What game are you playing?

[DavidW]

Glad to see I'm not the only one that dislikes Bioware's tree.  Choosing between good, evil and sarcastic is not much of a choice.  Perhaps I would like a chance to choose an actual different response other than three shades of "I'll do it".

[Philoctetes]

Elder Scrolls don't have dialog threes, just wiki style topic windows. Worked fine on Daggerfall, not so much in the rest of the series.

And i hope you are not hinting that Torment dialog system was in any way "obnoxious". Even disregarding the atrocious amount of dumping down, Bioware's new wheel system is just plain stupid. Half the time the character's dialog line doesn't even reflect the choice you made. Not that it matters of course, since the outcome is the same regardless.

Elder scrolls tree is definitely structured like an encyclopedia, but it is still a tree.

It was obnoxious, but in a good way. I adore the insane amount of choices available.

I will agree with your last statement, mostly.

[Renfield]

Without wanting to be 'that guy', I think you gentlemen may be selling Bioware's dialogue system a little short. The 'wheel' was put to use by Obsidian in Alpha Protocol, and had little issue coping with a wide variety of choices there*. Ditto for Bioware's own DA2, to a greater extent than the Mass Effects.


Contemporary gamer here, BTW. Just not always with enough time on my hands to post in a timely fashion!

Re: Deus Ex 3, it will either work, or it won't. At worst, it'll be a well-engineered fan tribute, a la Heroes V. I honestly don't think they'd risk the brand with a game that is bad per se; what the audience will claim, however, is another issue. DA2 reminded me how dumb the PC Gaming Master Race really is!

And that's speaking as someone who didn't own a console until 10 years after I played my first PC game.



*Unless by 'wide' you mean 'Fallout 2' (or New Vegas) - a niche experiment on player choice, despite my being very much in that niche.

[Lethevich]

Even ignoring the idiot wheel, DA2 was depressingly unacceptable. The texture work was also horrible, the weren't even pretending that this wasn't an Xbox game. The opening is as bad as I can recall in any modern game, thrown into a shitty brown desert with a cohort of idiots with no personality and a plot scrawled on the back of a napkin.



I am of course kind of biased against this even more than its badness warrants as I was witness to what a bullshit company Bioware now is. 4chan's /v/ was basically ruined for the runup to release due to their attempts at marketing, which in turn created a backlash, which basically led to the most intense trolling shitstorm which locked the whole place down. Taking advantage of social media is one thing, but realising you have a turd on your hands and instead of listening to fan feedback,* scrambling to make fake positive feedback on every aggregator you can find is just behaviour that indicates this is a company gone badly astray.

*From people on the official forums with accounts dated years old and lengthy posting records - not same-day signups. They just locked every thread trying to discuss it.

[DavidW]

Without wanting to be 'that guy', I think you gentlemen may be selling Bioware's dialogue system a little short. The 'wheel' was put to use by Obsidian in Alpha Protocol, and had little issue coping with a wide variety of choices there*. Ditto for Bioware's own DA2, to a greater extent than the Mass Effects.

I haven't played Alpha Protocol since the previous Obsidian games I've played were buggy, broken and incomplete.  But I've played all of those Bioware games and I've noticed in DA 2 and ME 2 you really don't have any options other than karma related.  I mean you have

* I won't do it (if an optional side quest).
* I'll do it because I'm an angel.
* I'll do it for gold.
* I'll do it because I'm evil.
* Sarcastic joke and I'll do it.

... and it's always a fetch quest in DA 2.  That's not choice.  In other rpgs like Dragon Age 1, Oblivion, Knights of the Old Republic etc you faced moral dilemmas, or an inability to complete the quest if you took another quest, and they involved diplomacy, solving a mystery, theft, murder other neat things. 

In DA 2 the only real choices you have are at the end of the game... and they result in the same boss battles anyway!  In ME 2 I don't think you really have any choice in the game.  Contrast that with Vampires: Masquerade Bloodlines in which you had four different endings and great replay value.  Or constrast with Dragon Age 1 where just your choice of race led to a different beginning game!

