Dragon Age: Origins 2

[InCrYsIs]

"Dragon Age II: The Decline of the classic RPG"

 

http://www.hookedgamers.com/editorials/2011/03/02/dragon_age_ii_the_decline_of_the_classic_rpg.html

 

a small summary,thanks to gamebanshee:

 

"None of this would be so much of an issue if BioWare lived up to their

promises and actually provided two viable styles of playing the game.

Everyone can sympathise with their decision to add real-time combat to

the game and make it easier for new players to get into the game, in

fact we support it. The more people you can get to play your game the

better; cRPGs are notoriously hard to start off with so making things a

bit easier for beginners is great. However, the issue arises when you

change the very core of the game. The real time combat should in fact be

harder to play. At the beginning of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall,

players were asked if they would like high or low player reflexes

enabled, the slower being easier because players could adopt “a more

cautious and thoughtful playstyle”. This is the kind of option that

should be given in Dragon Age 2. Instead the game only truly caters to

the fast, button-mashing style.

 

Playing with these kinds of

settings just isn’t right for the traditional pause-play style. People

have argued that if you want that traditional experience then you can

simply play on a harder game mode, but this does not solve it. The

difficulty simply makes the game harder with modifiers such as friendly

fire (in nightmare mode) tougher enemies and so on, but it is still

played as an Action-RPG. While playing the demo, pausing the game to

issue an attack on an enemy just felt completely ridiculous, as they

would have already landed 3 attacks on you by the time you have done

one. The only possible way to do it is to pause and unpause the game

every half a second, therefore forcing players to simply mash buttons

until the enemy is dead. Dragon Age 2 is a real-time Action-RPG, and so

having the pause-play (that only really works with the slower pace of

turn-based RPG’s) is just an unnecessary feature rather than another way

to play through the game.

 

Like many other developers, BioWare

have made their three main cRPG series into Action-RPGs with Mass Effect

2, Dragon Age 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. There is no doubt that

these will be great games, but the problem is that they have been

sculpted to what will sell, rather than making the gaming experience

that a number of players are struggling to find nowadays. The market has

always been driven by sales, but nowadays the publishers and producers

are sacrificing genres in order to make more money. As said previously,

Dragon Age: Origins was a commercial success so there was no real need

to change the game so dramatically. This declination is inextricably

tied in to the popularity of consoles over PCs amongst today’s gamers.

As gaming spreads to mass audiences, producers and publishers are lured

by the money that comes along with it. In this case it seems that EA

have encouraged BioWare to open up the game to a bigger audience, and in

doing so have lost many aspects of the genre it once was.

 

 

Worse still, there are signs that the game has been rushed out to meet

publisher demands. The graphics are not going to mesmerise anyone, in

fact they don’t look any better compared to Origins, environments are

fairly dull looking but worst of all is weak level design. The review in

PC Games has said that the majority of Dragon Age 2 plays out very much

like the demo, meaning a lot of copy-pasted and narrow paths - ugly.

Narrow paths in an RPG is actually an oxymoron as the genre requires

freedom and an open world and should not be bottle-necking its players.

What this effect does however, is focus the game more towards combat as

is the nature of an action-RPG. It’s quite understandable that all of

these shortcomings have occurred as BioWare are making an effort to

bring out all three of their big RPGs in one year. Given that Dragon Age

2 has only had a maximum of two years in development, many of us

suspected that the game would fall short in some areas. This lack of an

open world, combined with the simple combat means that the game slides

even further from its origins. "

[bp9801]

Damn good summary of it. Somehow I don't see it changing much in the long haul because BioWare is now a part of EA. EA is more known for quantity rather than quality, as is Activision.

[InCrYsIs]

Damn good summary of it. Somehow I don't see it changing much in the long haul because BioWare is now a part of EA. EA is more known for quantity rather than quality, as is Activision.

 

This is the way games are going. If you are looking for Oblivion type games go find them, they are out there. Even though I am looking forward to the game , I do think they deviated from the original too much. But do people buy games that are too close to the original? YES. they want the coninuation story and if they loved the game all you need to do is make some subtle changes.

Edited March 7, 2011 by InCrYsIs

[WhenKittensATK]

Damn good summary of it. Somehow I don't see it changing much in the long haul because BioWare is now a part of EA. EA is more known for quantity rather than quality, as is Activision.

The only quantity series EA has now that I know of is Medal of Honor (approved for annual release) and sports games.

Edited March 7, 2011 by Krazyxazn

[bp9801]

That is one reason why I'm looking forward to TES V: Skyrim. It's the same basic game with some changes that make it more modern, without ripping anything away so far. With ME2 and DA2, they took the basic RPG elements, stripped it down to almost nothing, and then made the game all about killing things as quick as possible. One thing that bugs me about the DA2 demo are the hurlock grunts. In DAO, those guys died in one hit basically.. now in the DA2 demo, those guys don't drop until you've wailed on them for ages it seems. It's just, yeah, I'm looking forward to DA2 but I don't know how much I'll like it or enjoy it because of all the changes. Call me a traditionalist, but I don't see the point in radically changing a game from one iteration to the next when there was almost nothing wrong with the first game.

[WhenKittensATK]

Dragon Age wasn't a traditional RPG to begin with. The changes to DA2 follow in line of what they were doing in DA. You practically play both the same way, except combat is more interactive in DA2, which I like. In DA1, I just leave them on auto pilot.

Edited March 7, 2011 by Krazyxazn

[El_Capitan]

Welcome to the world of hardcore gamers. I gave up on the gaming industry years ago. Sales = everything these days. The only good games you'll find are the small start-up game companies before they make it big. Once they make it big, the games are watered down and their name in conjunction with marketing is what sells the game.

 

While it sucks for us gamers, at least the developers get their money. Not so popular good games usually don't make a lot of sales, while popular not-as-good games, do.

[InCrYsIs]

Dragon Age wasn't a traditional RPG to begin with. The changes to DA2 follow in line of what they were doing in DA. You practically play both the same way, except combat is more interactive in DA2, which I like. In DA1, I just leave them on auto pilot.

 

 

What isn't traditional about it? I think it has plenty of traditional components.

[WhenKittensATK]

Automation through Tactics, combination spells, and etc. It was basically a tactical action RPG with play and pause style gameplay. Not many RPG games are like that. Most are either turn base, mmorpg style, or plain action RPG.

Edited March 7, 2011 by Krazyxazn

[InCrYsIs]

First Review

 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8701-Dragon-Age-II-Review

 

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/115/1154229p1.html

 

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/unnameddragonageprojectworkingtitle/review.html

Edited March 8, 2011 by InCrYsIs

[WhenKittensATK]

High Resolution Texture Pack for the PC version of Dragon Age II

 

If someone hasn't posted it yet.

[InCrYsIs]

I have been reading through the Bioware forums. Expect problems. If you are running an Nvidia card it sounds like the newest beta drivers fix most of the performance issues with DX11 issues. Didn't find anything for ATI users.