Bioware is lost for the RPG community

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For myself, after Mass Effect 2 I lost faith in Bioware to give us a RPG worthy of Baldurs Gate.

 

I agree with you, but I find it difficult to choose an appropriate answer in the poll.
Thinking, Bioware is drifting towards the shooting/action genre completely is overreacting, in my opinion.
The third option is too fan boyish. Yes, they still do acceptable RPGs compared to other producer/developer, though blindly marking everything they do as good doesn't seem fitting for me.
The second answer sounds too positive. I'd say they try to 'streamline' their newer games as much as possible to include the broadest customer base possible. That could be seen as 'balancing', but I can't find a positive sentiment for this, imho this way it isn't but luke warm.

 

I do not agree. ME1+2 are superb games. And Dragon Age is pretty great too.

They both aren't as good as BG2 though, but I can't imagine many games that could live up.

 

No, it's not lost. Dragon Age was a great game. Flawed, but beautifully done and lots of fun. DA2 looks like it's going to be pretty good. Is there a developer out there who does RPGs better than Bioware? I can't think of one. Bethesda makes great games, but they're more action RPGs than the traditional party-based top-downers that Baldur's Gate was the archetype for. Obsidian? Every game they've made that I've played has felt half-assed, and they don't really do anything original (they build on the work of other studios).

I think you're making a poor assumption with the title of this poll and the way the questions were worded.

 

DA is a great game, very worthy of the BG spiritual successor title. I'll wait to see what DA2 actually looks like before saying anything final, though. It's looking more and more like ME in the DA world to me, and that's not good. Both Musyka and Priestly have officially come out calling it an action-RPG, but apparently definitions are mixed on that term.

 

Well considering that in DA2 you can`t put armour on your companions and such (outfits are static like in ME2), I am inclined to say that Bioware now makes action games, not rpgs. Action games with dialogue, kind of.

 

If you want new traditional computer RPGs then basically the only choice is indie developers. There are a few good ones out there like Basilisk Games. The main stream games are mostly shiny action RPGs nowadays, which is what Bioware does too. Not that it is a bad thing, at least I have enjoyed many of them. Perhaps ironically I did not like DA:O that much which was more of a traditional CRPG, but that was mostly because of setting and story issues.

 

I think it depends somewhat on your definition of RPG. I'm of the opinion that the best RPGs are often the ones that have a minimum of number-crunching and inventory management, and use the time to polish their gameplay so that the better you are at playing the role, the better you do at the game. Thief and Assassin's Creed are probably good examples of this philosophy. Neither are "traditional RPGs" but when "traditional RPG" can also mean "tedious crap-shoot" (see: NWN OC), BioWare's rationalisation of the genre makes increasing sense.

Removing or minimising the tedious part of the RPG equation (inventory management, grind) in order to optimise gameplay is just good sense. Sure, a lot of traditional RPGs lasted ages, but how much of that was fun, and how much was padded with pointless busy work? Even BGII suffered from flaws. Aside from the aforementioned inventory management (although at least that was much improved from BG1), the class system was horrendously unfocussed, with kits being to game balance what a chainsaw is to a baby seal. That BGII was still great is testament to how much else BioWare got right. As is Dragon Age, as all BioWare really did there was tweak & streamline BG2's gameplay, and drape the whole thing in hi-res 3d.

As for DA2... well I have some reservations, but probably not the same as most peoples' here. If BioWare wanted to make an ARPG, fine. Jade Empire was the finest RPG of the previous generation, only being widely overlooked largely because of KotOR having lightsabres in it. Gameplay-wise it was streets ahead of its forebear, and nowhere near as up its own arse as Fable. The scissors-paper-stone inspired melees of punchy-kicky-blocky action worked insanely well, and I've little doubt that they could have pulled the same trick for DA2.

Unfortunately, it seems that they're trying too hard to please everybody, judging by the combat walkthrough video on SP's frontpage. Switching between RTS & Action-style gameplay on the fly sounds like a developmental nightmare. In general, games that have tried to do things similar to this in the past have not been good. Usually, the price you pay for trying to do too many gameplay styles in one game is that they all end being poorly done, or game difficulty balance ends up demanding fans of one style have to use the other sometimes, like it or not. Whilst I'd probably back BioWare out of any development house to actually pull it off, the industry track record for this kind of dual-mode gameplay does not bode well.

 

Yes. Bethesda makes better RPGs, especially once the modding community is considered, and there is no reason it should not be. IMO, Black Isle and early BW games are still the best by a small margin, but the Elder Scrolls have always been great RPGs, for the most part, and now they have Fallout. They have long since passed BW in RPG games.

 

The sentence after that was "Bethesda makes great games, but they're more action RPGs than the traditional party-based top-downers that Baldur's Gate was the archetype for." I don't and I didn't dismiss Bethesda at all. They just make a different type of game. Their games are, arguably, more first-person shooters with RPG elements than traditional RPGs.

 

Yes, and I did not agree with it, hence my counter post. I consider them to be better RPGs than those by BW, at least these days.

