Dragon Age - Preview @ Games Radar
 

Games Radar has a preview of Dragon Age that treads familiar ground but still provides a reasonable introduction. Here's a bit on Origins:
More information.

"BioWare's plan is nothing less than a reinvention of the genre, of the way we play."

Man, how many times are they gonna reinvent, redifine or re-whatever this genre? How about just producing some good games from the previous redefenition generation for a change?

This seems like an incredibly ambitious game. I wish that it wasn't going to take so long to get here. The last game that came out like this was Baldurs Gate 2, and that was seven years ago!

I think that what they are trying is interesting … I just hope they can pull it off …

Or better yet, when are companies going to stop lying about reinventing whatever it is when they're just recycling the same things? Just call these games for what they are, be honest.

KotOR and NWN were both disappointments for me so I am not overly optimistic on how this will turn out, I'm thinking it will be another Fable (i.e. crap).

Leaving aside marketingspeak, which I love with all my heart, because it does help sell the game to people who do in fact believe that we've reinvented the entire concept of gaming every time we ship a product… I'm really looking forward to playing Dragon Age. It's been long enough since I've been on the project that almost everything storywise has changed (and for me, that's good, because knowing the story inside and out tends to rob it of its drama a bit).

I really like how the combat already looks, and the story they're writing is one gigantic love letter to people who want stuff dark, grim, and choice-based. Heaven only knows if that's the way it'll ship -- stuff gets cut and changed for reasons that the designers don't always, or even often, get a say in -- but if it ships as it's being written right now, I think that anyone who liked the breadth and depth of BG2 is gonna like it. I think that good trumps innovative, despite the fact that a lot of people use "innovative" to mean "good"… and I think that Dragon Age is gonna be very, very good.

Personally I'll take good over innovative any day of the week.

Innovation is necessary to keep the flow going so the market doesn't stagnate (a lesson EA has utterly failed to understand) but that certainly doesn't mean that every title has to be innovative. Then again, I play for the thrill of experiencing everything for the first time and letting the story capture me and take me for a ride in the magical world of gaming …

erm, less acid trip, more coherency, okey dokey … :blush:

Anyway, I totally agree with Patrick, that it is a lot more important that a game is good than that it is innovative.

So it helps sell a game by misleading people on what the game actually accomplishes.

There is a nice Dilbert comic that shows how it used to be possible to make people swoon by using words like 'dang', but now you have to use combinations of expletives that make them self-combust to even get noticed. When every game out there is 'ground breaking' and 'earthshattering' and so on, you need to do something to compete for mind-space. That is the reality of the marketplace.

Shall I explain how that Crest toothpaste commercial is actually just using marketing hyperbole when it says that it's going to change the way you brush forever, and how a new kind of toothpaste can't actually make a toothbrush fly through a waterfall in slow motion? I mean, you've apparently misled, and you're going to be disappointed when your toothbrush doesn't start flying.

Or should we perhaps just acknowledge that marketing-speak is part of our society and move on?

Crap - I want my money back!

He's in the midst of a pissing contest in another thread, perhaps that has him feeling antagonistic …

Dude, me too. I figured that it was the tartar control making the brush more aerodynamic or something.

I also don't want to entirely downplay the innovation Dragon Age has got going. Right now, you can change some pretty big chunks of the game with your personal choices. It's gutsy (and hellishly complex) to put long-term consequences on your actions in any kind of compelling way -- it's easy to make the villager shout, "Hey, you killed the dragon!" if you killed the dragon, but if you can kill the dragon in three different ways, and each way makes you some allies and some enemies, and those allies or enemies are interacting with you 20 hours later, offering different ways to complete a new quest or blocking off the easy way because of what you did to them before…

I'm not explaining this well, because any attempt to explain it well gets into spoiler territory, but it's a lot more reactive and a lot more complex than just "Group A likes you, Group B hates you". Assuming that stuff makes it into the final game, that's going to add a lot of replay value in terms of people on the forums realizing how many different ways some major events could go down.

Your condescending manner is neither amusing nor particularly relevant since the issue is not about my inability to understand advertising (or rather, your intention of trying to pass me off as ignorant given your intention to somehow "explain it" to me) but about how you've just claimed to enjoy marketingspeak because it allows your company to sell products based on features they don't have by lying about them.

Also, your point is misleading. Does the commercial at any point claims that one of the toothpaste's featues is that it will make a toothbrush fly through a waterfall? No. It claims it will change the way we brush forever which is hyperbolic and devoid of any meaning to the end consumer because it's not being used as representative of the product's features.

