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Kaysette posted:despite having different issues, thats one thing i liked about the romance stuff in the witcher 3 (with yennefer at least). she's presented with this whole history there and a deep relationship you kind of merge into. you're not just loving your subordinates after a half dozen missions. i guess the power dynamic thing in the ME games creeps me out... W3 is a bit weird in that it encourages you to take the sex options. I never finished a second play-through, but I can tell you that you can flat out refuse to bang Keira, and she'll just put a sleep spell on you.
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Feb 11, 2020 18:45
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Chomp8645 posted:It seems to just be an enduring quality of Bioware/the industry that romance plots in RPGs are awkward. A lot of fantasy/scifi fiction has major problems with romance plots in general. Especially books. Tetrabor posted:I feel like competent fantasy writers do not exist because every book/show/movie in the past decade inevitably shits on itself with a half-baked ending. The witcher but it only sneaks in on a technicality (last book released 2013) Iron Crowned posted:W3 is a bit weird in that it encourages you to take the sex options. I never finished a second play-through, but I can tell you that you can flat out refuse to bang Keira, and she'll just put a sleep spell on you. She puts a sleep spell on you if you bang too shes just more subtle about it.
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Feb 11, 2020 18:48
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e: fbIron Crowned posted:you can flat out refuse to bang Keira, and she'll just put a sleep spell on you. she actually does that regardless of what you choose because she's doing other shifty poo poo behind your back
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Feb 11, 2020 18:49
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I just don't have the same amount of time that I used to for video game playing anymore, so it's been a few years since I played W3 
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Feb 11, 2020 18:58
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Yen is the only option you can kind of stumble into but that still requires an explicit "renewal of vows" so to speak. The narrative growth since Witcher 1 is really impressive.
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Feb 11, 2020 18:59
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The Witcher is the only good romance in games because the idea of a buff, rugged, handsome dude who can’t get you pregnant or sick getting mad play makes a ton of sense to me.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:09
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CharlestonJew posted:I'll be honest, I don't really believe that considering the well-documented issues Frostbite has when it's used for making any non-fps game. I believe it was a "choice" in that they were given a choice between either using Frostbite or having their budget slashed in half or some poo poo. I'm pretty sure anyone involved would be fired if they actually told the truth Don't worry, Dragon Age 4 and the rebooted Anthem will once again showcase how Bioware is incompetent. They were given 8 years and farted out this bullshit, but let's blame an engine instead of thinking for a single second that the team at Bioware is garbage.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:14
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Legs Benedict posted:maybe the biggest problem with romance plots in modern games is that there is very rarely an adequate scale of time represented in game, so it feels like you go from In many films a romantic relationship can play out from strangers to lovers in less than two hours, so it's not that they need a lot of time with the player. But the actual interactions that are contained in the "romance" pieces of Bioware games are, in isolation, only a handful of minutes--if we were to put that in cinematic terms, those things in isolation would feel like a b-plot that should be cut, or a glossed over set-up for something else. What's supposed to fill the gap is you bringing that character along and having lots of other interactions so you can "feel" like things are progressing organically by having more opportunities to interact with the character. Even if it's not actually organic like in a proper movie or book where it grows in bits and pieces, it can "feel" like it if that character is around enough and ... well let's be honest, there's lots of room for projection (a big reason Bioware games have (had?) a huge fanfic-y following). Sometimes this works pretty well--I think Dorian's romance in DA:I was pretty good because it has enough segments and conversations to draw you in, while also taking place over what must be months or possibly years of working together; also you're not actually his boss or anything, and he will gladly leave at any time because he's here to help, not serve. Other times, though, you can leave someone on the ship 90% of the time and still get the romance if you do the one story quest and say the right lines, which probably takes ten minutes out of the multiple hours you'd spend on a playthrough, and the time scale is so nebulous as to be meaningless. As much as people complain about Bioware, the way everyone falls for the Sole Survivor over the course of no more than three dialogue checks in Fallout 4 is worse. Agreed that Yennefer's romance in Witcher 3 was very well done. I have a friend who is Team Triss all the way, but I have never bothered because Yennefer feels like the proper partner for Geralt to have.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:04
