Heroes of Dragon Age (Dragon Age iOS F2P game) Review

What do you mean try too hard? Man need to discover Codex so he can learn the correct bile and venoms to spit at his target.

 

I'm glad the Dragon Age IP is being turned into shit.

Fuck Bioware. May the black plague infest them and cause them the same misery they have inflicted.

 

I was going to say, it doesn't sound like a problem since there are tens of thousands of better games to play.

Besides, this wasn't really made for us.

 

Bigger problem than this game being shit.

 

Bioware is the James Cameron of the video game world. Colorful, exciting, just enough drama to make a story, but with themes so hamfisted and shallow they border on cartoony.

That being said, Dragon Age is just colorful and energetic enough to make it work. One of their better creations.

 

James Cameron lately, yes, but there are movies Cameron has done that are much better movies than DA are games.

 

Remind me again why we should care about this

 

He starts the review with slamming freemium payment models but then bluntly confesses that he's addicted to the 'bait & switch' method of doing business at the end if done right. Way to fight the power?

 

Too many dashes, he need to embrace commas.

 

Sounds less like an attempt to market to imbeciles, and more like an attempt to put out a product with the DA name and artstyle as cheaply and quickly as possible in the hope that DA fans will download it on name value (hence the 'soft launch' - this isn't the result of some long effort at balancing the game's difficulty around idiots; it's an attempt to avoid having to balance anything so they can maximise $$$ on a cheap name cash-in that relies on well-establishes psychological addiction mechanisms).

Minimising the player's input in combat is vital to this kind of game. The game has to be able to rig the dicerolls behind the scene in order to encourage or force cash purchases. This is extremely common in freemium games: they give you an array of stats but there's nothing to link the stats to the outcome. Sure, you might raise strength by 5 points, but there's nothing to tell you what that actually means for damage, hitpoints or resistances. Invariably, the stats that actually count are not only hidden, but pre-set - the game is designed to present the player with 'content gates' every so often, and it doesn't matter what stats you have or what you do, the content gate will arrive when the game is programmed to make it arrive.

The same tactic has been used for years with poker machines. By putting up cards imitating the rules of a poker or blackjack game, the machine gets the player thinking that they have the same odds as if they were playing cards - the player often doesn't realise (or realises, but doesn't fully process) that there's no relation between what's on the screen and the likelihood of winning. The machine is programmed to pay out X amount of money after X number of turns (guaranteeing a fixed income for the house); it simply spawns whatever cards it needs to meet its pre-programmed payout cycle. Freemium games work the same way - no relationship between what's on the screen and the outcome.

That's why you never see a freemium game with combat more complex than turn-based alternating of attacks, perhaps with a cool-down limited selection of special attacks. They're never movement based (in terms of movement and positioning mattering to combat) and they never involve squad tactics, as that would risk disrupting the game's 'payout cycle'.

Many actually adjust the payout cycle 'behind the scenes' once a player makes a purchase (as most of the freemium games' profit comes from a very small number of players, the aim is to get the player to make one purchase on the basis that it will provide a long-term convenience in the game, then accelerate the rate at which content gates appear to milk the player to a point where the player has spent too much money to 'waste it' by quitting). There's never any true randomness in these games (the win rate in combat is pre-set to ensure the content gates arrive at the right times), but there's plenty where the game presents a 'soft' content gate that you can ignore for a few hours before the first 'pay or quit' content gate arrives. They don't make money from people playing for free, and if the player hasn't paid up after a few hours the games usually just cash out and present a hard content gate to net the % that wil pay up rather than quit. Once the player DOES make a certain number of purchases (often after just one purchase), the game adjusts and starts throwing content gates at the player every 2nd encounter.

Yep, in most of these games making a cash purchase actually makes the game harder (insofar as difficulty is a relevant concept in a game where the outcomes have no basis in player skill).

 

Why are you glad? Dragon Age is one of the truly unique and interesting franchises. I find it sad that such a great potential is being mercylessly raped and desecrated by its own creators.

 

That is why.

Fuck them and fuck EA.

 

DA was just a lame attempt to be a Baldur's Gate 2 spiritual successor.

 

I thought BioWare could go no lower. It's sort of embarrassing

 

What's unique and interesting about it? To me, it seems as generic as fantasy can get.

 

So what? DA had consistent world with decent backstory to support it. The fact that biowhores threw it into trash pile with DA2 is another matter.

 

When they were probably the first to add "extra" skin/weapons as dlc. This is the only road they could go

Dragon age 2 first dlc was a item pack, if I recall properly too.

 

I think you've set the bar too low.

 

To go more into the point of my previous post, cause I cannot edit

When an EA employee said that they going to charge you for clips of magazine in battlefield, you really should know better that they are going to try this
When biowhore spend so much effort into making Kotor mmo, only to switch it to free to play. (they were doing well, when they switch. If I recall correctly) Just for a crappy few buck (I even recall someone saying that they didn't even do it well engouh, probably because the idea of making a quick buck effectively was rushed to just to make a quick buck)

I'm not approving that this is a good thing. But one cannot possibly not see this coming a mile away base on the past action EA made

I think rather then thinking how low can EA/Bioware possibly acheive, one must question whether these idea are making them the few quick buck they so wanted.

 

I don't really get the author's point.

Yes, it's a downward spiral - but you can't blame us for this mess. Games have always been a gamble. Like movies, you don't know what you're going to get until you pay the fee. I think the free-to-play model isn't inherently evil (just look at games like Path of Exile) nor is it inherently damaging to the market - it is instead this lack of empathy for the product and the business strategies exmployed by producers that cause this downward spiral - consumers get the impression the games they are being asked to 'buy' aren't worth the money, this impression only grows more and more powerful with each title like this that is released.

It's like complaining about the nature of a phone game. Did you really expect it to not be total shit? The most wildly successful phone game is - well, you know. If that's the success that's being strived for, is it any wonder we're where we're at?

At least films have film school - where scholars sit down and point out what works and what doesn't in film. Your average game designer probably couldn't even relate binary trees to level design, or explain what makes good artificial intelligence. Hell, most game designers couldn't properly come up with a balanced and fun weapon in Team Fortress 2, let alone design an entire RPG - where often the emphasis is not on some WoW-inspired experience bar or perk tree, but items.

 

There's this thing now that lets you read about games from people who've already played them, and use this to make informed purchasing decisions. It's called the internet. If you can't be bothered to do the research before spending your money, then you deserve to be parted from it.

Here's an idea: maybe developers could make the games they'd want to play, instead of trying to find new ways to exploit their customers.

 

I didn't even know this game existed. I want the last 10 minutes of my life back.