Dragon Age: Inquisition (Plot Details in Spoilers!)

Well this started ok, but now its just the exact same conversation as the EQnext thread. So fucking take it there and stay out of other games.

Yea, I think at this point people are disagreeing with eqnext posters and just following them to other gaming threads.

And really Tuco? GO BACK TO GUILD WARS HEATHEN.

Alternate theory: EQNext posters are making bad posts and having terrible ideas everywhere instead of just the EQNext thread, they just stand out more in the other threads because there's less of an echo chamber effect.

EQNext? What are you talking about Gavin? This is the Dragon-Mass-Effect-Skyrim-Fallout-Age Thread, go home, you are drunk!

I just hope to God they take the time to actually finish DA3 all the way. With a real, satisfying ending that not only ties up the story and the characters, but also leaves enough of the story open for other adventures, meaningful DLC post game and not this prequel/sidequel bullshit that people seem enamored of these days. I mean shit, all DLC should be Shivering Isles / Awakening level of awesome. That is DLC. Not this pansy ass 'extra adventure off the beaten path' crap.

I think of it like Lord of the Rings. Sure, the story ends when Frodo tosses the ring into the fire, right? Fucking wrong. All kinds of adventurous shit happens for another 50 years until its all flowers and happiness and sailing into the West. Aragorn and Gondor war with the remaining forces of Mordor and the Easterlings. Mirkwood gets cleansed. Moria gets retaken. Annunimas gets retaken and rebuilt. I kind of hope LOTRO goes that far just to see what happens, see if they take the story past Mordor or what. That's the kind of DLC/storytelling I would love to see in some of these huge series, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Keep the story going past the Big Bad Guy, milk the fucking dorks like me who fall in love with these places and want to see what happens.

NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer is as god damn awesome as an expansion/DLC is ever going to get I think. That expac MADE that game for me.

Awakening was very similar to Mask, so here's to hoping we get more of that.

LadyVex_sl said:

It's a semantics argument - I use storytelling as a verb, and if the story is not written into the game and told to you, then yea, there's less of it. That's the fact part.

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I think you're missing what I'm saying there. My point is simply that there's not less storytelling in, say, Dragon Age or Baldur's Gate simply because so much of it is unvoiced. It's just shifted some.

In Dragon Age, thanks to not being voiced, they were able to tell detailed multiple origin stories from multiple races and options of characters, something that got sacrificed for the sequal in order to provide full voice acting.

Baldur's Gate would be better compared to Planescape: Torment in terms of having a character created by the player vs. a fixed protagonist created by the developers, since voice overs were very limited in scope back then, and PS:T doesn't even have any close competition when it comes to depth of storytelling.

That said, I do sometimes wish that voice overs were still done PS:T-style today. Having every trivial little conversation fully voiced gets tedious no matter how good the actors are (read: Jennifer Hale's Shepard), and using a mix of voices and text allows for both a cinematic feel as well as opening things up for a lot more depth and choice for the player. I know it's absurd to even think that AAA games will ever go back to that style, but at least there's Wasteland 2 and (hopefully) Project Eternity to look forward to.

I don't understand how people enjoyed DA2 enough to be willing to even look at DA3. I'm not trying to be intentionally dense or argumentative or hipster trash or whatever... I literally don't understand it.

DA2 insulted me in every way it possibly could. That shit was just straight up bad.

I disliked DA2 because of the map reuse, ninja-paratrooper reinforcements, and lazy writing that merged every fork created by player choice back into a single thread almost immediately. The first and third were due to it being a blatant rush job and cash grab, which there's no excuse for at all, and the middle one is just plain shitty design that should never have made it out of alpha testing. Everything else I thought was far superior to DA:O.

Which isn't to say I'm looking forward to DA3 at this point or anything. I fully expect BioWare to put out yet another spectacular failure with a few good parts completely overshadowed by the shit.

Iannis_sl said:

I don't understand how people enjoyed DA2 enough to be willing to even look at DA3. I'm not trying to be intentionally dense or argumentative or hipster trash or whatever... I literally don't understand it.

DA2 insulted me in every way it possibly could. That shit was just straight up bad.

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There were things that I liked about it, and I guess I should say, I tend to be a sucker for RPGs in general. I'll play anything or at least try mostly anything RPG related, and because of how much I loved DA:O, DA2 seemed the natural progression.

It faltered a lot, but it had a familiar atmosphere, familiar characters, and while the overall writing sucked, I thought the interaction between your party members and you, and party members between themselves was well done. I mean hell, they had RELATIONSHIPS and that was awesome to me. I highly disliked not being able to talk to them, RPG-style, where you could just ask them random shit all the time.

