I just get grumpy when people make it out to be a complete catastrophe. I can't remember a single occasion during nearly twenty years of games where people were so utterly extreme, and just because of a game that was arguably rushed, but not even in a devious and scheming way. Quite dazzling, really.

medal of honor :sadvaultboy:

I remember completing an EA survey, and one question asked what I liked most in games or something, and I said "realistic combat scenarios" or some crap. next day I got an e-mail with a beta code to MoH. I thought that y'know, just MAYBE....but no.

Seriously? DA2's response didn't seem that special to me. I've seen people try to boycott games for being rushed or incomplete before they were released.

It seems like half the kids today have never even heard of the old MOH games. Everything is COD. They would probably think Doom was witchcraft.

Agreed. Maybe I've just been gaming for long enough that the disappointment of DA2 seems small compared to countless others over the years. It's disappointing, yes, but the over-the-top reaction to it is baffling to me. To be honest it sort of makes me think half of the people complaining haven't played the game. The story and environments are repetitive and underwhelming (the extreme re-use of maps was pretty surprising), but other than that it's not that much of a departure from Origins. I don't get the intensity of the outcry. Once you get past the changes to the animations and such, the removal of the skill ladders, the fact that you can't equip armor to companions, etc., the gameplay is virtually identical to Origins (on the PC versions, anyway...the console versions are a different animal). DA2 feels very rushed, but designed to appeal to the masses compared to Origins? I don't see it unless you want to argue that they spent too much time on cosmetic changes and ran out of time to create content. :shrug:

Anyway, I've seen a lot of franchises go downhill over the years. I can guess that some of them did so because they were trying to appeal to a wider audience, but without being a fly on the wall at planning meetings in the offices of the dev shops and publishers it would just be speculation. I will say that one of the bigger disappointments for me was the transition from Morrowind to Oblivion. I was also pretty disappointed in Fallout 3 once I got past the beautiful artwork and realized how vestigial the RPG system was and how lacking in intelligence and subtlety the story was. Everything has to be "epic" nowadays...everything is trying so hard to be so freakin' "epic" now that it's all just become incredibly tedious...but I digress. Still, though, I wouldn't call "worst game evar" on either of them...they were just a disappointing direction for two of my favorite game franchises to move in. Neither of them were bad games.

Judging by the way you isolated what I said, i'm assuming you didn't put the two together.

lol, my little brothers friends all think CoD was the original "world war" game(and probably the first FPS)... I still remember playing the old MoH's on my PS1. ah, the good 'ol days.

Definitely Call of Duty, I still remember being so amazed/terrified when charging through Stalingrad and how the series fell apart just as it got started.
Maybe TES but Morrowind was so unbelievably good I don't think Oblivion had much of a chance in the first place so it all falls to Skyrim.
Strangely I have never noticed Biowares problems since I would only ever play them for the story anyway.

It's not a franchise, but oldschool CRPGs. It would be nice to have one or two new games that were more like the oldschool ones than have all the games be cinematic and visceral and gritty and stuff.

Troika fought the good fight, but 3 buggy releases in a row with the very small target audience...

Impossible. Literally anything would be an improvement over yet another story about an ancient evil threatening the world with you being the last in a mythical line/chosen one/special dude and the only one with the power to stop it.

Not addressing problems is stagnation, not regression. It's certainly an issue, but it doesn't indicate any amount of simplification over it's predecessor. And really regardless of whether or not you believe the updates made to ability progression were good decisions, it was undeniably more complex than that which was present in Origins. The ability trees were far from perfect, with some requiring you to select mostly useless talents just to reach something worthwhile, there is definitely more depth there than in single path progression.

I think that they have a pretty good amount of content actually, it's just that a lot of the things that were added in the TS1 and TS2 EPs are already in the TS3 base game. Except pets. I want my pets, dammit. :stare:

And weather. Damn you, EA, give me my snow.

It's too bad that I let my family borrow my TS2 disc, because they lost it. Now I can't even install the expansions. -_-

Assuming you are talking about the movie, I don't think the sequel was ruined by appealing to the masses, it fails with the same reason the first movie fails.

Even a piece of [censored] story with no conflict conflict, effectively made up of a bunch of barely-connected episodes, that waddles around without any sense of direction 80% of the time? You're right, though, at least it didn't involve any ancient evil you had to destroy...except for that red lyrium idol, which comes out of left field at the last minute, and turns out to have driven Meredith insane. Oh, wait a minute...