Should we exempt something ethically reprehensible from criticism because it's part of our society?

The other thread isn't so much a pissing contest, more like someone who enjoys chess and seems to think everything else pales in comparison. There are far more interesting things to be pissy about ;) Besides, I don't let whatever happens on one thread to affect another. I don't blow off steam on people who have nothing to do with my problems. And that thread certainly isn't bothering me enough to do it elsewhere.

But… Antagonistic? What? All I did was ask Patrick a question. That's hardly antagonistic, which is more than I can say of his reply. Actually, that's about the second time he's had this attitude for no good reason even after all I did was respond in a friendly way.

I thought it was kind of amusing. It scored well with the "me" audience.

If you're reading my first line as sincere, it's actually about your inability to understand sarcasm.

Edit: For context, here's my line, clearly sincere in all aspects:

"Leaving aside marketingspeak, which I love with all my heart, because it does help sell the game to people who do in fact believe that we've reinvented the entire concept of gaming every time we ship a product…"

Really? No sarcasm at all? None? Okay. I'm sure it's just me.

Okay Patrick, if you say so. Apparently I jumped the gun.

Well, I certainly took it as sarcasm; it's the sort of thing I'd write, but then I enjoy sarcasm!! (perhaps too much :) )
I'm actually really looking forward to this game and hope I won't be disappointed. Sure, it won't live up to all the hype, it will have some features or aspects I don't like; no game is perfect, but Bioware have a good solid track record for producing quality games. Who else is there with a chance to make an RPG the vast majority of 'real' gamers will enjoy?

What about the fakes? They're people too, you know.

Dragon Age sound okayish at this point but I suspect disappointment is going to happen anyway. Some of the more tantalizing stuff has been done away with, like governing nations through necromancy. That sounded awesome, really.

Another introduction hung-up on graphics and animation, as if lip-syncing and facial expressions are the be-all and end-all of immersion and tacit points.
BG2's characters managed to convey their thoughts and feelings on stuff without switching between talking heads, because it had competent VAs and writing. If the tones and inflections used in the spoken word are done properly, or the text reads as intended, I don't need to see an artificial head mugging at me to get the point (which, without meaning to sound churlish, is usually quite melodramatic, so difficult to not understand).
Then again, I guess you have to keep upping the ante in a 3D engine. I just tend to think it'd be better to work on the machinery and gameplay of games, then do the odd graphical flare here and there, if you absolutely must.

It's a bit sad that we have to wait 7-odd years only to have a game hoping to have the same level of depth and quality as the 7 year-older.

Still, DA has always sounded highly ambitious, which is admirable, and I'm certainly looking forward to it. Let's hope the cutlist doesn't grow too much on the run-up to release.

A thing I actually never quite understood, is,

why does it always have to be dark and grim ?

Honestly, I have seldem seen RPGs that are colourful. Consoles, maybe. WOW, maybe, Fable, maybe, but I've never played them.

There seems to be an unwritten law that mediaval-themes RPGs must be "dark and grim". As if only worlds in which all light colours had been sucked by some sort of demon entity are fun and actually playable.

On the Larian boards someone ironically wrote he had never seen darker grass than in Divinity. And the beginning of Beyond Divinity wasn't "funny", either.

Why does everything have to be dark, grim, and battle-based ?

Cause it represents a period of history we call the DARK AGES!! :)

Maybe it's "earth-quaking" the next time ?

Only if they are using some version of the Quake engine!! :)

LOL ! :D

I like your dry humour ! ;)

One quick point of clarification:

Metaphorically dark and grim.

I have no idea what the art looks like -- what I've seen looks nice, but not particularly dark. I'm hoping it bucks the "brown, with lots of bloom" trend that I've seen in so many recent games.

I'm pretty much talking about the story in terms of the darkness. Picture the love child of all the crap that Conan has to deal with and the nasty political fighting and underhanded tactics of "A Game of Thrones", and that's what you're gonna be getting.

As far as why it has to be grim and not happy or funny… I don't think they all do. But Dragon Age is. It's all a matter of what you're going for in terms of feel. Dragon Age wants to make you feel like you're in "A Game of Thrones" when you talk with people and "Conan" when you deal with monsters. Mass Effect wants to make you feel like you're in a classic action SF movies. Revolver is… unannounced. :)

I personally love all the books of "A Song of Ice and Fire", but I have yet to see a game that can truly make you feel deeply involved in the political turmoil as the books can. In the best case you are little more than a pawn or a puppet.

I actually don't remember *any* RPG that's *not* "dark and grim" - not in terms of graphics, not in terms of story.

