1921

I’ve reinstalled the game. It’s on my backlog to finish. Thankfully, I managed to copy my saved games from my old harddrive. If I’d had to have started from scratch, I’d have cried.

1922

Finally plowed through the Deep Roads and decided to do something I’ve never done before, I flipped the difficulty down to Casual. Since I’m not playing on the PC, I’m not getting that full Baldur’s Gate vibe anyway. While I appreciate how Dragon Age tries to bring some of that feel to a console, I decided that after 50 hours of play, I had gotten my fill of combat padding. Now I just want to see how the story resolves for its own sake.

I think if I had played it on the PC, I would be more frustrated at the game’s length since I imagine I never could have gotten as far as I did in 50 hours with the more demanding PC control.

I thought NWN1’s engine looked solid enough given that a lot of what it had to do was serve as a fairly simple module creation kit for people. I remember seeing some footage of characters walking in pitch black dungeons with only torches for light, and there was a decent vibe going on there.

The OC “get 4 things” crap was rough, though, and it’s been a Bioware staple ever since. Even Dragon Age has you collecting races. Playing NWN1 entirely in coop made it a lot more fun, though.

1923

Well, there were two main problems: the first was that it was pretty low-poly and otherwise low-end. The second was that there were only a handful of tilesets from which every single area in both the official and fan-made campaigns had to be made. This meant every city looked pretty much the same. Every forest. Every cave system. Etc. The expansions each added a couple more, and at least two or three were added in patches, but the final total still has to have been under 20, and even the wider variety of tilesets didn’t prevent every area made with a given tileset from looking pretty close to the next one. Compared to the gorgeous hand-crafted backdrops of the various Infinity Engine games, it was a rude shock.

1924

I’m just about to start on the Deep Roads… I was pretty burned out on the game and had let it sit for a few months now. Got 60hrs behind me and have finished the Elven, Human & Magi quests and only got the dwarven area to complete, which is where I got stuck last time. All the backwards and forwards in the dwarven levels (geography & politics) wore me down last time & I let it sit there…

Just finally want to finish the game now and plow through! But I gather Deep Roads takes a bit of time & I’m not sure how much game content there is still left after that.

1925

Does DA scale the areas at all? I did the Dwarven area last and the Deep Roads weren’t over long to me… but the common enemies went down very quickly.

1926

You could probably plow through the deep roads in a long evening of play, especially if you wuss out like I did and go with casual difficulty to speed through combat.

I have the elves, dwarves, and the earl of redcliffe all on board. then went to denerim and got plastered with a ton of new quests. I appreciate what they are trying to do with some of the groups like the Irregulars and the Crows, but I felt like Oblivion’s Thief and Assassin guild chains have Dragon Age beat.

Hopefully not a ton left for me to clear since I’m already itching to try some Assassin’s Creed 2 or Gothic 4.

1927

Be sure to try the G4 demo before you commit :) It’s got good points but it’s probably about the bottom of the list of the RPGs around…

1928

Yes.

Encounter levels are set per map, the first time you visit. Minimum encounter levels vary per map, maximum encounter level is 20 pretty much throughout.

1929

I have checked out the demo and was intrigued enough to give it a shot. With some trade ins, I got it for a decent price. I also have Two Worlds 2 and look forward to Divinity coming to the XBox 360.

Anyway, beat this today and suddenly realized that I bought Awakenings during some DLC sale, but I’m not going to bother. I totaled 70 hours with Dragon Age and that’s more than enough for me. Curious about the sequel, but I know I won’t buy it for a very long time since I’m burned out on the Bioware style.

Truth be told, aside from combat and their quasi-QTE’s masked as conversation responses to break up minute after minute of dialogue cut scenes, I’m not sure what there is to Bioware games if you don’t fall completely into their melodramas. It’s just talking talking talking go here and kill everything in between so that you can either talk more on the other end or return to talk more. Some quests were interesting, a lot weren’t. The world never felt quite as complete or alive as my recent experience with Risen, there’s no exploring to be done, like in Bethesda games, given the way the maps take you from exact point A to exact point B. I haven’t played a ton of JRPGS, but are they that different at their cores?

I really feel like Bioware wants to write novels and then do film adaptations of them, and I stand by my thoughts that given this, they need to focus their experience much more. I left about 20 quests on the table, but I just couldn’t care anymore, and given the narrative going on (hey, then end of the world is coming again in a Bioware game!!) why should their games bother with mundane side quests other than that’s what CRPGs do? Maybe the trick is that Bioware should admit that they don’t make traditional CRPGs anymore and stop sticking to those tenets. Mass Effect 2 demonstrated that when they strip out a lot of business as usual from a CRPG, you get a much purer Bioware experience. I think the same should sort of go for Dragon Age games. Make areas less generic quest hub #8 and only serve their point to the heroic story that the PCs, as said heroes, are experiencing. Let someone else deliver envelopes to widows because the big proverbial Shit is going down.

