But that's how all non-hands on previews work. So are you saying all those previews are useless or just the negative ones? And who have we to blame for that anyway?

Well, all pages presented so far were mediocre at best and often just laughable, especially in the context of all the "mature" talk.
Books where you have to skip pages to get to the good stuff suck.
Dragon Age: Search for the Good Content.
Maybe the context will change this, maybe not. Worrisome reactions are perfectly justified.

Personally, if Dragon Age will turn out as Plan 9 of rpgs, I´m fine with it :).
My ironic mustache is ready.

we havent seen enough of any significant content yet, not enough for people to be "disappointed" overall in the game - that's what I'm saying. Who of the disappointed is actually playing the game? Promotional cinematic trailers, I'm sorry, are not indicative of the actual gameplay. Previews like this are what they are - snippets of an overall picture taken out of context. People sitting around watching someone else play.
Meanwhile, I'm seeing comments from readers here and on that site to the extent of it dropping off their lists.

REally? over this kinda stuff?

I just think it's funny, this coming from a crowd that runs people up a flagpole for not thoroughly playing a game to the end before they write a review of it, getting ready to turn their back on a game that hasnt even been released yet.

Sure. Why not? Previews and promotional trailers are enough for some people to become interested in a game. Why would they not be a valid reason to become disinterested?

I agree if you're generally dedicated to BioWare and/or impressed by most of their titles, dropping interest over previews seems kind of silly. If it was just DA's presentation in its early days that got you interested, and not the BW name, I can well imagine being turned off it again by this.

How is deciding whether or not to buy a game well before its release-date aberrant behaviour? If you haven't played it, you can't criticize it, but it's not like every one in the world has to give every game in the world a try just to see whether or not they like it. Heck, 's kind of the point of previews.

Maybe these people will be swayed back again by reviews. Gaider certainly hopes so.

On a personal note, I'd like to commend BroNo and DeepO for not feeling that they have to literally re-post the entire post of the person theyre responding to. That's really annoying, to have to be scrolling thru an entire page of re-posts - especially when the response directly follows the post their responding to, and the response is like a sentence. You condense it logically, just posting a snippet maybe of what youre talking about, and let the reader take it from there. Very good, I wish everyone would follow your fine examples of good forum form.

I'm not trying to slight anyone, just realize that it's unecessary waste of pagespace when you could simply quote a piece, or even put the person's name in the response like this "@person-", or "i agree, right on bro" etx


I'm not saying that, I'm saying that theyre gonna form an opinion without playing a game, at least form it based off someone else's experience playing the game. He didnt actually play the game, he hasnt played the game at all, and people are taking his word as some sort of broader critique of the game as a whole and getting all distressed over it. SOMEONE actually put a couple hours into this thing, then come report, and then I'll get my panties in a bunch if need be. Until then, it is what it is - someone's opinion of a snippet, which im sorry, I cannot hold against an entire game

Considering the amount of attention they get with this discussion through this marketing campaign I'd say they just did it right.

Now everyone wants to buy it for only to see whether "the rumors are true".

I bet on that.

Hey! I assume you're talking about me because it's no coincedence that I posted 1 sentence directly under yours. I thought about condensing your post, but it was tiny and I agreed with everything you had to say in it :p Seriously, did you really have to get annoyed with a 2 paragraph quote? It was freaking tiny. I know you did say your not trying to slight anyone or me for that matter since I was the one that did that, but you were the first one who was making any kind of sense. Maybe, I should of just wrote my sentence without quoting, but it was tiny.

I've been around here long enough for you to know I don't do that all the time. You, however, said EXACTLY what I was thinking and you said it much better than I would have. I guess I could of wrote another two paragraphs saying exactly the same thing as you, but with more emotion and not without some kind of WTF are you guys thinking statement. I can't seem to leave out the emotion of a lot of my posts especially when people are being moronic. You, however, can and did. Now get off attacking people like me for their "tiny" requotes and get back to people who are actually arguing with you, not agreeing with you, please. :p

I don't think this preview makes a dent in my expectation. To tell the truth, everything I have seen so far of this game did not excite me. I don't like the atmosphere. I guess I won't like the story, as far as I see it. Everything looks as if they had taken all the things I don't like of many previous games and made a new one from it.

I know that this is all a preliminary impression, and I would be glad to be mistaken here. But at the moment, my expectations are pretty much near zero. And this has nothing to do with that sex scene, which really doesn't bother me at all.

If I was to conduct a new "RPG roundtable", then I'd ask around how the developers of RPGs see romances in general and in terms of importance, actually. I'd also invite the makers of The SIMs for that, just as a contrast opinion.

Dragon Age is a AAA title. It's big, the biggest in RPGs in a long time. For that lone reason, many people will adopt it as their reason to live and become fans of it, just the same as many people reject it as 'not being that good', both sides adopting their positions without any real reason.
Funny thing is, even after a demo is released, the 'fans' will say it's the best game ever done, and the 'not fans' will say "told you so, this game sucks". I find it amusing really.

I have the feeling as if this qwill be a "BG standard", regardless.

