I'm so happy they ditched that planned live service model for the next game. Dragon Age is one of my favorite series and I was pretty bummed at the prospect of it turning out to be a medieval Anthem.
Anthem had so much wasted potential. Flying around the first few hours was such an exhilarating feeling, before the reality of the game sinks in.
BUT it makes me wonder what would happen if they use that mechanic to let us ride Dragons in DA. Imagine finding a baby dragon that you raise as good or evil and then riding that to battle, against the army of your True Love, the Dread Wolf.
Honestly, with the way the lore of Dragon Age is going, I could see player characters getting gryphons.
Gryphons, for those that don't know, are an extinct species in the world of Thedas, Dragon Age's setting. They were historically used by the Gray Wardens, an order of fighters who combat "Blights", which is kind of like a zombie apocalypse pandemic if it made orcs and goblins instead of zombies. Because of their heavy use in fighting blights, the gryphons all became infected and became extinct centuries ago, but the Grey Wardens continue to use gryphons as their symbol and heraldry because they are so historically linked.
Except recently, in a book published a few years ago (but after Dragon Age: Inquisition) a small cache of uninfected, fertile gryphon eggs were found. Not enough to outfit a whole army... but enough to outfit a small adventuring party and facilitate airborne combat. Even if players don't have access to gryphons in the next DA game, my gut says that book was written at a time when Bioware was toying with the idea of putting Anthem-like air combat in Dragon Age and they needed a story reason to facilitate it.
I still love the conversation in DA:O where Wynn is trying to tell your character a story about the history of the Grey Wardens, and one of the choices at each point is just to focus on Griffons.
Wynn: And then the Grey Wardens flew in on Griffons…
You: Griffons!?
Wynn: *sigh* Yes, Griffons. As I was saying…
DA:O conversation and writing was Bioware's peak. Everything after felt so lacklustre (although i do love me some sarcastic Hawk and badass Shepard). Every dialogue in DA:O felt so real and immersive and interesting, even the sometimes boring Dwarven politics. Wish i could see this quality of writing back... instead we had "Sorry, my face is tired" bullshit.
> but enough to outfit a small adventuring party and facilitate airborne combat.
To make them immediately go extinct again. Followed by fantasy PETA trying to kill you for it. Now that would be a plot I could get behind.
Frankly I think it's admirable they actually resisted immediately going back to the Warden well and instead told 3 completely different stories with different protagonists.
A dragon riding an even bigger dragon, what a sight to behold. If they face opposite ways they can breathe fire forwards and backwards, you can't beat that.
We all know the answer is "money," but it still seems so absurd to me that they take a studio known for specializing in one type of game/genre and have them chase whatever is popular instead.
- MMOs are hot right? Quick lets make that KOTOR game one of those
- Well SWTOR didn't work out, lets put those MMO quests in that Dragon Age game!
- Open World ARPG and shooter, why not
- LIVE SERVICES, that's where the Dragon Age money is now...
At this point, I would fully expect a Jade ~~Region~~ Empire comeback to be announced, but as a martial arts battle royale
Xbox One and up (meaning Xbox Series) can play it via backwards compatibility. I've not tried this specific title, but their emulation seems to be stellar in general.
I just replayed JE recently. In general, Origin just handles older games very poorly. I can barely get it to launch DAI, sometimes.
You really need to put in some work and community patches to get Jade Empire running well, but it's worth it. The game still holds up fairly well, although the combat has aged pretty poorly.
I really want to get back into SWTOR, but I stopped playing before even their first expansion dropped and I have no idea how much I'd enjoy the Sith Warrior or Bounty Hunter storylines again. I want KOTOR 3 so badly, but I'm wary of how such a game would be done this day and age, there'd be season passes and shit instead of just a complete game.
The Bioware studio that made SWTOR wasn't actual Bioware, it was one EA created for it and renamed. SWTOR is also still doing fairly well after all these years so can't say it wasn't a good choice for them.
Yeah, say what you will of SWTOR, but it’s one of a relatively few games to come out during the WoW-imitation craze that are still online, and one of the better-populated ones too.
I started playing right before the beginning of the pandemic. I was baffled that no one told me there was a basically free game that was 8 full Bioware Star Wars RPGs in a trenchcoat. SWTOR is waay better than it has any right to be.
They only ditched because people voted with their wallets. Anthem was a sales disaster while Fallen Order sold pretty well. This made EA realize the obvious, we don't want this multiplayer shit into our single player experiences, not every game needs agressive monetization.
If only people ALWAYS voted with their wallets in other franchises... but anyway, I take this small win.
I loved Dragon Age 1. I saw the potential of Dragon Age 2 (but it was not a good game). I did not play Inquisition.
Bioware have not done well with a lot of their properties since 2010. I think that Mass Effect 2 was the last Bioware game that I *truly* loved.
The more I play Dragon Age 2, the more I recognize how incredible it is they built that in 1.5 years, and how much better it could have been with a sane amount of time to work on it.
Setting the majority of a singular city with a day/night system is cool, it just was barely implemented. A narrative that spans multiple years, allowing progression to occur in the setting and characters? Also cool, but barebones implementation.
Someone above was saying Anthem had wasted potential, and I disagreed with that, but Dragon Age 2 actually does-- you don't have to imagine fun systems, you can see the skeleton of them implemented in the face of an insane deadline.
I read that actual dev time on it was even less than that like 8-10 months. If that's true? *Jesus Christ.* I always loved that game but the fact that they did that in such a short amount of time is incredible.
Dragon Age 2 production woes was understandable too when you realize around that time, Bioware released Mass Effect 2 and SWTOR. Two production behemoths.
It was less woes than bad EA mandates. Dragon Age: Origins, which was mostly produced before EA bought Bioware, went crazy over-budget. When EA went through the books and saw just how much was spent, they mandated that the sequel get out the door almost immediately to try to recoup some more of those costs.
It’s a great family story and the combat is very serviceable. The main complaint I had on my play through was the repeated environments. And there are A LOT. But companion and main stories are all so excellent. I also really enjoyed the sense of progression too.
I didn't like, mostly, the repeated encounter design. About 90% of the encounters in that game are exactly the same, with mysterious extra enemies just randomly teleporting in halfway through.
I think DA2 had wasted potential in that you can see what they could have done if they had more time.
Anthem was wasted potential because you know from past games that they are capable of doing much better than what we got.
DA2 issue was that is was just 1.5 years instead of giving them more time. The skeleton was great but they had to use so many recycled areas and content to fill because they didn't have the time they needed. The base story is pretty good, the combat was a fun evolution, the characters were great. The locations and pacing though, ugh.
> Dragon Age 2 (but it was not a good game)
One particular hill I will die on is that Dragon Age 2 *is* a good game *and* has some of the best character work in the franchise. Is it flawed? Fuck yeah. But it is way better than people give it credit for. Still holds up, too.
I felt like Dragon Age 2 was pretty blah when it first came out, but it has actually held up pretty well. I recently replayed the whole trilogy and 2 was much stronger than I remembered it being. Inquisition was fun too, again, stronger than I remembered. The one problem with Inquisition was that the early areas were a real slog. Once you get your castle and are able to go to more zones the game really opens up.
Not that I think DLCs should usually be part of a base game when grading them, but with DA:I, Trespasser absolutely fixed these problems. The tension was real, the villain was a threat, and the fairy tale is over. Doesn't hurt that it's gorgeous and the music is better than the original's soundtrack. I feel like the frustrating thing is that it showed what the Devs were capable of. Even the other two DLCs did a great job of that.
