Dragon Age: Inquisition

[Malekith]

 

"We got voted worst company in America because of homophobes!". It took two awards in a row to get a whimper of an admission that maybe there was a little more to the 'awards' than just being pro-LGBT.

 

EA got voted worst company two years in a row because gamers- by and large- lack any sort of perspective, self awareness, sense of proportion or relativity; which is more than made up for by the hugely inflated senses of self importance, entitlement and ability to take truly trivial stuff serious. I find it deeply embarrassing even being tangentially associated with a group who think Day 1 DLC for their luxury pursuit is more of an affront than some of the stuff BoA and other entrants pulled. (Yeah yeah, sending a message, BoA always wins etc etc)

 

Gamers. Like a three year old throwing a tanty telling mum and dad that they hate them at the top of their lungs...

 

Yes and no. If i'm not mistaken the site was consumerist. So the vote was exclusivly about which company their customers thought had the worst product/servise whatever.

BoA or other companies that cause enviromental destruction deserve to close, but it has nothing to do with consumers. You are not a customer of BoA, not in a day to day basis. They don't sell you a product.

 

So the whole poll was never about changing the world, vote which company violates human rights etc. It was about which company provides the worst servise/has the most disatisfied customers. If you look at it from that perspective, EA is a deserves the award.

If there was a poll about the worst company (as in which company causes the most harm), then sure, EA shouldn't be even among the contenders. But that wasn't what the poll was about.

Edited August 6, 2013 by Malekith

[decado]

 

She is a sexual being *because she wants to be* as opposed to "she has sex with the player character because that's what her reason for existing in the game is."

 

Here's the thing though: she is not a real person, so "because she wants to be" is not a real reason.  I get that they gave her motivation and backstory and she's a modern (medieval) independent woman in control of her sexuality, but the reality - like, in the real world, reality - is that she is a video game character.  And as a video game character, in a game played mostly by men, many of whom will never finish the game or pay much attention to her backstory, she is a scantily-clad woman who has big boobs and talks about having sex A LOT.  I am not saying such a character should not exist or cannot exist, and I am not saying there was not an honest attempt to write her intelligently.  But, fundamentally, you can't get around the fact that her function in the game is more sexual object for the player than sexual being.  She reads to the player as "the one with the boobs who likes sex."  Bioware is trying to have their cake and eat it too with this character by subverting expectations - but those expectations are never actually subverted.  She basically still *is* that superficial character the player imagined. You can tell the player "Well, but it's HER wanting sex, not you" but this is meaningless in a game where you essentially control the outcome.  All of the potential romantic partners in any Bioware game "want" the player to the same degree as any other - that is, to the degree the player selects the "heart" dialogue choice.

 

This idea could work, maybe, in a game where you didn't have one single PC avatar and you were controlling (or not controlling) all of the characters equally.  But in the traditional Bioware cRPG formula, Isabela still reads (to me at least) as a pretty awful presence in the game.

 

YMMV

 

 

This is a very good post, and one that sums up my objections to the character nicely (full disclosure: I never finished DA2). 

 

The other thing that bothers me about this standard defense of her character is even if we grant she is a liberated free spirit or whatever, she simply talks about sex too much.  I mean, she talks about it all the time.  This isn't a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality -- as written, she comes across as completely crazy and irritating with the constant sex talk.  That part of her personality was completely oversold by the writer(s).  Isabella is not a believable portrayal of a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality, or simply even a woman who just likes sex.  She comes across as a sex-crazed lunatic with an annoying habit of making almost every conversation about sex.  It's ridiculous.

 

Also, I think it is disingenuous for BioWare (or any other company) to point to the legitimately disgusting behavior of some people who have a problem with LGBT folks, and use these clowns to dismiss every criticism of DA2 as grounded in bigotry.  The average age of a gamer in the US is over 30 years of age.  Most people who play these games are adults, not stupid teenagers trolling on the internet.  And like most adults of my generation, a good chunk of these people have absolutely no issue with LGBT people, and many of us take very seriously issues like civil rights, bullying, and discrimination against LGBTs.  And that's just the US -- what about all other places where BioWare sells their games? Are we supposed to believe that every Frenchie who disliked DA2 did so because he or she is secretly a closeted homophobe?  Absurd.

 

So when someone points out that hey, maybe spend less time on making every flavor of romance with your oversexed characters and more time developing decent maps and enemy AI, you might want to listen.  I don't give a flying eff who I screw -- or who you allow me or anyone else to screw -- in a video game.  Really, I don't.  Throw it all in there!  But please don't do it and point to yourselves as "pushing the boundaries" and expect that kind of social justice cred to erase the fact that you churned out a crap game in 18 months.  

