Christ, what a mess.

I’ll admit to having doubts over whether it was even worth writing this review. Thanks to the drubbing it’s been receiving in the gaming press as yet another high-profile, half-baked release it probably has not escaped your notice that Anthem is broken as fuck. I’ve reviewed many broken games on here before. Some of them had clearly visible quality in spite of the brokeness and were being held back by failures in the development and design process, such as Civilization 6 and Stellaris, and some of them, like Rome 2 and No Man’s Sky… didn’t. All of those reviews ended up being extremely lengthy pieces of writing both because there was a lot to unpack, and because I felt there was something useful for me to learn from the failures involved and so went extra-deep on the critical breakdown.

But Anthem? I’ve been playing it for maybe a dozen hours and I don’t feel like I need to play it any more because I can see exactly where things are going to end up. By extension I also feel like writing a review is somewhat redundant because I know, just by looking at it, what went wrong during Anthem’s development and how it ended up in the state it’s in. There’s no need for me to go in-depth this time, and yet it’s going to be extremely difficult to avoid doing so in a review because the game is practically nothing but bugs, flaws, terrible writing and boneheaded design decisions. Given that I don’t think there’s any new lessons to be learned I’m correspondingly reluctant to spend six or seven hours of my life writing six or seven thousand words that I could simply copy and paste out of my other reviews; where Anthem is concerned it would have the particularly grim sound of a broken record, because much of what is wrong with Anthem is also exactly what was wrong with Mass Effect Andromeda¹.

Still, much like Bioware I’ve started now, so I might as well push through to the finish and see what the end product looks like. The difference is that I at least have the luxury of shooting this review in the head if it looks like being the kind of Chaos Spawn-esque monstrosity that Anthem has turned out be.

Okay, so. I usually start these things with a paragraph or at least a sentence explaining the basic premise of the game I’m reviewing, but I’ve been playing Anthem for just over twelve hours and I’m still not entirely sure what the game is about. I understand the broad design goal behind its existence — that Anthem should be an always-online cooperative loot-driven shooter in the vein of Destiny or The Division– but I do not know what it is about. There’s a lot of Capitalised Nouns being thrown around, as befits a studio that has decided to ape Bungie writing without understanding² that you can’t Capitalise Something without the Something also having Some Meaning — so we’ve got the Cenotaph, the Monitor, the Cataclysm and so on, and all of it has roughly the same overall comprehensibility as staring into a bowl of Alphabetti Spaghetti. Anthem’s world is sci-fi with an awful lot of fantasy tropes mixed in, just like Destiny. You play yet another Capitalised Noun in a long tradition of Capitalised Nouns; you’re not a Bhaalspawn, or a Spectre, or a Grey Warden, or an Inquisitor, or a Pathfinder, no, this time you’re a Freelancer who pilots a robot suit called a Javelin and takes on contracts to kill things and grind materials in the immediate vicinity of Anthem’s hub city, Fort Tarsis. Despite the words “freelancer” and “contract” implying some sort of monetary compensation for your services, we’ve already established that words have totally ceased to have any sort of meaning in Anthem and so all you get for committing these sporadic acts of mass murder is the loot you pick up along the way; presumably the higher-ups in Fort Tarsis are promising to pay you in exposure.

Anyway, Anthem’s big innovation is supposed to be that it’s mixing Bioware-grade storytelling with the compulsive gameplay loop of Destiny. This is an… interesting plan, with two or three tiny flaws that I shall now list:

1. Narrative-driven experiences tend to involve lengthy exposition dumps and cutscenes. Loot shooters and the ARPGs they’re based on rely on short 15-20 minute gameplay loops — you play for a bit, you do an objective, you get a reward, you upgrade your stuff, you do it again. The two concepts are an inherently poor fit for each other, as evidenced by Bungie eventually deciding to rip out all of Destiny’s backstory and put it on a website partly so that it wouldn’t slow the game down.
2. These days the phrase “Bioware-grade storytelling” tends to put me more in mind of radioactive waste or biohazard storage than it does any feeling of high quality.
3. Bioware have never done a Destiny-alike before (few people have; I can think of only three successful examples). They’re also attempting this in the Frostbite engine, which they still appear to be having serious issues with³.

Throw in a troubled development process (Anthem’s been in development since 2012 and has been rebooted at least once) and EA issuing their usual ultimatum to get the game out before end of financial year 2018 (or else), and it’s very easy to see how Anthem turned out the way it did. It’s why I think this review is a little redundant; an extremely talented development studio with an established development pipeline and full publisher backing could maybe have pulled Anthem off, but Bioware don’t have any of those things going for them and so they were doomed from the start by these poor technical and design decisions.

Let’s start with the thing Bioware are supposed to know how to do, that they’re supposed to be good at, and which should be the one part of this game that turned out in a semi-passable state: the story. As already mentioned, it is an utterly nonsensical mess that’s obviously been stitched together out of whatever was lying around during the last twelve months of development; even Bioware would have difficulty intentionally writing a story this bland and meaningless. Still, after thirty years I’m more than used to ignoring shitty videogame stories if I have to, but the problem with Anthem’s story is that you can’t.

The major culprit here is Fort Tarsis, the hub area you’re supposed to go back to after every mission and which is one of the most staggeringly ill-conceived areas I’ve ever seen in an AAA game. Not only does it take nearly a minute to load into it (loading times are Anthem’s biggest problem by far, as we shall see later on), but your movement speed inside of it is limited to a pathetically slow jog. Fort Tarsis is not exactly large — it’s essentially three rooms and a few connecting areas — but it still takes a couple of minutes to walk from your Javelin to whatever NPC is going to give you the next stage of the quest you’re on, and then a couple more minutes to walk back to the Javelin so that you can start another mission. NPC conversations are both laughably shallow and interminably long and all follow the same pattern: the NPC will say three lines, then you get to pick one of two responses, and then you repeat this cycle four or five times, but it doesn’t matter which response you pick because there are no branching paths or outcomes and the conversation is basically just there to pad out the game’s running time.

