Can't get over how good POE is & why Bioware abandoned this style of gameplay.

[abaris]

It's not posturing Bryy, some people's complaints do have tabletop gaming contexts. Nobody is saying people who don't play tabletop are worse gamers or any other posturing. It's just context to a complaint.

 

 

It's also not about better or worse gamers. I wouldn't even know what that means when talking about recreational fun.

 

But it's certainly about preferences and tastes. Bioware for example, especially after the EA takeover, caters to a totally different audience now. Their core medium is the console and PC has become an afterthough. Again, that's not about better or worse, but it's about different audiences. Console players are usually younger and more action based. Also shiny graphics and voice acting trump content in most of todays games.They're not designed to have a long shelf life and they have to have action based multiplayer. The idea is to sell as many copies as possible in as short a period of time. EA has become a master of that art. They're voted again and again to be the worst gaming company, but they not only stay in business, they obviously make enough of a revenue to buy up smaller companies.

 

Hopefully, and the last year points in that direction, other companies fill the void left by the so called AAA titles. With D:OS and POE there have been two ambitious old school RPGs on the market within a year.

[.niamh.]

I just can't get over how good this game is, especially once you've found a class you really enjoy.  It boggles the mind to why Bioware abandoned this style of gameplay.

 

so..  this is my first post here ever and just wanted to share that i find myself sincerely grateful for this game. for some reason isometric never did sit well with me, even back in the day, what kept me playing bg franchise was the story not the visuals - an i was sceptical as to weather to invest or not. did not regret it, i really think this game looks great. as for gameplay - it's fun. (period)

 

as for comparison - don't really think DA series is comparable, but visually/gameplay wise in terms of future wishful thinking i'd go with whatever engine DOS utilized, especially with unlocked camera mode. for PoE sequel that would be grand (and i'd stop ceaselessly trying to change camera angle to no avail).

 

@luzarius - so, yeah, agreed.

[Jasta11]

Role playing to me quite simply is this: how close to the pen and paper RPG feel can it get and still be a computer game.

 

In that sense Bioware's post DA:O games are vastly inferior to those preceding it. You won't understand unless you've ever played pen and paper.

 

The patronising is strong in this one.

 

Anyway, ''P&P RPG'' is a vast medium. They don't all play like D&D by any means. So it's hard to say that Bioware has veered away from tabletop since tabletop is an incredibly diverse genre. They moved away from doing D&D games, sure. But given that I am lukewarm at best towards the D&D ruleset and think alignments are pure idiocy, I don't consider that a bad thing, all things considered.

 

And yes, I have played P&P. But I think judging an RPG simply by how much it emulates P&P is a bit nuts, since not only does it change so much depending on the game but on the GM. All the D&D campaigns I've played had not a lot of player choice (to account for 4 players) with a plot that was mostly on rails so that the GM didn't have to spend his life creating new plots. Doesn't seem to different from Bioware RPGs, or any other RPG from that matter.

[Sven_]

Before this goes into a semantics argument (which I think is pointless), we can likely all agree that until more recently, had somebody asked for something closely connected to games made by Black Isle, Interplay, New World Computing, Sir-Tech, Bioware (of old) or Troika, say, you couldn't have pointed them to a heck of a lot of games, in particular new ones. And that despite all these companies either having folded years ago or their successors being committed to different things to various degrees. Computer and video role-playing games, in particular initially, had super strong connections to pen&paper rule sets, in particular of the D&D kind. It's crazy to think how popular Wizardry despite all the stats was in Japan too. I happen to enjoy complex character systems being translated fully into a video game, but I can also recognize and appreciate that there are other flavors and different spins -- in particular now that the market sees a much more diverse range of games again. Of the more recent Obsidian games I enjoyed both New Vegas and Eternity, despite the former obviously being a very different kind of thing. Despite me liking complex character systems, combat rules and more cerebral games all fully translated from the P&P origins, I quite like this Looking Glass piece of awesome, by the way:

 

 

 

We're role-playing gamers, fantasy/sci-fi fans, and computer game developers. We play all the same games you do, and we know as well as you do that "Computer Role-Playing Game" is a contradiction in terms.

