evilthecat said:
Do me a favour..
Go back and play Baldurs Gate, KotOR and the original Neverwinter Nights.
Everyone fantasizes about things they played when they were younger and turns them into monolithic epic things which can never be superceded, but in my experience that's generally because were more easily impressed, not because the games were better.
In fact, go back and play a fighter in the original Baldur's Gate. Note how deep and tactical the combat is, certainly nothing like the action RPGs of today where you have to select abilities and click more than once in an entire fight.
I get what you're saying and I sort of agree with it at a basic level, but I think your analogy leaves a lot to be desired. A single fighter in Baldur's gate is just part of the 6 part team, plus there is the entire meta game of choosing the appropriate equipment, appropriate classes and level ups in different classes and spells. It's actually quite deep in terms of the amount of thinking and planning that goes into the game before you even begin a combat encounter.
The same is not true for Mass Effect 2, and certainly not for Dragon Age 2, which I actually find more disappointing since it's "supposed" to be more of a traditional RPG. Really, they have massively regressed from DA:O to DA:2, for example take character attributes:
In DA:2 you get 3 attribute points at each level up that you should be able to spread across something like 6 attributes, each attribute having a different derived outcome for your character. Sounds great, but in practice, each character class has to use equipment, which (surprisingly enough) is usually restricted to either a character class, or requires 2 out of those 6 attribute points in order to use. So, if you are a warrior, well I hope you enjoy putting all your points into STR and CON until you're almost done with the game, otherwise you will never be able to use most of the loot you find. Same goes for the other classes as well and their respective "class attributes". (Here's a fun idea - try building a blood mage in DA:2 and using HP as your mana pool - you can do it, so long as you're willing to restrict yourself to equipment with laughably low willpower requirements to use, which means generally stuff far below your level and taking half of the fun, ergo loot acquisition, out of the game)
This is just poor game design and I'm more than willing to bet it came about by a desire to cater for the lowest common denominator and the end result is a shallow system that is actually
easier for a novice gamer to screw up if they aren't paying attention - for example, a younger friend of mine got almost to the end of the first act before he realized his warrior would never be able to dual wield in DA:2 because the appropriate weapons were restricted to an ability that he'll never posses, regardless of if his attributes met the requirements for the equipment.
Frankly, I'm not a fan of this at all. Bethesda/Obsidian managed to do a far better job with the SPECIAL system from Fallout in terms of making it more accessible yet still providing depth and while I don't know if we can compare sales across titles here as easily (ergo: I don't have the numbers in front of me), you'd be hard pressed to argue that FO:3 and FO:NV were anything but huge commercial successes.
Anyway, I actually think that DA:2 is a mediocre game, which for a company with a reputation like Bioware, makes it a
bad game. It's easily one of the worst in their recent catalog and what makes it even more frustrating is that it
didn't need to be so bad. They made several gameplay decisions that seem completely unjustified, even considering the claim that they wanted to make it more "action oriented".
Right now I'm at the point where a new Bioware title has gone from "Must buy on sight" to actually wondering what the quality will be like. For someone like me who has been a huge fan of theirs for almost 2 decades, I think that would give them pause.
