Dragon Age II and the decline of the classic RPG

[DannibalG36]

To be completly honest Dragon Age 2 is a bad homolust fanfiction which felt like it was written by a Stephenie Meyer follower. Dragon Age 2 was squeezed into the Mass Effect template and it ruined the game.

I loved Dragon Age Origins but I was really dissapointed with Dragon Age 2; I really tried to like it as well.

Amen on the homolust fantasy fanfiction. Dragon Age 2 had a middling story compared to Origins's epic yarn.

 

[cainx10a]

To be completly honest Dragon Age 2 is a bad homolust fanfiction which felt like it was written by a Stephenie Meyer follower. Dragon Age 2 was squeezed into the Mass Effect template and it ruined the game.

I loved Dragon Age Origins but I was really dissapointed with Dragon Age 2; I really tried to like it as well.

Amen on the homolust fantasy fanfiction. Dragon Age 2 had a middling story compared to Origins's epic yarn.

This. I always felt they spent more time on relationships, and pretty boys than on the game actual game.

 

[linwolf]

well good. i don't like convuluted inventory management simulations anyways.

plus, i hate "dice roll" games which everything is determined by chance unless you REALLY know what you're doing.

sure, after putting the effort into it i could breeze through dragon age, but the random passersby who just wants to play in a fantasy world and build up a character literally just turns off the game and won't play it.

is this what the "hardcore" rpg players want? games that can ONLY have niche appeal and thus will never make a return on investment so there will never be a sequel?

well i, for one, like when people make their games more accessible gameplay wise. it means i can enjoy it with family and friends and not have to worry about being that awkward lonely nerd who only plays niche games that no one has heard of, or plays, or likes because the barrier of entry is too damn high

Yes, I would rather have a niche appeal game that I enjoy than a accessible one that is boring. Also if you want a game to be enjoy by the biggest number of people there are only FPS's, they are the one that sell the most so making anything that isn't a FPS is niche.

Peggle isn't niche.
Rock Band isn't niche.
hell, even Castle Crashers breaks free of niche when you show it at a party.

Your generalization is a logical fallacy moreso than anything i've said. In any case, if the traditional RPG is declining, then the people have spoken, the majority does not want those kinds of games made. Of course we'll keep making the Cash-In of Duty's because that's what the people demand, and the games industry is not unlike what any other industry is... supply and demand.

It's a sad but true thing in our world, that supply and demand shall rule all industries that hope to be profitable, and whatever doesn't sell well won't get the time of day for a sequel or have one in development hell for loooong periods of time (Brutal Legend, Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil)

Besides, wouldn't you rather enjoy something with a group of friends than enjoy it alone? I quit dragon age and then picked it back up when my then-girlfriend now-fiance and her family started playing it out of nowhere. I like doing things i can share with others, growing up surrounded by siblings and their friends and my friends made me always crave the games that i could enjoy socially.

Of course i still can't stand most FPS games or any Cash-In game, but when it's made accessible enough that my friends, family, and loved ones can all enjoy it, that is superior to a game i play alone in my room.

It wasn't meant as a logical fallacy as must as you point driven to the extreme, also forgot about games like Peggle those have a huge market.

I will cut to the meat of you post "enjoy something with a group of friends" and here I have to say no. I like game to be something to take place in solitary that the way I enjoy them the most. When my friend conviced me to get WoW I spend a couple of days playing with them before I stop made a different character and play the game alone, after a month I looked back and sow that I had play WoW as a single player game and whenever I tried playing with other I stopped enjoying it, so I unsubscibed.

For me games are enjoy alone and movies are for socialising.

 

[DannibalG36]

Dragon Age 2 really shouldn't have been marketed as a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins. It should have been placed as a spinoff game in the Dragon Age universe. I certainly hope Dragon Age 3 retains DA:O's epic scale - Kirkwall's laughably small size and the cloned caves and mines of its environs played a huge part in making DA2 feel like a hastily shipped cash cow sequel.

On the IGN article: the Xbox achievement boards are certainly not how I would gauge player involvement in a classic RPG. Like it or not, the hard-core RPG audience is primarily PC based. The observation that only half of 360 players managed to finish DA:O does not take into account that game's undeniable success on the PC.

 

[Canadish]

Okay, lets put this in simple language.
I go to the store and ask for an apple. Here is an apple:

The man who owns the shop asks me for my money first, then presents me with this:

Sure, its round.
Sure its sweet.
And its also juicy as well.
But its not an apple
I don't care if its a tasty orange, I didn't pay for an orange.

Let me fix that for you. You actually asked for an apple at a store that doesn't sell apples.