Sitting around the table at a gaming "run" is a social activity and an exercise in imagination. Players express their imaginations through their social interactions and their creative approach to the problems of an adventure. The problem with the whole notion of the "computer role-playing game" is that this cannot happen the same way in a computer game. The social interaction which can be offered by a computer is pretty hollow, and most games don't provide a whole lot to replace it. The tedious mazes of pre-scripted menu options that some games (including our own!) have tried to pass off as "conversations" certainly don't cut it.

This probably sounds like we don't think role-playing can work on computers, but we do. It's a hard technical and design problem, but we like hard problems or we wouldn't be in this business. What many games have done, which isn't hard, is to copy the forms of a paper role-playing game, which keeps all the sheets of paper from the gaming table at the expense of all the people around it. A computer game can have all the trappings of a paper role-playing game (the Tolkienesque dwarves and elves, the "character classes," "to-hit rolls," and "experience levels"), but without role-playing it's not an RPG. It's computer strategy game about paper RPG's. Some of them are okay.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/19980224020118/http://www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/manifesto.html But this was coming from a developer re-known for thinking (brilliantly) out of any kind of box, whereas nowadays it's mostly commercial reasons why somebody would class complex p&p trappings to be a hindrance rather than a burst in creativity. It is pretty clearly admitted as such though mostly. Mostly. I think Bioware had been pretty open about where they were going, and if it wasn't them, it was Electronic Arts stepping in, like announcing that Skyrim would have changed everything (by which it was pretty clear that this was about setting sales records first and foremost). The one mistake was perhaps announcing that Dragon Age would be their return-to-roots PC exclusively series.The initial reportedly about 2 millions of BG on PC wasn't enough, Mass Effect wasn't enough either -- now they're aiming for Skyrim as well. 

 

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as that doesn't pave the way for like the entirety of the market (which had happened now for the better of the last decade). There's got to be quality games for everyone on any platform. What personally bothers me though is when I'm playing an otherwise brilliant game that on occasion borderlines on being destroyed by the design-by-marketing-committee, excessive focus group test kind of culture which on occasion influences far too much the overall design. A fairly recent example would be one mission of Dishonored in particular, which is a whodunnit of sorts, and which after a couple of minutes just phones in whodidit via an NPC appearing out of nowhere -- this NPC clearly wasn't part of the original design as it defeats the entire purpose of the mission. http://www.pcgamer.com/dishonored-clues-hints/ Also "modern" features such as the much talked about quest compass has lead to lazy quest, journal and world design being forced upon everyone, and they can outright contradict the exploration, in particular in open world games. Rather than taking these missions out, changing the design's core or making and communicating the game's world as something that players cannot possibly get lost in in the first place, this seems plenty weird. But then people on evidence have always been easily impressed by huge numbers -- and as such games are being made as huge as then some, and then reverse designed to cater to those who get lost on their way from bed to bathroom (which is has nothing to do with intelligence -- more experience or a lack of sense in direction, which can be pretty bad and is something you're born with or aren't). That plain doesn't make sense. I recently read a making of article about a then popular R-Type kind of game developed in the 1980s for Commodore 64, and the company doing that hired play testers by going to a local arcade and interviewing those making the top of the high score tables. It was experts giving feedback, exclusively. Different times and different audiences. Different budgets too though.

Edited May 11, 2015 by Sven_

[Luj1]

 

POE crushes Dragon Age Inquisition.

 

 

Like DA:I is hard to crush lmao. And PoE is way overrated. Its a fun small game but nothing special for senior RPG players. So reviews like 90/100 are cringe-worthy

[Ink Blot]

 

 senior RPG players

 

Clarification?

[Luj1]

People who have replayed classics multiple times. Do you need a clarification on what are classics too?

[Ink Blot]

People who have replayed classics multiple times. Do you need a clarification on what are classics too?

No, but thanks for the sarcasm.

[Ichthyic]

I am sorry to burst your bubble but DAI earned more money in 1 month than PoE will over its lifetime.

You wanted to know why..

LOL, you want to know WHY?

