Has Bioware been falling in quality?
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They still haven't made a game I don't like (though I haven't played the Sonic one, The Old Republic, Shattered Steel, and MDK2). Mass Effect 2 is my favorite game of all-time (and the first game is #3). I'd say it's a definite no to the question posed by the thread title.
It's more "alternate dimension where mysterious power stems from and where demons that are exaggerated aspects of the human/nonhuman psyche - and predominantly destructive aspects thereof - and that mages/psykers use as a source of power but that can destroy them and everything around them if they let their guard down."IAmTheVoid said:
It does lead you to give the qunari/templars a lot more slack re: their treatment of mages when you realize they're basically living in a young version of the 40K universe
Agree with this. It's borderline annoying even when Joss Whedon does it, and Bioware isn't exactly Joss Whedon.Frankster said:
Haven't had any problems with the ME games any disagreements that anyone can have about them really comes down to opinion, personally I love them. Can't speak for dragon age, but I heard they're being developed by a different team anyway.
My, you're observant.
Yeah Bioware has started to suck ever since EA took over and tried to suck all the creativity out of their souls.
Not only that it's hard to follow Baldur's Gate, and it's also hard to follow KOTOR, so even if EA wasn't making them suck you'd still probably see a dip in quality
Personally Dragon Age Origins is the best game that's come out on this side of the console generation. And I have unrivaled love for the Mass Effect games, but ever since Bioware has tried to make their games more about action oriented gameplay instead of deep involving stories they have started to suck, the writing is still top notch and that carries a lot of weight for me.
I'm worried for ME3 because of all the news saying it's going to be the best cover based shooter on the market. That scares me because there is no way that a cover based shooter could ever be less than awful. If they cut down on the dialog or the writing seems uncreatively churned out as just excuses to shoot more shit Bioware will be officially dead
Yeah Bioware has started to suck ever since EA took over and tried to suck all the creativity out of their souls.
Not only that it's hard to follow Baldur's Gate, and it's also hard to follow KOTOR, so even if EA wasn't making them suck you'd still probably see a dip in quality
Personally Dragon Age Origins is the best game that's come out on this side of the console generation. And I have unrivaled love for the Mass Effect games, but ever since Bioware has tried to make their games more about action oriented gameplay instead of deep involving stories they have started to suck, the writing is still top notch and that carries a lot of weight for me.
I'm worried for ME3 because of all the news saying it's going to be the best cover based shooter on the market. That scares me because there is no way that a cover based shooter could ever be less than awful. If they cut down on the dialog or the writing seems uncreatively churned out as just excuses to shoot more shit Bioware will be officially dead
I would agree that bioware is declining as of late. The standard of writing set as a precedent in their previous titles wasn't met by both ME2 and DA2. That's not to say they were bad games (although DA2 was a bit rubbish) but that they don't stand out in the way bioware games traditionally do. ME2 is fun gameplay wise and the writing as far as dialogue and characters is concerned is very good. The main plot is stupid, railroady and full of holes. DA2 was just all over the place, with little coherent story structure, boring combat and an extremely bad and obviously rushed ending. Again, character and dialogue was generally solid.
I don't know. There's still good stuff in these games but it's amongst a lot of bad stuff that didn't used to be there. I don't think bioware's gone for good or that they'll continue sliding down this slippery slope but I do think they need to get their act together and soon.
I don't know. There's still good stuff in these games but it's amongst a lot of bad stuff that didn't used to be there. I don't think bioware's gone for good or that they'll continue sliding down this slippery slope but I do think they need to get their act together and soon.
Baldurs Gate 2 and it's expansion stand as the high water mark for them storywise in my opinion, that said I'm still a huge fan and have enjoyed everything they've done outside those iPhone games(I should mention I also haven't touched their facebook games, or what have you). Mass Effect 2 blew me away, and while Dragon Age 2 wasn't quite up to that standard it was still a great game I've gone back to once already. The Old Republic is not quite the same beast, but has been some of the most fun I've ever had in an MMO. It's probably fair to call me a fanboy, they make games that hit me right in my happy place. No apologies though, There are precious few developers who so reliably hook me.
The Old Republic is a brilliant blend of styles and is quite fun, but it has many flaws (including the Mass Effect conversation issue of sometimes having no idea what you're going to say) and a host of glitches, and I can't help but think that the original Knights of the Old Republic was better in many ways.
That said, I really loved Dragon Age, an epic game with a solid plot and great dialogue system, though as you mentioned it had a pretty unoriginal world.
