I'd like to experiment with fashion, but I really try to avoid wearing anything that could label me as a punk, goth, hipster, skater, etc...

That's easy, just balance it off with something else. Along with my skate shoes I wear an old red army military jacket. I highly doubt anyone thinks "oh he's a skater" (old photo)

Now we just need someone to animate the gravestone landing on and crushing the joystick and it's done.

I don't think we want dead projects to stand out like that, screaming for attention.

I've used like, two pairs of skate shoes over the last 10 years or so, summer through winter, rain through drought. Persistent things. Not the exact model pictured below, though.



The property about skate shoes is that you tie the laces once, then slip 'em on and off with unparalleled ease.

I feel like I want to acknowledge your progress but I don't really have anything constructive to say. Just... sweet. Keep it up.

But we both know that you don't do something for 30 fucking hours because it's boring, or because you have no idea whatsoever whether what you are experiencing is enjoyable or not, when at anytime you have the ability to turn it off. If you had played maybe half the game, I would believe you. This is childish and dishonest though.

I didn't say that I didn't know if what I was experiencing was enjoyable or not, that I knew very clearly. I kept playing because I hoped it would get better. Actually, it sort of did at the very end, but not enough to justify a 50 euro price point. 1 hour out of 30, more like 2 dollars. Which I could indeed pay for the experience - but I can't, no method is offered for me to do so.

....Unfortunately, those developers have long since moved on in the past 20 years and all the money goes to a monolithic conglomerate that bought out the company when it went belly up decades ago.

That's a very good point. Take for instance Donkey Kong Country. I have the SNES ROM, but Rareware is long gone - original staff quit, the company acquired by Microsoft... To be fair I bought the game back when they were in business, but still. My little sister is playing these old games on emulators as she's growing up. Is it morally wrong of her to experience the history of video gaming without paying the current IP holders (Nintendo)?

[completely]

Do you pay for tickets to music concerts? [...] Do you pay for movie tickets?

In both of these examples you consume some physical resource, however. You occupy a seat in the theater and the staff has to clean up after you and maintain the theater. When I have but a copy of a digital good, it has no effect on anyone else what I do with it.

I understand where you're coming from though, because I didn't like Dragon Age 2 very much either, and I also played it through to the end. But I bought it and I learned my lesson and won't be buying EA/Bioware products again.

Here's the core of the issue; You only get to vote with your wallet for the second generation game. If you always buy before you play, a developer's first sale to you is always positive reinforcement to them, even if they shouldn't be rewarded for it. Dragon Age 2 sold well and they bribed the "official" reviewers to give great scores. To their eyes, it looks like a commercial success, and we're likely to get more of the same. The only way to tell them they made a mistake is to not buy at all. And that requires playing before making the decision.

Right now the way I understand your argument is something like this "the only things that have value are physical goods, such as food or electricity." Which is not true. Just because something doesn't disappear after use doesn't mean it has no value, and therefore doesn't have to be paid for.

I completely disagree. That's exactly how it is. Digital goods are not scarce goods; They have practically infinite supply. And the economics of supply vs demand dictate that digital goods therefore have no value.

As a developer of digital goods, be it games, music or movies, you're not selling a product. The product itself it essentially worthless because it has infinite supply. What you're selling (or should be selling, if you're appropriately adapting) is the service of making more. What people actually do with your product is of no concern, because it's out of your hands, infinitely copyable and unenforceable (in private use). The only thing you should be worrying about is incenting people to support further development. Rushed product, bad quality, bugs, DLC and DRM are not incentives. Neither is "you're all criminals!".

I think it's morally insincere to reap the benefits (whether its entertainment, however slight, or lessons learned about good/bad design) of hundreds of peoples' hours of hard work, only to later decide it wasn't valuable to you. If you want to get a taste without buying it, you can play the demo.

A fair claim, but I argue that I received no benefit from playing these games. It was their decision, their risk, to sink so much work into a bad product. I feel not sorry for them one bit. People come together and labor for the stupidest things, for the "benefit" of everyone; Does not oblige me to support them in any way if I so choose. And I've already pointed out that demos are not representative of the final product, ever.

There's nothing morally insincere about it. I'm perfectly aware that if I want to play good games, it's my responsibility to support the developers of such games; Otherwise they go out of business and no more games come my way. Indeed, I have not pirated a single Valve game to date. They know how to add value to their products and rarely make stupid decisions (looking at you, Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2).

