BioWare Mondays
BioWare have begun promoting the next update for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Said update will also feature some new palette-shifting technology that BioWare have developed for the game’s engine, which give them the ability to perform all manner of hue, contrast, and saturation adjustments to textures on the fly. Which, in turn, will be useful for using colour shifts to create mood highlights in certain areas.
The big BioWare-related news of last week, though, was the release of several screenshots from Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the revelation that the game will allow players to select from different playable races again (contra Dragon Age 2). Also, mounts will evidently be featured…get ready to get your horse on! Only they’ll probably call it a hunse or something similarly almost-but-not-quite-the-actual-English-word.
A lot of other information about the game has also come to light, including details about its combat model, semi-open-world design, and plot. The game will grace next month’s GameInformer cover, and they have thus begun to ramp up their coverage of the game’s development and characters something fierce. Case in point: an extensive look at Morrigan, one of the characters from the first Dragon Age game.
The latest SWTOR patch wasn’t just a graphical update. It included new factions for reputation, animal mounts (I’ve got a taun taun!), a new Ewok companion, new daily missions and 2 new flashpoints. It was a pretty huge content drop.
The next patch will include new PvP arenas, PvP ranked seasons, a new planet, new daily missions and two new Operations. Two Operations at once is huge.
I know WtF Dragon left the game a long time ago and hasn’t looked back, but the game really hit its stride with 2.0 and the expansion. We’re getting tons of great features and content lately. If anyone wants to try out the game (or perhaps give it another try) please consider using my referral code and we both get bonuses in game:
http://www.swtor.com/r/hJPK89
I actually reinstalled it a while ago. Haven’t dived in for lack of time.
You certainly do a lot with the site!
That. And more besides, when I’m away from it.
And that doesn’t even get into the whole “husband/father of 3” thing I’ve got going on.
Dragon Age 3… almost sounds interesting. But I’m standing my ground – I’ve been burned too many times by Bioware now and I refuse to buy this game until it’s been out long enough to be vetted by those more willing to put their money and time on the line.
What is Bioware’s recent track record?
DA2 was disappointing compared to DA1 but still better than many games out there. ME3 had an infuriating ending, but up until the ending, it was one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Bioware is the only studio I pre-order collector’s editions from, just to throw them money so they’ll keep making top-notch RPGs.
I’m glad you enjoyed those games but I just disagree. DA2 was a crapfest at times and at it’s best was poster child for video game mediocrity (in my opinion, of course). ME3 pretty much followed suit (again, in my opinion). It was a pretty 3rd person shooter, I suppose, but as a fan of the old style Bioware RPGs with rich storytelling and deep character development I found it sorely, sorely lacking. The terrible ending, to me, was only the final nail in what I already found to be a pretty disappointing entry to the series.
For my RPG fix I would much rather spend my hard earned time and money on games from CD Project Red and Bethesda. I guess they just build the kind of games I like, and Bioware really doesn’t anymore.
Granted, the re-use of certain generic levels in DA2 is annoying (and even jarring) at times, and granted (furthermore), I didn’t finish ME3 until after the ending-modifying DLC had come out.
That said, both RPG series (the aforementioned entries included) featured “rich storytelling and deep character development”. This point really should be beyond debate.
Certainly both series featured it. I was a huge fan of Mass Effect before I played through ME3 (and I still do love the first two games). I was also a huge fan of Dragon Age: Origins and the major expansion, though I did find the various DLCs for it to be pretty lackluster, the game itself was great.
Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 were definitely lacking in these areas, though. That’s not to say they didn’t have their moments – they certainly did. Dragon Age 2 had some well developed and likeable characters, but the story and scale of the game itself were incredibly poor compared to its predecessor and not on par with what I (and many others) had come to expect from a Bioware game. Likewise, Mass Effect 3 had some pretty incredible parts like reuniting the Geth and the Quarians or curing the Genophage. Unfortunately these were rare glimpses of greatness in the game. Gone were the character development quests of Mass Effect 2 or the open exploration of Mass Effect 1. Exploration (of which there was very little need, ever) was limited to very small areas of the Citadel and a few other worlds. Players spend a great deal of time gathering resources only to find it makes hardly a difference in the game’s story or ending. Choices from earlier in the series that we thought were going to have lasting consequences in the end, had little. Did Tali die in Mass Effect 2? Well, you’re in luck because another female Quarian will join you instead. Did you choose to kill the Rachni Queen? Magically, there is a new Rachni Queen in her place. I could go on, as I have a pretty long list of gripes regarding Mass Effect 3, but my point is, there is quite a bit of material for debating whether or not Mass Effect 3 and/ or Dragon Age 2 contained character development and story on par with their predecessors from their respective series. My opinion is that they didn’t.
To be perfectly fair, the “open exploration” of ME1 was kind of a letdown too. It was neat and novel to be able to explore and land on planets almost on a whim, but most of the planets were boring and uninspired. And the various bases scattered across them were repetitive, akin to any example one could cite from DA2. To be fair, ME1 remains my favourite of that series…but as is my wont, I’m pointing out that it’s not exactly innocent of some of the issues that people cite re: DA2 and ME3.
(And don’t get me started about combat in DAO. Ugh, so kludgy. I did a happy dance in my chair when I got a taste of combat in the DA2 demo; significant improvement, that!)
And as I recall, ME2 took a lot of hear for jettisoning the inventory system, among other things.
My point here is that there’s a certain amount of retconning that takes place when people look back fondly on the earlier entries in a series (especially a BioWare series) and disparage the most recent entry. I can almost predict that when ME4 comes out, people will complain that it abandons so many of the good things about ME3…conveniently forgetting much of what they complained about back when ME3 was new. It’s the same with DA2; people complained about a lot of things in DAO, but much of this seems to have been forgotten now in favour of disparaging DA2.
The earlier games had their flaws, as you pointed out, but managed to outshine them with their positives. The exploration in ME1 was definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but I have always been a fan of exploration games like Ultima 7, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, etc so it struck a chord with me. But in my earlier post I was referring specifically to just the areas of the game like The Citadel, the various planets you visited (as part of the story), they just had a lot more ‘meat’ to them than in ME3. And even in ME2 (actually my favorite entry of the series when taken with all of its DLC) there was more to do and explore.
Dragon Age definitely had an odd combat system, but it had such a great scale and story to it that I was willing to overlook it. I’d rather play a great story with DA:O’s combat system than a terrible one with DA2’s. Maybe retconning opinions about previous entries in a beloved series is a thing, but not for me (for example, I loved KotOR 2, Fallout 2, 3, New Vegas). I’ve never been so displeased with a new entry in a series that I vowed not to invest in it anymore, but Bioware managed to do it twice in a row.
DAO didn’t just have odd combat…it had the most dreadfully boring and uninspiring combat I’ve ever encountered in an RPG, worse even than in U7/SI. It was so bad, that on two separate attempts it took me out of the game before the end of the Ostagar segment! All the epic story and setting in the world couldn’t keep me spellbound when every fight was a plodding bore.
I did eventually pass the game…after installing a mod that doubled the speed of the combat animations and increased the frequency of “epic move” animations to around 25%.
And I thought that was rather a shame, because you’re right, cor…DAO is a very epic game in terms of story and scale. But it’s also a combat-heavy game…and it has a crap combat system that, for me at least, really hampers progression. DA2’s story doesn’t aspire to the same scale (which is not to concede that it is somehow of lower quality; it isn’t), and it’s locations don’t have quite the same epic feeling as e.g. the Deep Roads in DAO (plus, the repetition issue), but it has upbeat combat that makes progression fun.
(The best example of this in a game, of course, is Reckoning, which has an epic-scale world and an interesting — though in need of some fleshing out — story, and utterly amazing combat. And I know I’m banging on the combat drum here a lot, but…it’s a thing in all these games; you can’t pass any of them without engaging in a significant amount of fighting, so it’s important that they have good combat systems. Contrast this with something like U6: it’s combat system is pretty simplistic, but you can largely avoid combat in the game…and there’s no end boss to fight.)
Personally, I think both ME3 and DA2 rise above their flaws. Not as much as some games, sure, but certainly neither game is consumed by its issues. Your mileage obviously varies.