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Walrus Pete posted:Andromeda sure as gently caress didn't, but I can understand why you'd forget about that game. Yeah, that was not a good one. I honestly can't even remember of name of the main bad guy. gently caress, I can't even remember the name of the evil empire you're fighting they were so unmemorable.
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May 13, 2019 13:27
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Lmao @ DA2, hardcore dungeon crawler.
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May 13, 2019 14:00
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DA2 on Nightmare gets some things right, but it also makes some parts such a frustration to deal with outside of constant pause-spamming. Assassins are a pain and a half because they could just 1-shot anyone that's not Aveline or a souped up Merrill. Any AoE spell that's not Lightning is near useless because it can decimate your own team. Isabela and Fenris are near trash outside of a lot of micromanagement. I like DA2 for a lot of things, but the combat balance could use just a bit more tweaking.
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May 13, 2019 14:38
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I’ve never played BG2; is it important to play BG1 first?
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May 13, 2019 15:26
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Walrus Pete posted:Andromeda sure as gently caress didn't, but I can understand why you'd forget about that game. I rather like Andromeda gameplay but I had to concentrate very hard what was the deal with this villain. I still can't remember what was his problem with us colonists except him being evil. I also remember how the game created mystery around a theocratic totalitarian system they had... but then it allowed you to listen to those guys internal correspondence and turns out they have political infighting and for their core worlds that villain guy was Caesar in Gaul.
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May 13, 2019 15:39
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Ainsley McTree posted:I’ve never played BG2; is it important to play BG1 first? I'd say it's not. Plus BG1 aged much, much worse than BG2. BG2 is recognizably a BioWare game with dialogue, companions, well-defined locations. BG1 has a dozen "wilderness" locations that have groups of enemies just sitting there, or sometimes a minor NPC interaction. Dialogue and companions are very simplistic, quite often you'll get a quest with no option to say anything about it, and then you return after doing what you were asked for and still can't react. Plus, early level D&D is very frustrating. For the first couple of levels, most of the characters in your party can die from a single hit, and most attacks in the game are misses. In terms of story BG2 sometimes lets you meet characters from BG1 but it doesn't change much. You start with some pre-defined friends but you may not travel with them in BG1 and thus will not care probably.
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May 13, 2019 15:47
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ilitarist posted:I'd say it's not. Plus BG1 aged much, much worse than BG2. BG2 is recognizably a BioWare game with dialogue, companions, well-defined locations. BG1 has a dozen "wilderness" locations that have groups of enemies just sitting there, or sometimes a minor NPC interaction. Dialogue and companions are very simplistic, quite often you'll get a quest with no option to say anything about it, and then you return after doing what you were asked for and still can't react. Plus, early level D&D is very frustrating. For the first couple of levels, most of the characters in your party can die from a single hit, and most attacks in the game are misses. In other words, the $20 enhanced edition is probably not worth it then...I’ll just read the Wikipedia summary of the plot and jump to 2 then, thanks!
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May 13, 2019 16:16
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Ainsley McTree posted:I've never played BG2; is it important to play BG1 first? ilitarist posted:I'd say it's not. Plus BG1 aged much, much worse than BG2. BG2 is recognizably a BioWare game with dialogue, companions, well-defined locations. BG1 has a dozen "wilderness" locations that have groups of enemies just sitting there, or sometimes a minor NPC interaction. Dialogue and companions are very simplistic, quite often you'll get a quest with no option to say anything about it, and then you return after doing what you were asked for and still can't react. Plus, early level D&D is very frustrating. For the first couple of levels, most of the characters in your party can die from a single hit, and most attacks in the game are misses. I agree completely. Reading a summary of BG1's story is plenty. It doesn't hold up nearly as well as BG2 for a lot of reasons, IMO.
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May 13, 2019 16:18
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BG1 suffers from being level 1 in dungeons and dragons. Have 4 HP is not fun, it never was and the grind to get to three (when you can start surviving) stinks.
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May 13, 2019 16:22
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BG1 is very good at giving folks a low-level DnD experience, unshod of the things that make it a lot more tolerable (namely, no consequences for Tod the fighter dying because his brother, Todd, is also a fighter and will happily join up) in a tabletop setting. BG2 is the game that made me want to keep playing more CRPGs for the rest of my life.
