Dr.Sopel said:
I don't mean to inflame, but I wonder how any of the last three Bioware games qualify as even remotely bad. One of them is technically The Escapist's latest Game of the Year. Nothing makes me more sad in the games industry today than the amount of shit Bioware gets for slight flaws in otherwise great games. Especially in the RPG genre which I always considered quite tolerant of big flaws in otherwise great games (see Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, any Fallout game). Especially especially when compared to stuff like DNF and (apparently) ACM that has the same price tag. But that's just me.
To be fair it all depends on what you want out of the games.
The RPG genre is fairly tolerant of flaws in games, so long as the game still focuses on being an RPG. You don't find a lot of true RPGs out there these days, and thus people tend to become rather aggressive against games that change from being primarily RPG to being primarily something else.
This is where a lot of the hate for some of Bioware's games comes from. DA2 as an example, where the second can still technically be played like an RPG if you try to, and you bump it up a few difficulty levels, but otherwise plays largely like a Hack'N'Slash with some levelling options. You spam buttons at enemies that randomly appear on the battlefield in fast paced combat, not greatly RPG like. Additionally things like removing armours for followers and just having upgrades that you can only buy at one point in the game and if you miss them are gone for good kinda went against the RPG nature of things too.
ME3... Play ME1 after it and tell me they feel like the same series. You've got the same protagonist, largely the same cast, same world - but they don't feel alike. Its like watching return of the Jedi then Revenge of the Sith. Things like the removal of player choice when it comes to most of the dialogue in the game, as well as increased focus on combat and action based problems as opposed to exploration of the world and more thought based problems took ME2 and turned it even more shooter, despite it supposedly going back to its RPG roots. Then there were the sidequest and journal issues and a bunch of other things that bit by bit wore people out on the game.
I don't think anyone will deny that ME3s combat is the best in the series [Except Infiltrator IMO. I still want to be able to snipe enemies from 1Km away, like I could in ME1, but that's more level design really], but along with the improved combat everything else took a turn to be more actiony - which is not what a lot of people wanted from Mass Effect. Even the story took a more action based turn, and was focused more on space ninja fights and explosions than in finding a way to stop the Reapers or gaining allies.
To be fair I don't entirely blame Bioware for this. Reasons for them doing each thing based off fan feedback can be found [I.E; less dialogue because most of the dialogue was almost the same anyway], however their way of fixing such complaints was the easy and lazy way out a lot of the time, which wasn't what people wanted [Removing choice from dialogue as opposed to improving the options you're given in dialogue].
Also I don't think it took three games for the fans to turn on Bioware, I felt like the vocal ones turned right after DA2 and they were already turned by the time ME3 came out. I almost think the players who like BioWare don't post on forums all that much (say like, for example, myself) - at least that's the only explanation I can find for ME3 being voted GotY here after nearly a year of ME3 rage in the threads.
I don't know. After DA2 a lot of people felt burned, but were fairly willing to forgive Bioware 'cause they said they were making ME3 epic, with tons of promises that sadly never came to be. People were definitely somewhat cautious of Bioware after DA2, but ME3 was the tipping point. Its why, if you go back through a thousand or so threads to the ones made near the start of the whole fiasco, you'll find a lot of people who say "I could understand DA2 thanks to its rushed schedule, I didn't care about SWTOR 'cause I wasn't into KotOR anyway, but this is it", or variants thereof basically forgiving DA2, SWTOR and ME2, dependent on what a given person liked, and damning ME3.
And yeah, most people who liked ME3 don't comment that much 'cause it does cause flamewars quickly. As we can see from a reference made to Bioware as opposed to even Mass Effect, there's been a few posts in this thread already discussing the issue =/
The Critical Miss comic is actually not far from the truth ether. That little dancing panel you saw- yea.Desert Punk said:its one of those things, where the longer you watch it, the funnier it gets, yet the sadder it gets at the same timekburns10 said:If the aliens randomly dance in the game I'll Redbox it
