Mass Effect 2: Arrival DLC (Confirmed release date and new screens)
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And is it really, is it REALLY so hard to imagine that others..... might have enjoyed Mass Effect 2!? Honestly! I can understand why you don't like it. Can you imagine.... is it POSSIBLE for you to imagine... just.... imagine.... that other people might like it? And maybe that's why it sold well?
When DA:O got good reviews, no one raised the issue of "oh they might all be shills". You see, when you agree with a game score, you have no problem accepting the review as being completely accurate, but when you DON'T agree with a game's score, suddenly the reviewer MUST have been bought out. The very notion that your opinion MIGHT be in a minority doesn't occur to you AT ALL.
Mass Effect 2 was an unqualified success by any metric you go by: Review Scores, Sales, Focus groups and quite a bit of the customer feed back. Now, you can construct elaborate, bordering on bizarre, explanations to explain away all that and paint a picture that ME2 was a disaster beloved by no one, but ME3 pre-order sales are probably going to prove you wrong on that (again, we'll have to wait and see).
If you didn't like ME2 or DA2, I understand. The RPG elements have been taken out of those games, mostly. It has been simplified. I wouldn't use the word "dumbed-down", because let's face it, RPGs aren't exactly like courses in rocket-science now are they? Traditional RPGs don't require an Olympian intelligence to play. But ME2 and DA2 were simplified and are easier than the first game. If you have issues with that, then I agree, you have every right to be disappointed in these games. But you're not everyone. Neither am I for that matter.
Let's all sing along kiddies:
"We can be very happy living with each other"
La-La-La, Da-lalalalala!
"We can do anything by working with each other!"
La-La-La, Da-lalalalala!
"Differences are what makes us great, what makes us special!"
"Differences exist between us on every single level!"
That's the song they made ME sing in the second grade. Seems a bit sad that some people STILL haven't gotten the message. Well, puberty does strange things to folks I guess.
When DA:O got good reviews, no one raised the issue of "oh they might all be shills". You see, when you agree with a game score, you have no problem accepting the review as being completely accurate, but when you DON'T agree with a game's score, suddenly the reviewer MUST have been bought out. The very notion that your opinion MIGHT be in a minority doesn't occur to you AT ALL.
Mass Effect 2 was an unqualified success by any metric you go by: Review Scores, Sales, Focus groups and quite a bit of the customer feed back. Now, you can construct elaborate, bordering on bizarre, explanations to explain away all that and paint a picture that ME2 was a disaster beloved by no one, but ME3 pre-order sales are probably going to prove you wrong on that (again, we'll have to wait and see).
If you didn't like ME2 or DA2, I understand. The RPG elements have been taken out of those games, mostly. It has been simplified. I wouldn't use the word "dumbed-down", because let's face it, RPGs aren't exactly like courses in rocket-science now are they? Traditional RPGs don't require an Olympian intelligence to play. But ME2 and DA2 were simplified and are easier than the first game. If you have issues with that, then I agree, you have every right to be disappointed in these games. But you're not everyone. Neither am I for that matter.
Let's all sing along kiddies:
"We can be very happy living with each other"
La-La-La, Da-lalalalala!
"We can do anything by working with each other!"
La-La-La, Da-lalalalala!
"Differences are what makes us great, what makes us special!"
"Differences exist between us on every single level!"
That's the song they made ME sing in the second grade. Seems a bit sad that some people STILL haven't gotten the message. Well, puberty does strange things to folks I guess.
If it is Kaiden/Ashley that you are meeting up with, I hope Bioware remembers they are actually different characters. I'd rather not have the character model swap with the same script that was in Mass Effect 2.
The problem is traditional, old-school, number crunching, turn based grognard RPG's were not selling well. The capital investment in them was enormous because they took so long to create, and the returns on them were very small. They almost went the way of the adventure gaming industry. You're just not going to see the byzantine level of depth and complexity you seem to be yearning for.Therumancer said:
Second, we went through all this crap when Baldur's Gate came out and it was phased real time instead of the old turn based glory of the Gold Box games. Bioware was accused of dumbing down the industry at that point, too. One of the most gamed RPG critics of the time raked the game as not even being a true RPG. And then we have Dragon Age: Origins, which many claimed was a dumbing down of Baldur's Gate 2, and now we have you absurdly proclaiming that Dragon Age 2 is a huge dumbing down of Dragon Age: Origins, a game it is virtually indistinguishable from. Bioware is absolutely 100% correct that there will always be a loud, vocal minority that will bleat on the internet whenever a franchise undergoes structural changes. Look what happened when Bethesda made monstrous, sweeping changes to Fallout. The hard core Fallout lobby were practically clawing out their eyes with outrage. Their raw, seething hatred dwarfed anything you've seen over DA2 or ME2. And yet Fallout 3 sold exceptionally well. So did New Vegas, despite being a bug riddled catastrophe at launch. Funny, that.
