Dragon Age - Review @ GameVisions

A very positive review of Bioware's crpg Dragon Age posted over at GameVisions, giving the game that rare score, 100% :

…the question was: "…is this truly Baldur's Gate III?" The answer is a resounding yes! It has its caveats and unfulfilled wishes, but no game is perfect, and some (editor included) have found that BGII lost some of the open charm of the original BG, so the value of each title must stand on its own. But were this to bear the the actual title of BGIII (and feature Elminster somewhere within) no one would find it to be out of place. Despite a slow-going mandatory set-piece at Ostragar immediately following the origin story, the game rapidly opens up to a much larger and entangled world, and every element one would look for in a new Bioware fantasy RPG is accounted for. It's rare that a game gets an absolute perfect score, at best, a 99% is warranted for a few minor flaws, but in this very rare case I'm issuing a perfect 100%. There was so much that could have gone wrong that didn't. So many places for fans to feel let down where they weren't. There's no such thing as complete perfection in a game, so 100% must stand, not for true perfection, but for attaining as close to perfection as any human can make it. Much like the Star Trek franchise reboot in theaters, this pulls in a new audience, pleases, even enamors old fans, and makes no serious missteps in the process. It even creates a fair console port of an old PC-centric franchise from the days when PC-centric games existed, while providing a true PC game experience in an era where such things are rare indeed….

More information.

It's not the claim that the game is near-perfect that is so ridiculous, but the score. And even that only serves to exposing a ridiculous system, as the whole rationale behind the "100%" shows. I wish reviewers and buyers would rely less on scores and more on what the reviewer writes.

"There's no such thing as complete perfection in a game, so 100% must stand, not for true perfection, but for attaining as close to perfection as any human can make it.

And 99% is thinking, "WTF?"

I've almost finished DA now and the more I've played, the more gripes I have with it.

I give it a resounding……85%.

It's a good game, not even a great game. It's like playing KotOR all over again without any of the franchise attachment. The level & loot scaling is really starting to get to me, it's painfully obvious. I don't think they even tried to hide it.

Go from nobody to sole hero, save the world vs the evil, beware the political intrigue that's going to get in your way and talk to your companions until you've exhausted their dialog every time you're in camp. Don't forget to stop off and do the "morally challenging" sidequest on your way to saving the world!

100% doesn't stand for a perfect game, when do people understand… it's reviewer's tilt.

There's no such thing as complete perfection in a game, so 100% must stand, not for true perfection, but for attaining as close to perfection as any human can make it.

Good thing there hasn't been anything to patch in it then.. oh wait a minute..

Nope, they could have made this better. Whether it could have been made better with the resources and timeline they had, I'm not sure, but this sound bit doesn't seem to imply any kind of resource bias on the score.

The good things in DA are certainly good enough to be blinding, obviously so much that the inherent flaws might not be apparent on first sight to everyone. Under that light however, such a score seems premature at best, even when considering the disclaimer.

While DA was among the best games I've played while playing, which for most people is probably all that matters, I wouldn't include it in any of my personal top lists for various reasons.

Well I like it enought to agree. It's about as good as an RPG can get.

If you like the Baldur's Gate style game and consider it a favorite, I don't understand why this wouldn't rank up there as well.

If you like a first person style RPG better, then those are style preferences.

Originally Posted by LuckyCarbon
Go from nobody to sole hero…

That depends completely on your origin. In some you are FAR from "nobody" at the start.

And also you start out relatively competent as compared to many other RPGs where if something sneezes at you you die. Mass Effect was also this way and I like this trend in RPGs.

I had to stop reading halfway through the first paragraph.

Complete garbage. I almost get the impression that he received incentives from Bioware to write that.

I don't have anything against DAO, and I'm playing it through a second time just to feel what life is like as a mage (hint: much, much easier, despite moving up to Hard). So I appreciate some enthusiasm.

But near perfect it isn't. 90% feels about right, 95% is overly gushing, 100% is… well it must be nice to be so easy to please.

The score would make more sense in the ABSENCE of the BG reference. I mean, look at Baldur's Gate I and II, and then just imagine a game just like them in size and depth, only updated and enhanced. Then imagine there's no parts that annoy you at all. That's what a 100% RPG looks like.

But that's not what DAO looks like. It's a good game, but come on.

I don't remember BG II receiving many 100% reviews.

Dragon Age must be ASTONISHINGLY excellent.

No game could ever be really 100%. However, having said that a numerical rating should depend on the criteria for that rating. Here we use a 1-5 scale for our reviews. Giving a game a 5 would NOT mean it was perfect (or why have that number in your scale, especially when we don't use half scores). All a 5 would mean is that the game meets all OUR criteria for that score and being perfect is not one of those criteria!!

Agreed - every added level of granularity suggests a greater amount of supposed objectivity, which is of course an illusion … as though 87% is better than 85%.

As for the review, I call it more 'frothing fanboi' than 'paid off'

A review score is an abstraction designed to give a quick idea of how good a game is. A score of x out of x does not imply that the game is perfect. If you only ever give out a maximum score of x - 1 out of x, on the grounds that no game is perfect, then you're effectively just scoring out of x - 1 instead of x.

I could go into a longer reductio ad absurdum to illustrate why the notion that "a score of 100% means perfection" is false, but it's not worth the bother.

Incidentally, a modern-day Baldur's Gate II with no serious flaws, is exactly how I'd describe DA.

If you decide on a rating scale, you should be able to use it in full. Or do you think no one should get an A in school, because no human is perfect? If you say full points should not be given to anything (or anyone) then you simply install a different actual rating scale, but don't admit to it. It's a real problem though - I work in academia, and in a lot of places rating systems are completely out of whack - usually in the reverse direction, where a B is suddenly already considered a bad grade because 80% gets an A…
But if you have a rating scale from 0 to 100 (wether thats a good idea or not is a different matter), then you should have some rare games that get a 0 and some rare games that get a 100.

See, Aussies agree!!

Well, it might be "Baldur's Gate 3", because there's no guarantee that a sequel to BG2 would surpass it (more often than not, sequels are not superior). However, it does not surpass BG1 or 2 in my opinion. If DA:O was a sequel to BG, it would simply end up being the worst in the series. Of course, "worst" doesn't mean a whole lot in this context, as the two BG games are both on my top 5 RPG list. DA:O might become a top 10 given a few DLCs or an add-on.

WTF indeed. I agree with around 85%. A good game but nothing more. And not even in the same league as the Baldur's Gate games. Dragon Age is possibly one of the most over-rated games that I have ever seen in recent past.

The 7 to 10 scale is dead; long live the 99-100 scale. Professional game reviews are a form of incest.