Dragon Age Dragon Age: Dreadwolf - full reveal in Summer 2024, Solas fangirls rejoice

[9ted6]

A problem here is a lot of people don't consider ME well written, not even the first one.

I don't think it was at all.

 

[Monocause]

A problem here is a lot of people don't consider ME well written, not even the first one.

I don't think it was at all.

"Not even" the first one? ME1 was basically cool ideas with very poor execution. Pretty much everything about the game, be it the writing or different gameplay elements, was either shallow or hollow. Or both. In ME2 they refined it a lot and delivered a tighter, much better game in pretty much every department. Scrapped a bunch of stuff that didn't really work in the first game anyway and would likely never work, and improved vastly on the things that were promising. As a result ME2 was a competently written, much more tightly designed and enjoyable action game with some minor RPG elements to spice things up.

It was an interestingly different path compared to the DA series. With ME, the team stuck to a large chunk of the original vision and refined it. With DA, if you compare Origins to 2 and 3 these are very, very different games in terms of the vision and the core design. Which was a damn shame as I'm one of the people who really liked Origins when it came out.

Curious how will DA4 pan out but not holding my breath. DA3 was an improvement over the piece of shit that DA2 was, but was still overall a poor game suffering from huge content bloat and major design issues. I can bet that what will happen is that when it gets released I'll probably watch some gameplay and determine it's meh, then few years later I'll buy it on sale for like 8$, play it for a few hours and drop it cause it's meh. This is what should've happened with DA3 but i was younger and had more time to kill playing mediocre games.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

Video games don't have great writing and never will. They have serviceable writing at best. If you want great writing, then read a novel.

That said, I do think the ME series has some interesting lore, rememberable characters and compelling plotlines for a video game. The problem is that Bioware either tainted or abandoned most of it by ME3.

 

[Tyranicon]

Video games don't have great writing and never will. They have serviceable writing at best. If you want great writing, then read a novel.

Give it time. Video games have a high production threshold to pass before solodev catches on for writers who want to explore an interactive medium.

Writers are inherently lazy creatures, part of the reason why we didn't get real jobs in the first place.

Once the convenience tools are there, you'll see plenty of creatives flocking to the medium, and some of them will be good.

Solodev is self-filtering: those who don't have neccesary skills and stamina likely won't even get past the idea guy stage.

 

[jackofshadows]

L'Etoile also became a woke hack by the way, as he proved on The Outer Worlds.

You sure? Because if you mean Parvati then it was Dollarhyde who's changed the character so abysmally.

 

[Roguey]

L'Etoile also became a woke hack by the way, as he proved on The Outer Worlds.

You sure? Because if you mean Parvati then it was Dollarhyde who's changed the character so abysmally.

He was the one who conceived her as an asexual lesbian, Dollarhyde just made her quest all about that.

 

[NecroLord]

an asexual lesbian

 

[Camel]

L'Etoile also became a woke hack by the way, as he proved on The Outer Worlds.

You sure? Because if you mean Parvati then it was Dollarhyde who's changed the character so abysmally.

She’s considered the best character in the game.

 

[Roguey]

She’s considered the best character in the game.

By cringe peddlers.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

L'Etoile also became a woke hack by the way, as he proved on The Outer Worlds.

You sure? Because if you mean Parvati then it was Dollarhyde who's changed the character so abysmally.

She’s considered the best character in the game.

Preacher guy > all the other companions.

 

[ind33d]

Anyone seriously expecting DA4 to be good should just play SWTOR instead. Bioware is donezo

 

[Rhobar121]

She’s considered the best character in the game.

It rather shows the quality of the other characters.

 

[Lodis]

Anyone seriously expecting DA4 to be good should just play SWTOR instead. Bioware is donezo

I don't think anybody is expecting it to be good except maybe coping redditors who are pretty much all that's left of Bioware's fanbase.

 

[9ted6]

Anyone seriously expecting DA4 to be good should just play SWTOR instead. Bioware is donezo

I'd say at this point it's looking just about as unlikely DA4 will be released as it's unlikely to be good.

Very likely to be complete unmitigated disaster if it does launch, though, and it'll be fun watching the devs jump through hoops passing the blame on ists, phobes, and each other.

