1561

Some of my own feelings are beginning to echo aphoristic’s, and I’m only about 5-10 hours in. I mean, the game is fun and a well made RPG, but do I really want to invest another 50 hours in a game that has very little to show me that I haven’t already experienced in countless other fantasy RPGs? It all seems too much like a retread of more original ideas and worlds. Dragon Age is like an encyclopedia of fantasy tropes, and exclamation points over quest givers? Really? You couldn’t think up something different, Bioware?

I’m gonna sleep on it, but I’m seriously considering stopping my playthrough.

1562

Now we’re complaining about exclamation points over quest givers? Unbelievable. Why not complain about the box art?

Seems that some people simply no longer want that kind of game that Dragon Age (very excellently) represents, but bought it anyway out of nostalgic sentiment. They thought they still want this gameplay, and now they find that they don’t and vent their frustration by making all those absurd nitpicks.

1563

Chris N:
Bingo. I think you hit the nail on the head there. I feel the same way about flight sims. I haven’t got the 100+ hours to invest in getting so good it feels good to fly anymore.

1564

The exclamation points were just a little thing that really stuck out to me late last night. This quote from the Eurogamer review really sums up my overall issues with the game:

Small wonder, then, that super-studio BioWare’s return to the realms that made its name has attracted such intense, devotional interest. It might have shed the formal connection to Dungeons & Dragons, but otherwise Dragon Age: Origins might as well be a sequel to Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, and the world is willing it to be a classic. Over half a decade in the making, vast in scope, neck-deep in loot, lore and labyrinthine plotting - if classics were measured by the yard and made out of man-hours, Dragon Age would stand head and shoulders above them all.

But they’re not. And although it’s a work of great accomplishment and craftsmanship - and no small amount of ambition - Dragon Age is sorely lacking in the things that make a truly great role-playing game, or any game for that matter: vision, inspiration, soul.

Somewhere in its journey back to its roots, BioWare has got lost in the dense tangle of what it was trying to accomplish. It hasn’t been able to see the wood for the trees. It has summoned an entire world into existence in the most meticulous detail, but failed to give it an identity beyond the blandest cliché. It has created living characters that respond like humans, but speak like dictionaries and move like mannequins. It has engineered solidly absorbing RPG gameplay and character progression and stranded them in a succession of hackneyed and hide-bound scenarios.

In its desperation to infuse this setting with “maturity” - be it of the sober, political kind, or the game’s painfully clumsy gore and sex - BioWare has forgotten the key ingredient of any fantasy: the fantastical. Without it, you’re still left with a competent, often compelling, impressively detailed and immense RPG, but it’s one that casts no spell.

The RPG is one of my favorite genres, but raw gameplay alone cannot carry a game for me. Dragon Age is a really good RPG, but it isn’t one of the great ones.

1565

Well, I just disagree and I couldn’t make any sense of that Eurogamer review either. It’s simply not true that the characters “speak like dictionaries” or that the scenarios are “hackneyed and hide-bound”. Claims that the game lacks “vision, inspiration, soul” or that it “casts no spell” are vague and utterly subjective, and I cannot interpret them as anything but a veiled admission that the author no longer wants the kind of gameplay that Dragon Age epitomizes. I don’t mean the whole RPG genre here but the Baldur’s Gate style of fantasy RPGs with a party and tactical combat. Dragon Age is a really excellent representation of that sub-genre, one of the very best, and I just can’t see how anyone can substantiate a claim that this is not the case.

1566

The combat is the worst part of the game, actually. How they tested that out and thought it was fine is beyond me.

1567

Huh? The combat system is excellent. On the PC anyway…

1568

I don’t really get the complaints over the game being “generic” fantasy. It’s fantasy, certainly, and okay, it doesn’t go as far afield as something like Planescape, or Entomorph, but I really don’t think there’s a wide audience looking for that sort of esoteric setting. Planescape didn’t exactly light the world on fire originally, did it? And Jeff Vogel has noted time and time again that it’s the relatively familiar fantasy setting of Exile/Avernum that’s paid off for him, not his experiment in doing something different (see: Nethergate, to a lesser extent Geneforge).