Not only are options not present... but in Dragon Age 2 being able to persuade people is not a present skill.  I really enjoyed being able to talk someone into revealing information with a high persuade skill in many other rpgs.

Bioware's devs realized that to tell a story you have to do it Final Fantasy style, and not offer choice, and they admitted in an interview! (well they didn't say FF style because they don't consider FFs to be rpgs).

[DavidW]

Without wanting to be 'that guy', I think you gentlemen may be selling
And that's speaking as someone who didn't own a console until 10 years after I played my first PC game.

Sounds like me too.  I went from nes as a kid to not having a console until the 360.  I completely missed out on the ps1, ps2 and the xbox generations.

[Josquin des Prez]

I haven't played Alpha Protocol since the previous Obsidian games I've played were buggy, broken and incomplete.  But I've played all of those Bioware games and I've noticed in DA 2 and ME 2 you really don't have any options other than karma related.  I mean you have

They are not as buggy, broken or incomplete as they are made out to be. The problem with Obsidian is that they are trying to play second fiddle to Bioware because they are too afraid of making the game they would really want to make, since there is no market potential for a real RPG. They made a small attempt with Mask of the Betrayer, and that expansion must have not sold a lot because the next one was pure action. You should try it, BTW. Its a very good expansion.

[Renfield]

I haven't played Alpha Protocol since the previous Obsidian games I've played were buggy, broken and incomplete.  But I've played all of those Bioware games and I've noticed in DA 2 and ME 2 you really don't have any options other than karma related.  I mean you have

* I won't do it (if an optional side quest).
* I'll do it because I'm an angel.
* I'll do it for gold.
* I'll do it because I'm evil.
* Sarcastic joke and I'll do it.

... and it's always a fetch quest in DA 2.  That's not choice.  In other rpgs like Dragon Age 1, Oblivion, Knights of the Old Republic etc you faced moral dilemmas, or an inability to complete the quest if you took another quest, and they involved diplomacy, solving a mystery, theft, murder other neat things. 

In DA 2 the only real choices you have are at the end of the game... and they result in the same boss battles anyway!  In ME 2 I don't think you really have any choice in the game.  Contrast that with Vampires: Masquerade Bloodlines in which you had four different endings and great replay value.  Or constrast with Dragon Age 1 where just your choice of race led to a different beginning game!

Not only are options not present... but in Dragon Age 2 being able to persuade people is not a present skill.  I really enjoyed being able to talk someone into revealing information with a high persuade skill in many other rpgs.

Bioware's devs realized that to tell a story you have to do it Final Fantasy style, and not offer choice, and they admitted in an interview! (well they didn't say FF style because they don't consider FFs to be rpgs).

And this is where I have to politely disagree.

Clearly, like I said above, Bioware does not aim for Troika-style RPGs. Their narrative have always been linear-plus-minor-permutations.

Much like a lot of classical era composers (and thank goodness this is a forum I can make that comparison in ), they work on pre-determined narrative frames, but it's in the involving presentation of the familiar narratives that they excel, when excel they do (e.g. DA: O).

The reason I invoked DA2, to which both you and Lethe reacted as I was afraid you would, is precisely because I am still at a loss to explain why so many people, otherwise thoughtful and thorough commentators, judge it based on a form it was never intended to represent! DA2 is certainly very self-consciously 'different'. Its art style is different, and clearly that's a perfectly valid reason to complain, if one does not appreciate the change. But as a narrative, it simply is not a fantasy RPG anymore.

Its plot is as see-through as - extreme example - Crime and Punishment: tension exists, shit happens, consequences are pondered. To that extent, I don't think the story is the point at all. There's no One Ring. What there is, rather, is a somewhat unrefined (by the standards of literature and cinema) attempt to explore moral conflicts in a fantasy wrapping, packaged with absolutely superlative real-time tactical combat mechanics*. The main difference with DA:O is that it no longer cares to dress its goals in Tolkien-love-letter wrapping.

In some ways, DA2's problem is the reverse of New Vegas', which really is Troika's Fallout 3, but that was lost on many people due to how much it looked like Bethesda's. DA2 tries so many new things that its actual goals, and how well it meets so many of them (IMO), are very easy to miss in the cacophony of unfamiliar elements.


