| Scoobes said: I actually love Obsidian stuff. When it comes to writing, they're among the best WRPG devs out there. When it comes to putting a complete working game together they seem to fall short in a couple of areas (usually mechanical or bug related, but I suspect that comes from using third-party tech) that stop their games from attaining classic status. Pillars of Eternity actually looks pretty good and is old-school in terms of mechanics (which is what they excel at) so I hope that will become a classic. With Bioware, they've made a couple of mis-steps, Dragon Age especially but I'm hopeful Inquisition will get the balance right. With Mass Effect, they only really messed up the last 30 minutes of a hugely ambitious trilogy and they actually devoted resources to fixing it for free which I think should be respected. Their problem imo is they've grown hugely in the last 5-10 years and have multiple teams so some of the charm of the older games is harder to replicate. |
I also enjoy Obsidian stuff, when it works... Star Wars: KOTOR 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol where all so very broken I consider them faulty and deserving of a full refund. That said I love KOTOR 2 which I consider one of my favourite games of all time. The others become far more playable once you install a few mods, I just feel that a game should stand on it's own which they've never yet managed.
As for Bioware, I hope you're right. I'm expecting nothing of note from Inquisition, but maybe it'll be a worthwhile game. As for Mass Effect, I respectfully disagree. I genuinely consider everything after the first to be an insult to gaming. Mass Effect 2 isn't a bad game, hell, Mass Effect 3 isn't a bad game either... but they're not good games, and they're certainly piss poor Mass Effect games. Mass Effect was one of the best selling games of 2007. There was no need to rush to the centre market in a desperate attempt to grab the Gears Of War market. I wanted a sci-fi RPG, not a third person shooter. In the first game the shooting was a means to an end, in the second game it's the core gameplay. I consider Mass Effect to be one of my top 5 games of all time. Depending on my mood it occationally sits at number 1. The changes to the setting, the background, and the gameplay mechanics just leave a bad taste in my mouth. Hell, the inclusion of ammo in the second game alone outright offends me. It tells me Bioware think we're so pathetic, so stupid, so incapable of imagination, that we cannot handle a game with shooting without ammo because ammo is how all the military FPS games do it.
Mass Effect 2 and 3 was a franchise that stole my heart going and stabbing me in the back in a desperate attempt to attract the dude-bro market. As far as I'm concerned, they both compromise quality, scope, genre integrity, and artistic merit for wide appeal and it makes it so that the franchise has no soul. No, the ending isn't what I have a problem with in Mass Effect 3, it's just the point where everyone else realised the franchise had become a vapid hollow shell of it's former self... I noticed as soon as I started playing Mass Effect 2. The industry already caters to the fans of shooters and action well enough, they didn't need to take away my sci-fi RPG and rape it for the dude-bro market... I'm sorry, but I can't forgive Bioware for that.