That said, Dragon Age’s Thedas/Ferelden is still a very distinctive, detailed fantasy world with a ton of stuff I have -not- seen before, thank you very much, certainly not in a CRPG.

1569

I’m rather in agreement with the Eurogamer review, even though I’ve enjoyed the game a lot. I find the game very enjoyable in terms of gameplay (creating a combat team that blows through even the toughest boss battles in moments even on the highest levels is a fun challenge); but the actual presentation itself? Meh. Rob people blind right in front of their eyes and no one bats an eyelash (which you can in fact do that to one of the key characters in the game). Like most Bioware games, the game world itself is dead.

Ferelden is a bog-standard medieval human fantasy land; the dwarves are just dwarves (with politics) and there is really nothing about the elves that make them particularly distinctive from Elves in every other fantasy world. The setting is fantastically detailed, but IMO also totally forgettable. The Eurogamer assesment of it being great craftmanship but lacking in magic seems really spot on to me.

I still think it is a excellent game, though - definitely the best RPG I’ve played for quite a while.

1570

Maybe that’s it. I’m playing on the 360, and not only do they consistently forget what they’re doing, the targeting is ass. Plus, you can only either have them hold position, in which case they won’t attack anything, or have them move freely, in which case they will all run to cram within two inches of whoever you’re controlling.

1571

Add me as one that can’t really make sense of that Eurogamer review. Those quotes are vague assertions that I just can’t agree with. Yes, the underlying fantasy base is familiar but there’s enough character and identity to make it satisfying.

I would like more environmental interactivity and “simulation” but that stands for every BioWare game - it just isn’t their focus.

1572

I’m pretty sure elves in most other settings aren’t either a hated, ghettoized underclass or paranoid antisocial hunters trying to salvage the culture that remains after centuries of slavery.

I mean, except in The Witcher.

1573

Wait, what? Did someone actually write the following?

That’s hilarious.

1574

Yeah. They should have had umlauts over the quest givers, to make the game more METAL.

Oops, I was thinking of Brutal Legend. Never mind.

1575

I think this is the key here. Dragon Age is a typical Bioware game in a lot of ways and for some people that’s no longer good enough. Something has changed their minds about what they want in an RPG. Maybe it was Fallout 3’s open world. Maybe it was some other game, perhaps not even an RPG. After all, the lines between game genres are getting rather blurred anymore.

It reminds me in a way of how Doom 3 was received. A very typical game of what Id had done earlier in the series, but FPS games had changed and so had people’s expectations.

1576

Very good point, Sarkus. I think this partly explains why I am struggling so much to get into the game. Hell, even Mass Effect (which despite being released a year earlier, is a much newer game than DA) makes me look at Dragon Age in a more negative light. It does so many things better than Bioware’s most recent release.

1577

The important thing to realize is that all those Dragonage haters would also hate Torment, as it shares those characteristic “flaws.”

Me, I thought that Bioware did a good job of making me not miss an open world, except for that first town with the little grass arena to the north. That place felt contrived and full of arbitrary boundaries, but the rest of the game felt perfectly normal, less closed-in than Mass Effect or KOTOR.

1578

You might be right there.

Eurogamer review that rates PST 7/10

(I knew I remembered something like this from when Torment was Wikipedia’s article of the day)

1579

Er…what? All the bitching about Doom 3 I can recall was about how it -wasn’t- like the earlier games in the series. Low enemy count, emphasis on “horror” over guns blazing action, etc.

1580

What? No he isn’t. That Eurogamer review doesn’t complain about the same things at all. It complains about a bug that slows the game down to a crawl when you play it for an extended period. I remember that bug well. It also complains about a lack of multiplayer.

I don’t think anyone would ever accuse Planescape Torment to be generic fantasy or that it lacks vision, inspiration or a soul. Torment has that in spades, and there’s not a whiff of that kind of complaint in that Eurogamer review, or anywhere else on the net with regards to Torment.