Dear Escapist community,
I hope you are all doing fine^^
I am among the, apparently, very few people who got terribly burned by Dragon Age Orgins. The game was sold to me by pretty much every review as a deep, non linear game with high replayability. To me it had none of those (I will explain later). For a long time I wondered how nobody else noticed and in fact kept praising it up to this day. I think I started understanding it when Bioshock Inifinte came out.
I love Bioshock Infinite, but so many people dislike its shallow and mediocre gameplay. These people mostly love FPS games, and as an FPS, Infinite is apparently not very good. It is a mechanics question. When you are big into a genre and played many games in it for a very long time you understand it better then others who have not. I am not an FPS player, in fact I quite loathe the genre, it being to me among the most boring genres in gaming. So the mediocrity of Infinite never stood out for me, because that was pretty much the experience I have with other shooters anyway.
I am a huge fantasy rpg geek instead. Just telling a nice story does not cut it for me.
Let me explain my three points of criticism I stated earlier. (Note: I played the PC version)
Linearity is the least problematic. But I just felt lied to. A game where I always do the same and always end up the same place is linear. I do not care that between ponts B and F I can choose in which order I will do C, D and E. I do not care if I have dialogue options that seem to be very important but end up not changing anything of importance.
For instance: in many reviews the fact that you can choose to either help the elves or the were-wolves was presented as a big thing, but in actuality it just changed a little thing in the last level of the game.
This is a common problem I have also with games like Mass Effect or The Walking Dead. Games that claim your choices matter when they in fact do not. I feel cheated and it breaks imersion on subsequent playthroughs. At that point I prefer a game that just tells a great story then one that needs to account lots of choies you made but needs to funnel them all to the same endpoint through the same route.
The little excursion you had in the middle of Origins, were you could choose in which order to tackle the next few levels also had a horrible side effect. Level Scaling, the worst and most immersion breaking thing you can have in your RPG. It exists basically to cover how badly )or lazily) designed your rpg mechanics are. At that point, choose one or the other, but do not resort to level scaling. If in a Pen & Paper RPG your Gamemaster would start doing that you would kick her/him out or at least demanding a little more effort next time.
DA:O was also heralded of being a deep rpg in the vein of classics in the genre. It was often compared to the Infinity Engine games which I like a lot. Now with those games you had a party of six, allowing you a variety of classe with different specializations. DA obviously only had a party of four characters. By default you are very limited on the RPG mechanics and/or roles you can use. What happens is that these four characters need to be able to do everything in the game, resulting in the characters feeling all pretty much the same. This is less of a problem in an action RPG, but a big one in a "pure" RPG.
In Origins you had three classes and wihtin these classes the choice of abilities you had did not make a big difference. Compared of how different the characters of the people in your party were this was a huge let down to me.
Combat felt very shallow and MMORPG like more concerned with flashy (and gory) effects then with giving you actual tactis you could use. A combat system in which I can't block a path to the enemy feels utterly ridiculos to me at this poimnt in time. It got very frustrating and immensily repetitive to me, because in the end, combined with its shallow mechanics, resulted of me winning every fight in the game the same way.
This all resulted in the worst case scenarion in an RPG for me. While it was adequately fun on the first playthrough, i stopped playing the game in the middle of the second. I could not be asked anymore. So I played through the different origin stories and then gifted away the game, never looking back and to this day not feeling the slightest need to play it again.
Not even mentioning all the little problems like having a damn DLC vendor in your camp...
I am convinced that would Dragon Age Origins have come out five years earlier it would not have gotten a single score over 8. Like the new X-Com, the game proffited from having zero competition or games it could be compared to. Something reviwers apparently need to have to notice the problematic parts of game design.
Now that DA Inquisition is coming out, I do not really know how to handle reviews of it. None of the problems I had with Origins was mentioned in reviews, in fact often the opposite was claimed, giving me the impression that the reviewers are really not that much into RPGs, and don't understand the inner workings of them. Again with Bioshock Infinite you had a much more varied and critical review process, and big FPS fans got the information they needed if they looked at more then one review (which you should do anyway).
So what do you think? I am just expecting to much from the game types I love? I already read and heard that Inquisition would even be more "accessible" and I can hardly imagine how, since DA:O basically took me by the hand and made sure I could not do anything wrong or did not have any meaningful choice.
Or maybe you agree and reviewers should at least talk about these issues even if they will not take them into account for their scores?
I am very curious to read what you all think of that.