Edited August 6, 2013 by decado

[decado]

At the end of the day, though, all of this is academic.  The true lesson learned comes after launch, and here the only thing worth mentioning are the dollars and cents.  DA:O made more money, and was rated higher by critics.  In the video game industry, you have a to make a pretty bad game for sequel sales to be LOWER than original sales -- it almost never happens.  They should be asking themselves why that happened, and using those lessons learned for DA:I.

[Maria Caliban]

I thought the main lesson from DA:O was that financing five years of video game development cost more than BioWare could afford.

[decado]

Unless you're Valve or Blizzard, nobody can afford it.

[Tale]

The main lesson I got from DA:O is that the best way to overcome years of skepticism is to appeal to my inner Farscape fanatic.

 

More seriously, I always wonder how long the actual game we ended up with with was in development. They completely overhauled the design twice or so I understand. It certainly doesn't feel like it was a 5 year effort, the end result didn't seem any more expansive or polished than Mass Effect 1 or 2.

[anubite]

EA is disliked because it's perceived to be anti-consumer, not because it dumps toxic waste into the ocean. Companies that do that **** deserve to be eradicated off the face of the earth, but those companies don't tend to interact with large numbers of Western consumers anymore.

 

EA keeps up this perception by:

-Pioneering and expanding upon things like online passes

-Dropping game support [shutting down servers] after short periods of time

-Significantly reducing dev cycles in order to pump out lower quality games anually

-Using focus groups and success anecdotes to steer game development (instead of game development being designer-driven):

*tacked-on multiplayer

*tacked-on DLC

*tacked-on pre-order bonuses

-The wholesale purchase of successful independant studios (and then the successive destruction of them through these practices)

-The use of 'deflection tactics' when confronted with criticism - when something doesn't work, it's either ignored or a scapegoat is used to distract consumers

-The fudging of numbers and statistics to mislead investors and consumers

 

Basically, my history with EA is that I started playing PC games with the Sims / Sim City. The producers of those games became apart of EA. I continued to support those games, but gradually my interest waned when each new interation failed to impress. I didn't blame (and still don't, really) EA for what I perceived to be a declining quality in those games, so I moved on. Fast forward to 2008. I had been following Spore's development and was really excited for it.

 

Unfortunately, if you followed Spore's devleopment at all, looking at the final product was like a slap in the face. It was basically all a lie. I felt like I had been lied to. It didn't help that it came with Draconian 3-installations-in-your-lifetime DRM. Not that the DRM really mattered to me after the fifth hour I played it - it was around then I got to space and realized the game was dead to me. I uninstalled it and said, "Nope, never pre-ordering another EA game again."

 

That was just the beginning, but it really woke me up to what EA was as a company. If you read the whole debacle that was Spore, you can see all of what I'm talking about. EA either directly poisoned that project, or its policies and executive culture did so passively. It's not that I'm exactly accusing EA of being intentionally mal-aligned, I just believe everything they touch turns rotten. It may just simply be they have a bad culture and reduces productivity and poisons development teams.

 

BioWare is basically a culmination of all of this. It feels like they are in sync with EA, or are puppets with strings tightly wound around them. As a consumer, I don't trust them anymore.

 

I think that is partially why everyone is so acidic around these games and BioWare. It's what they represent that upsets us.

 

I don't think anyone genuinely cares about homosexual romance in BioWare games. Why do a lot of people (trolls, rather) harp on that specific subject? It's because, I think, they perceive it as nonsense. Does it matter who you get to **** in a video game? Um, no. It really doesn't. Not with the way BioWare designs their games. You could have the choice to **** Saren or The Illusive Man in the Mass Effect trilogy and it'd have no impact on the story. It's like playing Fallout and telling the merchants where your vault is located and it having no effect on the game. People want to see BioWare invest in the reactivity of their RPG, not in the number of diversity of romance options.

 

And yes, DA2 was spawned largely in-part because DA:O took too damn long. I do not understand at all how the project took as many years as it did and it makes absolute sense EA would clamp down on their studio, "No, you cannot spend another four to six years making a game."

 

RPGs cannot be AAA projects. I think that's the fundamental problem. With development costs for AAA games as they are, you cannot justify making a classic RPG. What EA should have said was, "Drop the console support." Console support adds too much overhead - you need to produce the game and its engine for Cell/360 architecture and x86. You need multiple control scehemes and you need to make your game run on terrible hardware specs.

 

RPGs should be low to mid budget titles that use older engines and more 'already constructed' assets. Because once they become AAA titles, they pretty much have to become action titles with little substance to "succeed" in the eyes of a major publisher (which is basically "Five million sales" at this point in time).

 

Fast forward to today and we have DA3 which is being hailed as some sort of Skyrim knock-off. It feels like nobody has learned their lesson here.

