Monte Carlo

The music industry managed to adapt and survive in the digital age, but the gaming industry (allegedly hi-tech) is still flailing around like a rubber Godzilla in a late 60's Japanese disaster movie. Piracy is an issue, sure, but the happy confluence between DRM and increased revenue harvesting hardly seems coincidental.

It's pointless arguing about balance with Vol. Because DA does have a definite balance problem with mages... it's all pro and no cons. That you can make a pure melee mage adds insult to injury, ditto consequence free Lyrium-chugging. Balance demands that for these benefits you pay a couple of hindrances. In D&D it's glass cannon syndrome with mages --- great magic but mucho fragility. In Company of Heroes the glass cannon is the Sherman Firefly tank. It has the best Allied AT gun in the game. You hear the gun going off as a German player and you crap yourself because two or three of them can make scrap metal of your tanks... but they are fragile. Average AT infantry can eat them for breakfast. You have to protect them with infantry and other armour, spot for them and think. In other words, they are a balanced unit to be used judiciously. DA abandons this completely with the mage class, which is why I only have one in my party. Two and it becomes a screen-saver, just like CoH would with up-armoured Sherman Fireflies. Cheers MC

The irony is that Krezack is being patronizing by... not trying to be patronizing. 'Normal People' like a whole combination of things. One minute they are playing Guitar Hero on the Wii at 3AM with their friends then the next day they are playing Alpha Centauri III and micro-ing their space empire. Not in Krezzie's world, where you are either the sort of person whose brain is taxed by Halo 2 or a backwoodsman who only plays American Civil War hex-based wargames only six people bought. :: sigh ::

I defer to your knowledge, mighty one.

The way I feel about DRM I almost want big-budget gaming to die on the PC. A small cottage industry making a few games for people without attention deficit disorder free of DRM, DLC, invasive malware to track how you play... Yeah! Year Zero gaming. Rogue-likes! Emulators! The gaming equivalent of heading to the hills with a hunting rifle and a box of tinned food.

Mod Request: Ostagar-Be-Gone. Wow I'm starting a new game and it feels pretty hard work. Just like Dungeon Be Gone for BG2 I'd like a mod that gives me all the loot and XP I'd have gotten just after the ogre battle and waking up in Flemeth's hut.

Just read the Awakenings FAQ --- the 'Dead Warden' thing is OK by me (they simply say if you want to suspend disbelief and play that character then that's your call and they ain't gonna stop you) but both NPCs already leave me cold. And Oghren. Oghren? Honestly, he's the major NPC. I shake my head, he's probably the worst DA NPC. And there's no romances A mixed bag, but lots of new skills and talents and powaz too.

No I don't think the term RPG is meaningless, it's just that the genre has become extremely broad. Within that there remain identifiable elements that still make it what it is. After all, we all know what we mean when we say 'Family Saloon Car' right? But it might have fuel injection, or be a quasi-SUV or a four-wheel drive or a fabulous new convertible roof... But it's still a car big enough to get two kids, a dog and a weeks shopping into and not break the bank when you fill it with petrol... that's the meat and potatoes. Character, story and progression are the same thing for the RPG.

^ He's right. 90% of my hundreds of playthroughs have been a leisurely dungeon crawl around Amn followed by a Spellhold / Underdark / Elven City / Hell derby galloped at tremendous speed. BG2 is appallingly designed --- it's cool by accident. I like it. But it is appallingly designed. It's like a twinkie --- only a madman would design one but they are strangely more-ish. Although I only do Watcher's Keep after ToB starts. Cheers MC

LOL they've been having this discussion in the pen & paper RPG world since the Year Dot. After rules-heavy systems heavily influenced by hex-based wargames (Chainmail, OD&D to Chivalry & Sorcery... Bushido FFS) came games like FUDGE which were simple story-telling systems with very loose mechanics. Trading card games came out of RPGs. Computer games came out of RPGs... so I'd say look at the source material. A role-playing game is one where you take on the role of a single character within a story controlled / referee'd by a third party (be it a games master or a computer). Everything else is gravy. Doom could be considered a RPG if you want to apply that test. 'RPG' lite (Deus Ex, ME etc) came to mean that an action game took on story elements and character progression beyond that of the shooter genre... we all know the story and the arguments. Personally, I'm a grognard, a backwoodsman and a snob. A RPG needs stats, NPCs, inventory, tactical combat, loot, a compelling story and rust monsters and / or half tracks. Everything else is just a shooter or a dumbass MMO. Cheers MC

