EA said in March that BioWare’s Mass Effect team had been drafted in to assist with Dragon Age: Dreadwolf development, while a small group led by Mike Gamble continued pre-production work on the next entry in the sci-fi series.
Isn’t this what happened during the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem too? Jason Shreier’s post mortem of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is going to be awfully familiar reading…
I think at this point the best plan is to mash all the assets together and release Dragon Effect. Mass Dragon? No, that sounds like maybe a Catholic dragon. Mass Age? No, people will buy it expecting a massage. Maybe subvert all expectations and go with Age Effect! We’ll throw out all the magic and aliens, it’ll be a harrowing exploration of human mortality.
Bioware has spent over a decade chasing mass appeal for their games, to the detriment of what they’re good at. They made that work as they shifted from 2D to 3D to action-3D. That stopped working as they went too far, abandoning their core strengths. Bioware hasn’t had an unmitigated success since… ME2 in 2010? That’s 13 years of them floundering, with the very mitigated successes of ME3 and DA:I early on in that.
That kind of floundering is going to filter down to everyone working there. It’s hard to bounce back from that. They know Dreadwolf needs to hit it out of the park if they hope to continue on. Easy situation to end up in development hell with delay after delay…
I don’t think the slim will be any better than the current models. It sounds like they are doing it to simplify their lineup. One console with an optional detachable blu ray drive. They are likely sticking to TSMC’s 7nm process, so the SoC won’t get any smaller or less power hungry.
Also ES has some of the best, deep, insane lore. The series is at its worst when it tries to be grounded.
Even Skyrim ends with you going to the afterlife to gather aid from the dead and fight the embodiment of the cyclical nature of time by imposing the concept of mortality on it. And somehow that was a bog standard dragon fight.
Even Skyrim wasn’t bad. I put like a thousand hours into it. It’s just not exactly what I’d call “ultimate”.
Oblivion was good. It’s dated at this point and like Morrowind combat is not comparable to say Elden Ring. Oblivion solves the whole open world (as in OpenCities) thing in mods, but Morrowind has it to start with. Which is why I think Morrowind is the closest the series has been to my ideal.
Rather than saying it’s better than say Oblivion, I’m saying it’s closest (among the ES games) to being what I’d want out of an “ultimate” ES game. Oblivion has mods that fix its bixest shortcoming (OpenCities and various magic mods) but I’m not inclined to give Bethesda credit for the work of modders.
Morrowind was the first of the ES series where they drastically reduced the area but invested more in the content in that area. It had a unique art style and location. It kept most of the complexity of the prior games in the series, while subsequent games heavily simplified things to cater to console gamers. There are a lot of babies that were thrown out with the bathwater after Morrowind. Of course the later games also added a lot of improvements, but I think for its time, Morrowind was a very good game. It depends on preferences, but I would consider it the best game of the ES series relative to when it was launched.
Fair enough. I loved it. Had never played a game like that. I was definitely under the impression that these were mostly PC games. I had a lot of fun with Morrowind and played oblivion a bit too. I didn’t see a ton of difference in them. Then Skyrim for me was absolutely incredible. Besides the bugs (which I barely ever saw myself) I didn’t see a single reason people talked so much smack about that game.
Not a dumb take at all, it’d be awesome if they did. Unfortunately there are likely contracts or business reasons preventing them from doing so, or code shared between the 360 and current gens that they want to keep proprietary. Still, with MS open sourcing more and more projects over time, I’d love to see it.
If the goal is game preservation, the idea would be the community would preserve them for you. We would likely have highly usuable emualtors within a short time.
Bethesda, everything doesn’t need to have the biggest map ever, it just needs to have good writing and replayability.
Like New Vegas has a map 3 times smaller than fallout 4 & 76 and I’m still enjoying it almost 15 years later. (I’m not knocking those other games, I’m just saying map and game hugeness isn’t what matters.)
You don’t need the biggest map ever to make a good game. You do, however, need the biggest map ever to make a good Elder Scrolls game. People referring to BG3 don’t really understand the essence of the Elder Scrolls, a vision the series has pursued all the way back to Arena.
…well when you put it that way you are right. Elder scrolls games are known for having enormous expansive maps, criticizing that is like criticizing mario for having too many coins or something haha
You don’t need the biggest map ever to make a good game. You do, however, need the biggest map ever to make a good Elder Scrolls game.
No you don’t. The evolution of the Elder Scrolls series proves that, as the map size has been massively reduced. The Skyrim map is extremely tiny compared to Daggerfall.
Skyrim with actually good melee combat, much greater magic variety, companions who are smarter and not suicidal, horses who can move around with logical sense, more biome variety as much as I love what's already there, factions that don't end in you ruling all of them at once...
Turns out Skyrim gets a lot right but there are tons of things that could be much better.
I just wanted Skyrim where I could invite a few friends to come along for dungeons. Then they made Elder Scrolls Online as though that was at all the same thing.
That would indeed be pretty cool, I'd love to see if they go that route for TES 6. Clearly the FO76/ESO routes are not what that same customer base wants, for different reasons.
ESO is a fine MMO, but it's absolutely an MMO and not a multiplayer TES game. FO76 is a skeleton of a Bethesda RPG but isn't formatted at all how what the average Bethesda fan would want to play. It's strange they went both of these routes before attempting what people have been asking for and even trying to make themselves for so long.