In fact, Anthem’s conversations put me in mind of that AI text generator that can string together themed words and phrases to produce something that has the appearance of a news article, even though it can be exposed as a fake with just a couple of seconds of actually poring through the words for real meaning. They feel like exactly what you’d get if somebody was told to write N conversations each of which must have a minimum of X NPC voice lines and Y player responses, and who duly set off to fulfil that quota without particularly caring about the actual content itself. I’d already quickly learned to avoid talking to any of the “flavour” NPCs dotted around Fort Tarsis, who lurch to life spouting the same canned voice line whenever you pass by them like they’re awkward animatronics in a low-budget haunted house experience, but after a couple of hours I also found myself skipping through plot-relevant exposition and backstory dumps while just barely skim-reading the subtitles, because they were nothing more than the verbal equivalent of styrofoam packing chips.

Skipping a regular conversation works much as it does in Mass Effect or Dragon Age; you just hammer that Escape button to fast-forward through individual lines of dialogue until the conversation is over — but the conversations are so long, and so content-free, that even this becomes something of a chore after you do it for the umpteenth time. There are also some extremely lengthy in-engine first-person cutscenes — all of Fort Tarsis is first-person for some reason, because god knows the last thing I want to do in a loot-driven game is look at the equipment I’ve picked up as it’s nicely shown off on a third-person character model — and these can be skipped in their entirety by holding down Escape, even if it is a bit of a shame because they’re genuinely impressive on a technical level. The animators who worked on the character mocap and facial animations did a really good job only to be let down by the utter drivel that these characters spout as they pace up and down in front of you, and once the novelty wears off you’ll be skipping past them just as quickly. However, these skips only apply to the cutscenes that are inflicted on you in Fort Tarsis; one of Anthem’s more ridiculous design decisions is to also scatter cutscenes around inside the story missions, and these cannot be skipped, and they’re just as long as the ones in Fort Tarsis. Given that Anthem is a co-op game this means that there’s up to four people waiting around for this damn cutscene to finish so that they can get on with the mission, and given that the story missions are in the Quickplay list because Anthem doesn’t have enough content to fill it out otherwise, this also means that you wind up repeating the missions and having to sit through the cutscenes multiple goddamn times.

Between the unskippable cutscenes and running slow laps around Fort Tarsis to pick up the next set of quests it quickly becomes apparent that Anthem has a very low regard for the player’s time as a resource, which is kind of a problem when you’re trying to build that quick, snappy gameplay loop that’s at the core of every successful ARPG and loot-driven shooter. The story adds absolutely nothing to the game and only serves to drag it down, like Bioware decided to fit it with a pair of concrete overshoes before shoving it out to sink or swim in one of the most crowded release windows of the last decade. However, the story — incredibly — isn’t actually the biggest source of time-wasting in Anthem. That’s a dubious honour reserved for the loading screens, which have been written about at length in many other places, and for good reason: they’re possibly the longest and most frequent loading screens I have ever seen in a modern video game.

I have to be a little careful with the hyperbole there because I’ve been gaming for a few decades now and I can still remember having to wait several minutes watching trippy colours as my family’s ZX Spectrum loaded Jet Set Willy off of a cassette tape. Technology has moved on a bit since then, though, from tapes to floppy disks to increasingly fast hard drives to solid-state drives, and now to the NVMe SSD, one of which I shoved into my PC a couple of months back and which Anthem is currently installed on. NVMe SSDs are blazingly fast, with most other games loading their assets in seconds and only one that I can think of that takes much more than half a minute (it’s fellow Frostbite title Battlefield V, oddly enough). However, to load from Fort Tarsis into a mission in Anthem takes eighty seconds plus. To load from the mission back into Fort Tarsis takes another forty seconds. There are dungeons scattered throughout the world which take 20-30 seconds to load into, and back out of. Even opening the inventory via an interface in Fort Tarsis called the Forge brings up a 10-second loading screen. And then closing it again takes another 10 seconds. Bear in mind here that I know these times to an accuracy of plus or minus ten seconds because that’s the interval at which I have Fraps set to automatically screenshot gameplay (or in this case, loading screens) and I’m giving Anthem as much rope as I can by quoting the lower bound. Also bear in mind that I’m using pretty much the fastest consumer technology available for this and I’m still getting loading screens that are a minute and a half long. I’ve read horror stories of people on HDDs and consoles having to wait nearly five minutes for a mission to load. For a supposedly triple-A game released in 2019, that is insane.

These loading screens totally destroy any remaining chance Anthem had of being a satisfying loot shooter. Consider the typical gameplay loop in Anthem:

• You start in Fort Tarsis, next to your Javelin. You run for around a minute to get to an NPC so that you can get a mission, and then you run for another minute to get back to your Javelin so that you can start that mission.
• Loading into the mission will take ninety seconds.
• The mission itself will take 10-15 minutes to play through. You can add another minute of loading screens to that if the mission wants you to go inside a dungeon.
• When you’re done with the mission, you’ll spend 10-20 seconds loading into the end-of-mission screen that summarises your experience and loot.
• From there it’s forty seconds back into Fort Tarsis, and then another ten seconds into the Forge to equip the loot you just picked up, and then another ten seconds to get back out of the Forge.
• You’re now ready to pick up another mission.

That’s five minutes of nothing time for each 10-15 minute gameplay segment — and that’s the best-case scenario, remember. If you’re not running Anthem on an SSD you can at least double the amount of time you spend just twiddling your thumbs and doing nothing. To be completely fair to Anthem, Destiny also had some pretty long loading screens, to the point where I used to joke it was a game about watching your ship fly through a loading screen interspersed with some light FPS gameplay, but there are two big differences between how Anthem and Destiny handle their loading screens. First is that Destiny was at least smart enough to give your something interesting to look at — the ship cosmetics of you and your party — while you sat through the loading screen. All Anthem shows you is a blurry JPEG and the usual loading screen hint.  And second is that Destiny frontloaded its loading screens: you would load into a place once, and then you could spend as much time there as you wanted without ever encountering another one until you decided to leave. Importantly, you didn’t have to sit through a loading screen to access the bloody inventory, which is one of the most colossally idiotic things you could do with an inventory in a game about loot. Another is making it so that you can only access the inventory when you go back to the hub area, which Anthem does also. A third is giving you limited backpack space that forces a return to the hub area when it’s full — Diablo does this, obviously, but the Town Portal system means it takes literal seconds to offload all of your crap and then you’re back in the fight. In Anthem that’s at least five minutes as you go back to Fort Tarsis to painstakingly salvage each of your crappy excess items, one at a time.