In other words; you asked for a remake of DA:O when it was always clear DA2 wasn't going to be that. And yet you feel like the wronged party.

I would agree but the marketing for Dragon Age 2 kept saying all the depth was there. I remember actually speaking to the developers on the Bioware forums and they insisted that all doubt would be eliminated upon playing the game.
Sadly they were wrong/lying and it just got worse (glitches, copypaste, indoor parachuting enemies, sudden endgame Lightsaber fight...etc etc).
Now, I'm not an idiot and I know the marketing is always going to claim everything is perfect.
But it was Bioware. I trusted they wouldn't be such sellouts. Mass Effect 2 still felt like Mass Effect, despite changing some things.

To bring back the now tired analogy;
The Fruit Store was claiming to be selling both Apples and Oranges. The Apples are a lie.

 

[Azaraxzealot]

well good. i don't like convuluted inventory management simulations anyways.

plus, i hate "dice roll" games which everything is determined by chance unless you REALLY know what you're doing.

sure, after putting the effort into it i could breeze through dragon age, but the random passersby who just wants to play in a fantasy world and build up a character literally just turns off the game and won't play it.

is this what the "hardcore" rpg players want? games that can ONLY have niche appeal and thus will never make a return on investment so there will never be a sequel?

well i, for one, like when people make their games more accessible gameplay wise. it means i can enjoy it with family and friends and not have to worry about being that awkward lonely nerd who only plays niche games that no one has heard of, or plays, or likes because the barrier of entry is too damn high

Yes, I would rather have a niche appeal game that I enjoy than a accessible one that is boring. Also if you want a game to be enjoy by the biggest number of people there are only FPS's, they are the one that sell the most so making anything that isn't a FPS is niche.

Peggle isn't niche.
Rock Band isn't niche.
hell, even Castle Crashers breaks free of niche when you show it at a party.

Your generalization is a logical fallacy moreso than anything i've said. In any case, if the traditional RPG is declining, then the people have spoken, the majority does not want those kinds of games made. Of course we'll keep making the Cash-In of Duty's because that's what the people demand, and the games industry is not unlike what any other industry is... supply and demand.

It's a sad but true thing in our world, that supply and demand shall rule all industries that hope to be profitable, and whatever doesn't sell well won't get the time of day for a sequel or have one in development hell for loooong periods of time (Brutal Legend, Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil)

Besides, wouldn't you rather enjoy something with a group of friends than enjoy it alone? I quit dragon age and then picked it back up when my then-girlfriend now-fiance and her family started playing it out of nowhere. I like doing things i can share with others, growing up surrounded by siblings and their friends and my friends made me always crave the games that i could enjoy socially.

Of course i still can't stand most FPS games or any Cash-In game, but when it's made accessible enough that my friends, family, and loved ones can all enjoy it, that is superior to a game i play alone in my room.

It wasn't meant as a logical fallacy as must as you point driven to the extreme, also forgot about games like Peggle those have a huge market.

I will cut to the meat of you post "enjoy something with a group of friends" and here I have to say no. I like game to be something to take place in solitary that the way I enjoy them the most. When my friend conviced me to get WoW I spend a couple of days playing with them before I stop made a different character and play the game alone, after a month I looked back and sow that I had play WoW as a single player game and whenever I tried playing with other I stopped enjoying it, so I unsubscibed.

For me games are enjoy alone and movies are for socialising.

ah. so there's just a fundamental difference in how we find enjoyment in our games then? that makes sense. however, people shouldn't be mad at the AAA industry for shying away from traditional or old-school games. a lot of those game's tropes died out for a reason, and the public at large seems to want them gone.

For instance, i don't like how FPS moved to realism and away from sci-fi shooting and colorful, unique enemies and environments, but it changed and we just have to accept that, as a minority group. Besides that, perhaps we should put the pressure on indie developers or even ourselves to create the games we want to see, since the AAA will do what just makes them money.

 

[almostgold]

Its the decline of the traditional RPG, the ones with clunky inventory management and problems instead of choice, not the RPG genre itself. All of this lamenting is nothing but melodrama and overreaction to the logical evolution of the genre, technical capabilities were always just a matter of time, so when you find that the RPG genre no longer consists of the same formula as the Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale series, don't be surprised! its the same reason why you find cars of all different shapes, sizes and utilities today instead of a single 1891 Panhard-Levassor type of vehicle.

The writer's reasons for DA1 being more enjoyable are based upon nostalgia and stagnation, something which he dresses up as "soul and heritage" and it seems that its what made DA1 so well received, not the game itself, but the nostalgic feeling they got from clunky inventory management and trite story-telling.

