Dragon Age 3

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Bioware is in the process of hiring for Dragon Age 3. So, it looks like it will be developed. Hopefully this time around they go back to the stuff that made DAO great and add/modify that stuff that made DAII a good game. One other thing, I hope DAIII take 2-3 years to develop and not 18 months. Bioware should also provide gamers DLCs or an expansion for the next 18-24 months to flushout DAII.

 

My concern is that EA appears to be forcing Bioware to adhere to its standard mold, which seems to be something distinctly different from the Bioware I've come to know and love.

My impression of EA based on DA2 and recent comments I've seen about ME3: Don't take more than 1 year to release a game, gear it toward the mass market, players are stupid, and will take whatever we give them.

Somehow they managed to release Origins in true Bioware fashion, and they were just about at their best. With Dragon Age 2, you see the same hints of genius, but by and large, they aren't carried through to their proper conclusions. And then you have the plain old corner cutting.

I guess that DA3 will either be a "Bioware game" or an "EA game." As much as I love Bioware and the Dragon Age IP, I sincerely doubt that I'll pick up DA3 if it comes out as just another EA title. They need to go back to something much closer to what Origins was, take their time, and focus on their faithful audience (which happens to be a bit of a niche audience), or they will be lost to me.

They may still make a ton of cash appealing to the mass market console monkeys, at the cost of their artistic souls. It remains to be seen where Bioware will take it. I'll also be watching DLCs for DA2 very closely for clues to where Bioware is headed.

 

Sega? Don't you mean EA? EA owns Bioware now and EA is known to push games out just for a revenue stream regardless of the game quality.

 

Well they did make that one Sonic game .

 

They did the same with Origin (the company that made the old ultima games). That company went straight south after EA took over. If I remember correctly; they also did the same to Westwood studios. I am betting Bioware suffers the same fate.

 

Right, EA is what I meant, of course. I'm currently playing Shogun 2, which is published by Sega, so I have Sega on the brain. Add to that working too many hours and not sleeping much due to a newborn, and details get mixed up real easily in my head right now.

 

Even though EA doesn't idle for too long, before spilling titles with ever increasing numerical values at the end, I was still a bit surprised how fast DA3 was announced...
Haven gotten around to try DA2, and most likely I wont!

I really wonder what's left of BioWare...people that made epics like BG and PS:T.

 

Bioware didn't make PS:T, Black Isle did.

 

I believe Bioware is going to be EA's MMO and RPG studio developers. I am stating this simply because Mystic was combined with Bioware after EA acquired them. I believe that Bioware has a strong enough presence as a RPG developer it would be stupid and costly for EA to disolve Bioware; however, EA is pretty stupid and can ruin Bioware's reputation with mass production of RPG titles, like DAII.

A few things to point out about DAO and DAII.

1) DAO was developed by Bioware when they were an independtent company and took over 5 years to develop and get released.

2) In 2009 EA bought Bioware and made DAO,a PC game go console, which delayed Dragon Age release date. Within 6 months time DAO was released on three platforms with many bugs on the consoles and a few on the PC, though the PC was patched within a month and the consoles took roughly 9 months to get properly patched. This was a EA move and not a Bioware move. Bioware had 2 story add on DLC and another one in the pipeline that was expected to be release 2 months after the game was developed.

3) DAII was announced when DAO Awakening was released with an expected release date of 2-11-2011, which was roughly 14 months after DAO was released. It has been confirmed that DAII was in development right around the time DAO was released if not the month before the November 2009 release date of DAO.

4) DAII took 15-16 months for development, which is about a 1/4 of the time DAO took. This resulted in what we have seen and heard from gamers who enjoyed DAO. It has been two months since DAII has been released and we have 1 story added on DLC and one (3 if you go by class) item DLC. As of now I have not heard of any other DLC for DAII.

5) DAIII art and design team is being hired two months after DAII released. Hopefully, Bioware uses the same engine that was used in DAII, but spends a good amount of time updating it to align the series between what we saw in DAII and DAO for charater development with talents/spells, skills, crafting, etc... Also, maybe more time being spent on developing more envirnoments that what we saw in DAII.

Right now I am being hopeful for DAIII. There are over 90 pages of custmer comments on DAII and DAO - things we liked and did not like, etc... My hope is that Bioware listened to its customers and make DAIII what the customers expected from DAII and not what was developed and sold to the public. If Bioware fails on DAIII my bet is that most of the Bioware supporters will not buy another old school fantasy product from EA/Bioware. If DAIII does provide that gaming experience we hoped for from DAII, than Bioware would reclaim there glory and satify the loyal fans that helped build up its business.

 

At least we have CD Project and Beteshda.

 

Too bad they aren't doing party based games though. That is, to the best of my understanding Elder Scrolls is still primarily a "single hero" type game rather than a party, and I know the Witcher/Witcher2 doesn't include a party (it has the silly "mouse tactics" to keep you busy instead). Oh well.

