Dragon Age

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Lago PARANOIA
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Dragon Age

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Man, remember when Dragon Age was touted as the Next Big Thing in fantasy gaming? Like, it'd do for cRPGs what Jackson's LotR did for fantasy movies or what Final Fantasy 7 did for jRPGs? Now it just seems kind of a dead franchise. It was such a Next Big Thing that Green Ronin pushed all of their roulette chips onto a (rather jejune and pathetic) TTRPG of the setting.

So... WTF happened? A lot of people seem disappointed with DA2, but not franchise-killingly disappointed. Yet even the hype for DA3 seems kind of anemic.

Also, I'd like a love interest that was as hot as Morrigan but who wasn't such an enormous jagoff. Do you think you can handle that, Bioware?
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Post by Longes »

I think DA:O just wasn't as grand as Bioware wanted it to be. KotOR was the first good Star Wars RPG. Mass Effect was a really good sci-fi action-rpg. Dragon Age was just a fantasy RPG in a mildly grimdark world. It was a Bioware RPG by Bioware with Bioware plot.

Love interest. DA2 had a choice of Isabella, Aveline and Merrill. Questionable fashion choices aside, they were rather pretty and less annoying than Morrigan.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Aveline is not a love interest in Dragon Age 2.

I also feel that Isabella and Merrill were both more annoying than Morrigan, but that's debatable. I also think Morrigan was a big set of jugs, but not particularly attractive. I tend to like the not-french bard although her accent slipped at several parts.

All the Dragon Age games thus far has had some rather glaring flaws. I am going to get DA3 as I enjoyed the first two just fine despite the flaws, but it's not a factor of IF they'll fuck something up, it's WHAT. Although the lack of female dwarf love interests is still a huge problem.
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Post by name_here »

Funny story about Lelianna and her accent: The voice actress is actually French.
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Post by Blicero »

DA:O was very good, and it was very popular. It was Bioware's top-selling game of all time at one point. So it did have a pretty big impact. But that was five years ago. And since the release of Origins and Mass Effect 2, Bioware has been shitting away their customer goodwill. Both by releasing bad games, and by becoming more closely associated with EA. So that has hurt them, I think.

Also, computer RPGs have experienced something of a renaissance as of late. Which makes it harder for any one game to really define the genre.
Lago wrote: Also, I'd like a love interest that was as hot as Morrigan but who wasn't such an enormous jagoff. Do you think you can handle that, Bioware?
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Post by fectin »

It might be a conceptual space issue.

KOTOR inherits most of its universe, so you can dedicate all your new givashit to the story and characters. Same with Baldur's Gate. DA had all this immense history and cosmology that you had to start caring about, and bought that care out of the same pool it used for tactical gameplay, interesting characters, and an actual story. Because its Bioware, the characters and story eat up nearly all the givashit, with gameplay absorbing any remnants.

That explanation is consistent with Mass Effect: more familiar characters and simpler gameplay freed up a lot more space for people to invest in the setting.
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Post by Longes »

fectin wrote:It might be a conceptual space issue.

KOTOR inherits most of its universe, so you can dedicate all your new givashit to the story and characters. Same with Baldur's Gate. DA had all this immense history and cosmology that you had to start caring about, and bought that care out of the same pool it used for tactical gameplay, interesting characters, and an actual story. Because its Bioware, the characters and story eat up nearly all the givashit, with gameplay absorbing any remnants.

That explanation is consistent with Mass Effect: more familiar characters and simpler gameplay freed up a lot more space for people to invest in the setting.
But Dragon Age: Origins fits perfectly to the Bioware Plot Chart. And the companions were kinda lame. The dwarf got most of his character development in the expansion. Wynn was boring. Morrigan was annoying. Shale was good, but added as a DLC. Most companions just weren't very good.
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Post by Blicero »