I honestly don’t know why these loading screens are so damn long, but when you put them together with the backwards design enforced by the story they not only mean Anthem fundamentally doesn’t work as a game, but they ensure that it can never work as a game. A large part of any ARPG or Destiny-alike is the endgame grind, which relies on players doing the same things over and over again in search of increasingly rare rewards. When you have players do something hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, you have to minimise the amount of friction they encounter along the way, otherwise they’re going to get pissed off and leave. Diablo 3 post-Reaper Of Souls had next to no friction, which is why I happily spent fifty hours or so grinding up full sets for my Hardcore Barbarian. Destiny had a bit too much for my tastes, which is why I fell out of the game after doing all of the non-endgame content, but most other people have a higher tolerance for that stuff than I do, and it made enough concessions for those people to play it and enjoy it and make it very successful. Anthem, on the other hand, is arguably more friction than it is game; frustration is the major emotion you’ll feel while playing it, and even if they eventually hammer the base game into shape (as Bungie did with Destiny and Ubisoft did with The Division) it’s not going to have any long-term appeal if they don’t fix the loading screens. And I’m not sure how they do that short of just making Fort Tarsis a menu or something. This would be an absolutely massive improvement just by removing most of the story elements from the game, but that’s precisely why Bioware won’t do it: they’ve got way too much invested in it.

So, from a metagame perspective, Anthem’s mix of stodgy story and technical limitations together Bioware’s seeming unfamiliarity with the genre they’re trying to make a game in (I really would have thought that all of the stuff I just outlined was How To Make A Successful ARPG 101) ensure that it’s simple impossible for it to succeed. But if you ignore all of that stuff — Fort Tarsis, the Forge, the incredibly annoying characters who are constantly yapping through your comms, the loading screens — and focus on what happens after you’re past the final loading screen and have actually gotten into Anthem’s game world, what it is like to actually play?

Well….yeah, it’s still pretty bad.

Anthem’s moment to moment gameplay ends up being just as hamstrung by idiotic design decisions as the metagame. Most activities in Anthem take place in the single generic overworld map the game has, called Bastion. Bastion is jungle-themed and quite pretty (if there’s one thing Frostbite can do it’s make things look pretty) even if the art direction for it is a bit soulless and the actual layout of the map is confusingly mazelike. There’s no way to set waypoints for your team to follow and the ones baked into the game as part of the scripted missions are wilfully misleading at times, so a large part of the game is spent looking at a map and trying to figure out where the hell you should be going next, and then finding out that what looked like a tunnel on the map was in fact a sheer cliff wall, and then realising you’ve lost your bearings and have to check the map again. One of Anthem’s big innovations is that the Javelin suits can all fly — and even hover in place during combat to provide a stable firing platform — and it looks like Bioware decided this meant they could add additional three-dimensionality to the maps without giving players any additional navigational aids to compensate. The flying itself is one of the biggest missed opportunities of Anthem; a lot of time and effort has gone into making the flying feel good and it almost pays off, but it all ends up being undone by yet another stupid design decision to have your flight time be gated by an overheat meter. Spend too long in the air and you’ll come crashing down to the ground and be stuck there for a while until you clear the overheat. Going into a dive and flying through water reduces the rate at which you overheat, but you’ll always eventually max it out, and so the simple process of flying from point A to point B ends up being a very unsatisfying stop-start journey as you have to periodically land for a few seconds to empty your heat meter. And so what should have been one of Anthem’s signature features is reduced to yet another time-wasting point of frustration.

In terms of mission design Anthem has the most pathetic, low-effort objective structures possible, the sort of thing World Of Warcraft grew out of a decade ago. Nearly all of them involve one of the following: killing a bunch of things, standing on a circle while killing a bunch of things, or picking up things and taking them to another thing while killing a bunch of things. That’s it. That’s pretty much the sum total of the imagination Anthem has when it comes to mission design; it’s actually morbidly funny when you get to one of the game’s big story missions that’s supposed to be a recreation of a big battle from aeons past and it’s just the same “stand on a circle and defeat enemy waves while a timer runs down” mission you’ve been doing for the last ten hours — it’s got the same enemy types and everything — with only a self-important narration over the comms to differentiate it from the cut-and-paste content used for the generic repeatable Contract missions. The weird thing is that there are game mechanics that show the vaguest spark of something more, like a flight inhibition field that shakes up the combat a bit but shows up all of twice, or the combination locks that are mechanically quite basic (you just match the symbols on the walls) but you’re so starved for something different that you welcome them on the few occasions when they’re actually used in a mission. It’s just that they’re more difficult to implement than the three stock objectives Anthem has, and so they’re pushed to the back of the shelf while those three objectives are repeated ad infinitum and make the game even blander than it already is.

