Making a decision early, deciding to make a mature game, to target an older audience, then knowing that all the way through... you play and it's like, "that's really challenging. I wasn't expecting that kind of motivation for these characters". That mixes up with, "I wasn't expecting to have that much sex". It goes into the same space. It works as one cohesive unit. It's kind of like having a blue period.I wasn't expecting to have so much tripe. This is really challenging, I didn't expect Bioware's kind of motivation to let them sink this low.
"I wasn't expecting to have so much sex". Heh. Maturity. Heh. Blood, guts, gore. Heh.
*blinks* Uh .. I don't want to have sex in an online game. Either I do or do not have enough of it iRL, getting it from a game is really not what I desire. And really not what I'd look for in a game...
ReplyDeleteDude. This is single-player.
ReplyDeleteSo maturity these days involves "Woohoo, look we have BREASTS to sell to you!" and some of the characters being cute?
ReplyDeleteWell, I guess breasts sell....
Well, according to the latest trailer, it's more like "magic unremovable underwear that permits the SO MUCH SEX to be had"
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, that's maturity, apparently.
On that note, to those that remember the dude that accused us of immaturity - that explains so much, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteOh, single player. Well, call me weird, but I don't want to have sex in a single player game either ;)
ReplyDeleteI was just talking about this game with a friend of mine. We came to the conclusion that the devs in their great wisdom to launch a game for the mature audience actually puts the said audience off the game with this kind of circus trick.
ReplyDeleteWe am so smrt.
-I.
Yush, I completely agree there. It might have been horribly attractive to me when I was 16 and things like Soldier of Fortune were new and awesome. Unfortunately though, my definition of "mature" fails to include things that BioWare apparently finds to be such.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, BW should stick to making game engines and interfaces. They're good with those. They're good with graphics and the shinies. They're good with buzzwords.
With games, they're bad.
"Why aren't you looking forward to The Old Republic?", they ask.
This is why.
Nobody expects BioWare to sink so low. Their chief weapon is surprise, surprise , surprise and the power of the greedy moloch EA behind them. Uh, their TWO chief weapons are surprise and the power of the greedy moloch EA behind them and lack of imagination... UH...
ReplyDeleteThey have boasted that DA is a spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate. I don't know, Shadows of Amn I have been playing were full of the bizarre (Irenicus and everywhere he set his foot in), human failure and greatness (Sir Keldorn) and it was, all in all, a spiritual quest for the redemption of your soul.
But then again, perhaps true spirituality lies in big swords, unrealistic huge armour, anonymous "evil" and elves with pointy ears...
But still, I AM looking forward to Jade Empire which I will play once I get home...
Well, looking back, SoA is pretty much indicative of what Bioware was to become in a few years. It already had quite a bit of cheese, even if I liked - and still like the game. I mean, urgh, every female character? How delightfully stereotypical.
ReplyDeleteDon't look forward to JE too much, that way you might actually enjoy it more. "Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment"
Yeah, BioWare is a big company... which means that there are (or have been) people with vision and... people with a limited vision. The second group is more numerous...
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, their female characters rather suck. Come to think of it, even Bastila in KOTOR was rather a cliché... But then again, I expect from JE a BioWare version of a Hong-Kong action movie with some cocky choices and hope for at least a pinch of ancient Chinese mythological atmosphere. I guss when (if) I finish the game I'll write a review about it
Bastila and Aribeth were badly written charicatures. Women with adventurous mind don't act like they do. I so wanted to be able to jump into the game and slap them. That catwoman in KOTOR (forgot the name now) had an interesting personality; the loyalty aspect in her character is something usually reserved to male characters.
ReplyDeleteJade Empire is a nice game. It doesn't necessarily offer anything new but it had its own charm.
-I.
Bahh, you people leave me no choice but to try it out.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly enough, the character you bring up, Juhani (Hrhr, and more of it later!) is, from what I've read, considered to be, by the BioWare fans, at least, a lesbian, and, from what I recall reading somewhere, there are lines in the dialogues that actually support that theory. I seem to recall reading them myself at some point, too.
So there you go, a Bio female with a touch less cheese is, naturally, a lesbian. Surprised? Didn't think so.
On the topic of female depictions in RPGs, I must say that Annah/Fall-From-Grace from Torment, a couple of party NPCs from KotOR 2 and Triss Merigold from The Witcher are all done on a "well above average" level in the sense that they have a *motivation* to their actions. They're not just a bunch of "love interests", although I suppose they could, if one was so inclined, be considered as such, and they're not just cookie-cutter "helpless female/bitter female/smartass female" that BW usually comes up with.
Then again, I understand that all the games I mentioned actually had female designers on the team. Or Chris Avellone, a designer that can write.
Juhani, right, thanks.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean the lesbian side of her character, or her being a love interest. She had that one aspect that made her different from the others. Or so I saw it at the time, dunno, been a while since I played that game.
