Winter is coming. (STEAM SALE THREAD Q4 2011)

[Rokal]

The first game still sells for more than the second game. That should tell you something about how it stacks up. The two outcomes for the game are that you will either be angry or bored. You can determine whether you want to pay $6 for that.

Seriously though: just buy Skyrim. 

[Ingmar]

The first game + expansion + all DLC sells for more than just the base 2nd game. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

[bhodi]

Shogun's load times are gruesome, even with a SSD and a quad core. The reason is that it only uses 1 CPU. The coders are retarded.

[Sjofn]

The two outcomes for the game are that you will either be angry or bored. You can determine whether you want to pay $6 for that.

Bullshit.

I loved DA:O to fucking death. Fucking. Death. I enjoyed DA2. No, I'm not going to spend 700+ hours on it like I did with DA:O (To. DEATH.), but it's a perfectly fine game as long as you have some goddamn perspective. The things wrong with it are things that simply do not bother me enough to take away from the things I enjoyed about it. But bear in mind I found DA2's combat more fun than DA:O's (mages in particular went from a class I loathed (half of my playthroughs had no mage in the party at ALL) to a class I enjoy). And once again: I loved DA:O a whole fucking lot.

[bhodi]

DA2 is bad. If you don't believe me, just read this.

The sequel to a game that Bioware spent over half a decade developing, Dragon Age 2 was developed in significantly less time. Like, barely over a year. Not much of that time was spent on pesky timesinks like "designing maps," "designing combat encounters," "balancing the combat," or "creating a remotely coherent storyline", as Bioware focused on what really mattered: writing a harem of psychologically broken dipshits who will gladly fuck you no matter how much they hate you. This last part was something Bioware actually used to publicize the game.

Following release, Bioware decided that anyone who didn't like this obvious masterpiece was a 4chan troll and started banning people en masse from the Bioware forums, and subsequently their EA Accounts. You read that right, criticizing this trainwreck amounted to a lifetime ban from any future EA games. Their solution to remedy this problem was to lock the Dragon Age 2 forum so that anyone without Dragon Age 2 linked to their Bioware social network account was unable to post. That policy persists to this day.

Name: Jennifer Brandes Hepler
Title: Managing Editor -- Dragon Age
Company: Bioware Corporation

Q: If you could tell developers of games to make sure to put one thing in games to appeal to a broader audience which includes women, what would that one thing be?

A: A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to "button through" dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don't enjoy listening to dialogue and they don't want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you're a player who only enjoys the dialogue. In a game with sufficient story to be interesting without the fighting, there is no reason on earth that you can't have a little button at the corner of the screen that you can click to skip to the end of the fighting.

EDIT: Oh my god there's more of it:

Companies have a lot of objections, such as how to calculate loot and experience points for a player who doesn't actually play the combats, but these could be easily addressed by simply figuring out an average or minimum amount of experience for every fight and awarding that.

The biggest objection is usually that skipping the fight scenes would make the game so much shorter, but to me, that's the biggest perk. If you're a woman, especially a mother, with dinner to prepare, kids' homework to help with, and a lot of other demands on your time, you don't need a game to be 100 hours long to hold your interest -- especially if those 100 hours are primarily doing things you don't enjoy. A fast forward button would give all players -- not just women -- the same options that we have with books or DVDs -- to skim past the parts we don't like and savor the ones we do. Over and over, women complain that they don't like violence, or they don't enjoy difficult and vertigo-inducing gameplay, yet this simple feature hasn't been tried on any game I know of.

Granted, many games would have very little left if you removed the combat, but for a game like Deus Ex or Bioware's RPGs, you could take out every shred of combat and still have an entertainment experience that rivals anything you'd see in the theater or on TV.

...

Q: What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

A: Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games... I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life.

So, yeah. I know the DA series is your baby sjofn, but it's still a terrible game. By far the worst of the series and a bad game on it's own. You've just got DA colored glasses :)

[Ingmar]

She's not involved in the gameplay side of the decisions, so I'm not sure why it matters that she doesn't like the combat. She's a writer/editor.