The enemies aren’t much better. There’s a selection of random beasties walking around Bastion, but they’re effectively one-offs and don’t really attack you unless you aggro them. Otherwise there are basically four different enemy types in Anthem: a faction of humans with guns, another faction of humans with guns (although they also occasionally have magicians), a faction of insects who have formed themselves into the shape of humans with guns, and some scorpion-spider things. You may notice something of a running theme in the enemy design, but I’m not going to call out Anthem for having all of their factions be humanoids with guns because Destiny does the same thing. No, where Anthem fucks up is that it totally fails to differentiate between the different factions of humanoids with guns; the Vex and the Cabal in Destiny feel fairly distinctive thanks to enemy variety within each faction as well as factional gimmicks like the Vex teleportation, whereas the Regulators and the Dominion in Anthem are basically a palette swap of each other.  Anthem also makes the same mistake The Division did by introducing all of its enemy factions in the first hour of the game and ensuring you’re thoroughly bored after playing it for another twelve and not encountering anything new. And when it comes to the AI behaviour of each faction — the thing that’s most responsible for making them fun to fight — Anthem actually plumbs new and terrible depths; each faction will spawn literally out of thin air, walk just far enough that they’re in line of sight of the nearest player, and then stand still and start shooting them. There’s no use of cover, no flanking and no advanced combat behaviours based around ability use; they just mindlessly shoot at you, or mindlessly run up to you and try to melee you. Like everything else in Anthem it feels like the enemy design is the barest of bare minimums necessary to get the game out of the door by their FY 2018 deadline, not something that a supposed triple-A studio has spent seven years developing.

The combat is almost good in spite of this. Bioware are helped along here a little by their experience with Mass Effect 3’s excellent multiplayer mode, which Anthem is heavily based on, and you can still see very occasional flashes of what Bioware probably intended Anthem to be, as three out of the four Javelin classes you can pilot are quite distinctive and have a bunch of fun abilities. I lucked into picking probably the best of the lot as my starting Javelin; the hulking Colossus can deploy a shield and juggernaut through hordes of enemies, as well as leaping high into the air and then pounding the ground with a shattering AOE melee strike that also detonates combo primers. The special powers linked to the Q and E keys were also fun; I could shoot enemies with a siege cannon or a rail gun, or activate a electricity field to passively shock nearby enemies as a I charged through them with my shield. My friends who played the rogue-like Interceptor and the mage-like Storm also enjoyed piloting their Javelins — that is, just so long as they were using the custom Javelin abilities to do damage and kill enemies and not having to fire any of Anthem’s actual guns, which are all quite shockingly anaemic. None of them feel like they have any force or impact behind them, and even the single biggest gun in the game — the Colossus’s Torrent minigun — feels like you’re pelting enemies with a spray of tiny ineffectual pebbles instead of a hail of lethal lead. The guns are just what you use when your abilities are on cooldown because they’re no fun at all; they’re all identically blocky-looking and have absolutely no distinctiveness to them, and I didn’t particularly care whether my secondary weapon was an assault rifle or a light machine gun because they both looked, sounded and behaved the same as each other.

(This is also why the fourth Javelin, the weapons-focused Ranger, is no fun to play at all, because the guns are all they can do.)

This presents yet another problem for Anthem; when the guns are so unsatisfying, and upgrades are so meaningless, that basically scuppers any hope you had of hooking players in with your loot system because 80% of the available loot is guns. The other 20% is incremental upgrades to Javelin class abilities, which are perfectly fine but difficult to get excited about because you’ll settle on a build you like fairly early and then you’re just getting slightly better versions of the abilities that make up that build. There’s no armour drops, no cosmetic drops; just an endless parade of identikit weapons that I could not give the tiniest iota of a shit about because they’re so generic. I understand the weapon situation improves slightly once you get into the endgame and start rolling legendary weapons with unique, powerful affixes similar to Destiny exotics or Diablo 3 class set bonuses, but then we run into the other problem Anthem has: of the twelve people in my Friends list who “bought”⁴ Anthem, only two of them completed the game (I am not one of them) and both stopped playing shortly afterwards as the true vacuousness of the game really started to bite. The rest of us fell out of Anthem long before then and never even saw any of those special affixes.

The general experience my group had towards the end is a great way to sum up Anthem, in fact; there’s so much downtime in Fort Tarsis with the various cutscenes and the loading screen gating to get in and out of the inventory screen that we actually preferred to play solo or with matchmade parties rather than dragging friends into the mix, because that meant we were only wasting our own time, not everyone else’s. It’s a multiplayer game where you actively try to avoid playing with your friends, for god’s sake; the last session I played was me and my regular co-op partner Kenti trying to blast through some story missions, and the whole time I felt horribly guilty because I didn’t particularly want to be playing Anthem at that point, and so I can only imagine how Kenti felt. Guilt, frustration, boredom, annoyance — these are not emotions I want associated with anything in my life, let alone a thing I’m supposedly doing for leisure, and so I called a stop to it after that session. I like to finish games if I can in order to get a full picture of what they’re like, but Anthem simply isn’t worth it.

I’m at 5,000 words now, and there’s still an awful lot I haven’t mentioned: the hyper-aggressive tethering during missions that teleports you to your party if you’re more than five metres behind them when they hit a checkpoint (which results in another loading screen); the utterly barren Free Play mode that’s supposed to provide some of the sense of a living world that Destiny and The Division do but which merely accentuates just how much better those games do it; the revive system that’s absolutely not fit for purpose; the Titan world boss, whose attacks are all incredibly broken and who is in general one of the most atrociously-designed enemies I’ve ever seen; the UI that started out bad and has been rendered borderline unusable by a terrible PC port⁵. Anthem is just a never-ending list of fuckups, though, and I really don’t have time to list all of them. I’ll just say that most could have been avoided with even the most basic analysis of what the competition is doing; after years of live ops to fix their own serious failings Destiny, The Division and Warframe are all pretty good blueprints for how to make one of these games and have it be a success, and yet Anthem has seemingly intentionally ignored every single one of them, instead choosing to jet off on its own and immediately ram itself face-first into the nearest wall like a drunken Javelin pilot.

(I can guarantee there’s one group of people who are quite happy about this outcome. Ubisoft are about to release The Division 2, which doesn’t look like it’ll be anything special but whose bar for success has suddenly been lowered so far it’s practically tunnelling into the Earth’s core.)

