VG247 Article - How Bioware is losing its heart

I would be playing it for the open world multiplayer they supposedly have in it. Story stuff doesn't bug me if it sucks. Only core gameplay and combat matter. It's how I can play WarFrame because the story there is non-existent.

I'm with her. FUCK MP.

When you compare Fallout 1 and 2 with Fallout 3 and 4, Skyrim with Morrorwind, it is almost sad to see that Bethesda still gets so much praise.
Seems everyone is guilty of fanboyism these days

As much as the gaming community often loves to put Skyrim up on a pedestal, Bethesda's games tend to have all the depth of a kiddie pool. Their strengths are in the stories players make for themselves while playing the game, and the modding community that has popped up around their games.

Only since Skyrim was absurdly popular other RPG developers wanted to shift to making open world style games, and it doesn't exactly mesh terribly well with BioWare's style of focusing on characters and story. Even The Witcher 3, as amazing of a game as it is, suffered in some areas because of the open world.

Also to be honest, the fact that the person said the radiant quest system in Skyrim where virtually every quest is literally going to a random cave and killing a nameless NPC is more interesting than most of the stuff in Andromeda suggests to me that this author is rather biased against BioWare. I'm not saying Andromeda has perfect quest design in every way but the radiant quest system is the epitome of grindy, boring sidequests with no real story to them.

Since we're talking about modern BioWare one of my bigger issues is that for a developer that makes RPGs... where's the RP? Both Inquisition and Andromeda followed the path of not being able to effectively roleplay a character very well in terms of the dialogue. In Andromeda I'm basically just choosing which tone I want to say the exact same thing in, and at no point did I ever feel like Ryder was my character. Inquisition suffers the same issue, albeit to a lesser degree at times. You got some choice in minor details, but still had to play their overall idea of the Inquisitor.

Out of all the voiced protagonists BioWare has, Hawke probably had the most variation and thus most potential for actual roleplaying. Shep got to choose between one of two personalities and in Mass Effect 3 either way largely just became "Soldier that has emotional issues that either talks about it or shrugs it off depending on if paragon or renegade".

Getting to occasionally make a choice that will presumably have an impact later in the game or in the next game is cool and all, but most of the dialogue options just feel pointless and inconsequential in that it neither furthers character RP development or any kind of mechanical benefit. At least with Dragon Age if you keep making decisions that a party member doesn't like they might leave, but with Mass Effect they just forget about it 30 seconds later and you can bang whoever you want by picking the flirty option whenever it shows up until they throw themselves at you.

With rumours about Dragon Age 4 taking place in Tevinter, that would be the perfect opportunity to get back to giving us a variety of character styles to play as and not make our actions so quickly forgotten about by those around us.

The article makes a point myself and others have made on these forums. When it comes to RPG's it's always about how you dress up the fetch quests, enemy strongholds and checklists that prop up your game. Presentation is everything. The goals of any game are usually rather straight forward, it's the incentives the games offer the player to engage in the world that elevate it above it's base gameplay.

That's the real difference with Andromeda and most other AAA open world videogames. They've not got the carrot-on-the-stick to drive you forward to see and do everything beyond simply completing a checklist. You're going through the motions too much. There are plenty of mundane missions (from a purely mechanical standpoint) in The Witcher III but what i come away remembering is the characters and plot in those quests.

All that said, the reality is you arguably don't even need to look at other games. The first Mass Effect has very simplistic third-person shooter combat yet it's beloved by many because it's story, characters and atmosphere elevated the experience. Maybe BioWare needs to look no further than itself.

Yeaaah I'm ashamed at the crazy amount of money i throw into MP. But gosh it's super fun i just wish they would stop the silliness with classes lol...

I'll throw tonnes of money on weapons , gear and classes but let me pick male or female and customize look.😆

Analytics are the death of art and creativity in video games, especially in RPGs when the whole point of the genre is to provide different experiences for different players.

IIRC 70% of the playerbase chose paragon options over renegade, which certainly could have led BioWare to dropping it. Why bother making content only 30% of the playerbase will see, the money men will say. This is death to a genre that is defined by choice and consequence.

Strangely though, despite a staggeringly low amount of the playerbase choosing them (3%) with each passing game BioWare are devoting more time and resources to gay romances. Shows where their priorities lie.

I love mass effect 2. I think it's one of Bioware's best games. But mechanically it was a sub par rpg. It did choices well, but everything else was limited.

Yeah, I just wished those old school RPGs would make a true return in form of next gen games. Pillars of eternity is nice, but I want an AAA Game. But that probably won't happen.

Now I am feeling like a old man bitching about the new types of rpgs.

If Dylan is a new IP, I'm ready to try it after it's thoroughly patched. I want to dive into it, actually. I'm hoping it's great. 

This.

I've never quite understood the POV that BioWare is a great storyteller. (Never mind the fact that I don't look to games to tell me stories. Film and novels are much better at it.) Their stories are serviceable.

Where BioWare shines is characters, followers, team-based combat, and world-building, imho. Those are things that draw me to DA and ME.