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I always thought W3's choice between Yen and Triss was interesting because in the first two Witcher games, Triss is very clearly your Main Love Interest and Yen is just not in it (presumed dead, maybe?) I think when Geralt has a bit of amnesia in W1 he's even like "I kind of remember... being in love with a beautiful sorceress. That's you I guess?" and Triss going "Yes. Yes that was totally me." The end effect is choosing between the character you spent most time with if you played any other Witcher game, or the character Geralt spends the most time with if you consumed any other Witcher media. It's an interesting way to force a choice between who you, the player spent more time with and who Geralt, the character spent the most time with.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:24
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Mechanically, Andromeda was pretty drat solid. The way it handled skills was also good and there were a lot of them. Decent variety in weapons too. It's just the encounter design, level design, writing and quests that were mediocre. Not truly bad, just very mediocre. I still say people exaggerate how bad it was. If it weren't a Mass Effect game, I doubt it'd get as much heat
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Feb 11, 2020 20:43
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precision posted:Mechanically, Andromeda was pretty drat solid. The way it handled skills was also good and there were a lot of them. Decent variety in weapons too. this is unquantifiable of course but to me it felt like the game had no soul like Dragon Age 2 was a bad game -- probably worse than Andromeda -- but the game felt like it had far more weight than Andromeda did. The developers blew it pretty bad in DA2 but it felt like they were at least trying to accomplish something -- namely, you and your family/friends surviving in a city in turmoil Andromeda is a game where you go down to a First Contact situation and everyone immediately speaks English and there's not even a "oh wow they have translators too, let me just interface with them through space magic and DONE" moment
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Feb 11, 2020 20:49
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a whole new galaxy but it's the same poo poo as the last three games and in many ways worse
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Feb 11, 2020 20:50
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Kaysette posted:a whole new galaxy but it's the same poo poo as the last three games and in many ways worse a whole new galaxy with fewer aliens in it because the
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Feb 11, 2020 20:51
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Thank GOD they’re all still bipeds who speak English!
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Feb 11, 2020 20:52
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Bust Rodd posted:Thank GOD they’re all still bipeds who speak English! It's such a shame because it would be pretty cool to have a game about first contact where you have to attempt to navigate alien cultures and languages as a human.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:55
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Yes. If the game wasn’t a Mass Effect game it could have been an “well, C+ good try, come back next time and you’ll get it done” But it was a Mass Effect game and that’s the reason why it’s so drat bad. They had 3 other games to draw inspiration, story, and mechanics from and they took nothing from it. One of the things I loved about Mass Effect games is that even if you were a completionist and did every side scenario, you’d still end up with maybe a 30-40 hour game. They were tightly developed and very focused. So what does Andromeda need to be? OPEN WORLD! PEOPLE LOVE OPEN WORLD SHOE HORN THAT poo poo IN. Oh wait, that was done in the first game and that was the part that pretty much everybody hated about it. Especially the Mako, good thing we learned from that mistake? right? So a open world design, with tons and tons of side quests to uncover neat lore, seems like a good idea in theory but it just bloated the game because none of that poo poo mattered and it turns a 10 hour game into a 70 hour game. That’s how long it took me to beat Andromeda my first time, 70 hours. What the hell. Andromeda sucks. Andromeda is a complete garbage game that only gets goodwill because it’s combat is “not bad” it’s a poo poo game, and I love Mass Effect 3. It’s my favourite one. So if somebody likes what’s considered the worst Mass Effect of the main trilogy, hates the new one. You know you screwed up, badly.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:57
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Bust Rodd posted:Thank GOD they’re all still bipeds who speak English! Gotta have them be playable in the multiplayer mode!