This post is reaching Seanian lengths, so I'll close with two examples:

Persuasion is not gone. It's simply manual. They have completely excised the game-mechanical aspect of persuasion, in favour of picking the right dialogue options. Does this happen often? No. But it's there, and I prefer it to [Speech 100%] These aren't the droids you're looking for. Ditto the issue of choice, which Bioware have finally honestly framed the way they've always gone about it: you play a pre-established heroic archetype, and have to choose things through the prism of this narrative role. [The male] Hawke is a macho stereotype, and he acts like one. What the player considers and engages with is how their particular brand of macho-stereotype-Hawke deals with certain crucial issues. Peripeteia, catharsis and all that. That's Bioware.


And yes, Troika games are still better. But for decency's sake, bad? No, DA2 is not bad. It's as bad as Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht is, at being a symphony.



*Play it on Nightmare. No, really. There is a qualitative difference, more than any other game I can remember.

[DavidW]

They are not as buggy, broken or incomplete as they are made out to be. The problem with Obsidian is that they are trying to play second fiddle to Bioware because they are too afraid of making the game they would really want to make, since there is no market potential for a real RPG. They made a small attempt with Mask of the Betrayer, and that expansion must have not sold a lot because the next one was pure action. You should try it, BTW. Its a very good expansion.

I liked Mask of the Betrayer, but it was REALLY HARD. 

[DavidW]

Renfield, I think you've misread my post.  I liked DA 2, I just didn't like the lack of choice in conversations.

[Lethevich]

http://www.youtube.com/v/P3Ci09GwAmg

I keep going back to watch this every week or two. Dat terrifying scream ;_:

[DavidW]

Man I'm loving Portal 2!!

[Jaakko Keskinen]

Man I'm loving Portal 2!!

The cake is still a lie.

How much u wanna bet that Skyward sword has Ganondorf as villain? Although it was stated that in zelda timeline it happens before ocarina of time, maybe even before Minish cap. But that doesn't necessarily change anything. Two separate timelines are already enough confusing.

[CD]

I just wish they'd continue with the Ocarina storyline. Wind Waker was cool though.

[lisa needs braces]

Maybe this thread should be stickied? 

I went to an internet cafe the other day and I noticed that a bunch of kids were playing the Defense of the Ancients clone "League of Legends." It's a free game and I would so try to really give it a chance and learn were it not for the fact that my multiplayer focus right now is Starcraft 2 and seriously picking up another RTS would be too strenuous.

Blizzard however is coming out with a free DOTA Starcraft 2 mod, perhaps as a response to Valve trademarking "DOTA 2." Maybe that'll rope me in. DOTA was originally a mod created by Warcraft 3 players, and Valve is seen by some as trademarking community property. But from the Warcraft 3 mod (actually maybe going back to the original Starcraft), we now have League of Legends, Heroes of Newarth, and pretty soon DOTA 2, all of them a hit (and guarenteed to be a hit, in Valve's case.) Interesting seeing the evolution of a genre of RTS.

[Mirror Image]

I've been playing the new Mortal Kombat game. Not bad at all. I'm still learning the fatalities though.

[lisa needs braces]

^But how are you coping with the Playstation Network outage?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3544727/Sony-PlayStation-net-game-KO-hits-day-5.html

[Sandra]

Last night I played the original Contra!

) Very primitive. But it reminded me of my childhood, so I enjoyed it.

[DavidW]

^But how are you coping with the Playstation Network outage?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3544727/Sony-PlayStation-net-game-KO-hits-day-5.html

IT SUCKS!!!  At least I can still use netflix after I read a trick to get it to load.  No vudu=no watching new releases.  Can't play co-op on Portal 2.  Can't compare trophies with my friends.  Can't download demos.  Or get new wallpaper.  Several times a day I check to see if it's up... sadly...

[Mirror Image]

^But how are you coping with the Playstation Network outage?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3544727/Sony-PlayStation-net-game-KO-hits-day-5.html

Sandra, you like classical music and play video games? Are you a married woman?