If we want evolution to happen in any media bad developers must die. It's very simple, universe 101.

But if you play the entire thing, then it's obvious on some level you found it valuable, and therefor are obligated to pay the people that created that value, even if you don't give them the asking price.

Now there's a good idea. I'd be happy to give BioWare, say, two dollars, to nudge them in a different direction, "not good enough, try again". But I can't. They provide no facilities for me to do this. I have to pay the price on the box or nothing at all. Even worse, there's lots of middle-men: retailers, publishers, DRM companies, etc. shaving a cut off the profit. I don't want to support these obsolete entities. Again, BioWare offers no way to directly pay them for their work. I would love a pay-what-you-want, after-you-play, directly-to-developer service for all games. That's precisely what I'm going for here.

You are saying that you played the game for 30 hours because you didn't have anything better to do. That means playing the game was better and more interesting use of time than whatever it was you would normally be doing. Which means it made your life slightly better during that time period, and therefor you were entertained. That means you extracted value from the game.

Once again (did you read my previous posts on the thread...?) I did not play the game because I enjoyed it. I played it because I didn't know if I'd enjoy it or not, without playing. I played it because it had the potential to entertain me more than something else I could have been doing instead - sadly, it failed to do so. But I couldn't have known that until the end. I might have extrapolated that Dragon Age 2 wouldn't get better towards the end from the aimless beginning and middle, perhaps, but you know BioWare. The quality of their products varies greatly between sections.

This argument is nonsense. You are putting the forum post in a (semi)public space. Which means you are giving it away for free. It would be like writing a sign and putting it on your lawn and then asking people to pay you when they read it from the street. Or maybe more like going to a mall and then starting conversations with people and then asking them to pay you for the conversation.

Just as nonsense as producing an infinitely copyable digital good and trying to prevent people from doing so. If you make something and give it to people, they will share. Always have, always will. Anything you put on the Internet is free game in private use (as it should be). Time and time again it has been shown that this does not kill the industry, on the contrary, it creates new markets. It's the old, obsolete companies struggling to adapt to new technologies and culture that scream "piracy!" and beg for government bailouts.


Also, good job calling my arguments childish without actually saying what was childish about them. Ad hominem.

Yes, but the difference is that you kept playing DA2 all the way to the end. The restaurant analogy would be more apt if it were like this: You got served a salad (allegedly rotten, although this is somewhat subjective) but you kept eating it. In fact, you ate a huge five-course meal, spending many hours at the restaurant. Then after you'd polished off the dessert you said "Well actually, the salad was rotten, the steak was raw, etc. so I shan't be paying for any of this."

There is no difference between playing 5 minutes of a game and playing 30 hours of it (unless it's an MMO or something where I'm draining shared resources from a server). For a local game, any time and electricity lost is on me. At a restaurant a waiter serves me, I occupy a table and they wash the dishes afterwards; No such costs associated with playing a game. Once I have a copy, whatever I do with it is nothing off anyone else, and so it's irrelevant if I finish it or not.

You know, it's like the difference between testing something for a few hours and "testing" it by using it until it is no longer of use. Like taking a car out for a test drive to the Bahamas.

Except you can't test a game until it's no longer of use, since anyone can make a copy for practically no cost. The primary "use" for a game is to entertain, and regardless of whether I played DA2 for 5 minutes or 30 hours it failed to do so.


I suppose the argument is now whether I was truly entertained playing it or not, since I saw it to the bitter end. Like I've said, I simply hadn't anything better to do at the time - doesn't mean it was good or worth paying for. I've stopped playing plenty of games because they were bad; Latest example is Crysis 2 - I plan on neither finishing nor paying for it.

That's a straw man.  You said you gained knowledge from playing the games.  If you "most certainly would not have made" those mistakes, then you didn't gain knowledge from them.  I'm obviously talking about the mistakes you *did* gain knowledge from.

But then the game's intended purpose is not to give knowledge, it's to entertain; And DA2 certainly failed at that. If BioWare had made the game specifically as satire to demonstrate how not to develop games, I might consider it differently (I'd likely not even play it, because I know plenty well how to make an RPG from all the good ones I've played - and paid for).

You intend to make games that are then pirated?  

In a manner of speaking. Another way to put it would be that I'll let people play them for free, then decide exactly how much they want to support my development. Which is what I'm doing by "pirating" (well, the developers still don't offer direct payment, they still use obsolete middlemen, publishers, instead of connecting with their fans).