Two things --- (a) BG2. I'm actually indifferent about the backstory, I think DA is far superior. I know it's intangible and not even defensible (I don't even think it need be either), but I just find BG2 more fun. I know, go figure. Maybe it's a D&D thing, that it doesn't take itself seriously, that it's hokey and all the rest of it. It's the apogee of hammy H&S, Monty Haul, Gygaxian fun on the PC as a gaming platform. It's flaws make it more enjoyable for me, as much as DA's just make that fingernails-down-a-blackboard sound in the back of my head. This doesn't change the fact that I enjoyed 75% of DA, (and of that I loved 25% of it) and hated 25% of it. The lack of an urge to replay it is for me telling... and that's never been a problem for me even with mediocre CRPGs. (b) Now you've got my wargamer head on by making perfectly valid points about how you stymie the advance of an amorphous, leaderless horde living off the land with no other objective than destruction. Hmmm. Look at the battle of Ostagar clip. The Darkspawn use skirmishers, archers and ogres as arty support with boulders. They rely on emmissaries as their officers. They do have a rudimentary organisation. I don't know if they need food or water (I presume so) but it is a big army. Flood fields to slow them down, salt the earth to spoil food, reinforce key points and delay them, harass them with skirmishers --- the Crusader armies of the 12th Century were slow-moving and were constantly hampered by Saladin's light cavalry and mounted archers. Now, I know that the Darkspawn really are a plot device, a trope, a meme. They aren't meant to be anything else than a screensaver villain lurking in the wings to give you a reason to plunder all the key hubs. But wouldn't it be nice if they at least gave a nod to their key bad guy, the Horde that is allegedly driving the whole game onwards? Cheers MC

^ I don't know if we are speaking about different things here. What I'm getting at is that there are key points in the game that apply to everybody (i.e. Ostagar / Landsmeet). As Tigranes says, inbetween you complete the main quest hubs and apart from the invasion of Lothering (a la the 'coffee stain' on the map and the occasional overland encounter) there isn't much to suggest that there is A DESPERATE WAR WITH THE FORCES OF UTTER RAMPAGING EVIL going on. What I would have liked is two or three episodes, which don't all have to be hack'n'slash, to show you slowing the advance. Maybe you need to persuade someone to do something, like rally their forces and block a route of advance. Leliana might have to flutter her eyelids to achieve that one. Yes, in one episode you might have to take action --- kill the vanguard of Emissiaries to blunt an advance, maybe Sten needs to show you how his unit does things. Maybe you need one of the existing allies to do something pre-emptive, maybe the Dalish need to be mobilized to engage in early guerilla war to draw the Darkspawn into the woods.... I'm sure you see what I mean. Any one of these objectives is triggered by achieving any number of hub quests. OK, it's a resource thing, so move the Chanter's Board or one of the Fedex-heavy stuff like Blackstone irregulars. Result? Increased immersion. Fun. Feeling involved. Impactive gameplay. Cheers MC

^ Yes, that's the sort of thing I was imagining. It would have been pretty easy to blend them in with the origins as well --- another criticism of the game. Edit --- the Origins and the NPCs. I've got an Orlesian spy, a professional soldier, a shape-changing witch and a commando-assassin with a luxury footwear fetish in my group. Funnily, I can't use them for strategic advantage against the Blight. Which is a shame.

Actually, one of the interesting things DA tried to do was make your character deal with a central problem, i.e. The Blight, in the way you wanted. The Blight is like the Nazis, they want to take over and destroy everything and negotiation is impossible. The war is one of national survival: good, bad and ugly people simply can't ignore it. You can make the end justify the means or you can try to win with honour. Or, like most of us, you do a bit of both depending on the circumstances or what you think you can get away with at the time. And, of course, with the people you are relying on to get the job done --- what do they think? Duncan is an interesting mentor. He's an extremist. A Kamikaze. That dip-sh*t Alistair worships him as some sort of paragon of virtue is revealing. Of course Duncan swindles the desperate into becoming Grey Wardens --- who else would join? It's a foreign legion of the desperate. I'm liking all that. The game doesn't pan out as dark or interesting as the premise but that's another subject. However, this strength is also a structural weakness. The Darkspawn army moves mysteriously slowly. The sense of urgency in DA that should be there isn't. Conversely, a CRPG shouldn't be time trial. Tough one to manage, and I think DA fails. Not an epic FAIL, but I began to feel the Blight was just a plot device, not anchored in the structure of the game as it should have been. I'd have put a Blight-themed challenge in at certain key moments to explain how you were slowing their advance (destroy that bridge, assassinate that general, disrput those supplies) but that's probably the wargamer in me speaking. Nonetheless, if you didn't like Duncan (I was amibvalent) then that's tough. You joined the Wardens out of desperation, your bed was made for you and now you have to lie in it. Funnily, it's a bit like PS:T in that the die is cast for your character. Like I say, bits of DA irritate me greatly --- Elements where greatness beckons just didn't make it, and I simply cannot warm to most Bioware NPCs nowadays, they aren't written for me. So I take the least annoying ones. It's still a great achievement but, and I say this not of nostalgia but because I played both games in the last month --- it ain't no BG2. Cheers MC

^ Nope, no brothel-crawling for this callsign. Well, maybe once or twice.