 

compare the amount of money the two companies have to spend on advertising.

 

saying something like DAI sold more copies so must be better, is like saying since Ann Coulter's books outsell Neil DeGrasse Tyson's, Coulter must be the better writer.

 

basically, the argument boils down to an ad populum fallacy.

 

 

[Idleray]

Role playing to me quite simply is this: how close to the pen and paper RPG feel can it get and still be a computer game.

 

In that sense Bioware's post DA:O games are vastly inferior to those preceding it. You won't understand unless you've ever played pen and paper.

 

I don't understand it because I've never played pen and paper, but I'll go right a head and say that I have no interest in pen and paper role-playing. I signed up for a computer game, I want to play a computer game.

 

If I wanted to immerse myself in a fantasy world, I'll read a book.

 

Pen and paper simply has no appeal to some people, including myself. There's nothing innately superior or inferior in the relation between traditional role-playing and crpg.

 

Getting snobby about it just makes pen and paper look stuffy and bad by association, kinda like how wine snobs ruin wine when wine is a-ok by itself.

 

edit: Actually scrap that. I understand it. I've read fantasy novels, played muds, played board games, watched twitch streams of p&p roleplaying. I think I have a pretty good grasp of what exercising your imagination is like. I just like to do it without the hassle of other people arguing about rules and minutiae all day while the game proceeds at a snail's pace.

Edited May 11, 2015 by Idleray

[Lord_Mord]

Interview with a vampire made $105,264,608

 

Twilight made $192,769,854

 

I didn't calculate inflation, the difference isn't that much and I don't like Interview with a vampire that much, but I think, you get the point.

[FlintlockJazz]

People who have replayed classics multiple times. Do you need a clarification on what are classics too?

I have played the 'classics' multiple times, do I get a badge?  Seriously though, if you only count CRPGs in there then you are not a senior RPGer, a senior gamer maybe but if you don't think tabletop can be counted instead of playing CRPGs (and in fact many real RPGers look down on computer ones as they feel they are inadequate to the task, not me but I know them) then you counting out the actual real roleplayers, the ones who actually gave the name to the genre, and that's not even including the live action RPGers, so maybe you should clarify just what you mean by Senior RPG players?  Since your clarification does not include vast swathes of RPGers at all, just CRPGers.

[FlintlockJazz]

Interview with a vampire made $105,264,608

 

Twilight made $192,769,854

 

I didn't calculate inflation, the difference isn't that much and I don't like Interview with a vampire that much, but I think, you get the point.

With inflation Interview has made $167,712,375.01.  It was released in 1994, and you have to take into account lower ticket prices, less overall money earned by people (even with inflation they earned less than people nowadays do, so less expendable cash), the film being old when Blu Ray came out, meaning only the more hardcore fans bought it as opposed to Twilight which came out when blu ray was already established, etc.  With those considerations $25 million does not seem that big a difference.

[Fardragon]

There are things I like and things I dislike about both DAI and PoE, and none of them have anything to do with the game being 2d or 3d. I think the real difference is in how much they cost to develop. 3D, being far more expensive, always has to play safe and target a mainstream audience, wheras 2d, being much cheaper, can afford to take more risks and target more specialised audiences (or simply be bigger).

[Zwiebelchen]

There are things I like and things I dislike about both DAI and PoE, and none of them have anything to do with the game being 2d or 3d. I think the real difference is in how much they cost to develop. 3D, being far more expensive, always has to play safe and target a mainstream audience, wheras 2d, being much cheaper, can afford to take more risks and target more specialised audiences (or simply be bigger).

 

This pretty much has nothing to do with 2D or 3D. Even with 2D backgrounds, the environments had to be modelled in 3D in the first place, so you can't really cut any production costs that way.

 

The decision to go 2D was for nostalgia reasons (to allow a paint-over layer), not for budget reasons.

[Fardragon]

 

There are things I like and things I dislike about both DAI and PoE, and none of them have anything to do with the game being 2d or 3d. I think the real difference is in how much they cost to develop. 3D, being far more expensive, always has to play safe and target a mainstream audience, wheras 2d, being much cheaper, can afford to take more risks and target more specialised audiences (or simply be bigger).