Your conspiracy theories and breathless jeremiads about an army of disenfranchised fans rising up and toppling Bioware and EA for their trespasses are the very essence of nonsense. Bioware is a business. They make business decisions. EA is a business. They make business decisions. They know if their games are selling well. If they were remotely concerned about ME2, DA2 would be a very different looking game. You need to learn to disassociate angry forum rants from reality. Go to the WoW forums sometime. Read the general attitude and opinion towards the game. My word, everyone hates it! That game couldn't possibly have sold more than a few copies.
We already know that you've convinced yourself that your attitude towards Dragon Age 2 and Bioware is "THE TRUTH". I've yet to see you recognize or give validity to a single dissenting voice. I might suggest that you have a confirmation bias and that it is coloring your perception of the games in question and the industry in general. Hard core war gamers currently pay upwards of $80 for games in their specific, tiny niche...games that haven't evolved graphically since the mid 90's. Why? Because it's the only place they can get them. If you don't want CRPGs to end up in the same boat, you'd best be prepared to allow them to evolve.
Oh my gosh! Is that Admiral Hackett?! ...Y'know, if it is, I'm actually a bit sad. I kinda like important characters whose face you never see...
I expected hackett to be a butch middle aged guy who wore sunglasses for some reason.
Not an old skinny guy,I guess that's how my mind processes a character i haven't seen and only heard.
Not an old skinny guy,I guess that's how my mind processes a character i haven't seen and only heard.
This completely makes me cringe because I'm not all that well off but I am a rabid fan of ME so I have spent that much money. Oh well. If BioWare keeps making amazing games and DLCs and I'm going keep spending my money on em.Icehearted said:
Sounds fucking epic, and in roughly two weeks? Hell yeah!
Also, I demand high noon tea with Admiral Hackett. It is the only way.
Also, I demand high noon tea with Admiral Hackett. It is the only way.
BloatedGuppy said:
Actually what I am saying is the truth. The problem is that the dissenting voices have very little that hasn't been covered by what I'm saying.
To be entirely honest, you ARE correct that the dumbing down of RPGs has been an issue for a long time, and it's been a long time in building up to this point. Each time it happened it was always "meh, what differance does it make, it's just a little bit" until now we're looking at things that are barely RPGs. In the case of "Dragon Age 2" vs. the first game in the series, it's not a minor set of changes, it's a pretty signfigant one. It's simply that people who were not "into" the RPG aspcts of the first game are glad to see them reduced.
The problem has never been that RPGs "don't sell" there has never been an issue with that. The issue has simply been a much more appealing market in the form of casual gamers. As each generation of games has come to pass, with slightly more approchable technology, the number of casual and mainstream gamers has increased along with it. As elitist as it is, RPGs cater to a fairly intellectual crowd, and always have, and intellectuals are a small portion of society. There is more money to be made by catering to a wider audience of people, and that can be done by dumbing them down to the point where those of average or below intelligence can understand and play them. The attitude to some extent being to design games that make the player feel like they are intelligent or capable, rather than them actually having to be. Plenty of money could be made by catering to the serious RPG players, it is after all not *that* small a group, and what's more it's a consistant market. However in an industry that is increasingly defining itself by the biggest successes out there, nobody wants to simply turn a decent profit, they want the next "Call Of Duty" and that means developing on a level that is approchable by the largest group of people possible.
Incidently, it's not just a problem affecting RPG games, it's just what gets talked about most frequently on these forums, and the area I most frequently wind up discussing since it's my genere of choice. It's also a situation where the serious RPG gamers are numerous enough and vocal enough to make a decent showing.
Another genere that is victimized by the same thing are fighting games. One of the big things you'll notice that fanatics complain about is that developers that still make them are focused on making the experience as user friendly as possible, and that so any button masher can still do some impressive and flashy looking things. This frequently comes at the expense of depth, and due to creating so many moves with a high degree of payoff compared to the complexity of performing them, it frequently borks the competitive aspect of the game. You see people who argue this back and forth, just like with RPGs, but the point is that it's an issue that goes accross genere. With fighting games the basic arguement is that they want to produce material where any goober can come away feeling like a badass, rather than something people actually have to work at to even reach a mild level of proficiency, because there is more money to be made from the average button mashing dude, than the serious competitive fighting game player. It's also been argued at various points, and with a number of games ranging from RTS games to fighting games, that one of the reasons why E-sports is unlikely to take off with the majority of the world population to the extent that some people hope, is because the game industry spends too much time creating products that everyone can get involved in, rather than ones that are designed for a serious gaming demographic and which people have to seriously work at to get involved in. Every time a game comes up with a "noob tube" or some other crutch for casuals, it weakens chances of gaming ever being taken all that seriously. After all it will always be kids stuff if a kid can literally jump in and play nearly any game, or it's approchable to your grandmother. You want it to be taken seriously, you need to ensure a lot of it is aimed at serious people. If your grandma can do it, then your not going to be in awe at someone playing a game with proficiency. This however gets well away from the central subject we're discussing, it's merely a side point.
When it comes to RPG games in paticular there is also the MMORPG factor. That is to say that your correct that it takes a lot of work to make a decent RPG, a lot more than just tweaking a "game in the box" and adding the thematic art you want for a shooter. A lot of the old school RPG designers went on to do MMOs due to the simple fact that for a similar amount of effort they can put a game online and have a chance of making some money off monthly subscriptions. Richard Garriot for example pretty much stopped doing single player games when he launched "Ultima Online", going to "Tabula Rasa" and just now talking about going back to single player games after that failure.
That said, the success of "Origins" to begin with as well as the original "Mass Effect" sort of shows that games can be successful with those levels of mechanics, and perhaps even deeper. It isn't a matter of games NEEDING to be simplified, it's a matter of the developers constnatly reaching for a bigger audience, and even with a successful franchise never being happy with the audience they currently have.
... and then when talking about DA2 there is the issue of sloppy game design, which is also a factor with it. That's part of my points about "The Truth" as much as any discussion of mechanics. It's not just simplification, but also doing it badly.
I've been playing these games since the 80's and I couldn't disagree more. This argument directly supports, for example, that Bard's Tale was a fundamentally more intellectual and sophisticated experience than Planescape Torment because the combat mechanics were tighter. CRPG's have matured and evolved as narratives in leaps and bounds. In doing so, they have become streamlined and lost much of their old number crunching complexity. This does not automatically make them worse, or stupider. It makes them different. Might they appeal to a different audience? Perhaps. Might they appeal to a BROADER audience? Apparently, yes. The future of CRPGs appears to be in storytelling, and not in managing a fantasy spreadsheet, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.Therumancer said:
I'm assuming you've played MMOs, and know that they're a completely different animal than the modern CRPG. They're actually far more directly the children of the mechanic-heavy games of yore than Bioware's offerings. Go to Elitist Jerks and read about attack rotations or the theorycraft that goes into kitting out a tank. Think back on Everquest and the almost absurd level of player hostile opacity that was the user interface.Therumancer said:
As for Garriott, he had very little to do with Ultima after Black Gate, and it showed. He was already going crazy and spending all his time knocking around his castle and playing with his secret doors.
Yes, DA2 was rushed and there are some signs of sloppy or lazy design. I agree that the game had room to be better. I disagree that it was a poor offering, or that it represents a substantial downshift in complexity or quality from DA:O.Therumancer said:
Having participated in many of the vitriol spewing threads on the subject I would agree that there were plenty of people with negative things to say about the game but finding someone who outright said the game was bad was hard to come by. Most of the complaints were of the form "it isn't an RPG anymore", which is hardly a damning indictment of the quality of the product. At worst it indicates the product was not exactly what the user was expecting.Therumancer said:
Mass Effect 2 is a rarity in games in that it managed a better reception by critics than its overwhelmingly loved predecessor. While Metacritic does not tell the whole story, the fact that one game managed a markedly better average than the other (96 versus 91) implies that the reception, at least from professionals, was overwhelmingly positive. Hell, given the number of "Best games of the year" lists ME2 appeared on, I'd say the reaction could easily be called "overwhelmingly positive". As far as fans go, I think the dramatic difference in sales between the two tells the story just fine as well (the second sold far better).Therumancer said:
I don't really buy the basis of this argument. Mass Effect was never an RPG with a lot of depth; it was an RPG with a lot of clutter. I would note that I count myself among those who deeply loved Bioware's older work; in fact, at this very moment, I have the entire Baldur's Gate saga installed so that I might play through it again (my last save is in Act 3 and was made mere days ago).Therumancer said:
I think you are overestimating the number of people who felt this way. Certainly some portion of the population would qualify but I have seen no evidence that it represents a significant segment of the population and I would think the only support for such a claim would be the result of wild conjecture. I will not deny that there are people who legitimately disliked ME2 yet loved ME1; I just don't think this group represents a significant fraction of those who played the second game.Therumancer said:
Other than an instance of an employee allegedly writing a fake review, the critical response to the game was generally positive. Regardless, there was a notable decline in the critical reception and a shocking drop in user reception (the user score tracked by metacritic was cut in half).Therumancer said:
I am not going to sit here and answer for the various problems inherent with DA2 as the evidence supporting your argument is quite clear. However it just does not hold up for ME2. ME2 managed to garner both a better critical reception and user reception than it's predecessor. Hell, the worst review I could find of the game made the following point:Therumancer said:
