TheGZeus

@ShadowofSparta try re-playing BG.
Then try to tell me the narrative has any kind of flow or the combat is even passable.

If my GM dropped a campaign with that level of random.nonsense I'd kill my character.

@get2sammyb That's something I would say either to confuse someone or... be suggestive.
It's just ...WHAT???

@johnny30 I have played as least one game from every BioWare franchise and gave up early on all because they were all cluster forks, mechanically.
Inquisition wasn't any better than Baldur's Gate, it was just shallower.
Moronic AI, spam-tactic combat out of 1990... I was in shock. I got to the intro boss and deleted it. The combat in that game is a sin.

@johnny30 I'll take quality over quantity. I didn't pay 60 for Doom, but I would have.

@johnny30 ...you're expecting good gameplay from a BioWare game?
They make CYOA games and just slap combat in there somewhere and don't care if it works.

I thought "maybe I'll get a GOTY someday" then I thought about how bored I was of shooting birds and cows and listen to people yammering...
I just can't be bothered.
I had my fun. I sold it and made back what I overpaid. I'm good.

@AlejandroMora I'll be playing in Japanese audio, anyway. Played the demo, and it's corny, but in that "shounen anime" way.
I don't really watch anime these days, so if a game has the option I take it. I was a weeaboo over 10 years a go. First trip travelling Japan cured me.
Yeah, I'm defensive... but the Japanese voice acting is OK.

Why should we stay positive?
It's a product. They want our money, and what we've seen looks... gross.
I saw Batman with a gun, and decided I was never going to watch Batman VS Superman.
We have every right as consumers to expect a certain level of quality, and since BioWare isn't exactly known for their combat as much as their writing, this level of acting, animation and design is cause for pause.

@adf86 I've never gotten past the intro of a BioWare game after NWN. I hate their idea of combat.
I forced myself through hours of Baldur's Gate waiting for it to get good. NWN was passable, but just made me wish I was playing actual DnD. Everything else I've tried (at least one from every franchise) has made me angry for days.

@get2sammyb agree 100%

@adf86 I think Inquisition had decent animation.
I just thought the game was disaster of archaic mechanics.

@get2sammyb Witcher 1 and 3 are solid. Morrowind is pretty good, at least the important NPCs. NieR Automata is good, though the Japanese is slightly better. The English localisations of Dragon Quest games are better than the Japanese ones, much of the time! They're intentionally corny and over-the-top, so I think the God Eater games get a solid 7/10. Dead Space 1 is art.
Hell, if you count the codex entries Doom 2016 was fantastic!

My problem with Horizon is the dialogue doesn't do the story any justice. The lore and plot are great, but the characters just vomit their life story at the smallest question, then just never matter again. They natter on forever. It's like they took the character history document and replaced third-person pronouns with first-person. I ended up turning voice volume way down and skimming the text "shutup X shutup X..."
A glaring example is the prison warden who spends an eternity saying "I don't conform to gender norms. Bye!" As a transwoman I was severely annoyed that their idea of inclusivity is to just put a character in the game, have them say a few paragraphs, then basically vanish.
Onebof the main characters has an arc so generic I saw it from his first appearance. "I like to party irresponsibly! A tragedy will put me through the five stages of.grief, then I'll be redeemed somehow".

@Octane everyone has bizarre body and facial proportions.

@get2sammyb I was less worried about the acting than the writing in Horizon.
It was as ham-handed as I worried. I sold it knowing there would probably be DLC.

Well, it looks like the first game felt to play.

I'm not far in, but it's 1000* better than the Japanese beta.

...wow.
I've enjoyed exactly one BioWare game, and got bored with it (NWN) but I always thought they looked great for their time.
The graphics and models here are awful.
Everyone is made of rubber and has some kind of mild dwarfism.

@crimsontadpoles you have an internet connection.
Look at real boobs.

Anyone who claims to like these games for anything but juvenile reasons is full of it.
Anyone who admits to the real reasons has my sympathy.

@Lonejester well, you heal the other player, so it's just a nice thing to do.

I love this game. Great combat, derpy fun story, change your build on the fly and now these expansions?
Buying it again.

@themcnoisy not one BioWare game I've played (one from each franchise at least, people kept saying "but this one is good!") has even been playable. I suffered through a bunch of Baldur's Gate because it's dated, and tried to forgive the horrible mechanics, but I hated everything else, too.
NWN was OK, I suppose. Just made me want to play real DnD.
DA:O was twice as bad as BG. I uninstalled after the first boss. Same for Inquisition, but it was worse than either.
Didn't make it to a boss in Mass Effect. Leroy Jenkins joke in the first mission, awful combat and interface.

