I'm not saying the story was bad, especially in the context of video games as a whole, but saying it's top five amongst all rpgs i just don't think is true. Heck, Bioware itself has multiple rpgs whose stories are more interesting/creative, like Kotor 1, ME1, Baldur's Gate. Add in games like the Witcher series, Planescape, early Fallout games, System Shock games, etc. People bash the Elder Scrolls for its story telling, but I personally think Morrowind was pretty good, much more creative than DAO. Obviously this is subjective, but I just don't think DAO is really all that close to the top in terms of story. If you want to say top five in terms of recent rpgs, maybe, but I don't think it's really close for all time.
re: Morrowind / DAO
They're
very different styles of story telling and I think they both work in their own way. Morrowind was really excellent at world building, atmosphere, mood, lore, and the main plot was in my opinion the best of the Elder Scrolls series by far, but a lot of it was in the background in books and such or inferred. Much of it was really subtle and I suspect lost on many people.
Dragon Age the story is front and center and you can't really get away from it (well I guess in Inquisition you can run around the Hinterlands for 50 hours or so; they did inject a bit more ES in the latest chapter). Also I think Bioware always has its characters, the interactions with them, feeling of camaraderie with a team as one of its strong points. Characterization is kind of a weak point with Elder Scrolls. There's really only a couple of characters from Morrowind I remember like Therana and Crassius Curio and that's just because one was batshit insane and the other was a furry pervert.
Morrowind was about as far from generic as you can get while still having some roots in Tolkien fantasy, but they went and whitewashed the next game from what should have been Greco-Roman culture in a jungle environment to traditional Anglo-Saxon inspired fantasy with some token Roman architecture in the capitol.
And ES doesn't do choice and consequence at all. Their solution to when they did do it was to have a quantum event where all possibilities, including conflicting ones, happened at the same time. Admittedly though the whole choice and consequence thing is debatable anyway because the differences are largely token and no matter what they're always going to have to have the paths converge to about the same place anyway. That's just practicality and I get it.
The one thing you hit on though, "
If you want to say top five in terms of recent rpgs", when I first played Dragon Age Origins I kept feeling like 'Nobody makes games like this anymore' and I actually got that same feeling from Inquisition too, which after reading from multiple sources (not just press either) that it was good I decided to go for it (well that and I had a bunch of Amazon credit saved up from Bing Rewards
).
Recent Elder Scrolls in comparison? Well let me just say that I do like Skyrim, but for those of us who have been around for the series since early on it does feel like it's lost some of its roots (they just don't make things like the good old days *shakes cane*). It feels like a wordy console game. Like for most people it's just you run around a beat stuff up.
Giving the devil their due, Bioware with their latest Dragon Age I think for the most part was able to take back again some of the qualities and feel of RPGs of old to some extent (I'm not talking about combat because quite frankly I don't give much a shit about it so I'll let someone else argue that point)
and they were able to work in some Elder Scrolls open world feel so I think they did a good job with it overall. That's why I don't feel bad about not cheaping out on it. That and
Admittedly I'm
way on the extreme end of playing time I think and I have done two play throughs doing most of the side stuff, stopping to smell the roses and all that jazz.
My concern though is that if Inquisition doesn't sell a ton more copies than Dragon Age 2 (and remember DA2
was on Steam at launch) that EA will look at it as why bother spending extra time effort and money when you can make about the same amount of sales cutting corners and half assing with a short development cycle.
I'm not sure EA will go for another game like this if it's not super mega uber blockbuster. And on the PC side, while I don't have much problem with it personally, forcing the mountain to come to Mohammed (Origin) is not helping. Plus we're all so damned spoiled with cheap prices that it seems outrageous to pay regular prices even for games we
want and will play the hell out of.
/End MysterD-eque RPG rant
...Bought!
