Nerevarine
Keeper of the Watch
- Joined
- November 18, 2010
- Messages
- 1,022
So every time an older game is overwhelmingly favored over a newer game it's automatically nostalgia?
Of course not. Personally, I have had a great deal of fun playing classics that I missed out on when they were initially released, and there's something about some of the classics that is just…better. They have more character, and a lot of that can be attributed to their relative simplicity, which seemingly forced the developers to inject more personality into the games to make up for the lack of technological bells and whistles. It's unfortunate that so many newer games have lost that charm and creative spirit. In short, the classics are remembered as such for a reason, and they have not been surpassed in many ways to this day.
However, a lot of people never fairly consider that a newer game might be better in some aspects than the classics that inspired it. I don't like using the "nostalgia" argument very often, because that's been used as an unfair defense of games like DA2, but I think BG fans are a bit nitpicky when judging DA:O. Perhaps some people just don't want a new game to be better than an old favorite, so they overly criticize a newer game to justify to themselves why the favorite is "objectively better." I imagine the same thing will happen with Skyrim; Morrowind fans will come up with all sorts of wild arguments to justify Morrowind's status as the "best Elder Scrolls game" while completely ignoring its flaws and unfairly magnifying any faults of Skyrim.
Keep in mind that I don't think that you are blinded by nostalgia JDR, as I've seen enough of your posts to see that you mostly keep an open mind for newer games and I believe you when you say that for you, BG is objectively better. I guess I've gone off-topic into a "nostalgia analysis in general," so I'll stop here .
Maybe Gothic isn't actually better than Arcania. It could be that nostalgia is simply twisting our perception.
Ah, so that's why I didn't like Arcania! It was pure nostalgia for the older Gothics! Games like Arcania and DA2 are why I hate using the nostalgia argument and try to avoid using it unless I really think it's necessary .
I don't think they're even close in that aspect, but obviously some people have a higher tolerance of repetitiveness than I do.
You basically fought the same 4-5 enemies over and over again in DA, regardless of where you were in the world, with very few exceptions. Both games had filler combat, but the difference is that BG at least displayed a large variety of enemies, rather than just having you slay an endless supply of Darkspawn for the most part.
I'll admit that the BG series did have the advantage of being created from an IP that already had hundreds of monster types to choose from. If you look at it that way, then it's probably not really fair to compare them.
BG may have had more enemy types that the player could encounter, but many of them could be defeated using the same strategies. So I guess your point is more from an immersion/atmosphere standpoint? Again, I completely agree that BG was better in this area, with several unique enemy types that required new tactics (my first encounters while still early on in the game with invisible enemies, trolls, and a few others come to mind as very basic examples of encounters that required new tactics), but there were still a lot of encounters that didn't force you to abandon the tried and true methods of your basic party strategy and felt like "filler combat."
Combine that with the dungeons that are oftentimes a major headache to maneuver through - I can't for the life of me understand how the narrow passageways that a full party can barely fit through (don't even try using formations) weren't fixed - along with a magic system that requires constant micromanagement, and you get a lot of repetitive gameplay in BG too. Then again, I think both games have flaws that the other didn't have, and that's why I have a hard time deciding which is better. They are both great experiences imo, and I could go either way depending on which one I'm playing at the moment, with maybe a slight edge to DA:O.
Perhaps we can come to a simple agreement that Dragon Age was a welcome return to a gameplay style that had sadly been abandoned . Unfortunately, it has abruptly been abandoned once again, and I don't see another Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age coming along any time soon. It's really unfortunate that the Infinity Engine was outright abandoned; it's aged well enough that I think it could absolutely still be used with great success today.
- Joined
- Nov 18, 2010
- Messages
- 1,022