[bhodi]

Because the writing is just as bad as the gameplay, and the reason is it's written by someone with no talent or passion at all for gaming.

Why would you get into videogame writing if you hate playing games? Why would you hire someone who openly admits to not liking games? This baffles me. It's like hiridng someone to produce a movie when they don't like watching them.

Because you can't make it as a novelist, screenwriter, or even a comic book writer so you're left with nothing but the medium with the lowest standards imaginable.

[Rokal]

Apparently she's not very good at writing either if DA2 is any indication. I suppose she thought the meaningful moral decisions you make and deep romantic plots were the highlight of the game   The story was the absolute weakest part of DA2. It's even the only element Bioware publicly agreed needed to be improved for DA3, where they responded to the rest of the criticism about the game with their fingers in their ears.

Who the fuck skims through a movie? You know what I do if a movie is boring me? I turn it off and find a better use of my time. A movie that is worth watching won't have boring parts, because they'll be servicing the overall story that you care about. If I had not spent $60 on DA2, I'd have followed the same rule and uninstalled it within the first 4 hours.

As for pricing, I doubt we'll see Gears of War 3 or Arkham City going for less than Gears of War 2 and Arkham Asylum GOTY editions this time next year. Good/popular games don't price drop like the brick of misery that is DA2. Nevermind that the base edition of DA:O, which is competing with DA:O Ultimate Edition and Dragon Age 2, is the same price as DA2 on Origin: EA's own webstore. It's nice that Sjofn's likes DA2, but me and EA seem to agree with everyone else that DA2 was a total disappointment.

[Thrawn]

Good/popular games don't price drop like the brick of misery that is DA2.

Another example, Duke Nukem Forever.  Released June this year, $4.99 on Steam sale already.  

[Sjofn]

Hey, I agree it's the worst of the series. The series of two games.

And yeah, that giant wall of text, bhodi, is one of the writers. I am not at all surprised a writer is sort of a tard when it comes to actual game design. It would be like being surprised that game designers will maul a story in the name of gameplay.

[Setanta]

Sounds like Jennifer Brandes Hepler played Myst a lot. Actually, that's probably giving her too much credit.

[Sheepherder]

Did they really travel through time to get a 50's housewife to write dialogue for Sjofn's game?

[Lantyssa]

And yeah, that giant wall of text, bhodi, is one of the writers. I am not at all surprised a writer is sort of a tard when it comes to actual game design. It would be like being surprised that game designers will maul a story in the name of gameplay.

*cough* Stormwaltz *cough*

I think writers should understand the medium they are writing for.

[He's an example of doing it right in case my language isn't clear.]

[luckton]

Goddamit, I thought I could get through this sale without buying anything (besides the copy of BB I bought for a friend), but DE:HR for $17 will break me.

[JWIV]

Goddamit, I thought I could get through this sale without buying anything (besides the copy of BB I bought for a friend), but DE:HR for $17 will break me.

It was 10 on amazon earlier this week.

[luckton]

Goddamit, I thought I could get through this sale without buying anything (besides the copy of BB I bought for a friend), but DE:HR for $17 will break me.

It was 10 on amazon earlier this week.

If it's not on Steam or Steam-activatable, it doesn't exist 

[Teleku]

That was the cool thing about it.  It was.  Buy the digital download copy for $10, and then activate it on steam.  Worked perfectly for me.

Still, $17 bucks is a nice deal.  This was the main game I was waiting on for this sale, and would have been happy with it.  However, when I saw the Amazon sale, I knew there was no way Steam was going to go lower than $10, so I jumped at it.

[bhodi]

If you're still doing achievements / trading in coal for coupons or free games you should stop now. Valve had a pre-arranged number of coupons and games and has now run out of them. The only thing you can get from this point forward is valve coupons.

