LogFAQs > #884526088

Kana posted...

That game felt so unfocused and it's way too big for its own good. It's like they were working on an MMO but changed their minds at the last second and made a single-player game.

Quoted from Helly's topic:

ParanoidObsessive posted...

VeeVees posted...

a game with huge maps for the sake of having huge maps and no focus

It's the end result of their "We love Skyrim and are going to examine it for ideas" philosophy they openly gushed about during development.

Even at the time, I was mostly like "While a BioWare-style game set in an Elder Scrolls-type setting could be phenomenal, odds are they're going to learn all the wrong lessons from Skyrim, and wind up watering down all the things that have always been BioWare's selling points". And that's basically exactly what we got.

About half the game felt like inconsequential fetch quests (a la 90% of Skyrim's pointless, weak, narrative-light sidequests that are almost inevitable once you start working in an open-world environment) and tedious grind (which in some ways felt almost MMOish in its pointlessness).

Developers never seem to understand this, but "open-world" makes it almost a requirement that the rest of the game be "narrative-light", because you never know when a given player is going to encounter a given plot-point, or otherwise experience part of the story. In Skyrim, you can play for 100+ hours and never even fight your first dragon, or you can rush directly through the main plot and ignore everything else. You can do the civil war plotline as soon as the game starts, or you can put it off until after you fight Alduin, or you can ignore it entirely. You can do the Mages' Guild questline, or not. You can spend the entire game never going to Markath. And so on.

So every one of those questlines has to be both almost entirely self-contained and mostly inconsequential, so as not to conflict with other things. Which means that almost nothing you do ever really matters, no one you meet is ever really going to be much more than a bland generic NPC, and no grand narrative is ever going to weave through all of your actions and tell an overarching story with interesting themes or metaphors. You're always going to be a bland collection of RPG stats adventuring in a very pretty but ultimately soulless world, grinding for mats, stats, and coin. You're basically an oldschool D&D character in a game being run by a dullard DM.

And while I'm picking on Skyrim (though the same could be said of Oblivion, and ESO, and...), the same holds true for most open-world RPGs. SOME can almost transcend this weakness (New Vegas), though most don't (Fallout 3 and 4). Because it requires brilliant writing and some massive coordination and dialogue juggling to really make that dynamic work and still tell a story worth hearing.

So when you're BioWare and 90% of the praise all of your previous games got was for strong narrative and character interaction, "open-world" is about the absolute LAST thing you want to try to incorporate into your game. Especially when you don't really seem to know how to do it in a compelling or interesting way.

In DA:I, that mostly manifested as the open-world just being a backdrop for endless fetch and grind quests, while all of the plot goodies were still mostly linear trees. Which made the game feel dull as shit (especially in the Hinterlands) when you were doing main story quests.

But even that could have been countered if the gameplay and supporting characters were the best the series had ever seen... as opposed to some of the worst, which is what they were.

DA as a franchise is pretty much dead to me. As is ME. And BioWare.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family