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May 13, 2019 16:25
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I don't love BG1 at all, but it does have the best Infinity Engine dungeon in my opinion. Durlag's Tower is so very good, and while BioWare tried to hit it out of the park with Watcher's Keep and almost succeeded, I feel like it's not quite *there* in terms of quality.
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May 13, 2019 16:49
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The discussion around Dragon Age 2 reinforces the foolishness of faith in opposite values. It was first released to rapturous critical acclaim. But it wasn't very good. Some of the core ideas were awesome. A single city RPG is a great idea (Planescape:Torment also did this, for the most part). So is a story that takes place over a long period with time skips. I also really like the idea of a player character who starts from nothing and achieves status and power without being the Chosen One. But there were also a lot of problems. The combat system has been discussed repeatedly in previous posts. But I think we're seeing a backlash to the initial backlash that's distorting how good the story was. "Kind Hawke" was boring. "Funny Hawke" was an unfunny sociopath. Varric was a great character. Merill, Alistair (who had been a perfectly good character in Awakenings) and Fenris? Not so much. On top of that ham handed attempts to put in references to both 9/11 and the Holocaust. Also, Dragon Age 2 didn't start the dialog wheel, but it represented that Bioware was now going to do that across all its franchises. And the dialog wheel is I think a rather terrible RPG innovation. Not every RPG should have detailed dialog trees-particulary RPGs with voice acted, previously defined protaganists. But Witcher 3 handles its dialog system far better within those same constraints.
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May 13, 2019 17:07
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I loved BG1 but it's very "of the time" and I can't imagine someone who didn't play it then wanting to play it now. As said, being level 1 is really poo poo and there's sure a lot of gigantic empty spaces with nothing to do in them. The characters are really flat even for the time, I remember being so disappointed at how little they said. I think with BG2 I've never played another game with the possible exception of Witcher 3 that gave me so much to do in a licensed and deep world. I wish we had a CD Projekt Red game set in FR. Or maybe, I dunno, Ravnica. And one that had a party, although I do enjoy interacting with the characters from the Witcher novels I'd rather have original characters in a world I know. Taear fucked around with this message at 17:15 on May 13, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 17:10
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prometheusbound2 posted:The discussion around Dragon Age 2 reinforces the foolishness of faith in opposite values. It was first released to rapturous critical acclaim. No, it wasn't. The game had very tepid reviews for a BioWare game. Sure, there were some outlets like PC Gamer that loved it (that's where the Darker, Sexier, Etc. Etc. quote comes from) but *overall* it was considered only decent by the press at large.
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May 13, 2019 17:21
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When people bring up voiced dialogue in DA:I vs W3, I have to wonder how much the need to have four different voice options for the main character, including dialogue options for different backstories based on race, class, perks, etc. limited them compared to having... Geralt. There are tons of resources going into writing and recording those different options and any variation in responses from NPCs. Defining my own character vs. having a fixed protagonist is the biggest selling point to me in RPGs. I would honestly be fine with Bioware going back to unvoiced protagonists so we could have more branching options, but I doubt that'll happen.
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May 13, 2019 17:29
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:No, it wasn't. The game had very tepid reviews for a BioWare game. Sure, there were some outlets like PC Gamer that loved it (that's where the Darker, Sexier, Etc. Etc. quote comes from) but *overall* it was considered only decent by the press at large. It's metacritic is 79, so you're right. But I do remember feeling dashed expectations. Baldur's Gate 2 was so much better than Baldur's Gate 1 and Mass Effect 2 so much better than Mass Effect 1, I'd hoped for a similar improvement.
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May 13, 2019 17:37
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prometheusbound2 posted:It's metacritic is 79, so you're right. But I do remember feeling dashed expectations. Baldur's Gate 2 was so much better than Baldur's Gate 1 and Mass Effect 2 so much better than Mass Effect 1, I'd hoped for a similar improvement. Oh yeah, that was crushing. Asscreed 2 also set a precedent of sequels blowing their (already highly regarded) predecessors out of the water so I was really looking forward to DA2, and instead we got....that
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May 13, 2019 17:50
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Taear posted:I loved BG1 but it's very "of the time" and I can't imagine someone who didn't play it then wanting to play it now. BG1 can be played nowadays with the BG2 engine/mechanics thanks to the enhanced editions and such which makes it a lot more palatable.