I don't know whether it's clear what I mean, but I mean bssically this : The impact on the hardcore RPG players is so that they might put it as a kind of "standard" even now - partly because it is "the biggest one in a long time", as you wrote it.

It is … Kind of beyond competition. Even although there are currently RPGs released, of any kind, the fans might erect Dragon Age as a kind of standard, kind of ignoring that there are other RPGs around …

These are my thoughts just going through my mind …

Hmmm……… got me thinking. If we say there are currently 3 rpg standards we'll call ABC, where A is a triple A title; B a second tier game and C a typical Indie effort, then what do people think are the defining games for each tier; the games by which we subconsciously measure all other games on that tier?

A: Super-high production values, cutting-edge tech. Everything professionally voice-acted, lots of slick animations, graphics at least "XBox 360 level" if not pushing it, polished gameplay, (relatively) bug-free on release. Examples: Oblivion, Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3.

B: Midrange production values. Graphics at "PlayStation 2 level." At least partially voice acted. Fewer and often cruder animations. Good, individual art direction and music. At worst, this is a B-grade copy of an AAA title; at best, it adds personality, story, or gameplay elements that distinguish it and, occasionally, elevate it above AAA titles. Often somewhat buggy on release. Examples: The Witcher, Gothic 3, VtM: Bloodlines, Sacred 1 & 2. (I think Iron Tower's games will fall into this category too, if they ever get around to releasing something anyway.)

C: Screw production values, content is where it's at. These are either much narrower in scope than A or B titles, or much cruder in production values. Graphics are often utilitarian, designed to communicate content rather than establish atmosphere or look good. However, these games can take creative risks: they have unique gameplay, great writing, contain themes or settings that are too hard to digest for the mass market, and so on. Examples: Dwarf Fortress, The Path*, Spiderweb's games, Eschalon.

*Production values are fully B class; instead, the game is very very narrowly scoped in terms of gameplay and content, and therefore succeeds brilliantly.

In purely my own opinion I'd say A is a budget that requires at least a million sales to break even, and games like Oblivion, The Witcher, Mass Effect are defining games.

B is a budget that requires at least 100,000 sales to break even, so perhaps titles like Gothic 1&2, Fallout 1&2 etc?

C is a budget that requires at least 10,000 sales or equivalent in ad revenues to break even. So usually small indie titles fit in here.

That's a pretty good way of breaking them down, but it doesn't address the *expectations* we have of said levels.

I wonder in what category Baldur's Gate gets … And *then* we must of course keep in mind, that means : measure - it against then current technology when it was released, and now.

And then we have other titles, too … I wouldn't know where to put Blizzard's action-RPGs into … Especially since everyone regards them as some kind of "standard" at least to the action-RPG genre, nowadays.
The curious thing is, that Blizzard's action-RPGs weren't in the top categories even then - *and* they sold !

Hm, therefore I think a categorization like AAA, AAB, ABB, BBB, BBC etc. would make some sense - but I must also say that it would be difficult to work that out.

Maybe if we put each letter for a specific part of a game … - But I'm almost sure that some marketing experts already made up such a scheme.

To cut it short, I don't quite know where to put BG and both Blizzard's action-RPGs.

Well the expectations are set and met by the sales targets - so the expectation I have of an 'A' would be that it would sell >1 million. Anything specific would be entirely related to that, for example it would need to appeal to a large enough market, for which you may need things like stability, polish, graphics.. whatever your target market considers important. In today's RPG terms I think that is neccessarily going to involve an element of action gaming in order to get the market size large enough.

If you can cut back costs then you can target a smaller market.

Sacred 2 is an AAA game. It had an 8 digit budget and is one of the few games running on 1080p on consoles. That they would have been well advised to aim a bit lower and polish better is a different story. ;)

I read this post something 20 times, i love the clarity of vision you express, and i'd love to see the production costs decrease, it would also HALVE the production times, usually spent in tech-distress tests. The race for big bloated graphics is a disaster for everyone: now that the crisis is upon us, maybe this feverish boom will blow over, we'll start seeing HUMBLE graphics and ppl will remember that gameplay depth costs nothing, so they can work on that.

But maybe there's a way out of this pseudo malthusian trap for complexity, even with big graphics(if they keep going on). People don't have a clue what multiple paths and non-linearity means, all they know is the game has shiny graphics and there's a sexy hero who does sexy killing blows to poor defenseless dragons. So graphics should BUY those persons in, while there's DEEP non-linear complexity for us. That may work because the average people won't even see those choices, they hack their way thru them with their eyes steady on the bloom and the blood… sort of like what happened with BI's Fallout, everyone could enjoy it, even not noticing all the choices you could make that would affect the story, but loving the gruesome fatalities.

Of course even if the Witcher and Empire Total War managed to do this "compromise", we'll probably have to give up the more extreme aspects of both sides. Still, the Witcher and Total War were DEEP games.

So to get this straight.. you want shiny graphics (to draw some people in), deep non-linear complexity (for others), develop in half the time, and somehow also descrease production costs..! Will it also make my tea for me in the mornings?