Edited August 6, 2013 by anubite

[Malekith]

I thought the main lesson from DA:O was that financing five years of video game development cost more than BioWare could afford.

And the main lesson from DA2 tham Bioware cannot make decent games in 18 months.

[Orogun01]

I thought the main lesson from DA:O was that financing five years of video game development cost more than BioWare could afford.

Those kind of development cycles are common when developing an engine, I will say that BW has had a bad run when it comes to picking engines with the exception of UDK.

[Halaster]

I don't know where people are getting the six years development for DA:O from. According to Brent Knowles (DA:O lead) the timeline looked something like this:

 

2004 - concepts and ideas bouncing about, not much in the way of full scale development

2005 - work starts in earnest but is interrupted when a large chunk of the team are taken away to work on another project (presumably Jade Empire)

2006 - later in the year after Jade Empire (?) the team is back working on DA:O

2008 - work ends on DA:O around summer. Brent then quits.

 

Then someone decides to HOLD the PC release and make console ports for an all platform release. Mike Laidlaw is put in charge of Project Console and completes his mission in 2009, upon which DA:O is released.

 

So what we have is quite probably less than 4 full years of work on the PC version. We shouldn't count the extra year Laidlaw took to make the ports in the same way we shouldn't add a year to any other known development time. Also the DA team size in 2005 was about half that in 2009.

[Maria Caliban]

 

 

Actual Dragon Age: Inquisition information in the DA:I thread?

 

IT'S MORE LIKELY THAN YOU THINK.

 

Horses.

 

Multiple player races?!

 

From the BSN

 

David Gaider wrote...

 

fchopin wrote...

Are you saying we can play an elf or a dwarf in DAI for single player?

Yes.

 

Edited August 6, 2013 by Maria Caliban

[Orogun01]

 

I don't know where people are getting the six years development for DA:O from. According to Brent Knowles (DA:O lead) the timeline looked something like this:

 

2004 - concepts and ideas bouncing about, not much in the way of full scale development

2005 - work starts in earnest but is interrupted when a large chunk of the team are taken away to work on another project (presumably Jade Empire)

2006 - later in the year after Jade Empire (?) the team is back working on DA:O

2008 - work ends on DA:O around summer. Brent then quits.

 

Then someone decides to HOLD the PC release and make console ports for an all platform release. Mike Laidlaw is put in charge of Project Console and completes his mission in 2009, upon which DA:O is released.

 

So what we have is quite probably less than 4 full years of work on the PC version. We shouldn't count the extra year Laidlaw took to make the ports in the same way we shouldn't add a year to any other known development time. Also the DA team size in 2005 was about half that in 2009.

 

So we shouldn't regard facts that counter your argument; that's convenient.

Edited August 6, 2013 by Orogun01

[BruceVC]

 

 

She is a sexual being *because she wants to be* as opposed to "she has sex with the player character because that's what her reason for existing in the game is."

 

Here's the thing though: she is not a real person, so "because she wants to be" is not a real reason.  I get that they gave her motivation and backstory and she's a modern (medieval) independent woman in control of her sexuality, but the reality - like, in the real world, reality - is that she is a video game character.  And as a video game character, in a game played mostly by men, many of whom will never finish the game or pay much attention to her backstory, she is a scantily-clad woman who has big boobs and talks about having sex A LOT.  I am not saying such a character should not exist or cannot exist, and I am not saying there was not an honest attempt to write her intelligently.  But, fundamentally, you can't get around the fact that her function in the game is more sexual object for the player than sexual being.  She reads to the player as "the one with the boobs who likes sex."  Bioware is trying to have their cake and eat it too with this character by subverting expectations - but those expectations are never actually subverted.  She basically still *is* that superficial character the player imagined. You can tell the player "Well, but it's HER wanting sex, not you" but this is meaningless in a game where you essentially control the outcome.  All of the potential romantic partners in any Bioware game "want" the player to the same degree as any other - that is, to the degree the player selects the "heart" dialogue choice.

 

This idea could work, maybe, in a game where you didn't have one single PC avatar and you were controlling (or not controlling) all of the characters equally.  But in the traditional Bioware cRPG formula, Isabela still reads (to me at least) as a pretty awful presence in the game.

 

YMMV

 

 

This is a very good post, and one that sums up my objections to the character nicely (full disclosure: I never finished DA2). 

 

The other thing that bothers me about this standard defense of her character is even if we grant she is a liberated free spirit or whatever, she simply talks about sex too much.  I mean, she talks about it all the time.  This isn't a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality -- as written, she comes across as completely crazy and irritating with the constant sex talk.  That part of her personality was completely oversold by the writer(s).  Isabella is not a believable portrayal of a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality, or simply even a woman who just likes sex.  She comes across as a sex-crazed lunatic with an annoying habit of making almost every conversation about sex.  It's ridiculous.