I want to end by considering Anthem’s — and Bioware’s — possible future. It’s no secret that Bioware are all-in on Anthem; resources have been stripped from other games (i.e. The Old Republic) in order to get it out of the door, and up until it flopped the company’s plan over the next one to two years was very likely to focus on live ops for Anthem while they worked on a Dragon Age 4 prototype that could be put into full production once the next generation of consoles had been announced. At the very least they would have been hoping that, even though they knew that Anthem was releasing in an extremely rough state, they could eventually turn it around the same way Bungie did Destiny and Ubisoft did The Division. I have some bad news for them: that simply isn’t going to be possible. Anthem’s not fixable. In the past I’ve made pronouncements on how other, less broken games were fixable, only to have them remain thoroughly broken years later, so I’ve re-evaluated what developers are willing and able to do with a game post-launch; there are some parts of Anthem that you could extract and put into other, better games, sure, but there’s too much that’s just plain rotten, and now that they’ve actually released it they’ve made it exponentially harder to do anything about that rot. It’s been critically mauled and the word-of-mouth is terrible; from a business perspective, running live ops on Anthem is pretty quickly going to be a case of throwing good money after bad.

So what do Bioware do? Sure, EA might give them one last chance with Dragon Age 4, but that’s at least four years out and, after two critically-panned games in a row, there’s no guarantee that DA 4 would turn out any differently to Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem because something is fundamentally broken at Bioware. There’s still definite talent at that studio, and some of it still shines through in Anthem in spite of everything, but until Bioware and EA both take a step back and address the structural issues facing Bioware and their relationship with EA that’s all Bioware will ever produce: games that are at best heavily flawed, and at worst utterly broken. That’s an expensive solution in terms of both money and time, of course, and I suspect EA are more likely to consider shutting Bioware down completely; all they’ve got going for them is that they’re one of the last EA studios standing and EA desperately need first-party content to push their subscription services, and also that the Bioware brand isn’t yet fully toxic and people will still turn up for Dragon Age 4. It’ll probably happen, but it’s definitely a last roll of the dice and I personally don’t expect that it’ll pay off. I have immense respect for Bioware’s history — Baldur’s Gate is one of my favourite game series ever, and KOTOR and Mass Effect defined console RPGs for their respective generations — but the people who worked on those games are long gone from the company. And as far as the ability of the modern Bioware to deliver a quality product is concerned, Anthem is a truly dire portent of things to come.

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The post Thoughts: Anthem appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I started Mass Effect: Andromeda last Friday with every intention of finishing it, or at least finishing the majority of it, by Sunday night. Based on my experience with other Bioware RPGs this seemed perfectly doable; my completion times for all three previous Mass Effects clock in at under 20 hours and I had nothing else to do that weekend, and they’d all at least been fun enough for me to blitz through them in a similar timeframe. It’s not Bioware, but when Alpha Protocol came out I completed it three times in a single week¹. What I’m trying to say here is that I have absolutely no problem smashing my way through an RPG in a very short space of time, and I’ll usually enjoy doing it unless the RPG in question is Dragon Age 2.

On Sunday morning, faced with the choice between playing more Mass Effect: Andromeda and doing literally anything else with my time, I instead elected to clean my fridge. I took all of the shelves out, washed them in the sink, dried them, thoroughly wiped down the inside of the fridge to remove some pretty gnarly hidden stains, replaced everything, and then went on to clean the microwave and the easy parts of the oven for good measure. Doing a proper job of it meant enduring a couple of hours of the sort of mild intellectual tedium that accompanies all housework, but you know what? It was an infinitely, infinitely more thrilling and satisfying experience than playing Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Playing Andromeda has made me more than a little bit weary. It’s yet another unfinished AAA game that’s been rushed out the door long before it was ready, and those are becoming less and less fun to encounter with every successive one I play. I can usually derive some level of enjoyment — or at least interest — from playing a game that’s just bad, or which has very questionable design elements, because I think that seeing an example of how not to do something is almost as important as seeing it done right – after all, how can you identify right without the context of wrong? In the case of games like Andromeda, though, I’m struggling to see what lessons could possibly be learned other than “Don’t release unfinished games.” Perhaps “Don’t hire the Halo 4 writer because he’ll just vomit out the same garbage-tier story tropes all over again” could have been one key takeaway, but I think Halo 4 itself was a sufficient argument for that. And perhaps another would be “If you’re moving the setting to a whole other galaxy, maybe actually have some elements of the game that are little bit new and alien rather than importing all of the same sodding races we’ve seen in the previous three titles”, but I also think that one is just plain common sense. This is Andromeda’s crime: it’s not just that it’s bad — although it is — but it fails to even be interestingly bad, to make mistakes that could be learned from in future games. It’s just overwhelmingly shallow and tiresome to play, a pale imitation of the original trilogy that, at its best, is still somehow less enjoyable as an experience than staring mouth agape at the fucking space ghost from the third installment.

Still. I’ve spent 35 hours slogging through to the end of the game, and I’m sat down in front of my computer with a Google doc window open. Let’s see if I can find it in me to spend just a couple more hours bashing out a review that bashes Andromeda.

The premise of Andromeda is that the various Milky Way civilizations fired off a bunch of colony ships towards the Andromeda galaxy just after the events of the first Mass Effect (so before the Reaper apocalypse had really hit full swing). Six hundred years later they arrive.  You play a Pathfinder – no, you’re not a Spectre in this one, the fact that Pathfinders are functionally identical is purely a coincidence – tasked with finding habitable worlds for the Andromeda colonists to, well, colonise. Exactly why a hundred thousand colonists require so much lebensraum is never explained, especially when their prospective new homes are littered with strange ruins and homicidal robots left behind by an ancient alien civilization — Protheans? No, no, these are the Remnant, they’re totally different. Your base of operations is a huge space station called the Nexus — SHUT UP IT’S NOT THE CITADEL, just look at it, it might be the same size and shape but it doesn’t have nearly enough glowy lights — that the Milky Way colonists have somehow constructed in just a couple of years despite the Citadel being plainly described as beyond the engineering capabilities of the races living on it. Your expansion efforts are opposed by the Kett, who are a race of Andromeda natives that have conveniently followed a line of parallel evolution into cover shooter baddies, and who are very interested in kidnapping other races for their genetic material  – they’re NOT Collectors, we swear. Shortly after the game begins your Chosen One character gets the ability to do the Special Thing with the alien ruins — ah, but it’s not at all like Commander Shepard and the Prothean beacons because there’s an AI involved! — and starts turning on a network of rather convenient terraforming monoliths, but also attracts the attention of the two-dimensional Kett Archon, a villain who shows up maybe four times in the whole story (and at least two of those times are to mwa-ha-ha at you over the holophone about how the last two hours of gameplay has been entirely according to his design, which is a really easy way to identify Lazy Writing) and consequently has even less relevance to the game than the nobody antagonist from Dragon Age: Inquisition.

