anubite

Enemy variety has no effect on complexity if you have no choices to even make. I would agree the types of enemies you fight effects complexity, but only in a 'meta-gaming' sense - it's not like you know who you're going to fight when you first play the game.

It's a little rough around the edges, the levels are also a bit cramped looking in terms of nagivation? Just a bit railroady. Hard to say, but the second demo does look good despite all that.

Volourn, I know you're a troll half the time, and yes, I know, sub 20 fighters in BG series have few active abilities, but that doesn't change the potential complexity. Let's compare BG2 DAO and DA2, just on the PC level: Human Elf Helf Gnome Halfing Dwarf HOrc Fighter Ranger Paladin Barbarian Cleric Druid Mage Sorcerer Thief Bard Monk 3 kits per class on avg 3 moralities at least (some classes can have any one of the 9 alignments, but a lot of classes are restricted) races * classes * kits 7 * 11 * 3 * 3= 693 If you're a mage, you have your starting spells, which add complexity, but not all that much, so we'll just ignore it. But every single one of those starting character choices matters. Your starting alignment effects your Bhaal spells and other ****, class kits are influential, as is your race and class. I'm not even going to add in complexity by counting the number of ways you can arrange your starting attributes. DAO: Race: 3 Class: 3 Origin: 5* *Not really five, every race->class choice limits you to as few as one origins (mages have one origin, most other have between 2 to 3). If I'm generous, I'll say 3 chocies for every class combination 3*3*3 = 27 DA2 starting complexity? 3 So, again, let's compare: 693 27 3 Numbers don't lie. Now, you might be tempted to say, "But waait a minute! Warriors and rogues have active/spam abilities in DAO/DA2, and what about leveling up in general? Those games might be more complex after level 1!" If you really don't believe me, I can do the combinatorics to show BG2 > DA:O > DA2 in terms of end-game character complexity. I haven't done the math, but I think BG is also > DA:O and DA2 in terms of end-game complexity. If we talk strictly in terms of possible combinations, builds, etc BG/BG2 are more complex in character creation and advancement and offer strictly more options for players. Many of these options aren't illusory (while I would go so far as to say many of DA2's talent trees offer illusory choices or offer zero impact at level up, one example that comes to mind is Varric's talent tree, where you have a choice between 3 persistent abilities that you cannot have all active at once, yet you must purchase all of them to get the final talent - two of those points at least are worthless because there's never any reason to change persistent effects, and hell, if the difference between DA2 and BG2 passivity is fighters have no abilities and every class in DA2 has 10 persistent effects that are passive abilites you merely flip on or off at a whim, then they have not fixed the passivity issue). It's also worth noting that BG/BG2 have more potential party make-ups than DA/DA2. So even at the party level, BG/BG2 is significantly more complex.

I disagree. I don't necessarily want to save the world. Firstly, many players want to be anti-heroes - note all the negative choices in games like Fallout or BG. Secondly, "epic" hardly describes some of the stuff you do in Fallout or even VTMB. Though, maybe it's easy to mistake it as that, with all the boss battles you have n' stuff. It's what I was trying to explain before - stories for games exist to give context to gameplay. Stories haven't yet been perfected to do this. What's fun about Fallout is killing doods (or managing not to kill them), exploring the wasteland, and making moral/story choices. The more of those you have, the better the game it is. We might want catharsis/climax at some point or another, but video games aren't like traditional story telling mediums. A good recent example of this is TLOU - it tells a serious story, but a lot of the videogameisms make you scratch your head at it, if you care to think for a moment or two (or be unjustly critical of certain situations involving the AI or game mechanics). If a story doesn't mesh with a game, well... Players want to do **** in a game. Gone Home is an example of a recent game where it tells a simple story but has no gameplay because what gameplay could there possibly be besides dumb Myst-like puzzles?

