have any longstanding relationships with any publisher of significant importance. It wasn't until LucasArts and Microsoft that BioWare started partnering with major publishers giving them the tools to make AAA games. Until that point, BioWare was a PC-only developer with a few titles under its belt, but hardly something one would call a AAA developer.

 

As far as the technical aspects of the ownership of BioWare and Pandemic, the specifics are irrelevant. The point is BioWare couldn't fund Mass Effect as an independent, thus they sought out investors to help them fund the project. They fact that they were owned by the same investment firm that also owned Pandemic may as well be a merger of the two. As far as financial difficulties earlier, that is absolutely false. Jade Empire was a financial disappointment, but it didn't cause BioWare financial woes. DAO was in development for a long time but that was hardly the game sucking out BioWare's budget. It was purely Mass Effect 1 (which had a much larger budget than DAO) and how ambitious the game. Most of the features were ironically cut anyways due to the hardware limitations of the Xbox 360.

 

Check your bias at the door. BGS has released a game of the year title for the past 14 years. My point is the fact they invest all this time into making these games before they release them clearly shows a trend of success. The same is the case with the many other studios I indicated, so please stop trying to find faults in my analysis where there are none.

 

Bethesda regularly releases games that are buggy as hell and leaves it up to the community to fix.

 

Blizzard is rather hit or miss these days. Overwatch and Hearthstone are great but they also released Diablo 3, Warlords of Draenor, and Heroes of the Storm all in unfinished states. Warlords at this point has basically been abandoned while they work on the next expansion and has seen the single largest subscriber drop in the history of World of Warcraft by a very significant margin.

 

and Bungie released Destiny in the state it was.

My point, which you hardly discredited, is developers who have long development cycles tend to have the best results. Regardless of your feelings on Bethesda, Blizzard, or Bungie, all of their games are highly successful. When BioWare started rushing their games on a 18 month cycle, that's when the quality started dropping. BioWare hasn't really lost their talent. What BioWare lost was its appreciation of time and making ambitious games.

[Sanunes]

 

My point, which you hardly discredited, is developers who have long development cycles tend to have the best results. Regardless of your feelings on Bethesda, Blizzard, or Bungie, all of their games are highly successful. When BioWare started rushing their games on a 18 month cycle, that's when the quality started dropping. BioWare hasn't really lost their talent. What BioWare lost was its appreciation of time and making ambitious games.

 

The only game BioWare released after 18 months was Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 had a 26 month development cycle and they reused a lot of assets from Mass Effect 2 to the point that Mass Effect 2's release on the PS3 used code from Mass Effect 3 to work properly on the console.

[RoboticWater]

My point, which you hardly discredited, is developers who have long development cycles tend to have the best results. Regardless of your feelings on Bethesda, Blizzard, or Bungie, all of their games are highly successful. When BioWare started rushing their games on a 18 month cycle, that's when the quality started dropping. BioWare hasn't really lost their talent. What BioWare lost was its appreciation of time and making ambitious games.

You're judging BioWare by quality yet every other company by financial success. You know perfectly well that those two things are different.

 

Besides, BioWare's most recent titles have all been critically and commercially successful, and much like Fallout, Destiny, and recent WoW expansions, BioWare's recent games are largely maligned by core gamers.

[Dean_the_Young]

 

My point, which you hardly discredited, is developers who have long development cycles tend to have the best results. Regardless of your feelings on Bethesda, Blizzard, or Bungie, all of their games are highly successful. When BioWare started rushing their games on a 18 month cycle, that's when the quality started dropping. BioWare hasn't really lost their talent. What BioWare lost was its appreciation of time and making ambitious games.

 

Time for what, though? The studios you mention all have ambitious games, true- but in very different ways, and with clear differences in focus. Different enough that it's not clear that 'time' alone would fix the supposed problems plaguing Bioware.

 

Bungie, for example, makes shooters with a focus on maps and MP. The Halo style was great for scenic areas- not exactly stellar when it came to story or character drama. Stories were also often short, so the time wasn't going into the main plot, which holds up Bioware games.