This is, for me, probably the most infuriating thing about Andromeda. I’m not going to pretend that Bioware moved the story to a different galaxy because they in any way wanted to do anything particularly new with it; it was a move born out of necessity after the Milky Way setting was effectively blown up at the end of Mass Effect 3. The amount of repetition going on is absolutely incredible, however, like they’re students who have copied and pasted an article from Wikipedia and are hoping it’ll pass muster as an essay if they just change some of the words around. There are all of two new alien races in the game: the Angara, whose defining trait appears to be that they speak with Australian accents and who are absolutely indistinguishable from humans in every single way save for their physical appearance, and the aforementioned Kett, who might have been moderately interesting if your interactions with them extended beyond shooting a couple of thousand of them in the face. The Andromeda races are outnumbered two to one by existing races imported from the Milky Way: the Asari, Turians, Salarians and — bafflingly — the Krogan² all made the trip over, but even these have been diluted down to the point where they’re now just funny-looking humans (in particular every single Asari in this game acts like a moody teenager, which is pretty much the opposite of how they’re supposed to be). Anyway, the Arks containing the majority of the alien populations got conveniently lost on the trip over so that in practice you spend most of the game looking at the awfully-rendered faces of your fellow human beings. Despite the premise, Andromeda is definitively not a game about exploration; its obsessive focus on retreading old ground means there’s scant attention given to creating anything genuinely new for the player to discover.

Case in point: the star map. Just like every previous Mass Effect, Andromeda has a star map that you can use to travel to a host of star systems. In the first Mass Effect you could physically land on many of the planets found within these systems in the Mako; the surface of any planet not directly related to the main plotline was always procedurally generated gumpf with nothing of interest on it, but an effort had at least been made to promote the concept of exploring the unknown. Mass Effect 2’s implementation was both better and worse; you now scanned planets from orbit to find points of interest, but visiting them was still worthwhile as there’d usually be some cool piece of lore or backstory to uncover in the planet description³. Mass Effect 3 kept the scanning but added Reaper fleets that’d chase you if you scanned too much, which didn’t have much to do with exploration but was at least in keeping with the theme of the game. The series has never quite managed to nail this mechanic, but there’s always been enough that was worthwhile about it for me to never fully resent it no matter how tedious it got.

Andromeda’s star map, by contrast, is some unholy amalgam of the worst elements of every previous iteration of the star map with additional time-wasting injected into it. The star map is closest to 2’s implementation, in that you’re scanning planets from orbit and launching probes, except every single planet you scan is an incredibly dull list of environmental factors that present as the writers desperately trying to explain why you can’t build a colony there. There’s no cool lore snippets, no backstory and no standout planets to discover; they’re just points on a map that Bioware would very much like you to scan so that you can get the progression counter at the top of the screen to 100%. Anomalies that you find are all the same 4-5 things repeated over and over again: a satellite, an asteroid, a rich seam of ore on the planet surface etc. etc. If I were part of the colonist team I’d be pretty damn outraged to have spent 600 years travelling to the Andromeda galaxy only for it to turn out to be even duller than the one I just left. And worst of all is the travel time, as any time you do anything on the star map you have to sit through a 10-15 second first-person sequence where your ship zooms along to your new destination. As Andromeda’s quest structure absolutely loves making you revisit places you’ve already been to on multiple separate occasions you will find yourself staring at this sequence a lot even if you outright ignore all of the pointless fluff; I would calculate how much of my life I wasted staring at the zoomy ship screen but I’d just get even more depressed with the game than I already am. It’s not even like they can make the excuse that it’s hiding a loading screen, because:

1. Those are distinct things that you still have to sit through any time you elect to actually land on a planet.
2. It’s a two-dimensional star map with individual not-very-detailed 3D planet models. It shouldn’t need a loading screen, and certainly not 200 of them.

I can’t conclusively rule it out, however, because Andromeda in general is a bug-ridden, poorly-coded mess with rock-bottom production values. You will have no doubt already heard many terrible things about Mass Effect: Andromeda’s animations and lack of polish, and I would just like to take a moment to confirm that everything you’ve heard is absolutely true. I don’t know if it’s the switch to the Frostbite engine that’s done it, or just everyone who was previously responsible for the character animation at Bioware upping and leaving, but aside from raw texture quality and lighting effects (some of the environments are quite pretty) Andromeda looks like a game released ten years ago. To be precise it looks like Mass Effect 1, and I know this because after finishing Andromeda I booted up the first installment to see how they compared — and ME1 actually came off better in several areas such as overall visual design and facial animation. Don’t believe any stills you see from this game: go on Youtube and watch it in motion and you’ll quickly see what I mean. Coupled with some truly awful voice performances that I can only assume were completely undirected (such as the infamous “My face is tired…” scene”) and which sound like the voice actor is reading them off paper for the first time and making their best guess at intonation and general mood, and the overall impression you get of the Andromeda Initiative is that it’s populated solely by a collection of robots on Xanax.