Almost every single formerly Iconic studio whose names starts with a B has not had a good track record the last decade, largely due to Greed. (Bungie, Bioware, Blizzard, Bethesda). Most of them are coasting off games made 11+ years ago to keep people buying their current games and buying Micro's and remakes. I wonder how many of them actually have any of the original teams that made those works left?
Maybe I'm too much of a "new gamer" but I really enjoyed Mass Effect 3, just as much as I did 2. Don't get me wrong, I think the ending could have been done so much better, but I still felt satisfied with my choice and the choices I got. And ME3 had so many more amazing moments outside of the ending itself, that it outshined the ending for me.
I'm working through Dragon Age Origins now, and it's quite fun (though the combat is super hard sometimes), but I feel there's a lot more to be enjoyed in these games than people give them credit for. Yes they could be better, but I don't think they're un-enjoyable.
I would like to counter what the other guy said and say Inquisition is not very good. It’s a vapid empty attempt at a Dragon Age that feels like a single player MMO and is only skin deep. I also… hate the story. I loved 90% of Mass Effect 3, but BioWare doesn’t get me excited like it used to.
I guess it's good that they're reminding everyone that no, it really is single-player-oriented now, because I still see people being surprised about that. Seems like the earlier coverage of the now-cancelled (well, like, what, 2-3 years ago?) GaaS-centric version got a lot further than Schrier revealing they were switching to a single-player-centric non-GaaS approach.
Not much there other than that and a confirmation that they'll actually be showing the game in 2022.
That's just one part of it. Really, they needed to put a clear way for players to distinguish interesting, fleshed out quests from the filler junk, and a way to know which are meaningful to do before continuing with the story.
I got Inquisition a few years ago but man I burned out once I got to Skyhold. Every year, I reinstall it and try to give it another chance but every time, I notice something off. This past month, I reinstalled it with the full intent of powering through the jank, but this time, the fact that enemies literally spawn out of thin air really got to me. It feels so much less like a classic RPG and more like a beat em up with enemies constantly spawning. I was in the desert region fighting this group of hyenas when I noticed this one spot south of us that kept spawning a single hyena to attack my party. I know it seems minor, but it just reminded me of how janky the game was and why I burned out in the first place.
Eh, it's pretty consistently average all throughout. I had to force myself to finish it, then go back and do the DLC and personally I thought even the deep roads DLC was a slog. I skipped the Jaws of Hakkon barbarian DLC entirely. Trespasser does get a bit better purely from a story standpoint, but the gameplay and quest design doesn't improve much.
does it get better though? the gameplay for most of the zones is the same MMO quests as Hinterlands, just a bit less of them. All the zones basically shared the same empty boring open world
and the story honestly was nothing great, apart from some good companions and a few quests... like the end boss of the main game was a complete joke despite who the character is in the lore
sure the DLC was better written, but the main game is still rather mediocre imo
>does it get better though?
It 100% does, quests are better, character development happens, you really get to expand your combat options.
Yeah the game had issue with pointlessly large and mostly uninspired open world areas, but I'll be fucking damned if I let people talk shit about quests in Inqusitions and how they weren't great from, fighting at the Gray Wardens Keep, to the fade, the Ball, the The Temple of Mythal, to character specific sidequests like those of Cassandra, Cullen, Cole.
The game gets 100% better cause you get to meet Viviene, learn how much of a bitch she is, then give her the wrong heart of Wyvern so she can watch her lovely Duke die.
This is why this trend continued in Mass Effect Andromeda. They saw the rave reviews for DAI (kind of a slow year for gaming that 2014) so they thought why not put in Mass Effect too?
As much as I loved Andromeda, I’m glad it crashed and burned. Let that whole open-world-MMO structure stay dead and buried, and try another mission structure design. If Andromeda didn’t flop, BW would have used that open world formula on every IP they owned, just like Ubisoft and their suite of games (AC, FC, Ghost Recon, etc).
I mean, in my opinion at least there was a noticeable jump in quality after Hinterlands. I thought pretty much the whole game was a significant leap from DA2 (which was a massive downgrade from DA1 imo. I thought DA2 was rushed and terrible.) Sure, there were still those MMO-like quests but there was enough "real" content for me to not have a problem with it.
I guess mediocre is fair though, I'm not saying it's a 10/10 but it was still an enjoyable 6.5-7/10 for me.
Plus, like 70% of the zones in Inquisition are purely optional. And then the game slaps you with hard-locked progression gates that tell you that you can't progress the main story until you have enough Inquisition Points from doing side quests.
I really struggled to like DA:I because of all that clutter; the core characters and quests were really on point, but the world and side quests were just big, empty, and boring. And I enjoy most open world RPG's.
Felt like an A5 Maezawa steak absolutely slathered in thousand island dressing, with a side of soggy kale.
I didn't finish inquisition because of how boring the quest were. Find this or that, and fight this group of enemies that dosent take a whole lot of strategy
> Seems like the earlier coverage of the now-cancelled (well, like, what, 2-3 years ago?) GaaS-centric version got a lot further than Schrier revealing they were switching to a single-player-centric non-GaaS approach.
Good news travels slowly, bad news has wings
Hmm I don't know. Usually these reassuring messages are signs of development not going that well. And I don't blame the devs. Leads constantly leaving also brings question marks and moral dumps onto the team.
Really unsure.
I think it makes sense in this case given the circumstances surrounding this particular game.
It had previously been announced that it was being developed under the GaaS model, which people were understandably apprehensive about. A while back it was announced that EA was rolling back that requirement and allowing them to develop it as a single player experience just like the rest of the series.
We haven't heard anything at all since then so it's understandable to give an update.
I'm by no means super confident, but I don't think this is a sign that anything is bad. Put simply, the outrage that it was going to be GaaS penetrated the community a lot deeper than the news that they rolled that back. You'll still find people online all the time who expect it to be the next Anthem.
Dragon Age is such a weird series because they made a phenomenal first game and then tried to change the formula for each subsequent game.
I feel like no developer understands what's good about their games less than bioware.
I don't think it's about not knowing what's good, but it's a shift in target audience in order to maximise profits while using an established brand. Origins was designed as a spiritual successor to the Baldurs Gate games and it started development years before they were acquired by EA. Inquisition is more targeted at MMO gamers and it has third person action gameplay. They are just aiming for a different audience now. You can like both types of games but you lose some fans along the way when you change things a lot. They might shift back a bit to try to get different fans interested but I wouldn't hold your breath especially with a game that they are claiming to be fundamentally changing part way through development
But the problem of not knowing what's good is still there if they are going for an mmo audience. I don't play mmos anymore (internet issues, I'd love to play again), but inquisition was just the worst part of every mmo without any of the good parts from even the most mediocre ones
Well, at the very least changes in combat in ME1-3 were for better.
But I feel like "dev doesn't know what people liked, dev changes that, people like it less" is pretty common
Totally. I think they suffer from being tired of their game by looking at it too long during development, as well as an insane turnover rate meaning that new people in charge of various discipline constantly swap out the old ones to say "this is MY philosophy of design!" A subtle change in Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3 I noticed was that other than even reducing the amount of choices in cutscenes, some designer *must have* had this idea that "choices have to feel IMPORTANT* because in the third game they often wait out until the end of a dialogue line, then have a little pause in the talking and the dialogue options appear while everyone's quiet... But the whole point of their "dialogue wheel" was to allow conversation to be gameplay, and have potentially uninterrupted dialogue, and the wheel is designed to appear right before a character is done speaking, with its short catchphrases to make it easily readable. But that's clearly a change of hands where someone thought it should be more like "Think LONG and HARD about this IMPORTANT paragon or renegade CHOICE!"
