What are you guys talking about dragon age two did a good job it got 8's and 9's.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/personal_attack


It was a ballsy move and I wouldn't blame anyone for avoiding the question, but this topic makes him out to be the people's champion. Folks, come back to reality.

Dragon Age 2, compared to DA:O, took a direction which moved it away from truer hardcoe RPG gameplay features. This made it more accessible to casual gamers, but was a disappointment to the vets of the series. Our concern is that likewise will be done to Skyrim.

The odds of that happening are slim to none. Beth isn't going to make the same mistake that Bioware did.

Did you check the User Metacritic ratings. :biggrin:

You're right. Saying that someone isn't genuine, and is only capable of giving "pre-programmed responses" isn't a personal attack at all.

I would have been disappointed with Todd if he had taken the bait using another game as an example of what the gamer doesn't like and I absolutely believe him about Skyrim. I love Oblivion and I see grander challenges coming in Skyrim. The game changes don't bother me at all. I want change. If I want to play the same game, I already have it and I'm playing it.

November 11 can't get here soon enough so people can talk about their epic adventures in Skyrim.

:tes:

He's a pretty jittery guy, I can attest to that mainly because I got to meet him during my internship at EA.

On the strengths of it's predecessor, I lost track of how many times I played Origins, I only played DA2 twice, I attempted a third play through but stopped once my character got to the city gates, I just could not find the inspiration to continue.

No, they're idiots. RTFM much?

I never said he wasn't capable of original response, only that I've heard him say those exact same lines before. Those are memorized lines.

I don't care how honest you are as a person, no one can memorize a genuine answer. That's an oxymoron.

Yeah, well, those reviews are quite worthless. I've seen great games get a 6.0 rating.

If the guy came out and said "You know what? Bioware svck ass" I'd respect him a lot more.

I love how he tried to corner Todd into talking trash about another development company and Todd said "That's a loaded question"

What exactly was asked? Video buffers too much on my phone. Is there a YouTube link?

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dragon-age-ii

7.9 average 4.4 average user review.

I'm sorry but that is beyond abysmal for a Bioware game. DA1,ME1/2,BG1/2,KOTOR are in the 90s.


DAII was bad. It was super short (14 hours for me), it had no crafting, copy and paste levels, no class mixing (no more battlemage, or dw warrior), bad story, bad characters(forced gay six?), one town..wtf?, but hey it still had attributes :whistling:

Basically the opposite of Skyrim.

It was pretty much, "Are you going to pull a Dragon-Age 2?" The questioner felt DA2 went after casual gamers at the expense of hardcoe RPG fans.

:tes:

Fix'd

I liked the combat overhaul as well. I did not, however like the amount of items and content that were recycled from the previous game. Bioware's Mass Effect can do it to an extent because you visit familiar places and it takes place directly after the first game...I expected Dragon Age 2 to be as expansive and unique as its predecessor though.

All in all, I liked it though.

What that has to do with topic..i'm not sure. Oh yeah. Take into consideration other people's opinions.

It's difficult to determine whether you are detailing an argument philosophy or whether you actually believe what you are saying.

I will say that RPGs are not "objectively" defined by the role-playing choices they give you. Sure, that is a part of what traditional RPGs trend towards and some people find this to be the most appealing aspect of an RPG, but it is not an "objective" definition of an RPG.

And there is still another argument to be made that they are not actually removing more stuff than they are adding. Which would make this game, by your definition of an RPG, more of an RPG than the series' previous iteration. I suppose this would be my main gripe with "reductionist hyperbole" in the first place.

-Removing-
Spell Making
Armor Degradation
Greaves
Athletics
Acrobatics
Hand-to-hand
Attributes

-Adding-
Blacksmithing
Dual Wielding Melee
Dual Wielding Spells (Really, the whole spell system. Charging up spells and combining them to make bigger spells. Stream spells. Trap spells. AoE Spells.)
Dragons (A sort of free roaming massive enemy implemented in a way that has never been seen before in any game.)
An improved 3rd person view. (Really, just improved animations all around.)
Wood Cutting
Ore Mining
250+ perks (This is really huge. Character definition looks to be more detailed than any previous Elder Scrolls game, which I find amazing.)
Finishing Moves (And now apparently decapitation.)
Children
Radiant Story (Just a sort of quest system to make things feel a little more natural.)
Pickpocketing Skill Tree
Improved Combat
A Stealth Overhaul (Enemies will have an alert status. Dagger do great damage from stealth. Etc.)
Dragon Shouts
Guardian Stones

-Leaving the Same-
All of that excellent object interacting, quest ridden, dungeon diving, story driven open world we've all come to know and love.



In the end, a "reductionist hyperbole" argument, as you put it, stands on thin ice. At least as I see it.

When Skyrim was first announced, the thought that they might follow the trend of streamlining and dumbing down crossed my mind, and I brushed it off thinking they wouldn't be stupid enough to make the same mistakes as Bioware and other companies.

Then I heard the words "streamlining" and "accessibility" being used repeatedly by BGS staff in interviews, and shortly after I found out attributes were removed. Then I found out armour pieces were being merged. Then I found out certain skills were removed. Then I found out armour degradation was gone. etc. etc.