The general low quality of the visuals and audio goes hand in hand with a startlingly rough gameplay experience. There’s pop-in absolutely everywhere, and I once got imprisoned by a trio of NPCs who loaded around me three seconds after I walked into a room. Enemies get stuck on (or sometimes inside) scenery with depressing regularity. There were a couple of fights where they were flat out invisible (and I don’t mean that they were cloaked). Andromeda has stolen the Destiny thing of having enemies be transported in by dropship — and relies on it to the point of absurdity, so that you’ll be driving around a planet and three dropships will fly in and drop off troops near to your location in the space of thirty seconds — but if you’re in an environment where it can’t rely on this, such as the interior of a building or a ship, it has absolutely no qualms about spawning them out of thin air right in front of you. The scripting for the final bossfight broke no less than three times, forcing three separate restarts. Finally, the game itself crashes at the drop of a hat; my friends get consistent crashes during multiplayer, I had two soft crashes back to the system menu in single-player, and — worst of all — my PS4 hard crashed and had to spend five minutes checking disk integrity and rebooting after one particularly badly glitched cutscene. This is supposed to be a triple-A game, and I am amazed it got through whatever passes for Sony’s console cert.

So the premise is terrible and breaks the universe’s own internal fiction, the game doesn’t play to the supposed themes of the new setting in the slightest, and the general production values are so low (for what was previously the premier sci-fi RPG series) that they’re on the verge of tunnelling into the Earth’s molten core. This is usually the part where I’d say “But at least the combat and characters are okay” because those are the parts that Mass Effect normally manages to get right, but I’m not so sure that’s true of Andromeda. Plentiful bugs aside the combat is okay, just so long as you’re the melee-focused Vanguard class; I suspect I would have been far more frustrated with it had I not been able to recharge my shields by punching people in the face. The problem with it is that — as with so much of the game — it gets ridiculously repetitive; there are three sets of enemies and you’ll have fought all of them by the time you get to the second planet, and then Andromeda fails to introduce any new variants for the next twenty-five hours. Even the final bossfight doesn’t actually have a boss in it, it’s just you shooting wave after wave of the same goddamn enemies while a timer ticks up. There is precisely one enemy in the game that hasn’t been designed around the wave-based multiplayer mode, and there’s next to no coordinating design in the combat encounters themselves; enemies are just spawned and left to get on with it, and then when you’ve sent their corpses ragdolling over the horizon you move on to the next room or location and the next enemy spawn.

Then we have the characters, and… hoo boy, I really don’t want to get into the characters, largely because I’ve managed to go 3000 words so far without mentioning The Witcher 3 and I don’t want to be constantly comparing the two. Suffice to say, though, that Witcher 3 raised the bar in just about every single area for both AAA RPGs and videogames in general. It wasn’t achieved without effort. CD Projekt poured a ridiculous amount of money and manpower into it, and even if the Bioware of 10 years ago were still around and developing on an engine they knew they’d still have trouble matching it in many areas; it’s a little unfair to hold every subsequent RPG up next to The Witcher 3 since they’ll almost always come off worse thanks to having fewer resources to play with. However, the thing Bioware are known for, first and foremost, is the quality of their writing; this is the one area where I’d expect them to look at what The Witcher 3 achieved with questlines such as the Bloody Baron and Heart of Stone and substantially up their game in response.

Instead, Bioware have simply doubled down on having all of their characters making lighthearted quips at the slightest provocation. There is clearly somebody on the writing team at that studio who has seen far too much Buffy The Vampire Slayer and fancies themselves as the next Joss Whedon, except they completely forgot to include even the ridiculously overblown drama of Buffy⁴ as a counterbalancing force. The result is that everybody in Andromeda comes across as either a childish buffoon or an unlikeable asshole, like the initiative to colonise Andromeda was secretly an effort to get rid of the Milky Way’s most unwanted inhabitants.  The Krogan companion Drack is about the only character for whom the self-referential writing works because he’s a thousand years old and really has seen it all before; everyone else appears completely incapable of taking anything seriously, and this robs the storyline of what little weight it has because there’s absolutely no sense of the value of the stakes involved. Characters have conversations about the wholesale slaughter of colonists as casually as they would talk about what they had for breakfast that morning; life-or-death situations are faced with the same robotically-smirking expression and sarcastic comments as the rest of the game, and are totally robbed of any consequence as a result. Thanks to both the lackadaisical writing and the low production values ensuring that all too often we’re told about things happening in lieu of actually being shown them happening, there’s absolutely no emotional depth to anything that happens in Andromeda. Even Dragon Age 2 didn’t sink this low.

Speaking of Dragon Age 2, I got a very similar vibe from Andromeda, especially in the latter stages of the game. Development of the game was underway for five years so it probably went through several different iterations as new mechanics, worlds and storylines were developed and then later discarded, and what I think happened was that at some point last year Bioware were told enough was enough and that they had to release it before the end of the 2016 financial year or else. This is because Andromeda plays like a game stitched together out of several parts that were made more-or-less in isolation, regardless of how well they actually fit into the game; this is particularly obvious with the final pair of worlds that you unlock, as they have practically no worthwhile content in them and appear to have been included largely because the surface map for the planet was complete and it let them pad out the running time of the game. The finale is an incoherent mess that feels like it’s been ripped out of a completely different game (called Halo 4), while spaceship interiors are reused again and again in a similar manner to Dragon Age 2’s dungeons; the Ark interiors in particular are recycled on four separate occasions⁵. The whole thing starts to feel like an episode of Babylon 5, where they had a single apartment set that they redressed for each individual ambassador’s quarters – except this isn’t a relatively low-budget mid-90s sci-fi show, it’s a modern triple-A video game that’s had millions of dollars of development money thrown at it.