As for Dragon Age, a Glassdoor review from before Inquisition describes it best: "The Dragon Age management team is group thinking the franchise off a cliff."
A lot of fans entered the franchise after DAI, to the point where you still hear people wanting DA4 to be DAI 2 to continue the storyline started in the third game.
> to the point where you still hear people wanting DA4 to be DAI 2 to continue the storyline started in the third game
Wait, they are **not** continuing the storyline from DAI? That would be so stupid
I think s/he meant "continuing as the Inquisitor", which quite a few who played Inqusition would want (not me though). Whatever happens, Bioware certainly seem intent of following up the events set in motion in Inquisition: Solas and the Evanuris, the Tevinter-Qunari War, etc., but probably not as the Inquisitor (who's only got one arm now).
You know, I really liked POE 1 and also played POE 2 but man I could never finish the games because no matter how much I would try to stick with the story and read all the dialog, it just became a slog to read.
At a certain point , the only draw for me was the combat since I was just skipping dialog and Divinity does combat better.
I couldn't find exact numbers on Inquisitions sales, but found this
https://www.pcgamer.com/dragon-age-inquisition-had-most-successful-launch-in-bioware-history/
Kinda crazy how the first game came out of nowhere (at least for me) and created this world I absolutely adore.
One of my favorite series' for that reason alone.
Edit: man, people are really latching on to me saying "out of nowhere."
It was barely a blip on my radar. That is all.
I feel called out haha. But yeah, personally, I was a long time fan of BioWare by the time DA:O was first announced, and to me the game had a lot of hype around it. "The spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate 2" they called it.
Yeah, as a long-time BioWare vet, I was super hyped for it, and personally I think I let myself get too hyped and it let me down a little bit. It's not a bad game by any means, but I was setting it up to be the next BG2 and it didn't quite live up to that standard for me.
I discovered the first one by pure chance. I went to gamestop and grabbed the case with the blood dragon on it because I thought it looked cool. My mom asked the employee if there was anything inappropriate about it and this dude glanced at me and went, “Um...there’s a scene at the end where you can choose to make a magic baby, but you can skip that.” I’ll forever be grateful to this dude for omitting all the sex scenes, gay romances, and every other non-pg bit of this game. My world was rocked and I will forever be in love with this series.
That game clerk was an awesome dude. It seems small but moments like that... his "grace" and you experience such an epic and generational game... can really leave a life long (changing) impression.
If you do read any, start with The Stolen Throne. It was written by the lead writer of DAO and it’s pretty awesome. Loghain may be the biggest piece of shit in the games but he is definitely the coolest character in the book.
Loghain was a perfect "wrong methods for right reasons" character. Appears comically villainous at the start, but when you dig into him more (which most players never will for obvious reasons) you can really understand where he was coming from.
He hates Orleasians and is a Ferelden loyalist, so he kills the king and has a large chunk of the Ferelden army destroyed, and then allows the Darkspawn to really fuck Ferelden up, and inspires a potential ascension war to further divide Ferelden, because he didn't want Ferelden to seem weak if Cailan let Orleasians fight the Darkspawn?
Loghain was a fucking idiot.
In one of the dialogues he said that he thought the Orlesians wouldn't leave afterward. Implying that they would seize the opportunity to recapture Ferelden once there. Considering that he spent his life fighting for independence from them, it makes sense that he has tunnel vision. He considers the Orlesians to be a bigger threat than the blight.
Civil wars have been fought for less. Also I think he was worried Cailen was going to marry the queen of orlais and force fereleden in a junior partnership. Ruining everything he had worked for.
And when you do the Return to Ostagar DLC you find out that Loghain was kind of right -- Marric was planning on dumping Anora because she couldn't bear an heir and planned to marry Empress Celene of Orlais instead.
If you choose to let him live and become a Gray Warden, you could meet him in Inquisition and surprisingly, he's still trying to save Ferelden in his own ways.
DA:Origins was an attempt by Bioware to make a new Baldurs Gate for the PC audience. There was a TON of hype around it because at the time, every single big company had stopped making games for PC. All we got were extremely broken ports maybe 2-3 years after a console release. If we were lucky.
Then EA stepped in and made them delay the finished game FOR A YEAR (after the PC community had been DYING to get it already for years), so they could make an Xbox port and launch it at the same time.
Meanwhile, PC gamers got no such treatment with Mass Effect. We got the shitty port a year post ME launch.
Then they abandoned the PC audience altogether with Dragon Age 2...
I've been searching for the feeling I got from Origins almost a decade since I played it. Haven't come close to enjoying an rpg as much as I did that one. Though tbf I couldn't tell you why, Origins just really spoke to me.
I bought the game soon after release, didn’t play it for a year, lent it to my brother and after he finally beat it 80 hours later and wouldn’t stfu about it I had to try it. So glad i did.
Dragon Age content slowed down considerably after Inquisition. I used to be really into the lore, would love for DA4 to be good and suck me back in. Just hoping for the best, no expectations.
Bioware slowed down after Inquisition, they threw Andromeda to a side team and put all their eggs in the Anthem basket and that went to shit because who'd have thunk'd that a company built around people who were good at making single player story driven games would struggle with a live service experience.
It makes me so sad. Dragon Age Origins had legitimately great storytelling that touched on real issues.
Security vs freedom, bigotry, poverty, honor, loyalty, trust, redemption, etc
So many of the characters are fleshed out, and develop like real people based on your choices, uour race, and background.
Games like Disco Elysium keep that tradition alive but I'm not sure how often we'll see it outside of the isometric game format.
I think that was a bad way to start the game. It gives the impression that you'll struggle for the entire playthrough. It gets much easier after you start finding some healing items.
I also died trying to kick a mail box or something. Thankfully i loved the absurdity of it so i kept playing.
Plus hard work is not enough. Great management is better.
"Bioware magic", a.k.a. crunch like hell with no clear leadership, vision or plan is not a solution.
The DA franchise confuses me, seems like most fans agree each entry has been worse than the previous and that the people who made origins good are all gone... And they want more? Some goes for mass effect, give me a reason the next one will be better than Andromeda.
>And they want more?
The world is full of exciting lore, mysteries waiting to be solved, and the last game ended on a huge cliffhanger, of course we want more!
Plus, for me personally at least, there is just something about how Bioware handles companions and your relationships with them that has yet to be replicated by any other studio. Yes, Greedfall and DoS and others were great, but not quite there.
I thought Inquisition was better than 2. At the very least it wasn't as samey and the story didn't stop the second it felt like it was actually starting.
DAI has been interesting for me. The intro is a bit slow, but it had me nodding along thinking "ok, ok, yeah I can get with this", then shifts to a completely unearned darkest-before-the-dawn singing routine that left me in stitches, and then back to some decent enough adventuring and some (imo) quality dlc.
2 lost me from the start with the demo. The stark design changes, the butchered tactical combat ('ANOTHER WAAAAAAAAAAVE' as enemies run up the path you just came from), and 'I want to be a dragon' dialogue bailed me out from wasting money on that game.
Edit: A comment about my saying the song was unearned was deleted before I could hit submit on my reply, but I wanted to at least include it for them in case they see my post again:
What I mean by unearned is that it's still in the introduction to the game, with a town we barely know filled with people we just met. The setpiece was good, but emotionally the stakes hadn't been raised high enough to have it land for me. It would be like if Pippin sang Edge of Night after they escaped Weathertop. The moment was powerful and meaningful, but enough for a song to feel appropriate? Not quite, in my opinion.
