Dragon Age: Inquistion - Can Bioware Survive Another Misstep?

Thyunda

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Gor Kur said:
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Only someone with their head in the sand, or up their butt, will trust BioWare again. Despite all the apologists on here lying and saying their last three games didn't suck, they sucked, and the next game will probably suck too. I do not buy EA or BioWare games new anymore and I won't again.
I liked Dragon Age II more than Origins. Am I an apologist, or do we just have different tastes?
 

CloudAtlas

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ravenshrike said:
Moreover, we know that DA:I is going to be shit because once again they are taking the really interesting plot points and tossing them out the airlock to make for a simpler story.
How do you know? Did the crystal ball tell you?
 

Raikas

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ravenshrike said:
At this point, all the people that really made Bioware Bioware have left. Moreover, we know that DA:I is going to be shit because once again they are taking the really interesting plot points and tossing them out the airlock to make for a simpler story.
Plenty of people are still looking forward to DA:I, so while you may think that it's going to be shit, we certainly don't know anything of the sort. In fact, recently I've heard more positive comments (the return of race choice, the longer development time) than anything else.
 

CloudAtlas

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Thyunda said:
Gor Kur said:
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Only someone with their head in the sand, or up their butt, will trust BioWare again. Despite all the apologists on here lying and saying their last three games didn't suck, they sucked, and the next game will probably suck too. I do not buy EA or BioWare games new anymore and I won't again.
I liked Dragon Age II more than Origins. Am I an apologist, or do we just have different tastes?
What? Different preferences? My friend, there's no such thing as preferences here. Here, personal opinions are absolute truths, and everyone who disagrees is simply blind to the this truth.
 

Legion

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That depends on what you mean by a misstep.

The games may have had a lot of criticisms, but they didn't sell badly, and EA cares more about the profits than peoples opinions. As long as Bioware keep making games that are a commercial success, they will survive.

As for the fans, I suspect that depends. A lot of people have been put off of Bioware, but at the same time they have also gained a lot of new fans. I suspect the "older" fans would probably swear off of Bioware if this game turns out badly, but I doubt that the company will run out any time soon. They will most likely just get new ones again.

Bioware are shifting the types of games they are making, while pretending to still be making "proper" role playing games to try and keep the "core" crowd interested. That is the kind of thing that will kill the "older" fans more than anything else, but those that don't care about that sort of thing most likely won't be affected very much.

I think fan expectations are what have caused so many issues with their games. A lot of people want or expect one thing, and when Bioware delivers something else they are upset regardless of the quality of it. I have noticed that the people who enjoy Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 are more often than not people who didn't play the previous games before their release. As such they didn't have the hype building up to unrealistic proportions by the time they played them.

After all, if you had never played Mass Effect before the outcry over the third games ending, if you then picked it up you'd probably wonder what all of the fuss is about. Regardless of how much people disliked it, it's not that the game was bad, it's that the game did not fit in with what a lot of people wanted from the series.

This is not entirely the fans fault though as I vaguely mentioned earlier. Bioware are very vocal with the fan base, and they keep trying to please the fans, often by exaggerating or promoting certain aspects of their games. Quite often this kind of thing leads to speculation or people seeing what they want to see and in many cases building up unrealistic expectations. If Bioware were like most other developers and simply kept quiet then I suspect this kind of thing would be less common.

The problem is that Bioware wishes to have close ties with the fans, but cannot seem to keep their revelations in check. They keep promising things that don't make the cut, or are not as good as they make them sound (choices for example) and when you get a company constantly in dialogue with it's customers, it makes them take it a lot more personally if those promises turn out not to be true.

Really this whole situation is both the fans and Bioware's fault. Bioware needs to stop hyping up their features to sound like they are much better than they are, and the fans often need a reality check and to remember that they are only games.
 

votemarvel

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Bioware lost my "buy without question" mentality with the double whammy of Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age II.

Now the studio is firmly in the wait and see catagory.

