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Do They Really Not Make Them Like They Used To?

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nstgc:

--- Quote from: zherok on July 04, 2012, 05:32:08 AM ---
--- Quote from: nstgc on July 03, 2012, 04:05:40 PM ---That's pretty close to what they did in Dragon Age II. Of course it was a mind numbing short tunnel as well.

(for those who haven't played DA2: Everything thing looks the same. There is little variety.)

--- End quote ---
They wanted to stylize the artwork in order to avoid the sort of generic fantasy look the first game had. But they went with almost but not quite cel-shaded look, so it mostly just meant fairly flat textures with little detail.

What really killed it though was having the entire game set in the same city over a period of like six years. Not terrible in itself, but the fact that the city doesn't change almost at all over that time frame (and then making the majority of the game backtracking over the same cityscape, hell, even the tunnels, caves, and forests you occasionally visit outside the city) in combination with that art style and it came off as incredibly lazy.

I have to say though I'm not sure that they didn't put the work in so much as their choices ended up undermining the work they did do.

--- End quote ---

That's not the only problem. They also have a single cave/dungeon for all outdoor caves which they then merely open and close doorways. Its either the same city, the same building, or the same cave. There is nearly no variety. Bioware seriously dropped the ball on DA2. I'm not expecting yesteryears' quality, but we could at least have post-sell-out quality. This was just bad cost cutting bull shit.

zherok:

--- Quote from: nstgc on July 04, 2012, 02:18:04 PM ---That's not the only problem. They also have a single cave/dungeon for all outdoor caves which they then merely open and close doorways. Its either the same city, the same building, or the same cave. There is nearly no variety. Bioware seriously dropped the ball on DA2. I'm not expecting yesteryears' quality, but we could at least have post-sell-out quality. This was just bad cost cutting bull shit.

--- End quote ---
Yeah, the caves with cemented doorways was bizarre.

I liked the party in two though. I think the angle of having people who actually like each other was better done than DA:O's party just having to get along with each other to get the job done approach. And I think they made positive steps with the dialogue system not using a binary morality bar to dictate choices (mostly I just liked being able to be constantly sarcastic the entire game.) Having your dialogue choices change how your automatic dialogue comes out was nice. I didn't think I'd like Hawke being voice acted over DA:O's silent protagonist, but it worked for me.

Too bad the gameplay and setting ruined what they did have going for them. I'm pretty sure I incinerated thousands of bandits and thieves in Kirkwall over the course of the game. Having enemies pop up out of nowhere and attack you every other minute was just lazy padding. I think the story worked, but the way they used the gameplay seemed designed to just prevent you from getting stuff done quickly. I never felt that way about combat in DA:O, because it wasn't used as a brake just to drag out the game length.

nstgc:
Yeah that whole "ninjas poping out of nowhere like in some fighting scroller game" bit was super lame.

Bloodfox:
In my point of view, games have never been better, they play, sound and look better than ever before. We get bombarded with great games literally every month and with the rise of digital distribution we now see the return of shorter, arcade style games. Sure there's gonna be a nice amount of bad games but that's always been the case (if it wasn't then the Angry Video Game Nerd's career would have been awfully short).
We had great games in the past and we still have great games now. Every year there are a ton of games that will become the classics for the current and future generations. We had Sonic, they will have Uncharted. We had Doom, they will have Bioshock. We had Final Fantasy, They will have Mass Effect. We had Adventures of Batman and Robin, they will have Batman: Arkham Asylum. We had Metal Slug, they will have Gears of War. And this principle holds true for bad games and games that are just okay but lack that special something. I'd even say that for every bad game from this generation there's around 3 bad games from the 16-bit era.

Also people seem to praise retro gaming for its challenging difficulty but neglect to recall that in most cases that was a result of terrible level and/or gameplay design. By today's standards that crap ain't acceptable anymore, and rightly so, but you can still pump up the difficulty in the majority of games. Try Devil May Cry on Dante Must Die Mode, or to co-op Expert Realism on Left 4 Dead 2 and tell me that stuff ain't hard.

Look, I understand. We all have fond memories of the games we played as children, in the same way we will always cherish the memory of our first kiss, or of that first summer you had after you father stopped drinking. Its Okay to look back and think "Damn World of Illusion was a wonderful game", just don't dismiss everything that came after that.

P.S. Like many pointed out in this thread, there does seam to be a distinct lack of good JRPG's in the current console generation. I cannot argue against this as I only had the pleasure of playing one good JRPG this console generation and that was Valkyria Chroniles. I heard Pandora's Tower, The Last Story and Xenoblade Chronicles were good but I do not own a Wii so I can't say. I believe there are two reasons for this decline. One being that the JRPG market has become a niche market in the west due to the rising in quality and popularity of western RPGs that arguably usually feature more engaging combat systems. The other one being that Square/Enix (who is supposed to be the biggest supplier of JRPGs) has done practically nothing this generation apart from portable spin-offs of KH and FF and one of the shittiest FF games in memory. And why do anything?! Why go through all the trouble of making a proper KH or FF sequel when they can just keep counting the money they get from people still buying rereleases of FF VI and VII?

Until some studio comes along willing and able to fill the gap left by Square/Enix, the JRPG genre will stay like this.

nstgc:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlL09nriFfk&feature=youtu.be

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