Here, why don't we use another analogy. Supposing you went to a restaurant to try it out. Even if you don't like the food in the end, you don't just walk out without paying, do you?

Food is a scarce, physical good; If I eat it, the restaurant loses it. A video game is an infinite, digital good that costs nothing to copy.

And indeed I have tried things at restaurants without paying for them. Once, I ordered a stake and it was raw. Obviously I didn't pay for it. Another time, my salad was rotten. Similarly, I "ordered" an RPG from BioWare and it was crap; I didn't pay for it. I don't know how restaurants work where you're from but over here it's far worse for a business to give customers bad service such that they never return. If my food is bad, the restaurant always apologizes and compensates. It's pretty obvious, otherwise I'd never go there again.

Of course, the restaurant didn't invest millions of dollars into developing the dish; Game developers feel more motivated to screw people over, justified by their (poor, in BioWare's case) investment, I guess.

someone made a product. you use it, you pay them for it (if possible).

I wrote a forum post. You downloaded a copy of it from the Internet and read it, thereby using it. Pay me (if possible).

Are you even listening to yourself you stupid bastard

[...]

Imagine if you made a game and people told you that hey, it was alright but they aren't going to buy it because they'd rather pirate it -- but hey, continue to make games and you'll get better right? And then they can pirate those games too!

More importantly, are you listening to me? Dragon Age 2 was not alright. I don't want BioWare to continue making games. I am less likely to even pirate their future games, let alone buy, after what they did.

I don't have to imagine that, it's what I intend to do. It's like you just dropped in to call me stupid without reading the thread at all.

They're doing the legwork for you though, failing where you would have and saving you time.  Maybe they don't deserve a reward for it, but they do deserve compensation for time and labor.

Who's to say I would have? I think BioWare made absolutely terrible mistakes I most certainly would not have made myself. Should we pay babies for demonstrating how not to walk? Or talk? Obviously not. I just don't see an economy around failing, even if it's an interesting point. There's an infinite number of ways to do something wrong, but you only need one to do it right. I don't support developers who screw things up, and I don't really see how that can be used as an argument against "piracy". If piracy is wrong, and you should reward failure, then developers should pay pirates for showing how not to acquire and play games, just as much as pirates should pay developers for making bad games. It's illogical.

Then you are getting a benefit from someone's product.  You owe them money. 

That's an interesting point. But used incorrectly, it basically means every work anyone has ever done is worth paying for because even if it was bad work, you at least learned how not to do it. That's obviously not what you meant; But still, exactly how much is it worth then? Clearly it's unethical to ask the same price for bad work as good simply on the basis that you learn how not to do it.

I think I have to disagree with this idea; There's plenty of people doing things wrong, all the time. I fail to see how that means I owe them anything. Shouldn't we reward success rather than failure? But it is an interesting point nonetheless.

And please don't take this as an accusation, but I'm curious as to what are some of the games you've designed.

You'll be seeing my projects in the future when I solve some of the problems in my life right now, preventing me from working efficiently.

I would encourage ignoring the game completely rather than pirating it, if one was making a "this game sucks and I don't support the developer" stance.

Ignoring other people's mistakes only make you more likely to repeat them. Of course, I'm a game designer, so perhaps this doesn't hold true for the masses. But I did state that in my review. And I'm assuming we're all game developers here, yes?

You had nothing better to do? Were you locked inside a room with a computer that can't do anything except play DA2?

I'm on the computer 24/7, so I run out of things to do fairly quickly, sometimes having to resort to less than enjoyable experiences, such as finishing DA2.

whether corexii liked dragon age 2 or not doesnt matter because his original post read "worth playing at least once" and "pirate, don't support bioware"
doesn't sound like testing

Well that's what it is. Despite being a disappointing experience, it was still an experience worth having if you've nothing better to do (like me at the time). You quoted me out of context:

Is Dragon Age 2 worth playing? ...Yes, once, if you don't have better new games to play.

A game I want to play even when I have "better" things to do is a game worth buying. Like Counter-Strike: Source.

You don't spend 30 hours playing a game unless you've already decided that you like it.

Now you're accusing me of lying, then? Well if you already labeled me a criminal for trying products before buying them then that would be a relatively minor offense, I suppose.