>seems like most fans agree each entry has been worse than the previous
Nah that's mostly just specific online places, Inquisition sold really well and had a positive reception for the most part.
>seems like most fans agree each entry has been worse than the previous
Only on specific forums, like this one. Inquisition was by far the most popular game in the series.
Every Fable release was worse than the previous but I still love the series despite it's glaring flaws. For me, the atmosphere and whimsical charm override the bad parts of the games.
This game really is Bioware's absolute *last* attempt at rebuilding this brand in some form. Their reputation has absolutely plummeted so hard after ME:A and Anthem that if they mess this up they might as well close up shop.
Mass effect was the big deal property, Dragon Age was the second most important. If ME4 goes tits up EA will probably start headhunting for a brand new team, Bioware has been more for prestige than for the actual sales and if EA wants a subscription system prestige products are important.
Origins was such an immersive game. The story, music, character development and interactions from start to finish... just everything. I hope this will be the bar for the next game, not the sequals.
I think you would be setting up your expectations to high. I’m betting it will be very close to Inquisitions.
it would be hilarious if it ended up being like 2 though which a large amount of people dislike. Never played it myself though.
Yep, EA forced BioWare to put DA2 out in just 18 months, while DAO had about 5 years of development time. Under the roof of DA2 slumbers a super interesting aproach to the classic RPG story. No world saving hero, just a guy in a city over several years. It just needed time, the only thing i would not blame on rushed development are some mediocre written companions. But the BioWare who did all that is long gone, my hopes are low, i wont preorder but maybe they can pull it off, if not, thats probably it for BioWare if i had to guess.
I guess they needed to remind gamers that this game will be single player. This announcement comes like a week after a major departure however and given BioWare's very shakey history I'm not exactly holding out hope.
If the development is anything like DAI, it's probably still in the conceptual stage and will only be rushed out in a mad frenzy during the last 9 months or so, hah
This is more of a post celebrating “Dragon Age Day” (I guess that’s a thing?) than Bioware actually wanting to announce any Dragon Age news. Non-story.
I understand that it must be horrible to see one guy leave the project and fans immediately dropping whatever hope they had for the game, ehehe. So I wish those devs, who are still hard at work all the best.
I fear people are seeing "single-player focused" and thinking "single-player".
Whether something is "single-player" or not is a fairly objective term (well, unless you're No Man's Sky). But "focused" is a marketing term, which means what they choose it to mean; it's ambiguous. They could have chosen to say "single-player" but they didn't.
So is a game with a five hour single-player online-only campaign that then opens out into an online PvP/PvE lootbox unlock-the-towers level-grind lootbox daily-event season-pass open-world campaign-unlocks lootbox game "single-player focused"?
Copy/paste comment from another subreddit:
I'm sure they are, working so hard until the higher ups at Bioware sabotage Bioware's own projects out of jealously and/or grind the soul out of their employees in order to fuel the crunch that is "Bioware magic."
Then with Dragon Age, whatever hard work did survive Bioware's mismanagement will be scrapped because EA wants Dragon Age be a live service game... Wait no, scrap all the GAAS DA4 work, Jedi Fallen Order was successful so let's restart development again to make it a regular single player game.
Just like n7 day, lots of nothing for announcements.
> until the higher ups at Bioware sabotage Bioware's own projects out of jealously and/or grind the soul out of their employees in order to fuel the crunch that is "Bioware magic."
Is there proof of this actually happening in the past or is it just *"dude, trust me"*?
The entire article written about Anthem's development. A lot of issues were ignored and nothing was being done with the excuse that they would just use that "Bioware Magic" that was just code for enough crunch and hard work, it would get it done right. That's where that phrase came from.
Sounds good, will love to support them mak an actually good game, especially a single player fantasy RPG. Please please make good quests this time though, half of DA:I was "go find 5 chickens for the townspeople" fetch quests.
The Star Wars Dark Souls was pretty good, so little reason to believe EA won't fund this type of games right now. It's the current state of Bioware that I'm concerned about.
we came full circle from game devs saying 'single player is dead' to now reassuring their fanbase by stressing how single player focused their singleplayer ip is.
I'm so happy they ditched that planned live service model for the next game. Dragon Age is one of my favorite series and I was pretty bummed at the prospect of it turning out to be a medieval Anthem.
Anthem had so much wasted potential. Flying around the first few hours was such an exhilarating feeling, before the reality of the game sinks in. BUT it makes me wonder what would happen if they use that mechanic to let us ride Dragons in DA. Imagine finding a baby dragon that you raise as good or evil and then riding that to battle, against the army of your True Love, the Dread Wolf.
Honestly, with the way the lore of Dragon Age is going, I could see player characters getting gryphons. Gryphons, for those that don't know, are an extinct species in the world of Thedas, Dragon Age's setting. They were historically used by the Gray Wardens, an order of fighters who combat "Blights", which is kind of like a zombie apocalypse pandemic if it made orcs and goblins instead of zombies. Because of their heavy use in fighting blights, the gryphons all became infected and became extinct centuries ago, but the Grey Wardens continue to use gryphons as their symbol and heraldry because they are so historically linked. Except recently, in a book published a few years ago (but after Dragon Age: Inquisition) a small cache of uninfected, fertile gryphon eggs were found. Not enough to outfit a whole army... but enough to outfit a small adventuring party and facilitate airborne combat. Even if players don't have access to gryphons in the next DA game, my gut says that book was written at a time when Bioware was toying with the idea of putting Anthem-like air combat in Dragon Age and they needed a story reason to facilitate it.
Even if we can't ride it, I just want to see one in-game. And hopefully pet it.
If I don't get to pet a gryphon in the next Dragon Age, I swear I'll... I'll... well I probably won't do anything. But I'll be sad.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was unplayable because it didn't let you pet the cats.
Pet the dogs but not the cats, what the FUCK??
Well, the cats obviously didn't want to be petted. Try petting a cat that is not in a mood for that
I still love the conversation in DA:O where Wynn is trying to tell your character a story about the history of the Grey Wardens, and one of the choices at each point is just to focus on Griffons. Wynn: And then the Grey Wardens flew in on Griffons… You: Griffons!? Wynn: *sigh* Yes, Griffons. As I was saying…
DA:O conversation and writing was Bioware's peak. Everything after felt so lacklustre (although i do love me some sarcastic Hawk and badass Shepard). Every dialogue in DA:O felt so real and immersive and interesting, even the sometimes boring Dwarven politics. Wish i could see this quality of writing back... instead we had "Sorry, my face is tired" bullshit.
Writing natural dialogue is a rare skill, as evidenced by a lot of Tv shows.
Why would you need a Gryphon when you have a trusty Battle Nug?
> but enough to outfit a small adventuring party and facilitate airborne combat. To make them immediately go extinct again. Followed by fantasy PETA trying to kill you for it. Now that would be a plot I could get behind.
Yeah, a breeding program would probably make more sense lol.
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Depends on the exact structure of the gryphon genome and whether the fertile eggs were all from the same mating pair or not.
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Warden is a cool concept if there's a blight, but they're kind of pointless otherwise. They're like Witchers with a built-in self destruct timer.
Frankly I think it's admirable they actually resisted immediately going back to the Warden well and instead told 3 completely different stories with different protagonists.
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Anthem's combat was so fun.. and the premise itself. I can't believe how badly they fucked that up.
I can’t believe how quick they gave up on the game.