The world Aventuria (the world of the Realms of Arcania series) - to draw an example from the P&P RPGs - has shifted towards a world that is much darker and much "grimmer" than before as well. And most of the fans want that. The feeling I get is that would really want something that is so dark and grim that it would be like … Blade Runner ? I don't remember any movie that can serve as an example of what I mean. One of the recent authors for the Dark Eye RPG system said in an interview that she likes this world "grey and dirty".

To put it rather ironically : I get the impression as if RPG makers are more or less Gothics in their feelings - considering how dark & grim RPGs often are.

To put it cynically, I'd say that most gamers would even welcome the change of our world into a world of ashes and ruins. They would welcome it with a great "Hurrah!" if all colours of all of our meadows would was out and leave nothing but grey, colourless plants behind.

Many people in the official Drakensang forum actually battle to get an "evil" style of play implemented. They want to be "really evil", to put it cynically, I think it would be fun for them to destroy EVERYTHING. They don't realize that The Dark Eye system is an "her-system", as I call it, and in prociple does not allow evil player characters. You play an good character, and everything's evil turns immediately into an NPC. At least in principle. Of course there are P&P players managing to play more or less "evil" characters. But the goal in *every* adventure is something good - that's embedded within the layout of the adventures. There are no "evil" ways of solving an adventure officially implemented. That is not the style of this system.

I still don't get it. Why is darkness and evilness so much "fun" ? Why do kiddies destroy guesbooks of a good friend of mine ? Why do they feel proud when they behave themselves as trolls and disrupt forum communities ? Why do hooligans find so much fun in killing innocent policepersons (happened in Italy a few weeks ago) ?

Why doies everything have to be dark, grim, grey, dirty, evil ? Is this kind of an Escapism ? One into destruction because we are not allowed to destroy within our societies ? Is this the reason why people become shootists like at Columbine, Erfurt and elsewhere, killing innocent school pupils ? Is this the reason, FPS games are "fun" ? Because they allow to kill other people within a game - a thing that is not allowed within society ?

I don't get it, because I'm different. My heart of full of deep love for nature and everything that lives - as long as it does not willingly kill other beings. I'm too sensitive for this world, I guess.

You've never played a bright game? What about Oblivion? It's so bright I'm close to getting an epileptic seizure when I do a 360 spin in-game. Sure, it's got a few demons here and there, but that doesn't mean it qualifies as a "dark and grim" game. The Gothic games are "dark and grim", most games are not.

What is fun about such games? They're not fairytales, they're unforgiving, ruthless and challenging. At least that's what I associate with such games. They're not just the classic clichè: "Chosen ones' rise to fame and ultimate super power, saving the world with ease".

Alrik, if you ask your question over in the Religion Forum, I'll answer it for you!! :)

I guess the Games are a Mirror of Society… no Gods, Kings, Countrys or People worth fighting for - no Black and White anymore, only Grey and maybe Dark Grey, so you know in which direction to swing the sword… and why not… thats closer to the truth anyway.

Aventuria is a nice Example… back in the 80's it was a cross between medieval Germany, Fairy-Tales and probably a tiny bit spirit of the 70s …

Back in the Days the Enemys were Smugglers, Bandits, Slavers and Cannibals, today we fight Necromancers, Cultists, undead Dragons and evil Gods. Where once were noble Kings and Knights are now bickering Nobles, each with his/her own agenda… it's ok this way - it feels closer to the "Zeitgeist", the "Spirit of our time".

OT: Dragon Age will be just another KOTOR - all the signs are there, Bioware has lost it's mojo. There goes my last hope for a decent intelligent CRPG.

Sorry, I'd like to, but my PC is too weak for that and I just can't afford a new one right now.

@Corwin : I know what you mean. :)

@Fenris : You brought it to the point. Thank you for making clearer what I tried to explain about Aventuria. :)

Alrik, I'll respond to your PM later this week; I'm not near my PC most of this week, except for a very short time each day!! In general, yes, today's games do in many ways reflect the changes in our society as one might expect!!

You're right about this. And a lot of what is called "innovative" nowadays isn't really innovative, but rather fad following.

I hope that you're right about Dragon Age. It's about time that Bioware got back to making a truly great PC RPG, which they haven't done since Baldurs Gate 2 (I still liked Kotor though).

And there is a difference between 'stylistic' and innovative - the PSP is going through some nice stuff visually right now, such as Death Jr 2's HDR, the Legend of Heroes games lens flare, and so on. But each of the games is pedestrian and not remotely innovative.