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May 13, 2019 17:51
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Review score inflation for video games when DA2 came out was through the roof, even moreso than it is now. If you had a AAA project from a well-known developer then it was going to get all 9s and 10s short of being a total disaster, where it might get an 8.
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May 13, 2019 17:52
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prometheusbound2 posted:Alistair (who had been a perfectly good character in Awakenings) Oh, I hold no love for DA2, but Anders is right up there with the Arishok for me with things that the game did right. People complain a lot about how different he is from his original appearance and how much of a mopey loser he is, but that always made perfect sense to me. Anders in Awakening was a complete and total waste of a character: as you unintentionally said, he was basically just Mage Alistair 1.5 with some extra lolrandom humor scooped on top. Easily the worst character in the whole story outside of Oghren's non-stop fanservice. But one thing that was always clear about his character was that he was a selfish coward (in a perfectly reasonable sense) who looked at the Templar oppression and said "gently caress that noise". He never fought back against it, but instead wanted to run away to have his own life untouched by it, even though it meant abandoning everyone he knew to that continued abuse. And then, after being forced to accept some level of responsibility by becoming a Grey Warden... he fights alongside and befriends Justice. There's a bit of a skip here that would've been pretty important to actually show, since I never got the impression that they were particularly close. But whatever the case, he decides to let Justice possess him when the Grey Warden corpse that he's residing in can't hold him any longer. So you have Anders, who has spent a lifetime being mistreated by and witnessing all sorts of horrible behavior by Templars against mages that he deals with by keeping his head down and looking out for himself at any cost... and Justice, a supernatural spirit who exists solely by his own nature of needing to right every single one of those wrongs. Anders spent years suppressing the widespread abuse, and that all comes screaming to the surface when he merges with Justice, which fundamentally breaks both of them to the very core. Anders can no longer turn a blind eye to anything that he knows about what Templars do or just run away, and Justice suddenly finds himself facing one of the most pervasive injustices in the world that he is incapable of personally solving. He's a spirit driven by a need to make the guilty pay for their trespasses against some moral code, and someone essentially just told him the equivalent "hey, go fix racism" Generic American fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 13, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 18:42
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Can't wizards turn into legit demons if they gently caress up magic or I'm making that up?
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May 13, 2019 18:58
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Generic American posted:Oghren's non-stop fanservice. Is this fair? I know I detested Oghren and resented the pressure the game puts you under to cart him around the Deep Roads and then again in Awakenings - and I had the distinct impression this was a common reaction. I seem to remember the developers made defensive statements about how they liked Oghren, so there (more or less).
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May 13, 2019 19:00
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I actually did like Oghren at first in Origins, because it at least seemed like the game was presenting him as the drunken rear end in a top hat that he was and playing him up as the classic stereotype of a fantasy dwarf while making everyone in Orzammar absolutely despise him for it because he's a belligerent drunk. But then in Awakenings, it felt like he was written in reaction to people laughing about him online. Like the walking incarnation of that moment in Dragon Age 2 where Alistair turns directly to the camera during his little cameo and says "that's right, SWOOPING IS BAD". Generic American fucked around with this message at 19:33 on May 13, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 19:29
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Ginette Reno posted:BG1 can be played nowadays with the BG2 engine/mechanics thanks to the enhanced editions and such which makes it a lot more palatable. I'm going to say that the mechanics make absolutely no difference to me at all and I don't think having the BG2 engine in BG1 changes what I've said. The characters don't say enough and there's too many open spaces for a modern game. Like I say, it was great when I bought it new but that was during a time when cRPGs on the PC in Europe were pretty rare and it was just refreshing to play something so exciting and new. Then BG2 blew it out of the water.
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May 13, 2019 19:32
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I remember as a young teen dying all day in early BG1 until I made my own multiplayer game and made my character plus five others named Guard 1, 2, 3, etc. I can't imagine beating the beginning part without doing that now.