They don't.make good games. They make Telltale games and shoehorn garbage RPG tropes into them for no good reason.

@ironcrow86 apples and oranges.
HZD is NOT an RPG.
Any elements borrowed are thinner than what Borderlands borrows.
If you look at it as an action game, it's good, but the storytelling is pretty stiff and heavyhanded aside from main quest.
If you look at it as an RPG it's rubbish, but the combat is pretty fun.

@ironcrow86 I played with Polish audio and English subtitles. Way better voices and acting.
I prefer limited fast travel personally (rarely use it anyway), and leveling up is huge. What are talking about? The perks change everything, and you can change your build as you see fit to suit the situation.
Otherwise I agree. Inventory is a mess, and the load times made Bloodborne pre-patch seem fast.

Bloodborne.
Bloodborne is high art. Performance stutter in areas aside, it's nearly perfect.

HZD will be remembered fondly.in the years to come, and it deserves that. It won't be spoken of as much as any Dragon Age game, and I don't see anyone.talking about them very much (though I hate BioWare games don't get me started).
The story is good, the lore is great, the graphics are fantastic, and the.combat is good. However, the characters speak in paragraphs of exposition and are paper thin. "I have a drinking problem, because I'm irresponsible. My character suddenly changes because I come to terms with loss. Bye." or "I don't conform to gender norms. Bye." but it takes forever.
The quests are one maybe two steps deep, generally, and choices just don't matter bar one or two, and I didn't care because I didn't want anyone to talk any more.

Half the perks don't do anything. Melee is there to stun things without the critical hit perk, and that's not very effective without other perks. The trees make no sense.

Oh, and I can't talk to Gaia, becaue the.door doesn't respond. Guess I'll wait for a patch, or just flip the disc the bird and sell it. I am not starting over.

"Shiny shiny graaaaaaayfix" is no reason to say this is somehow a perfect game. It's a very good open world action game with too much dialogue, no pacing and not that balanced. If you don't fast travel or rush the main quest you'll be overleveled and wreck everything. I turned in my hard-earned flowers and vessels to get garbage I didn't need.

I enjoyed my time with the game when I wasn't dealing with NPCs.

None.

So, they read a summary somewhere and decided the game was offensive.

Didn't right wingers do this with Mass Effect?

I once saw a video editorial saying white people weren't allowed to say "aloha", which is like saying only French people can say "viola"(don't know which letter to accent, sry).

My main issue with the game is that all dialogue is big exposition dumps and everything is so ham-fisted.
Aloy: "Who are the blah blah?"
Total stranger: "The blah blah are a group of bluh bluh with a history of meh meh and a supply of blub blub that live near the bleh bleh. They used tho nah nah but then the geh geh started..." 5 min later
Me: SHUT UP!

I'm trans but wasn't any more offended by the prison warden giving her life story of defying gender norms than anything else. It was equally boring and obvious.

Good game. Decent story. Good world. Terribly written dialogue.

Weh.
It's a dang video game...

@Ralizah well, it looks very carefully crafted, but like Braid he took an existing games ideas (Mario then, Myst now) and added more mechanics.
The Witness is unquestionably superior in mechanics to Myst. So is... just about anything. Plot unfolds the same way.
I can't say first hand how close it gets, because I'm rubbish at puzzles, but i hear it has a 20 min fmv cutscene that makes no sense. Sounds like Myst right here. ;p

I'm not saying it's bad, but I think it's good to distinguish innovation, quality and actual design. I don't see it as innovative. It's just well made.

@themcnoisy blast! You beat me to it!
Too many people don't know their computing history.
"Oh, but you can land in NMS!" So then it's Minecraft.
"You can walk around the planet!" Not actually that different, and it's not the first game with spherical maps.

NMS has nothing new in it.

@get2sammyb 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%28

...what's innovative?
Nothing in this game hasn't been done before...
I hate awards shows.

@get2sammyb to be clear, it's the fact that you get to play the role BioWare set for you that informs that opinion.

I'm not sure I'd call Witcher games RPGs for that reason. I'm biased as I love that story so much, and always set out to play Geralt as he is in the books. Those choices actually affect the story, though, not just who you do the horizontal shuffle with ;p

BioWare would go a long way to either give real chose as to what to do or not do or at least make the combat better if I can't avoid it.