Some people are speculating that this is partly due to people abusing the humble bundle tradeins at $0.10 a game, or maybe they just miscalculated how many people would be climbing on the gift pile. Whatever the reason, what you have is what you get for this year.

[Engels]

Picked up LA Noir for 14 bucks.

[Azazel]

I found the whole coupon/coal promotion pretty uninteresting. All the coupons are shit, the free games are largely pointless (as everyone has them) and I'm not grinding games for coal. The Summer break promotion, despite being very similar was much more interesting as there were ingame items and dlc etc you could actually go for. I ignored the coal promotion last year so I don't know how well it stacked up against this year's version.

Oh, is L.A. Noir complete worth a purchase for 13 bucks? I'm tempted by it at that price. How intrusive is all that Rockstar Social Club bullshit?

[Sheepherder]

They need some longer text for the Shogun 2 loading screens.  Like The Art of War.  All of it.

[Mrbloodworth]

How intrusive is all that Rockstar Social Club bullshit?

Not at all.

[Yoru]

I managed to get one free game that most people don't own. Problem is, there's a reason for that.

Apart from being the most accurate and innovative truck driving simulation game ever produced, Rig’n’Roll immerses players in an exciting story with an unexpected finale, making new allies and battling treacherous foes as they discover a conspiracy that will test their skills to the limit.

 

[Kail]

I managed to get one free game that most people don't own. Problem is, there's a reason for that.

Apart from being the most accurate and innovative truck driving simulation game ever produced, Rig’n’Roll immerses players in an exciting story with an unexpected finale, making new allies and battling treacherous foes as they discover a conspiracy that will test their skills to the limit.

 

Wow, that's the first time I've seen a game cost more than a collection which includes it...

[Minvaren]

Woo, encore day has Arkham City half-off again.  So that's one thing I've bought this sale.

[Simond]

Hey, I agree it's the worst of the series. The series of two games

Let's broaden that a little to "the worst (non-MMO) Bioware game" and then I'd agree with you.

[Rasix]

Base NWN was worse.  It's about even with Jade Empire.

[Strazos]

People hate on Jade Empire so bad, I actually liked it well enough.

[Setanta]

Got to admit I enjoyed Jade Empire too. It was my first real experience with the genre since Dungeons and Dragons on my Amiga though :D

[Rokal]

So we can agree that DA2 is the worst game Bioware has ever made, save for maybe NWN which was mostly a game editor with a campaign tacked on? 

[Ragnoros]

So we can agree that DA2 is the worst game Bioware has ever made, save for maybe NWN which was mostly a game editor with a campaign tacked on? 

That's roughly akin to bitching about Wall-E being the worst Pixar movie. Even if you accept that hypothesis, it is still better then 90% of the dreg out there. Same goes for DA2. If you want to try a game that is just as well put together as Skyrim, but has the complete opposite focus, play DA2. While Skyrim has the most amazingly crafted world to explore, any attempted NPC interaction is just laughable. Conversely DA2 is literally a town and one cave, but hey, actual convincing human interaction, rather than Arnold mocking me about a sweet roll. 

[Ingmar]

Beat me to it.

[Simond]

So we can agree that DA2 is the worst game Bioware has ever made, save for maybe NWN which was mostly a game editor with a campaign tacked on? 

That's roughly akin to bitching about Wall-E being the worst Pixar movie.

Well, no, because anyone who thinks Wall.E was the worse Pixar movie is mental.

[Strazos]

So we can agree that DA2 is the worst game Bioware has ever made, save for maybe NWN which was mostly a game editor with a campaign tacked on? 

What about the MDK games, or Shattered Steel, or Sonic Chronicles? Haven't played any of them myself, which is why I ask.

[Tebonas]

Wall.E is certainly the Pixar movie children find most boring of the bunch. If you watch it to entartain and/or silence your children, it can certainly be rated the worst Pixar movie. It disappoints on a very high level, though. Just like DA2 does. Which kinda is the point.