I don't like leaving something unfinished unless it's a complete waste of my time. A bad game can still be worth finishing, if only to see how not to make games, even if it isn't worth buying. Also, some games start off boring but get good later (e.g. SpaceChem); Some start interesting but get stale (e.g. Spore). That's why you need to play the whole thing before you can judge its overall value. Very few are awesome from start to finish where a fraction of a demo would actually represent the product accurately (e.g. Portal).

Or, to return to the actual subject at hand, you don't play through a 30 hour game and then decide not to buy it because it wasn't good enough. I'm sorry but that's not "testing".

Well, that's your opinion. Wiktionary defines "testing" as "To place a product or piece of equipment under everyday and/or extreme conditions and examine it for its durability, etc.". Sounds about what I'm doing. Playing a feature-restricted 3% of a game in the form of a "demo" is not "testing" according to my definition.



The whole situation is like trying to enforce copyright on water as it rains from the sky. The morals and ethics are irrelevant - it's happening regardless. You can either fight it futilely or adapt to the new market. Evidence has shown that you can compete with free, crazy as it might sound. You just have to want to, but the corporate CEOs funding game development lack vision and understanding of our digital culture.

Like I said before, I want to give e.g. Nintendo my money for all the great games they make... but they don't accept my PC money. They only make games for closed consoles; I can't have that. I should be able to run any software on any device. That's what I want to buy; The first game developer to do that gets all of my money. In the mean time, I have to turn to the only existing solution: ROMs. There's just simply no other way for me to play console games on my PC, period.

[lost sales]

You're not stealing the original copy - you're stealing the money you owe them for playing it.

I don't owe them anything. If you test-drive a car and don't like it, you're not obliged to buy it, any more than I'm obliged to buy a game I didn't like.

If you go in to work, do your job, and at the end of the week your boss says 'You know how I'm supposed to pay you for this?  Well, I'm not gonna.  See you next week, ciao! ^_^'
That is pretty shabby treatment, right?  Well ..... that's piracy!

You left out the part where you do a crappy job and don't perform up to expectations, and your boss says "you're fired". Piracy is merely a safeguard against getting screwed by dishonest marketing and hype (BioWare employees rating Dragon Age 2 perfect tens on metacritic... tsk tsk). Also, it was your choice to do business under those circumstances. Developers know their work will be pirated, that's a known fact and isn't going away. So the risk is theirs to make a terrible game nobody wants to buy. Don't blame me for not buying it. Again, nothing is lost by me playing it anyway (except perhaps my time, but that's my own fault).

In fact, I'm surprised of your argument because that's exactly how I intend to do business. I'm going to develop games, release them for free, and accept donations to support the development of more games. That's exactly as you described, and it sounds like a better model than those of old where you sell a "product" that costs nothing to copy. Trying to introduce artificial scarcity to an infinite digital good... well now, that's just bad economics, and I don't feel sorry for developers who can't adapt to technology.

There are no lost sales, only potential customers. People who pirate your game but don't buy wouldn't have bought it anyway even if they didn't pirate.

I'm not sure if I remember the numbers right at all, but IIRC it was something like 20k legit users and 80k pirates, which effectively DDOS'd the servers and more directly created a negative impact by piracy rather than simply "potential lost sales".

Another failure to adapt to technology. Distributing large content via centralized server is expensive and unnecessary. BitTorrent is a distributed protocol where no central server - and thus, bandwidth - is required. Developers could use it to distribute content essentially free of cost. They simply choose not to, or maybe they're too dumb to even realize it. Again, I don't feel sorry for them. Universe 101, adapt or die.

You are exchanging something they want (money) for something you want (the game (or, more captiously, the right to play the game)).

Yet again, I can't know if I want their game or not without actually playing it. The work-has-already-been-done argument justifies playing the game without paying for it, because nothing is lost in doing so. In an exchange of physical goods, the original product is lost from the seller. That's not the case with copyable digital goods. You have to pay for the car before using it (beyond test-driving) because the dealership loses the car when it's in your garage. A developer loses nothing by me playing a copy of a game - quite the opposite, in fact; They gain my potential support. My potential support doesn't exist unless I play the game. That's a fact. I'm not buying something without trying it first.

When you demo a car, they usually don't let you drive it on the highway.  But given what you do get to do, you can get an idea of what it might be like on the highway. 