Longes wrote: And the companions were kinda lame. The dwarf got most of his character development in the expansion. Wynn was boring. Morrigan was annoying. Shale was good, but added as a DLC. Most companions just weren't very good.
YMMV obviously, but you are one of the only people I have ever heard to describe the Origins companions as collectively lame.
Last edited by Blicero on Tue Nov 04, 2014 2:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Longes wrote:
But Dragon Age: Origins fits perfectly to the Bioware Plot Chart.
You keep saying this like that matters to people, but for the most part it doesn't. Bioware didn't thrive because of intricate plots or surprises, they made their bones off of three things: amusing dialogue, cinematic pretensions and catering to a weirdly intense fanbase that often feels ignored by the rest of the industry. For god's sake, Baldur's Gate and ME2 are some of their most beloved games and plotwise you can sum them up as the Dirty Dozen in SPAAAAAAACE and Highlander in Faerun. Seriously. Sarevok is basically the Kurgan. They should have ponied up the cash to hire Clancy Brown and make it official. So there's obviously a market for "story driven" games with more dialogue than CODBLOPS but there is far less evidence that people want Doestoevsky instead of Whedonisms and pap.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:
So... WTF happened? A lot of people seem disappointed with DA2, but not franchise-killingly disappointed. Yet even the hype for DA3 seems kind of anemic.
You don't know the core fanbase well enough then because DA2 was the video gaming equivalent of the Fourth Edition debacle. DA2 has the ignominious distinction of being the first Bioware game to feature a large gulf between its Metacritic user and reviewer aggregates, something which was nigh unheard of back when the fanboys were united. The setup for this fall from grace is really simple: Bioware was acquired by EA. This shortened devleopment times and forever altered the definition of "success." It's an unfortunate turn of events because Star Wars buoyed titles aside, Bioware's games have always been bigger on critical acclaim than actual sales--Rockstar could probably shit directly onto an old floppy disk, call it GTAVI and then sell more units than the combined might of the Mass Effect series. I am fundamentally suspicious of the idea that a Bioware game could live up to the pressure of being the next big thing. They have the loudest fans, but that's not the same as having the most fans.

So, yes, in a sense, the failures of the series could be in part blamed on DA:O not doing well enough. By most developer's standards, it should have been considered a success--it went triple platinum before the year was out and went on to spawn a lucrative expansion despite being a new IP in a relatively unpopular genre--by way of comparison, the original Borderlands did comparable numbers. But already cracks were showing--triple plat isn't that incredible for a cross platform release and it's a game that actually sold somewhat poorly* at first and then had a long tail as good word of mouth lured back lapsed fans on the PC, a platform on which the game was just straight up better and where the "it's an old-school crpg like grandpappy used to make" pitch plays well to the base. All of which sets the stage for the grand failure that is DA2, since that game introduced simplification, repetitive environments and DRM to a franchise that was buoyed by the kind of grognard who felt like KOTOR was nice but a bit too dumbed down for their tastes. Between that and the ME3 ending Bioware has been dealing with an amount of "betrayal" butthurt that's frankly rather out of proportion with their place in the industry or the quality of their releases. Again, they don't have the most fans, just the loudest.


*Some of this was also due to the shit terrible marketing. Marilyn Manson wasn't even that all cool back in '98 when he was still a relevant cultural reference. Probably not a good idea when half your fanbase openly mocks FPS gamers for being obsessed with macho bullshit.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Tue Nov 04, 2014 3:26 am, edited 7 times in total.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Whipstitch basically has the gist of it. Bioware had a solid reputation and a loyal fanbase, and then EA bought them. It is impossible to have a solid reputation and a loyal fanbase as an EA subsidiary. EA is universally reviled. Sure enough, DA2 happened and people flocked to the internet to complain that it didn't feel like a Bioware game. Some of those complaints were legitimate, many were exaggerated, virtually all of them were poorly expressed, and everyone took it as proof that EA had ruined Bioware. Then ME3 happened, and people flocked to the internet to complain that the game did not actually have an ending and had presumably been rushed out the door with a giant turd simply pretending to be one, and everyone took it as more proof that EA had ruined Bioware. And now Bioware does not have a solid reputation or a loyal fanbase, and instead everyone thinks of them as just another entry in the long list of things EA has shat all over.

And they're not really wrong. It's not that Bioware was previously an outstanding example of exceptionalism, but it is the case that under ownership by EA they have made a number of out-of-character decisions both in regards to the content of their games and production of those games. No one is really convinced they're still getting actual Bioware games anymore, and they aren't - even if a lot of the same talent is still there EA is very obviously running the show, and EA really only cares about brands insofar as they can make money by running them into the ground. That's practically their entire business model.
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Post by Whipstitch »

It can't be emphasized enough just how much the EA acquisition has changed the relationship many fans have to the company. Bioware had a rep as the sort of company that was if anything a bit too open about how they worked and due to their PC roots has long had an active internet presence. People like David Gaider netted the company an enormous amount of good will by doing crap like co-writing the BGII Ascension mod and otherwise demonstrating the ability to be critical of their own work, which is part of why so many people handled the ME3 ending like something could and must be addressed. But these days Bioware is now saddled with not just answering for their own controversial decisions but also those of their parent company and predictably their fans have not taken kindly to corp speak about how Bioware remains committed to crapping out 4 DLC packs a game. It really reached a head when one of their employees made the hilariously poor decision to write a metacritic user review of DA2 which claimed critics were going overboard. Naturally, people found out and made fun of him on the internet.