My next backlog game after DA:O will be Fallout 3. Already played some today, and I like the simpler, more terse conversations that get me back to the game. I love the exploration that makes the game feel more like a world than Dragon Age or Mass Effect ever did, and I love that I’m not the Big Damn Hero du jour so that when I take on the small stuff, it seems to fit. I love that when I find an area, the quests I do feel like I’m participating in an area’s business, not just checking off lists of things to do so that the game can boast RPG side quests.

Most people agree that the main plot of BG2 was the weakest part of the game and that the side stuff was significantly better done. Dragon Age seems to flip this but without changing the proportions. Now there’s tons of meh side content that drowns out a more interesting main plot.

1930

It’s easy to call Bioware’s writing melodrama, but that’s basicaly a throwaway critique that’s usually valid for any ambitious and earnest essay in an immature storytelling medium.

It’d be easy to cite examples from when the plotting in movies, television, comics, and new fiction genres was derided by contemporaries as, in general terms, “trashy melodrama.” There are good reasons for it to look a little bit florid and a little bit amateurish when compared to (often cherry picked examples of) writing in genres or media that were already very professional.

We’d be better critics if we at least corrected for some of the “standing on the shoulders of giants” condescension of critiquing games as movies and HBO miniseries.

Compare BW’s storytelling with the storytelling in games in general - good, bad and average, not just “How does it compare to Planescape” or whatever sacred cow - and to a similarly “honest” standard of mainstream entertainment.

1931

This will probably be an uneven reply, but here it goes. I never called bioware games trashy, but I stand by my choice of calling them melodramas. The stories tend toward the my God can you feel the gravitas of how huge all of this is side of storytelling, which I think forces the characters to try and keep up with the gravitas. I don’t blame bioware for going this way because they are trying to make video game an emotional experience beyond the sort of fight or flight stuff. But video games aren’t in a place (yet?) that movies or novels are to accomplish this, so I feel like they overdo it at times to make sure the intent gets through. I’d call Peter jackson’s lotr trilogy melodrama as well, and I basically loved them.

But I think it’s perfectly reasonable to compare recent bioware games to my strongest video game stories since that was so obviously a major focus. I just spent 70 hours playing the game? Why would I do anything but hold it to the highest standards of the medium? Bioware gets to stand on the same shoulders of giants. And I think it’s even more reasonable to compare recent bioware games to big time movies that i love because they are so clearly trying to borrow those tools (almost to the neglect of other storytelling tools).

I think the main point I was trying to make was that since bioware does this go big or go home approach to everything, they might as well start sculpting the whole game to that. Sort of like in mass effect 2 where I felt everything was mostly driving toward the central story. I find the romance sides ridiculous on these games, but I thought it fit better in mass effect 2 because everything drove toward this big finale. So when Sarah walker from chuck shows up and says let’s hump because we could all die, I feel like it fits in the general context of this kind of melodrama. When morrigan and I fall into lust over six dozen meaningless side quests, it’s tough to keep the “potential ferelden ending war is right there so we should get one in” in mind.

Tapatalk doesn’t let me see previous posts and I forgot to quote, so i apologize for missing things to respond to.

1932

I don’t disagree that there are melodramatic and otherwise “clangy” elements in the storytelling. One thing I find quite interesting is how many people liked the Salarian commando’s pep talk in Mass Effect 1, whereas I found it too over-the-top and a very standard execution of a pretty tired movie cliche (“The Henry V Speech,” “the Braveheart speech,” etc.) As a writer that is an area where I would stop and think: Hey, this is something that risks sounding cliched - how can I avoid that or put a novel twist on it. To me the build-your-own-Henry-V-Speech at the end of ME1 approached that situation adroitly.

What I was getting at wasn’t “don’t judge it in comparison to the best competition,” since they’re clearly going for gold at Bioware. It was “don’t only judge it in comparison with the best competition.” IE, one might say, using as one’s baseline GTA IV, FO1/2, Planescape and Bioshock, that “Bioware does storytelling seriously and mostly well, but the flaws stand out.” To me that’s cherry picking - by the standards of most big-budget AAA games those are all pretty damned ambitious and impressive.

Same deal with judging the writing in an emerging medium with that in a very well-developed one. Maybe ME looks rough in places as the CRPG version of Star Wars, but it looks pretty good compared to that of the first few decades of film.

