Has it stalled creatively? Sure. It did that with the Hellfire expansion with Diablo 1 - it's a very simply, repetitive series with a cardboard plot. The fact that the games are still maddeningly fun and addictive is the magic of interactive software.
The reason Diablo gets a pass for this is because they give you a decade between games, rather than making one every four months like COD.
I generally shop with Amazon, and I'll preorder the games I know I'll want right away. Amazon often gives $10-$20 in site credit for pre-orders along with some DLC, and release-day delivery is only 99 cents. So I get a game I really want, at effectively 10-20 dollars off, and sent to my house the day it drops. I am very comfortable with this. The relentless franchising in video gaming has always been a problem (Assassin's Creed peaked three installments ago), but it's hard to blame pre-orders for that. People have always gone with the safe and familiar, which is why moronic blockbusters and fast-food chains have been safe bets for decades. There's certainly a VERY compelling argument to make about the sheep mentality of the gaming consumer, but pre-ordering seems like a strange place to start. And believe me: if you shop at a brick-and-mortar store and want something more exotic and hardcore than Call Of Duty, you BETTER pre-order, because the store will probably get three copies of the latest MegaTen game and the store cashiers will snag two of them.
This was an interesting article; nice to see GameSpot do something about gaming as a cultural force, rather than yet another story about the new guns in Battlefield Of Duty Of Honor. I'm sure the comments will devolve into the usual 'atheists versus theists' slap-fight that the Internet craves, but even as a non-believer, I enjoy pious characters and find them fascinating. I often play as one in tabletop games for the role-playing opportunity. Final Fantasy IV has a ton of Biblical elements, for example, and Cecil's journey is basically a crisis of faith in video game form. Sadly, the hobby was too young for a game to go in-depth at the time, and Nintendo of America's 'no God allowed!' policy at the time neutered the game after localization.
@Arthas017 I'm kind of in the middle on this. As you can tell by my photo, I'm one of the older cats here and do love BioWare's early stuff. That being said, I've also endured 20 years of RPG minutia and I generally like the modern approach of streamlining the process and maximizing the good stuff: dialog, decision-making, combat, and character development. Mass Effect 2, for example, was just about perfect because it didn't have the anchor of the first game's terrible inventory micro-management. All that said, trying the same tactics on Dragon Age clearly didn't work. Rather than making the game feel slick and thrilling like ME2, DA2 just felt shallow. Instead of just trimming the fat, they went nuts and cut off a few limbs and an ear, too. Hopefully they can find the right balance for DA3... this interview and the brutal MetaCritic user score suggests that BioWare has received the message loud and clear.
@Arthas017 Perhaps? I dunno. Homefront bought a ton of ad space here for weeks and got a pretty 'bleh' review. As did Dragon Age 2, really. Considering the fact that AAA games generally get graded on the 7-10 scale, an 8 is a pretty tepid score.
I know this is probably the designated area for DA2 complaints, but I really liked this interview. Or the idea of it, at any rate. GameSpot should do much more of these... a post-mortem analysis of a big game after all of the reviews and fan feedback have hit the wires. Granted, the questions were pretty soft. Nothing about the re-used dungeon assets or bugged DLC? I know you guys don't want to burn bridges, but BioWare needed to be called out for those and I'd love to hear their justification.
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