It's a bit of a shame Starfield won't include multiplayer either, but it's hard for me to complain since I don't have friends anyway.
Tell me you played 30 minutes of 76 on launch and never touched it again without telling me you played 30 minutes of 76 on launch and never touched it again
Yeah 76 is pretty rad and based now. There was an actual dialog I had with an NPC who wanted me to go find gold and I was telling them this unquenchable lust for money caused the whole damn apocalypse in the first place.
I actually have not even played it, but I've heard it's been much improved, correct me if I'm wrong though it's still different from literally Fallout 4 with other players. For example, are there multiple long faction storylines, large populated cities with many side quests, a few radio stations, caravans, morality or faction reputation, bobbleheads, basically every major and minor feature in a standard Bethesda Fallout.
If it's been updated enough times and in the right directions to include all that stuff, then awesome. I was by no means saying it was a bad game, I just want to know if it's seamlessly a Bethesda title through and through with other players or if it's still Fallout in a different direction.
Are you able to enjoy the world privately with only players you choose without any DLC or microtransactions based restrictions on construction or storage, mod support so long as each player maintain the same modlist, etc.?
I played it recently and it is still a clunky half broken mess with friends. Setting up three camps was a pain and the one quest we tried to do failed to spawn the final objective except for the party leader, and none of the rest of us were able to complete it.
I played around 20 hours of it at launch, and it was bad. Not just in all the hilariously broken things that were memed all over the place back then, but the fundamental concept of the game just didn’t quite work.
Far different games though. Completely different genres and I don’t find dwarf fortress as immersive as even nethack due to it being more of a god game. It really pulls me far out of the experience when you don’t control a single character. I still find it fun but more in a strategy system way rather than an RPG.
For me Dwarf fortress is like watching TV, nethack is like reading a book.
I feel like I’ll watching some bizarre sitcom with such great stories as “dwarven child sees an elephant trample a goblin and then gets possessed, keeps making bone carvings of the scene, and then gathers all the elephant meat in a forge and kills three grown men by slapping them with meat.” I’m not anyone in that story, but it’s fun to watch.
Nethack is like getting to know the quirks of your character as they narrowly escape death.
Have you only played the Steam version? The non-steam build has Adventure mode, where you control just a single character in a turn-based roguelike. IDK why it wasn’t included with the Steam release, but it’s always been my favorite part of the game.
Delay as long as you need, just please release a good game. I loved the first game, and while I felt DA2 was a step back, I still enjoyed it. DA3 felt too… MMO-y to me.
It’s such an amazing world to play in, I really hope the 4th installment isn’t garbage.
Totally agree about the DA series. Can’t say I have very high hopes for this one, given the direction they’ve taken the franchise, but I’d love to be wrong.
I think it would be very funny if the game came out and was good. Like Bg3 level good. Just the irony of everybody going “not Todd doing his bullshit again” and it turns out to be a perfect game or something.
And for the record I’m not a huge Bethesda fan.
Edit: I’m astonished I even have to say this, but this is just a stupid joke comment. I’m not trying to make comparisons between baldurs gate 3 and a game that hasn’t even come out yet. Don’t dig that deep.
I’m not into fantasy at all, but it’s would be so funny seeing people cope about the game being good. But let’s be real, if it’s still on creation engine, it won’t be.
I agree the name means nothing. Which is why when people go gaga over Creation, I have to remind them it’s still GameBryo, but with more graphical features tacked on to it. The foundation of shit that is GameBryo is still at the heart of the tech driving their games. If Bethesda’s games were buildings, they all build them on a foundation of sand.
I also agree it’s not the reason why their games suck (their games in and of themselves tend to not suck), but it will be the reason why it performs like shit or has the same technical issues that have existed since they started using GameBryo. Unless even after all the time they’ve spent using the engine they still suck at using it, and that’s the reason they have so many problems.
The only other company and series of games I see having the same stuff holding back making better products because of the engine used is Bohemia with ARMA. They have just kept piling stuff on top of Virtual Battle System and all the problems stemming from VBS are present in the current iteration of the engine. Even the devs themselves hate it, but it would be way more work to make an entirely new engine.
They are on creation engine 2 with starfield and honestly, we’ll see how much of an improvement it is. I was saying back in fo4 that if they don’t upgrade the engine it would be a flop but it apparently was one of the best selling games at the time.
BG3 is a gem in this current age, but if you look at it as an open world game and specifically look at that only, then it’s not even good. (honestly even compared to BG1, the open world aspect is very limited)
The worst part is that it wouldn’t be that hard to “up” the level of Bethesda games. More focus on the writing, both story and characters would go a long way.
Dropping the whole “It’s one big world, no transitions.” goal. Make cities huge, with transitions and fill them with stuff and people. More “inhabited biomes” so to speak.
Choice & Consequence. Having different paths the players can go down. Locking players out of certain content and areas because of their choice, isn’t a bad thing. It just encourages multiple playthroughs. As well as adding multiple ways to dealing with a problem.
Not forcing motivation or character upon the player. The “chasing after a loved one” motivation in Fallout is terrible. And being a ‘shiny superman’ in both TES and Fallout is boring. We need more grey-area to move around in.
There’s clearly more that could be added to the list. But these four points alone would elevate their games to a more passable grade.
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne