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General discussion (archive)Seriously, GOG should stop releasing games!(37 posts)(37 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted March 21, 2012
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mrmarioanonym: No, they don't. Just play KOTOR or Baldurs Gate
KOTOR was released 9 years ago. Baldur's Gate was released 14 years ago. They might have been good then, but they're pretty bad now.
Posted March 21, 2012
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mrmarioanonym: No, they don't. Just play KOTOR or Baldurs Gate
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sheepdragon: KOTOR was released 9 years ago. Baldur's Gate was released 14 years ago. They might have been good then, but they're pretty bad now.
You have a point, but what about Mass Effect 1?
Posted March 21, 2012
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mrmarioanonym: You have a point, but what about Mass Effect 1?
To be fair, I enjoyed both Mass Effect 1 and 2, and I also liked Dragon Age: Origins.

Dragon Age 2 on the other hand, was horrible. The Old Republic looked like shit from the moment it was announced, and I won't touch it or EAs origin with a 10 light year pole through a quantum singularity gateway at the end of the universe.
From what I've played of Mass Effect 3, it seems to try too hard with all these emotional moments, and it looks like the endings are pretty bad (guess everyone already knows that). Might... acquire it when all the DLCs are released to give it a proper play through. If I enjoy it, I might consider properly compensating them for the experience.
Post edited March 21, 2012 by sheepdragon
Posted March 21, 2012
You got most of the keywords in there but had you also included "Steam sucks" you would have instantly been promoted to Deity. Oh well better luck next time.

Disclaimer : I like Steam.
Post edited March 21, 2012 by Egotomb
Posted March 21, 2012
My comparing BG with CoD:MW was that both game were developed with mass appeal in mind. BG uses the most boring, but well known, AD&D setting imaginable. Very simplified controls and mechanics (for 90s RPGs at least). Again, I'm not saying that those other games were better, or BG bad, but it certainly wasn't the "second coming of RPG christ" that people make you believe it was.

Honestly, calling BG story superior over DA:O, even DA 2 or ME 2 is fueled by nostalgia glasses. After playing the Candlekeep demo, I had very strong indications on were the story was going. While that isn't bad itself ( If you consume enough pop culture, there is hardly a plot twist you won't see coming), it wasn't the masterpiece many people make it out to be. And even one of the major revelations of part 2 was blalantly obvious when playing the first.

Bioware has always played the mass appeal card, no less with BG (when they were fishing for the Diablo crowd) or KOTOR (cashing in on the Star Wars hype) or Mass Effect (aiming for the "shooter kids"). Yet, none of those were necessarily bad games. I enjoyed just about every Bioware game I played, some more, some less. And for the foreseeable future, every Bioware game will be bought eventually by me.

Being a gamer now and then I can't see the point in all of the complaints. Biowere never was the "great artistic studio". That was, imo, Black Isle, Troika, Obsidian. While the letter get a lot of flak for buggy games, Bioware is held in an esteem that they simply don't deserve.

Actually I think there recent games are a lot more interesting than the earlier games.
Posted March 21, 2012
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mrmarioanonym: You have a point, but what about Mass Effect 1?
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sheepdragon: To be fair, I enjoyed both Mass Effect 1 and 2, and I also liked Dragon Age: Origins.

Dragon Age 2 on the other hand, was horrible. The Old Republic looked like shit from the moment it was announced, and I won't touch it or EAs origin with a 10 light year pole through a quantum singularity gateway at the end of the universe.
From what I've played of Mass Effect 3, it seems to try too hard with all these emotional moments, and it looks like the endings are pretty bad (guess everyone already knows that). Might... acquire it when all the DLCs are released to give it a proper play through. If I enjoy it, I might consider properly compensating them for the experience.
That pretty much sums it up. Bioware has a bit of a split personality. On the one hand you have the Bioware of the 1990s and 2000s that actually cared about making good, deep RPGs. You could tell that they were gamers at heart from their PR work. I didn't get to play Shattered Steel until it came out on GOG, and I've really enjoyed it. I played Baldur's Gate and MDK 2 in my formative years, and over the years I really enjoyed KOTOR, Jade Empire and the first Mass Effect.

With the release of the first Mass Effect and its takeover by EA though, we began to see a much more "mechanical" company that seemed to obsess more about its PR work than it cared about actually making good games. Mass Effect 2 gave me the feeling that I might as well as just have bought Call of Duty, and Dragon Age 2 was a joke beyond all definition. Everything since ME1 just seems too mundane, too bland, and too stripped down (DA:O notwithstanding).

I respect Bioware for its achievements in its early days, but I agree that Bioware, in its current incarnation, does suck.

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Egotomb: You got most of the keywords in there but had you also included "Steam sucks" you would have instantly been promoted to Deity.
Steam sucks. I am God. Bow down to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
Post edited March 21, 2012 by jamyskis
Posted March 21, 2012
Okay, I'm about to piss off everyone.


I didn't play Bioware game before KOTOR1 and nothing after KOTOR2. So no Dragon Age, no KOTOR MMO, No Mass Effect. I've played a Buldur's Gate but it's not on the list I have so I'm not sure if Bioware made them all.

But the ending, really, it's theirs. They had this in mind for a long time, probably the entire trilogy, how this series would end. Maybe at one point the ending was going to be based on how you played up to the end. Then again, doing that means hoards of people would never see the other endings without popping through the other games if they wanted to do it proper. It's a really interesting idea to have such a bleak ending as the ones portrayed, the only recent game I've finished to do so was Halo: Reach, where you're left alone on a world quickly being overrun by the enemy, the lone survivor of your team, and your only goal left is to fight, and take as much of the opposition with you as possible.

Maybe they will change the ending, or maybe they'll eventually expand the game. There's a few hints to what happens to the protagonist between the endings, we might see another game based on another character down the line. But right now it's not worth getting upset over a fiction that you didn't write, nor one that you didn't plan, work with, develop for 5 years. Because then you become that crazy person from the Dean Coontz (Spelling? Right author?) story where the fan kidnaps the author to write a new ending for his book. And then you're the one being the dick.
Posted March 21, 2012
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QC: But the ending, really, it's theirs. They had this in mind for a long time, probably the entire trilogy, how this series would end.
http://www.officialplaystationmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/26/mass-effect-3-bioware-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/

Nope.
Posted March 21, 2012
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mrmarioanonym: You have a point, but what about Mass Effect 1?
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sheepdragon: To be fair, I enjoyed both Mass Effect 1 and 2, and I also liked Dragon Age: Origins.

Dragon Age 2 on the other hand, was horrible. The Old Republic looked like shit from the moment it was announced, and I won't touch it or EAs origin with a 10 light year pole through a quantum singularity gateway at the end of the universe.
From what I've played of Mass Effect 3, it seems to try too hard with all these emotional moments, and it looks like the endings are pretty bad (guess everyone already knows that). Might... acquire it when all the DLCs are released to give it a proper play through. If I enjoy it, I might consider properly compensating them for the experience.
I f*ckin hate Origin. Once had to register something for DLC and the game didn't even appear in my account. luckily this game doesn't need origin. And then i find out that the free dlc can't be acquired through registration anymore, but through a free master key.
Posted March 21, 2012
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jamyskis: On the one hand you have the Bioware of the 1990s and 2000s that actually cared about making good, deep RPGs.
If you can call BG and KOTOR "deep" with a straight face. I know I can't.
Posted March 21, 2012
I'm just saying that this thread is no also on my ignore list, because I will only start playing tomorrow. How many threads about the ending do we need for fucks sake!
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jamyskis: On the one hand you have the Bioware of the 1990s and 2000s that actually cared about making good, deep RPGs.
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bazilisek: If you can call BG and KOTOR "deep" with a straight face. I know I can't.
Excactly my thoughts, BG was just another High Fantasy RPG. I've never finished BG 2, which people say has a better story.

Edit: Which doesn't make it a bad game, as I said before.
Post edited March 21, 2012 by SimonG
Posted March 21, 2012
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QC: But the ending, really, it's theirs. They had this in mind for a long time, probably the entire trilogy, how this series would end.
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sheepdragon: http://www.officialplaystationmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/26/mass-effect-3-bioware-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/

Nope.
Your link itself says they knew what they wanted, just not how to do what they wanted.
Posted March 21, 2012
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sheepdragon: http://www.officialplaystationmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/26/mass-effect-3-bioware-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/

Nope.
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QC: Your link itself says they knew what they wanted, just not how to do what they wanted.
True enough. But that's a given. Bioware made an antagonist, they knew that at the end it would have to be defeated, and that they would have to give it the series at least a couple of endings. This has all been repeated ad nauseum, but the general complaint seems to be that the ending is entirely unaffected by an actual choice, apart from what you get right there at the very end. Bioware hasn't ever been really good at the whole choice and consequence aspect. But in some of the previous games, you might at least had gotten a feeling that your choices throughout the game in some way affected what slideshow/cutscene you got at the end.
Posted March 21, 2012
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QC: Your link itself says they knew what they wanted, just not how to do what they wanted.
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sheepdragon: True enough. But that's a given. Bioware made an antagonist, they knew that at the end it would have to be defeated, and that they would have to give it the series at least a couple of endings. This has all been repeated ad nauseum, but the general complaint seems to be that the ending is entirely unaffected by an actual choice, apart from what you get right there at the very end. Bioware hasn't ever been really good at the whole choice and consequence aspect. But in some of the previous games, you might at least had gotten a feeling that your choices throughout the game in some way affected what slideshow/cutscene you got at the end.
Since I don't have a year and $80 to spend grabbing the games, I've no issues with spoilers. Deus Ex Machina device basically there at the end. The whole goal is of course, survival. I don't know what all the possible uses for the device are, but the end result is always the same. Changing the ending means putting someone in place of himself at the end, or downright failure otherwise. There's an ending implicating that he lives, the others let you assume otherwise, so canon isn't something that can really be established right now. I don't know if there were other options, other possibilities, but gamers would likely be pissed off anyway if Shepard hadn't played that role in the end, if everything you did resulted in absolute failure, and maybe more so if you didn't have any option at the end game. Those options didn't seem like they reflected much on who the character was though, since it was the same result regardless. The difference was how you set about to do it. Having a true ending by choice would require about 12 different possibilities, from failure, successes, death, sacrifice, a solitary existence as the one sole survivor in the universe.

I think, the only way you can really do that anymore, would be to scrap the entire ending device, or save it as the outcome for several of them. Say in another game, your choices lead you to early success, late failure, utter bypass, or a new solution entirely. But who knows. Bioware has acknowledged people's annoyances already and say they might do something about it. I don't think it's likely.
Post edited March 21, 2012 by QC
Posted March 21, 2012
Yeah, see it's all just opinion.. there's no one right answer.

What makes me say that is that I could reverse everything you've said.

I DO find the DA games inferior in gameplay, story and writng, and I simply didn't like ME after the first.. the only thing better is the graphics engine, and even then it's not the best.. You say 'fueled by nostaligia' I say you're distracted by shinies. You say most boring version of D&D.. and I say all other versions have no flavour with it's constant add a stat and homoginised everyone can be anything, add a perk, add a class, add some interest.

So no one is really right when it comes to consideration and opinion... it's when you start writing definatives that you can be class as wrong.

Bioware at no time, went for 'The Diablo crowd' they knew exactly who they were going for and EVERYONE at the time knew that fans of something so simple and action oriented wouldn't be the audience for this slow, deliberate and thoughtful project. I will agree that Bioware were never the bunch of faultless genius they are considered to be today.. their writing was never great, their engines were hardly state of the art, but they used to know their audience and catered to that.. the support BG and to a greater extent NWN received was phenomenal and that alone is what built their name. Then they pissed all that goodwill away and opted for the mass audience, I'm not surprised their older audience is sickened by the turn of event. Black were the true innovators.. Bioware get credit for BG, but in all honesty Black IsIe are far more deserving of the the credit for the first, Biowares biggest contribution was the engine and support, BL did most of the actual memorable design work, not all though admittedly. Kotor was admittedy the beginning of Bioware's focus, from loyal audience to mass appeal, they failed a couple of times and lied to their fans more than once, remember the venture capital fiasco?.. they justified their switch in focus by saying they needed more capital investement but that because of the investment they would never end up in bed with the big boys pulling the string.... well that was correct, they just ended up with the big boys after all and chose to have their strings pulled for a nice cash payment. Yes it's all about money making, but it's just rather shitty when to make that money includes kicking you audience to the curb none to cerimoniously, whlie already courting their next 'gal'

Unfortunately we come to Obsidian.. they are a sad state of affairs, occasionally you can see greatness, but it's all mired in bullshit, with buggy and broken releases, and I can't EVER give a pass for gameplay if the product is broken.. Kotor2 was broken and unfinished (admitedly Atari denied them, what should be, their rights to patch the game even though one was ready, but still, to release the game in that condition in the first place..it's piss poor planing and direction), NWN2 was a travisty of a product, it took 2 years to get it up to a playable condition and it's still overwhelmingly considered as the bastard stepchild, it should have been an evolution in everyway.. but all it was in reality was massive step back.

But even at Bioware's heights, I fully agree with you, they are held in an esteem that they don't deserve, not now, and not then.
Post edited March 21, 2012 by Tormentfan
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussion (archive)Seriously, GOG should stop releasing games!(37 posts)(37 posts)
(37 posts)