Fuck you guys. You are probably right, but fuck I hope you're wrong. I'm still excited for the damn game, I'm just hoping against hope that it's not the same mineral gathering snoozefest that Inquisition was.Kerg3927 said:This is my expectation.chrissx2 said:It will be Dragon Age:Inquisition in space
I LOVED the Mass Effect trilogy, even with its flaws. The overall story was good if not perfect, the characters were great, the gameplay was fun.
But Bioware seems to have taken a drastic turn with DAI. From what I've read, it looks like it will be more of the same with MEA. I expect a massive open world sand box, broken into huge zones/planets. It will be gorgeous, but it will be all about endless hours exploring in the Mako and doing fetch quests rather than riding an intense roller coaster action/adventure story. Like DAI, I expect the overall story to be shallow and heavily diluted by the open world/fetch quest make-it-as-big-as-possible-so-we-can-brag-about-its-size format.
The characters will be more about making progressive political statements and checking the boxes on the politically correct item list rather than making truly interesting, cool, and badass characters that you grow attached to and enjoy developing and taking on missions (like Garrus, Wrex, Thane...).
I will buy it and check it out because I'm a huge fan of the series, but I am expecting the worst. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I hope so.
Agreed, you can't expect it to sell was well as ME3 after ME3.Wings012 said:Don't care. While ME3's ending left me sore, it has been bloody ages and I'm not really so hung up over it anymore.
If it looks good, I might give it a shot? There's been such a bloody lack of games recently that I might jump on anything halfway decent just to get a bit of a fix.
Pre-face: I love the Witcher 3, it easily qualifies for one of my favorite games all time. however, the thing W3 did was not very spectacular. It gave you pretty much the same quests that DA:I or DA:O would have, but added one or two lines from the questgiver ("Without mah piggy mah children will starve") that tied the quest to the world and then made sure to reconnect to that later in the quest when the twist/choice/reveal came around. The quests in the Witcher are not that much better on a purely mechanical level (in fact, I'd argue that several are worse since they are "follow the red quest thread. Now kill this. Good, loot container and turn in for reward"), they feel better to the player however since they are well-executed in terms of narrative and world building. You aren't just running into some dude in Novigrad whom you overhear have lost his family heirloom in Vizima somewhere, instead you meet a down and out noble in a shady bar in Novigrad who pleads with you to return the family heirloom that will restore his good reputation to him. The actual quest is just standard RPG-fare, but the fact that the quest feels so grounded in the world makes the player far more invested, even when there isn't a twist or choice.Caramel Frappe said:- Make sure every mission is unique like how The Witcher III did their quests.
It is not that ME3 didn't try, but I, personally, never felt the immersion at the Citadel. I was painfully aware of how staged it all felt, from the way that you "just overheard" side missions, to the way that people just stood clumped around spouting the same dialogue over and over. W3 added a rudimentary day/night cycle, NPCs that moved about their daily business and was just plain better at invoking mood in the hub areas than ME3 ever was.undeadsuitor said:Me3 as well? I mean I know it's non story mission structure was bad, but the world/quest hubs were the most "alive" I've seen in any game. People had conversations, they were grouped in believable areas, the layout changed after every mission to reflect the results, the areas got more and more crowded and the memorial wall got more and more full as the war went on etc etc
Even the Normandy felt alive with your squad mates moving around the ship talking to one another instead of standing in their designated corners
Yeah, that's right. Witcher 3 adds lots of flavor to the mechanics but it's also expertly put together as a cohesive whole. Many other games often excel at one point or another but it's like the developers didn't communicate or lacked a capable director or whatever so games end up repetitive or disjointed. Every developer did their job competently but the game still lacks flavor. I think you really need one person with the creative vision and a clear focus of how the game should eventually end up. I think this becomes less common primarily because modern game development requires hundreds of people to manage so you'd really need a 'top down' approach for it to work.Gethsemani said:The quests in the Witcher are not that much better on a purely mechanical level (in fact, I'd argue that several are worse since they are "follow the red quest thread. Now kill this. Good, loot container and turn in for reward"), they feel better to the player however since they are well-executed in terms of narrative and world building. You aren't just running into some dude in Novigrad whom you overhear have lost his family heirloom in Vizima somewhere, instead you meet a down and out noble in a shady bar in Novigrad who pleads with you to return the family heirloom that will restore his good reputation to him. The actual quest is just standard RPG-fare, but the fact that the quest feels so grounded in the world makes the player far more invested, even when there isn't a twist or choice.