 

[Slaver1]

This game will be so gay it will pop out of the monitor and molest underage male family members. After you install Dragonage Dreadwolf none of the icons on your desktop will align straight; your taskbar itself will curve in a vertical fashion. Your Email address will be spammed with so many propositions from every gay nightclub on Planet Earth and other planets you never knew existed that your account will end up permanently cancelled. IF the rapidly deteriorating degenerates who are working on this title are even able to produce a game at this point every byte of it will be dripping with so much depravity it will cause spontaneous gender transformations, the urge to slaughter Christians, straight to gay conversion and sudden unabating lust for troons.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

"Not even" the first one? ME1 was basically cool ideas with very poor execution. Pretty much everything about the game, be it the writing or different gameplay elements, was either shallow or hollow. Or both. In ME2 they refined it a lot and delivered a tighter, much better game in pretty much every department. Scrapped a bunch of stuff that didn't really work in the first game anyway and would likely never work, and improved vastly on the things that were promising. As a result ME2 was a competently written, much more tightly designed and enjoyable action game with some minor RPG elements to spice things up.

ME2 is neither a good RPG, nor a good action/shooter/adventure and does not improve upon ME1. At most you can say it's a "sidegrade".

On the gameplay side you a bland cover shooter:
1. The introduction of ammo; it makes no sense in the world of ME and even the writers know that considering their lore reason for the change is so stupid and they know it. Talks about "DPS" even for stuff like snipers for example.
2. Ammo also exacerbates the cover shooter issue
3. Introduction of "heavy weapons", from grenade launchers to reaper tech to blackhole guns that all use the same "energy cell" ammo.
4. Useless Classes; on the higher difficulties you essentially need Miranda with you at all times and others who can use warp/overload to strip the multiple layers of armour on every single enemy in the game. Once the armour is stripped, the enemy dies way too fast for biotics to work at all so Adept doesn't work. Remember the days you could send fully armoured Krogans flying into the air with biotics?
5. Gameplay changes added tons of narrative issues & plot holes. ME1 was pretty good with narrative cohesion in almost every aspect (I'm not including dialogue options in that). For example, the new droids & heat sinks being used in areas that shouldn't have access to them (i.e. Jacob's loyalty mission)
6. Global cooldowns, not just the one used like in ME1 which negatively affected gameplay as well

ME1 combat on highest difficulty rewards positioning, ability use and speccing yourself & party members
ME2 combat on highest difficulty is stripping 2-3 levels of armour waiting for ability cooldowns on enemy after enemy and conserving ammo
ME3 combat is ME2 but much more refined, won't go into specifics here but the fun, action combat they're clearly going for is at it's peak here

The only improvement I can think of is enemy AI, and when the level design was at it's best, it provided some decent thinking instead of mind numbing cover shooting. Tali's loyalty mission when you meet Kal Reegar & the final fight on Horizon come to mind. However, the quality there is still bogged down by the cover shooting mechanics that haven't been ironed out. In contrast, level design in ME3 was consistently good to decent all around apart from some misses like the final mission, without being as bogged down by monotony.

It reminds me of the Witchers, the second game does a sidegrade/downgrade into a new system where both have their flaws (instead of improving on the first) and then the third games combat is much better than the second (for what they were going for).

On the narrative side, ME2 has a retarded plot that also destroyed any progress in what's supposed to be a trilogy and has some of the most retarded story moments in all 3 games. There are no sidequests apart from random shit you find on random planets that are also shallow. The loyalty quests are just checklists & daddy issue drama. It also goes into the "chosen one" thing where Shepard can do anything without an actual reason of why he can do it in ME1. Improvements came only in the character department where you get more personal instead of most characters being information dumps for their respective races (ex. Wrex was the only exceptional character in ME1 imo).

With all the downgrades/sidegrades, and a few actual improvements, I don't see how ME2 can be "an improvement in virtually every department".

 

[lycanwarrior]

Dragon Age 4: Dreadwolf Will Not Release Before April 2024​

https://wccftech.com/dragon-age-4-dreadwolf-not-release-april-2024/

 

[Child of Malkav]

Dragon Age 4: Dreadwolf Will Not Release Before April 2024​

https://wccftech.com/dragon-age-4-dreadwolf-not-release-april-2024/

I'm shocked guys! Honest.

 

[DeepOcean]

Man, it is looking more and more like, when this game comes out, will feed memes for the next 10 years the same as Mass Effect Andromeda did.

 

[mediocrepoet]

They're waiting for new advances in data storage and compression to fit all the concentrated gay in there. It's simply too much for current media to handle.

 

[DeepOcean]

Probably we reached the gay singularity and the game identified itself as a tranny and as alot of trannies like to do, the DVD decided to escape oppression by jumping Bioware's office window.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Man, it is looking more and more like, when this game comes out, will feed memes for the next 10 years the same as Mass Effect Andromeda did.

