Re: New games suck, I'm back to D2
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying people should keep making the same game over and over again. But neither should they completely abandon everything that made a franchise "work" in the first place.
(Although I will duel anyone saying Planescape: Torment is not perfect to the death. TO THE DEATH!)
Anyway: A simple example from Dragon Age: Origins vs Dragon Age 2.
In Dragon Age: Origins, in one of the origin stories, your familiy is brutally murdered through intrigue. I care about this because prior to the murder, they had dialogue and I got to know them a little. We saw them interact and interacted with them. That is how you do it. Show, don't tell. It's like film making 101 or something.
Fast forward to Dragon Age 2. In the first 2 minutes of the game, one of your siblings dies horribly as well. I don't remember his name. I did not give half a damn either. The game pretty much just mentioned "oh yea, that random redshirt was your brother, by the way. His death makes you very sad because we say so" and he had about one line of dialogue, which was just whining anyway.
That is not good writing. That has nothing to do with games evolving. A game should not attempt to be story driven if that is all you can come up with.
This continues through the entire game. Every couple hours you're yanked out of the game by force through hamfisted narrative and dumped 10 years into the future. You do not feel that time passing because everything looks exactly the same and everyone picks up right where we were. And this is NOT how you do it.
I wouldn't even say anything if anyone had had a (good) new idea for gaming in the last... 10 years? Innovation for the sake of innovation is ****ing stupid as well. My car runs on round tires now just as it ran on round tires 10 years ago. I don't need to try triangles to know that's gonna suck. And I don't need to play another rushed, halffinished, poorly written and poorly designed game again to see that's not an improvement over the classics.
Even the much lauded Mass Effect 2 has some serious problems. Every level is a corridor. In some cases the writing makes no sense. The overarching plot makes little to no sense, too. And the way pretty much everything you did in ME1 is negated is incredibly hamfisted as well. And still, aparantely the game was perfect because critics and gamers alike gobbled it right up. Maybe I nitpick too much, but we kinda went from "You saved the galaxy" to "You're just a lunatic, go away now!" really quick... Just because we needed a semi-disgraced Shepard. Maybe I'm a sucker for continuity, but imo, if you cannot be assed to make your sequel consistent, make a new game intead.
Not that this has anything to do with the actual gameplay.
What I don't get is why EVERY game has to be dumbed down. Seriously, why can't we have some games that are sorta hard to play and intellectually challenging? Does every single game have to be playable by a lobotomised monkey?
D2 does that remarkably well. You can have great success without knowing jack ****, but you can have a whole different kind of success if you really put your brains to the task. I'm not wholly convinced that is all intentional, but it's brilliant either way.