That said Dragon Age 2 made me want to vomit blood as it got rid of all the things I liked about the previous game (except maybe the plot, I have to admit I haven't played it past the demo because the combat, dialogue and character creation systems all offended me to the point of a silent boycott).
Are Bioware dropping in quality?
I feel you make a good point sir and I feel you can say they are.
However, to offer constructive counter argument:
Mass Effect 2 was far better than Mass Effect with a much more lively pace, better set pieces, and more fluid combat system, so there's an improvement. However the improvement was made oddly by making that series less Bioware-ish. I feel like this may be the issue Bioware has run into, with Mass Effect and it's success at being a less complex role playing experience open to a wider market they're turning all the rest of their game into less hardcore RPG style games, which while working wonderfully for Mass Effect is a horrible thing to do to all of their games (which we can now say they have, with the Old Republic and Dragon Age 2 using the convo system whole sale, I miss actually knowing what I'm saying when I role play, kind of vital yeah?).
I feel like someone should go through the bioware staff and pick out the guys who are good and like the Mass Effect direction, make them one team, and make the more old school CRPG crafters into another team. One can explore the potential future of RPGs (or whatever) while the other can be perfecting the concepts of the past while they keep pumping out more games like the original Dragon Age.
But, I also wish that the American government would stop oppressing free speech, and I don't see that happening any time soon either.
Dreams, everyone's got 'em.
That said, I really loved Dragon Age, an epic game with a solid plot and great dialogue system, though as you mentioned it had a pretty unoriginal world.
That said Dragon Age 2 made me want to vomit blood as it got rid of all the things I liked about the previous game (except maybe the plot, I have to admit I haven't played it past the demo because the combat, dialogue and character creation systems all offended me to the point of a silent boycott).
Are Bioware dropping in quality?
I feel you make a good point sir and I feel you can say they are.
However, to offer constructive counter argument:
Mass Effect 2 was far better than Mass Effect with a much more lively pace, better set pieces, and more fluid combat system, so there's an improvement. However the improvement was made oddly by making that series less Bioware-ish. I feel like this may be the issue Bioware has run into, with Mass Effect and it's success at being a less complex role playing experience open to a wider market they're turning all the rest of their game into less hardcore RPG style games, which while working wonderfully for Mass Effect is a horrible thing to do to all of their games (which we can now say they have, with the Old Republic and Dragon Age 2 using the convo system whole sale, I miss actually knowing what I'm saying when I role play, kind of vital yeah?).
I feel like someone should go through the bioware staff and pick out the guys who are good and like the Mass Effect direction, make them one team, and make the more old school CRPG crafters into another team. One can explore the potential future of RPGs (or whatever) while the other can be perfecting the concepts of the past while they keep pumping out more games like the original Dragon Age.
But, I also wish that the American government would stop oppressing free speech, and I don't see that happening any time soon either.
Dreams, everyone's got 'em.
Yosharian said:
hmmm,
i am now depressed; thanks chaps!
seriously though with regards to the OP... "dragon age was essentially baldurs gate 3" i threw up a little in my mouth when i read this..
Dragon age was a dog of a game compared to the Baldurs gate saga, a DOG!
The problem is that its honestly very hard to judge a game by its own merits nowadays, if Bio ware would just release games under secret pseudo-names... we probably wouldn't constantly compare new titles to older established favourites.
Redundant dialogue trees are hardly new, games have been doing that for years.80Maxwell08 said:
Bioware has explained quite well that the ethos of Mass Effect is that you are playing Commander Shepherd and that while you make choices about Shepherd's reactions at the end of the day the reactions fall within a range of what their character, Commander Shepherd as they imagined him, would do.
This is completely understandable because they had signed up from the very beginning to do this epic trilogy of games they had to stop the storyboard from turning into the Mandlebrot set.
That's personal experience.. I can assure you that I, if anything, over-relied on my soldier skills in Mass Effect. There comes a point where you can have 80% damage negation on all the time.. I found it pretty much essential in the harder game modes.80Maxwell08 said:
Someone has probably already said this, but they're using translation software, I can't remember which game it's referenced in but there's a point where Shepherd asks if it's glitched.80Maxwell08 said:
The darkspawn are orcs from lord of the rings. I know Warhammer has altered the image of orcs, but the physically twisted and ugly horde are always orcs. The story is not terribly original. Dragon Age 2's story is considerably more original, so surely this defies your hypothesis of everything getting worse..80Maxwell08 said:
I got the Fade/Warp similarity, but there are enormous differences. Also, both are borrowed from a fairly generic idea which ultimately comes from observation of shamanic cultures in which people take drugs to travel to the spirit world and back.
