Ultratwinkie said:
Rainbow_Dashtruction said:
Ultratwinkie said:
Rainbow_Dashtruction said:
Duster said:
I really dislike the direction that bioware is going in.
When I was newer to rpgs I thought that companions where awesome and that rpgs should be all about them, but I really take that back. Most of companions should be made by modders who have no professional obligations/need to politically correct.
Yeah the movement towards companions began long ago and some games, such as kotor 2 and BG2 have companions and are classics, but I feel when you make a game from the ground up around companions it doesn't work well, and that seems to be the approach these days.
Literally all of Biowares games were built around the companions, with the least companion focused game being Baldur's Gate 1. Coincidentally, its also substantially less liked then Baldur's Gate 2, which centered entirely around them. Bioware has ALWAYS built their games around the companions, and if you don't like that, you don't like Bioware games. The two games when they didn't entirely focus on companions are the most boring of their games aside from the DragonAge trilogy.
Secondly, Kotor 2 is not made by Bioware. Not sure what else to say there.
Thirdly, I've never seen them be politically correct aside from having gay options, which were more or less equally well done as the regular romances, so who cares.
Fourthly, the reason Bioware focuses on companions is because it is what they are good at. They suck at grand scale storytelling. They suck at world building. (and I honestly believe Mass Effect 2 in that aspect was a fluke) All they are good at is character writing. Therefore they focus on them.
Fifthly, pretty much no western RPGs focus on characters except for Bioware's games. Even Kotor 2, which many people claim to, really didn't, even if they were well written. I don't see how its a genre trend lately.
So yeah, TL;DR Bioware isn't going in any direction. They are sitting doing the same thing they always did and always did well.
There were many better RPGs with better companions, the problem is the western RPG genre died when AAAs hired everyone and drove costs up. So anything past 2005 is a clusterfuck. Everyone does action RPGs now and wants the player to feel bad ass instead of vulnerable like it was before. Less skill needed that way.
So Bioware is the only one they haven't killed yet. Even then, bioware still falls prey to the same trends that killed companion centered western RPGs in the first place.
And here is people being dramatic. Most Western RPGs from Baldur's Gates era and earlier are garbage. Utter shite. With generic plots, personality drained characters and a completely lack of logical design or quality. Even Baldur's Gate 1 falls prey heavily from this way of thinking. They were all about feeling badass back then, the only thing that made Baldur's Gate 1 stick out is that it is the only RPG of the era to do leveling progression really really well, which is still unmatched by nearly every RPG ever made to this date.
Secondly, almost no western RPGs from that era, outside Planetside Torment, did any of those things better then Baldurs Gate 1 or 2. And Planetside Torment, outside its complex and deep writing, is garbage is practically everything it tried to do. Baldur's Gate had, while worse, some great writing AND fantastic gameplay.
Thirdly, complex RPGs died out because the number of GOOD complex RPGs can be counted on one hand. Action RPGs gave substantially more involvement in the player, were much easier to make actually enjoyable for players and saved a shitload of the time the creators would spend doing complex algorihisms and balancing that would be the cause of nearly all players becoming bogged down, extremely bored or plain be confused, into creating actually worthwhile stories, writings and climactic scenes. Which 9/10 is better focused in anyway.
is this the part where you extol JRPGs and talk about how the katana is a superior weapon because its from japan? And how Japan is so much better than everything else?
You have a severe lack of knowledge of RPGS from that era. That was the era of Black isle, where the bar was set sky high and you could get away with ANYTHING. Where games are unbelievably hard by design. Some of their games like arcanum are held up to a higher standard than games today because of the crap that gets said in it.
Why? because arcanum didn't pull punches. It gave you consequences for the race you picked, then at the end of the game it told you to kill yourself. After all your hard work.
That was the kind of shit that old RPGs get away with. if we pulled that shit now we would have had everyone on gaming's ass.
also, giving a simple plot a lot of useless fluff is not good story telling. Its shiny baubles to distract you from the glaring holes in the story and the characters. Its there so you don't realize how shoddy the writing truly is. Its present in every Bioware game.
and did you honestly say that dumbing down was the best thing to happen? It wasn't. It was an excuse to treat every gamer like a 5 year old and it gets worse every year. It wasn't to make story telling better, it was to make it easy so more people would buy it. algorithms have nothing to do with it. In fact, algorithms are incredibly easy to code. Someone who can't code algorithms shouldn't be making games.
Hell the equations didn't even leave, it was moved to under the hood. The difference being you got a bigger margin of error (read: its piss easy).
And did you say they were all about being bad ass? If you didn't have a party of at least 4 or so people you are guaranteed to fail. This was a time of turn based combat. Real team based turned based combat with lots of enemies. Bad Ass didn't come around until later, when they have to justify only 1 person being able to take everyone on.
So obviously you never played many CRPGS of the era. They were hard by design. They went above and beyond what was socially acceptable. They were filled to the brim with good writing because back then that's all you had.
EDIT: I'd just like to apologize for any times when I called it Planetside Torment. For ages I thought that was the title, and still constantly accidentally call it that.
Firstly, you praise black isle, then claim games made you feel weaker. Planetscape Torment is one of the easiest fucking RPGs I've ever played, and the Nameless One can beast through nearly every encounter solo with little knowledge of DnD. Fallout 1 and 2 are all about a single man beasting his way throughout the wasteland, he just takes an hour or two of game time to start doing so.
For reference, Black Isle games are awful. Utterly and totally awful. Their gameplay is dry and their atmosphere is dead and not in a good way for the darkness of their games. The only thing they were good at was writing and even then, they were awful at inciting the player to continue playing with early pieces of great writing. Planetscape Torment in particular, often considered arguably their best game, is shit. Planetscape was atrociously easy, had pointless amounts of 'fluff' to appear like the mechanics were deep and the most enjoyable mod someone could make for the turd is one that skips all gameplay segments and switches straight to the dialogue. Because thats all it was good at.
Secondly, regardless the quality of the story, Bioware is fantastic at inciting the player to keep playing with its story. That makes it a better story, no matter how fantastically complex Planetscape is.
Thirdly, no, I'm not going to say JRPGs have and always will be magical pieces of work. They have a shitload of problems that are completely different, particularly being too long with way too much filler that is never enjoyable in 99% of the games. And the Katana was a god awful weapon, that managed only to be the best sword of a nation which sucked at making swords. It was hundreds if not thousands of years out of date during its use and no one in their right mind would ever use it in a battle, hence why Japan focused on polearms.
Fourthly, the thing is, that complexity which supposedly made the games amazing simply did not exist. It was simply poorly explained. Yes, action rpgs have less depth, no shit, they focus on player skill. All those RPGs everyone marveled at for being amazingly complex and difficult usually aren't even difficult, or rely on the player using a guide (although lets be honest, that was more common during the pre-infinity engine days). All they did was make the player understand the developers pointless new terms for everything, and it went back to being "Hit chance increases chance to hit, armour class increases either damage resistance or reduces enemy chance to hit or both. Damage is damage and scales in a simple way. Same with health. Magic will be either brokenly overpowered or useless by end game"
PS: Oh and guarenteed to fail? Of all the good RPGs from that era, you can count on your hand how many games you couldn't solo the entire game outside the final boss with two party members, even one if you were good. They just tended to have unnecessary difficulty spikes every 10 hours or so with a stupid bullshit boss that you'd kill then immediately no long need your party anymore.