Also, I was pretty drunk last night and despite a million edits I somehow failed to mention that SWTOR never became the world beater it needed to be in order to live up to its dev costs and licensing. A less intrusive hype machine may just be EA's way of quietly accepting that Bioware isn't going to be the next Bungie or Blizzard any time soon.
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Post by MfA »

EA's involvement has been hit an miss ... I think they had as much influence on ME2 as DA2 and although I hated ME2 it was a huge success and probably much cheaper to make than ME1.

ME3's ending was a home grown disaster, a writer with a massive case of NIH with a producer who enabled him to fly solo in a universe someone else created ... both rose up from pre-EA ranks. EA just gave us multiplayer and thank god for that.
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Post by name_here »

On the other hand, all the lead writing staff on the first game have vanished from the credits by the third game.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Whipstitch wrote:
*Some of this was also due to the shit terrible marketing. Marilyn Manson wasn't even that all cool back in '98 when he was still a relevant cultural reference. Probably not a good idea when half your fanbase openly mocks FPS gamers for being obsessed with macho bullshit.
Not only that, they picked the song Manson wrote about how all his fans are idiots.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Looking at the leaked skill trees the Necromancer looks really lame. It's a shame because you could build a more flavorful necromancer in DA:O with the Spirit and Entropy trees. Now you can't even animate dead.
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Post by Longes »

Well, despite the console semen smeared all over the Inquisition's face (you need to hold the LMB to attack, you need to press "t" to zoom out into the "tactical mode", you are using the Skyrim inventory ohgodwearedoomed) it seems pretty decent so far. Nothing particularly annoyed me so far (other than the fact that I have to use the american VPN, because it'll only be released on 21st in Europe)
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Looking at the leaked skill trees the Necromancer looks really lame. It's a shame because you could build a more flavorful necromancer in DA:O with the Spirit and Entropy trees. Now you can't even animate dead.
Ug, LAME. then again, you can't raise the dead in 2 either.

Since they pretty much said that only one type of mage can heal, I'm probably going to play one of those.
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Post by Longes »

Healing is in the Spirit skill tree, availiable for all mages. Your first mage companion specializes in it.

I'm currently putting all my skills into the lightning, and planning to go the Knight Enchanter when the specialization becomes available. Currently level 6, just went to the Val Ruyo for the first time.

EDIT: actually, no. Spirit doesn't have healing. It has Revival as the final spell. Looking at the wiki description, Necromancer doesn't have healing either.
Last edited by Longes on Wed Nov 19, 2014 1:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by radthemad4 »

Anyone tried any mods? I might try this one if I decide to pick up Origins again.
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Post by Longes »

Deluxe Edition includes an incredibly metal horse called "Swamp Unicorn".
It's an undead horse with a giant rusty nail rammed through its head.

Sadly, no one ever mentions Herald of Andraste riding the Nightmare.

Btw, the Horse is played by the Skyrim Horse. It's always behind you, right outside of your field of view. It teleports. It cares not for petty threats of mortal weapons. It devoures your companions and sends them off into the hellish subspace whenever you ride it.
Last edited by Longes on Wed Nov 19, 2014 8:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I need to call Gamestop, because I preordered the game and they haven't called me yet.
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Post by name_here »

Apparently there's been some stupid EA delay. Amazon isn't delivering pre-orders on schedule either.
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Post by Longes »

I don't know where you are, but in Europe the game will only be released on 21st. I have to use american VPN, or Origin will tell me that the game hadn't came out yet.
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Post by shinimasu »

Yeah gonna echo that being aquired by EA really soured the relationship for some stupid reasons.

I loved Origins, I avoided DA2 because the sheer volume of backlash I was reading really made me think it wasn't worth investing time into. I only just recently picked it up because knowing the story was looking like it was going to be necessary for inquisition.

It really wasn't that bad. Repetitive? Yes. Pacing Issues? Oh yeah. But mostly it just felt like I was playing an expansion instead of a finished game. Not a bad expansion, just kind of thin and watery.

I'll probably wait until christmas before picking up Inquisition, give it time to get its bugs sorted out, read some player reviews. But I'm not letting myself get sucked into the negative hype spiral again. DA2 was kind of a thin game, but Aveline is probably my favorite companion of all time, and the story was pretty good. I'll try Inquisition myself before passing judgement.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

So, I'm playing Inquisition, and everyone's hair is distractingly shiny. I'm assuming that's due to some part of my computer taking a shit and not due to any stylistic choices on the part of the designers. Is there any way to tweak that? Also, my computer is having issues and the framerate is really chugging along, is there a way to tweak that? Turning down the graphical settings doesn't seem to affect it.
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