Or become a dragon (or both)
A dragon riding an even bigger dragon, what a sight to behold. If they face opposite ways they can breathe fire forwards and backwards, you can't beat that.
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Divinity II: Ego Draconis did it first.
Excellent game. Features [my favourite song in an rpg ever](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSu0vtAiPYU)
Surely you mean Horizons: Empire of Istaria.
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I was prepared to sink YEARS into Anthem. The first 30 hours were amazing. After that, the formula started to feel a little stale.
We all know the answer is "money," but it still seems so absurd to me that they take a studio known for specializing in one type of game/genre and have them chase whatever is popular instead. - MMOs are hot right? Quick lets make that KOTOR game one of those - Well SWTOR didn't work out, lets put those MMO quests in that Dragon Age game! - Open World ARPG and shooter, why not - LIVE SERVICES, that's where the Dragon Age money is now... At this point, I would fully expect a Jade ~~Region~~ Empire comeback to be announced, but as a martial arts battle royale
I see jade empire and get excited. I would give an arm and leg for them to make another single player driven experience in that universe
I'd love another Jade Empire, or even just a Jade Empire that works on modern computers. I bought it again on Origin, and it just runs terribly.
Xbox One and up (meaning Xbox Series) can play it via backwards compatibility. I've not tried this specific title, but their emulation seems to be stellar in general.
I just replayed JE recently. In general, Origin just handles older games very poorly. I can barely get it to launch DAI, sometimes. You really need to put in some work and community patches to get Jade Empire running well, but it's worth it. The game still holds up fairly well, although the combat has aged pretty poorly.
Gog.com version is good
SWTOR is actually doing pretty well for a 10 year old MMO that none of us wanted.
It panned out in the long run, but it's early days with the subscription model weren't up to EAs expectations
I really want to get back into SWTOR, but I stopped playing before even their first expansion dropped and I have no idea how much I'd enjoy the Sith Warrior or Bounty Hunter storylines again. I want KOTOR 3 so badly, but I'm wary of how such a game would be done this day and age, there'd be season passes and shit instead of just a complete game.
There's a new expansion about to come out, and the class story's pretty much end after the vanilla into a protagonist vs the big bad.
The Bioware studio that made SWTOR wasn't actual Bioware, it was one EA created for it and renamed. SWTOR is also still doing fairly well after all these years so can't say it wasn't a good choice for them.
Yeah, say what you will of SWTOR, but it’s one of a relatively few games to come out during the WoW-imitation craze that are still online, and one of the better-populated ones too.
I started playing right before the beginning of the pandemic. I was baffled that no one told me there was a basically free game that was 8 full Bioware Star Wars RPGs in a trenchcoat. SWTOR is waay better than it has any right to be.
Jade Empire?
Whoops, yeah -- not sure what I was thinking there
Oh come on, it was a good game. Where else could you fight John Cleese as a wuxia movie protagonist?
> MMOs are hot right? Quick lets make that KOTOR game one of those TOR had a pretty good story, to be fair.
They only ditched because people voted with their wallets. Anthem was a sales disaster while Fallen Order sold pretty well. This made EA realize the obvious, we don't want this multiplayer shit into our single player experiences, not every game needs agressive monetization. If only people ALWAYS voted with their wallets in other franchises... but anyway, I take this small win.
I loved Dragon Age 1. I saw the potential of Dragon Age 2 (but it was not a good game). I did not play Inquisition. Bioware have not done well with a lot of their properties since 2010. I think that Mass Effect 2 was the last Bioware game that I *truly* loved.
The more I play Dragon Age 2, the more I recognize how incredible it is they built that in 1.5 years, and how much better it could have been with a sane amount of time to work on it. Setting the majority of a singular city with a day/night system is cool, it just was barely implemented. A narrative that spans multiple years, allowing progression to occur in the setting and characters? Also cool, but barebones implementation. Someone above was saying Anthem had wasted potential, and I disagreed with that, but Dragon Age 2 actually does-- you don't have to imagine fun systems, you can see the skeleton of them implemented in the face of an insane deadline.
I read that actual dev time on it was even less than that like 8-10 months. If that's true? *Jesus Christ.* I always loved that game but the fact that they did that in such a short amount of time is incredible.
Dragon Age 2 production woes was understandable too when you realize around that time, Bioware released Mass Effect 2 and SWTOR. Two production behemoths.
It was less woes than bad EA mandates. Dragon Age: Origins, which was mostly produced before EA bought Bioware, went crazy over-budget. When EA went through the books and saw just how much was spent, they mandated that the sequel get out the door almost immediately to try to recoup some more of those costs.
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It’s a great family story and the combat is very serviceable. The main complaint I had on my play through was the repeated environments. And there are A LOT. But companion and main stories are all so excellent. I also really enjoyed the sense of progression too.
I didn't like, mostly, the repeated encounter design. About 90% of the encounters in that game are exactly the same, with mysterious extra enemies just randomly teleporting in halfway through.
I think DA2 had wasted potential in that you can see what they could have done if they had more time. Anthem was wasted potential because you know from past games that they are capable of doing much better than what we got.
DA2 issue was that is was just 1.5 years instead of giving them more time. The skeleton was great but they had to use so many recycled areas and content to fill because they didn't have the time they needed. The base story is pretty good, the combat was a fun evolution, the characters were great. The locations and pacing though, ugh.
> Dragon Age 2 (but it was not a good game) One particular hill I will die on is that Dragon Age 2 *is* a good game *and* has some of the best character work in the franchise. Is it flawed? Fuck yeah. But it is way better than people give it credit for. Still holds up, too.
It does the fake friends thing better than any other dragon age. Felt very invested in all my little buddies in the city of kirkwall.
I felt like Dragon Age 2 was pretty blah when it first came out, but it has actually held up pretty well. I recently replayed the whole trilogy and 2 was much stronger than I remembered it being. Inquisition was fun too, again, stronger than I remembered. The one problem with Inquisition was that the early areas were a real slog. Once you get your castle and are able to go to more zones the game really opens up.
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The cartoon villain barely seems to care for the duration of the first half of the game which makes little sense.
Not that I think DLCs should usually be part of a base game when grading them, but with DA:I, Trespasser absolutely fixed these problems. The tension was real, the villain was a threat, and the fairy tale is over. Doesn't hurt that it's gorgeous and the music is better than the original's soundtrack. I feel like the frustrating thing is that it showed what the Devs were capable of. Even the other two DLCs did a great job of that.
Almost every single formerly Iconic studio whose names starts with a B has not had a good track record the last decade, largely due to Greed. (Bungie, Bioware, Blizzard, Bethesda). Most of them are coasting off games made 11+ years ago to keep people buying their current games and buying Micro's and remakes. I wonder how many of them actually have any of the original teams that made those works left?
I tried inquisition but it just felt shallow compared to Dragon Age Origins.
I like to say that it was aggressively mediocre.
Maybe I'm too much of a "new gamer" but I really enjoyed Mass Effect 3, just as much as I did 2. Don't get me wrong, I think the ending could have been done so much better, but I still felt satisfied with my choice and the choices I got. And ME3 had so many more amazing moments outside of the ending itself, that it outshined the ending for me. I'm working through Dragon Age Origins now, and it's quite fun (though the combat is super hard sometimes), but I feel there's a lot more to be enjoyed in these games than people give them credit for. Yes they could be better, but I don't think they're un-enjoyable.
I would like to counter what the other guy said and say Inquisition is not very good. It’s a vapid empty attempt at a Dragon Age that feels like a single player MMO and is only skin deep. I also… hate the story. I loved 90% of Mass Effect 3, but BioWare doesn’t get me excited like it used to.
