Dragon Age 2 - News Roundup #4

On Saturday March 5 at 1pm PST, Dragon Age 2 Lead Designer Mike Laidlaw will be holding a live demo of the game followed by a question and answer chat with Dragon Age fans. Mike will be playing the Exiled Prince downloadable content as well as showing off the character creator and DA2 promo items. After the demo he will be answering your questions.

Don't miss out on watching Mike's live demo and asking your questions about Dragon Age 2. You can take part here: Live Demo and Chat

The Bioblog has Part 2 of The Technology of Dragon Age 2:

One of the major goals of the team was to make the game look great on all platforms. Having accomplished that, we started researching what additional features we can offer to our users that have invested on higher end PC hardware. The latest PC GPUs that have been recently released on the market are very powerful. DirectX 11 technology is a great way for us to target this advanced GPU hardware, as DirectX 11 is fully backwards compatible with DirectX 10. So if you have a video card that supports DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 or DirectX 11, and Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7, you’ll be able to benefit from additional technology features as described in this post.

Gaider Gaider has been interviewed by the NY Daily News:

DN: It seems like more and more open-ended RPGs are cropping up these days. You guys keep things more focused. Is there a risk in the open-ended RPG?

Gaider: It is hard. One part of an RPG is letting the player tell their own story. That's something like "Fable." If you're letting the player wander where they will and do what they will, you le the player create the story in their head.

In my experience, you can go too far down that side. You run the risk of sort of depersonalizing it for the player. They can do lots of things, but do they care?"

DN: But with "Dragon Age II," you guys wanted a balance to it, right? How hard was that?

Gaider: Finding the balance between the two is difficult. They're kind of diametrically opposed. In order to offer the player to make their own story, you have to surrender some control. But in order to keep it under control, you have to take some control from the player.

...and Gamasutra has a blog post titled A Critcism of BioWare, which makes some good points that are lost in the poor writing:

In The Witcher, you can improve Geralt's fighting abilities and magical signs to improve your odds in combat. Integrated with the consequences of your decisions there are some upgrades that are only accessible if you make certain decisions in game. By the end of the game you have more abilities and utility then at the beginning and chaining attacks at the hardest difficulty required good timing to master.

What I love about the SMT series (and most of Atlus's rpg lineup) is that they challenge the player. Just pressing the attack button will not win fights in their games. The SMT series is known for unique boss fights with twists to mix up the regular fights. Their games reward players for learning and mastering the mechanics with better items and challenging fights. There is that sense of mastery when playing their games, when you reach the point that you fully understand the mechanics and get into a groove with winning fights.

That sense of challenge and reward is nowhere to be seen in the Bioware games I've played. Side quests require me to do the same thing I've done before and exploring with the only reward being experience points or morality points don't interest me. Battles don't offer variety and the only challenge is dealing with a stat difference. There is no sense of learning the game mechanics after the prerequisite tutorial and no growth of the established game mechanics. Which leads me to this: If a game doesn't have a compelling story or good game-play, what is left to keep me interested in playing?