 

i dont expect anything good from bioware anymore since long (ME and DA didnt do it for me)

just waiting for diablo 3 to come out, although blizzard too has disapointed me these last years

the peak of crpg and h&s was reached in 2000 when both diablo 2 and bg 2 were out, there wont be a golden age like this ever again

 

Nothing like the waiting game to see what DAII will offer us as fans of RPGs. DAO could possibily be the last true great RPG from Bioware for all we know as RPG fans.

I'm not going to discount them though; they have created many great RPGs over the years and even though ME2 is more of a FPS it is still a great game and is fun to play.

 

It's obvious by now that DA2 is going to be closer to Mass Effect than DAO. I can't say I agree with the direction Bioware is taking and truth be told I don't care anymore.

Bethesda makes shallow games but if the developers take a hint from what Obsidian did with Fallout New Vegas (not the bugs!) they can really make the next Elder Scrolls game the best in the entire series. Playing an Elder Scrolls game with some real depth and dialogue would be truly awesome.

I have nothing against console games like the Fable series but the "action RPG" label that Bioware is advertising is just an excuse to dumb down every aspects of new CRPGs to appeal to a wider audience (kids who play Halo or Call of Duty and can't be bothered to read anything and certainly don't care about RPing and stories).

 

I dont find bethesda's rpg's good at all, they are first person shooters and nothing more

 

Depth & Accessability: the Holy Grail

To be fair, I've played Halo and CoD, and loved the BG series and games like Ultima VII & VIII (the less said about Ascension, the better though).

From a game design perspective, you have to bear in mind that many old-school RPGs had a lot of tedious padding that masqueraded as "depth". Depth in gameplay (where it really counts) can take many forms -- and while I realise I'm probably pissing in the wind trying to communicate this on a D&D RPG site -- FPS games don't necessarily lack depth just because they have a linear (or no) story. Depth can mean multiple approaches to combat -- sniping enemies from afar, tossing in a grenade and mopping up stragglers or just charging in with the biggest gun available -- which RPGs sort of have by default, with their Warrior/Mage/Rogue class templates, but FPS games can do as well. I challenge anyone to play either of the Half-Life games and tell me with a straight face that they don't have depth. Many different approaches to tackle enemies and physics puzzles as satisfying (or more so) than anything in any BioWare game ever and an actually engaging storyline. Completely linear, but still excellent. Of course, you can't just sellotape a level-up system and/or "moral choice" onto an FPS and call it an RPG (yes, BioShock, I'm looking right at you).

Similarly, RPGs can't just insert a system that makes you need to drink & eat and call it "depth" if the gameplay itself is paper-thin. I loved Ultima VII, but the gameplay was atrocious. Combat essentially involved pressing "c" and crossing your fingers that none of your retard followers dropped any vital plot items in a place you couldn't pick them up. Ultimately (pun unintended) the "RPG elements" of stats and levelling were just padding for an adventure game, it's just that that it was well enough done adventure game to work well. Neverwinter Nights had similarly poor combat, but was pretty dire elsewhere, too, so fell apart like wet tissue paper. The RPG genre has (with the exception of MUDs) always been a producer of lamprey-like games, needing to latch onto gameplay styles in order to legitimately call themselves games, rather than glorified choose-your-own adventure books. With the BG series' success, the host genre of choice was usually the RTS. But we've also had Beat-em-up's, First- and third-person shooters, and the occasional turn-based throwback.

As for dumbing-down... well, it's a common argument. And while I can't watch an evening of TV comfortably nowadays without a few ales and a couple of strong whacks across the noggin with a kendo stick, games haven't suffered as much. The thing to understand is the difference between so-called dumbing-down and accessability.

Accessibility is vital for games. Manuals are actually pretty poor ways to communicate to someone how a game is played. Even when you put aside issues like dyslexia, reading about playing the game is never as good as being introduced to the different gameplay elements as you play -- good tutorials minimise frustration and maximise fun, which is surely why we play games in the first place. A good interface doesn't need a manual, it should be pretty obvious where one has to go to do what, with the manual a last resort for the persistently confused & frustrated. A bad interface constantly interferes and gets in the way of you playing the game (NeverWinter Nights 2 is a good example of a bad interface, for example). Also, thick manuals don't guarantee depth. It's a very good design strategy to say "make this playable without having to RTFM". Thin manuals and tutorial systems aren't dumbing-down: they're just developers taking the work out of your play. Which I suppose I can understand people being frustrated about, if they love the Skinner-box grind of WoW or other catatonia-inducing MMORPG snooze-fests.

In conclusion, BioWare are far from "lost" to the RPG community. They're just on a Columbus-like exploration for new territories to splice the RPG's genes with. "True" RPGs never really existed outside of MUDs, the old-school RPGs just spliced with the turn-based strategy genre. Things move on, new genres emerge and the RPG can join with any of them. Don't go shoving dog poo through the happy couple's letter box just because it's not a traditional union. And don't go kidding yourself about depth -- having to sell off a metric sh!tload of kit at the end of a level/dungeon/mission isn't depth, it's just tedious busy work conducted to pad out playtime (see: Mass Effect 1).

