Recently I’ve been playing Bioware’s stellar fantasy title Dragon Age: Inquisition – XboxOne & PS4" href="/reviews/dragon-age-inquisition-xboxone-ps4/">Dragon Age: Inquisition (my second playthrough) and for all its immense quality and engagement, one thing left a real sour taste in my mouth. Read more …
Long-time readers will probably be aware of my love for the Dragon Age series. I’ve covered both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II on these very pages over the last couple of years.
I hailed the first as an excellent and challenging technical combat RPG, praising its depth and scale, while highlighting its unforgiving nature and its potential to put off the more casual gamer. Read more …
Dragon Age: Inquisition will be available to EA Access members from November 13th. This means members will be able to play the game five days before the official release date. Members will be limited to six hours of gameplay during that period. Any progress made in the trial will carry over to the full game. EA Access members will also get a 10% discount if they purchase Dragon Age: Inquisition from the Xbox One Game Store.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is due to release on November 21st in Europe and November 18th in North America.
Just as they did with Mass Effect 2, Bioware has released an interesting set of statistics that they tracked during peoples play time of Mass Effect 3. Now I love this sort of thing since I wasted my time getting an Anthropology degree and data like this is interesting as hell. Sadly its incomplete as we don’t know anything about the people who the data is gathered from other than its probably everyone who didn’t pirate the game. And while it’s fun and interesting to mull over the data gathered as a lowly plebe like myself to me it spells disaster in the long run. EA is not a company known for going the extra mile unless it will allow them to bleed some more money out of people. All they are going to see from this data is wasted time and effort creating content that people didn’t see and will use this as a reason to create cheaper, more content light games. And just what will this cheap, cash-in, content-free game look like? Dragon Age 2!
Am I seriously going to drag out Dragon Age 2 to kick around some more? Maybe later!
But enough about that digital tragedy, I’ve gone down the Bioware mocking trail before and chances are I’ll go there again when they decide to actually show something about Dragon Age 3. But this data isn’t a failure on Biowares part, at least not quite. I suppose you could argue that they should have made more interesting characters or some small changes here and there. No this time I place the blame squarely on all of you and your lazy, unimaginative choices. Do you people understand what a role playing game is! Clearly not because you aren’t roleplaying PROPERLY if you are taking the most default path possible!
Seriously, Soldier is above and beyond the most popular class with second place, Infiltrator / Sniper, a whopping twenty five percent lower! And why? Because soldier is the easiest class to play and the most over powered? Probably. Well really just easiest because with a little brains you could be overpowered as hell playing the two LEAST popular classes, Adept and Engineer which came in at 8.1 and 5.1 percent respectively. The thing is, Mass Effect isn’t an RPG to most people, it’s a cover shooter that inconveniences you with dialogue. Might be jumping to conclusions with that one because sadly they didn’t track, or merely didn’t release, information on how many people utilized the mode that did the story for you. And speaking of story…
Overall some good news and bad news. Bad news first, sixty four percent of you didn’t get to meet Wrex in ME3. I know the default story in 3 if you didn’t import a save had Wrex flagged as dead, making him more or less a reward for people who played all 3 games. And that’s a damn shame. I know Mass Effect 1 wasn’t great gameplay wise but it still did a great job on creating the universe used in the other 2 games. Wrex was a great character and was half the reason Tuchanka played out so well. On that topic I’m proud of you, only 3.8 percent of you killed Mordin. Although on the other hand you should have played through as evil just to see as much of the game as you could. Although thanks to the ending it really doesn’t matter, nothing matters……
Internet you never let me down! They give us a female lead and you rip their clothes off.
Liara is tragically the most popular squad member but not by much. Once she became protected by plot armor she became significantly lamer and more Mary Sue than I was comfortable with. LEAST popular is not surprisingly Kaiden, who also had a 17 percent survival rate and a comically low popularity score of 1.5. I credit his unpopularity with 2 things, 1 he’s voiced by Raphael Sbarge, a fine voice actor indeed, who many of you may remember as the voice of Carth Onasi from KotOR, aka the boring whiny guy which is also pretty much how Kaiden turned out. And 2, Kaiden is bland and boring especially compared to space dinosaurs with guns, womanoid creatures with gigantic bosoms of the blue and robot variety, and a multi-eyed monster with a superiority complex and defeatist slant. The other victim of being boring is Jacob and arguably Vega who managed an 82 percent survival rate that I’m going to go ahead and attribute to playing 3 on the default settings. Which is probably also to blame for 82 percent of you playing as male Shepard, also a shame! Nothing against Mark Meer whose delivery made for some great moments, but Jennifer Hale overall did a better job in my opinion for her ability to pull off both the paragon and renegade lines in a believable way.
THIS HURTS YOU
Like I mentioned before, the problem with these stats is in the lowest numbers. The renegade/evil options were remarkably unpopular, as were characters like Kaiden, female shepard, and most of the classes. The people calling the shots on what gets made in games are going to look at these stats and demand more cost effective material. And while I understand that it’s hard to justify content that not everyone is going to see, it does make for a better game. The better answer would be for them to simply re-evaluate what wasn’t popular and try to make things better, but then I’m reminded that this is Bioware, and when something in a Bioware game doesn’t work out they cut it and never go near it again. Just look at how much gear changed from Mass Effect 1 to 2, same goes for how gear was handled in Dragon Age. Or look at the travel mini-game difference from KotOR 1 and their second game Jade Empire. One was a turret arcade game and the other was a shoot-em-up. Most of these were in fact unpopular and often clunky and inefficient but their method of improvement was usually scrap the system entirely and make something so simple it’s superfluous.