Hm. DA2 is better than ME3? That's a tough call. On one hand, ME3's gameplay has no redeeming factors for me - it's like any gun-game of the last 4 or so years. It has barely any polish (or at least, for the parts of it that I can remember) and there's way too much "**** is spawning from the sky". DA2 has that too, of course. DA2's story is also weaker for me - well, if we ignore the Arishok, DA2's story is strictly weaker - there's no reason at all for Meridith and Orsino to attack you at the end. One or the other, at best, but never both- Wait. I better stop. I think DA2 and ME3 have a lot in common, so saying one is worser than the other is silly, as you'll be trying to apologize some problems for one that the other has that you simply cannot see. There are elements in DA2 that are better - like the Arishok. I can't think of a ME3 antagonist that is as well-done. TIM was kind of butchered to death in ME2, let alone in ME3. And cyborg ninja? Don't get me started. At least BioWare didn't invent anything new in DA2 that was as bad as that. And I guess I can't be upset about DA2's plot pacing, I mean ME3 starts after a whole bunch of DLC and comic content that I didn't play or read. Didn't appreciate that. But ME3 gets points for actually not copypastaing the entire game, though there are some copypasta areas - which is excusable I think since it's not in excess. DA2's talent system is more complex and interesting, but that's only faint praise from me - it's still less complex than DA:O which is significantly less complex than Baldur's Gate.

Again, there's nothing wrong with 'save the world' stories. It is tiring after a while - but let's face it, video games are about action. They're about constant action that generally has to ramp up higher and higher. Even if you don't give your player "super powers" they're going to be doing "super ****" - I mean, it's hard to create a game where you only kill/incapacitate one or two dozen people in its entirety. What are players supposed to be doing in between all that? Stealth? Exploration? Crafting? I love those things, but they're hard to market, or at least, the bigwigs believe that. Good luck writing a down-to-earth story where your protagonist is entering into combat against swaths of enemies in every scene. Look at TLOU - isn't it jarring how many people Joel kills? Does it hurt the realism ND was going for? The same can be said of Max Payne 3 and other cinematic games.

Nihilus is lacking, but he's not the main antagonist. He's like the... red herring. The game isn't even close to over when you kill him.

Darth Nihilus is hardly crud, Star Wars is supposed to be about saving the world. I mean, you could do some kind of smaller story in the universe, but... Star Wars isn't a setting for minor dramas or character growths. It's about death stars, light sabers, and big, cumbersome philosophical statements. So, Nihilus is perfectly fine for the game he resides in. If you're looking for Ayn Rand or something, Planescape or traditional D&D is a better crpg setting, though even there, you're sort of asking for a save-the-world kind of story. If you want something smaller or petty, the universe is probably going to be more grounded in the modern or mundane. The way you're arguing, you'd expect us to turn the Superman series into grimdark Batman - and then assert that we've fixed it or something. I've seen people argue this and it's silly. There's nothing wrong with "an ancient evil awakens" - it is tiring after a while and I could appreciate a smaller-in-scope story in an RPG, but Dragon Age isn't suited for that. That's a whole new IP.