 

That's one long post full of sanctimonious bull...

FYI there is no such word as "accessability" in the English language so you must have been thinking about accessibility.

So you tell us (real) manuals are bad because people can't be bothered to read them. That's hilarious. Now you have to spend money to get something that used to come with the game or wait for the community to build some sort of wiki on the net.

Depth in some good old games was not about going through tedious badly arranged levels. It was about playing a game that didn't require you follow the dotted line pointing at the next clue flashing on your minimap (in case you snoozed during a cutscene).

The funny thing is that many genres which are not RPGs are borrowing stuff from RPGs so the whole "lamprey" theory of yours is built on very shaky ground. For instance a game like GTA has some RPG elements thrown in. I'm not an expert as far as FPS are concerned but I've heard about some kind of experience systems in (I think it was) Call of Duty World at War in which you could get better gear after reaching certain levels/completing certain challenges.

 

technically all these games have that, BGII had it in the form of the journal "Go here, meet so and so, do this, decide whether or not to take this to him or her"

 

That wasn't so much "A" dotted line, as it was a series of MANY dotted lines, and many paths and options to consider.

 

Firstly -- cheers for the heads-up on the typo. I always do that with that word, for some odd reason.

Secondly, just because RPGs have always borrowed gameplay elements from other genres, it doesn't mean that the inspiration doesn't run both ways. RPG elements have been creeping into more and more games nowadays (e.g. the trend for "sand-box" games), and for me it's only fair that the RPG takes back. A game based solely on letting the computer role the dice for you while you watch does not sound entertaining to me. And you could argue that was precisely why Neverwinter Nights sucked so hard in single player, whereas a few minor gameplay changes (and some lightsabres) turned KotOR into a classic (albeit one that now plays very long in the tooth). The lamprey analogy may seem strange to you, but it's really a part of the RPG's strengths. RPGs are almost unique in terms of the number of styles of play that can live under the banner; the fact that this diversity (tending towards the turn-based strategy/RPG) was less in the olden days shouldn't diminish experimentation.

In a sense, BioWare have always made steps to diversify the genre. Baldur's Gate started it by trying to drag the genre away from the turn-based cul-de-sac, towards a more real-time approach. Oh sure, there was still a turn-based, dice-rolling mechanic "under the hood" but the game played in real time, and effectively killed the turn based Western RPG; after BG showed how to turn turn-based systems into real time, there was no excuse left to release turn-based games anymore. Well, unless you work for Square Enix and you're deathly afraid of the player actually doing something and interrupting one of your meticulously animated cutscenes. The move towards RTS mechanics also opened the genre to RTS fans, who were & are a huge chunk of the PC gaming pie. The beat-em-up gameplay of Jade Empire and shooter system(s) of Mass Effect 1 & 2 similarly show that BioWare can take RPG sensibilities and transfer them to other modes of gameplay.

That -- diversification -- is the thorny question at the heart of the "lost" BioWare argument. Personally, I believe that without diversification, the RPG will stagnate & die. Without some acknowledgement of the need for popular appeal, would any RPG companies survive financially to make games? RPGs would become the preserve of "auteur" developers, and carry all the problems that implies.

No. I stated that it's always better to show, rather than tell. It's a storytelling maxim that's as true for teaching people how to play a game as it is for teaching them how to do anything else. Just as rote learning is only effective for certain people, so is memorising from a manual. And whether it's effective or not, it's always less engaging than a good tutorial system. Teaching people how to play the game by playing the game will always be more satisfying. It's not about "not being bothered". It's just better design.

Games are great because of how they play, and they play better when they are both accessible and possess lots of depth. The two are not mutually exclusive. No RPG was great because it had a thick manual, or came with a cloth map. It was great because it had an open, intriguing world to explore and lots of entertaining things to do, like hacking, shooting or fireballing monsters, or interacting with interesting characters, and preferably a minimum of inventory management and grind. The box contents are window dressing, and dire, uninformative manuals are not a new "innovation". Daggerfall (1996) had one of the worst manuals known to man. Also, no modern game would require its players to memorise pages of keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ultimas 1-6, every MicroProse flight sim ever). That's accessibility, without any decrease in depth. Win-win.

Also, there are practical problems with inserting statistical information relating to gameplay in a manual. Manuals are finalised and sent to the printers long before games hit the shelves. Any detailed info is probably going to be out of date by the time the game has been playtested and hits the shelves. BG 1 & 2 got away with it, because they were using AD&D rules under license, which they couldn't alter that much. As for the lack of storytelling in manuals, once again it's better if the story is set in play (and I mean in gameplay, not a cutscene) rather than in a manual. Also, consider the expense of printed manuals and the problem of piracy. Special edition bonus shinies can help prevent piracy, but a manual can be scanned and sent worldwide in a .pdf pretty easily. They're no deterrent, only a greater expense. It's a shame, true, but the decline of the manual has more to do with piracy than "dumbing down", and a lot more to do with developers being far cleverer at making their tutorials.