Given that each time they take a step away from what their traditional audience wants they improve upon sales what possible motivation could they have to cater to the tastes of people who really loved Baldur's Gate? Just take Dragon Age: Origins as an example. While it was billed as being incredibly similar to Baldur's Gate, no fan of that franchise would be willing to make that claim. One didn't need a 200 page tome to understand how to play the game and, in spite of it's presumed difficulty, the game was nowhere near as prone to murdering the party on a whim. There were fewer options for characters, fewer classes, fewer decisions, fewer items, fewer enemies, fewer spells etc. It was, simply put, a "Dumbed Down" version of Baldur's Gate. And the people loved it. Sure, some portion of the player base was incensed but they almost certainly count in the minority. Plenty of people didn't like the game but most of them made their decision on different grounds.Therumancer said:
The problem is that this message of fan grumblings is easily lost when, in spite of the complaints, the game sells far better than the original which has, thus far, been the case for both Dragon Age 2 and ME2. People scream into the wind about the creative bankrupcy of Call of Duty and then each new game breaks the sales records set by the previous. What reason then does Activision have to change the game.Therumancer said:
More to the point, why should one really listen to the fans in the first place? If you look at the trend what precisely have the been asking for? I think you'll find that, if you look closely, what they want is the old game they loved, only new. This sort of advice does little but ensure you'll be making the same creatively bankrupt game again and again and again. And I hardly think that is really what the people want.
BloatedGuppy said:
We are getting quite far afield of the subject of ME 3 being pushed up which was the suspician I stated and explained.
That said, I think you misunderstand my point. You are correct that MMORPGs have a lot of those elements. That is why I said that they have been such a factor on RPG development. The guys who would be developing deep single player experiences, figure that with all that work they are doing they might as well put it online and try and get more money for it.
I simply used Richard Garriot as an example because he build one of the most notable single-player RPG series of all time, and then went into MMOs and never looked back. As far as him not being involved in UO I'd beg to differ, largely because her was insturmental in the game's promotion (and I was there from the very beginning). He did however seem to seperate from it after the "Zog Cabal" incident. The issue being that Zog, the first man, is a part of Ultima lore, you have his bones in the museums, and if you talk to the wisps he's mentioned as having been taught the Armageddon spell. The Zog Cabal having been a nilhist group planning to resurrect him to end the world, the event having been run by the GMs over a period time. Well to make a long story short, someone decided to complain that the game glorifed Jewish terrorists (honest truth) as The Zog Cabal was a real group with Zog meaning "Zionist Ordained Goverment". Apparently there was some bickering between the people running the game, and the bottom line was that political correctness and avoiding potential scandals due to misunderstandings trumped maintaining costistincy with the Ultima lore, and that was when Richard Garriot really parted ways with the company. I played UO at the time this was actually happening so I have some idea as to how it went down.
The point is that even after things fell apart with his established franchises, Richard continued to go the MMO route, as opposed to returning to single player games, though he currently says that is what he plans to do again, and from a certain perspective, it makes a degree of sense because it offers the best level of returns for the amount of effort put into a game. That's the entire point, the similarities have caused a lot of the guys who would be doing the single player games to wind up developing for MMOs.
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To be entirely honest, "Bard's Tale" is early enough where you could really compare it to "Planescape Torment" because Torment actually had deeper mechanics than Bard's Tale did which kind of undermines the point, given that Torment was drawing on the then-current AD&D rules set. Bard's Tale was inspired by PnP RPGs but came about before anyone had seriously considered actual serious liscended products.
On the other hand I could quite easily put things like the later Wizardry games up against Torment as better overall RPG experiences. The same could also be said about some of the Ultima games and a few other titles. I generally tend to lionize "Wizardry 8" as the pinnacle of RPG game design, suffering in quality only due to the time it took for the trilogy it was a part of to be completed. Of course for a lot of reasons that game saw very limited distribution and not all that many people have played it.
Opinions are of course going to vary, but the reason why you don't see games like Torment, Wizardry 8, or Arcanum is largely because the mechanics involved in those games and the level of understanding involved is too great for the masses, meaning that while they might make good money, there is MORE money to be made by creating far more simplistic introductory games with detailed stories, but very simple gameplay.. as opposed to games that include detailed stories and very complex gameplay to go along with them.
