You do know that Ray Muzyka(CEO of Bioware) is a Vice President and General Manager at EA and calls the shots on pretty much all of EA's RPGs?
But sure, just blame every change you don't like on the "evil" publisher
I can understand why not everybody would be comfortable with this change, but I personally think it makes the most sense.
In RPGs(and games in general) you usually have two broad categories of storytelling:
First person, where the character is basically just an extension of you, think Fallout 3, Oblivion, Half Life, etc..
And third person, where you are following the story of a pretermined character, which is more along the lines of Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy, Deus Ex, Uncharted..
(note this has nothing to do with the perspective of the game, but simply with the storytelling methods).
Now in good first person storytelling games you will rarely have alot of cutscenes, cinematic style dialogues and events, since the character isn't voiced and predetermined. You are in direct control of your characters actions most of the time.
In modern third person story telling you'll have a lot more cutscenes and cinematic events, and here it's important that the character is pretty much pre-determinted so the dialogues and cutscenes can play out properly.
In Dragon Age they were aiming for a more first person style storytelling(which Bioware said themselves). However it ended up as a wierd mixture between the two, since they still tried to have these dramatic dialogues and cutscenes, which often came off as odd due to the main character performing all these actions absolute silently. Whenever my character stabbed or punched or performed some other epic feat during dialogues and cutscenes it just appeared so unemotional due to him being almost entirely mute.
So one of the writers explaining that the conversation system in Awakening was the way it was because they didn't have the word budget to do it the same way as Origins was because Ray Muzyka decided unilaterally to scrap it? Wonder if he noticed how many people singled the out conversations, or lack thereof, as one of the reasons they didn't much care for Awakening. Or was it because the publisher decided that it was too expensive? Whatever. Following EA's history of buying out studios and what happened after that makes me rather not surprised at just about anything that might happen.
Going back to the cinematic events; this isn't a movie. It isn't supposed to be a movie. ME and ME2 were, from the beginning, supposed to be what they were; your first person story-telling game with sweeping cinematic space-scapes. I own them, and I play them. There are, as I said, aspects of them that I don't like, and the having to have hints of what you intend your Shepard to say instead of text that would be specifically what you want your Shepard to say is one of them. The "cinematic cut-scenes" that show my Shepard using weapons that she *can't* use and doesn't even carry is another annoyance. Whoever that is in the cut-scene, it isn't *my* Shep, and when it happens I'm back to watching the semi-interactive movie instead of playing the game. I bought DA:O because it was a throwback to the old rpg games that I love. And that includes not having a voice while having choices in text dialogue. Of course, I am old enough to have played those games, and so apparently don't fall into the demographic they are seem to be interested in at the present time. Let's see..."Dragon Age II uses a conversation system similar to Mass Effect's, where players select paraphrased versions of the dialogue from a wheel. An icon in the middle of the wheel even illustrates the line's basic intent (like aggressive or sarcastic), so you can focus more on the interaction rather than reading and anolyzing your dialogue choices." Yeah, that's great. Leaves out the people who want to read and anolyze their dialogue choices, cause, you know, you're playing a role-playing game and not watching a movie.
We'll see. I'm willing to see what they actually come up with, since the game isn't gold yet. But there is no way at this point that I will be pre-ordering this game. [I'm not going to get bothered about pre-order bonuses; recent past experience show that EA will cheerfully put the bonuses out as paid dlc sooner or later.] And there might be the possibility that some hint of what your Warden did might come through. The story happens in the past, but its being told in the present, with, apparently more than one narrator. Since Hawke is from Lothering, if they actually do something with information from a DA:O save, you may get a different viewpoint on what your Warden did in Lothering.
» Mon Mar 22, 2010 3:19 am 