I'm struggling to see how that's any different to what every RPG does.Gethsemani said:...instead you meet a down and out noble in a shady bar in Novigrad who pleads with you to return the family heirloom that will restore his good reputation to him.
It's hard to properly delineate the difference, but there is a difference. Witcher 3 was roundly praised in all corners for "side quests that felt like they mattered", despite them being functionally indistinguishable from ordinary RPG side quests in description. As Gethsemani says, the Witcher team did a far better job of world building and quest integration, and the game just had a more natural "flow". It was almost never jarring or immersion breaking. You never felt like the quest was overt padding. DA:I actually felt MORE static, lifeless and ill considered than your average bargain bin FTP MMO, which is really saying something. In an interview with PC Gamer Bioware claims to have learned from DA:I and that they'll be getting away from that in Andromeda (we'll see) which indicates even they are aware of the difference.Zhukov said:I'm struggling to see how that's any different to what every RPG does.
Hell, any game with sidequests.
As I said, on a mechanical level there isn't. W3 succeeds by engaging the player and making the side quests feel like self-contained, serious narratives in themselves. You are just collecting 10 Bear Asses because some guy said so, but the game really manages to contextualize it and make it feel like a worthwhile activity beyond "need them xps". Some of the side quests are seriously great (by giving serious choices or because they are really involved and genuinely well-written, some both) but the majority of them are standard RPG-fare that CDPR managed to really doll up to look much more attractive then they actually are.Zhukov said:I'm struggling to see how that's any different to what every RPG does.
Hell, any game with sidequests.
I haven't played DA:I so that particular comparison is lost on me.BloatedGuppy said:It's hard to properly delineate the difference, but there is a difference. Witcher 3 was roundly praised in all corners for "side quests that felt like they mattered", despite them being functionally indistinguishable from ordinary RPG side quests in description. As Gethsemani says, the Witcher team did a far better job of world building and quest integration, and the game just had a more natural "flow". It was almost never jarring or immersion breaking. You never felt like the quest was overt padding. DA:I actually felt MORE static, lifeless and ill considered than your average bargain bin FTP MMO, which is really saying something. In an interview with PC Gamer Bioware claims to have learned from DA:I and that they'll be getting away from that in Andromeda (we'll see) which indicates even they are aware of the difference.Zhukov said:I'm struggling to see how that's any different to what every RPG does.
Hell, any game with sidequests.
I kind of want you to just so we can sit down and have a nice time shitting all over it, but really...you've got better things to do with your time.Zhukov said:I own it, just haven't gotten around to it.
I thought ME3 did a great job with the Citadel, giving it a foreboding mood with all the refugees talking with each other, etc. Yeah, they repeated themselves if you visited the same area enough times, but overall I think they did a great job.Gethsemani said:It is not that ME3 didn't try, but I, personally, never felt the immersion at the Citadel. I was painfully aware of how staged it all felt, from the way that you "just overheard" side missions, to the way that people just stood clumped around spouting the same dialogue over and over. W3 added a rudimentary day/night cycle, NPCs that moved about their daily business and was just plain better at invoking mood in the hub areas than ME3 ever was.undeadsuitor said:Me3 as well? I mean I know it's non story mission structure was bad, but the world/quest hubs were the most "alive" I've seen in any game. People had conversations, they were grouped in believable areas, the layout changed after every mission to reflect the results, the areas got more and more crowded and the memorial wall got more and more full as the war went on etc etc
Even the Normandy felt alive with your squad mates moving around the ship talking to one another instead of standing in their designated corners
I'm currently playing through it again (largely for Cassandra's arc, plus I've never played a male Herald/Inquisitor before), and it is worth noting that DA:I never forces you to do any of its BS. With the GotY edition - which hands out Power like confetti [in a confetti factory] - you can pretty much ignore most of the nonsense it tries to busy you with.Caramel Frappe said:The moment it spams me with fetch quests like Dragon Age: Inquisition did ... i'm going to stop playing.
