... I think you're a tad hard on the companions in Dragon Age.
The problem beeing, your characters talked to YOU in baldur's gate, when THEY felt like it (after X hours of gameplay after quest Y). The average run-through was about 100 hours, so the dialogue was spread out pretty heavily. But it was spread out.
In dragon age, I quest for three hours, then pick the new dialogue options in the camp before I go to bed.
The game is kind of forced to do this, because the story is just too short to have companions fetch your attention every fifteen minutes to build up your relationship with them -- like they talked to your charcter every hour like in BG2 -- so the developers chose to let you talk to them instead, when you feel like it.
Problem is, when everything happens when YOU tell things to happen, characters become less interesting.
...
I expect dialogue when I enter the camp.
Not when traveling.
The fact that your companions TOOK your attention in BG2 caused them to seem more alive.
There were five companions with you at all times in BG2, and many of them interacted with eachother and forced you to listen by normal dialogues.
I love that characters interact with eachother in Dragon Age, but I wish they interacted with ME half as much as with eachother. Or one quarter. I'd settle for one tenth!
But at the very least talk to me, or I will feel alone. Talking to, and talking with are two entirely different breeds of conversation.
When characters "
talk TO you",
they start the conversation. That is a forceful action which bonds the player with that character.
When you talk with them you start the conversation every single time, which makes them just another NPC with dialogues which may lead to loot.
The same is true ingame: I skip a lot of dialogues I initiate because I know there will be a quest added to my list.
I listen to the NPCs that come and talk TO me.
maxernst wrote...
Minsc was the mindless barbarian with the hamster. A completely 1-dimensional character.
Very funny, considering that the development of minsc progressed YEARS ahead of the making of the game:
He was originally a pen and paper character some of the developers used in a Dark Sun campaign.
His Giant Space Hamster isn't necessarily just a hamster: If Minsc is truthful, the hamster IS actually an intelligent alien hamster-like lifeform bred to minatyre size for the purpose of light travels on the ground, beeing wiser and more intelligent than most ranger animal companions.
It also would explain why Minsc appears to be mad. He has actually listened to and followed an alien lifeform's advice and may have started to see the world differently through the advice of his companion.
This is not something I make up, minatyre giant space hamsters ARE D&D source material, albeit probably just random material provided for fun by Wizards of the Coast -- it is officially D&D source material, used by Black Isle.
Note that the Black Isle developers have never said Minsc is insane, nor have they said that Boo is a regular hamster.
Other than that, if anything made minsc insane rather just unsane and unsanitarty, it was the death of Dynaheir: He wasn't too bad in BG1, but in BG2 he's pretty messed up.
... and I actually felt for him and HOPED there was a quest to restore (a part) of his sanity.
...
You may think he's one-dimensional, but I beg to differ. His dialogue is ment to be witty and lighthearted, but he is also disturbingly accurate in his assumptions provided by boo.
Finally.
Most people in the Dungeons and Dragons setting have never seen nor heard about most types of dragons, and don't know that gods exist in the D&D world. Raise Dead and Ressurection are spells that not even kings can afford when they fall in battle... and how many people in the game world EXACTLY, do you think have actually interacted with extraterrestial mindflayers and aquired the knowledge of there actually BEEING giant space hamsters in the D&D world considering people don't know about dragons despite there beeing thousands of them?
...
THAT is a quite disturbing and game altering observation right there.
Boo is in fact a giant space hamster: The only way Minsc, a simple barbarian,
could have known about the existence of such creatures is if someone told him. He has an effing hamster. What if that hamster told him about giant space hamsters?
The plot thickens.
Don't take me too
serious on this matter, because I'm certainly not taking this discussion very seriously myself, but all I've stated is the truth.
Source material for giant space hamsters:
The Spacejammer campaign setting for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
If you bother to read the source material, why of ALL THINGS would Minsc know about giant space hamsters (which is too fantastical to be thought up by D&D characters randomly) and not EVER mention Thri-Kreen or other D&D space creatures -- creatures that are both more dangerous and more fantastical than magical hamsters?
Remember that next time you play: Chances are -- Minsc is sane or at least not as insane as the developers want us to believe, and Boo is actually a giant space hamster bred to minatyre size by extraterrestials like mindflayers, and Boo itself told Minsc about their existence... and listen to Minsc whenever he tells you what boo has told him... just try. And see if he's ever mistaken. EVER.
Modifié par Red Frostraven, 18 février 2010 - 03:35 .
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They are both great games though