Mike Laidlaw claims that he's listening to community feedback regarding the failings of DA2, and plans to address the sticking points in future release. I hold out some hope, but since it seems that EA's business model conflicts with the sort of games I'd like to see Bioware making... I don't hold out a lot of hope. Time will tell, though.

 

I'm not sure what was going on during DA:Awakening production, but if you ask me, all i see is EA all over it.
It has the continuation of DA:O, starts up well, there's loads of quests with exclusive endings, a bunch of good ideas in there.

And yet.. it's unfinished. It has no polish, there's so few real alternate paths. You're pidgeonholed into the one main road with precious few sideways. Dialogues get forced on you, so many times i've ended up taking/making a quest decision in-game while having absolutely no intention of doing so.
It's like they laid the groundwork, most of the infrastructure of the story, yet when it came to really flesh it out in other directions, someone simply said "stop, it's fine" and out it went.

DAII is just a much more extreme case of the same, the lack of time showing in many other areas as well.

I've little to no hopes for a good DAIII game. If EA had any intention of encouraging quality games, they'd had ample time to learn from their many, many ruinations of very good developer houses over the years.
It's like they're showing FIFA series as the one and only destiny for every game. "Look, it works here, a game every year that sells... and if yours doesn't, well, it's not our fault, FIFA proves it can be done."

 

DAO: Awakening is an expansion that was released roughly 4-5 months after DAO was released. I was not expecting the expansion to have the depth of DAO. DAO: Awakening did provide extra time to play the warden from DAO or start an Orlesian warden. It was good for an expansion, and I would not expect much more than what it had; however, it was buggy and still is at times. That is the only disappointment I have from DAO: Awakening.

As for DAII; it was the sequel to DAO. To put it simply, you would expect a compelling story, improved game play, and more DA goodness. Instead, we get an OK story, slightly improved game play (when fighting) and less DA goodness. It is so bad that even Mike Laidlaw recently admitted that DAII has quite a few faults. I don’t mind DAII, but it is not what RPG fans expected from Bioware and if anything, it was insult to the gamers who buy Bioware games.

When I played ME series from Bioware I thought the first one had many good points and quite a few annoying points. For the type of game that ME was I felt ME2 improved on all the good points and took away all the annoying points. The only two things they changed in ME2 that I felt they should not have removed was the skill/level system and how armor worked in ME1. But overall, the story of ME2 was just as good as ME1. The NPC were just as colorful, actually I felt they were more colorful than ME1 NPCs. ME2 was not a let down when compared to ME1. The game continued Shepard’s story and his epic heroics.

When I compared the DA to the ME series they did try to make DA series line up with the ME series. Dumb down the leveling system, remove companion armor/equipment, reduce inventory, etc… To me it made sense how things changed from ME1 to ME2, but in the DA series it did not make sense.

Here is why the changes worked for ME2. 1) You are in space and working for a company that has quite a bit of financial backing – therefore you companions should all have well equipped armor/guns and if you do find something it is because the weapon is custom by another civilization, etc… In ME2, if you did find better equipment it made sense to update/upgrade the armor since it is all technical and requires some tinkering.

In DA2 it didn’t make sense to restrict companion armor, because most of your companion, like Hawke, did not have money early on. As you acquired money/found treasure they should equip the better armor/items. Instead, we don’t have the option and they continue to wear the same clothing through out the game. Since DA series is medival, upgrading armor is not a technical thing; maybe magical, but even that can only go so far without updating the armor itself.

I just hope that Mike Laidlaw, Bioware, and company listen to its gamer and makes DAIII what DAII should have been or come out with a DLC/Expansion that fixes some of the issues we see in DAII to make it a game that is closer to DAO and not ME2.

 

My feelings as well. This is really the first time Bioware hasn't hit it out of the park, and I think they know it. It'll be interesting to see now much EA interferes with their commitment to quality, and how much of a fight they put up to ensure DAIII lives up to their fans' (now bitter) expectations. Hopefully they will see that mass-appeal isn't always a winning strategy.

I can't really fault Bioware for the missteps here. I fault EA. Greedy publishers ruin a lot of good games. I'm still pissed off about KoToR 2: The Sith Lords, and that was 6 years ago. While I was tempted then to blame Obsidian, in digging around I discovered that it was Lucasarts that all but forced them to ship the game in time for the holiday season despite Obsidian's pleading them for more time, game-breaking bugs be damned.

 

Patch 1.03 is now released. It supposedly fixes a lot of the issues gamers had with the game for difficult or lack thereof. I just hope Bioware is able to bring in new elements with the DLCs and make the DLC part of the game, instead of how they operated in DAO.

 

The console monkey were not all that happy with DAII too. I'm one of them, though prior I did only play RPG on PC.

 

Good grief, part #3? I haven't yet fully recovered from, let alone completed part #2.

 

All I hope is that they resolve the map issue and go back to DA:O where the locations were different and more of it took place outside of a city.

And that they get rid of the Fight-cutscene-fight-cutscene mentality that DA2 seemed to have.

I enjoyed DA2 but it fell way short of DA:O and I hope that the third volume is much closert to the original.