ThoseDeafMutes
Learned
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2016
- Messages
- 239
The problem isn't the gameplay--EAware makes reasonably competent skill-tree action games--but the everything else. There's a reason why Bioware has been butting its head against ~5m sales for 15 years, while Bethesda sells more on launch day that Bioware games do over their lifetime. The fact is that core gamers (talking males 18-34 ± 5) have never really taken to the soap opera/romance elements that have been progressively devouring the main plots from ME2 onwards. If they absolutely had to include those elements, ME2 was probably the most core-accessible way to do so: supersoldier/underwear model Shepard saves the galaxy while blowing shit up and fucking a variety of (theoretically) hot women.
7 years later and where are we? The Thalidomide Twins, Hipster Manlet and his sister Potato, picking space-elfroot in a game where the devs have spent more time tweeting about what insect- and tentacle-people the player can fuck than they have the actual plot. I assume EA wants these games to make as much money as possible, which is why they've been dropping Skyrim and TW3 comparisons, but I doubt the combined slashfic and animalfucker communities are going to come through for them.
tl,dr: If "see that cricket-woman? you can fuck it" is part of your online marketing, you're probably not making games for core gamers anymore.
I'm not sure you can say they're progressively devouring the main plotlines. Even in ME3 where you had the highest number of romances, they didn't spend much of the game on them at all. They're still shallow, minor flirting with a few dialogue prompts on top of what everyone else got, then one cutscene for sex at the end. The reason it had a high number of them was because it had to be able to continue them from the first two games. Inquisition had fewer numerically, but slightly longer. Still, that game was excessively long by every metric, so they're a far smaller percentage of the total game, even if you just count the main questline and whatever bare minimum of sidequests you need to gather enough power. What ME3 and Inqusition did offer was more variety in the types of romance options, e.g. gay men, lesbian women (as opposed to the standard bisexual woman they'd usually throw in in previous games). It was Dragon Age Origins I think where they first had a bisexual man. Ultimately this is part of the bioware DNA and it's not becoming more prominent over time, at least not for their last three or four games.
For reference, ME3 was confirmed to have sold 6 million units recently. Each game in the core ME trilogy sold progressively more than the last. As to whether or not Inquisition sold well, I have no idea. EA bragged about it at launch, but has been quiet ever since. We rarely get total sales figures anymore from any company. But in any case, you don't hit 6 million units without appealing to the core gamer. There aren't a lot of franchises that do better in the RPG space, it's basically Bethesda, Witcher and that's it.