 

This pretty much has nothing to do with 2D or 3D. Even with 2D backgrounds, the environments had to be modelled in 3D in the first place, so you can't really cut any production costs that way.

 

The decision to go 2D was for nostalgia reasons (to allow a paint-over layer), not for budget reasons.

 

It's still much more expensive to do things in 3D, or at least to do them well. You may model a 2D environment in 3D, but it only has to be seen from one direction, and never in close-up, and it never has to stretch to the horizon.

[Zwiebelchen]

 

 

There are things I like and things I dislike about both DAI and PoE, and none of them have anything to do with the game being 2d or 3d. I think the real difference is in how much they cost to develop. 3D, being far more expensive, always has to play safe and target a mainstream audience, wheras 2d, being much cheaper, can afford to take more risks and target more specialised audiences (or simply be bigger).

 

This pretty much has nothing to do with 2D or 3D. Even with 2D backgrounds, the environments had to be modelled in 3D in the first place, so you can't really cut any production costs that way.

 

The decision to go 2D was for nostalgia reasons (to allow a paint-over layer), not for budget reasons.

 

It's still much more expensive to do things in 3D, or at least to do them well. You may model a 2D environment in 3D, but it only has to be seen from one direction, and never in close-up, and it never has to stretch to the horizon.

 

 

It cuts some corners, but it also creates new ones:

1) Rendering a giant image takes time... some backgrounds in the game are (mind you: compressed) several hundreds of megabytes large. I think in one of the backer updates, they said something along the lines of bringing the rendering time of the backgrounds down from several days to a couple of hours by some tech improvements.

2) Vertex collision information is lost in the process; pathing textures must be hand-drawn.

3) More restrictive in terms of lighting and shadows, as everything must be baked directly into the texture. This must be considered in the design process.

4) Level design and art asset design are stronger intertwined, which requires extra planning and overhead (Basicly, the entire background must exist before you can start placing interactables and 3D objects on top of it; in conventional 3D level design, you can arrange your level around the intended gameplay and make changes afterwards - if, for example, the level designer notices an area is too small to fight, there is no way to retroactively change that without having to re-build and re-render the entire background image)

Edited May 11, 2015 by Zwiebelchen

[Darkpriest]

If DA was only a PC exclusive then PoE would have a shot at destroying it. But consoles are quite a big market and since there is a shortage of interesting games on consoles things like DA:I sell good... 1 because hype. 2 because you don't have real alternatives for consoles.

 

Skylines i did not try it yet. Waiting for some sale since i already have a huge backlog.

 

If EA can F... up a Sims game with sims 4 release then problems with the latest simcity are not that odd anymore.

 

Bioware will cease to exist once the trademark will get fully depraciated in the books.

 

It's just the most economically sensible decision. By that time not many gamers will remember the original Bioware. (Even now you can see that a lot of people on the Biow forums started their adventure with ME or ME 2). Kids of 2000+ AD will not think of Bioware as some super good development studio. Same as kids of 90s don't recall Westwood or Bullfrog and same as kids of 80s don't really recall goldbox games or games like the original Wasteland. (For various reasons but in many cases it would be how expensive a computer was to relative incomes in many many countries)

[MReed]

 

 

 

There are things I like and things I dislike about both DAI and PoE, and none of them have anything to do with the game being 2d or 3d. I think the real difference is in how much they cost to develop. 3D, being far more expensive, always has to play safe and target a mainstream audience, wheras 2d, being much cheaper, can afford to take more risks and target more specialised audiences (or simply be bigger).

 

This pretty much has nothing to do with 2D or 3D. Even with 2D backgrounds, the environments had to be modelled in 3D in the first place, so you can't really cut any production costs that way.

 

The decision to go 2D was for nostalgia reasons (to allow a paint-over layer), not for budget reasons.

 

It's still much more expensive to do things in 3D, or at least to do them well. You may model a 2D environment in 3D, but it only has to be seen from one direction, and never in close-up, and it never has to stretch to the horizon.

