Nightly Open Thread
BioWare announces the final DLC for Mass Effect 2
Of course it has something to do with the imminent Reaper invasion that will be at the core of Mass Effect 3’s story. And it looks like it’ll have a lot to do with the mass relays as well.
Actually, I think that’d be a cool way to end the DLC and, by extension, the game: have Shepard and the team fight their way through a mass relay to stop someone from activiting the relay and allowing the Reapers to complete their journey. Of course, they fail in this regard, and the Reapers arrive, smashing the Normandy SR-2 to bits as they pass, leaving Shep and the team stranded on the relay.
I mean, what better way to open Mass Effect 3 with a training scenario then having Shephard fight her (I play as FemShep) way out of a relay?
The US isn’t ready to deal with a cyber attack
The head of the US military’s cyber forces warned the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that at best, America’s network defenses deserve a ‘C’ rating.
Comforting, no?
Ireland really is the Emerald Isle
So very green. And yesterday, the entire island was visible sans clouds (a rarity, and then a rather timely one!) from orbit. Naturally, NASA took an incredible picture of it.
Sony continues to find willing judges
Now they get to look at George “GeoHot” Hotz’s PayPal account records, to see who his donors were and where they made donations from.
Comforting, no?
Somebody turned off the Rustock botnet
You may have noticed less spam in your inbox since Wednesday. I know I have.
Tonight’s post brought to you by Dino Riders:
Remember these?
Mass Effect 2 show what it means to have DLCs done RIGHT.
For lack of a better soapbox to say this: I am having increasing misgivings about Bioware’s business practises, between banned forum users being unable to play ME or DA/etc and then this recent fiasco with Bioware employees (yes it was plural) posting 100% reviews for DA2 on Metacritic (which then resulted in a bit of an amazonbombing where a ton of people gave it 0% reviews in response).
Its just mildly sleazy and its misfortunate to see a formerly good company going that direction.
Wizadry: In fairness, as regards the guy whose ban rendered him unable to play Mass Effect and Dragon Age, that effect wasn’t BioWare’s fault, but EA’s. A BioWare employee — Stan Woo (great fellow; sang with him for a number of years) — explained the distinction in a forum post, and I believe the situation was eventually resolved.
Not that it wasn’t bad juju; it was. But the blame there can’t really be pinned on BioWare, at least not primarily. The user was banned under an EA TOS violation, and that was apparently why he lost access to his games for a while. Had he been banned under a BioWare Social TOS violation, he’d evidently have retained access to his games.
As regards the reviews, I will grant that it is kind of…er…yeah, basically not good at all. “They hast lost an eighth,” so to speak. Though in at least one sense, I can understand the frustration of the developers who did feel moved to post those reviews; Dragon Age 2 has been the target of a lot of rather irrational hatred and negativity from what I’ve seen and heard. I’ve read a number of criticisms of the game which have left me wondering if the erstwhile reviewer(s) actually played the same game that I purchased.
But again, I don’t say this to excuse the developers their actions. I simply note that I can understand their frustrations, and I tend to think of their actions as being dishonest in equal measure to those people (more than two!) who bottom-rated the game before it even released.
Wizardry: I saw one of your comments in the spam filter…but it was too late; I’d already clicked the ’empty’ button. My apologies. It was something about Dragon Age 2, presumably your impressions, but…yeah, sorry. My bad.
Update: Thanks to the miracle of the back button, I was able to recover the text from Chrome’s cached version of the un-emptied spam page. Give me a moment and I’ll get that comment online for you.
P.S. The issue was your use of BBCode, I think. That’s not allowed in the comments form. Just use the regular HTML a tag for links.
Dragon Age 2 felt like a reboot to me, and not a terribly good one; it has the air of the clone brush about it in the air; but that Penny Arcade encapsulated my issues with the game better than I could myself.
Its easy to say it’s EA’s fault that they got disconnected; they banned them, right? But Bioware is the one that programmed the game. They made the game in such a way it becomes disabled if you get banned. That’s just .. its not good. There is no other way to put it. It’s since been patched out, but the damage in goodwill has already been done, no?
I am left with the overwhelming feeling of hubris from Bioware, and it settles poorly in me. To me, they seem increasingly overrated.
I take some solace in the fact that Mythic is seperate, and they seem to at least have some solid ambitions and some good people; so all is not yet lost.
I haven’t yet played the game (my wife convinced me to give up gaming for Lent, though I’m still not clear as to how she managed that), so I can’t comment on the nature, air, and tone of the game. Others I know who have played and passed it expressed overall enjoyment, though all of them mentioned asset re-use as an issue.
I did play the demo, and I greatly enjoyed it, especially the overhauled combat and conversation systems. I can barely play Dragon Age: Origins now as a result. The overall tone of the demo seemed a bit more base than I’m used to in a game, but I am still open to the possibility that I’ll be proven wrong on that score.
It has, yes, although I don’t personally begrudge them anything in the incident. The games hook into your BioWare account for various reasons (achievement tracking, character saving, and DLC authorization, among others), which is also (courtesy of the buyout) the same as your EA account. EA and BioWare have similar TOS stipulations, but the penalties for violation are different. But since they’re both applied against the same account in the end…
It’s a technical shortcoming, although really not one that one can complain about too loudly. It’s generally nice to keep the number of logins one maintains to a minimum.
I think, pace your Penny Arcade link, that there are probably some interesting conversations taking place at BioWare right now, and I’m hoping that this unpleasantness will be a one-time thing. Time will tell.
I am really quite inspired by Mythic’s ambitions, however.
My understanding of how that guy was banned from playing the game is a little bit different. From what I can tell, it was all kind of an accident (on both Bioware and EA’s part). See, to play (install) the game for the first time you need to authenticate the serial key with your account. Since his account was temporarily banned, he was unable to authenticate until the ban lifted. I don’t think EA ever meant for the inability to install your games to be a kind of punishment, it was just an odd side effect of their copy protection that they didn’t think about.
As for DA2, I’m coming up on the final stretch of gameplay and I like it… But I’m not blown away by it like I was with DA:O. I’m still having fun, though.
The big nagging issues for me are that they took some big steps back in terms of level design and the conversation system. Specifically, how they reuse the same environments over and over, to the point where I’d say that literally 80% of the game is recycled environments. That is an awful lot of backtracking, which is a cardinal game design sin. With regards to the conversation system, you can no longer talk to your buddies whenever you want. Instead you can only talk to them when they have a quest for you. It isn’t a huge deal, but I do miss interacting with my broheims and dudettes around the campfire.
The combat is sort of a mixed bag. Without going into it much, it should be sufficient to say that where Mass Effect 2 overhauled their combat system and made it dramatically better, Dragon Age 2 overhauls the combat system and makes it kinda-sorta-better. Boss fights that look like Benny Hill sketches? Hilarious, yes. Epic, no. Also, badguys, especially the big ones (size wise), often get stuck and bug out on geometry.
Speaking of bugs, I have crashed to desktop several times. I’d say it is an acceptable level of crashyness, though. It isn’t nearly as bad as Fallout: New Vegas, where I crash as much as once every half hour or so. That said, DA2 isn’t capturing me nearly as much as New Vegas did, so the crashes actually feel more annoying. Once I beat this game (which is proving to be significantly shorter than DA:O, even though I’m being more completionist in this playthrough than my DA:O playthroughs), I don’t think that I will be tempted to give it another run (unless some epic DLC comes out… And is super cheap).
Overall, a B- game. Lots of Bioware fun, but some odd design choices this time around. The development cycle was super short, and you really can feel it. Still, if you liked Dragon Age (as I did), Dragon Age 2 is a worthy purchase.
I gotta I got much more enjoyment out of DAII than I did of DAO.
I liked DAO… but it never really clicked with. It was just… generic as eck in pretty much every aspect and with a main plotline that was pretty dull (altough the interesting cast of character made it up for it).
As I’m matter I’m actually rather puzzled at seeing DAO somehow elevated now as some kind of RPG classic… since I remember it had some rather mixed reaction back at its release. It was solid sure, but a far cry from NWN2 or BG2 – and I also liked Jade Empire and the ME games more than it.
But DAII just felt much more interesting and engaging than its predecessor. As a matter of fact, DAO bored be enough (during the Fade) to make me drop it for a few month, and almost made me quit again during the Deep Roads. I played DAII without stopping, which says a lot.
First it felt and look less generic: a lot of fuss has been made about the change of style (which is not that much of a change really, it still feels like the same world), but most of the change are definitly for the best and help to give Thedas a more unique feel – Elf don’t look like Vulcan anymore, Darkspawns don’t feel like something out of “How to draw an Orc for Dummies” and Qunari are just goddamn impressive.
But where DAII shines its in its plot and writing. While it admitedly doesn’t have as much C&C as DAO… the writing is much more solid (I’d argue it’s amongst the best Bioware has offered) and more subtle. The plot has more nuances that what Bioware usually offers and never feels Black&White to the least. Indeed it kinda feel like something that could have come out of Obsidian: which says a lot. This is true about the Companions as well.
But the plot was just very good and damned more interesting that you usual fantasy fare. In retrospect I don’t think it feels so much as a spin-off and I would have thought initially. Sure, it doesnt follow the story of the Warden from DAO… but the events of this game are too major in the history of Thedas for it to be considered a simple “spin off”.
Now DAO is probably the better game in terme of RPG mechanics and choice&consequences – but DAII is definitly a very solid game despite it being a “rush job” (this is no Ultima IX). The reused area really is my main complain of this game (reusing a area a few times is a thing, after a dozen times… not so much), altough it wasn’t as annoying as ME on account of having real quests within it. But if it wasn’t for thise annoying reuse, this might actually have ranked along my favorites Bioware games.
There are some other issues though nothing major. I feel the pacing could have been improved as well: Act I dragged a bit too long and should have been tighter, and things went a bit too fast during Act III (also with one of the “letters side quest” impossible to complete I wonder if that did not remove some other quests to do). Act II was pretty much perfect though. On the whole the whole “flashback story told over ten years” works pretty well if a tad rough around the edge and it felt fresher compared to previouses Bioware endeavours in that it didn’t felt like it recycled the same basic premise over and again like all their other games did.
On a side note while this is not exactly a complain, I can’t help thinking the game would have worked better as a semi open world kind of game: think a big sprawling city à la Assassin’s Creed with night&day cycles and obviously more RPG elements. The idea of setting the whole game in a single city would have made more sense this way rather than using the regular Bioware approach.
Of course that would have meant a totally different kind of engine and approach of gameplay that Bioware is used to. ANd definitly more time 😛
In any case I now look forward to the next Dragon Age games… while I honestly wasn’t that excited or interested after DAO.
I agree that there were some areas in DA:O that were so boring that they were actually a struggle to get through, particularly the Fade bits and the prison sequence… But I did, nearly twice, one after another.
In DA2, about midway through the 2nd act the game just ran out of steam. I had set a clear goal early on (that goal being to bowm-chikka-wow-wow Merill), and once I had achieved it and got back to the actual “main quest” (such as it is, it is really just about becoming a hero, no dire threat or even coherent reason as to why you are still tooling around in Kirkwall after the blight is over) I found that it didn’t interest me at all.
Still, the game is charming in its own way. I want to see the end, I’m just not in such a big hurry as I was in DA:O. Because that game was better.
As for the artwork… Blah, not my thing. Very overdone and anime-ish. Every character wears outfits that are almost completely covered in pointless buckles. Seriously, why do I have ten buckles on my shoulder pads? WHAT PURPOSE DO THESE BUCKLES SERVE!?! And they turned the subtle, mysterious, old granny Flemeth into some kind of freak anime dominatrix.
“I did play the demo, and I greatly enjoyed it, especially the overhauled combat and conversation systems. I can barely play Dragon Age: Origins now as a result. The overall tone of the demo seemed a bit more base than I’m used to in a game, but I am still open to the possibility that I’ll be proven wrong on that score.”
The problem is that if you were to play the demon five times over, you’ve essentially played the full game. It reuses assests with such frequency that it becomes QUITE noticable.
“It isn’t a huge deal, but I do miss interacting with my broheims and dudettes around the campfire.”
More and more such side interaction gets cut out of Bioware games these days. I wonder if they realise that these side interations was the charm of their storytelling. The side conversations with Bastila or Jahiera or Minsc were epic.
Now things are very formulaic, and you only get interaction in the form of the quest transaction. It makes the supposed friendships seem marriages of convinence and while that may work for the odd character having it for every single character just makes all the characters seem all the shallower.