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Oh dear me posted:To be honest I think Andromeda showed the opposite of this. The worlds were its best bit, the characters and quests and scenes were terrible. What's worse is some of them were terrible in ways I recognized from previous Bioware games and which made me regret the times I'd defended them (Sera -> Liam, for example, and that pilot who repeats Ashley's piffle about a Higher Power). They got new writers, that's half the problem - most of the old Bioware staff left or was shuffled off to other projects. The gameplay of Andromeda was fun when they let you sink your teeth into a dungeon or base or whatever uninterrupted without making you go to other planets or talk to inconsequential NPCs or travel to the other side of the planet. Which didn't happen much, and the enemies desperately needed variety. Andromeda was a goddamn mess across the board. I think there's a kernel of a good idea, but it's let down by so many terrible story and gameplay decisions I hardly know where to begin. Oh wait I do, it's in one of the worst UIs I've ever seen in a game. Destiny 2 has lately presented some strong competition in that regard, though. Still, I'll take Andromeda over Inquisition. At least I like everyone in Andromeda. Inquisition is mostly a band of assholes, some of whom happen to be assholes with interesting points.
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Nov 19, 2018 19:19
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The companions in Inquisition were my favorite of any Bioware game (with the exception of Sera and Blackwall, and even then I came around on them), and the companions in Andromeda were the most boring of any Bioware game to me.  goddammit EA are you trying to guilt us into buying Anthem so you don't kill DA
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Nov 19, 2018 19:59
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The gameplay of andromeda was good but I don’t think the open world treatment was an improvement. I’d take an original trilogy style treatment of handcrafted corridor missions any day. Ultimately the game boiled down to a loop of land on planet > open map > move to nearest dot > fulfill requirements of dot > repeat I got so caught up in clearing dots that I forgot why I got into the dot-clearing business to begin with. It didn’t help that the story, if you did attempt to keep track of it, was total dogshit, just plain rear end, but the open world concept didn’t help either
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Nov 19, 2018 21:32
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The world design in Andromeda was legit great especially the desolate moon world and the ice level But why 3 desert levels
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Nov 19, 2018 21:39
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DAI had good open world gameplay imo. But then I guess I'm a weirdo who liked closing rifts
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Nov 19, 2018 21:46
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It wasn't the worst open-world gameplay I've ever seen, but the gap in quality between sidequests and main story + character segments was pretty steep. If you like pretty visuals and copious party banter then you could do worse imho.
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Nov 19, 2018 21:49
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If I had a jetpack so I wasn't constantly playing the old game of "Find the way up/down this cliff in a map made of cliffs and canyons!" I might have liked Inquisition's open world more.
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Nov 19, 2018 21:50
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My main complaint about DAI’s open world is that the map was completely useless as soon as you encountered anything steeper than a gentle hill (emprise de lion and that desert map that was nothing but canyons and ladders can eat my whole rear end). Andromeda, to its credit, had a pretty good map that actually told you how to get around the planets.
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Nov 19, 2018 21:52
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VostokProgram posted:DAI had good open world gameplay imo. But then I guess I'm a weirdo who liked closing rifts It's great to play through once but is one of the least repayable games of the genre unless you just love infinite bullshit
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Nov 19, 2018 21:54
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VostokProgram posted:DAI had good open world gameplay imo. But then I guess I'm a weirdo who liked closing rifts I enjoyed it, but some of the fetch quest/grindy parts were a bit meh. I generally enjoyed the main story areas in any given open world area in DAI. Like each area would have a main quest to do, and those would always be fun. That said, The Witcher 3 just blows other open world games out of the water for me because they somehow manage to make every tiny little side quest in that have depth and good writing. That game knocked me on my rear end in terms of how deep and rich the writing was literally everywhere. DAI is a well written game when it wants to be but it also has a lot of filler. After playing Witcher 3 though I really wished every open world game would take that type of approach because they showed it is possible to make even minor sidequests and monster hunts interesting without feeling grindy. That said I dunno how the hell they did it. It can't have been easy to put all that writing together and program all those minor quests to be that cool. But they managed it.
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Nov 19, 2018 21:55
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precision posted:It's great to play through once but is one of the least repayable games of the genre unless you just love infinite bullshit If you’re on pc, there’s a mod that gives you like 200 power so you can skip all the grinding for it. Not a bad way to replay the game.
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Nov 19, 2018 21:56
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My main issue with DAI's open world was that there was little to no connection between the separate areas and the main plot. Which is what hurt the replayability for me. The majority of the time I felt the game gave me no reason to go to an area. It's all just running around until you have filled out your map. Would it really have killed the writers to make a bunch of missions relating to Corypheus and Calpernia/Samson? It probably would have helped the main plot as well as the antagonists are practically non-entities in the story.