Dwarves in DA:O are.. one of the most original takes on Dwarves I've ever seen, although if you didn't play that much you might have missed the brutal caste system and the vicious opportunistic ultra-capitalism.
Is that a humblebrag?80Maxwell08 said:
I suppose if you're some kind of God of modern shooters it's perfectly possible, although I'm not sure how you didn't run out of ammunition constantly if you weren't tailoring your ammo powers. The Solder has been refined into a much more shooting oriented class in ME2 rather than the tanks of ME1. If you play any other class, you'll need to use abilities constantly.
Which takes 15+ seconds to recharge and doesn't work any enemy with shields or barriers (all of them, in harder game modes).80Maxwell08 said:
It's pretty balanced.
Hang on.. why are you commenting on a game you don't own?80Maxwell08 said:
And the dialogues aren't the same at all, they just reflect a different manner of speaking rather than necessarily a different game-altering choice every time. This has happened since the dawn of RPG history.
...80Maxwell08 said:
At this point I can tell you've neither played the game or been in this situation.
1) Noone likes being shot down, even if it's their fault for getting the signals wrong.
2) A tiny rivalry penalty which you can make back in 2 seconds by saying "I like mages" at some point in the future is not "getting pissed". Anders response is actually along the lines of "fair enough, I got the wrong idea", but he takes a small friendship hit because.. well.. see above.
I didn't see anyone particularly complaining that Bethany had a really high friendship score at the beginning of the game which you had to work to remove if you wanted to be her rival.
This is not actually true..80Maxwell08 said:
When you dig into the code, it's actually that the Origins save files weren't set up to export whether you killed Leliana. While this is an oversight, I don't think anyone expected Origins to be a huge hit, I don't think they'd planned Dragon Age 2 at that point and from what they'd said they never wanted subsequent Dragon Age games to be a direct continuation of the prequels. They also clearly never expected the characters to acquire such enormous status so when it came down to a choice between reusing characters irrespective of the lack of data as to their status at the end of the game, they made the choice to put them in.
If I'm honest, alarm bells were ringing after my experiences with ME2. It's not a bad game by any means and I love many things about it, but it simply didn't grab me in the same way the original did.
When I first heard about ME1 and about it coming out on 360 I just was so ravenous in finding info about it and seriously considered getting a 360 just to play it. I even watched a 'Lets play' session on Youtube of Mass Effect on the 360 long before I ever played the game myself, and I still thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it when I finally got hold of it and played through it multiple times over.
I can't put my finger on why I like it more than ME2, but I do know I could play the original for far longer in a gaming session that I could ME2. After a while I just got fed up with it and end up playing something else.
I also wasn't keen on the expansion to DA:O, Awakening, although there were moments of it that stick in my head that make me smile fondly, so I suppose it's not particularly negative point and possibly simply a matter of personal taste.
Dragon Age 2 I didn't like all that much. Be it the things that dramatically changed the gameplay from the original, streamlining them or lesser things that again come in to my own personal taste such as the change in visual styles.
In short, I suppose I'm simply saying that in recent times Biowares' offerings have seemed to be less enjoyable and gradually turned into lacklustre experiences that took too much effort in getting immersed and interested in.
I do, genuinely, hope that ME3 will send off the story of Shepard and his merry men/women in something that everyone can enjoy. I would be truly grateful for such a thing, but I have to wonder as to whether or not it will come to pass. I'm more than positive Bioware are capable of it, but whether that will be the case or not is another matter entirely
When I first heard about ME1 and about it coming out on 360 I just was so ravenous in finding info about it and seriously considered getting a 360 just to play it. I even watched a 'Lets play' session on Youtube of Mass Effect on the 360 long before I ever played the game myself, and I still thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it when I finally got hold of it and played through it multiple times over.
I can't put my finger on why I like it more than ME2, but I do know I could play the original for far longer in a gaming session that I could ME2. After a while I just got fed up with it and end up playing something else.
I also wasn't keen on the expansion to DA:O, Awakening, although there were moments of it that stick in my head that make me smile fondly, so I suppose it's not particularly negative point and possibly simply a matter of personal taste.
Dragon Age 2 I didn't like all that much. Be it the things that dramatically changed the gameplay from the original, streamlining them or lesser things that again come in to my own personal taste such as the change in visual styles.