 

 

It cuts some corners, but it also creates new ones:

1) Rendering a giant image takes time... some backgrounds in the game are (mind you: compressed) several hundreds of megabytes large. I think in one of the backer updates, they said something along the lines of bringing the rendering time of the backgrounds down from several days to a couple of hours by some tech improvements.

2) Vertex collision information is lost in the process; pathing textures must be hand-drawn.

3) More restrictive in terms of lighting and shadows, as everything must be baked directly into the texture. This must be considered in the design process.

4) Level design and art asset design are stronger intertwined, which requires extra planning and overhead (Basicly, the entire background must exist before you can start placing interactables and 3D objects on top of it; in conventional 3D level design, you can arrange your level around the intended gameplay and make changes afterwards - if, for example, the level designer notices an area is too small to fight, there is no way to retroactively change that without having to re-build and re-render the entire background image)

 

 

 

If I'm remembering correctly, Obsidian released an update reporting that the 3D -> 2D + paint-over was less expensive than simple 3D.  They didn't say why, but I suspect that the reason is that an enormous amount of effort is spent going from the initial 3D area (made up of stock parts) to a high quality area map that is still capable of being rendered in real-time.

 

Note that Obsidian did, in fact, "rough-out" areas using simple stock parts (that probably rendered to 2D in seconds) to allow area designs to be playtested before executing the final render & paint-over.  You can see these areas in the background in many of the updates.

[abaris]

If DA was only a PC exclusive then PoE would have a shot at destroying it. But consoles are quite a big market and since there is a shortage of interesting games on consoles things like DA:I sell good... 1 because hype. 2 because you don't have real alternatives for consoles.

 

 

There were no interesting games within the last three or four years, wether we're talking about PC or console. The last games I bought before D:OS and POE were Fallout New Vegas and DA:O. Everything else on the market was digital fast food with ultra short development cycles to rake in enough cash to satisfy the shareholders in the annual meetings and to grant the bonusses for the bosses. Yes, I'm looking at you, EA.

 

That's the problem these days. Most developers aren't invested in their products anymore. Their bosses could just as well run a toilet paper company, since all that matters is beancounting. That's also why we see this abundance of catering to consoles as the primary medium. Because it promises the hhighest revenue in the shortest period of time.

[Naughtydread]

But the OP has a pic from DA:I as Avatar!!!!

 

Oh man, the irony is rich!

 

Baaaaaah!  Baaaaaah!

Made me laugh 

[Naughtydread]

One of the beauties of the marketplace is the fact that, if there is a demand, there will more than likely be a supply. While DA:I is successful in its own right as an AAA title, I'm very happy there was enough demand for Obsidian to slide into the niche market of old school isometric RPG's. Bioware and EA Games can continue with their mainstream titles for all I care (I'm not saying its a bad thing), so long as they don't start buying up the little guys like Larian and Obsidian. I don't think we have too much to worry about there, but one never knows!

Could not had said it better.

[Sven_]

 

One of the beauties of the marketplace is the fact that, if there is a demand, there will more than likely be a supply. While DA:I is successful in its own right as an AAA title, I'm very happy there was enough demand for Obsidian to slide into the niche market of old school isometric RPG's. Bioware and EA Games can continue with their mainstream titles for all I care (I'm not saying its a bad thing), so long as they don't start buying up the little guys like Larian and Obsidian. I don't think we have too much to worry about there, but one never knows!

Could not had said it better.

 

 

 

And yet it had taken years to figure something out that appears to work, for more specialized RPGs anyways. Going by the Road To Eternity videos, it speaks volumes that some of their staff predicted they'd barely rake in 100,000 Dollars on the first day after their Kickstarter had launched, I think some significantly less. And that's the funny thing, as this kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: If nobody is making the games, obviously they don't sell a single copy. Almost every major Kickstarter is off a studio that got burnt by more traditional models of development/funding.