I don't think Bioware are doomed though. As the Citadel DLC showed, they still know where their strengths lie.
 

littlewisp

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The amount of drama from people is kinda surprising to me. Whenever I buy something I don't like, I'm disappointed, sure, but I'm not going to go around spewing bile all over the creator and using every opportunity I get to decry their values and abilities. I've read books from favorites authors I didn't like. If the books keep going in a direction I don't like or that bore me, I just stop buying and if someone asks me what I think I say "I didn't like them for this reason, but if you like this sort of thing you would!" And that's okay. I certainly don't take my dislike and some random number of people as a sign that doomsday has arrived and the author is no longer successful. Now if the publisher of the author drops them or (if self published) the author randomly disappears and doesn't publish anything else -- that's my cue to start saying 'oh wow, this author might have finally bit it with sales'. Even so, I won't say the author betrayed me because I don't actually know the author and the author doesn't actually know me. The author would likely have many fans, and his or her own ideas. I won't ask that the author remains a slave to some random idea of what good means. The author either succeeds or doesn't depending on what he or she likes to write; people are allowed to change and it's not personal if his or her stuff drastically changes from what it used to be. The same goes for any other individual or group selling stuff.

Too often in forums like this it becomes a necessity to parade the dislike around without giving a nod to the fact that different people like different things. Instead it's a pass/fail, and if you think it failed then it's going to fail for everyone. Don't take it so personally!

That said, for the question in the OP you're going to have to define what counts as a failure in the industry. When x sales are made? When x number of previous buyers don't buy the next time around? When the average rating of the game is x? When the developer is forced to cancel a franchise? When their earnings are less than x?

If you're talking like what happened in Rhode Island (88 something or whatever, I forget the name of the dev), then no -- I don't think Bioware is going to be there any time soon. If you're talking like what's happening to WoW (and by extension Blizzard), I don't think that's failure just yet. It's certainly some tricky and potentially dangerous territory, but there's a lot more ground to lose before the company folds.
 

shatnuh

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Okay, I have to say this before people continue to praise the "risks" BioWare took with DA2 and ME3.

Dragon Age 2 was a rushed release, choked full of unoriginal plot ideas, reused environments, little-to-no significant contextual fighting, flat NPC's, rote side quests, and everyone's horribly out of place foul mouth. Now, that last point is a little weak, I know. But it felt so forced and unnatural, like someone on the dev team said, "Hey, we're going for a new, edgy design for DA2? Lets make them say naughty words!" I actually like when a franchise makes its own curses, and DA:O certainly started in that territory. But DA2 decided to drop the allegory and just thrust our clumsy vernacular into the game, making Varric and Isabela sound rather ignorant.

If I could think of a good analogy for DA2, it'd go something like, "DA2 is like shooting a sequel in a studio lot, where the first movie was shot on location." Vastly inferior. I've never disliked the usual fantasy tropes appearing throughout DA:O because ALL Fantasy games possess them. Nearly all Fantasy ANYTHING is "Tolkien-stylized", anyway. DA2 occupies this awful medium-ground, where it has one foot in classic Fantasy writing, and the other is planted firmly in the "I'm ashamed that I like Fantasy" camp, and that second foot is cannibalizing the rich (albeit not very original) structure presented in DA:O.

As for Mass Effect... Ugh. The best thing about sci-fi is that you can supersede tropes by being truly original. I know I just got through saying that I enjoyed the simplistic Fantasy approach for DA:O, but sci-fi doesn't lend itself well to copycats. And Mass Effect is a repackaged Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I've said it before on this website, but the backbone of Mass Effect's story relies around the ME Relays, which are just the Farcasters that existed in Simmons' novel. Is that an oversimplification of the plot? Absolutely. But when the conclusion to the series boils down to destroying the ME Relays (the same way The Fall of Hyperion ended) all the ideas that set ME apart from the novel get swept away. That is unbelievably lazy, especially for a game release of that magnitude.