I'm not sure I can agree with this. But then again, I didn't make games before 2009 so I suppose I'm not perfectly qualified to say. Don't bother. It's a dumb assertation. Technology and finance has changed so much in the last ten years that there's no way you can possibly argue either way. Yes, we have handy little things like XNA or the Apple Store/Steam to make the distribution and development of games [that are simple/small] easier, and yes, we have better graphics cards and higher memory pools so we can be wasteful in some instances where otherwise we would need to be meticulous about how things are coded, but overall, wages have gone up, expertise needed to produce a game has probably gone up as well (then again, look at Doom's crescent fresh code, or Unreal Tournament, no two-bit programmer made that stuff back then). You're trying to market AAA games to a wider audience now, so you need a much bigger marketing budget... and you have lots of competition from indie/free/f2p/p2w games, plus torrents weren't around in the '90's... Games are more or less about the same to make then as they are now. The difference is that budgets have probably been forced to go up. Is this because of bloat in big publishers? I don't know, I can't say. We as consumers don't have all the facts, for one, so it's really hard to make the judgment of DLC is necessary or large developers won't make enough money to justify their existence. Where I think it sucks is how it feels to be a consumer of DLC. That's why I rarely buy DLC, I feel like it's a rip off - the content:money spent ratio is usually not in my favor compared to the base game and often I find out this content is just locked away on the disc - which means it could have been included in the original sale, because they got it to market on day one. Back in the 90's or before, that's how it worked. And I really don't get the whole monopoly thing that results in "thou shalt not price games at $70 USD" - I really don't. Why is that the case again? Just raise the base price to $70. If nobody is going to buy it at $70 then we have a problem fundamentally with the market. I mean, look at kickstarter, we see some people will pay $250 USD for a good game now n' days. The problem is too big to really be academic about it, you need be strong in a wide variety of disciplines and have a lot of facts in order to make the judgment that games are easier or harder to make, that DLC is necessary or its not. However, to me as a consumer, I hate it. I don't like it. It feels wrong and I would prefer an expansion, or I would prefer something. And no, "season passes" which are basically black boxes of content are not the solution. I'm gambling that #1 you'll produce the DLC you say you are and #2 it will be something I actualy want. Nevermind I have no idea when this DLC will be made available. It's like pre-ordering an expansion of variable size/length/duration/content you get in fragmented, disjointed rarely-connected pieces on arbitrary days in the future at a price that when combined with the base product price -- I could have just waited a year and bought the "Complete Arcade Ultaimte GOTY Edition" and gotten it all for way less anyway.

If the comment doesn't apply to you, then the comment doesn't apply to you. There are people that literally have literally told me Mass Effect 3's DLC (all of it) should have been free because it was all "essential story content." Juxtaposed with people that say we should *only* make DLC like that, because they'd rather have more story content than simply some customization stuff. There are indeed some that would rather we release something like From Ashes as Day One DLC than simply some weapon/customization pack, simply because they like the story content and would rather get more story content. This may be echoed among the preorder/special edition fans since it's often included as an incentive there, as well. A lot of it is still "this stuff is relatively new" as well. Since some people are always going to be upset, the challenge comes in ascertaining how much frustration there is. Although people do send mixed signals when they talk about how much they loathe DLC yet still buy it. I always encourage people not to buy it if they aren't a fan of DLC, because saying "I really don't like DLC" while still buying it makes it more difficult to go "Do they really not like DLC, or are they hoping that if they are part of a group voice, they can get more content for less cost?" It's similar with price increases, and when some people started to get upset at new PC games being $60 instead of $50 in the past few years. Saying "This is too expensive" and still buying it complicates the issue. As for the idea of stuff being cut content, from what I understand most stuff ( "expansion" or "DLC" ) often is. Pretty much all of Tales of the Sword Coast, for example, was content that was cut from Baldur's Gate. There's often close to as much game that ends up on the chopping block as content that actually ships with the game, with a variety of reasons motivating cuts (time being probably the most common). The difference is that "cut content" showing up on the same day as the full game's release is disingenuous. When did you guys find time to bug test it, bulid it, integrate it into the game, QA test it, et cetera 1-2 months before launch? Whether we're wrong or not, to us the customer, it feels like you just took out a piece of the game and sold it to us just to make more profit. That crazy Jamaican is on the disc, I'd only need to substitute one line of code to make him appear in any copy of ME3 in the world. That feels like a scam. Do we deserve him? I'm not going to get into that, but if you're going to make DLC I expect you guys to foot the bandwidth bill for a few hundred megabytes. And I totally get why there is Day1 DLC - it's because I'm far less likely to buy your DLC 6 months after the game's release. In-fact, I haven't bought much DLC ever, but I certainly never have six months post release. I guess I'm too old to 'appreciate' DLC - I'd much prefer an expansion than a DLC (mostly because DLCs are always overpriced for the content delviered in each "Bite") and honestly don't understand why expansions can't just be delivered instead. I don't know how well Awakening did for DAO, but it seems more sensible to me, to provide an expansion. I feel like DLC only makes sense for games with a multiplayer focus, because DLC can be released quicker and faster, to keep an active audience afloat. But for a single player game, the audience is always going to drop off after they beat the game - you need to make a highly replayable experience to keep them hooked for a longer period.