They don't? I wasn't aware of such restrictions. But why would I buy something based on the idea of what it might be like? That's exactly the kind of stupid blind consumerism that I'm avoiding by pirating the game first, paying for it second, if it deserves my support, and exactly why demos are not representative of the final product. They give you an idea of what it might be like. I don't want an idea, I want to know if I want to buy the thing or not. If I only have a vague idea then it's not an informed decision.

You make a valid point about the whole demo issue, but at the same time I disagree about demos not being representative of the final product. Have you had a specific bad experience with a demo you would like to share? Because usually, when I download a demo of a game, it's pretty representative: you watch the intro, which sets the backstory of the game, which may or may not be interesting to you, then you play a couple of levels that show you what the general gameplay of the game is like, and what you can expect to be doing for the next 20-100 hours, depending on the game. If you disagree, I'd be happy to be enlightened as to where your experience differs.

AmnEn and myself already covered Dragon Age 2 as an example, you can also read my review here.

I would like to reference other disappointments but it's been a long time since I played demos, because I prefer to test the final product instead. I only played the DA2 demo because it was released earlier than the full game. Most games don't even have demos, just marketing hype which has led to spontaneous shopping, only to be disappointed by the game. I've sworn not to buy games without testing them first... well, except Valve. They seem to have a pretty good idea what they're doing, though I have lost some faith in them after what they did with Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2.

Would you prefer it if, say, you download a demo of the game, and after you finished playing through it said "Pay $5 to play the next section of the game", and you play through that, and you keep paying to keep playing the game in $5 dollar increments until you finish the game? By your logic, that would seem to be more 'fair', since you can stop playing and paying whenever you get tired of the game.

That's very close to what I'm doing, though you word it incorrectly; It's not "Pay $5 to play the next section of the game", it's "Pay $5 if you enjoyed the previous section of the game you just played". I'm concerned it would break immersion though and be generally inconvenient. It's preferable to play the whole thing from start to finish, then decide how much it was worth, $5, $10, $15... or $500, if you really want more.

Until then, though, developers need to eat, and a lot of them have put a lot of time and money into getting where they are. Please give these people money so they can keep making games, instead of having to switch over to some other career path, like banking software.

I'm not disputing that. Developers of good games deserve to get paid. The argument here is if they should get paid before I even play the game, and my answer is 'no'. I feel no pity for developers who can't make good games, such is life.

I don't pirate because I want everything for free. I pirate because I want to know what I'm buying before I buy it.

--------------------------------------------------------

Hm, this is actually off-topic, isn't it? Doesn't exactly relate to ROMs the way the topic intended.

ROMs are OK because device-locking is evil. Emulators allow me to play games on the PC that are not available on it. It's the developers fault for not porting their product such that it's available to me. I'm right here, waving my metaphorical wallet at Nintendo, ready to throw my money at them. It's actually rather puzzling why they don't allow me to pay them, really.

u know how to save money?? by 1. playing the demo, 2. not buying it if you didnt like the demo. "wahhh i didnt like the game but im going to pirate it anyway because im entitled to steal from a corporate company because they didnt make the game how i wanted it to be!!!!"

Or you can 1. play the game, 2. not buy it afterwards if you didn't like it. A demo is never representative of the final product. The Dragon Age 2 demo had character creator, inventory and most skills locked out. If you were buying a car, how would you feel if you only got to demo part of it and then discovered after buying it doesn't go as fast as advertised? You can't vote with your wallet if you're forced to buy the thing before playing it.

Also, it's not stealing when the original doesn't change owners. It's copying. And there's nothing wrong with that, not in my mind anyway. It ensures great works of art survive. If there was a good book that was forbidden to copy, and the library it resided in burnt down, it would be lost forever.

If you don't like a game, by all means, don't buy it. If you don't like a game, you should have no reason to pirate it either.

Yet, you can't know if you like it or not without actually playing it. Hence, pirate.

Remember, the work has already been done. The game exists. You're not buying the product, you're giving money to the developers to support their effort to create more games. When I pirate a game and don't like it, I don't want to support a developer of poor games. The unethical thing here is trying to pass these pathetic excuses for demos as representative of the final product, which they never, ever are. It's like demoing a car with a unicycle. Yes, they are both vehicles. No, they don't provide the same experience.

imo there are no ethical problems with ROMs, but they are bad because you aren't getting the authentic console experience. Playing an SNES game isn't nearly as good (to me at least) as playing it on an actual SNES.