God, just thinking about how awful their combat is makes me bristle. I've tried at least one of every one of their franchises and I was almost instantly put off. Ham-fisted moralising, garbage combat, dank memes (Leroy Jenkins in the first mission of ME1) fake choices or some combination.
I can't get with voiced protagonists, because then I'm just listening to someone.else's character, not my own. That's not role play. That's just a cutscene.

I play proper pen and paper RPGs. The further a game is from that, the less of an RPG it is, afaic. I class Shin Megami Tensei higher than anything after Neverwinter Nights from BioWare on that RPG scale.

@get2sammyb it has most of the ingredients of a BioWare game, but I don't count them as anything but CYOA games with some RPG stuff shoehorned in.
I have nothing but complaints about their approach to game design, though. Much of that is down to taste, but I really wish they'd ditch combat and exploration and go full Telltale. They obviously care more about characters than mechanics, so they should focus more on that.
And even BioWare has classes for Mass Effect games, and that series has exactly 2 main characters.
Heck, some of those choices actually do a few things.

Again, Ubisoft games have all these things already.
"Fantasy/Sci-fi setting equals RPG" in so many people's minds. It's understandable, but I don't see anyone calling Borderlands/FarCry or even Shadow of Mordor RPGs.

Again, Borderlands has more options to role play. To create a character of your own and develop skills that suit that archetype. It's still called "a first person shooter with RPG elements".

This is a great game. It's just not an RPG.

@BAMozzy edgier than my knife collection.

As much as I liked the main plot of TPS, the mechanics and balance were a bit of a mess. Well, almost an entire mess.

Well over 1000hours of 2 and 4-700 hundred of 1 (mostly offline on PC, not tracked).

Here's hoping they don't require a persistent online connection. If it does, I'll probably skip it.

@banacheck "it has gear so it's an RPG"?
...Huh?

Borderlands has more room for role play. Borderlands has more diverse and deep skill trees.
Borderlands is not an RPG.

This is a fantastic action game. It's not an RPG.
Hell, the choices don't even do anything.

It's fun so far, but I don't get how anyone calls it an RPG.
The respawn rate is insane, there's basically no customisation to a 'build'...

It's an open world action game.
It's better than Ubisoft, but it's the same formula, mechanically. FarCry isn't an RPG, nor is Assassin's Creed...

This is the best open world action game I've ever played, and it's better than most RPGs I've seen or played in recent years.
It's still not an RPG.

@Mahe DO NOT BECOME ADDICTED TO PLAYSTATION PLUS!

Zzzzzzzzzz

I had high hopes based on the demo...
Sigh.

If it weren't for Bloodborne I would have cancelled PlayStation Plus a while ago...

If the story is less half-horsed, the sidequests are less of a joke, and you can actually use your army for something I'm interested.
The mechanics were great, but the framing was so flimsy...
I had fun, but I paid 10usd. I can't recommend it for more in the face of so many better games.

I hope the sequel builds on that. They don't need to work on the combat or graphics. Just give me a story that isn't so boring and predictable I skip everything. Let me interact with NPCs.

I ended up accidentally beating the game waiting for it to get good, maxing out the skils i liked, and playing it like some Warriors game. Just building up meters and wrecking house while I listened to podcasts.

I'm more interested in Horizon Zero Dawn, and I'm not all that interested in that.

Good.
Every game should have this, because these things are stupid to begin with.

I make own goals, dangit.

Looking for furniture to craft in ESO.
Need a bed and a chair.

Ubisofty open world? Decent way to kill time, I guess.
Good combat? That's important in general.
BioWare-esque conversations? Yech.
Big monster fights? Why not?
Ludonarrative dissonance? Sigh.

Sounds like 30usd of fun.

@renankj woman who likes women's butts right here.
Everything I've seen about this game is so early 2000s anime it fits right in.

At least they didn't make excuses, like a certain developer...
"Why is she wearing revealing things?"
"Butt."
"...alright."

I couldn't watch because the editing literally hurt my eyes and was making me nauseated.

I recognised Caldera in one of the brief flashes before scrolling down.

I already knew I was getting it, though.

I wonder when BioWare will finally stop pretending they make RPGs at all...
They make choose your own adventure games with few real choices.
Telltale don't pretend to be more than that, and that's fine.