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Nov 19, 2018 22:01
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Cythereal posted:They got new writers, that's half the problem - most of the old Bioware staff left or was shuffled off to other projects. But they also had old writers working on it, who seem to have been involved in some of the worst bits (why yes, I do mean Liam). I really liked Inquisition and played it many times. The 'worlds' aren't especially replayable, in that there's not much point reading all the codexes after the first time, but I found the gameplay fun so it didn't matter. Whereas in Witcher 3 I don't actually like the gameplay at all, but the sheer number of high quality sidequests makes the world work - I wouldn't be interested in replaying them, but I never got to them the first time round. I suppose it helps that TW3's xp system actively discourages completionism.
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Nov 19, 2018 22:37
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Cythereal posted:And I think it showed in Inquisition and Andromeda that Bioware just doesn't do open world well (that I loathe open world design in most cases is another matter). Bioware's good at creating a well tailored story with some amount of freedom, but that freedom comes in plot decisions and characters regardless of how illusory that freedom actually is. Open world design does not serve their strengths. I agree. I detest Inquisition's gameplay. BW had a very successful formula and I don't know why they changed it up.
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Nov 20, 2018 02:53
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There are parts of Inquisition's gameplay that aren't well thought out, and it can't quite decide if it's a tactical or action game -- some specializations like Knight-Enchanter only "work as intended" if you're controlling directly. There's still enough that I enjoy replaying it and tinkering with different builds and party setups, much like I've replayed Mass Effect a bunch of times with different classes even though I largely make the same story decisions.
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Nov 20, 2018 06:06
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I thank DA:I was the best DA game with the best characters and second best story. Dragon Age Origins is great in its own way but is overall a really cliche and boring story. Like, I still love DA:O; but i far preferred Inquisitions huge gorgeous open levels where I could pick and choose what I wanted to do to progress the story. And until the third act, the whole Qunari plot line in DA2 is by far my favorite dragon age narrative.
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Nov 20, 2018 06:10
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chaosapiant posted:I thank DA:I was the best DA game with the best characters and second best story. Dragon Age Origins is great in its own way but is overall a really cliche and boring story. Like, I still love DA:O; but i far preferred Inquisitions huge gorgeous open levels where I could pick and choose what I wanted to do to progress the story. And until the third act, the whole Qunari plot line in DA2 is by far my favorite dragon age narrative. Agree about DA2. Wanna quote a guy I know who is much more eloquent than I and expressed why I loved the qunari stuff so much: quote:It's a pity, because DA2 at least seemed to indicate that they understood what people like about the qunari: their harshly ascetic code, but also the way that code seems genuinely appealing and fulfilling for those who adhere to it, and the way their meditations on the nature of reality inform their society and conduct. The Arishok took up the ideas Sten explored and did a lot with them. I'm sure I've said before: what's great about the Arishok is the extent to which he is able to make religious fanaticism and asceticism seem genuinely appealing. The Qun is profoundly illiberal, and its logic is opposed to pretty much everything any modern Western person is raised to believe in (individualism, freedom, ambition, democracy, etc.), but the undeniable charisma of the Arishok combined with the chaos and degeneracy of Kirkwall manages to make the Qun actually look quite tempting. It's just plain good writing IMO. There's the part in Act 1 where the qunari mage chooses to kill himself instead of going free. You can try to stop him or let him go through with it. That choice left me thinking for a good while. Is it my right to impose my values on him? To deny him something so important? I ignored Sten in DAO because he's so relentlessly hard to get Approval for at first and I just gave up. But after that moment with the mage and the rest of DA2, I went back and made sure to get Sten's full Approval on my next run. I think the Qunari are easily the highlight of the setting. I like the characters and stuff of course but in terms of the 'world" the qunari are the most interesting part.
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Nov 20, 2018 06:40
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I wonder what DA2 might have been like if they gave it the same time to marinate as they did Witcher 3. I don't know if an AAA publisher that's not CDPR would let such a thing happen these days, though.
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Nov 20, 2018 06:49
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https://twitter.com/Mike_Laidlaw/status/1064706640497172480 u have betrayed eveything that u set out to creat
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Nov 21, 2018 16:11
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TEENAGE WITCH posted:https://twitter.com/Mike_Laidlaw/status/1064706640497172480 Can you imagine how nice it would be to leave a job where you basically have to read fanfiction all of the time to understand what your consumers want from your product? "yeah, uh, boss? The internet is really into Vivienne pegging Iron Bull. Like they will not shut the gently caress about it. Where should we write that into the next game?"
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Nov 21, 2018 17:16
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NeurosisHead posted:Can you imagine how nice it would be to leave a job where you basically have to read fanfiction all of the time to understand what your consumers want from your product? Isn’t that exactly how BioWare develops games?