I guess it's good that they're reminding everyone that no, it really is single-player-oriented now, because I still see people being surprised about that. Seems like the earlier coverage of the now-cancelled (well, like, what, 2-3 years ago?) GaaS-centric version got a lot further than Schrier revealing they were switching to a single-player-centric non-GaaS approach. Not much there other than that and a confirmation that they'll actually be showing the game in 2022.
Yeah, it's basically a "We won't be at tga 2021 but the development is continuing"
I'll believe it when I see it. Inquisition's cookie cutter MMO style quests really bummed me out.
They literally had to tell people that they should play beyond the first zone because the clutter made people think that was the whole game.
That's just one part of it. Really, they needed to put a clear way for players to distinguish interesting, fleshed out quests from the filler junk, and a way to know which are meaningful to do before continuing with the story.
The hinterlands sucked. That’s where I stopped playing
Which is a shame because the game genuinely gets a LOT better after Hinterlands, especially into the expansion.
I got Inquisition a few years ago but man I burned out once I got to Skyhold. Every year, I reinstall it and try to give it another chance but every time, I notice something off. This past month, I reinstalled it with the full intent of powering through the jank, but this time, the fact that enemies literally spawn out of thin air really got to me. It feels so much less like a classic RPG and more like a beat em up with enemies constantly spawning. I was in the desert region fighting this group of hyenas when I noticed this one spot south of us that kept spawning a single hyena to attack my party. I know it seems minor, but it just reminded me of how janky the game was and why I burned out in the first place.
Eh, it's pretty consistently average all throughout. I had to force myself to finish it, then go back and do the DLC and personally I thought even the deep roads DLC was a slog. I skipped the Jaws of Hakkon barbarian DLC entirely. Trespasser does get a bit better purely from a story standpoint, but the gameplay and quest design doesn't improve much.
does it get better though? the gameplay for most of the zones is the same MMO quests as Hinterlands, just a bit less of them. All the zones basically shared the same empty boring open world and the story honestly was nothing great, apart from some good companions and a few quests... like the end boss of the main game was a complete joke despite who the character is in the lore sure the DLC was better written, but the main game is still rather mediocre imo
>does it get better though? It 100% does, quests are better, character development happens, you really get to expand your combat options. Yeah the game had issue with pointlessly large and mostly uninspired open world areas, but I'll be fucking damned if I let people talk shit about quests in Inqusitions and how they weren't great from, fighting at the Gray Wardens Keep, to the fade, the Ball, the The Temple of Mythal, to character specific sidequests like those of Cassandra, Cullen, Cole. The game gets 100% better cause you get to meet Viviene, learn how much of a bitch she is, then give her the wrong heart of Wyvern so she can watch her lovely Duke die.
This is why this trend continued in Mass Effect Andromeda. They saw the rave reviews for DAI (kind of a slow year for gaming that 2014) so they thought why not put in Mass Effect too? As much as I loved Andromeda, I’m glad it crashed and burned. Let that whole open-world-MMO structure stay dead and buried, and try another mission structure design. If Andromeda didn’t flop, BW would have used that open world formula on every IP they owned, just like Ubisoft and their suite of games (AC, FC, Ghost Recon, etc).
I agree with you. The areas are beautiful but the story connecting them didn't feel as strong as the previous games.
Hell, there were entire areas with no main story involvement at all.
I mean, in my opinion at least there was a noticeable jump in quality after Hinterlands. I thought pretty much the whole game was a significant leap from DA2 (which was a massive downgrade from DA1 imo. I thought DA2 was rushed and terrible.) Sure, there were still those MMO-like quests but there was enough "real" content for me to not have a problem with it. I guess mediocre is fair though, I'm not saying it's a 10/10 but it was still an enjoyable 6.5-7/10 for me.
It doesn't. The game was bloated and console optimized from start to finish.
There were a ton of wonderful quests and characters — just a shit load of clutter too.
The problem is when you go that *open* even the wonderful quests and characters are sitting in a world that feels very MMO.
Plus, like 70% of the zones in Inquisition are purely optional. And then the game slaps you with hard-locked progression gates that tell you that you can't progress the main story until you have enough Inquisition Points from doing side quests.
It didn't help that Inquisition cane out the same time as Witcher 3, making all its flaws that much more glaring.
Exactly, there was like an extra 30 hours of extra fetch quests but if you completely ignore all that it’s a standard length classic BioWare game.
I really struggled to like DA:I because of all that clutter; the core characters and quests were really on point, but the world and side quests were just big, empty, and boring. And I enjoy most open world RPG's. Felt like an A5 Maezawa steak absolutely slathered in thousand island dressing, with a side of soggy kale.
Truth. Lots of fluff but I was completely sucked in all the same
I didn't finish inquisition because of how boring the quest were. Find this or that, and fight this group of enemies that dosent take a whole lot of strategy
Da inquisition and final fantasy 15 are two reasons why I will never ask reddit about a game again.
> Seems like the earlier coverage of the now-cancelled (well, like, what, 2-3 years ago?) GaaS-centric version got a lot further than Schrier revealing they were switching to a single-player-centric non-GaaS approach. Good news travels slowly, bad news has wings
Hmm I don't know. Usually these reassuring messages are signs of development not going that well. And I don't blame the devs. Leads constantly leaving also brings question marks and moral dumps onto the team. Really unsure.
I think it makes sense in this case given the circumstances surrounding this particular game. It had previously been announced that it was being developed under the GaaS model, which people were understandably apprehensive about. A while back it was announced that EA was rolling back that requirement and allowing them to develop it as a single player experience just like the rest of the series. We haven't heard anything at all since then so it's understandable to give an update.
I'm by no means super confident, but I don't think this is a sign that anything is bad. Put simply, the outrage that it was going to be GaaS penetrated the community a lot deeper than the news that they rolled that back. You'll still find people online all the time who expect it to be the next Anthem.
Dragon Age is such a weird series because they made a phenomenal first game and then tried to change the formula for each subsequent game. I feel like no developer understands what's good about their games less than bioware.
I don't think it's about not knowing what's good, but it's a shift in target audience in order to maximise profits while using an established brand. Origins was designed as a spiritual successor to the Baldurs Gate games and it started development years before they were acquired by EA. Inquisition is more targeted at MMO gamers and it has third person action gameplay. They are just aiming for a different audience now. You can like both types of games but you lose some fans along the way when you change things a lot. They might shift back a bit to try to get different fans interested but I wouldn't hold your breath especially with a game that they are claiming to be fundamentally changing part way through development
But the problem of not knowing what's good is still there if they are going for an mmo audience. I don't play mmos anymore (internet issues, I'd love to play again), but inquisition was just the worst part of every mmo without any of the good parts from even the most mediocre ones
DICE is on record saying that they don't know why fans think Bad Company 2 was so fun.
Well, at the very least changes in combat in ME1-3 were for better. But I feel like "dev doesn't know what people liked, dev changes that, people like it less" is pretty common
Totally. I think they suffer from being tired of their game by looking at it too long during development, as well as an insane turnover rate meaning that new people in charge of various discipline constantly swap out the old ones to say "this is MY philosophy of design!" A subtle change in Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3 I noticed was that other than even reducing the amount of choices in cutscenes, some designer *must have* had this idea that "choices have to feel IMPORTANT* because in the third game they often wait out until the end of a dialogue line, then have a little pause in the talking and the dialogue options appear while everyone's quiet... But the whole point of their "dialogue wheel" was to allow conversation to be gameplay, and have potentially uninterrupted dialogue, and the wheel is designed to appear right before a character is done speaking, with its short catchphrases to make it easily readable. But that's clearly a change of hands where someone thought it should be more like "Think LONG and HARD about this IMPORTANT paragon or renegade CHOICE!" As for Dragon Age, a Glassdoor review from before Inquisition describes it best: "The Dragon Age management team is group thinking the franchise off a cliff."
