@ Elwro
Ow, sorry. My bad, i was taking in consideration that entire line of, like, exchanges about that thingie but only quoted the last one.
"The whole "army" stuff is just laughable - four beggars in your camp + 30-40 soldiers at once in the final battle who are nothing but a cheap meatshield. All "mass" fights are relegated to the pre-rendered cutscenes and thus irrelevant to actual gameplay. "
""It's not my problem that BioWare can't write a high-tech engine, offering Aurora with shadurs instead. The fact that you can easily mow down the darkspawn without "army"'s assistance only contributes to an anticlimatic feel of a battle for Denerim."
His concern about the whole army business being just a joke, the big battles happening only in cutscenes, and engine limitations affecting how relevant the massive fights are to the gameplay could be pretty well said about Shattered Lands. The final, epic battle between the alliance and the evil army thingie is your party plus three non player character heroes representing the three armies versus several waves of evil stuffies while text pop ups try to immerse you in the idea of you fighting a massive, epic battle.
But, like, we are playing role playing games. The final battle in Shattered Lands would totally not have been better if there were thirty thousands of non player characters rolling dice against some humongous army of evil thingies and stuffies. It would have been worse: Role playing games do not have the mechanics for that kind of stuffie, and even most pen and paper system that actually have some kind of massive battle mechanics involved usually abstract it a lot and then get the player characters in events from which they can affect the big picture, so in the end it is reduced to fights among player character and non player character allies against villains, subvillains, and nameless minions while the game master tries to immerse you into the idea thousands of guys and gals and trannies are dying all around for the glory of whatever.
If anything Bioware did it wrong by throwing large amounts of crap enemies instead of making it a fight among the, like, officers of your army and the strong evil dudes and dudettes of the evil thingie, throwing in some cinematics here and there with lots of guys going for the emperor and freedom and that kind of thingie.
It is totally not fair to say Bioware suck because of, like, what he mentioned when not even many pen and paper role playing games do it better. Do not misunderstand me: Bioware usually sucks a lot, and stuffies and thingies. But they do not suck a lot because they decided to abstract the epic battles or had not the technical prowess to make, like, Total War scale battles from the perspective of a role playing game.
Though now that i see it from this point and perspective and stuffies... My memory is kind of fuzzy, but wasn't get four allies and fight the evil army thingie Shattered Lands plot thingie too? DX I smell inspiration, nya.