So I decided to reinstall Dragon Age, just for shits and giggles and see if I could extract any anecdotal material I could share with people should they ever ask me what I thought about the game.
I fired up the game, and just from watching the intro I had a sudden urge to uninstall it because from what I could see it was going to be one hell of a generic, grand and supposedly epic popamole ride into Ferelden about fighting darkspawn, level-scaled bandits, and boredom.
So I kinda went like "Hey, if I'm to to get some juice out of this piece of crap I'm going to have to ignore some of the stuff in it and just enjoy the gameplay ride and have fun min-maxing stats, picking skills, talents, and tackling encounters that aren't as easy as those in The Witcher."
But that's when it hit me. I had to "turn my mind off" to enjoy whatever gameplay bits (and they're few) the game had to offer. I had to stop juding the voice-acting, the aesthetic design decisions, the way characters acted and behaved, the completely horrible and unbelievable writing, the reasons why a dungeon should or shouldn't exist, the economic and political landscape of the world, the uninspired monster lore, the whole Witcher rip-off vibe you get out of every corner of the game, and a myriad of other stuff that I simply couldn't bear to ignore.
Thus, my conclusion: the Codex is fucking mindless when it comes to playing games. It cannot into critical thinking, it can only think in terms of flowchart C&C, "functional" HUDs, item progression, spreadsheet leveling, encounter difficulty, turn-based vs. real-time...and all of this because judging said things is easy. Too easy. To this day the Codex still can't appreciate good writing (DA:O has some of the worst writing I've ever read and witnessing VD defending it was hard enough), it doesn't get what good music is all about, it knows fucking nothing about atmosphere, world design, lore, economics, basic human behavior, etc. The worst? Nobody seems to be making an effort to really understand this things. Instead you just call 'storyfag' all the other people that despite how utterly misguided they are (such as saying Mass Effect makes sense, or finding 13-year-old-aimed anime dungeon crawlers deep) at least put some (albeit incredibly small) amount of thought into why the goddamn Astral Dominae would fall into the Dark Savant's hands and if the war they mentioned between the ant-things and lizard-things was just mindless fluff to make the world sound epic, contrived and "alive".
To be honest, as I write this I've just realized I've outgrown this place. Before I registered I used to lurk the Codex a lot, and enjoyed reading how people here liked classics like Fallout, Arcanum, PS:T, but over time I've learned they've come to like them for the wrong reasons. I got in here because I wanted to promote my Witcher translation patch, because I thought people here cared about that sort of things in games (because Fallout and PS:T had them), and felt as bad as I did at the prospect of missing out all of the juicy art direction games could have, but I found out that still people couldn't really nail what it is that makes games truly great. It's like you all got stuck in this hivemind mode and couldn't really see the good and the bad in a game and just thought in terms of the buzzwords I mentioned above. "If it's turn-based, it's good!", "If it's got Tim Cain or Avellone in it, the writing's goode!", "Torchlight's music is good because it's got Uelmen in it!", and stupid crap like that.
To this day I can't understand how some people enjoyed DA:O. It's somewhat of a throwback to party-based RPGs but the content is so goddamn abysmal that you actually have to turn your mind off, but isn't the Codex all about being critical & intelligent when it comes to games? Then why did I have to actually not-think to wade my way through the first chapters? This never happened in The Witcher. I also can't understand how some people liked the new King's Bounty with all its kiddy stuff, abysmal music and shitty-quality sound effects, completely non-credible world and mindless grinding; or how someone could have said that DA2's Black Emporium has good voice-acting in it.
You really have to start growing, people. Judging games by their gameplay alone is too fucking easy.
I fired up the game, and just from watching the intro I had a sudden urge to uninstall it because from what I could see it was going to be one hell of a generic, grand and supposedly epic popamole ride into Ferelden about fighting darkspawn, level-scaled bandits, and boredom.
So I kinda went like "Hey, if I'm to to get some juice out of this piece of crap I'm going to have to ignore some of the stuff in it and just enjoy the gameplay ride and have fun min-maxing stats, picking skills, talents, and tackling encounters that aren't as easy as those in The Witcher."
But that's when it hit me. I had to "turn my mind off" to enjoy whatever gameplay bits (and they're few) the game had to offer. I had to stop juding the voice-acting, the aesthetic design decisions, the way characters acted and behaved, the completely horrible and unbelievable writing, the reasons why a dungeon should or shouldn't exist, the economic and political landscape of the world, the uninspired monster lore, the whole Witcher rip-off vibe you get out of every corner of the game, and a myriad of other stuff that I simply couldn't bear to ignore.
Thus, my conclusion: the Codex is fucking mindless when it comes to playing games. It cannot into critical thinking, it can only think in terms of flowchart C&C, "functional" HUDs, item progression, spreadsheet leveling, encounter difficulty, turn-based vs. real-time...and all of this because judging said things is easy. Too easy. To this day the Codex still can't appreciate good writing (DA:O has some of the worst writing I've ever read and witnessing VD defending it was hard enough), it doesn't get what good music is all about, it knows fucking nothing about atmosphere, world design, lore, economics, basic human behavior, etc. The worst? Nobody seems to be making an effort to really understand this things. Instead you just call 'storyfag' all the other people that despite how utterly misguided they are (such as saying Mass Effect makes sense, or finding 13-year-old-aimed anime dungeon crawlers deep) at least put some (albeit incredibly small) amount of thought into why the goddamn Astral Dominae would fall into the Dark Savant's hands and if the war they mentioned between the ant-things and lizard-things was just mindless fluff to make the world sound epic, contrived and "alive".
To be honest, as I write this I've just realized I've outgrown this place. Before I registered I used to lurk the Codex a lot, and enjoyed reading how people here liked classics like Fallout, Arcanum, PS:T, but over time I've learned they've come to like them for the wrong reasons. I got in here because I wanted to promote my Witcher translation patch, because I thought people here cared about that sort of things in games (because Fallout and PS:T had them), and felt as bad as I did at the prospect of missing out all of the juicy art direction games could have, but I found out that still people couldn't really nail what it is that makes games truly great. It's like you all got stuck in this hivemind mode and couldn't really see the good and the bad in a game and just thought in terms of the buzzwords I mentioned above. "If it's turn-based, it's good!", "If it's got Tim Cain or Avellone in it, the writing's goode!", "Torchlight's music is good because it's got Uelmen in it!", and stupid crap like that.
To this day I can't understand how some people enjoyed DA:O. It's somewhat of a throwback to party-based RPGs but the content is so goddamn abysmal that you actually have to turn your mind off, but isn't the Codex all about being critical & intelligent when it comes to games? Then why did I have to actually not-think to wade my way through the first chapters? This never happened in The Witcher. I also can't understand how some people liked the new King's Bounty with all its kiddy stuff, abysmal music and shitty-quality sound effects, completely non-credible world and mindless grinding; or how someone could have said that DA2's Black Emporium has good voice-acting in it.
You really have to start growing, people. Judging games by their gameplay alone is too fucking easy.