In short, I suppose I'm simply saying that in recent times Biowares' offerings have seemed to be less enjoyable and gradually turned into lacklustre experiences that took too much effort in getting immersed and interested in.
I do, genuinely, hope that ME3 will send off the story of Shepard and his merry men/women in something that everyone can enjoy. I would be truly grateful for such a thing, but I have to wonder as to whether or not it will come to pass. I'm more than positive Bioware are capable of it, but whether that will be the case or not is another matter entirely
Hell no.
For anyone wanting to use DA2 as an example, what other developer would have been able to crank that out in 15 months? DA2 may be a mediocre/bad RPG in the grande scope of things but in the time frame it was created in, it is really quite impressive.
Bioware is just readjusting to the switchover to mandatory 3D graphics. 3D environments bring in a new layer of game development so to try and hold their new games to some 2D game made back when 2D had been perfected so much that it began faking 3D is ludicrous.
Mass Effect inspired an entire genre wide dialogue model revolution. You may have something with retcons, but that is because they are trying to involve their community with the future of the series. So it is really give and take. They get brownie points for involving the community but get negativity point for retconning shit.
For anyone wanting to use DA2 as an example, what other developer would have been able to crank that out in 15 months? DA2 may be a mediocre/bad RPG in the grande scope of things but in the time frame it was created in, it is really quite impressive.
Bioware is just readjusting to the switchover to mandatory 3D graphics. 3D environments bring in a new layer of game development so to try and hold their new games to some 2D game made back when 2D had been perfected so much that it began faking 3D is ludicrous.
Mass Effect inspired an entire genre wide dialogue model revolution. You may have something with retcons, but that is because they are trying to involve their community with the future of the series. So it is really give and take. They get brownie points for involving the community but get negativity point for retconning shit.
Ok its incredibly obvious you didn't read a damn thing since I said I wanted to discuss this in the first freaking sentence. Please read one sentence before you post.Frostbite3789 said:
You know saying something is terrible, and then backing up your statement by saying its crap is not a valid way to prove a point. You have to back up why you thought it was bad.80Maxwell08 said:
Also, Origins' Fade is not a ripoff from Warhammer 40k. The idea of a dream realm has existed since some of the earliest writing. Of course Origins' elements were not nessecarily new. Its almost impossible to come up with new story elements, especially for a fantasy game. People expect elves and dragons, and that's what they got.
Thank you for using your brain here as well. My complaint wasn't a lack of challenge but that I could beat the entire game and only start to notice skills even existed on a second or third playthrough because I never needed them. Though the fade is only not the warp because it has good spirits that's it. Just list all the comparisons between them and that will be obvious. Also I own both Witcher games but I want to beat the first one before starting The Witcher 2.IAmTheVoid said:Hey Maxwell- I'd like to say thanks for a well written post and fairly well structured. I don't AGREE with you, but still. It's nice to have somebody who'll actually use their bloody brain before posting!
What most of your issues seem to stem from is an anger at balance. Except for Baldur's Gate, I've never found BioWare games to be challenging- but that's not what I look for in them. I don't want a cakewalk, but I don't want the kind of challenge which comes with playing Civilisation 4 on Immortal, or something. There are some games I play for challenge and some I don't; BioWare just don't DO challenge. They test you and sometimes throw a curveball, but they never make it ridiculously hard, but then again I don't want them to. That's just my opinion, though, and I can see why you as a gamer want further challenge from BioWare.
There's one of your criticisms with DA2 which annoyed me: "being forced to romance Anders or shut him down". Sometimes people make the first move and you have to reject them, even if you're their friend. Why should it be different? I thought it made a nice change of pace, to be honest, considering it's always the player character who initiates the move to jump into people's pants half the time (Zevran being an obvious exception).
Also, the Fade REALLY isn't the Warp. I'm sorry, but it isn't. I'd actually go as far to say as the Fade being one of the more unique things in the BioWare universe. Obviously they share similarities (alternate dimension where mysterious power stems from and demons eat people) but also stark differences (note, the 'good' spirits and the lack of any real order within the fade, unlike the Demon Lords).
But I'm just nitpicking here. Short answer: I don't think they're going downhill- just in a direction you don't like. I think CD Projekt are probably right up your alley.
Can you please elaborate? I'm honestly not trolling, I don't understand what was so wrong about DA2's story. The combat and level design I can understand, what with the former clearly being geared more towards console play and the latter being the most egregious symptom of its rushed release date, but the story? I don't really follow.RedEyesBlackGamer said: