Gileadan
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Post by Gileadan on Apr 15, 2024 13:54:16 GMT
Ryder Sr's death was unfortunately very similar to the sibling's death in the DA2 prologue.
Both times we were given barely any time to get to know those characters ("here's your family! care about them! NOW!") and then they die for a stupid reason that made me facepalm instead being emotionally invested. One goes "Raah I hate darkspawn", charges in alone and ends with a *SPLAT*, the other just hands over his oxygen supply instead of taking turns until help arrives. It felt like both of them *wanted* to die with about as much emotional impact as watching a stranger pulling a paper bag over his head and cheerfully hopping into a nearby highway's oncoming traffic.
I'm no Varric fan in any way but no character deserves that fate.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Apr 15, 2024 5:40:34 GMT
Varric's death as a cause of drama would have worked at the height of his popularity in DA2. Now, 13 years later, it would probably fall flat like the sibling's death during the DA2 prologue.
I wouldn't want him in DAD but that train seems to have left the station. The DA series is supposedly about the world of Thedas but the amount of returning characters makes it feel small because no matter where you go some of the old faces just happen to be in the neighbourhood. I'd rather have BioWare create a set of entirely new characters and have enough confidence in them to not feel the need to dig up their old heroes time and again.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Apr 4, 2024 7:09:20 GMT
"Back to work, 621."
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
I finished the game in NG+ (for the ending "The Fires of Raven") and NG++ which is required to get the true ending "Alea Iacta Est". Each replay on the same save file adds alternate missions and some twists to existing ones, and you need to pick a certain path to get the third ending. Loved how the voice in the protagonist's head, Ayre, makes a joke mid-game in NG++ that foreshadows the third ending. Loved the gameplay and while I'm not great at it, I did pat my own shoulder after finishing the final mission without any restarts.
Might as well shoot more robots, right?
Terminator: Resistance
Played through the main campaign, managed to keep all companions alive to the end, whew! This is a fine little AA game that I think fans of the franchise will enjoy. It is set in the apocalyptic future briefly portrayed in the first two Terminator movies where John Connor leads the human resistance against Skynet's advancing machines. They managed to fit the protagonist into the existing story quite nicely, the atmosphere is fittingly grim and you get to meet some likeable people that you want to help and keep alive. You can shoot, sneak, lockpick (Skyrim style) and hack door and turrets to deal with all those fricking terminators (and other things that Skynet has up its sleeve). Off to the DLC campaign!
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Mar 28, 2024 7:04:02 GMT
How was the delay ever a surprise if the voice recordings weren't done yet anyway?
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Post by Gileadan on Mar 23, 2024 20:57:50 GMT
"EA gives you just enough rope to hang yourself." ~Greg Zeschuk At least back in that day EA gave their studios a lot of freedom for decision making, so I suspect that BioWare has to own most of their failures. I mean, look at Anthem for example - the only thing being decided by an EA exec there was "flying is cool, go with that". EA probably also didn't make them lose so much time on a failed attempt at procedural content for MEA. Lots of problems are caused by BioWare's own sub-optimal decision making (or lack thereof in Anthem's case). Unfortunately, EA provides the rope and their crappy corporate culture for Bioware and aggravates the problem. Were the crappy ME3 endings partially the result EA insisting that the game be released before the end of the fiscal year in March? Examples of EA rope: Rushed release of DA2, MEA and Anthem EA vetoing previous work on Anthem to insist on flying. Five years of insistence by EA for DA4 "multiplayer" before relenting in 2021. EA insistence of Frostbyte. MEA and Anthem are almost completely on BioWare. MEA: Years wasted on ultimately scrapped procedural content leading to a super rushed "BioWare magic" release certainly wasn't on EA. They didn't make BioWare go down that road. Anthem: Years of indecision where practically no one knew what kind of game they were actually making was completely on BioWare, especially their management. Not EA's. In both cases, EA paid the studio's salaries for years and got practically nothing in return. In both cases BioWare wasted a ton of development time and then rushed a half baked product over the finish line. There's no telling how much development time went down the drain for the Dragon Age Dredwlof reboots and the current delay. I mean, how many other EA owned studios stumble from failure to failure like this and yet somehow continue to exist?
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Gileadan
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Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Mar 23, 2024 12:58:19 GMT
Maybe I risk being controversial here but... should we always assume that Bioware is the victim of EA? I think there's probably competent and less competent people on both sides, the difference is perhaps the viewpoint from which they act. We do know that even when Bioware was doing well enough, they struggled financially enough that they had to sell the company to EA to survive. I think the "EA bad" narrative is too simplistic, and that we like to put blame on them because it's a David vs Goliath kinda thing. For sure, they definitely make some wtf decisions (like trying to make DA a multiplayer) but I don't see them as the devil rubbing their hands gleefully trying to maje the studio fail. It's in their interest that Bioware is successful after all. "EA gives you just enough rope to hang yourself." ~Greg Zeschuk At least back in that day EA gave their studios a lot of freedom for decision making, so I suspect that BioWare has to own most of their failures. I mean, look at Anthem for example - the only thing being decided by an EA exec there was "flying is cool, go with that". EA probably also didn't make them lose so much time on a failed attempt at procedural content for MEA. Lots of problems are caused by BioWare's own sub-optimal decision making (or lack thereof in Anthem's case).
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Mar 14, 2024 10:43:10 GMT
On the old forums I once saw someone insisting that the game was FORCING him to sacrifice captive elves in a blood ritual in every DAO game because otherwise he'd be missing out on a point of Constitution. Some people take their min-maxing a little too seriously. I think what those people really mean deep down is "I am forcing myself but I want it to be someone else's fault".
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Mar 5, 2024 7:37:43 GMT
When they used "Only Human" in MEA's marketing it felt like an apology in advance to me.
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Post by Gileadan on Mar 3, 2024 9:05:06 GMT
I suppose a trailer with a line like "Will you stand against the darkness or lead this world to its bitter end?" is way more suitable to catch the average gamer's attention than the more realistic "Snark your way to inevitable victory as your pitifully incompetent enemy bungles around".
Only in DAO I ever felt that there might be a way we could actually lose in the end. DA2 was way too narratively dissonant between the number of enemies to fight and the actual threat registered by the rest of the city, like the three hucksters selling fake ashes getting you attacked by an entire ninja syndicate or all these gangs roving the city at night and then everything was sunshine and birds chirping again come the morning. And DAI see first paragraph.
How often does that actually happen in the gaming industry? A gameplay presentation or trailer being shown and then very little of it turning up in the actual product?
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Mar 2, 2024 9:13:35 GMT
"Got a job for you, 621."
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Played through the game and got to the "Liberator of Rubicon" ending. Man, I've really missed the crisp and somewhat challenging gameplay of a FromSoftware game. I really enjoyed the combat and tinkering with my armored core. Heck, I probably spent hours and hours just picking colours and paint patterns.
My favourite configuration is a medium weight build with MIND-Alpha parts except for the legs where I picked the MIND-Beta reverse jointed variant for extra jumping power at the cost of some stability and load capacity. Two laser handguns and some shoulder mounted missile launchers with different attack angles worked just fine. I know that's not fully min-maxed but looks are important too.
This is one of the very few games that made me want to go back to it immediately after the ending. Off to New Game+!
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Gileadan
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Post by Gileadan on Feb 26, 2024 8:09:17 GMT
The crafting RNGs in DAI look pretty funny. The masterworks could be save scummed since the success chance was rolled when you looted the item, not when you actually used it for crafting, and getting armour schematics slowed down as the game progressed because you apparently got nothing every time it rolled a schematic you already had... instead of just rolling for the remaining ones.
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Gileadan
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Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Feb 21, 2024 9:19:03 GMT
Given how they made fun of the sex cards in Blood and Wine I'm pretty sure those will be gone, thank goodness.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Feb 20, 2024 16:03:43 GMT
"It's a very big game..."
If someone's trying to say something positive about a video game and the first thing that comes to their mind is its size - not gameplay or anything like that - then you know there's going to be a problem. It's right up there with "but it's optional".
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Feb 14, 2024 7:06:50 GMT
I'm probably late to the party. The Expanse. Currently in the middle of book 2, Caliban's War. I'm enjoying this a lot so far. Are you doing books first or have you watched the TV series already? We watched about four episodes of the TV show but got kind of distracted with other things we watched and I picked up the books a few months later. Now I'm hooked.
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Gileadan
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Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Feb 13, 2024 9:31:21 GMT
I'm probably late to the party.
The Expanse. Currently in the middle of book 2, Caliban's War. I'm enjoying this a lot so far.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Feb 6, 2024 10:12:52 GMT
DAI's combat is pretty awful, a worst of both worlds hybrid between action and tactical combat. It's not real action combat because enemy hitboxes are human sized no matter what creature they're attached to (if it has more than one health bar each health bar is essentially hovering over an invisible human sized target instead of a single target of the correct size) and it's not real tactical combat because your moronic companions can't even stick to basic orders like staying out of melee range if all they have is a bow.
Some aspects of it are personal taste of course, like human bosses looking like they're 8 feet tall and some really silly animations like enemies with greatswords spinning like an angry top that's trying to drill its way to the other side of the planet and such. Overall it always felt like a chore to me and there's way too damn much of it.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Jan 31, 2024 20:37:40 GMT
This Willem person is new at being Nosferatu, no? It really kills the clan's mystique if the first thing one of them asks you is "Why are you here?"
That's like a Brujah who doesn't know how to fight or a Ventrue who meekly asks what the plan is.
But hey, we'll see...
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Gileadan
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Post by Gileadan on Jan 16, 2024 8:11:15 GMT
Youtube sans adblocker is a festering spawning ground for Hero Wars ads. And here I thought I was being singled out since that crap keeps popping up with a relentless persistence that made me wonder whether they were Youtube's only remaining ad revenue. How many people are dumping money into this garbage if they can afford this kind of ad bombardment...
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
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Post by Gileadan on Jan 14, 2024 9:25:58 GMT
So, on another topic, when do we start the betting pool regarding release date? And what would the prize be for being most accurate? I'm going to be an optimist and say 17th of November. It'll be released around the same time as Winds of Winter. Ouch. So... "never because all the people involved have died of old age"? Will there be regular updates about how there's only a few hundred lines of code left to write?
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Post by Gileadan on Jan 5, 2024 12:44:09 GMT
Innovative doesn’t necessarily mean completely new. It can be just taking what is old and making it fresh. There’s no game on the sci fi market like Starfield. It offers everything from ship building, rpg, exploring planets, ship combat, companions, fully realized quests. It’s brimming with ambition and essentially is everything that Star Citizen wanted to be. If you look at Starfield from its individual parts, it may not be the best at it. But what makes Starfield so good is that it’s great by the sum of its parts and that to me what makes it innovative. I don't want to derail this thread, but Starfield is pretty much everything Star Citizen doesn't want to be.
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Gileadan
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Post by Gileadan on Jan 5, 2024 6:56:18 GMT
A good character with a good origin story does not get better or worse through the addition of pointy ears, horns or purple eyes or whatever. That's like expecting a book to be more fun and exciting if the cover looks outrageous enough. Sure you are not completly wrong from a storytelling perspective. But what´s the point in giving players options to create their characters if most people went if the standard (and in my opinion boring option) aka human?
The human origin isn´t terrible. The revenge story i guess fine on its on but not the best of the Origins. I am more than happy to have the other origins but yeah it was a huge letdown that Hawke is always human in DA 2. Clearly Bioware didn´t have the time and budget for other races back then but yeah my point is that a character editor especially with races options aren´t something that is always a matter of course.
So yes its disappoints me to see that so many other players aren´t that creative and just playing as vanilla aka human male warrior with the standard face. And it´s only fair if someone higher up at Bioware or EA ask if this is really necessary that the team invests ressources in something that most people won´t use / see.
Now I understand your worry about some yo-yo with a Powerpoint slide explaining to their higher-ups that detailed character creators are a waste of resources because 80% of the players just pick Default McStandardface and click "go". That's a very valid concern, right up there with some developers claiming that it's okay to have poor quality endings because only a minority of players ever gets there anyway. That said I personally find the choice to play as a human a valuable one because I like to start out as someone from humble beginnings. It was what made "The Bride" origins (female city elf) a good one for me - not because she was a city elf but because she was an average person rising out of hard times. It would have worked just as well with an oppressed human. Of course, you also have games in settings that have many diverse races like most D&D games and the character creators let you make a wild variety of protagonists. But in these worlds you generally find that there's some truth to the saying "if everyone's special then no one is special". You can be a girl with horns, flaming red eyes and a barbed tail or some such, but it's common enough that you can walk her into any pub without being treated much differently than the average Joe. The patrons won't raise an eyebrow, the piano player won't stop playing and the barkeep won't drop the mug he's just cleaning. And then the difference is just looks and a small percent of different dialogue lines. Making a human face can be a lot of work by the way! I spend quite some time on mine and I still don't hold a candle to the effort (and result) my wife puts into them. Of course some people (or maybe even a lot of people) might just go with the default face and you may rightly see that as uncreative - but I suppose we aren't all born with a creative streak or the patience to actually use it before diving right into the game and its story.
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Gileadan
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ALoneGretchin
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Post by Gileadan on Jan 4, 2024 22:50:39 GMT
A good character with a good origin story does not get better or worse through the addition of pointy ears, horns or purple eyes or whatever. That's like expecting a book to be more fun and exciting if the cover looks outrageous enough.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
Clearance Level Ultra
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: ALoneGretchin
Posts: 2,844 Likes: 7,118
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Agent 46
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7,118
Gileadan
Clearance Level Ultra
2,844
August 2016
gileadan
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
ALoneGretchin
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Post by Gileadan on Dec 28, 2023 15:14:17 GMT
Hm. While the Exodus trailer did very little for me I really like the idea that the other "races" are actually evolved humans that just happened to climb out of their stasis pods 20,000 years sooner than our guys did. It certainly beats Mass Effect's rubber forehead aliens who seem to be humanoid without any special reason and are even often so much like humans that inter-species romance isn't even rare.
And I could swear that the line "what are you willing to sacrifice" from the trailer appeared in an early Mass Effect newletter ad with an image of Ashley and Kaidan (*hint HINT nudge NUDGE*) so it seems obvious what fan base they're going for here.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
Clearance Level Ultra
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: ALoneGretchin
Posts: 2,844 Likes: 7,118
inherit
Agent 46
177
0
7,118
Gileadan
Clearance Level Ultra
2,844
August 2016
gileadan
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
ALoneGretchin
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Post by Gileadan on Dec 27, 2023 16:02:33 GMT
Pillars of Eternity had a pretty nice implementation of benevolent/pragmatic or kind/cruel and all those other personality choices it offerend.
Even the ancient Planescape: Torment had a very simple but effective implementation of intent:
"1 - (Truth) I love you, Deionarra." "2 - (Lie) I love you, Deionarra."
I think the actual reward for making such choices should be how the world and NPCs react to your character, not just the loot it gets you.
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Gileadan
N5
Agent 46
Clearance Level Ultra
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: ALoneGretchin
Posts: 2,844 Likes: 7,118
inherit
Agent 46
177
0
7,118
Gileadan
Clearance Level Ultra
2,844
August 2016
gileadan
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
ALoneGretchin
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Post by Gileadan on Dec 23, 2023 15:59:11 GMT
A single adjective isn't much of a critique. Singleplayer and multiplayer can certainly coexist, but most games have a clear focus on one or the other. The Battlefield and Call of Duty series have their 4 hour singleplayer experiences with a quite high production value for the short time they last and the later Mass Effect games have their shoe box sized arenas for co op MP. What I don't like is when the singleplayer part gets simplified because it has to work in multiplayer too - four abilities is enough, who needs that skill/gear wheel anyway? I do wonder where this claim comes from given how little sense it makes...at least in context for BioWare/ Dragon Age. Afterall despite this being an argument and despite you not being able to pause in multiplayer games you're still able to do it in the SP game. An ability/ equipment wheel, and the tactical camera. Even the ability limit has no baring on multiplayer since pretty much anything you can do to extend abilities for MP could just as easily apply to SP. And vice versa. The much more likely explanation is its gameplay balancing, which I have discussed whenever this comes up, between console and computer and making it a more even experience or engine limitations of some sort. I'll admit that consolification probably had its share in the gradual loss of mappable controls, but on the other hand - if Dragon Age had remained a single player only franchise, would mage players really have to go through the bother of having way too few assignable buttons for their skills and spells? With every iteration they play more and more like a ranged class who just uses differently coloured flashes instead of a bow or crossbow. Nice and streamlined, great for multiplayer... but I think that for the singleplayer mage experience it's a net loss.
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