 

Larian opted to become fully independent prior to doing Divinity OS (and risked the entire studio by doing such)

http://www.pcgamer.com/how-divinity-original-sin-almost-bankrupted-larian-studios/

 

Brian Fargo of inXile (Torment, Wasteland 2, the already announced Bard's Tale sequel) doesn't grow tired of telling the disheartening stories of even pitching games, let alone handling them getting made.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/5/2/5613114/wasteland-2-fallout-brian-fargo

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/15/brian-fargo-on-inxiles-darkest-publisher-driven-days/

 

And had Obsidian actually considered pitching PoE to the fans directly had they nod been in severe trouble likewise?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-11-before-pillars-of-eternity-obsidian-nearly-met-its-end

 

For a studio such as Obsidian, doing entirelly Pillars-size projects hugely likely isn't viable, though. It may be independent, but it's too big for that. Meanwhile over at inXile, they've scaled back to 25-30 employes give or take, and given interviews they should be super pleased how Wasteland's 2 been performing for them. I don't know why it took so long for RPGs in particular to figure something out. In particular Europe has specialized publishers for almost everything -- from adventure games that are far more niche to strategy games to pretty much PC specific things, such as Paradox Interactive, who are doing greatly and who make games commercially viable that are in my opinion far more hardcore and niche than any old CRPG ever was. Naturally it took Double Fine to make crowd funding appear viable, but considering that you kind of wonder what publishers were being approached and what the projects that were turned down looked like, in particular in terms of scale and budget. "Back in the days", someone like Fargo was running one of the biggest PC publishers there had been; and the Infinity Engines games weren't that hugely niche either. Even Troika Games, the follow-up of the original Fallout team of kinds, were as ambitious to be the first in line to license Valve's then fresh Source Engine who nobody expect their own coders likely had much experience to develop in.

 

If you've already climbed from apprenticeship to the top, it's likely tough to go back to more humble beginnings and do something comparably small. It's like Tim Schafer doing Broken Age after so many years of adventure gaming hiatus; at heart he may have loved them, but they weren't viable for the house he was running and the scale of the projects he had in mind. Well that and that a lot of those studios and their follow-ups who were responsible of the make-up of the classic CRPG kind of thing are based in locations that in terms of upkeep and living are fairly expensive. Games development on average is more expensive in the US anyways than in Europe, for instance, even Western Europe. But in California where studios such as Obsidian, inXile and Double Fine are from, by reports it's another step up on. Which is all contributing to things, as the more expensive a game becomes, the less likely it is to be made -- in particular for more specialized kind of games that aren't following the blockbuster model of copying like everything that's popular on the market at any point, i.e. the Ubisoft 3d real-time action open world kind of formula that is slowly creeping into everything or Bioware willing to sacrifice their expertise in tightly scripted interactive movies in an attempt to hit on their own Skyrim. There may have been a demand, but it took an entire decade after IWD 2 had shipped for somebody major to step up and put it to the test. This is not a criticism. But it's still a story of two sides: One of joy and one of wonder no less.

Edited May 12, 2015 by Sven_

[Jimmysdabestcop]

DA2 and DA 3 aren't in the same category as PoE. PoE is in the same category as Wasteland 2 and Divinty Original Sin. Even though those games have tactical combat.

 

DA2 and DA:I are basically action/adventure games with "rpg lite" elements throw in. Those games aren't even aRPG's like say Torchwood 2. Torchwood 2 compared to DA:I in the aRPG category and Torchwood 2 smokes DAI.

 

Its like saying Assassins Creed games are RPG's, Just because you can pick skills or level equipment up an rpg does not it make.

 

Its the same thing with MAss Effect 2/3 all the real cRPG elements were stripped out. The Only reason Dragon Age Origin was spared was because it was in development for like 5 years before EA bought Bioware.

 

Those games are like fast food.

[Hassat Hunter]

Getting 90 on metacritic is no easy task.

 

POE - 90 - user score: 8.6

Inquisition 85 - user score: 5.8

And here I was thinking you were talking about http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/241620/

I was already wondering why the review scores where so high since not AAA+ game...

 

DA:I didn't even come to mind till muuuuch later (around page 3 of this thread infact). That's how "good" BioWare became :/

 

EDIT; And as always:

Edited May 12, 2015 by Hassat Hunter