Dragon Age 2 - Laidlaw: "Aware of the concerns"

"That was never my intent, nor the message I wanted to convey."

People who say stuff like this are soulless goons who really have nothing to say at all. I immediately tune them out. He might as well say, "Hi. I'm either lying or thoroughly insincere."

"...a world that, while still very much involving the Grey Wardens and Darkspawn..."

Oh, well, this is good news. I couldn't get through Origins, due in no small part to my spiraling boredom of the endless, inevitable and invariable Darkspawn sprouting from the ground.
 
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This is a critical juncture for BioWare. It gambled recklessly with its goodwill (millions of diehard fans) for the sake of elusive extra sales from a casual teenage audience. The gamble failed. DA2 sold miserably, and a large percentage of those who bought the few copies sold, thought it was tripe.

So it needed vision. Leadership. Courage. Humility. To re-examine what they're doing and how to fix the cock up. Make sure it never happens again. Reverse course if need be. Stick the captain in the brig, if necessary. Then a large part of the 4 million fans that bought DA1 might still be lured back.

Instead, we got Laidlaw saying that the overall direction was just fine and dandy, only a few tweaks here and there, and DA3 will be all set for next spring. As if any self respecting RPG fan was bothered about asset re-use. This was their chance to get back on the straight and narrow. A chance they failed to understand and grasp. BioWare's lesson in choices and consequences.
 
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skavenhorde said:
A little off topic, but I just recently found out about TED talks and I can't get enough of them.

My favorite so far is Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice
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As someone who study psychology I agree with Barry Schwartz.

We actually did our last test in this year on this very subject (about why the existence of multiple experts in healthcare do not make you develop better judgement but will instead empower poor judgements).

Tell someone who know the basics "choice makes you free" and you could as well have said "I believe in pink unicorns". The idea of "choice" is scientifically debunked by the biological perspective, behaviorism, humanistic psychology, personality psychology, social psychology and cognitive psychology. The human mind simply doesn't work that way.
 
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skavenhorde said:
A little off topic, but I just recently found out about TED talks and I can't get enough of them.

My favorite so far is Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice
Click to expand...

That was very interesting thanks.

And possibly related to the topic well enough too, if you think that he pretty much the reasons why a reviewer's job is so important, and how it becomes irrelevant when reviewers stop being interested in helping you choose and use their work as vessels to carry their egos.
 
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Suits at EA call the shots about the game being streamlined and people like Laidlaw get the hate.
 
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Ashbery76 said:
Suits at EA call the shots about the game being streamlined and people like Laidlaw get the hate.
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That's hardly our concern though... if we don't like the game we complain to the one chosen to act as a representative of the company and it's his job to transfer our feedback to those suits. If he doesn't like being the guy who gets the hate he should stay behind the scenes and assign someone else to take his place because I have absolutely no interest in unraveling his company's structure in order to find which specific suit took which decision. Nor am I going to offer unconditional praise because it's not really the front-man's fault.
 
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DArtagnan said:
"We didn't make enough money, so now we'll try bullshitting and pretending to understand game design."
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Couldn't have said it any better.

Tis time we stop supporting companies like Bioware.CDPR all the way.Perhaps Bioware will get the message and change(wishful thinking)direction.
 
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"Aware of the concerns" doesnt mean they're going to do a thing about it. Im sure they were aware there was going to be a reaction to reusing the levels. still made it to the final product tho.
 
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holeraw said:
That's hardly our concern though… if we don't like the game we complain to the one chosen to act as a representative of the company and it's his job to transfer our feedback to those suits. If he doesn't like being the guy who gets the hate he should stay behind the scenes and assign someone else to take his place
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Yep, part of a producer's job. If you can't take the heat, get the heck out of the kitchen, 'cause it's only going to get hotter for Bio here on out, unless they make some dramatic shift. There are many lessons to be learned from Witcher 2, the chief lesson being that there is still a very LARGE audience ready to scoop up the next, dyed-in-the-wool CRPG, the kind of game that Bioware used to make. Better to make a really good niche game (that pulls in 90% of that niche's audience) than to try and pander to every EA consumer metric under the sun.

I think it's telling that my two favorite Bio games—Baldur's Gate 2 and NWN: Hordes of the Underdark—were worked on by Brent Knowles and a small team of dedicated developers (i.e., probably something along the line of CDProjekt's team on "Witcher 2"). Bigger does not mean better where RPGs are concerned. Kudos to Brent for not sticking around to see the EA fallout.
 
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@Captain Buzzkill & holeraw You're welcome. :)
 
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@rat

not sure what the new social forums rules are but I'm guessing they are the same as what happened on the NWN forums in 2002.

There were so many complaints from people that pirated the game (and therefore couldn't play multiplayer and the unpatched toolset was broken for them) that a forum member suggested they only allow owners to post. It was a sharp and successful decline of Action RPG fans who did not get the Diablo clone they were looking for among others,

SonOfCapiz said:
"Aware of the concerns" doesnt mean they're going to do a thing about it. Im sure they were aware there was going to be a reaction to reusing the levels. still made it to the final product tho.
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I notice there is no talk of fixing the game like other companies say: such Elemental - War of Magic, NWN2, Dungeon Lords...

Had they released a toolset could the fans have fixed it - at least partially?
 
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So why does everybody say DA2 sold miserably ? Is there any proof or source for this?
 
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