Pretty much everything I know about the game so far clearly suggests that streamlining the series and making it more accessible to a wider audience has been one of the main goals throughout development.

Only here can someone consider this a problem.

Except so far it looks like they are starting to head in the other direction with this "Stream-lining" :\

I don't really see ANY game in the TES series as being catered towards the "casual" crowd. Too much depth in alternative playstyles, 100+ hour playthroughs, completely non-linear storyline, thousands of items/weapons. I know I haven't touched Skyrim, but I know it offers this same level of content. I honestly don't see how any of those are qualities of casual friendly rpgs. Even if design decisions have been born out of a necessity to appease a different crowd, TES at its core will always reward players who favor complexity.

So, from what I'm seeing in this thread, I'm guessing a hardcoe RPG player is someone who played RPGs on PCs long before consoles took off. Since PC's at the time didn't have the graphical capability and processing power of today's PC's, a lot less prettiness and a lot more number crunching went into those games, because it was much less heavy to have all data in a spreadsheet and use numbers to decide how successful or unsuccessful your character was in the game. You just had very basic animations, the rest was reliant on numbers. Well, I think many of us have been there, myself included, back when we lived at home with our parents and only had school to worry about and we could take as much time as we needed sifting through all the numbers (esp. if you were shy like me and didn't go out much) and I loved every minute of it!

More recently, I suppose I've evolved into a "casual" gamer because I started working full-time, got married and started a family. On top of that I have a semblance of a social life and I play volleyball and hockey. I just don't have the time anymore to fiddle too much with numbers or the money to keep upgrading my PC (like I did in the past), so I play on console now and I'm actually happy with the direction Skyrim is taking, where I can be sure the game will handle well on the console and remove some of the time consuming tedium, in favour of having more of my very limited free time being dedicated to gameplay and story progression. You say you want to harken back to the old days and that in this new age of "casual gamers" all they are looking for now is pretty graphics and fluff but no real RPG content. Yet, you go on and on about how "pretty" Crysis 2 is on PC compared to console and how upset you'll be if there isn't a high-rez texture pack included with the PC version of Skyrim and how you are so upset because they aren't using tesselation and whatnot with DX11 and how they aren't taking full graphical advantage of the PC, etc. etc. Admit it, PC players like graphics to look pretty too. If you didn't, you wouldn't give a damn about DX9 or DX11. So the whole argument about games being made to look nice is moot. If Bethesda wouldn't have spent any time creating a whole new engine to update the look and animations of Skyrim and instead worked on a system for spears, you say you'd be happier with that, but at the end of the day you know you wouldn't. If Skyrim looked like Morrowind, graphically, very few people would purchase it, PC or otherwise. It's not the highest level of graphical awesome-sauce but I'd say it's right on par, and looks pretty darn good - on console anyway. I've read the PC version will "melt our faces" Graphics in games will constantly be improving, and in essence the "prettier" games are actually being made for PC-only, so the talk of casual gamers looking for prettiness isn't quite true as the consoles can only reach a certain level of prettiness, and I think we've seen that with Skyrim.

As for content, I'd say Skyrim has that in droves. What is it, close to 200 hand-crafted dungeons/caves/caverns etc or something, a whack of P.O.I.'s, a ton of quests, several jobs to RP in the game, smithing your own armour, 30 hour main quest and 300 hours of side quests, and whatever else?...I won't get into it, mostly everyone on here already knows all this stuff. You can basically go anywhere you want, unlike most games where your corralled along like woolly mammoths being herded by giants.

Anyway, Skyrim will still be an amazing game, and I'd say TES VI is going to evolve again, like games in the series always do. Doesn't mean necessarily removing/streamlining/dumbing-down more stuff. Means re-visiting Skyrim and previous games in the series, to see what worked and what didn't and what (with new consoles coming out) can be handled if it was added back in along with new things they can think up or things they had wanted to add into Skyrim but couldn't. They may, over the next five years, develop an attribute/perk system that works nicely together. For Skyrim though, with what they had available to them, they removed certain things or made some sacrifices to get the game to work well, as a whole. It also feels like BGS is growing along with the "hardcoe" RPG fans since we are older now and our gaming time is becoming more and more limited, they seem to be making the actual playing of the game much quicker to get into while still getting you to spend a good 3-400 hours of your life on it. It really is a massive game so I don't think it's fair to expect the needs of every single one of us to be addressed in the game. It's a mature game and older people like me (not elderly, but mature) lead busy lives so if anything, I feel like they've made Skyrim even more accessible to the mature crowd and have given me specifically a chance to get through it without having to divorce my wife, disown my son and take a life hiatus from the rest of the world.

To the point on Todd and the DA2 comment, Todd is a courteous professional who would not put other game studios down in order to boost people's impressions of himself or Bethesda. He'll let Skyrim do the talking. And there's a good possibility Todd has friends at Bioware, but the almighty media likes to blindside nice guys like Todd with such questions because it throws them off-guard and they think it makes for a more interesting interview when they put someone on the spot. Shame on them (the media).

Actually he sounded more diplomatic than oblivious
He could be flamed if he agreed with the guy that DA2 svcked, on the other hand he could have passed the idea that they think that DA2 was a good idea if disagreeing with him

Learn to read between the lines

BTW DA2 made me facepalm so much

*Laughter*