Dragon Age - E3 Hands On @ Joystiq

Thirded. That was smart. S-M-R-T smart.

Thanks guys, it's a lovely site, and the posts of yours i read so far are great, very insightful.

Quests.Muin said:

the old pc culture is naturally that of the first games ever to appear in a computer, text and graphic adventures. It's the culture of PUZZLES. There's a door and there's a key. A console game for kids tells you exactly where the key is and how to get it. A pc game will refuse that, it'll split the two things and put an INDIRECT HINT on where to get it, the indirectness of the hint being an obstacle between the problem and the solution.

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This hits quite the nail whyI'm constantly thinking/combining of role playing games and adventurte games having a similar background ... To me, RPGs were in general rather about puzzles than about fighting. With my "background" with adventures as my favourite and first genre in gaming (apart from Jump & Run), this is understandable, I think.

Which is I'm also so much against action-RPGs : They don't offer puzzles and no more thinking anymore. In action games, everything is reduced to a "non-thinking", graphics-heavy representation of a game. So, to cut it short, "action" games are in a tendency gravitating towards movies.

If I follow this thought concept, then I think I must say that PS:T is the most "mature" game ever made : Not because of the "dark & gritty" cliché, but because of then inevitable thinking.

Personally, I don't think that "mature games" are about what the marketing people want us make to believe. I even dare to believe that marketing people try to create their own definition of what they thing makes up a "mature game" - and then they do everything to make us believe their kind of definition ... Perhaps this is what happened with the current DA marketing campaign.

(And) Now, this cliché of what makes up a"mature game" could be explicitely directed towards a younger audience which whishes to be oh-so-cool and "mature" ... It's to me as if a teenager sprays the word "sex" on a house wall to appear as a cool guy before others (not to mention with the intention to shock others). It's as if this guy believes that the word "sex" makes a shicking effect on all others ... But me, as a "real mature man", so to say, I can only yawn at this lame attempt - I do know what sex is about, and to me it has no "shocking" effect whatsoever ! Actually, to me, it is even rather the reverse effect : Real sex has a lot to do with love ...


To cut things short, I think we have here a contrast/hiatus between

- what people believe is "mature"
- what "maturity" really IS

That's all.

Oh regarding the thinking and maturity issue i don't think most of the people really claim that what they play is mature, while they're farming quests in some kind of world of clonehammer... online... craft. It's more likely that they believe videogaming shouldn't be taken too seriously, like literature or engaged cinema... but other times it's true... big triple A productions sometimes feature a hollywood story(like Kane&Lynch), so they claim it's the peak of videogaming, that it does everything cinema does, including the staring passively at the screen, may i add... it's also the case with crap like Oblivion and Fallout3, "immersive and realistic" yet it needs less thinking than pac-man.

But most of the time it's probably just low consideration of the medium... after they tell you on tv how videogames are childish and violent and immature, many will start to believe it, it's a rhetorical idea. I remember Chris Taylor interviewed about Space Siege. For some obscure reasons someone associated our beloved Deus Ex with SS... well the man was honest and blunt, in his answer... he said something around this: "no, this game has nothing to do with DE, times are different, the market is different, players don't wanna waste too much time and effort into a videogame anymore"

I couldn't believe mine own eyes.
Anyway for more reflections on thinking taken as a standalone element of a videogame i invite you to read my blog on gamasutra

Let's get back to DAO, i got many things to ask the Bioware folks.