Nalgas D. Lemur said:
ZippyDSMlee said:
I dunno Dragon age and Mass effect 2 and to a lesser extent KOTOR and ME felt like half a game due to poor or unfinished implementations, story is nice but it dose not make up for annoying or lacking game play and yes I am looking at you bioshock and you fallout 3 as well......
I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say
half a game, but I do kind of agree with you on this. Haven't played Dragon Age yet, but I think BioWare's combat systems have generally gone downhill since KotOR, which I mostly liked. Jade Empire was a so-so brawler tacked onto a good RPG, for example, and Mass Effect was a
very mediocre third-person shooter tacked onto a great RPG (if you ignore the side quests; the main storyline was a lot of fun, but most of the side quests were pretty awful; the Mako was a heap of junk, and driving it across the same planet to the same building to kill the same guys copied and pasted in every single system in the galaxy got old after doing it a couple times). I was also really underwhelmed by BioShock, too. The setting and story and art direction and music were all really interesting, but the gameplay was pretty meh, enough so that I got bored of playing it about 3/4 of the way through and just looked up how it ends online.
Ideally, I'd like a game that's good in all areas (Star Control 2 comes to mind (yes, I played it when it was new, and get off my lawn, heh), mostly because someone accidentally typo-ed it earlier tonight in place of StarCraft 2), but those are hard to find, so if it's at least ok in all of them and stands out in some of them, that's usually enough for me to at least enjoy it, whether it's great story and ok gameplay or great gameplay and ok story. I am kind of picky, but I guess not nearly as much or in quite the same way as you are.
I really can not come up with a better expression than "half a game" it works on many games tht are either unfinished/poorly implemented,lacking content or just pure spam.
DA suffers from completion of themes a sublet of unfinished implementations, enhancement is half assed and I really really enjoyed making my own weapons and stuff. Other than that the on the rails feel to it was stark as well the wonky skill pathing and 2nd classes.
If you want to nii pick my nit pick its mabye a 3/4s a game LOL. All in all every thing else was up to snuff the dailog,voice action and writing was good to great even if at times cliched and formalistic. Dialog trees are still pretty simplified I will rant about those in detail here in a bit.
I loved jade empire(mabye due to my love of bad kung fu) I wish more games would get into attack/dodge mechanics yes I realize it and fable can be boiled down to inane button mashing but there is something about dodging,stricking,ect under your own power that is just irreplaceable and dice rolls and crap just do not cut it. I mean you can use a mix of dice rolls to caluc damage and if in a roll it either misses or dose less damage,ect this is one of the things I over focused on on the whitcher well that and the grimy sex filled world is a turn off but even this idiot saw the setting/story,ect was top notch I just didnt care for the daibloesqe game play it felt to much like a point and click snooze fest(oh god as a TB combat fan could I even play a TB game now these days? ..>AAARRHHH!!! I have ....become........uuuussssssss. ........ooneeeee off. .......uussss....... bbwwaiinnnssssss).
Anyway where was I ah yes raved and drooled some over JE, now for ME I liked me for the maki and the tweaking dailog and such was solid dailog tree old, liked the side quests but I did not care much for the combat, they should have put in melee stuff and done the AI to go from hide to cover to all and all attack. Most of the time I was just driving into a area to get the bee hive a buzzing and then go hide and pick them off one by one.
I think ME would have done alot better if it game people a choice of play style do it as a FPS or dose it as a over head TB/RT RPG.
But alas they went completely with the lowest demographic...... I did enjoy the mako not so much for the quests and such but just for the rock cralwing, they should have offered upgrades to weaopns,armor,shiled and wheel type(track,stickywheel,hover,ect) tossed in more enimes and made it a full fledged game within a game. Bu even still I enjoyed it for what ti was...whitch is strange as I RARELY do that anymore.
Oh I thought KOTOR was to simple and to short,even if I liked it, its emphasis's everything thats wrong with the lite RPG sect of today's gaming, I mean look at DA and you wonder its trying not to be a lite RPG but it sure as hell has the trappings of one.
Now on to Bioshock I have ranted and droooled over it in acouple threads I started
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.173063-Bioshock-yet-another-zippy-rant?page=1
But to put it simply its poorly balance and paced, level design(and by that I mean layout) is good enough if a bit small. The game is too simplified and missing normal balancing themes and rules it like FO3 its a train wreck you may get varying mileage from.
I can over look story and characters in a heart beat if here is something there I enjoy Dark Messiah is a highly under appreciated game IMO while its a bit clumsy and cumbersome the AI is alone some of the best seen in a FP game in a decade.....
IMO a dailog tree and morality/karma system should do 3 things first off you have 5 options to chose from very bad/evil response, bad ass/selfish response , neutral response selfishly good response holy man savior response. These responses and your actions do 3 things the Frist is to raise or lowers what the NPC you are talking to, next it sets the general regions(town area or area around a town or cluster of towns) thoughts of you and then it sets the score for what the world thinks of you. Also for stealing and thievery there is a huge difference in being seen and not being seen,some fable dose rather well IMO.
All of this goes to how the world sees you and thus how the NPCs treat you, you can make it so that good area treat you as a criminal if you are playign a bad guy and bad areas treat you as a sibling. Which is another thing I am shocked RPGs anywhere have not done something better with, in fable the guild treats both hero and hero turned villain with respect thats beyond silly. It should be that if you become a villain the good parts of towns hate you as do the guards, at night its easier to slip into and get to the bad parts of town to find a meal a bed or weapons....even Fallout 1-2 dose a poor job at it...... oh well I will stop rambling now...
edit
rambling game maker mode
Specking of star control I been thinking how to make a new one.
Frist off have a nice 4D grid where you place ships and what not. This is RTS mode you do RTS like things. Now for the fun bit you can get off your command chair and explore youer ship, even play the class ST games or a ST game like it. Then you can get into another ship via Doppler tech and plot it. you can take a fighter wing and try and fight and take down other fighters or carriers, Ship flying mode is rather simple think shadow sqaudern/wind comander with acouple extra buttons or SW Xwing/Tie fighter with 4 or 5 less buttons . You can upgrade all kinds of stuff and take to various people to find new ways to save on doing stuff and such.