I don't know, emulation can be pretty accurate. There's also USB SNES controllers. I don't get the authenticity argument - that's exactly what emulators are emulating.

but it would still be unethical to *agree* to not use the mug for orange juice, take the mug, and then use it for orange juice.

How many people actually agree to EULAs? People just click next without reading. I would take the mug and dismiss such a ridiculous restriction. If my friend pulled stupid shit like that he doesn't deserve to be my friend - just like all these game developers.

Sure, nothing physical has been displaced, so I guess maybe you could argue it's not larceny? I don't know how much of a distinction there is between the two. But either way, value has been lost.

If you make a copy of a digital good, value isn't lost, it's gained. The more people share and copy, the more value the work gets. Meanwhile, the price of a digital good is effectively zero.

You don't pay for a product, because the product costs nothing to copy. You pay for the service, supporting the developer to make more.

Hence there's nothing unethical about "pirating" or ROMs because the work has already been done; The product itself costs nothing to copy and the only thing you should be "buying" is more of the same.

Has anyone ever met someone that worked at a game company that was cool with you pirating that game? Working at a game company during crunch is hell. Seeing it get pirated right after that is a smack in the sleep deprived, malnutritioned game dev's face.

...Is that the pirate's fault, or the game company's for treating its employees badly?



I've already invested lots of money into a beefy PC; I'm not going to buy a Wii just to play Nintendo's games. If they can't be assed to port their games onto other platforms that's their fault, not mine. The games have already been created, so if I pirate and emulate them, nothing of value is lost. Quite the contrary, it's free advertisement for Nintendo when they finally do port their games.

[Pirate, don't support the developer]

Here's the mage spell trees BioWare made for Dragon Age 2:



The requirements aren't laid out in a simple hierarchy but have stuff like "Requires: 3 points in Elemental" (that's including its prerequisites, making it even less intuitive and visual).

And here's how I would have laid out the mage spell trees. Now they're actual trees with options; No level or point restrictions or upgrades. The entropy tree requires you to take every spell before the last... but by its description it's really powerful, so I'm not too worried about that (and it combines effects from all the other spells).





Is it worth playing? ...Yes, once. Possibly a second time in a few years with all the DLC. Is it worth buying? No. I don't know what BioWare thinks they're doing. The quality of their games has been sinking since EA acquired them. Final verdict: Pirate, don't support the developer.

[Enemies]

Enemies in Origins were quite interesting and varied. Sure, the same type of enemy was used repeatedly such as darkspawn, walking corpses, etc. but every fight still managed to be different somehow. Maybe there was a lieutenant or elite with them, different mixes of enemies and repeated encounters were broken up by surprises, like a pack of mabari between groups of walking corpses, out of the blue, but appreciably varied. Different enemies also had special moves like giant spiders overpowering you or templars smiting your mage to the ground.

BioWare: Dragon Age 2 is very scarce when it comes to enemy variety. You'll fight generic warriors and archers 99% of the time, wave after wave. In fact, reinforcements materialize out of thin air before your very eyes at least thrice every battle. Some of them are made out of paper dying in two hits, some have stupid amounts of health, but they all bog down to auto-attacking you until either party dies. None have any special attacks. They just gang up on the party member that "draws" the most "threat", a stupid arbitrary mechanic I hoped they'd upgrade to actual zones of control for warriors and tactical battlefield manipulation spells for mages (such as Dungeons & Dragons has been refining for 4 editions now (I have a feeling BioWare designers don't actually play other games and end up repeating mistakes others have already solved)). But no; It's a clusterfuck and several waves of generic enemies are invited.

Very, very rarely you'll meet a more interesting enemy, like a mage that actually casts spells other than teleport or shield. Yes, most mages you face just auto-attack, cast an impervious but temporary shield and teleport elsewhere when attacked. Or maybe the way too fast combat and all the over-the-top blood and fire particle effects just distracted me from noticing them doing anything else, because you can't see a damn thing.

Bosses are special, of course. Sadly, for every boss you fight a million billion generic mobs.



Meaningful choices are better suited for a more open game. Origins is a largely linear story with no choice of not becoming a gray warden or doing anything else than you were destined for, really. There are some "moral choices" along the way but they are completely inconsequential, usually in the form of someone dying or not, but they actually play no role thereafter, hence carrying little weight. Unless it was a companion; Then I guess you'd care personally, but even then, it does little to influence the greater events.

