I was planning to talk about Bayonetta in this second entry of my blog, however I suppose there must be like a trillion of blogs entries about the new king (or is it queen?) of action games, so, since I’m not the kind of gamer that likes to talk about overly chewed subjects, I’m going to leave Bayonetta for next week’s blog, I hope that by that time I had already finished it and at least have more than half of trophies, that way I’m going to be able to give a better and more objective opinion.
This time I’m going to dedicate this space to give my thoughts about BioWare and their latest creation: Dragon Age: Origins, since it is the latest game I’ve finished and I just restarted it some days ago, so the memories and thoughts are fresh enough to give my rants and raves about it.
The first thing I’d like to say is that I’m not a PC gamer, I have tried many times to play PC games with horrible results, if we don’t count World of Warcraft, that I played from late November 2006 to early April 2008, the PC game in which I have done more progress is Warcraft III, I finished the Human campaign and got half way through the Undead campaign, oh, and I’ve got a Sim in The Sims 2, but that’s it, further attempts in games like Dawn of War have been unsuccessful, so I never got to experience the world rocking games that Bioware put on PC years ago.
My first encounter with a BioWare game was none other than Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I remember that I got an original Xbox just to play that game, and it rocked my world like few games had done it before, KOTOR was the first time I was exposed to dialogue trees, to moral choices that actually affected the course of the game, I loved how well BioWare managed to apply them to a Jedi/Sith situation, it was a dream came true for a Star Wars fan like me, so yeah, with this game BioWare got me as a loyal follower.
The loyalty however didn’t last long since I skipped Jade Empire due to lack of interest, nothing in that game appealed to me, it’s one of the games that has been on my game queue at Gamefly since day one and I have always moved it aside to order other games, I really have no idea why Jade Empire never interested me since I loved KOTOR as the child I haven’t got.
However things changed when Mass Effect was announced, I was eagerly anticipating that game, I was one of the many gamers that followed Mass Effect evolution during its production time, reading interviews, watching trailers and videos; I just couldn’t wait for it to come out.
Due to financial reasons I wasn’t able to buy it on launch day but was able to rent it and play it a few months later, and being honest the first thought that came to my mind when the final credits started to roll was: “This is not a game I’d buy, good thing I rented it first…” For some reason, Mass Effect didn’t live up to my expectations, I don’t know if it was me who was waiting for a game as mind blowing as KOTOR, or just the game wasn’t as good as everyone said it was, whatever the reason, the high opinion I had of BioWare faded a bit.
When Dragon Age: Origins was announced it was my friend Ernie who sent me the link to the first video through msn, I thought it was going to be a new MMO but he told me then that it was a new offline RPG from BioWare, honestly I didn’t care a lot about the game, actually I didn’t care at all, I just felt like it was going to be another Mass Effect to me, so I just ignored the game.
By the time the game came out I was oblivious of it, but I ended getting it thanks to the initial love it got from Ernie, even Roli, another great friend of mine who happens to not like WRPGs a lot, got it, so I decided to give it a try after all.
After spending almost 70 hours in my first playthrough I have to say that Dragon Age: Origins is, at least to me, another step down taken by BioWare, with this I’m not saying that the game is bad, it’s actually entertaining, but that’s it, the game lacks the personality and charisma from other games from BioWare, not only that, it’s glitchy and unbalanced.
When it comes to the game’s plot it got me really interested at first, but I lost interest when I found out how much it resembles the book “A Song of Ice and Fire” I mean, BioWare took all the core elements from the book and pasted them on their game. Then comes the graphics, some have dared to say that they are beautiful and I wonder if they played the same game I played, the graphic work is mediocre at best, there is a lot of late textures, the character models look like robots and the body language is just hilarious.
I could go on and on about he things that I disliked about Dragon Age: Origins, but I have to say that there were things that I enjoyed enough to make me like the game to the point of giving it a score of 8.0, and even start a second playthrough aiming to get more trophies, so, like I said it’s not a bad game, just not as good as I thought it could be.
What I find interesting in all this is how, at least to me, but if you check game scores of BioWare games you will see a trend, BioWare games have been getting lower scores, in my case KOTOR was a perfect 10, Mass Effect a 9 and now Dragon Age: Origins is an 8, and honestly, their games are starting to feel repetitive and in some moments monotonous, you don’t believe me? Go and play the Fade event in Origins, then you’ll understand.
Another weird thing is that recently BioWare top guys declared in an interview that Japanese RPGs are stuck because they lack evolution, that comes from the guys that have been using the exact same gameplay core elements (the dialogue trees and the moral choices) for seven years now, so if you ask me it’s not more than hypocrisy from their part, I mean, Mass Effect 2 is coming out in two weeks, it’s going to sell tons of units, but in the end it’s going to be the same game you have been playing since 2003, I don’t use comparisons, I actually hate them, but I don’t remember any Final Fantasy game feeling like any other of the series, but with BioWare games it feels more like if you are playing expansions of the same game just with a different setting, could it be that the success finally got into their heads? Who knows, I just wish they wouldn’t have made that comment, that just gave me an impression of them that I didn’t want, since I actually used to admire them as a developer team.
Anyway, I think I have been ranting for way to long now, before I stop let me thank all of you who read this blog and all of you that commented on my past entry, it sure gave me the confidence I needed to continue blogging in this site, I thank you once again for reading and I say goodbye for now, see you next time my friends
