Caltrops - Dragon Age 2





	[quote name="jeep"]Fucking RPGs need to have more than an MMO interface or they're shit and this demo is shit. I know a lot of you don't try to play every MMO so let me get you acquainted: play the Dragon Age 2 demo and understand that's as good as fantasy MMOs get because network shit is complicated and there's only so much you can do over the wire. 10000 identical enemies and miles of identical terrain, and even that stupid lag waiting 45 seconds for drops. Just add an irc chat window in the bottom left corner and you're playing eq2 or rift or whatever. Mass Effect 2 was a great ride, it was the best game of last year, but it's not an RPG. It's Operation Wolf with cover mechanics and some spaceship bullshit painted over it. There's no excuse to remake that in a fantasy setting. That camera angle doesn't fit melee-centric play and murdering shit on rails doesn't make an RPG. I played the first Dragon Age all the way through out of a loyalty to the now-dead pen-and-paper RPG industry the game is a simplistic rip of, and I may never be able to shake that loyalty to maybe the only thing I've done every week since I was 5, but I'll be damned if I'll call it good. It had 2 genuine RPG elements and I bet both are gone in the sequel: the varied origin stories were really well done (you should just go back and play them all), and the <a href="http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/The_Fade:_Lost_in_Dreams">Lost in Dreams</a> quest was basically what the Mage's Shapeshifting specialization should have been, it was the very best play control and level design in the first game, and once the people in charge saw it they should have stopped development and redone the whole rest of the game and all classes and abilities should have been re-engineered around the play style permitted <i>in that one quest</i>. RPGs must have better stories, more varied interfaces, and more in-depth character interaction than any MMO, and so they must be better than Dragon Age in every way. Not being tied to the wire means you can push the PC in different directions and make something new and good out of a game, but multiplatform development, having to support retards and their fucking wristwatch-cpu'd xboxes, means PC gamers get stuck using bullshit click-and-recharge interfaces. Where're the fucking destructible objects? Where's the full array of object interactions? Where are the procedurally-managed city-state societies and ecosystems for us to travel to and use our varied skills to interact with in complex ways? <i>We already know better than this is possible</i>: that sperglord who makes dwarf fortress does the procedural pieces <i>by himself</i>, it can't be that hard for a full team to implement. Plenty of games have had destructible terrain or simple context-menus for interacting with different objects in the environment in varied ways. Sure the social wheel in oblivion wasn't fantastic but I'm sure there's people who can do better. Whichever euro made <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/37000/">The Void</a> came up with a brand-new thing I could never have thought of, throw something along those lines in as a magic system or <i>come up with a new one you lazy fucks</i>. The first Dragon Age is weak and this demo is a piece of utter fucking shit, I could have spent that half hour playing a roguelike I hate and at least found one novel thing, this doesn't even get close. Even Fallout 3 and New Vegas were better than Dragon Age(s) to date, and RPGs must push to be better than those. /jeep/ ...also is it just me or is the great RPS turning into an IGN-style exclusive screenshot preview machine[/quote]