Dragon Age: Inquisition (Plot Details in Spoilers!)

I never pretended it was the crux of your argument. I have not admitted that. In fact I JUST refuted that. Dude. What the fuck? The romance options are a NON-FACTOR in the disparity of these two games' relative success. It is not important. I have yet to make the claim that the romance options are the crux of your argument. When you earlier stated what was, I said it was plausible and agreed.

I said they're not a factor in the disparity. We covered this ground. I'm not talking about each aspect's weight towards the game's success. I'm talking about the difference between the two games. You discussed it as a change from one to the other. No change occurred.

Tuco_sl said:

Nah. The debate is whether or not Bioware can appeal to casuals and female gamers and the old school RPG crowd.

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To that -- I think they can. But I think it will take some actual effort on their part. Not that slimy, cynical, half-assed trendy bullshit that they thought they could get away with.


Rather, I don't think Bioware can do it. I think it can be done.

Edit: It really doesn't piss me off that Anders is gay. I really don't care. Arcade Gannon was gay, and I was like "eh, that makes sense. Now gimme yer power-armor and don't die foolishly. Ya queer". But the presentation was SO BAD. So insultingly bad. It'd be about like in ME2 if you played Male Shep and went up to the black dude and said, "Gimme some of dat American Inventordick" and boom... there's your romance. Gotta appeal to the jungle fever spike lee crowd!

A lot of my enthusiasm was due to my curiosity about how weird his statements were. I'm sorry for the trivial derail.

Tuco_sl said:

"That concise and well laid out statement is not my argument, it is a strawman. Here is my argument: *couple pages of regurgitated talking points with no real substance*".

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dude for real... the last 5 pages have just been the two of you arguing about NO ONE HAS ANY IDEA ANYMORE.

romance has been in every bioware game that i can think of. there's probably one or two i'm forgetting, but since baldur's gate there's been romance.

no one is disputing that DA2 wasn't good. there's a few people who have said it was "not bad" but no one is really putting this in the win column for bioware. there are a hundred different reasons for that and even ATTEMPTING to single out a few of those reasons as the "main flaw" is completely disengenuous to the rest of the flaws.

that being said... a flawed game can be good. a flawed game can be great, even. a lot of reviewers gave Dragon's Dogma a B overall and those same reviewers gave it a 2012 game of the year. it's incredibly flawed in a lot of jarring ways, but it's also got something that you can't help but be attracted by. i'm not arguing that DA2 is a great game, just that it did bring a lot of good things to the table, despite it's flaws.

What. The. Fuck. is going on here?

hodj_sl said:

People mad because I dared say Bioware has become an unfocused studio more concerned with pandering to as large a demographic as possible to garner sales than just make good games which people will want to play, basically.

Or a lot of trolling one way or the other its been a great morning.

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I don't see anything wrong with that assertion. A lot of good people left Bioware and there's some huge assholes in charge. BUT...

We wouldn't care as much about DA2's fuck ups though if ME3 hadn't shit the bed. I think it gets way more hate than it deserves because of that. I played through it multiple times and enjoyed the game despite its failings. People give the game a lot of undue hate because it wasn't what they were expecting, but it has a lot of good shit in it, especially on a technical and mechanics level. Also, Merrill is so adorables.

Oh also - the Legacy DLC was fantastic and pretty much everything that DA2 should have been concerning level design and encounter design. I was REALLY disappointed when they said that they cancelled the DA2 Expansion to work on DAI, because I think that they could have regained a SHITLOAD of good faith if they had kept up that level of quality.

After Legacy and seeing the 30 minutes of DAI gameplay and what they've said about it I'm actually really looking forward to the game.

I just hope that I can setup my own choices from past games somehow if I play on the PS4. Hopefully they give that option or let you load saves from something somehow.

hodj_sl said:

Mass Effect 3's ending has little to do with my feelings on DA2. DA2 was a visceral gut reaction the moment I turned it on and gained control of my character.

I understand people who liked ME more than DA being more upset about ME3's ending, but the immediate overwhelming near physical response I had to the changes in DA2 have and will never leave me. I don't waste time hating games very often, but when I do, I hate Dragon Age 2.

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That's too bad, I think the game had a lot to offer if you could overlook its failings. As a filthy console peasant the controls were a *massive* upgrade for me in DA2. DAO's were absolute shit in comparison and it was an extremely unresponsive game, especially for the melee classes. They were really, really horrible to play in DAO, but had fantastic controls and responsiveness in DA2.

It looks like DAI is combing the best of both worlds though. So yay.

Sean_sl said:

We wouldn't care as much about DA2's fuck ups though if ME3 hadn't shit the bed. I think it gets way more hate than it deserves because of that.

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Sean_sl said:

Oh also - the Legacy DLC was fantastic and pretty much everything that DA2 should have been concerning level design and encounter design. I was REALLY disappointed when they said that they cancelled the DA2 Expansion to work on DAI, because I think that they could have regained a SHITLOAD of good faith if they had kept up that level of quality.

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Disagree. I swore off the DA brand after DA2 and leaned heavily towards boycotting BioWare entirely after they used a $10 DLC as their "apology" that didn't fix anything. I still remember your gameplay video you posted praising it and thinking "wtf is Sean smoking?". I can always post the hidden boss tutorial that clearly shows teleporting/parachuting creeps, combat mechanics going unchanged to fix issues, itemization still being nearly as bad as PoT.

The only reason I went with ME3 was because I thought "Flagship. They can't fuck up the flagship game." But yeah, DA2 was horrible with or without perspective from ME3 included.

Perspective I guess, I can understand the PC player hate. As someone who played both DAO (and DA:A and all the many DLC packs) and DA2 on the X360 though it wasn't nearly as bad for me and I had a lot of fun with it. Playing 2H Sword Hawke with a controller was really pretty fantastic.

hodj_sl said:

Right, at the expense of the pc players who supported Bioware from the beginning. That's the issue. I don't begrudge you that. But I do begrudge Bioware that.

Its basically a second Holocaust is what I'm saying.

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i know i'm kicking up a dust storm but... i have never gotten this anomosity between pc and console players. why can't we just sit down and love games together? i have a pc. i've played games on my pc for 20 years and i will continue to do so until i am old and arthritis has stricken my fingers so bad i can't use the keyboard and mouse. i also have a ps3 and a 360. i have played games on my consoles since the super mario bros/duck hunt NES combo pack was available and i will continue to play consoles until i am old and arthritis has stricen my fingers so bad i can't use the controller.

i understand game ports. i understand that it's frustrating when a game is made for multiple systems because it is designed at the lowest common denominator and then ported to the beefier systems. i get that frustration when you have a game that COULD look better, but it looks the same. i also think it's juvenile, but whatever. what i DON'T understand, especially in THIS day and age is being pissed off out of a sense of entitlement of being either a console bro or a pc fag and saying that YOU deserve something because you are one or the other. to me, that sounds like you have a victim mentality and that you, yourself, believe that what you have isn't good enough because someone else has the same thing.

Bioware doesn't owe you anything. Bioware doesn't owe ANY of us ANYTHING. they are a business and they are in business to make money. i am surely not going to begrudge a business for doing what they are designed to do.

now, i can begrudge them all day long for making poor, snap judgements that anyone with any kind of longterm mentality could see was a HORRIBLE idea. but i'm not going to go on a holy crusade and start blaming anything and everything else other than that. they made some poor decisions. just like every other company. the question is whether or not they can recover well enough to change directions before they burn themselves down.