-I.
Well, that's not what I meant either, I was speaking about the same thing - but also about how BioWare failed even with her in that respect.
ReplyDeleteAnd I do recall her to be a nice character but I never had a use for a Consular that I recall her to be and the "storyline mechanics" for all the different NPCs that BioWare had at the time sort of sucked, so I don't really know much about her.
Funny, though. Gameplay-wise, BioWare games are pretty neat. I can't claim I didn't enjoy NWN or KotOR, that's untrue. However, their writing should be reserved for pre-school kids that believe that that kind of things are original and not try to lie about aiming at a mature audience.
I don't know. It would take a LONG article for me to write down all the mistakes BW did in NWN... except for a completely lame story line, the "party" management completely sucked, quests were just boring (except for the quest of the haunted village) and fighting was downright moronic. The duel of my paladin versus a dragon? Cycling three actions for fifteen minutes...
ReplyDeleteHeh, I played NWN before they nerfed player advancement to make it more, you know, challenging, and when my Fighter took on two dragons (of course leaving the sidekick around the corner, so she doesn't get harmed), I can't remember using any "skills" as such. It feels I just told him to "attack" and he then dismantled them with his 5-7 attacks per attack round, while the vampire sword would keep him healed up .. against the damage output of two dragons. Still, it was a fun game.
ReplyDeleteI think what really hurt NWN was, that it seems pretty obvious (I don't know, maybe it was even announced somewhere) they originally were designing the game with a BG-style party in mind. Somewhere along the road, they probably either ran into some technical limitations or simply became jealous of Diablo's success, and scaled it all down. Things like having six inventory tabs for no apparent reason other than that you initially were supposed to have six people to carry around stuff and now had to manage all by yourself.
It sort of left NWN being 1/6th the game it could have been...
Ah yes, the dragons. I agree, they were an utter disappointment, all the way from the concept of "You fight two dragons now!" to the fact that a dragon, one of the rarest and most solitary creatures that collects a ton of stuff, drops a goddamned useless gem that a goblin would drop. Wooo, rewarding epic fights.
ReplyDeleteAs far as NWN fights go, my best fight would have been that against a sword spider in a Chapter 2 (I think) dungeon. My fighter had a very low number of antidotes, heal potions and healing kits, and for a while I tried to do it without using any buffs, so it was really an epic battle with tons of parries, blocks and counter-attack attempts. Did end up having to use some buffs though.
...And that was the only memorable battle in the game.
And yesh, the cursed forest was nice. Very nice. Until the point you had to go through the ever-respawning portion of the tower and partake in some other somewhat stupid stuff that I really wish they didn't do.
Also, yeah, it does feel like it was supposed to be more BG-like in party mechanics and world system. Unfortunately, it would have likely required a whole load of extra work from BW, and they couldn't afford that kind of an investment.
P.S: Gah, why do they keep making 3D games where you can't make any use of the vertical plane? Where's my Climb skill? Why can't I jump over that stupid knee-high fence?
Because it's really, really hard to program/simulate. Not the jumping over the fence, of course, but making a real, functional third dimension. It's a mathematical challenge of another magnitude. Suddenly, you can't express "direction" and "orientation" intuitively. Suddenly, the very concept of "turning" becomes a huge process. You have to use intricate mathematical structures like quaternions, so you end up sitting there, breaking your wrist applying the right-hand-rule, and it all ends up broken because you used your left hand once by mistake.
ReplyDeletePlus, pretty much the entire entirety of world building is based on height maps, an easy and compact way of assigning a height coordinate to every pair of floor coordinates. That means, whenever you have to place two things above each other, the engine goes cross-eyed and you hack around it. Watch it happen in Sarnur. Watch it happen in Moria, where they fled into the "South is down, North is up" replacement symbolism. Allowing you to "just climb a wall", would allow you to break out of the functioning coordinate system.
Short: it's an enormous effort, that just doesn't pay off, as long as no one really cares.
Well, I certainly realise the technological limitations and the amount of (initial!) work it would take to implement such technologies into a game, but, as we can see with the examples of Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge, the "climbing" ideas are getting more and more popular. I've caught myself thinking that I wanted to climb a roof and go jumping around and climbing like mad in LotRO after playing a few hours of AC and getting used to the (somewhat retarded port-crippled) controls, that much fun the thing actually is.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that as the gameplay becomes more attractive, more and more companies will actually use the elements in their games. And well, the system's not that revolutionary anyway - Descent already had the dubious 360 degrees of freedom, and AvP added the whole climbing thing to the mix.
What I rather meant is, why the hell use a 3D technology while not utilising any of the 3D's actual benefits? Yeah, I know the answer to that too, but it does feel pretty daft when you play something where you can't even jump (NWN, KotOR, Mass Effect I'm looking at you) meanwhile the surroundings are awesomely 3D as hell, while a fat plumber from the early 90ies can do that non-bloody-stop.