OakTable said:
What'd you not like about it?
Every BioWare game follows the same formula and I've never been endeared to it. If you love the BW formula, obviously you'll love every game of theirs since they're so formulaic, but they're hit and miss for me, I either somewhat like their games (KotOR, Dragon Age) or hate 'em (Mass Effect).
So what don't I like about it? Easier to ask what I do like about it.
But to answer the question, a selection:
- Combat is terrible. Combat design has never been a strength of BW (or any RPG designer, really), but shitty third-person shooting action just won't do. Compound it with mediocre AI and uninteresting tactical options and you get a snorefest worst than DA:O's endless filler combat. The clunky AI (on PC) is just the final drop in the bucket.
- The followers are terribly written cardboard parodies. This is true for most BW games, but they do manage to do better in some games (particularly in BG2 and DA:O) than others (particularly Mass Effect and KotOR). But the endless verbiage attributed to obviously uninteresting characters is what makes ME the worst. The human characters are the only interesting ones, and that's not saying much.
- The dialogue wheel is stupid. I know, I know, it's "innovative", but it's also stupid. Horndog on it all you want, gaming media, that doesn't change the fact that it's essentially a tool to make dialogue more accessible to
people who don't like dialogue (I mean: why?!), and is functionally broken as the few words given to me rarely accurately tell me what my character is actually going to say or in what tone, fortunately...
- ...Mass Effect is, possible after Jade Empire, probably the worst of BW products that suffers from "BioWare disease", where dialogue "options" are de facto just filler and dialogue tends to follow a linear path for most of the game. Even the choice between Kind or Extreme Collargrabbing Shepard is meaningless, as it never has any kind of ingame consequence, as long as your relevant skill is high enough it'll lead to the same outcome.
- Probably the worst of the lot is BioWare's tear-inducing obsession with being "cinematic", which makes the game at times feel like a lot of filler cutscene (since dialogue options are often meaningless) rather than actually playing a game. It'd be ok if they were more than just competent writers and directors, but they're not, meaning you're looking at the gaming equivalent of Sci-Fi opuses like 1994's Welcome to Oblivion. Light-hearted fun with some good moments, but really just B-grade cinema
...
etc. etc. really. That's enough.