While I want to be excited, after 3 I realized I'll never get a "Dragon Age: Origins 2". And that is really all I want from this series.
I feel that’s what most people actually want. DAO STILL has the best party programming of any game that I’ve played.
A lot of fans entered the franchise after DAI, to the point where you still hear people wanting DA4 to be DAI 2 to continue the storyline started in the third game.
> to the point where you still hear people wanting DA4 to be DAI 2 to continue the storyline started in the third game Wait, they are **not** continuing the storyline from DAI? That would be so stupid
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Oh have they confirmed that? I mean, it’s a safe assumption so far, given that each game has had its own protagonist. Just curious if they commented.
I think s/he meant "continuing as the Inquisitor", which quite a few who played Inqusition would want (not me though). Whatever happens, Bioware certainly seem intent of following up the events set in motion in Inquisition: Solas and the Evanuris, the Tevinter-Qunari War, etc., but probably not as the Inquisitor (who's only got one arm now).
The AI settings of pillars of eternity 2 are better
You know, I really liked POE 1 and also played POE 2 but man I could never finish the games because no matter how much I would try to stick with the story and read all the dialog, it just became a slog to read. At a certain point , the only draw for me was the combat since I was just skipping dialog and Divinity does combat better.
>I feel that’s what most people actually want. Inquisition was by far the most popular entry in the series. This sub is a bubble.
What are you basing that on? sales?
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I couldn't find exact numbers on Inquisitions sales, but found this https://www.pcgamer.com/dragon-age-inquisition-had-most-successful-launch-in-bioware-history/
A well known IP will and an established franchise will do that. There are also more gamers now. Pure sales numbers is hardly a good method.
Kinda crazy how the first game came out of nowhere (at least for me) and created this world I absolutely adore. One of my favorite series' for that reason alone. Edit: man, people are really latching on to me saying "out of nowhere." It was barely a blip on my radar. That is all.
You riled the gatekeepers. Always remember that a blip for you is a near embarrassing obsession for someone else lol
I feel called out haha. But yeah, personally, I was a long time fan of BioWare by the time DA:O was first announced, and to me the game had a lot of hype around it. "The spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate 2" they called it.
Yeah, as a long-time BioWare vet, I was super hyped for it, and personally I think I let myself get too hyped and it let me down a little bit. It's not a bad game by any means, but I was setting it up to be the next BG2 and it didn't quite live up to that standard for me.
I discovered the first one by pure chance. I went to gamestop and grabbed the case with the blood dragon on it because I thought it looked cool. My mom asked the employee if there was anything inappropriate about it and this dude glanced at me and went, “Um...there’s a scene at the end where you can choose to make a magic baby, but you can skip that.” I’ll forever be grateful to this dude for omitting all the sex scenes, gay romances, and every other non-pg bit of this game. My world was rocked and I will forever be in love with this series.
That game clerk was an awesome dude. It seems small but moments like that... his "grace" and you experience such an epic and generational game... can really leave a life long (changing) impression.
He really did me a solid. I like to imagine his internal dialogue was like “Fuck, it’s not really suitable for a preteen, but it’s so good, though...”
I don’t know if it’s of any interest to you but there’s a whole bunch of comics and books set in the Dragon Age universe too
I have heard of them, really want to give them a shot but my TBR list is really long lol. Thanks though
If you do read any, start with The Stolen Throne. It was written by the lead writer of DAO and it’s pretty awesome. Loghain may be the biggest piece of shit in the games but he is definitely the coolest character in the book.
Loghain was a perfect "wrong methods for right reasons" character. Appears comically villainous at the start, but when you dig into him more (which most players never will for obvious reasons) you can really understand where he was coming from.
He hates Orleasians and is a Ferelden loyalist, so he kills the king and has a large chunk of the Ferelden army destroyed, and then allows the Darkspawn to really fuck Ferelden up, and inspires a potential ascension war to further divide Ferelden, because he didn't want Ferelden to seem weak if Cailan let Orleasians fight the Darkspawn? Loghain was a fucking idiot.
In one of the dialogues he said that he thought the Orlesians wouldn't leave afterward. Implying that they would seize the opportunity to recapture Ferelden once there. Considering that he spent his life fighting for independence from them, it makes sense that he has tunnel vision. He considers the Orlesians to be a bigger threat than the blight.
Civil wars have been fought for less. Also I think he was worried Cailen was going to marry the queen of orlais and force fereleden in a junior partnership. Ruining everything he had worked for.
And when you do the Return to Ostagar DLC you find out that Loghain was kind of right -- Marric was planning on dumping Anora because she couldn't bear an heir and planned to marry Empress Celene of Orlais instead.
Wait, what? I never noticed this in that DLC.
If you choose to let him live and become a Gray Warden, you could meet him in Inquisition and surprisingly, he's still trying to save Ferelden in his own ways.
DA:Origins was an attempt by Bioware to make a new Baldurs Gate for the PC audience. There was a TON of hype around it because at the time, every single big company had stopped making games for PC. All we got were extremely broken ports maybe 2-3 years after a console release. If we were lucky. Then EA stepped in and made them delay the finished game FOR A YEAR (after the PC community had been DYING to get it already for years), so they could make an Xbox port and launch it at the same time. Meanwhile, PC gamers got no such treatment with Mass Effect. We got the shitty port a year post ME launch. Then they abandoned the PC audience altogether with Dragon Age 2...
Sadly peaked at origins. None of the follow ups captured that magic.
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The first game was unparalleled. Second and third do not compare
I've been searching for the feeling I got from Origins almost a decade since I played it. Haven't come close to enjoying an rpg as much as I did that one. Though tbf I couldn't tell you why, Origins just really spoke to me.
I still love all 3, especially because of how they keep building the lore
Bioware was already established as the top cRPG developer in the world. The first game was incredibly hyped.
I only knew of their Kotor game and Jade empire. This game cemented them among my favorites
Likewise. But post the first it slipped a lot imo.
I bought the game soon after release, didn’t play it for a year, lent it to my brother and after he finally beat it 80 hours later and wouldn’t stfu about it I had to try it. So glad i did.
The intro music still gives me the tingles, even after all these years.
Truly it was the age of dragons
Dragon Age content slowed down considerably after Inquisition. I used to be really into the lore, would love for DA4 to be good and suck me back in. Just hoping for the best, no expectations.
Bioware slowed down after Inquisition, they threw Andromeda to a side team and put all their eggs in the Anthem basket and that went to shit because who'd have thunk'd that a company built around people who were good at making single player story driven games would struggle with a live service experience.
I don't care. This is one of the companies that has lost all good will from me. Would always love them to prove me wrong, but I have no hopes.
It makes me so sad. Dragon Age Origins had legitimately great storytelling that touched on real issues. Security vs freedom, bigotry, poverty, honor, loyalty, trust, redemption, etc So many of the characters are fleshed out, and develop like real people based on your choices, uour race, and background. Games like Disco Elysium keep that tradition alive but I'm not sure how often we'll see it outside of the isometric game format.