As for SWTOR, I can say that it's not terrible. But I cancelled my subscription after 2 months, and did so in favor of playing Neverwinter, which was once a BioWare property. When I'm quitting new BioWare games to play games that remind me of old BioWare, things aren't all great.

Dragon Age: Inquisition will have a massive hype train going into it, as have all DA games to date. It's going to be facing so much scrutiny that it possibly can't succeed. And that will not matter. BioWare will continue to exist, at the very least, as a money-sucking shell of it's former glorious self. It's just so sad that things have come to this.
 

kasperbbs

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I doubt that they can make it any worse than DA 2 was. The game will do well in sales like most of Bioware's games and they will continue making games, because companies don't close over people whining on the internet.
 

Zeldias

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As long as it's not as shitty as Jade Empire was, I'm happy.

I'm hoping it's closer to a kind of hybrid of DA2 and ME3, frankly. I enjoyed both of those games a lot. Action felt kinetic and fun in DA2 (a huge step up from the laughable animations and fire-and-forget tripe of DA:O) and my protagonist felt like a somebody in ME3 (talking to people about their problems and using his fame and influence to get stuff done for people). The only thing that I can say I really want from DA:I is more interesting specializations (I want shit that shifts the playstyle more dramatically for the base classes, because so far I've only found that Arcane Warrior and Blood Mage really do that), more interesting decisions to make, and a narrative that feels more together (I really enjoyed DA2's story, but there wasn't really a sense of time passing).

Otherwise, just let me romance everyone regardless of my gender, keep that personality system, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD KEEP THE RIVALRY SYSTEM, and don't screw me by making only one character other than the protagonist able to be a healer. I hate Anders, and don't want to bring him around to do stuff. That's the minimum needed to make me feel OK, although I do hope we get some kind of castle/headquarters to maintain and make decisions on a la NWN2.
 

CloudAtlas

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the hidden eagle said:
I'm not saying that at all.I'm saying that you can't put stock in review scores to determine if a game is good, I look at the reaction of the people who have played the game in question to see if it's good or not.If 80% say the game sucks then I will be wary of buying it until the price goes down,if the majority say it's awesome then I will feel confident about the game.

However sometimes you get mixed reactions and so you have to dig a little deeper to see if the the game is good or bad.

Also most major reviews have exhibited biases towards developers who advertise their games on the websites for a while now so their opinions are tainted.I only trust independant reviwers but even then I won't buy a game just because they say it's good,I would see what other gamers' opinions are before I make a purchase.
I've learned to ignore user reviews. They're simply useless. User score of 8.6 for ME2, but 4.8 for ME3 on metacritic, with hundreds of 0/1 point reviews, what a joke.
 

CloudAtlas

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the hidden eagle said:
kasperbbs said:
I doubt that they can make it any worse than DA 2 was. The game will do well in sales like most of Bioware's games and they will continue making games, because companies don't close over people whining on the internet.
You call it whining I call it criticism.
A lot what people are doing here and elsewhere hardly qualifies as criticsm.
 

Eacaraxe_v1legacy

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the hidden eagle said:
You call it whining I call it criticism.
"Criticism" is hardly the word I'd apply when individuals nail themselves to crosses to heap invective upon the company, proclaim a sense of betrayal or disrespect, and prophesize with a sense of deep self-satisfaction their downfall, all while deciding what is to be done with all that ill will and distrust is to...not pre-order their next game.

Not buy it used or on sale, not refuse to buy it at all, just not pre-order it.
 

kasperbbs

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the hidden eagle said:
kasperbbs said:
I doubt that they can make it any worse than DA 2 was. The game will do well in sales like most of Bioware's games and they will continue making games, because companies don't close over people whining on the internet.
You call it whining I call it criticism.
You might be right, in some cases anyway. I have read too much nonsense on these forums to still call it criticism. Some poeple just love to hate.