I suppose I will say that I've never had a moment in a BioWare game where the dialog made me go, "Really, did she/he really say that just now?" So at least they can keep the quality there a cut above a lot of games. I'd say it's the content and some extent the direction - things which are hard to be critical of anyway.

Art is art, at the end of the day, you live with your choices. You should be proud of them - but only if you were convinced those choices were right at the time of making them. All art invites critique and most artists are egotistical to ignore it - and they probably should. But the public impression is that BioWare games are not art, because they have descended down into the dreaded depths of "acquiring the call of duty audience". Or at least, this was the public impression upon the release of Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 2. Or at least, my impression way back then. It was not helped by the hypersexualization of BioWare's latest titles, or the decision to make all significant-role females in Mass Effect, even if they are alien females, physically attractive. BioWare has an identity crisis. They claim to be artists, and thus, deflect all criticism. Yet, they clearly aren't artists when they cave in to tacked-on multiplayer horde mode, hypersexualization (*let me make a note that I have nothing against sex in games; what I dislike is hollow vapid sexualization that doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to be eyecandy - there is a place for sex in art, that much is obvious, but in Mass Effect it feels like 90% of the motivation to actually want to engage in romance with any of the characters - not that they are enchanting people, just that their bodies make your brain all foggy), casualization, the dialogue wheel, et cetera, et cetera Japanese games feel more like "art" to me. Of course, I'm biased. My parents were both solo-artists. I'm not sure how "company" or "group" art really works. But if you're making a painting or a sculpture, your ego gets captured in there. I can understand a willingness to ignore critique - since your ego is basically being criticized, and one's ego, if properly expressed is true to oneself, there's nothing one can find fault in it. Japanese games come off as being these egotistical works, look at Suda51, or any older Mario game - they have a consistent look, feel, texture, et cetera, so that it feels like it's all got some coherent theme or design behind it. But for most Western developers, I usually don't get that impression - it feels more like a product than a piece of art, so the decision to deflect criticism seems like a cop out. If you want the call of duty audience, you have to be willing to take criticism. If you don't want an audience, then make **** however you want to and just hope that people will continue to patronize your work. That's how most of the artists I've met make their living - they make what they love, and if it doesn't sell, they keep making it anyway. And then it becomes valuable, after they're dead. This is my understanding of the philosophical conflict between the mass of angry (or 'butthurt') consumers and BioWare. Consumers want less corporate meddling, more art (or more hypersexuality? Maybe both.) and design, more substance, less flakiness... I mean, I've not been probably a great critic of BioWare's latest works, but I think I've clearly identified some areas that are in desperate need of improvement. Like, enemy design. DA2's enemy design is just bad. You can't deflect criticism there - every mage in DA2 has the same pool of spells with just some aesthetic differences. If that's not laziness, then it's bad design - or a sign of a team not properly planning ahead. I hope you guys didn't plan that ahead of time. I'm hoping it was something like, "****, this game is supposed to be released tomorrow?" "What can we cut guys?!" "T-The enemy spells! It's not like players want to lose anyway!" Criticisms in terms of writing are much harder to substantiate and analyze but I would pin it more on the whole choice thing than I would the quality or direction of the writing. Mass Effect 3's biggest criticism is probably that your choices up until the RGB ending scene didn't matter. Cosmetically, they mattered maybe a little bit, but not in the way maybe people were anticipating, when ME1 made its grandstand appearance.

So why is Gaider going on a rampage? Assuming this is his genuine account, he's kind of making a pretty bold, uh, statement here. https://twitter.com/davidgaider Gah, I suck at quoting tweets, but drop down a few tweets, he's making "internet definitions" of canon and stuffs. I fail to see the reasoning - he's just justifying some of the dickish behavior he receives from 'fans'.

I think it's unbelievably misguided for anyone to go into the business of making art with the intention of beating out mutual funds in terms of profit. A video game is pretty much like a movie, it's a huge gamble. There are safer gambles, like, super hero movies these days are, but at the end of the day, the public can be pretty fickle. But really, there's no artistic design process that guarantees the lowest risk and the highest payout; making a video game is not a science. If PST made enough money back to fund or partially fund the creation of another game, it should be considered a success. PST garnered enough critical attention it should be labelled a success. Any art which can be profitable enough to fund the further creation of an artist's work, or any art which is widely consumed and experienced and highly critiqued... it doesn't get much better than that as an artist. If you're setting out to paint, draw, make a movie or a game, you pretty much know the chance to wild success is a crap shoot. Having lots of money behind you (ie marketing) can be enough to give you a greater chance, but it just means you have a lot to lose if it doesn't pan out. So, if PST is a failure because it can't beat mutual funds, then the industry is broken. Games are art, even if they maybe aren't a mature medium yet - the creation of one is a risky artistic endeavor. The recent downward spirals for EA, Ubisoft, Square, Xbox (-3 bil net for Microsoft over 10 years) all show that there is no scientific recipe for success.

If I must clarify, PST has masterful writing, and for that, the game can be praised as having a good story. But can it be praised as a good game? Hardly. The perfect ideal version of PST would integrate its story into its gameplay - beyond the choice-based narrative stuff, I mean. The story doesn't justify why there is round-based combat, nor does it give meaning to the mechanics of the game. Ideally, story and gameplay need to synthesize. Imagine a game with no story. This is actually impossible to do. By the very nature of putting polygons on the screen that you control, you have created a story. A story that will be interpreted by each player differently. The mere act of putting things on a screen is suggestive. Making it a game - making it something someone can manipulate - elevates the game into something which invites imagination. Dwarf Fortress is a collection of ascii characters, but as you play the game, you learn to take those abstract symbols and give them your own internal meaning. By formally concocting a story... you're trying to give meaning to elements of a game that have no inherent meaning. Why are we fighting goblins? Wait, why are they called goblins? Who called them that? Why is that on the screen? Did someone outright call them goblins at some point? What's with all this omniscient knowledge? If you're "fighting" "green men with sticks" in the game world, there already exists a story. A formal story with a narrative and dialogue attempts to formalize the justification for the mechanic of fighting green men with sticks. That's its entire purpose, it can't do anything more than that. But a game which is purely mechanical, one which has no formal story, perhaps something like Journey, tells its own story through the visuals and your actions upon the game world. If a game's mechanics have no inherent meaning - say a typical D&D system, where there is no metaphysical meaning in an arbitrary calculation or dice roll - a story might be necessary to make the experience of the game enjoyable? My point is, formalized story is hardcoded. There's little imagination going on inside the head of the player when you play Baldur's Gate. A story is delivered and you execute it step by step. When you hardcode a story, there is a point at which you cannot go deeper. Characters are static at a certain point in the game's code. Depending upon resources, this is either a point at which we feel like it's deep enough, or not. Am I making any sense?

I guess I don't understand. Even in writing, you want your characters to be visually disinct. If they aren't distinct, rather difficult for readers to keep them all sorted. if a character is intentionally indistinct, that's also a kind of distinction. Hence, a "hook" is necessary and important. We all have first impressions of people. "The next step" is going down a layer, moving past the hook and seeing another aspect of that character. Good characterization is layer-based, but in a game, you might not have the opportunity to do that, because games aren't about stories, stories are justifications for why things happen within a game, not the other way around.

games is visual media, so am understanding that appearance is important, but we always is perplexed when we hears game developers describe process o' breathing life into characters. chrisA did a piece on character creation that were revealing and disheartening, but also reasonable given the media in which he works. chrisA basically said that the most important part o' making game characters were coming up with a hook-- that one attribute or quality that would make'em memorable. for years we complained that many obsidian/chrisA characters were developed little beyond some wacky concept. a winged paladin that literally sees world in black & white? a womanizing hagspwan with mommy issues? a blind sith who talks like a horrible anime stereotype? bah. ... the thing is, as much as we thinks one-trick-pony characters is cheap, we recognize that the most successful and beloved characters is popular not 'cause o' great writing, but 'cause o' the "hook." was hk-47 a well-developed character in kotor 1? nope. nice voice acting coupled with "meatbag" shtick made hk-47 popular. fo1 dogmeat was a freaking DOG. minsc was a cartoonish parody o' Lenny from Steinbeck's novel. some o' the most well-received game characters is nothing but hook coupled with nice presentation. am wanting to be dismissive when we read articles that seem to reduce character development to what we might expect from an advertising pitch for a 30 sec tv commercial, but we can't. is becoming increasing obvious that game characters gots more similarity to geico gecko or terry tate: office linebacker than characters from literature or dramatic works. HA! Good Fun! You're only partly right. Many people like Kreia. She's a blind ol' woman who wears brown. Hardly a character defined by visual icons or snazzy one-liners. Many people also like Sten. I think he's a lightweight character, but you have to admit he's visually indistinct and dull, so there's that. There are more ways than one to go about character design for a game. Obsidian's and Bioware's methods don't differ much, from what I understand. Where they divide is in the context of the game and themes explored within each game, also a greater willingness to create more layers for each character? Then again, FO:NV's companions aren't notable to me. We consider Charles Dickens' works to be classics? But he wrote a lot of caricature-based characters. I don't think there's a harm in it at all, to do what Bioware does. There's an appeal to both kinds of characters, it really depends on what you're trying to storytell.

That video they pulled at the EA gamescom conference was exactly the same kind they pulled for SWTOR and DA2. It's honestly not promising - a bunch of vague marketing jargon about how the game will be epic and such. I'd really appreciate it if they stopped trying to bull**** us, because my bull**** detector was on full alert with all those developers trying to cover their ass on camera. It didn't feel meaningful or genuine. In comparison, the article linked above is much nicer. I wish developers would come out of their shells and just tell us what's really going on. Stop acting like you guys have stuff to hide. Their character designing process doesn't sound any different from Obsidian's, so I can hardly find any thing wrong with it. The less surprised I am by DA3, the better. As I think I've said before, BioWare has to sell this game to us. It's not going to be an impllicit purchase like DA2 or ME2 might have been. Tell us what the game is going to look like, what we'll get with our purchase, because fewer people are going to take a risk, especially at full price. Of course... it is a year before it comes out, so I guess it's not worth it? It would mean BioWare is willing to engage in iterative design process with the fans, but I don't think they want to listen to us, or are convinced we're too negative to provide constructive feedback. So maybe they should save all this hype for next year? I actually don't understand why they are busting out all these interviews this month, what's the strategy here?

Okay, you guys can take your totally irrelevant fantasy writing debate elsewhere.

Yeah. We don't know the details. Depending upon the insurance... there's always some loophole somewhere that could result in him paying X% of particular parts of a bill.

You don't need to raise the level cap to provide new abilities. The point is D2 was built from 1-100 from the get-go. D3 was designed to appeal to a different audience, so it goes 1-60. They never should have done this, as much of the game's structure results from this critical flaw. A big appeal for D2 was reaching level 100 on hardcore. It's why "paragon levels" were added to D3, to try and give hardcore players "something to do". The jump from 99-100 in D2 is hours and hours of work, it's not a trivial accomplishment, especially on hardcore. ARPGs are very competitive, in a sense. Players spend a lot of time grinding in hardcore (a risky thing to do) with the aim to "be the best". When "being the best" is supplanted by "who spends the most money" we have a problem, when you do become the best, but an expansion back invalidates all those items you spend months acquiring - you feel burnt out, devastated, and cheated. The creators of Path of Exile, for instance, have always said they will never raise the level cap. They were rather disappointed when their design sort of failed and a player achieved level 100 in 74 days from launch - their intended target was much closer to 365 days. Their goal was to make reaching level 100 extremely ridiculous. For most players who try PoE, they will never reach level 100. The reason for this is prestige, but also to balance item drops by ilevel. ARPGs, or at least, Dlablo likes, are not static. They are item driven, not character driven. Raising the level cap raises the item level cap. Raising the item level cap means base 'lows' are raised. When this happens, the average newb now has better items than you, you who were at the top. That's the main issue. If item ilevel isn't changing (being capped at 63 for Diablo 3), then raising the level cap isn't that big of a deal, but we all know the level cap will go up for items. Path of Exile promises not to do this because they are indie; they know they will lose customer support if customers realize their items could become worthless six months from now. Blizzard doesn't seem to care. It's fine to introduce new items into an ARPG, but they need to be balanced against the 'best of the best' potential drops. A good ARPG is never static, because the best items are always possible, but just barely out of reach at times. For instance, in Path of Exile, there's a unique (legendary) that increases unarmed damage by 800-1000%. Obviously, the best you can get is +1000%, but only 1/200 of those legendary gloves will actually be 'the best'. The rest will just be 'okay' 'usable' or 'good'. Itemization like this works well in an ARPG, where players drive item bartering and trade - an item which gets the perfect rolls with the perfect stat selection is extremely valuable. Once base rolls rise though, that item basically become junk, you can't even sell it to a noob. This is pretty much equivalent to having your items (or wealth) "stolen" from you.

Blizzard, did you really make Diablo 2? Raising the level cap by 10 means everyone who has invested any time in D3 so far is an idiot - all of their gear will now be completely and utterly worthless. You can't pull this kind of crap in an ARPG. It's fine to drip feed gear in WoW, but ARPGs aren't WoW. An expansion like this should be anti-hype for anyone really interested in playing D3. It will make some money and bring people back, but it will really hurt any "core" people left. Who will want to stick around and play D3 when that next expansion invalidates all your gear again? Gear that takes potentially months to acquire and is entirely luck-based to find. This is just a shameless attempt to make the RMAH relevant again.

Immersive is... go boot up VTMB and sit in your apartment. Listen to all the sounds. Flip on the television and hear a plot point about a quest you've done or will do. That's almost the quintessential kind of immersion games need - a compelling, well-realized soundscape, things in the world which make you seem like a small part in a larger story. I'm convinced that's all you need. Do all RPGs need it? Not necessarily, but if you're giving up immersion you need to get something else in return, otherwise the game will be weaker as a result.

I am kind of confused why progressive BioWare neglected any female or non-white character examples in today's trailer Unless I missed them.

I could beat the game (easily, mind you, far easier than any other make-up) with four mages. Also, what was that pic about on the previous page, Sawyer said that in what context exactly? I've been saying for a while now that tactics requires thinking, there's no such thing as 'fast paced tactical combat' because fast paced implies, 'you have no ****ing time to think' and tactics come about without thinking (the last thing you do is in an action game is think). Nevermind that a game that is fast paced usually means enemies fall over quickly. If your enemies die quickly, what tactics must you employ to succeed? It'll always be easier just to sit there and take it, or at best, we've just made kiting the most effective strategy to beating the game. If by tactical gameplay, they mean, "Use these spells against these enemies oh and use that chain whip thing to stun people a lot" then it's just an action game. You can't call an action game tactical/strategic, because that's not what people mean when they call a game tactical/strategic. You can't make round/turn based combat "look" fun to people who have a stigma against it. I get it, RPGs are still viewed by the masses as "slow and dull" but going full action game isn't the solution, it's avoiding the real problem. And since DA3 is now just a full-on action game, it is going to be closely competing with other action games in 2014, like, Dark Souls 2, ot whatever. It needs to be as good or better than those next-gen titles a year from now. If DA3 doesn't sell well, I think we can pin some of the blame on this factor, that DA3's experience isn't unique enough to drive sales. Which, I guess, to Bioware/EA, might be a better explanation than, at least in their minds, "Well, roleplaying games just don't sell anymore."