 

Also, I think it is disingenuous for BioWare (or any other company) to point to the legitimately disgusting behavior of some people who have a problem with LGBT folks, and use these clowns to dismiss every criticism of DA2 as grounded in bigotry.  The average age of a gamer in the US is over 30 years of age.  Most people who play these games are adults, not stupid teenagers trolling on the internet.  And like most adults of my generation, a good chunk of these people have absolutely no issue with LGBT people, and many of us take very seriously issues like civil rights, bullying, and discrimination against LGBTs.  And that's just the US -- what about all other places where BioWare sells their games? Are we supposed to believe that every Frenchie who disliked DA2 did so because he or she is secretly a closeted homophobe?  Absurd.

 

So when someone points out that hey, maybe spend less time on making every flavor of romance with your oversexed characters and more time developing decent maps and enemy AI, you might want to listen.  I don't give a flying eff who I screw -- or who you allow me or anyone else to screw -- in a video game.  Really, I don't.  Throw it all in there!  But please don't do it and point to yourselves as "pushing the boundaries" and expect that kind of social justice cred to erase the fact that you churned out a crap game in 18 months.  

 

 

You make some good points but I don't agree with your assessment of Isabela. I found her character to be very believable. She oozed self-confidence and had clear objectives. She also supported other ladies in the party. I also only remember having sex with her near the end of the game after I had built a relationship with her. So I fail to see how this made her a "sex-crazed lunatic"

[lobotomy42]

Regardless of how much work was being done at any given point, that's still five years of paying people's salaries (i.e. "cost") without a release.

[Tale]

Actual Dragon Age: Inquisition information in the DA:I thread?

 

IT'S MORE LIKELY THAN YOU THINK.

 

Horses.

 

Multiple player races?!

 

From the BSN

 

David Gaider wrote...

 

fchopin wrote...

Are you saying we can play an elf or a dwarf in DAI for single player?

Yes.

 

 

I like what I'm hearing. Doing multiple races shows that they are listening to the audience, which is good. The world looks fairly open from the footage.

 

They keep promising to fix my biggest gripe with 2, but the trust isn't there that they'll do it. But I guess that can't be helped until someone beats the game.

 

How they're describing the Inquisition is way too adherent to the Bioware formula though. To a ridiculous degree.

 

Regardless of how much work was being done at any given point, that's still five years of paying people's salaries (i.e. "cost") without a release.

If the team was working on Jade Empire, there was a release. That seemed like the point he was making.

[Morgoth]

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/08/06/september-2013-dragon-age-inquisition-6119.aspx

[Monte Carlo]

Horses look neat. But Jesus you can predict everything they're going to say in one of those videos. Stuff about re-connecting with fans (but nothing went wrong, did it?) and the inevitable BG reference. Its like the guys who brought us Jar-Jar Binks claiming credit for R2D2.

[Maria Caliban]

Allan posted a snippet from the article: "health doesn’t automatically regenerate after encounters, so managing your risk and resources is important."

[BruceVC]

Allan posted a snippet from the article: "health doesn’t automatically regenerate after encounters

 

That is really good news. I don't want auto-resurrect or health regeneration unless I sleep. I hope they include that as a feature

[Tale]

That's pretty cool, too. I'm certainly more optimistic than before.

[BruceVC]

That's pretty cool, too. I'm certainly more optimistic than before.

 

Tale when someone like you gets positive about a game it bodes well for the game as I believe you can influence others in the right way as your opinion is respected.

 

I tend to be positive about most games so my view doesn't carry the same credibility as yours

[Malcador]

Allan posted a snippet from the article: "health doesn’t automatically regenerate after encounters, so managing your risk and resources is important."

Kind of silly to have it otherwise.

[Tale]

 

That's pretty cool, too. I'm certainly more optimistic than before.

 

Tale when someone like you gets positive about a game it bodes well for the game as I believe you can influence others in the right way as your opinion is respected.

 

I tend to be positive about most games so my view doesn't carry the same credibility as yours

 

I'd be wary respecting my opinion. I'm susceptible to hype and presumptuous. I've been fooled the same as the rest.

[Gfted1]

Again, never played the DA franchise, but didn't health used to autoregen after each encounter and you couldn't really die (just take a knee), like they are now doing in PE? I wonder why they changed that model. Can you die now in DA?

[BruceVC]

Again, never played the DA franchise, but didn't health used to autoregen after each encounter and you couldn't really die (just take a knee), like they are now doing in PE? I wonder why they changed that model. Can you die now in DA?

 

That's how I remember DA, no real death unless the whole party is defeated. But are you sure you can't die in PE, that concerns me