@Drachasor: it would not let me quote your post.

I liked the characters they are what redeemed the game.

The Mass Effect conversation wheel I think offers some choice but the options for conversation are pretty clear cut on being black or white choices, I do not really like that.

I like Skyrims dungeons I just wish they had branching paths: I do like how each one has its own little story that is very well implemented. What is GW2?
I do like idea of dynamic events and I wonder how that would correlate with event in game dungeon wise, maybe even affect the radiant AI.

Odd.


Yes, just about the only thing good about DA2.


Sometimes there are neutral stuff, but yeah, the system seems heavily bent towards being good or evil. One really annoying thing are the occasional issues the Biowheel (I just made that up) games have is giving you the occasional really misleading option. You think something is a mild rebuff or even largely supportive or whatever, and it ends up being this really mean thing or something else you didn't intend to do AT ALL. I am not sure why this happens, since they have enough room to indicate more what you are going to say. Though, that is a largely a criticism of their "summing up" text which is occasionally really bad.

Bioware definitely could work on often more nuanced approaches to morality. Heck, even being "good" isn't clearly defined. Take ME2 (SPOILERS), when you can choose to kill or reprogram the renegade geth. Reprogramming is good but killing is bad? That one is a tough call and honestly different ethical systems would come up with different answers to that. Some would say reprogramming them is a more flagrant violation of their identity than killing them is. Of course, there's a whole swath of various sorts of neutrality or ethics more focused on friends/family/etc before you even get close to being evil (and here I'm making a somewhat arbitrary scale based on egalitarianism). Then again, I am not sure there are many if any RPGs that have a great deal of depth to their moral systems. It's a complicated task that usually gets pretty simplified. I don't think it is impossible to handle it a lot better than what we see, however.

There's something to be said for not using much of a system at all if the only one you'd do is black and white though.



GW2 is Guild Wars 2 which is coming out...ehh...maybe at the end of 2012. Hard to say. If you are familiar with Guild Wars, then ignore that familiarity as GW2 is a lot different. It's an MMORPG, but not like WoW or any other MMORPG out there as it doesn't have the traditional Tank-Healer-DPS Holy Trinity of MMORPGs nor does it have traditional questing.

Here's a simplified example of Dynamic Events in that game: If you come over a ridge and a town is being attacked, then you can either try to save that town or not. If you don't save it (including if you fail to save it), then it will be destroyed and the bad guys (of whatever faction) will set up a base there or whatever. Then the world will change after that so those bad guys might use that to stage more attacks from that new point. If you do save it, then you might be able to continue on to the next bad guy town/fort and eventually push them all the way back to their home base. Later you might be able to effect a repair of that town, but for now it is gone.

Basically zones in the world have a bunch of "points of interest" in them. Any given point will always have something going on for you to do. What is going on depends on the state of points it is connected to. So if you go in somewhere and change something, then the points linked can also change in some way. This is nice for an MMO since the world is often changing. However, I see no reason why a single player RPG couldn't take this sort of concept to have a more complicated and interactive world where changing one thing somewhere will result in changes elsewhere. Maybe taking about bandits at one location results in bandits nearby becoming more organized, powerful and doing more since they have less competition for instance.

Of course, a game like the TES could go in other ways with it. Have points of interest and then given different factions as a whole some AI that determines how the faction behaves, what points they are interested in, and how they learn about and take advantage of opportunities. Essentially that's like adding some TBS or RTS AI to some factions to determine what they do on the overworld (and doesn't necessarily have to be that complicated and have a big overhead if conflicts that aren't nearby are abstracted). Of course, unlike a GW2-esque DE system this would be a lot harder to ensure there were always things to do and that the world remained interesting.

Anyhow, I doubt Bioware is going to be trying anything ambitious in this manner. I do think there are a lot of interesting ideas out there that could be combined in some really compelling ways.

i hope DA3 sticks to the story and does not work so hard on the world (well, work much much much harder than they did with DA2, that just stupid). story is (almost) everything, and DA actually makes the story count (or seem like it anyway)

This, after Dragon Age 2's abominable tragedy birth I am afraid to ask Bioware whats next. I still cant believe they are making DLC for that travesty.

It's their standard overpriced crap too as far as I can tell.

This is why I am waiting to see how ME3 does before I buy it. Bioware could have released a significant update and fix to DA2 for free, but instead they are just acting like nothing is wrong and milking the few people that liked it for as much money as possible -- and I must say, it is annoying how they never lower the prices on the DLC as far as I can tell. Can't even get it for cheap YEARS later. It's really absurd with DA:O where you can buy a new version of the game with all the DLC for less than it would take to buy some of the DLC.

I have serious reservations about Bioware now.

The DLC is pretty good. Actually. An improvement on some parts of the game.

Not sure if who here wants to talk about this though. "Abominable tragedy" is pretty extreme. There's no room for dialogue. I have a hard enough time talking to some people about movies that are merely medium quality, and they make it out to be the worst thing ever made.

Dragon Age is a lost franchise. It has none of the unique depth or originality of TW2, or the massive breadth of Skyrim. Its roots were generic to begin with. Just more Tolkein high fantasy. Bioware wanted to design by committee, and so we all got DA2. I don't think they can ever make Dragon Age relevant

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