Has this company ever made a single good game?

[Lhynn]

Both Fallouts are deeply flawed games. But they are deeply flawed games that evolved the fucking industry, so we love them for it. And love makes blind.

Bullshit, to this day theres nothing as good as fallout when it comes to interacting with the world. the setting itself was masterfully executed and there are tons of interesting and memorable characters in it.

Its difficulty is entirely based on how much you know about the game and the systems, like almost every good rpg ever made.

 

[Doktor Best]

I fully agree, but your statement doesnt contradict mine.

Knowledge about the game? Come on, all you need to do is put some skillpoints in shooting and there you go.

And ofcourse you can limit yourself by keeping combat skills low and therefor have more difficult combat. But that difficulty doesnt lead to more challenging combat (as in mentally challenging). Its still pretty onedimensional, the only difference being that you bite the dust more often.

 

[Lhynn]

I fully agree, but your statement doesnt contradict mine.

Knowledge about the game? Come on, all you need to do is put some skillpoints in shooting and there you go.

And ofcourse you can limit yourself by keeping combat skills low and therefor have more difficult combat. But that difficulty doesnt lead to more challenging combat (as in mentally challenging). Its still pretty onedimensional, the only difference being that you bite the dust more often.

Sure, but the first instinct isnt to specialize, its to put some points in shooting just in case, and some poins in throwing because you found some grenades, and maybe some points into speech. Then youll get to a town with gambling machines and find that maybe some spare money wouldnt hurt, so you put points there too, and you are struggling in the fights because you already used your grenades and missed like half of them and you end up spending too many bullets in each fight.
By mid point you start finding heavy weapons and they have higher number than small weapons so i guess ill invest in those, and some points into first aids. oh weit, last combat i got an injury, maybe i should invest in doctor a bit.
This is sort of recounting my first playthrough btw, like 15 years ago, and how most people play the game, they want to see everything so they split their points. It kept combat challenging up to getting to the brotherhood i guess.

As for challenge, true, it wasnt exactly deep combat with complex decision making (shoot, or heal for the most part), but it was still a very enjoyable experience due to sounds and animations, they were fucking awesome, and never overstayed their welcome in an already short game. So i dont get your complain in that front either, at least not in those terms.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Seriously all of their games are objectively trash.

Nope, MDK2 was an excellent tpp shooter.

 

[Kefka1134]

Warning, this a bit long.

The thing, is in terms of the game experiences themselves (characters, gameplay, etc), there really isn’t anything Bioware did that Black Isle (or Obsidian.. heck even CDPR) hasn't done better…

And yet, pretty much every Black Isle (and even CDPR’s first witcher game) were made with Bioware engines, perhaps supported with Bioware money, I don’t know all the details, but they are partnerships in a sense.

So while stating that objectively Icewind Dale 2 or Storm of Zehir are better than Dragon Age and Mass Effect is total sacrilege just about anywhere, probably even here, that isn’t to say Bioware hasn’t contributed in one way or another to the success of many video games and video game franchises. They built the engines used in PST and IWD, they built the engines used in NWN2 and their expansions, as well as in TW1. They clearly are (or at least were) highly skilled programmers and builders.

The best Bioware game, although I must confess having not played all their games, really probably is Sonic Dark Chronicles, which is kind of the hopeful aspirational side of the company, avid hyper cerebral fans of a Japanese video game franchise that while not, not totally mastering good game mechanics, basically make for a unique sort of romp, substituting gameplay aspects for immersive ones at a less than 1:1 ratio, but not enough to become unrespectable and you can certainly feel the kind of positive energy.

Lets be real here though, we all know at the same time that Bioware games themselves are really super cheesy and stuff, and with so many generic stereotypes and tropes and whatnot. Disciplined and focused samurai ninjas, spacey and easily manipulated bards, over aggressive and sexy pirates, autistic robots exploring their human and emotional side, flamboyantly dashing mages and rogues with a heart of gold, and all together in their hope to save the world from the clutches of evil Mr. Cyborg or Dark lord or whatever.

Plus they have that back and forth teasing romantic stuff like it was scribbed from 10 things I hate about you or some other mid 90s movie that reflects (to be kind of blunt but fair) a pretty childish view of romance….

And yet even then, you can see the purity and aggression with which they derive things is actually kind of impressive way, it’s like they’re amazing copiers to the point where you don’t even care that their copying so much…

But ultimately, those are skills better suited to something else, such as programming and stuff rather than the characters and essence of the experience itself. I make an exception for Portalbendarwinden and their sense of humor though.

In essence, Bioware was (coudln't really say still are, since they don't make engines anymore for example) really good at engine development, programming, navigating those kinds of things, but it’s Black Isle that really put the heart and soul into the CRPG genre and made it burn with energy and resonance.

Then eventually they split apart and Black Isle/Obsidian is like perpetually on the brink financially and Bioware produces things closer to interactive dramas or visual novels than CRPGs (and doesn’t even make engines anymore). It’s a bummer.

I would say “ever since Bioware decided to go it alone” but it seems it’s really probably safer to put EA for a lot of that, and that they were truly the ultimate wedge that spurred the two companies to move apart.

 

[Kefka1134]

Postscript: Sorry for misspellings and a few typos! =/, I am sort of used to a different forum which had an infinite edit timer, but in all honestly that probably just made for some bad habits.

Plus I also wanted to clarify that Storm of Zehir and IWD2 objectively really basically are better than the Dragon Age and Mass Effect trilogies, as crazy as that sounds, it's amazingly how well put together the games themselves are, despite their reputation and the opinions of even the people that made them. I would have to replay KOTOR (and well maybe, DA Origins) and such in order to make more aggressive comparisons but people really underestimate the value of a small scale non-save the world story, treating it as if it's intentionally made to avoid being taken seriously when perhaps that's precisely the powerful effect and feeling they are meant to have. =-)

I also haven't finished SWTOR, but from what I've played it seems to be in the vein of KOTOR much more than DA and ME so far. It's a bit of a challenge to experience all the content since it's locked behind specific periodic class quest chunks but at least the corpus of main quests and worlds are closer to that vein.

And also since I haven't figured out the signature I wanted to say I'm really a fan of earlier FFs than 6 not so much Kefka and crowd, it was the first I played but yeah, just a tiny note, all things considered plus there was a much closer connection to earlier FFs and D&D.

 

[Lhynn]

Soz is alright, IWD2 is crap.