 

Bethesda's style is also pretty light on plot, and while the increasing attention to companions is welcome, it's still clearly less than Bioware despite the time. Instead, a lot of the time goes into making a wide spread of thinly developed content- filler, in other words, which was one of the complaints about DAI's venture into the more open-world style.

 

So time alone doesn't make the Bioware strengths as strong as Bioware- and what, exactly, would Bioware's weaknesses being fixed be? Combat in its recent games has been mostly solid, even commendable come ME3, unlike the polished less-than-savory descriptions of DAO and ME1. DA2 would have been able to add more maps and reuse less, true, but most complaints come about the writing- and it's not clear to me that 'writing' would have been improved by more time. In ME3, for example, it wasn't the final level that attracted the criticism, as let down as it was- it was the Catalyst. But the Catalyst appears, by all indications, to have been exactly what Bioware's writers intended it to be. A misfire, to be sure, but not a hasty one. The Reaper's motivations, a galaxy-burning choice to big to walk back from, and the use of the child all appear to have been deliberate core elements. The EC added a bit more epilogue slides, which are truly something I consider an RPG staple, but they didn't change the core conceit, or the core flaw of ME- the (lack of) planning.

 

ME's biggest flaws typically derived from a lack of forward planning. But that was a lack- not insufficient time to. The ME2 process indicates that they simply never considered it for the most part. Longer development time wouldn't have changed that.

[prosthetic soul]

Why do I get this overarching feeling there are some in this thread who feel companies exist in a moral and ethical vacuum whereby the only thing they should be concerned about is the bottom line?

[Dean_the_Young]

Why do I get this overarching feeling there are some in this thread who feel companies exist in a moral and ethical vacuum whereby the only thing they should be concerned about is the bottom line?

 

Possibly because they dare to argue that profit isn't a dirty word.

 

And have a certain skepticism of claims of ethical failure by complainants who also happen to be modestly inconvenienced consumers.

[Lady Artifice]

Why do I get this overarching feeling there are some in this thread who feel companies exist in a moral and ethical vacuum whereby the only thing they should be concerned about is the bottom line?

 

 

Because you're only engaging this issue in terms of extremes, soulless corporate entity vs. artistic designers fueled by their own raw passion. The reality falls somewhere in the middle. 

[Battlebloodmage]

 

They need to remember that the fans are the ones who make the series what it is. The games are not about them or how much money they could make from the fans, it should be about the fans and how many can enjoy their game. This is why the ending is so frustrating, they make the game all about them instead of about the fans. If the fans are unsatisfied with the ending, they should have changed it instead of stubbornly stuck to their artistic integrity. 

 

You know why so many people support indie developers? They actively involved with the community, make changes accordingly. The fans feel appreciated. 

[AlanC9]

Hardly. To be a AAA developer you need a major publisher backing you in order to be considered part of the main stream industry. BioWare didn't have any longstanding relationships with any publisher of significant importance. It wasn't until LucasArts and Microsoft that BioWare started partnering with major publishers giving them the tools to make AAA games. Until that point, BioWare was a PC-only developer with a few titles under its belt, but hardly something one would call a AAA developer.

I'm not sure you two actually have a substantive disagreement here. Bio wasn't a modern AAA developer when they did BG2, but was that development model even a thing? What it means to be a top developer has changed over the years, and Bio's changed with it.

[Il Divo]

Why do I get this overarching feeling there are some in this thread who feel companies exist in a moral and ethical vacuum whereby the only thing they should be concerned about is the bottom line?

 

 

^It should be mentioned that making games that fans dislike isn't quite the same as existing in a moral and ethical vacuum. 

[Cyonan]

My point, which you hardly discredited, is developers who have long development cycles tend to have the best results. Regardless of your feelings on Bethesda, Blizzard, or Bungie, all of their games are highly successful. When BioWare started rushing their games on a 18 month cycle, that's when the quality started dropping. BioWare hasn't really lost their talent. What BioWare lost was its appreciation of time and making ambitious games.

 

Warlords of Draenor is not successful. It's cost World of Warcraft 5 million subscribers, which was about half the number of people playing at the start of the expansion.

 

We also have no metric to judge Heroes of the Storm because Blizzard refuses to release numbers for it. Every stat about the game has been grouped up with some other game in a "combined they've made X amount of money". Usually it's grouped with Hearthstone which has been highly successful.