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Nov 21, 2018 18:05
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chaosapiant posted:Isn’t that exactly how BioWare develops games? Only in the sense of "Hey, our player base really loves this character, let's feature them more in the next game!" which is how every game developer that isn't Blizzard works.
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Nov 21, 2018 18:07
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God help me I'm pretty tempted to get Hard in Hightown
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Nov 21, 2018 18:22
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precision posted:God help me I'm pretty tempted to get Hard in Hightown I got it. It's very short, and was probably my least favorite of the books, but it's still fun since it's literally a book by Varric. There's weirdly a lot of information about the Executors in it, which I guess is semi-canon since it's stuff Varric would know, but filtered through his fictional writing.
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Nov 21, 2018 18:29
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Cythereal posted:Only in the sense of "Hey, our player base really loves this character, let's feature them more in the next game!" which is how every game developer that isn't Blizzard works. Not really. As far as I am aware, only Bioware allows that level of fan pandering to dictate the development of the game. There is no other major RPG series that does that stuff.
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Nov 21, 2018 19:11
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Savy Saracen salad posted:Not really. As far as I am aware, only Bioware allows that level of fan pandering to dictate the development of the game. There is no other major RPG series that does that stuff. the greatest investment BioWare could ever make for future ME/DA games is to hire a group of ruthless editors their writers have plenty of great ideas but they need to be reined in significantly with the fanservice/too clever by half stuff
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Nov 21, 2018 19:54
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Pattonesque posted:the greatest investment BioWare could ever make for future ME/DA games is to hire a group of ruthless editors BioWare is, IIRC, one of few developers out there that actually employ editors.
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Nov 21, 2018 19:56
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Pattonesque posted:the greatest investment BioWare could ever make for future ME/DA games is to hire a group of ruthless editors I don't know, I'm pretty sure that Obsidian for example based their decision who would return from PoE 1 in PoE 2 at least partly on the popularity of game 1 characters.
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Nov 21, 2018 20:10
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Torrannor posted:I don't know, I'm pretty sure that Obsidian for example based their decision who would return from PoE 1 in PoE 2 at least partly on the popularity of game 1 characters. pallegina romance when
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Nov 21, 2018 20:20
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It's one thing to bring back party members based on fan popularity. But Bioware always takes it a little step farther, for better or worse, by allowing fans to determine who gets to romance who, and how. On one hand I applaud them for looking to give fans want they want. On they other hand, some of their worse writing is when they gets strictly fan servicey/pandering.
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Nov 21, 2018 20:21
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chaosapiant posted:It's one thing to bring back party members based on fan popularity. But Bioware always takes it a little step farther, for better or worse, by allowing fans to determine who gets to romance who, and how. On one hand I applaud them for looking to give fans want they want. On they other hand, some of their worse writing is when they gets strictly fan servicey/pandering.
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Nov 21, 2018 21:07
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I think the complaint with bioware is less that they listen to "the fanbase" than that they define "the fanbase" as the horniest, loudest minority of fans on the internet I mean, I guess it's always going to be a thing that the most noticeable contingent is going to be the most vocal one, but bioware seems to have habit of giving it a bit more deference than others, it sometimes seems. Then it becomes this horny ouroboros where the more you listen to them, the louder and hornier they get
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Nov 21, 2018 21:31
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Stroop There It Is posted:Where are you getting this from? As far as I know the only one like that is Cullen... Yeah, there's like one clear example of that, and that's Cullen. And even then, he wasn't a romance until third game, and wasn't even a playable party member. The fan service stuff is being exaggerated. Ainsley McTree posted:I think the complaint with bioware is less that they listen to "the fanbase" than that they define "the fanbase" as the horniest, loudest minority of fans on the internet
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Nov 21, 2018 21:43
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Ainsley McTree posted:I think the complaint with bioware is less that they listen to "the fanbase" than that they define "the fanbase" as the horniest, loudest minority of fans on the internet It's a positive fuckback loop.
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Nov 21, 2018 21:45
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Stroop There It Is posted:Where are you getting this from? As far as I know the only one like that is Cullen... Cullen sure, but Garrus is the best example I can think of.
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Nov 21, 2018 23:18
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chaosapiant posted:Cullen sure, but Garrus is the best example I can think of. At least Garrus was a party member in his first appearance, not some NPC with barely any importance
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Nov 22, 2018 00:07
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So out of 20 years of games there’s only 1.5 examples of fanservice affecting romance options? I always thought Cullen was one of the better written romances since it tied into the plot so well. the scene in the chapel still sticks with me.
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Nov 22, 2018 02:08
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i enjoy that cullen is in all three dragon ages
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Nov 22, 2018 02:13
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Cullen is cool
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Nov 22, 2018 02:18
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HIJK posted:So out of 20 years of games there’s only 1.5 examples of fanservice affecting romance options? They let Male Shepards bang Kaidan in ME3 too I guess.
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Nov 22, 2018 02:23
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