Core Xii: It's a direct issue of work. In order to have a truly open and consequential game world, a lot has to be taken into account, again adding to voiced dialogue. But games of the past have managed fine without voice, and frankly I'd rather have an RPG where my decisions carry weight, than a fully voiced, "cinematic" adventure where I'm railroaded into things.

Even voiced, Fallout 3 gives you the option of erasing an entire town off the map. A whole town, full of voiced NPCs with quests and stuff! Sadly it's downhill railroad from there but at least they tried.

BioWare: Dragon Age 2 is a 29 hours of inconsequential side-quests before the final act where your choices have no effect that I could tell. I started a second play-through and so far making different choices from my first made no difference. The dreaded dialogue wheel can have all the "no" and "yes" options in the world, but somehow the NPC you're talking to always manages to railroad you. In other words, there's three different ways to say "yes" on the damn thing.

On one side-quest you hunt down someone (I'm purposefully vague for spoilers). When you catch them, you have the option of killing them or letting them go. If you let them go, they appear later to do something specific. But if you killed them, someone else appears later to do the exact same thing. So your choice had no impact on future events whatsoever.



Runes spiced up Origins a little bit; You could add small bonuses of your own selection to weapons to spruce up their stats. That is... if you realized runes weren't permanent, as I didn't on my first play-through. They didn't say you could remove a rune once applied, so I assumed you couldn't, and ignored the entire mechanic for an obvious reason: If you wasted a rune on a weapon and then found a better one around the corner, it would have been lost. So I ended up stockpiling runes waiting for the "best" weapon - But that's pointless, as it'll be the last one you find and consequently the one you have fun with the least. When I discovered this wasn't the case, they added a bit of flexibility to equipment.

BioWare: So then Dragon Age 2 makes runes permanent. Well, at least this time it's not due to lack of documentation that I'm ignoring the whole mechanic. Seriously, an RPG is about finding nicer gear in every chest. Who decided runes should be lost when you switch? I found a bad-ass +30% attack speed rune but couldn't use it because had I found a better weapon, it would've been lost. (actually, I just put it on Varric's crossbow, the only character whose weapon you can't switch - and it kicked ass, too bad I couldn't have as much fun as Varric)



The AI sucks. That is to say, the 'tactics menu' is the wrong solution to the right problem; If you don't want to try to control the whole party at once with the awful interface, you have to let the game control the rest for you. Except, it doesn't. You have to use the very crude tactics system setting up pairs of conditions and actions. But there's only one condition per action, so you can't be very specific. You can't cast a certain spell on the enemy mage with the most health, for example; You can pick either to target the nearest enemy mage or the enemy with the most health, but not both. The tactics include a 'jump' instruction but the slots are far too few for that, being tied to the tactics skill on each character.

There's also a general 'behavior' setting you can set on e.g. 'aggressive' or 'cautious', but each type of role (melee or ranged, really) pretty much call for a specific setting ('aggressive' and 'ranged', respectively).

Core Xii: They should've just wrote proper AI so that your companions can use their talents smart. Why they delegated this task to the player is beyond me - it should be the programmers' job to make combatants behave intelligently in the game. As mentioned in the beginning, if they wanted you to play the whole party they should have designed the entire combat system differently altogether.

BioWare: Skills were removed and you gain tactics slots by leveling up. Other than that, no improvement. In fact, the system seems clumsier. I set the party rogue to use the evasion talent when attacked in melee, but he didn't when set to 'ranged' behavior, preferring instead to simply walk a couple steps back each time. The tactics menu itself is more difficult to use and downright buggy at times. It feels a little sticky and unresponsive like the rest of the interface.



This deserves special mention. In Dragon Age 2, there's a combat mechanic such that when a character is hit with a physical attack, they can be knocked back. It goes something like, if the damage is greater than 10% of your health plus your fortitude (from the strength attribute) then you get knocked back. Mages and rogues don't put points into strength, therefore they have no fortitude. They also can't invest heavily enough into constitution to have any amount of respectable health.

As a consequence, a powerful enough attack always knocks a mage or rogue back. The result? Complete stun-lock until death. If a dragon comes and melees your mage with no way of drawing it away with the retarded threat system (yeah, let's taunt the dragon to appear more threatening!), you're dead. It'll knock you back continuously with no way of breaking free until you die. This is especially noticeable on difficulties above normal.



I won't nitpick on the UI; Origins is very pretty, DA2 is "streamlined" (ugly but functional). A matter of taste, personally I liked Origins a lot better.