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Feb 11, 2020 20:58
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What's the like, really abridged plot of Andromeda? I ain't never gonna play that poo poo at this point anyway. From the tiny bits and pieces I've seen I'm guessing it's something like "humans find new friendly aliens, help them defeat evil aliens that want to kill everyone, discover ancient secrets along the way" but I dunno.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:02
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The Black Stones posted:One of the things I loved about Mass Effect games is that even if you were a completionist and did every side scenario, you’d still end up with maybe a 30-40 hour game. They were tightly developed and very focused. So what does Andromeda need to be? OPEN WORLD! PEOPLE LOVE OPEN WORLD SHOE HORN THAT poo poo IN. Oh wait, that was done in the first game and that was the part that pretty much everybody hated about it. Especially the Mako, good thing we learned from that mistake? right? you think they'd have learned that people don't want a single player mmo after da:i but no
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Feb 11, 2020 21:03
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Chomp8645 posted:What's the like, really abridged plot of Andromeda? I ain't never gonna play that poo poo at this point anyway. That's almost exactly right. There's good aliens, evil aliens that turn good aliens into evil aliens, and ancient ruins you use to defeat the evil aliens. gently caress you I'm not spoilering the evil alien corruption thing. It was a dumb af twist.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:15
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If andromeda hadn't been a mass effect game it would have sold even worse and nobody would have ever given a poo poo about it
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Feb 11, 2020 21:32
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Chomp8645 posted:What's the like, really abridged plot of Andromeda? I ain't never gonna play that poo poo at this point anyway. Basically: an evil bad guy named the Archon - the leader of the kett, a strogg-like race that "exalts" other races into new kett - is running around digging through the ruins of the Remnant - a bunch of precursor aliens/robots (?) - to try and find the secret of how to operate Meridian, a big, dumb, Remnant Macguffin that would allow him to control all of the terraforming machines on the various planets and thus control the whole sector. You engage in a bog standard Bioware hunt for the location of - and the means to control - Meridian, meet the Archon there, and defeat him. That's it.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:32
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Moola posted:If andromeda hadn't been a mass effect game it would have sold even worse and nobody would have ever given a poo poo about it I dunno, if we're talking about a world where BioWare stops making Mass Effects after 3 there's probably a market for people who want something LIKE mass effect so yeah it probably would have sold worse but as someone mentioned above it'd be a C+ game that people might forgive and look forward to its better sequel
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Feb 11, 2020 21:48
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I was a big fan of the mods you could put on guns to make them worse than the originals
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Feb 11, 2020 21:57
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moist turtleneck posted:I was a big fan of the mods you could put on guns to make them worse than the originals "oh cool this mod makes my bullets bounce around!!!!*" *and also makes them drop after 10 feet lol oops
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Feb 11, 2020 22:00
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Over the past decade or so the "blame pie" for bad AAA video games has constantly shifted - blame the programmers, blame the designer, blame QA, blame management - hell, blame the players! But no matter how many times it's shifted, there remains one constant: it's almost always centered around a BioWare game
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Feb 11, 2020 22:00
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Well back then game companies were smaller and the programmers were also the managers and designers. Now that the jobs have become more specialized and the companies have grown, the people making the games and designing the fun parts are distinctly separate from the finance managers and marketing.
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Feb 11, 2020 22:10
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Bust Rodd posted:Sex plots in BioWare games have always been really hosed up and super creepy and gross and just incredibly inappropriate and not even remotely close to anything like what a real relationship could even possibly begin to seem like and just made me feel like everyone involved was a hopeless incel virgin and it blows my mind that they made it out of the Dev cycle. The Jack plot from ME2 is basically taking advantage of an abused crazy person and makes me wanna puke. Bioware was good at writing characters, but it was really clumsy and awkward at trying to slot in romances. I'm sure there's more organic ways to do put dating sim elements into games, god knows it's a whole genre over in Japan, but there's very little of it over in the west. I'm pretty sure there's some people for whom the dating was one of their favorite parts of the game, but for me it was always awkward and none of the romances really felt good to me. They were all written to be interesting characters first and then possible romantic interests second, which is a double-edged sword. Pattonesque posted:Reminder that at the beginning of the decade BioWare was sitting on a franchise described as the next Star Wars and had a promising and popular fantasy series that was just starting out and now EA is a hell of a drug. They've done far worse to other studios, up to straight-up murdering popular studios and franchises, but what always stands out the most to me is Popcap, and how they went from putting out this whole diverse array of games that captured so much attention to making just the Plants Vs. Zombies franchise, letting the explosion of mobile games totally pass them by. They even went and made multiple AAA shooter games, which is exactly what Yahtzee was joking about in his video on Peggle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOp4vcb6RA&t=143s (it's very dated though). I wonder what the rules are for how soon after selling your business can you just quit, start a new company, and poach all your old employees.
