madbird-valiant said:
Starke said:
Regarding the moral choice system, it's kind of indicative of Bioware's faults in writing as a whole. The way Shepard's moral scheme is presented is kind of like choosing between Captain Picard (Paragon) and Jack Bauer (Renegade). Except, at the end it degenerates into being a jackass or being a lawful stupid hero. There's a similar issue in Jade Empire, where the morality scale is also slightly unusual. Both JE and ME's systems should work, but it ultimately deteriorates back into the Bioware standard for moral or asshole. Where the game actively punishes you for choosing what the devs consider the wrong choice. I'd be inclined to complement them on Dragon age for not implementing that, except, in that case instead of not being punished for making the wrong choice, there is no wrong choice and no difference between them.
That did annoy me in Dragon Age, how the only real difference between being a nice guy and being a wanker was everyone liking you except Morrigan, or everyone except Morrigan hating you. No effect on the world itself, just on your party, which really doesn't make much sense when you consider that you're saving the world, here. Surely every decision you make would have consequences.
Starke said:
If they'd eject that and simply vomit a linear story at the player, I'd be fine with that. There's a lot of very good games, even RPGs that don't have branching plots, Bioshock comes to mind off hand. It's not a great solution, but life goes on. Instead, they lie, claim that the player will have freedom of choice, and then manage to miss the mark every time.
Me and a friend were having an argument last night over what an RPG was, and we came to the definition it as a game that allows you to determine your character, your character's choices, and your character's path through the story. Also probably some quests in there. I've never classified Bioshock as an RPG, more a FPS-Adventure, since there isn't really any levelling up or stats or what have you, you can just look around and pick up stuff, and there's a moral choice system that makes sense when it's "Nice guy" or "Power-hungry prick".
Bioshock actually justifies it's moral choice system in the game, explicitly. It's a function of what the player does to survive in the setting. I'm not sure its really as mature as 2k played it up durring development, but it's still a good case for this.
Oddly, I've always classified STALKER as an RPG, and it fits almost none of your defining traits.
The Bioware games are ARPGs, like Dialbo, and others, but they carry with them the illusion of choice.
madbird-valiant said:
Now I've forgotten what I was go-WAIT there it is. As much as you can berate BioWare for leading the audience to believe that the entire universe will shift around their decisions, as far as I know they have never outright lied about the content of one of their games. I, for one, would much prefer a BioWare game to a Lionhead game, because scarcely a word out of Peter Molyneux' mouth that contains the title of an up-and-coming game (COUGH Fable COUGHCOUGH) isn't idle speculation and delusions of grandeur.
Molyneux is insane. Almost litterally. We're talking about the man who thinks farting is a way to woo the ladies. (Litterally or not, it's certainly a game mechanic from F2). I do get what Molyneaux is doing, and it's frustring but I can sympathize. He comes up with fantastic grandeous designs, and then fails to deliver. Bethesda is the same way, actually, they're just smart enough not to talk about what they want to do before the game ships.
As for outright lying about the content of their games? Yes. They said Dragon Age would be dark fantisy. I may be being slightly snide here, but the entire advertising campaign was a sham on that front.
As for lying to the player? One of the first dialog hubs in Mass Effect after Eden Prime is really a lie to the player, and they pull the same trick on the Citidel in the very next dialog sequence. In the first couple hours of Mass Effect there's at least three dialog nodes that have three multiple different options, that all produce the same dialog from Shepard's mouth. On top of that there's at least two (and I think a lot more, but I can't verify right now) nodes that will produce the same response from the dirrected NPC regardless of your comment. Very fundimentally that's lying to the player, it's presenting them with a choice that isn't actually there. I'd forgive it if this didn't also extend into the narrative structure as a whole.
To a greater extent this happens repeatedly in Dragon Age, as I discribed earlier.
madbird-valiant said:
Starke said:
For me this was particularly galling in Mass Effect 2. While Mass Effect did a fairly good job of creating an interconnected story where the various pieces affected one another, Mass Effect 2 whittles it down to a single outcome in many cases.
Killed the Council and replaced with a Human one at the end of ME? Yeah, that won't change anything about how the Council works in ME2. Saved them? You get to have one conversation where they give you the finger and nothing happens.
Yeah, I'll agree with that. As I said, I was pretty disappointed with how they implemented the carry-over-save-game thing, but hey, as I said, no one (to my knowledge) has done this before them. It's an imperfect system, as much as they like to deny it, and if they manage to pull it off in one of their future games I have no doubt it will be amazing. Until then we're stuck with the circlejerk, unfortunately.
This isn't even the first time Bioware's done this. Back in the day it was a pretty common feature in RPGs. The early Might and Magic games, for example. Most of this was simply character transfers, something almost every Bioware game has supported in the last 10 years. (Kotor and Jade Empire can support exporting characters, unfortunatly they don't actually do it though.) Now, as for actually importing the story progression? That was a little rarer, but there are examples from back in the 80s though.