"Original" does not automatically equal "better" or even "good." And DA2's story can't even be called original either.


I said that they got worse. They were not only not addressed, but simplified areas indirectly affected others. Every encounter in DA2, for instance, is quite the same; enemies spawn in waves and attack from every angle. Every. Single. Time. Less thought was put into them than in DAO, and the same strategies only ever need be recycled even more. DAO was guilty of this to a degree as well, as it often threw the same enemy combinations at you, but it at least had the occasional varied fight that forced you to switch gears. Furthermore, positioning became even less important in DA2 thanks to characters being able to swiftly cross the battlefield in an instant, and for friendly fire being removed from all but the highest difficulty levels.

Ditto for itemization, which got worse for two things. For one, they simplified the mechanics of the original by making it so that only Hawke could equip armor, and two, still made the majority of drops absolute trash. Armor was included with the drops. Armor often intended for one class...that only one character could ever equip. Put two and two together at what this equates to.

I've been playing games for about as long as you have and I do agree the reaction to DA2 is somewhat kneejerkone. And quite honestly, I don't really care about DA series, I'm not on the barricades to bring Bioware down though I do dislike their recent line of work. I had no real expectations about DA2 as I found DA:O to be but a decent experience at its peak moments, but it still felt like an emergency crap to me. And I can't really help it. I'm not being opinionated just for the sake of it. The game honestly feels like [censored].

Anyways....

You serious? I'm a teenager and I hadn't even heard of COD 'til WaW, MoH will always be far superior, also I played Doom about a year ago and it was awesome, more fun than any CoD I guess I'm one of the rare cases though sadly, and I hate how the 12 year olds on PSN and and Xbox Live give teens a bad name Just because they have no taste or skill at what they play doesn't mean we don't

sorry to bring this game to these forums, but the way world of warcraft went from everything being a long term effort to everything being maxed in 2-3 weeks kind of ruined the game for me. and along with the 'now now now' gameplay came the 'go go go' mentality of the community

I'd say Dragon Age 2 but I haven't got it... Oblivion I guess? It was worse than Morrowind, without a doubt.

The other series I usually play have improved. Assassins' Creed and Mass Effect stand out here.

Nothing, really. Except maybe Tales Don't Tell Themselves by Funeral for a Friend, but they made up.

Aren't funeral for a friend a band ? :s

They are, but the OP said anything that has let you down.

Shadowrun for sure. It exemplifies the notorious streamlining of this generation by a massive margin compared to any other sequel/remake. They took one of the most classic RPGs and turned it into a multiplayer action FPS.

As for music the typical ones are electronic acts that swing more and more to traditional rock as they rise in mainstream appeal. I loved The Prodigy's first album Experience, Music for the Jilted Generation was also pretty great but when Fat of the Land came out and their popularity exploded, the music just wasn't the same for me anymore. Pendulum started out as a Drum n Bass group but today they are pretty much an alt rock band (no wonder they somehow got so popular in America, eh)
The only instance where I don't mind this change is Infected Mushroom. I think they've really come into their own with the more recent material. I am a big Psytrance listener but their early stuff just didn't stand out for me. And it probably helps that what qualifies as "real underground" psy today is just utter crap.

I thought he meant franchises but I can see a band letting you down Yeah it makes sense

I found that there was just way too much comedy in it..It couldn't even be taken seriously in comparison to the first.

That college humor opened it up to a different psychographic.

Mass Effect 2
Dragon Age 2
Oblivion

Here are the 3 that really disappointed me. It is easy to tell these games were the product of trying to appeal to an even wider audience. Sad, seeing as how all of the games before them did rather well in the first place. Roleplaying games weren't made for everyone. Stop messing with them in the attempt to make them so, please.

The locations in World Adventures are god awful, look at Champs Les Sims! Completely slap dash and obviously rushed. Ambitions is probably my favourite of every Sims expansion pack but it's not without its own bugs and problems either. Nightlife added the dating function, as well as plenty of social interations. Plus they added Sub-hoods, remember those? Have you looks at The Sims 3's pathetic excuse for a remake of Nightlife? Late Night is by far the worst expansion pack, almost everything is half finished or broken or just completely inferior to its TS2 version.

The University sub-hoods had much more than one lot, I can assure you.

I hate how The Sims is all about "adventures" and missions now.