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May 13, 2019 19:40
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Glenn Quebec posted:I remember as a young teen dying all day in early BG1 until I made my own multiplayer game and made my character plus five others named Guard 1, 2, 3, etc. I can't imagine beating the beginning part without doing that now. I played through once with my character and having a load of difficulty until I found you could use wands while invisible and not become visible (which they patched out) Second time over I used my entire own party, and then carried them over to BG2. Even doing that I'd remove one so I could rescue Yeslik for some reason. Really the characters in BG1 are so flat and say so little that it didn't make me lose anything AND meant I didn't need to worry about them loving leaving because I hadn't done their too-hard personal quest yet. I wonder if so many people doing that is why they decided to make IWD?
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May 13, 2019 19:47
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I mean it’s not surprising that the thread for the dying game studio and the game series that hasn’t seen a release in years is full of people who think the bad games are good...but it still makes me lmao when the DA2 defenders log on
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May 13, 2019 19:48
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Apparently BG:EE has a story mode difficulty where you literally cannot die, but it sounds like even with that, it’s not worth the trouble.
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May 13, 2019 19:53
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Generic American posted:But then in Awakenings, it felt like he was written in reaction to people laughing about him online. Like the walking incarnation of that moment in Dragon Age 2 where Alistair turns directly to the camera during his little cameo and says "that's right, SWOOPING IS BAD". this is broadly the problem with modern BioWare writing -- "Swooping is BAD" is understood as the baseline for dialogue and not just an occasional joke
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May 13, 2019 19:57
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ilitarist posted:BioWare games thrive on companions and support cast and it doesn't even matter much what are they fighting again. 100% ME2 is my favorite and the best part is talking to your companions and doing their loyalty missions. Mordin's explanation for why they created the genophage is maybe the only time in a video game that a character actually changed my mind. Of course in ME3 he went "lol jk the genophage is bad" because that game is garbage from start to finish
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May 13, 2019 20:06
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Nefarious 2.0 posted:100% ME2 is my favorite and the best part is talking to your companions and doing their loyalty missions. Mordin's explanation for why they created the genophage is maybe the only time in a video game that a character actually changed my mind. Of course in ME3 he went "lol jk the genophage is bad" because that game is garbage from start to finish His explanation wasn't any different than what you got in the first game though?
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May 13, 2019 20:09
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ME2 could only be better if after all the loyalty missions and setup --- the actual main "suicide" mission was actually longer, better and harder.
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May 13, 2019 20:10
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Mordin changing his mind about the genophage and eventual sacrifice (at least for most players) was one of the best actual payoffs of the Mass Effect trilogy. "I made a mistake!" got me right in the feels, as the kids say.
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May 13, 2019 20:12
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Oh dear me posted:That explains why you like TW3 combat. Other games provide better for people who don't. I don't think there's really any mystery here. Which is perfectly fine, but when people say that TW3's combat is objectively awful I'm going to say that I disagree.
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May 13, 2019 20:14
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Taear posted:His explanation wasn't any different than what you got in the first game though? it was a complete 180 for no reason it was right in line with jack carrying a lifetime of trauma and hatred to suddenly becoming a kinnygarten teacher
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May 13, 2019 20:17
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Nefarious 2.0 posted:it was a complete 180 for no reason Mordin already begins to change his mind over the course of his own loyalty mission, that’s what the whole episode was about. Unless of course you felt like the genophage was a good idea, in which case you can get Mordin to agree with you in ME3 and sabotage the plans.
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May 13, 2019 20:19
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exquisite tea posted:Mordin already begins to change his mind over the course of his own loyalty mission, that’s what the whole episode was about. Unless of course you felt like the genophage was a good idea, in which case you can get Mordin to agree with you in ME3 and sabotage the plans. Yea this. I don't know what you could learn in the second game about it that'd change your mind, they lay out really obviously why it's bad/good. I guess it shows more actual death (as in it's a bit poo poo that they have so many stillborns instead of just being infertile) but still.
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May 13, 2019 20:23
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Glenn Quebec posted:ME2 could only be better if after all the loyalty missions and setup --- the actual main "suicide" mission was actually longer, better and harder. Also if they completely removed the illusive man.
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May 13, 2019 20:25
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I'm guessing you didn't actually try to sabotage the plans in 3. he pretty much says "over my dead body" and you have to either let him go through with it or kill him
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May 13, 2019 20:26
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He’ll agree to sabotage the plans but there are specific conditions for it. Wrex can’t be alive for one.
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May 13, 2019 20:28
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