Hmmm, I know revenants aren't exactly original, but the Dragon Age take on them --- undead uber-tanks with genuinely powerful and original attacks / tactics --- made them, for me, one of the highlight enemies of the game.

Grom, remember all the groovy magic items for serious BG2 combat micro-ing? This sword gives this bonus and I can D/W it with this axe against this monster to provide that effect... and so on. Armour, shields, potions, rings, amulets... the entire spam of Gygaxian magic there for you to find. The magic items in DA are in the foothills of such old-skool greatness.

And I was sure that they were going to include rust monsters. And they didn't, another dream dashed on the sharp, merciless shores of the Bioware design dept.

Although my view on this project is an enormous bucketload of Meh, I'm still pleased that Obz got the gig. It's a tough economic climate and they're in work. So what Grom said +1.

^ Please Starwars, teach someone else's grandmother to suck eggs. I'm more than aware of the challenges of modding. Which proves my point --- look at the DA project list. Work out a 75% attrition rate (generous) of announced projects and find me one or two that look genuinely interesting. Great mods are usually announced. Very few for DA are. I'm sure Adam Miller et. al will come up with something eventually. Cheers MC

Vol, you argument is bunk. At least you are consistent. With DA Bio released the toolset in it's entirety. They courted some of the leading lights in the NWN modding scene. With BG2 the source code was never released. Modders were never encouraged (with the laudable exception of Dave Gaider, who released his own extremely good BG2 mod to finish off what he wanted to see in ToB). It's a perfectly valid comparison. BG2 modding, incredibly, is still going on. DA, a very hot title, has a strange collection of dodgy romance stuff and new ways to make your character's hair mauve. Cheers MC

I'm not so sure, Grom. Why? Classes. DA has three classes. OK, within those there is a bit of sub-specialisation. But, when all's said and done the fighter and rogue are fairly indivisible (the melee rogue is just a light-fighter variant of the warrior class) and the mage can take some interesting paths, including the twinky battle caster option. Compare and contrast to BG2's take on the 2E AD&D system and kits. Love 'em or hate 'em (and I generally hate 'em in a P&P context) the multi-class and dual-class combos in BG2 add a hell of a lot of options. Grind? Hell yeah. Different ways to manage the grind? Hell yeah. From the ridiculous Kensai mage to the bizarro bard kits there were dozens of ways to spam your way through the hordes, with a more diverse NPC roster (from a class / ability POV). I even played a 'unpopular NPC' gimped game with the dudes a lot of people didn't bother with (the shapechanger, Duran Duran haircut Tiefling, halfling paladin chick etc), with the main NPC as a CE half-orc (wait for it) Cleric / Thief. Again, I'm not dissing DA --- I loved all the fighting. It's just that (as Ramza points out) BG2 manages to give you the feeling of scale, of different possibilities beyond the 'click on monster' nonsense Vol describes. And this is before I factor in the awesome modding around BG2 which, strangely, still hasn't happened for DA yet. And the IE is probably tougher to mod. Go figure. Cheers MC

So, after five pages of intriguing BG2 / DA comparisons what we have decided is that I have to wait until Dragon Age 4 --- Awakening of the Origins of MOAR ROMANCE to get the superlative RPG experience. xD This doesn't wash after a SIX year development cycle. Nazi Germany was defeated in five years for chrissakes. I was interested in the "Community Likes it then Hates it" point. I like Dragon Age, and I was a hater during the development cycle. Check out my happy crow-eating posts in my personal reviews. But the flaws do resonate more on each playthrough. I still like it, but it ain't no BG2. OK it wasn't meant to be but for all the obvious reasons comparison is inevitable. One last point - I saw the apocryphal screenie of Firkraag being killed by a monk using quivering palm but could never do it.

I'm not crying, hey I don't know what Wheel of Time is except from this thread. Now I know it's a series of uber-spammed fantasy books that some people like and some people don't. As for CRPGs, I wouldn't touch ME2 as far as I could throw it. It appears to be the antithesis of everything I look for in a game. Most people here have other stuff they're into gaming-wise, like Hurlie's strange stat-based sports sims or my nerdy panzer-addiction. I'm not jonesing for any game in particular to be honest. I need a reason to be excited about this, haven't really seen one yet. Cheers MC

^ Lyr, shouldn't that be wheel-based? I agree with Slowtrain.