 

While I'll agree with a ~3 year dev cycle for most games, it's not surprising that EA thought they could get away with an 18 month one considering games like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed have yearly releases and enjoy great success as well.

[Il Divo]

As far as financial difficulties earlier, that is absolutely false. Jade Empire was a financial disappointment, but it didn't cause BioWare financial woes. DAO was in development for a long time but that was hardly the game sucking out BioWare's budget. It was purely Mass Effect 1 (which had a much larger budget than DAO) and how ambitious the game. Most of the features were ironically cut anyways due to the hardware limitations of the Xbox 360.

 

Not to throw more mud, but was it really the case the Jade Empire didn't cause Bioware financial woes? Conventional wisdom on here (which could be wrong) is that Jade Empire flopped, which is pretty bad. Unless Bioware was just swimming in money from NwN and KotOR, I can't imagine a major game release bombing as a signal of good times ahead - especially given their more niche appeal up until that point. 

[Commander Rpg]

^It should be mentioned that making games that fans dislike isn't quite the same as existing in a moral and ethical vacuum. 

The only certain method to dislike a thing is to not buy it. Words don't make swords.

[prosthetic soul]

^It should be mentioned that making games that fans dislike isn't quite the same as existing in a moral and ethical vacuum. 

Lying to your customers with false promises and exaggerated claims does however.

 

Nickel and diming is also dubious.  You literally had to pay to get the true ending to Dragon Age Inquisition. 

[Il Divo]

The only certain method to dislike a thing is to not buy it. Words don't make swords.

 

I'm not certain what you're saying here, to be completely honest. 

[Il Divo]

Lying to your customers with false promises and exaggerated claims does however.

 

 

 

 

Depends on the premise and the exaggerated claim. There's definitely been questionable statements made by Bioware in the past, though I think it's a pretty big jump to go from that to "Bioware operates in an ethical and moral vacuum". At least, relative to other companies out there. Of course, if this is an extension of a larger point - that game developers should be more transparent, I'll go in with you on that. 

 

 

 

Nickel and diming is also dubious.  You literally had to pay to get the true ending to Dragon Age Inquisition. 

 

 

And I had to pay to get the ending to ME1 by purchasing ME2, ME3, not counting their dlc's. Did we sign a contract that says in exactly what form Bioware is (or isn't) allowed to release their content? We fought Corypheus, we beat Corypheus, and that was DA:I's story. Solas and Trespasser were a segue into a different plot, similar to Morrigan's Witch Hunt. 

 

The argument here is questionable, since Bioware has been pretty open (since ME1) about their desire to have post-release content that segues into subsequent games. ME2 had it, DA:O had it, DA2 had it, and now DA:I has it. 

 

 

[Saladinbob1]

A lot of rose-tinted view points in this thread. Personally, I'll take any post-EA Bioware game over the likes of Baldur's Gate 1 and Neverwinter Nights, which accounts for a pretty significant chunk of their legacy. 

 

Bioware's integrity isn't all that important to me - good games are what I want. 

 

You say people are viewing things through rose-tinted glasses then view Baldur's Gate through the lense of modern games. You have to view Baldur's Gate by its peers at the time and it was innovative, progressive. Traits the modern Bioware lack. 

[Il Divo]

You say people are viewing things through rose-tinted glasses then view Baldur's Gate through the lense of modern games. You have to view Baldur's Gate by its peers at the time and it was innovative, progressive. Traits the modern Bioware lack. 

 

Why do we have to view it through its time? That's exactly what rose-tinted glasses refers to - looking at a product from its time period and extrapolating that to a modern sense of quality, which are no longer present or innovative. We could say it's influential - given that the number of game developers who have been inspired by Baldur's Gate in their own game design. 

 

But developers have taken a proof of concept (BG1) and expanded it, to a point where BG1 is out-dated in many respects. If my interest is in narrative, writing, or characters, I'll take virtually every other Bioware game released after BG1 - that's not intended as an insult against 1998 Bioware, simply an acknowledgment that modern games have enormous benefits attached that weren't feasible back in that time.