As one of those aforementioned OCD gamers, the concept of skipping content, especially on a first playthrough, just does not compute. To me it's like picking up a new book and skipping chapters or watching a new movie and fast forwarding through parts. If you've never played the game, how are you supposed to know which parts are boring, tedious, and inconsequential filler until you take the time to check them out? How do you know that something that seems like just another fetch quest is not going to lead to real, worthwhile content?Darth Rosenberg said:I'm currently playing through it again (largely for Cassandra's arc, plus I've never played a male Herald/Inquisitor before), and it is worth noting that DA:I never forces you to do any of its BS. With the GotY edition - which hands out Power like confetti [in a confetti factory] - you can pretty much ignore most of the nonsense it tries to busy you with.Caramel Frappe said:The moment it spams me with fetch quests like Dragon Age: Inquisition did ... i'm going to stop playing.
I'm certainly not saying that's good game design, but DA:I filler content's only really a burden to the obsessive compulsives - everyone else is free to pick and choose, and it turns into a relatively pacey, still quite gorgeous looking (and sounding) experience.
That's an incredibly inaccurate comparison; an interactive entertainment medium is world's apart from a fixed linear alternative - books or films don't typically have optional content, but games have pretty much always had that (options are arguably one of the medium's defining traits).Kerg3927 said:As one of those aforementioned OCD gamers, the concept of skipping content, especially on a first playthrough, just does not compute. To me it's like picking up a new book and skipping chapters or watching a new movie and fast forwarding through parts.
If someone's had passing experiences with RPG's, then they'd almost certainly be able to sniff out filler content. By less than a third of the way through [the MQ] I'd sussed DA:I not only had filler content, but filler regions of the world map.If you've never played the game, how are you supposed to know which parts are boring, tedious, and inconsequential filler until you take the time to check them out? How do you know that something that seems like just another fetch quest is not going to lead to real, worthwhile content?
Well, that is obviously subjective. I certainly agree that DA:I is full of filler that tends to border on the meaningless/worthless (all the shards, for one major time wasting example. does the Keep even track that?), but as I said, most of it's optional and the game is actually quite short if the player focuses on the narrative (or even just the main task in each [inessential] map region). DA:I is as time consuming as the player wishes it to be.To make matters worse, games that are too massive and flooded with filler content have zero replay value to me, because by the time I've completed it, I generally have no desire to ever slog through the game again. It was like that with DAI, and even with TW3. Yeah, on a subsequent playthrough, I now know what parts I can safely skip, but there's never going to be a subsequent playthrough.
Well, this thread isn't a post-mortem of DA:I, but I've no real idea why they went with an SP MMO design. If ME:A takes too many cues from it and doesn't compensate with giving me characters I care about and an interesting world, I may end up rather loathing it. Time will tell.I'd rather they just make the maps smaller, minimize the filler content, and move on to make another game rather than stretch and bloat each game to make it as large as they can possibly make it just so they can brag about the size of it in their marketing materials.
I generally agree the world didn't really need another Mass Effect, but it's not exactly unusual to want to explore a created universe in different ways. Personally, I much prefer DA's universe, but if BioWare can come up with some nifty new species and concepts for Andromeda's probable trilogy, then I'm not exactly going to complain (if they have to do sci-fantasy/'sci-fi', then frankly I'd rather they just made KotOR 3 than any more ME's).Pseudonym said:There is no reason another mass effect should exist and a good reason why it shouldn't. Mass effect ended with mass effect 3 and its ending. Even though that ending sucked, it was an ending. Bioware could have made a new IP but no, money had to be made.
ME1 was finished while Bioware were still independent and the first game was published by Microsoft and was for a long time exclusive to the 360.Recusant said:Mass Effect was not an EA game. Oh, sure, they published it, and I'm sure they tweaked it to at least some degree, but by the time they got involved, the game was mostly finished; it bears almost none of their stamp. And it shows: the game asks us to buy into its one big conceit: the titular mass effect. It extrapolates from that, and assembles a world of what is surprisingly hard sci-fi (with the exception of its view of biology, which apparently was informed by some hallucinogen-induced tastes in porn), especially for a video game; it was clearly very thoroughly thought out.
Was it a good game though?Jandau said:ME3 was a good game up until the ending.