I have been saying this on other threads that touch upon the subject of RPGs, and that is that the genre is defined by two concepts: Character Progression and Character Differentiation, and that things such as stats, inventory management and redundancies are not central to the genre, but over-used tropes.

What bothers me the most is how a lot of these trite and formulaic RPG-tropes seem to rely solely on your ability to tell which number is higher and how vehemently the "hardcore" crowd has opposed any attempt to have it test different skills (such as strategy, snap-decision making, etc.).

But ugh.....let them piss and moan for all i care, i for one can't wait for a different experience than what the tired formula of RPG making has given me.

This man is right. Genres evolve, they change. Thats how gaming works. Its why we make new games. If you just want more DA:O, you could just play DA:O more. 'Problem' solved, I think.

 

[DannibalG36]

I can't believe people are still bitching about how Dragon Age II isn't a "true" RPG.

It wasn't true to its lineage. It's the legitimately hated bastard child of an epic game. Most of all, it's got "made to rip off and piss off the hardcore audience" written all over it.

 

[Undead Dragon King]

Snip

Thanks for the input. That's some food for thought.

 

[commiedic]

There have been tons of different genres within the RPG main for years now and even almost a decade.

Just like every main genre of anything they break into smaller groups of genres. There has been hack and slash RPG to very slow rpgs that focus on the story element. To me the second one is kind of like Bauldur's Gate and Icewind Dale.

Pretty dumb to say DA2 is the fall of RPG's. That is like saying CoD MW is the fall of FPS's for being too arcade like.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I can't believe people are still bitching about how Dragon Age II isn't a "true" RPG.

It wasn't true to its lineage. It's the legitimately hated bastard child of an epic game. Most of all, it's got "made to rip off and piss off the hardcore audience" written all over it.

The original Dragon Age isn't exactly a hardcore RPG anyway, though. DA II just took the steps taken in DA I too far for a large chunk of DA I's player-base.

 

[Azaraxzealot]

I certainly hope Dragon Age 3 retains DA:O's epic scale

if the numbers are to be believed, that "epic scale" is what caused only 52% of players to reach the end, and that same "epic scale" caused most players to get 5 or less achievements (according to the article)

making something so big it's nearly impossible to see an end to what you got yourself into is going to make you quit (science confirms this)

 

[Continuity]

I hate the attitude of 'if this had a different title, I would feel differently about the game'. It's dumb. A good game is a good game.

That doesn't mean that there is no value in discussing genre though, especially for fans of particular genre.

 

[Moromillas]

I read the entire article from top to bottom and I still have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

I was around for Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and the like, played through in its entirety DA:O, played through DA:2. What things have they removed exactly? 'Cause I sure as hell didn't find anything missing.

 

[AngryBritishAce]

As long as a Game has a good story, I don't care how you play it. I like RPGs more because they usually have better stories than, lets say, shooters, and they also come with a lot of customisation and many choices of gameplay. However for me you NEED a good story to make a good game. That's why I hate CoD. They have no good story to back it up but they do have customisation.

 

[Atmos Duality]

"Bold statements about an entire industry and genres, no argument to back it up"

Well, if you had been more respectful in your criticism, I might have found it worth my time to refute your rant. Point is, you are projecting your opinion against mine; not facts.
What determines the value of "choice"? Gameplay benefits? Story? Character development?

No, apparently it's the user "Hyper-Space" on The Escapist Forums. His word is God.

As it is, I see a post that's disguised to attack my person more than my complaints.

If you want the short version of how that debate would end: "I do not like the FAKE-CHOICE in today's RPGs."
You can try to refute it if you wish and then pat yourself on the back for proving absolutely nothing, but you're wasting your time.

Good day.

 

[DeathWyrmNexus]

*sigh* I liked DA 2 and played the hell out of DA O. It has plenty of problems but eh, my annoyance is the lack of things to do in the post game. I'm waiting for some actual DLC, not more item packs.

However, this isn't the death of anything. It is a game, moving on...

 

[adrian_exec]

I can't believe people are still bitching about how Dragon Age II isn't a "true" RPG.

It wasn't true to its lineage. It's the legitimately hated bastard child of an epic game. Most of all, it's got "made to rip off and piss off the hardcore audience" written all over it.

Indeed. It seems some people still don't get that the selling point of DA:O was that it was considered a classic RPG, it was described as a successor and spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate 2! So naturally people did noticed that something was wrong when it's sequel deviates from this lineage.

I just can't help it but to agree with the fellow that wrote that article, I feel the same way. If Dragon Age 2 was a new game and not a sequel to a classic RPG game, then it would have had a totally different reception.