Larian Studios Forums General Chat After Seeing the new Dragon Age Trailer so glad BioWare didn't get to make Bg3

Are you going to take bets?

@Liarie and @KlarissA, I agree with you both. I also love the DA franchise (as well the PoE, Pathfinder, and Witcher franchises) for the stories, characters, and world. And no matter what else is said about BioWare, their storytelling and character/world building have always been excellent as far as I am concerned. In all the RPGs I love, combat has always been something I viewed as that thing I had to tolerate in order to enjoy all the other things about RPGs I love so very much. And while turn-based combat is the worst, real-time combat, especially of the hack and slash variety, is not that much better. So with both Avowed and DA4, it is based on my expectations about storytelling, character development, and world building that I am so very excited for those games.

Hey I'm so with you on this. I also love the Varric character, and would be seriously pissed if BioWare killed him off.

Varric did look fantastic in what we got to see.

Great!

I hope Avowed also improves its quests and main story compared with Pillars of Eternity 2!!!

I am also looking forward to Life Is Strange: Double Exposure! It should be a great fall if all of these games turn out well!

I would agree with you on the older Bioware games, but DAI did seriously put me off. I couldn't get myself to get engaged in that game. I played it twice (with the other games I have well over 15 playthroughs under my belt) - and that only to really understand the lore behind Fen'Harel and everything. I did like some of the companions, but the world seemed dead.
As for Mass Effect: I think there are a lot of elements from Babylon 5 in it (which is good in my book - Babylon 5 is the best scifi show and I die on that hill), but the combat was too shootery for me - and I tried all classes. I finally gave up mid through game 2.
I heard terrible things about Anthem, but granted, I have never played it, since the premisse didn't interest me.
I will make a decision about DAV, when it was reviewed - I'm a bit on teh fence, similar to you with BG3, well, maybe a bit more positive, since I still hope, the game could be up my alley. But then, it is EA and I don't have faith in them.

Edit: Varric is among my favourite alltime game characters alongside Jaheira, Beckett, Gary Golden (both from Vampire Bloodlines), Isabela and Karlach. SO him dying would be a deal breaker for me.

I suppose different strokes...

Personally, I've found Bioware's storytelling quite lacking after DAO and ME1. These initial games did well in building their worlds and telling a story. But sequels never quite performed as well.

ME2 was carried by the characters and honestly I thought ME3's writing to be absolutely garbage, full of plotholes and inconsistencies and inexplicably shallow characters...

DA2 and DAI I found to be pretty forgettable in terms of writing.

With Andromeda being utter trash.

Which is why I have little hope that DAV will be particularly well written.


Personally I'd be pleased if Varric died. I never particularly liked him as a character and very much disliked his shoehorning into the series as the main character.

But because of that I doubt he'll die. He'll live and continue to be the main character for the next titles in the series too.

I liked the original Dragon Age: Origins but somehow by the end of the game I was sort of burned out on darkspawn. One of the great things about D&D was the variety of monster types, but other than the werewolf clan, a deer, and a few demons, DA:O was dominated by darkspawn monsters. I should also mention it did have the Mad Hermit, which I had asked them for. But by the end of the game, I just felt no desire to replay or to move on to the next release in the series. I went back to NWN II.

BGIII has a good set of monsters: dragons, imps, kobolds, myconids & fungi, spiders, goblins, hobgoblins, redcaps, hags, bullette, wood woads, various devils, eagles, owlbears, oozes, lurker above, one cute frog, cats, ravens, mimics, kuo-toa, various undead, elementals, iron golem types (Grym, Bernard), oxen, gremlkin, dogs, displacer beasts, dryads, harpies, illithids, djinn, dinosaurs, and even ... a clown (shudder).

Bioware *was* top tier when it came to writing, but they haven't written anything good in over a decade. Pretty sure none of the writers for earlier DA's are still around (or at least not many). Maybe they will do a good job with the writing in DA4, but I would not use previous iterations written by different people to predict that.

Odds are pretty good the new people will have corporate riding their buttocks telling them what to do, so I have fairly low hopes for the story. On the plus side this means that it will be easy for my expectations to be exceeded.

I think the big reason for many people feeling this same way about DA:I was the game becoming open world. At least for me, that's what does it to give me that 'everything is empty/dead' feeling. It is why I did not care for Skyrim, and that game is the only RPG I have played that I never finished and quit half-way through. But with DA:I, if you somehow manage to get through/past the Hinterlands area, then the game becomes much less open world and much more typical RPG. The Hinterlands is what kills the game for many, and why there is now a mod to get rid of the Hinterlands except for any quests therein. And DA:TV is explicitly not open world.