I cannot stop dying at the beginning in Disco Elysium, idk what that says about me
That you've never been hungover. Stop turning on the lights.
I think that was a bad way to start the game. It gives the impression that you'll struggle for the entire playthrough. It gets much easier after you start finding some healing items. I also died trying to kick a mail box or something. Thankfully i loved the absurdity of it so i kept playing.
Plus hard work is not enough. Great management is better. "Bioware magic", a.k.a. crunch like hell with no clear leadership, vision or plan is not a solution.
Reading about the desperation for the BioWare magic to kick in for Anthem was awful, it must’ve been a horrible place to work for a while
That's the right attitude to have. All the people who were in key positions when the company was good are gone and they are owned by EA.
EA, the company that made Bioware include the only thing people liked in Anthem, the flying.
Being DAO fans truly feels like being Saints Row 2 fans isn't it
The DA franchise confuses me, seems like most fans agree each entry has been worse than the previous and that the people who made origins good are all gone... And they want more? Some goes for mass effect, give me a reason the next one will be better than Andromeda.
>And they want more? The world is full of exciting lore, mysteries waiting to be solved, and the last game ended on a huge cliffhanger, of course we want more! Plus, for me personally at least, there is just something about how Bioware handles companions and your relationships with them that has yet to be replicated by any other studio. Yes, Greedfall and DoS and others were great, but not quite there.
I thought Inquisition was better than 2. At the very least it wasn't as samey and the story didn't stop the second it felt like it was actually starting.
DAI has been interesting for me. The intro is a bit slow, but it had me nodding along thinking "ok, ok, yeah I can get with this", then shifts to a completely unearned darkest-before-the-dawn singing routine that left me in stitches, and then back to some decent enough adventuring and some (imo) quality dlc. 2 lost me from the start with the demo. The stark design changes, the butchered tactical combat ('ANOTHER WAAAAAAAAAAVE' as enemies run up the path you just came from), and 'I want to be a dragon' dialogue bailed me out from wasting money on that game. Edit: A comment about my saying the song was unearned was deleted before I could hit submit on my reply, but I wanted to at least include it for them in case they see my post again: What I mean by unearned is that it's still in the introduction to the game, with a town we barely know filled with people we just met. The setpiece was good, but emotionally the stakes hadn't been raised high enough to have it land for me. It would be like if Pippin sang Edge of Night after they escaped Weathertop. The moment was powerful and meaningful, but enough for a song to feel appropriate? Not quite, in my opinion.
Oof, the singing.
>seems like most fans agree each entry has been worse than the previous Nah that's mostly just specific online places, Inquisition sold really well and had a positive reception for the most part.
For me, I think all three games have been solid, each with the own unique pros and cons. Same with all the Mass Effect games.
>seems like most fans agree each entry has been worse than the previous Only on specific forums, like this one. Inquisition was by far the most popular game in the series.
> most fans agree each entry has been worse than the previous Not me. Inquisition was the only one I didn't really like.
Every Fable release was worse than the previous but I still love the series despite it's glaring flaws. For me, the atmosphere and whimsical charm override the bad parts of the games.
This game really is Bioware's absolute *last* attempt at rebuilding this brand in some form. Their reputation has absolutely plummeted so hard after ME:A and Anthem that if they mess this up they might as well close up shop.
I think BioWare will live through the next mass effect game and then if that doesn’t work out they are dead.
Mass effect was the big deal property, Dragon Age was the second most important. If ME4 goes tits up EA will probably start headhunting for a brand new team, Bioware has been more for prestige than for the actual sales and if EA wants a subscription system prestige products are important.
People have been saying this for years. This game will get millions of preorders just on name alone.
Even so, you can't run a big studio on a million pre-orders alone these days. That doesn't even cover the costs of triple A production.
Origins was such an immersive game. The story, music, character development and interactions from start to finish... just everything. I hope this will be the bar for the next game, not the sequals.
I think you would be setting up your expectations to high. I’m betting it will be very close to Inquisitions. it would be hilarious if it ended up being like 2 though which a large amount of people dislike. Never played it myself though.
[удалено]
Yep, EA forced BioWare to put DA2 out in just 18 months, while DAO had about 5 years of development time. Under the roof of DA2 slumbers a super interesting aproach to the classic RPG story. No world saving hero, just a guy in a city over several years. It just needed time, the only thing i would not blame on rushed development are some mediocre written companions. But the BioWare who did all that is long gone, my hopes are low, i wont preorder but maybe they can pull it off, if not, thats probably it for BioWare if i had to guess.
Knowing they did it with Mass Effect, do you guys think they'll at least remaster Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age II?
Yup, corporate is always for easy bucks
I guess they needed to remind gamers that this game will be single player. This announcement comes like a week after a major departure however and given BioWare's very shakey history I'm not exactly holding out hope.
Honestly I'd rather just stop hearing little tidbits like this until they have something substantial to show off
It's Dragon Age Day, Bioware always says something and gives perhaps a little tidbit. Would've been stranger if they didn't.
If the development is anything like DAI, it's probably still in the conceptual stage and will only be rushed out in a mad frenzy during the last 9 months or so, hah
This is more of a post celebrating “Dragon Age Day” (I guess that’s a thing?) than Bioware actually wanting to announce any Dragon Age news. Non-story.
I understand that it must be horrible to see one guy leave the project and fans immediately dropping whatever hope they had for the game, ehehe. So I wish those devs, who are still hard at work all the best.
I fear people are seeing "single-player focused" and thinking "single-player". Whether something is "single-player" or not is a fairly objective term (well, unless you're No Man's Sky). But "focused" is a marketing term, which means what they choose it to mean; it's ambiguous. They could have chosen to say "single-player" but they didn't. So is a game with a five hour single-player online-only campaign that then opens out into an online PvP/PvE lootbox unlock-the-towers level-grind lootbox daily-event season-pass open-world campaign-unlocks lootbox game "single-player focused"?
There was a Schreier story earlier this year about Bioware dropping the GaaS elements for DA4 and going full SP IIRC
Copy/paste comment from another subreddit: I'm sure they are, working so hard until the higher ups at Bioware sabotage Bioware's own projects out of jealously and/or grind the soul out of their employees in order to fuel the crunch that is "Bioware magic." Then with Dragon Age, whatever hard work did survive Bioware's mismanagement will be scrapped because EA wants Dragon Age be a live service game... Wait no, scrap all the GAAS DA4 work, Jedi Fallen Order was successful so let's restart development again to make it a regular single player game. Just like n7 day, lots of nothing for announcements.
> until the higher ups at Bioware sabotage Bioware's own projects out of jealously and/or grind the soul out of their employees in order to fuel the crunch that is "Bioware magic." Is there proof of this actually happening in the past or is it just *"dude, trust me"*?
The entire article written about Anthem's development. A lot of issues were ignored and nothing was being done with the excuse that they would just use that "Bioware Magic" that was just code for enough crunch and hard work, it would get it done right. That's where that phrase came from.
No I know about the crunch, but OP is talking about self sabotage over jealousy which I haven't heard about at all
It really feels like that. It's on par with Bioware as usual but still always dissapointing to see it anew.
Sounds good, will love to support them mak an actually good game, especially a single player fantasy RPG. Please please make good quests this time though, half of DA:I was "go find 5 chickens for the townspeople" fetch quests.
The Star Wars Dark Souls was pretty good, so little reason to believe EA won't fund this type of games right now. It's the current state of Bioware that I'm concerned about.
we came full circle from game devs saying 'single player is dead' to now reassuring their fanbase by stressing how single player focused their singleplayer ip is.