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Feb 11, 2020 23:51
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Bioware is good at personal stories that take place on a small scale, ME2 was good and DA2 could have been good if it was given more time to bake. Any time Bioware attempts to make an Open-World, grand-scale concept, they poo poo all over it with one of the worst game engines in history. Sarcastic Hawke for life.
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Feb 12, 2020 00:52
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Hey, DA:I was good though I could concede that some of the open-world stuff were the worst aspects of the game. Coincidentally though it had a bunch of not-poo poo romance options. Iirc all of them were pretty good except for Sera and her whole awful thing. If you go by the article about Anthem though they really had to work to turn it around in the last stretch of production.
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Feb 12, 2020 10:54
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I couldn't enjoy Dragon Age. Seemed super slow and the animations were janky as gently caress
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Feb 12, 2020 11:38
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dogstile posted:I couldn't enjoy Dragon Age. Seemed super slow and the animations were janky as gently caress I assume based on the complaint you're talking about the first one, Origins? A lot of people said that, but it never really bothered me. Meh. That feedback was however, directly responsible for the anime-like moves in DA2, with greatswords being flicked around at lightning speed.
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Feb 12, 2020 16:08
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Jade Empire was real good. Fun combat, entirely new and interesting world, they even commissioned a linguist to make a fictional language for them because I guess they were worried about chinese speakers recognizing repeated dialogue clips. No sequels or anything.
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Feb 12, 2020 19:15
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SlothfulCobra posted:Jade Empire was real good. Fun combat, entirely new and interesting world, they even commissioned a linguist to make a fictional language for them because I guess they were worried about chinese speakers recognizing repeated dialogue clips. No sequels or anything. I remember Jade Empire being insanely hard which is a twist for a BioWare game like even some of the tutorial characters would gently caress you up
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Feb 12, 2020 19:44
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CharlestonJew posted:probably because those same suits made them use Frostbite and then neglected to check on how things were going until they were like a few months from release Lmao they didn't tho -- bioware opted to use it. By choice.
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Feb 12, 2020 21:03
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For what it's worth, in andromeda, the enemies absolutely do not speak english at all in the beginning. The first couple missions/areas has them speaking a completely alien language. Over the course of the early game they eventually start being understandable, assuming because the translators have finally figured it out, but I forget if it's a "suddenly the alien technology/enemy dialogue is in english now" sort of deal, or they worked their way up to that. Once you're able to understand them, you can actually go back to earlier parts of the game and listen to recordings and stuff that will then have properly translated audio, including a bunch of recordings of them interrogating humans. The game even makes a point in your first encounter with them that you don't know what they're shouting while they're pointing their weapons at an injured comrade, so if you shoot first, someone makes a comment like "well, hope we didn't screw up first contact" or something like that. Or you can just wait for them to murder him, but either way, no one knows what's going on. Oh yeah, though, I think when you first meet the good aliens there is at least one of them that seems to have little to no problem talking with you I think for some reason or another. I actually don't remember now. Andromeda wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either. I felt it absolutely suffered from the glut of side poo poo to do that inquisition had in "go here, collect these things, do that" instead of letting you get straight to the point. In a way it was more like ME1 than 2 and 3, but I liked 2 and 3 better so, oh well. I think by the end of andromeda, I started getting a little bored and I actually forgot about it for a few months before figuring I may as well finish it and get it out of the way. Similarly I think I got about halfway through inquisition before I just got burned out on the all the side content in an effort to "clear" every area, and never finished it.
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Feb 13, 2020 09:03
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Andromeda was terrible actually
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Feb 13, 2020 10:05
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Andromeda would have been a lot better without the busywork, but then it’d still just be on par with stuff like Outwr Worlds, ie completely mediocre
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Feb 13, 2020 10:26
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Moola posted:Andromeda was terrible actually
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Feb 13, 2020 13:24
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Andromeda woulda been fine in a vacuum but it was an awful Mass Effect video game
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Feb 13, 2020 13:45
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