Seven said:
I can see just fine: you used the sub-heading "PREMISE." The premise of both games are epic fantasies in which you save the world. Implementation is something different. Look man, it's the internet and this is a forum, you can't pretend that you meant something else when it's in plain black and white for all the world to see.
Alright, fine, outline the premise of DA and BG1 then, because this is plain black and white.
BG1: A dude trying to figure out what he is and what is going on with a bunch of bros. Finds out he's uber but with tons of other ubers being out there wanting to kill him and each others.
Da1: A dude sets out to save the world as one of the last of his kind.
'k. No difference.
Alright, alright. I'll make a small concession here. Yes, there are similarities in the sense of the following: it's a heroic fantasy, the protagonists are both blood-bound to their position in the plot, and they need to overcome something or the other. If you really want to use the "All stories have a finite amount of variations to run by", alright, we can go with it, too. However, in this particular case, first premise is interesting, while the second premise is interesting if you're a teenager.
Actually, Denerim was more than just the market district. BTW, sure they could have created separate little areas for every quest NPC, but how does that add value--who likes load times. Do you remember BG, where you had to go from area to another and then another just to complete the most mundane fedex quest? People tend to forget about this as time goes on.
A hundred square feet is in no way better though, is it? I'll not go immersion-fagging here, but just for basics - I want to see where the years of work are supposed to be. Couldn't they just carve the old zones up or something? Or did they redo everything from a scratch when the project was rebooted? Seems more that way to me.
When BG came out, it was
huge, and yes, it had painfully slow load times and don't forget that you had to often pop those disks in and out, but the pay-off was clearly there. Frankly, I prefer to pop those disks for an off-chance to see something different and creative to having slow load times of tiny repetitive zones. And yes, DA manages to have slow load times while not giving much of anything in return.
Let's compare to a contemporary - Denerim (DA) vs Vizima (TW). Denerim is tiny and slow and unmemorable while trying to present a down-to-earth sort of a fantasy setting. Vizima, on the other hand, is of a proper size, filled with crowd-generating NPCs and having a general atmosphere of a city. Certainly, TW didn't have a limitation of having to run on a console, and I can forgive tiny areas to DA based on this, but otherwise, it just fails to present a believable city. It's like Imperial City, only condensed to one tiny district.
Back to this--once again with time experience fades, so if you're going to limit yourself to just BG1, may be you might recall how generic and black and white the games was (even more so than the sequels and expansions)--it just seems like you're remembering just the good and then painting and overly rosy picture at that. And I mention this since you decided to bring up implementation.
Yes, but I don't mention all of the implementations, just those five points, which are my original concern. Quest design has improved undoubtedly, and the 3D presentation can make for more impressive camera work, melee combat is far more involved... But I wasn't bringing those up so let's just not go there, unless we do it separate from the rest of this thing.
You don't have to do all of the mundane quests in DA--in fact in some intances you can tell NPCs' off if you're unsatisfied with the quality of the quest. Maybe you've forgotten the myriad of mundane tasks in BG, or maybe you like killing rats?
Maybe I do, when the story supports the reasoning behind killing rats. At the start of BG you play a character that's probably only killed rats up to the point where the story begins.
In DA you can have a character that's never killed before at the start of the story turning into a murder machine still in the prologue - the Noble intro where you can rip off the asses off the assailants while the Guard and everyone else just fucking dies to the super-assassins. Your power, however, is not supported by the story at this point because you've not yet fused yourself with McGuffin.
And yes, you
can avoid the sidequests, but why should you? Unless you're doing a speedrun (what) or are bored of the side-quests, why would you want to skip them? Why would you not want to upgrade your sidekicks or bone Dog? And what will the story do anyway, present you a game over screen if you take too long?
Simply put, there's absolutely no reason to hurry. None! People bashed this to no end with Oblivion, and this is pretty much the exact same thing, except you have Blight instead of Gates.
Both games look fine when compared to their contemporaries to me atl least...
Dunno, man. Compare DA art/graphics against TW or Risen or Drakensang, for instance. Sure, DA isn't a steaming pile of crap when it comes to graphics, but it's not going to win beauty contests among even the RPG genre (although why "even"? RPGs these days are as much about graphics as any other genre). The graphics are serviceable, but unworthy of praise that have been given out by the media.
Meanwhile, comparing BG1 against its contemporaries is, while in part, a matter of taste, more in favour of BG1 - there certainly were more technologically advanced games at the time, but what BG1 has going for it is an overall impression - and it is a vastly different game from any other at the time from the way it looks and sounds. DA, on the other hand, feels generic, to me at least.