Admittedly I think politics have affected some of this to begin with. Arcanum for example wasn't the most successful game out there, but a lot of that came due to fights between Troika and Sierra. Troika had a nasty habit of developing games that the publisher decided they didn't like at the last minute due to content, having to go back to an earlier build and modify it, and then the game being released late and full of bugs. These kinds of conflicts certainly didn't help RPGs overall.
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As things stand now there is no real way to defend Dragon Age II, which is why it's been getting spanked in the ratings from users. There is no way to argue that not being able to change what style of weapons your fighters use in some way does not reduce the depth of the experience compared to DA:O. The same could be said of the changes to the entire gameplay experience and mechanics.
What's more there is no reason why your companions should not be able to wear the armor you find, what it's an intelligent RP design choice that in going into a very hostile enviroment Varric wants to wear an open fronted shirt so he can show off his chest? That's as bad as the chain mail bikinis (and while some might argue men deserve it, let's just be honest in saying that we're looking at a fundementally ridiculous situation and excuse for why it exists).
I could go down a list point by point, but let me be honest. I think the real reason why characters in DA2 can't wear armor or change weapons/fighting styles is because that would involve having to make sure every equipment model worked with every character model, and
that would take a lot of time and effort. What's more, locking the characters into a specific apperance in the game itself opens the door for them to charge extra money for alternate apperance packs. They got away with it for "Mass Effect 2" so why not try and do that here? By doing things this way it makes the game not only easier to code and test, but also means that they can wind up creating less overall graphics/skins, and make more money by selling the ones they do create.
I'll be VERY surprised if we don't wind up seeing "Dragon Age 2 alternate appearance packs".
Today's philsophy on game design is to not include things in the game, that you can charge extra money for as DLC. For all the defense of RP and storytelling, and everything else, I'm consideraly more cynical than that.
More Mass Effect 2? Yes please!
Those screenshots are sexy. I cannot wait to see the engine for ME3.
Those screenshots are sexy. I cannot wait to see the engine for ME3.
Eclectic Dreck said:
I snipped a lot for the sake of space.
The gist of what we seem to be debating is the success of ME2 and DA2 in terms of sales and what that data means.
One thing to understand is that a successful game typically works in the form of a pyramid nowadays due to the used market. Both Mass Effect and Dragon Age increased their fan base because of so many people buying them used to try them out when they heard they were decent games. Bioware never saw money from, or tracked those sales.
As a result of this, there was a lot more people waiting for a sequel than had actually purchused the first games in the series. Incidently this kind of thing is one of the big defenses made of the pre-owned industry, since on a lot of levels it benefits game companies.
The thing was that because of the first games in the series, a lot of people pre-ordered the sequels, or bought them in the first few days. The backlash of "this blows chips compared to the originals" and people talking about the changes to the mechanics compared to the previous games thus seems to run contrary to the success of the games in question due to the numbers showing that the game out performed the previous one. Remember, most of the sales for any game happen during the first few days of release, there isn't a lot of time for word of mouth to get around to say "this is a good game" or "this blows" by the time the big numbers have been compiled. The fact that the sales are so front-loaded that way is also why companies do things like pressure reviewers to not release reviews with scores below a paticular level until after the prime sales period is done, because really after the first few days the trickle sales don't mean that much anymore.
All that you can tell by the sales of Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2 is that the first games in the series were popular. We won't know a whole lot about these games and how they were received until the third games in the series come out.
I think that what "Dragon Age Rage" is showing is that people who purchused the game are dissatisfied. I also think that "Dragon Age" and "Mass Effect" share a lot of the same player base, and you can see a lot of anger over "Mass Effect 2" contributing to this as well.
If Bioware is not VERY careful to give quality assurances, and to promote their next single player RPGs as fairly deep RPG experiences, I think they will be surprised to find that the sales for the third game are going to be comparitively low. Only time will tell (along with a specific choice of path) of course.
I would however like to think that Bioware and EA have both had their eyes on things, and recent events have not gone unnoticed. That is why I suspect we're going to see Mass Effect pushed up. I mean it's fine if people disagree with me, this is all just my opinion, and the path of my thoughts. There is nothing wrong with other people thinking differantly, it's not like any of us actually KNOW anything.
Also, it's true, that a lot of people just blitz forums with very brief statements. That's how most internet traffic is, not many people take the time to fully express themselves or explain what they think like I do... and of course those of us who do tend to be overlooked by people who just see a long post and respond "TL
R" or whatever.
