oh go blow a dwarf already, Tan!
But I guess you'd actually have to play the game youve got as the focus of your little crusade!
But I guess you'd actually have to play the game youve got as the focus of your little crusade!
oh go blow a dwarf already, Tan!
You know, there are counselors trained to deal with people with your mental condition…. i dont care where you get help, just please get it. Soon
My mental condition is called intelligence, something you'll never have.
Wow, have we come to this? Hey, I'm no angel, but RPGWatch seriously was always different from all teh interwebz as far as this stuff is concerned. I suck a lot of the time as well, but (almost) never here. Here I just complain about the complainers, but without it turning into a name-calling exercise.
I don't think it's really possible to plan for everything, and extreme popularity - like what happened with WoW - is probably one of the hardest to foresee.
Since the game is great, and I think it's REALLY great so far - I'm going to cut them some slack. But communication is important and I think they should keep the lines open.
I still haven't gotten my redeem codes yet, but that's an EA store issue and not a Bioware one. That doesn't mean I like the concept of DLC, as I despise it, but I can hardly fault businessmen for being greedy. That's kinda the motivation for becoming one, I think. When art survives the business process, as is the case here, I don't want to come down too hard on that side of it.
Basically, this is the game I didn't think could happen ever again. Unless the game changes significantly after ~30 hours, this is the first masterpiece with true AAA production levels that I've seen in years and years. To put it another way, I think this is the first piece of genuine art with that kind of investment behind it, that I've seen in the industry for a LONG time. I didn't expect that from Bioware after Jade Empire and Mass Effect, that's for sure. I expected quality mainstream entertainment, certainly, but not this.
That means I now have a reason to support the business side of things, even if I hate what it does in almost every other case.
He says that my family was gang raped and you have the audacity to say other people are name calling.
I'd like to post an intelligent counter to DArtagnan's praise of Dragon Age as art and dismissal of Mass Effect in the same breath, but I just can't bring myself to it right now.
Alrik, skavenhorde and co., your little clan doesn't impress me, at all.
Please try and refrain from personal insults and name-calling. (As I've said before, I have enough of this at home since I live in Denmark where people are calling each other all sorts of names - I don't like it happening here). There's an internet expression called 'don't feed the troll' that might be of use here, I think?
So no one is allowed to tell Tan to get over himself?
However, with those negative aspects aside, it was a marvellous science fiction movie with "decent" action gameplay to back it up. That's kinda what I felt about it.
Dragon Age seems to be catering to enthusiasts primarily, and it's certainly made AND designed with some serious enthusiasm for depth and complexity - without entirely becoming "grognard". Everything flows so well together, and it's made without much concern like "oh no, what will casuals think of this difficulty, this amount of dialogue, or this level of text-based background material"
Oh well, maybe it's just the Eurogamer review (6/10) that put that thought in my mind, as the rest of the world seems to like it well enough.
Oh, I thought you were one of several who back then complained about the setting being derivative and unoriginal, wishing for more innovative ideas being implemented in games. Someone quoted an author as an example.
I also was under the impression that you meant with art the "content" part of Dragon Age: the characters, story, setting, races, etc. all of which are at least as derived from earlier works as Mass Effect.
While I think it would be interesting to have truly innovative storytelling in a video game rather than rehashing tried and true stereotypes, for me that is not a requirement for enjoying myself. Personally, I don't even need fresh game mechanics in every time, something every reviewer clamours for in almost every review they write (especially in adventure games, wtf?).
If your "true art" remark pertains more to game mechanics, then we'll have an entirely different discussion.
And I'd argue that Mass Effect also had a great deal of depth, complexity and dialogue—but of course then I'm talking about setting again, not gameplay. You would spent a good part of the game talking to characters or reading the Codex (if you wanted it). I agree that Dragon Age takes it all a bit further, especially on the tactics and difficulty levels, something I'm painfully noticing in the Xbox 360 version. At first, I thought the basic gameplay would be the same, but now I fear that the PC version may be a significantly different experience. More tactical and "flowing" (as you put it), that is. They tried to make it more like Mass Effect on console.
Oh well, maybe it's just the Eurogamer review (6/10) that put that thought in my mind, as the rest of the world seems to like it well enough.
Eurogamer gave it 8/10.
I took it more as an homage than creative theft - mostly because the developers have been quite frank about the game being a mixture of various established sci-fi works.
Mass Effect was good, but Dragon Age takes it to a whole new level - but that's just my opinion.
It's my opinion that it's impossible not to derive from other works in games of this nature. It's more what you do with that and how much thought you pour into your work.
It's my personal opinion that the work poured into Dragon Age in terms of story and setting is more thorough than what went into Mass Effect. But that's just my impression of the games, and I can't know for sure.
Mass Effect generally suffered HEAVILY from giving players ~"+1 damage" with each skill point and the gear literally being "Gun type X level 12" up from level 11. I have a hard time coming up with something less imaginative and less pleasing in terms of gameplay.
I'll gladly detail the kind of things I'm talking about, if it's not clear as of yet.
Dragon Age drowns you in written background lore. I think a lot of casual gamers will feel overwhelmed by that
But unlike Mass Effect, you have quite extensive dialogue choices and you're "forced" to read long sentences and not just three words with the main character forming the sentence himself. The conversations are generally much longer and a LOT more involved.
At least keep in mind that I've given this a lot of thought, and that since gaming is my primary passion - it's not just random thoughts