In some ways a new media can piggyback off the subtlety of other artistic traditions, and Bioware or Rockstar don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to action and camera work - but the writing is still basically done by amateurs or journeymen by the standards of well-regarded film and television.

1933

NB: I think another worthwhile comparison for BW games would be low-budget sci fi and fantasy television and movies based on new intellectual property.

BW and similar studios work under a lot of the same constraints - no big name screenwriter, no industry script doctors, no bazillion dollar Lucas/Spielburg budget, or for that matter even a Pixar budget. But imperfections aside, Bioware’s stuff doesn’t come off as an amateur hour, horribly compromised B-movie in the way a lot of that stuff does. Why should that be taken for granted?

1934

Isn’t that what they’re doing which is whats got the more purist of their fans up in arms about DA2.

1935

Are Bioware related in some way to whoever did Alpha Protocol? That seems like what ME is kind of reaching for - a talky choosy bit then a short shooty bit then another talky choosy bit etc. I think there’s a lot of merit in that approach. Navigating a 3d world is not automatically interesting and is a fairly large and unrelated thing to get right at the same time as those other elements. Personally I prefer the more open world because computers are uniquely good at that, where computer game writers are trying to get onto the shoulders of giants but have got stuck somewhere around ass.

1936

As an aside to answer the question - Obsidian (a spinoff from Black Isle after that closed up shop, now a subsidiary of Sega) did Alpha Protocol. However, they did work with Bioware (a Canuckistan subsidiary of EA) on NWN2 and KOTOR2, so one would hope things are friendly.

1937

Are they? That would get me a little more interested in DA2 at some point but I can understand why that might get a lot of fans of the originals upset.

It seems like there’s a ton of negative connotation automatically attached to melodrama, sure it can be cheesy when done poorly or with a heavy hand, but it can be done well and really hit home. I feel that melodrama’s nature means that the room for error gets extremely narrow. Anyway, the main thing is no one is forcing Bioware to tell melodramatic stories, they choose to go down that creative road with the bulk of the games they make (at least recently).

I also don’t understand why it’s not alright to pick my favorite stuff and only compare Bioware’s games to that standard. Why would I bother comparing it to the early days of film, or mediocre video game titles? I only really care about what I got out of my time with the game, for the most part, when I look back at the experience. I guess in a critical studies sense, there’s a lot of meat to go through and they definitely have raised the bar with what games attempt in their storytelling. But there’s no way I take them for granted… I’ve given them way too much time and money over the years for that.

I do think they can look at modern movies, see what they are trying to emulate, and then take a shot at that in their games. They must be comfortable with the results since they keep leaning further and further in that direction. But I’d be curious to know what kind of film making backgrounds are working there at Bioware, because I feel like that would say something about their commitment to creating more cinematic experiences. I have an MFA in film production, I was lucky to study film making, and so maybe it makes me a little more sensitive to a game’s attempt at a cinematic experience when I can go to a movie and get an full-blown awesome cinematic experience. Most of the time I see games using clumsy versions of cinematic tools and I guess the player is expected to say, okay, they’re trying for a dramatic dolly in with the game camera so I’ll meet them half way because I know what that’s supposed to mean. The game creators never seem to stop and think “you know, our dramatic dolly in looks like ass… what can be done or is this really the right way?” And if the developers are just using this to jerk off their dreams of directing Star Wars or LOTR, then screw them, they aren’t truly interested in bringing the best cinematic game experience to the player.

Having said that, I found SWKOTOR and Mass Effect 1 and 2 to be basically better movies than the most recent Star Wars films. So I don’t want people to think I believe Bioware can’t hold their own.

1938

Why compare them to XYZ?

Because it’s fair. In certain respects ME1&2 compare unfavourably with the SW prequels even though they’re terrible films, simply because the parts of the prequels that Lucas didn’t personally ruin were slathered in the best film know-how that hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of refined practice could produce.

BW is still working with a lot of the same constraints, budgetary and otherwise, that normally produce some 3AM B-movie on the science fiction channel, not the SW prequels. And yet they’ve produced something considerably more impressive.

1939

Major thread resurrection here. I’m playing some of the DLC many moons after everybody left this behind in their dust. I finished Origins a long time ago.

Question on control scheme (if anybody remembers) - if not, feel free to ridicule me and move on.

Hitting the = key selects all party members. But when I move, my party members don’t follow me (they only do so if I right click on the ground ahead of me in which case they run to their highlighted spots). I thought I remembered that there was a mode when they all followed you automatically, but maybe I am missing something.

1940

I can’t remember the keyboard shortcut, but there’s a separate hold/follow toggle. It’s one of the icons at the bottom of the list of party members.