Dragon Age 3 - What we want to see @ PC Gamer

PC Gamer muses on what they want to see in Dragon Age 3. Here's a good observation:

Story And Game Integration. It also needs to actually play by its own rules. To pick one element, the Circle of Mages is an interesting idea in lore-terms, but one that the game routinely breaks over its knee by filling the world with blood mages on the grounds that mages are fun to fight, by having guards completely ignore you wandering around in a mage’s robe and holding a mage’s staff and having fireball battles in the streets of Kirkwall, and by the game simply not having the guts to instil spellcasting with the risk it’s supposed to have. Mages can be taken over by demons from the Fade at any point? Yeah, right. Not if they’re the player character of a 20+ hour RPG, they can’t.
This kind of thing simply breaks the fiction, and even if you can find some “But Elves Are Nymphomaniac Nudists In The Lore!” type justification, makes the world far less interesting than if Bioware had actually changed things. Some things can obviously be handwaved. Making the entire plot of Dragon Age 2 unsupported by Dragon Age 2 can’t. Dragon Age 3 needs to be built around the rules as established so far, rather than taking the easy road and hoping we just don’t notice.

More information.

What I would love to see would be the project in the hands of Obsidian. Of course that will be impossible, but I hate the direction where Bioware is going with this franchise. Dragon Age: Origins was a promising starting point, but in my opinion the semplifications made with Dragon Age II were a big step in the wrong direction.

I think (hope?) BioWare learned their lesson with DA2. I think #3 will be somewhere closer to #1, although probably not close enough for much of the fanbase.

And PCGamer gave a 94 review for DA2?

At this point I don't think Bioware can please everybody. They can try but past history of there last two games shows this. David Gaider himself pondered this on his blog.

They already made what we want to see - Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening. It was fantastic, as was the feedback and sales. I fail to see the problem. It's a winning recipe.

Dragon age: the RTS

Originally Posted by xSamhainx
Dragon age: the RTS

Why not halo has one. I wouldn't mind a Mass Effect rts game either.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Why not halo has one. I wouldn't mind a Mass Effect rts game either.

Except that the "S" stands for strategy, and Bioware seems to have forgotten how to have that in their games.

What I'd like to see is an end to EA trying to make anything… Just dump this IP already..

Either go single character full real time like dark souls or skyrim or stay party based and go back to DAO but please get rid of the RTWP on speed combat.

Bring back the grey wardens, not sure why but I really got invested in them in DAO. Also bring back skills, sneaking so I can scout ahead, interesting npc's like shale and make a living world not one where people stand in the same place for 10 yrs. oh and real quests.

Make it bigger than 1 city and get rid of amazon stores in my house in place of crafting.

That would be a starting point.

I agree with most of this author's list of changes. The only one I disagree with is "no character voice." Hawke's flippant, sarcastic tone was the highlight of DA2 for me. Wasn't a fan of the hollow-eyed, staring into space gazes of DA:O. Mute protagonists work in Skyrim, not in something were there are loads of cinematic, dialogue-driven cutscenes. Just my humble opinion… I know others disagree.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
At this point I don't think Bioware can please everybody. They can try but past history of there last two games shows this. David Gaider himself pondered this on his blog.

I think this is very true. There is one group of gamers that want Bioware games to be the PC-only party-based RPGs of old and another group that wants Bioware games to be cinematic action games. They're trying to cater to both… and that's a very difficult balance to find.

Originally Posted by Maylander
They already made what we want to see - Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening. It was fantastic, as was the feedback and sales. I fail to see the problem. It's a winning recipe.

They were fantastic… as long as you played on the PC. The pause and play strategy style doesn't work well with a controller for consoles, and the result was awkward. That was one of the big criticisms for DA:O. I'd love for them to go back to making games geared for the PC foremost, but we all know that will not happen.

Action/RPG Choices. Ignoring the dreadful waves mechanic, I didn’t mind the more active combat of Dragon Age 2. With Bioware’s resources though, it would be good to see a choice between classic, hardcore RPG combat and something faster that can be either more exciting, or simply skip to the next bit of the story a la Mass Effect 3′s Narrative Mode. Bioware already made the (arguably bad) decision to split its audience between the two styles. Neither can really be left out of the next game.

This. Everything else in the article is nitpicking.

Originally Posted by Maylander
They already made what we want to see - Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening. It was fantastic, as was the feedback and sales. I fail to see the problem. It's a winning recipe.

I agree completely. They simply wanted to expand their target market, presumably under pressure from the Powers That Be (EA) to make even more money. Now that they have been assimilated completely, I think that their 'RPG' games will continue the relentless march towards full blown FPS with 'RPG elements' complete with many a cinematic interlude. These are not really games I want to play.

@dpc76: As for Controllers being not being able to handle RTWP sensibly, that suggests a lack of dev time on a well designed control scheme for controllers, rather then a fundamental issue with supporting such games on consoles. If they did a straightforward/naive mapping then yes, it probably wouldn't work too well.