THIS WAS THE MOST UNPOPULAR CHOICE
So here’s my prediction for the next Mass Effect game based off this data. It will feature a Male space Soldier who is mostly good but occasionally a renegade when it’s cool enough along with a default cardboard squad mate or two, and a female of either an unusual color or a robot who has a remarkably sized chest. RPG elements will be reduced further and there will be more focus on multiplayer. Here’s what I think it’ll look like:
GOTY
Ever since it was first announced, I was hooked on Star Wars: The Old Republic. It very rarely happens, but every once in a while a game comes along that manages to snare me entirely with just its premise. For me, SW:TOR is a combination of irresistible elements. First of all, it’s Star Wars; while my opinions on the films may not be in tune with the popular view, the idea of Jedi, Sith, the Republic and the Empire, the Force and all the associated technology has never stopped being enthralling. Secondly, it’s the sequel to two of my favourite PC RPGs: namely, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.
There have been any number of Star Wars games released in the past few decades, but almost all of them have had some relation to the plot of the films. Having not seen the original trilogy when it was at its prime, I can’t say I care much for the whiny Luke Skywalker, the bipolar Han Solo or the entitled Leia Organa. Whether this is down to cinematography or poor writing, I can’t say, but as disappointing as the relatively new Episodes I and II were, they managed to connect with me in a way that IV, V and VI never could. Yet the fact remained that everything I watched in the new trilogies was pre-determined: no matter how much I wanted Anakin to stop being such a gullible douche and kill Palpatine instead of hacking off Windu’s arm, I knew that it was inevitable.
When Knights of the Old Republic came along, it was the breath of fresh air I had craved for many years. These games were set in the distant past of the Star Wars universe, thousands of years before Anakin was immaculately conceived. This meant that the creators, BioWare – RPG legends already – had unparalleled freedom in creating their take on Star Wars. Finally, there was something new (albeit ironically much older) to get excited about. You were free to play the part of a new hero or villain, depending on your choices, in a galaxy where the powers of the Jedi and the Sith are undiminished.
Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that these two games were excellent. They brought a quality story to a franchise that desperately needed it, whether fans were willing to admit it or not. The games were very well received, but despite the second game leaving plenty of room for a third instalment, none seemed to be forthcoming. It wasn’t until late 2008 that we first heard about BioWare’s plans to make a Star Wars MMO set in The Old Republic universe: from then on, it was an ever-increasing tide of excitement, looking forward to what it would become.
From the get-go, BioWare were keen to tout their devotion to the “4th pillar” of storytelling. There was going to be no compromise in the quality that we had come to expect from their games; the story was not going to suffer just because they’d opted to create an MMO. What soon became evident is that they were doing a great deal to cater to a very specific category of players; a category which I belong to: the MMO solo-player. For many (indeed, perhaps the vast majority), MMOs are a way of playing a game with tens or even hundreds of other people, amongst an online community of thousands more. For those people, connecting with others is an integral part of what the game is about, and a great deal of the game’s features are tailored towards this aspect. For SW:TOR, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had taken a different route.
The single most important gameplay feature for me was that I could play through the entire game without ever having to acknowledge the existence of other players. I didn’t need to group up or rely on skills that other classes had which I didn’t; the core game of SW:TOR can be comfortably played solo. Of course, there are bonuses and benefits that come with being social, plus extra areas (dungeons and raids, or “flashpoints” and “operations”) that can’t be done on your own, but these are optional. Just like KotOR and KotOR II before it, SW:TOR can be treated as a single player game… and that’s exactly what I do.
This represents the third irresistible feature that had me from hello. It was KotOR III in all but name, with the developers going as far as to say that they were “really doing KotOR 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12+” in terms of story content. Everything we had accomplished in the first two games was being remembered and incorporated into the lore behind this new MMO. I was ready to pay just about anything to get my hands on this game, but it wasn’t until late 2011 that we finally had the chance to experience everything BioWare had promised. It was to be the biggest MMO launch since WoW. According to some, it was the long awaited “WoW-killer”, which would siphon off subscribers from Blizzard’s ageing, yet stubbornly invincible title. In hindsight, it was probably none of these things, and over the course of a year it began the slow march towards Free-to-Play. But for me, SW:TOR has lived up to every expectation.
I still pay the subscription fee, despite it being entirely optional at this point. It allows me to continue to experience everything the game has available, because I am far from done with it. I want to show BioWare that there are still people around who appreciate what they accomplished, despite the critics and naysayers. They made an excellent game, albeit not a “better” MMO than WoW: from my perspective, this isn’t a failure. I have a nice, quiet world to explore, with new content on the horizon in the form of the first digital expansion pack, “Rise of the Hutt Cartel”. I have at least six more storylines to experience, new classes to play… over a year after its release, I’m still finding new ways to enjoy my time with SW:TOR.
Guild Wars 2 remains my favourite MMO, because it achieves in every respect what its name implies. But SW:TOR will always be unique: to me, it’s an MSO – a Massively Single-Player Online RPG. No other game allows me to be my own Jedi Knight, almost completely unbound by the restrictions put in place by pre-determined narrative. No other game would allow my Light Side Sith Sorcerer to exist, nor my comically overweight, moustachioed villain, “Darth Deathdark” to grace the Empire with his presence. Like Star Wars: Galaxies before it, SW:TOR caters to a very unique section of gamers: one I’m glad to say I’m a part of. Lightsabers, man. LIGHTSABERS.
With Dragon Age III on the cards for 2013, now seems as good a time as ever to analyse the first two games as a way of getting us in the dragon-murdering mood, starting with the first game. Read more …