Tbh The Hinterlands was the least problematic. A lot of the maps are pretty empty and you just want to get storyline. There were too many fetch quests and 'Close teh Rift' quests that were pretty boring.
I never did finish Skyrim either . Itd didn't hold my interest. Bethesda can make beautiful worlds - I played a lot of Morrowind, with it's alien environments - but they lack in the character and story department for my taste. And the frostbite spiders didn't help either as arachnophobe tbh.

Things like collecting shards or the puzzle like things with the observatories/constellations, for example, was certainly tedious in my opinion. Same as the rifts, yes. I think my least favourite map was the Hissing Wastes, for some reasons. I liked the main missions and some specific locations more.

I also never finished Skyrim, even if I started it a few times. I had finally finished Oblivion, so I wanted to try. But every time it’s the same, I sort of get lost in a few side quests and a bit of exploration, and it becomes too much of a chore, as well as kind of filling the void my character is to me (I’ve become the boss of all the guilds and such, cool I guess). I tried to role play in different ways, but it’s just not for me. Edit : To add regarding my problem with Bethesda. I loved the two first Fallout. I really enjoyed New Vegas, which was taken care of by Obsidian. But with the third and fourth by Bethesda, it went the same way as with the Elder Scrolls for me.

I adore them too! Gary Golden particularly. He's amazing. Very unrelated, but VTMB2 has misunderstood or ignored what people enjoyed about the original so grossly it's hilarious. DA4 will at least be better than that, guaranteed.

My, I certainly hope so. It’s been a while, but I had a blast with the original game. I was enthusiastic when I saw there was to be another one, then it was like stuck in limbo, and I really don’t know what to make of what I saw about what is supposed to get out late this year.

Somebody will go broke this fall. It should at least be entertaining to watch that.

Holy Moses, you just made my day. I've been wanting to play through again, but thoughts of the Hinterlands kept killing the dream.

Honestly, I wouldn't be upset if DAV was as closed in as DA2, but they'd be in a heap of trouble with most folks if they did that.

Open World in of itself generally isn't a problem. Quite a lot of people enjoyed Skyrim and its open world. Elden Ring is also popular with its open world. Not to mention Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom.

It's what you do with the open world that matters. In DAI the world is just scattered with a handful of repetitive tasks. With any towns being scarecely interactable (With only like 2-3 people you can properly talk to in order to pick up one of the aforementioned repetitive tasks) which leads to it feeling empty.

Skyrim had a similar problem with its overuse of generic Draugr Tombs. Though it tended to have enough unique dungeons and side quests to keep people occupied (As well as mod support so people could easily add their own content and make a plethora of changes to skills to improve replayability which is how I managed to stay engaged through 29 separate 100% completions of the game)

It's the typical "Ubisoft Syndrome" where an open world is created, but cannot be filled properly, so developers just resort to copy/pasting the same 5 activites over and over and hope people don't get bored (Which is starting to wear thin for Ubisoft themselves, with recent Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games getting less positive reviews as people are tired of this formula). Which not only creates tedium but also makes a world feel dead because unique places aren't unique, since you just go over and do the same thing you've done 100 times before.

I never finished Skyrim, but I **DID** spend 1000 hours playing anyway. The story isn't the point with Skyrim (which is to say, I pretty much agree with the point that you are making).

The whole Nosferatu map was great. Mitnick and Imalia are two great characters too.
Yes, I don't have much hope for 2, especially since they kicked Brian Mitsoda, the mastermind behind 1. I seldom had so many memorable characters in one game. Andrei was great too and the sisters, Jeanette and Therese. Some of the best quests ever, like Ocean House. I don't think, 2 will be able to pull that up plus it was announced, that stuff will be behind a paywall, like clans ( I bet, the Malkavians will be one of them).

Sorry for the ot, but Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines was just so good.

It's my favorite videogame that I've played, I get you. I love Jeanette, Andrei and VV too (even made mods for VV and Jeanette, heh). I don't think Mitsoda was VITAL for VTMB2 to be a successful (as in, good and faithful) sequel, but understanding what people love about the game definitely was. Just the fact that their trailer focuses on (extremely bad looking) combat when... people who enjoyed VTMB didn't care at all about the also bad combat! Already says a lot. The clans you can choose are kind of baffling picks as well. Not to mention the predetermined protagonist and the dialogue wheel... that scene whose dialogue they showcased was also so goofily bad, and that's what they decided to highlight! I will still play, but every time they show more content I doubt more and more I will be able to complete it. I already had to drop VTM Swansong mid-game, and this looks just like it.
DA:TV will be a masterpiece in comparison in every regard.

Oh sure. I agree. A well done open world game can be really good. But when I said "people," what I meant was people who loved the original DA game, not gamers generally.