I hope you are all doing fine^^
I am among the, apparently, very few people who got terribly burned by Dragon Age Orgins. The game was sold to me by pretty much every review as a deep, non linear game with high replayability. To me it had none of those (I will explain later). For a long time I wondered how nobody else noticed and in fact kept praising it up to this day. I think I started understanding it when Bioshock Inifinte came out.
I love Bioshock Infinite, but so many people dislike its shallow and mediocre gameplay. These people mostly love FPS games, and as an FPS, Infinite is apparently not very good. It is a mechanics question. When you are big into a genre and played many games in it for a very long time you understand it better then others who have not. I am not an FPS player, in fact I quite loathe the genre, it being to me among the most boring genres in gaming. So the mediocrity of Infinite never stood out for me, because that was pretty much the experience I have with other shooters anyway.
I am a huge fantasy rpg geek instead. Just telling a nice story does not cut it for me.
Let me explain my three points of criticism I stated earlier. (Note: I played the PC version)
Linearity is the least problematic. But I just felt lied to. A game where I always do the same and always end up the same place is linear. I do not care that between ponts B and F I can choose in which order I will do C, D and E. I do not care if I have dialogue options that seem to be very important but end up not changing anything of importance.
For instance: in many reviews the fact that you can choose to either help the elves or the were-wolves was presented as a big thing, but in actuality it just changed a little thing in the last level of the game.
This is a common problem I have also with games like Mass Effect or The Walking Dead. Games that claim your choices matter when they in fact do not. I feel cheated and it breaks imersion on subsequent playthroughs. At that point I prefer a game that just tells a great story then one that needs to account lots of choies you made but needs to funnel them all to the same endpoint through the same route.
The little excursion you had in the middle of Origins, were you could choose in which order to tackle the next few levels also had a horrible side effect. Level Scaling, the worst and most immersion breaking thing you can have in your RPG. It exists basically to cover how badly )or lazily) designed your rpg mechanics are. At that point, choose one or the other, but do not resort to level scaling. If in a Pen & Paper RPG your Gamemaster would start doing that you would kick her/him out or at least demanding a little more effort next time.
DA:O was also heralded of being a deep rpg in the vein of classics in the genre. It was often compared to the Infinity Engine games which I like a lot. Now with those games you had a party of six, allowing you a variety of classe with different specializations. DA obviously only had a party of four characters. By default you are very limited on the RPG mechanics and/or roles you can use. What happens is that these four characters need to be able to do everything in the game, resulting in the characters feeling all pretty much the same. This is less of a problem in an action RPG, but a big one in a "pure" RPG.
In Origins you had three classes and wihtin these classes the choice of abilities you had did not make a big difference. Compared of how different the characters of the people in your party were this was a huge let down to me.
Combat felt very shallow and MMORPG like more concerned with flashy (and gory) effects then with giving you actual tactis you could use. A combat system in which I can't block a path to the enemy feels utterly ridiculos to me at this poimnt in time. It got very frustrating and immensily repetitive to me, because in the end, combined with its shallow mechanics, resulted of me winning every fight in the game the same way.
This all resulted in the worst case scenarion in an RPG for me. While it was adequately fun on the first playthrough, i stopped playing the game in the middle of the second. I could not be asked anymore. So I played through the different origin stories and then gifted away the game, never looking back and to this day not feeling the slightest need to play it again.
Not even mentioning all the little problems like having a damn DLC vendor in your camp...
I am convinced that would Dragon Age Origins have come out five years earlier it would not have gotten a single score over 8. Like the new X-Com, the game proffited from having zero competition or games it could be compared to. Something reviwers apparently need to have to notice the problematic parts of game design.
Now that DA Inquisition is coming out, I do not really know how to handle reviews of it. None of the problems I had with Origins was mentioned in reviews, in fact often the opposite was claimed, giving me the impression that the reviewers are really not that much into RPGs, and don't understand the inner workings of them. Again with Bioshock Infinite you had a much more varied and critical review process, and big FPS fans got the information they needed if they looked at more then one review (which you should do anyway).
So what do you think? I am just expecting to much from the game types I love? I already read and heard that Inquisition would even be more "accessible" and I can hardly imagine how, since DA:O basically took me by the hand and made sure I could not do anything wrong or did not have any meaningful choice.
Or maybe you agree and reviewers should at least talk about these issues even if they will not take them into account for their scores?
I am very curious to read what you all think of that.