The thing is Andromeda doesn't even fuel meme for longer than 1 year or so. It's completely mediocre and bland in everything its trying to do and its nipped in the bud by EA

This too will very likely be the same fate.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Man, it is looking more and more like, when this game comes out, will feed memes for the next 10 years the same as Mass Effect Andromeda did.

The thing is Andromeda doesn't even fuel meme for longer than 1 year or so. It's completely mediocre and bland in everything its trying to do and its nipped in the bud by EA

This too will very likely be the same fate.

1 year? Try 1 month, tops

 

[notpl]

Video games don't have great writing and never will. They have serviceable writing at best. If you want great writing, then read a novel.

Give it time. Video games have a high production threshold to pass before solodev catches on for writers who want to explore an interactive medium.

Writers are inherently lazy creatures, part of the reason why we didn't get real jobs in the first place.

Once the convenience tools are there, you'll see plenty of creatives flocking to the medium, and some of them will be good.

Solodev is self-filtering: those who don't have neccesary skills and stamina likely won't even get past the idea guy stage.

In order for a good writer to make a video game he would need to exist in the first place. Since it is no longer 1960 or earlier, this is an impossibility.

 

[Monocause]

ME2 is neither a good RPG, nor a good action/shooter/adventure and does not improve upon ME1. At most you can say it's a "sidegrade".

Your post sounds reasoned but there's a lot of things you say that stick to your perception of the writing/lore or never explain and wave away as obvious. But let's agree that it's not a "good RPG" - I'd argue that it's not an RPG at all. It's an action with some RPG elements that add flavour.

1. The introduction of ammo; it makes no sense in the world of ME and even the writers know that considering their lore reason for the change is so stupid and they know it. Talks about "DPS" even for stuff like snipers for example.
2. Ammo also exacerbates the cover shooter issue
3. Introduction of "heavy weapons", from grenade launchers to reaper tech to blackhole guns that all use the same "energy cell" ammo.
4. Useless Classes; on the higher difficulties you essentially need Miranda with you at all times and others who can use warp/overload to strip the multiple layers of armour on every single enemy in the game. Once the armour is stripped, the enemy dies way too fast for biotics to work at all so Adept doesn't work. Remember the days you could send fully armoured Krogans flying into the air with biotics?
5. Gameplay changes added tons of narrative issues & plot holes. ME1 was pretty good with narrative cohesion in almost every aspect (I'm not including dialogue options in that). For example, the new droids & heat sinks being used in areas that shouldn't have access to them (i.e. Jacob's loyalty mission)
6. Global cooldowns, not just the one used like in ME1 which negatively affected gameplay as well

1. The point I'll grant is that yes, the story "explanation" of why ammo exists in the first place was silly. But from a gameplay mechanic standpoint it served a very clear purpose - forced you to switch between weapons and prevented you from using the same gun all the time during protracted engagements. And other things like that.

2. You never defined "the cover shooter issue" therefore I don't know what is exacerbated. I take it you don't like cover shooters - cool. I don't either usually. One of the ME series strengths is that they're basically cover shooters that are acceptable and still fun for players who usually never play cover shooters.

3. And this is a problem why? I mean, I understand that this is silly in terms of worldbuilding but gameplay-wise these worked fine.

4. "on the higher difficulties" - you refer to that a few times including later when you compare the three games and mention armor. I believe the problem is shit balancing of higher difficulties and not "useless classes", and poor difficulty level balancing is something that Bioware has always done ever since their games started to have adjustable difficulties.

5. Look. ME story was always full of holes and undercooked. The Mass Effect worldbuilding fell apart when you poked a stick at it since the first game and kept being like that ever since. It was always a collection of sometimes cool sci-fi tropes and concepts put together in a world that really made barely any sense.

I don't get how can we talk about "narrative cohesion" and complain about ammo clips when we're talking about a world where biotics exist but have no real impact on the world, you're a super powerful (reportedly) SPECTRE agent but that has no real impact on the world and the interactions people you meet, "the council" is a group of three doofuses etc etc. It's all pulp that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief to stand straight.

I'll reiterate: The Mass Effect games never had good writing or believable worldbuilding. The plot holes you mention in ME2 - I could spend days writing up all the fundamental ridiculous problems with the setting that were introduced in ME1 and always waved away. I don't think the series ever really gunned for serious narrative consistency or proper worldbuilding and therefore I think it's probably best not to judge it for it.

6. You'll need to substantiate that statement with something - I personally don't see the negative affect.

It seems to me that your core issue is that you want/expect a specific kind of a game with a specific set of design choices and ME2 is simply not it. This is fine and that's your preference, but the problem is that you're trying to elevate your personal preference to something that looks like an objective assessment of quality and that's just not really working out.