Also, part of what made me at least stick with DA2 was an honest to god archery tree. Most RPG games have archery abilities, but you tend to only get powerful by utilizing specific talents that buff you in ways that aren't often apparent. I think I've mentioned that before - NWN for example, the path to winning was to roll a rogue, then load up on sneak attack dmg shortbow feats etc, and hay, you win. DA:O was similar, except not only did you roll a rogue, you actually ignored several archery skills because they weren't overall good for your damage.

DA2 had some relatively cool archery abilities, including some that mixed in melee attacks, or had you leaping back even, because it was more action based. It was often not my cup of tea, and things like enemies jumping on you from everywhere was sort of ridiculous but i got a kick out of it.

I played through it a few times, enough to get my "perfect" playthrough, but I never really went back after the last DLC. Felicia Day DLC blew, though I was looking forward to retaking Starkhaven. SOBS. =(

Voiced vs. not voiced is less a stylistic trade off than it is a resource trade off. Very few people spurn the fully voiced protagonist when said protagonist has the voice he / she envisions and this has no effect on the amount of customization and dialogue options in the game. Practically speaking however this is never the case. A fully voiced protagonists limits your customization and dialogue options and fully voiced NPCs limit the size of the world and the width / depth of dialogue interaction. This trade off is acceptable when the bulk of your player base only goes through a game once and is satisfied with the limited choices you provide them with, which I reckon is the case for Bioware's games. It is also acceptable because very few developers have the vision and skill to make use of a dialogue palette to construct poignant choices and customization options in the first place.

I don't think that Bioware's talky games have substantially limited replay compared to other games.

Can you actually cite an instance of this?

Zhaun_sl said:

I don't think that Bioware's talky games have substantially limited replay compared to other games.

Can you actually cite an instance of this?

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I'd actually say it has just as much replay value; depending on who you had with you in DA2/DA:O often changed how you could complete an objective. I had Fenris torture a guy for me, Isabela created a diversion, Varric straight up LIED to someone to save a guy and he made him give me gold, and Aveline even rallied the guards for me at one point.

If you're a lore or interaction nerd (like I am) there is shit tons of replay in that game. The sad part is the rest of it sucks so you probably won't see much of it.

I agree Vex, I ussual get sick of gameplay issues in RPGs than story replay. ME or TES style.

LadyVex_sl said:

Well, I wasn't really trying to point out that they should give you hard consequences necessarily in things like skyrim. My main point was that with a silent protagonist, you have to live vicariously through the other characters reacting to you almost to figure out -anything- about you. And they were mostly canned expressions, such that your skill level in specific things, or your quest completion led to a new phrase near you. But, it doesn't quite go far enough. I knew what my character was, but outwardly, no one else could know that. Sit behind me long enough and you might come to understand specific things about my Nord, but in a game like DA/ME, your own character, in a way, narrated who they were whenever they accepted a quest, or talked to companions, etc. You weren't silent, there was no guessing, or assuming how your character, based on your choices, would react to given situations, and the type of person they were.

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Ah, yeah, I understand, and I do think they can still accomplish more of what you are speaking about with a silent protagonist. To some degree, I think DA:O went a little ways towards bridging the gap due to them still including some very cinematic elements on top of them providing a bit of a backstory for your character.

We say "storytelling" as an aspect of the game, whether it is voiced, or silent, or given to you piecemeal through quests. I think of storytelling as a verb, wherein the story is actuallytoldto you, based on your choices.

I prefer that method, just because it feels more complete. The story can't quite be told to you if it's notthere, and a good many games with silent heroes miss out on key chances to reinforce or even introduce elements because you walk around like you bit into a peanut butter sandwich -just- as someone asked you a really important question.

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Well, again, I think there are multiple ways of telling a story, and I think there are several that have only begun to be explored. In the case of silent protagonist of a game like Skyrim versus the action hero of Mass Effect, I sort of see it as active storytelling versus passive.

In all honesty, I think one of the benefits of videogames is that they are allowed to present stories in a way that doesn't require justtellingyou the story. It's one of the only mediums we have that allows participation on our part, so I see the silent protagonist as a way of trying to make us feel like we're doing the unfolding of the story rather than having it unfolded for us. Though, I would agree there are still some limitations in this method, many of which you lay out, but I also don't think they are inherent in the design, it's just sort of become how certain developers (like Bethesda) have decided they want to approach things. Sadly, we have very few developers that want to explore storytelling in new ways, rather deciding to focus on things like shinier graphics.