Impressively I think the damage Andromeda does to the Mass Effect franchise might actually exceed that inflicted by Mass Effect 3’s ending. That might have been catastrophically bad, but it was at least one specific point in what was otherwise quite a good game (and quite a good trilogy) rather than this sustained background noise of nobody giving a fuck. I’m struggling to think of a single thing about it that I unambiguously like; even its best planet, the ice world Voeld, wouldn’t even register as mediocre if inserted into any of the previous games. With a game this poor, and a reception this bad, I think there’s a fairly good chance the Andromeda setting will be abandoned – after all, it’s hardly a rich and fertile ground for new storytelling when the inception is this horrendous. But then if they do that, how do they make another Mass Effect game? Because I guarantee you they will try, so given how the storyline of the original trilogy panned out Bioware have three options:

1. Grit their teeth and make another game set in Andromeda. The problem with this is that I wouldn’t buy it, and I’ve bought every single game they’ve ever made⁶. Thanks to Mass Effect: Andromeda they’ll effectively be releasing to a hostile audience if they do this.
2. Retcon the ending of the original trilogy so that they can make more games set in the Milky Way. This would be exceedingly ill-advised since it would engender previously unheard-of levels of fanboy rage.
3. Make a prequel to the original trilogy. Probably the outcome with the least chance of crashing headfirst into a brick wall, but the problem here is that unless Bioware crafted a personal tale with smaller stakes (something which I think they’re now completely incapable of doing) we’d already know the end point to it.

So from where I’m sitting, Andromeda is not only a terrible Mass Effect game, it also dooms the next iteration of the Mass Effect franchise to also being terrible. Perhaps that was already a foregone conclusion given the current state of Bioware, but I liked to think there was at least a chance they’d pull their heads out of their collective asses and turn it around; Andromeda effectively guarantees the opposite. Probably don’t expect great things out of the franchise any time soon, eh?

The post Thoughts: Mass Effect Andromeda appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I must admit to a spot of hubris upon seeing the intro paragraph to RPS’s review of Dragon Age: Inquisition. “I’ve spent almost sixty hours uncovering as much of Inquisition’s enormous open world and intricate story as possible”? Yeah, there was some eye-rolling going on when I read that. This is Bioware we’re talking about, who have cut and cut and cut at the core concept of the RPG until it consisted of nothing more than a dull series of linear dungeons propped up by their character writing, which is still consistently above average. There’s also the fact that games journalists are paradoxically terrible at actually playing the products they review for a living; as a general rule of thumb you can take any time they quote for completion of a game and cut it in half to get the actual length¹. And after the debacle that was Dragon Age 2 I’d mercifully insulated myself from any further publicity for the series, assuming that Inquisition would at best be more along the lines of a semi-decent fantasy Mass Effect than a proper, meaty RPG. Eminently disposable, in other words. I thought I’d be able to blast through it in a weekend and then move on to the next item on the huge list of games I have to play.

Forty hours later, and I am forced to admit I might have been mistaken.

Inquisition represents a remarkable return to form for Bioware. More than that, it’s the first time² they’ve really departed from the stock formula they’ve had for their games ever since KOTOR and tried something new. I’m not going to call the end result an unmitigated success — Inquisition does have some fairly big problems — but it’s undeniably better off for the innovation and is at least partially successful in its attempt to move away from the stripped-down style of RPG that Bioware did so much to sculpt. Instead, Inquisition perhaps overcompensates by making sprawling scope the centerpiece of everything it does. Rather than being in control of some plucky adventuring party you’re given command of the titular Inquisition, a vast organisation with hundreds of spies, soldiers and diplomats at your beck and call. Rather than trudge through a series of linear, scripted dungeon experiences you’re instead set loose in a collection of fully explorable open world maps that draw heavy inspiration from Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed. The game suffers from the odd case of invisible wall syndrome, but the usual rule is that anywhere you can see, you can get to. There are dragons flying around these maps. You can go and fight them at any time, but beware — even when you’re max level they’re much tougher than the pushovers found in Skyrim, being more reminiscent of the dragon battles from Baldur’s Gate. Still, there’s nothing really stopping you from going and getting yourself eaten at level one if you really want to. Handing this much choice to the player is a dramatic shift in priorities for the series, and a welcome one too – mechanically speaking, Inquisition couldn’t be further from Dragon Age 2 if it tried, which can only be a good thing.

While the open world maps are the headline change here, I actually think it’s the lesser of Inquisition’s improvements. As a consequence of Bioware’s use of the Frostbite engine used to power Battlefield they are unfailingly pretty, with the coastal areas in particular using Frostbite’s weather effects to good purpose. The scenery is varied enough that each area feels different, too, and the game even provides a number of mounts to speed up your travel from place to place. However, they are if anything too big – not for me as a player, I’m all for huge sprawling environments that take hours to clear, but it’s clear that Bioware have had… difficulty, shall we say, in coming up with enough interesting quests and encounters to populate these maps. There’s a definite whiff of collectible-itis about many of the activities on offer, while many of the actual quests are simple Fedex visit-a-point-on-the-map-and-maybe-kill-some-monsters affairs. Thankfully there is enough actual content to make these open world maps worthwhile, and I think they bring a lot to the table and would definitely like to see more Bioware games that refined them as a concept. Because they could do with refining; I enjoyed the smaller maps more than I did the larger one not because they were smaller, but because they were more focused. I think the bigger maps could maybe have benefited from that sort of direction rather than the current approach of throwing stuff at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

Where the maps do succeed, however, is in the injection of a large quantity of optional content that is genuinely optional. Those dragons I mentioned earlier? At no point does any quest, main plot-related or otherwise, require you to find and kill one. If you do hunt one down it’s done entirely on your own initiative — because you decided you wanted to kill a dragon, not because the game did. If you were to bulldoze through Inquisition’s main plotline from start to finish and only went to the areas you absolutely had to in order to complete the game, you wouldn’t even visit half of the maps on offer. Of the rest you’d see maybe 60% of their content, with the remainder requiring some additional exploration or questing to unlock. That’s both Inquisition’s great strength and its greatest failing: the main plot merely sits on top of this vast underlying world rather than the main plot being the world. While this is one of the contributing factors to Inquisition’s plot seeming unusually insubstantial (for a Bioware game, anyway) it also means exploration means something. You’re not just ticking boxes or doing a quick two minute side quest, you’re seeing a lot of stuff you genuinely wouldn’t see if you didn’t venture off the beaten path. Doing so is not without risk since it’s entirely possible to run into high-level baddies that wipe the floor with your party, but exploration wouldn’t be any fun if it wasn’t at least a little dangerous.

The open world maps are a broadly positive addition to Dragon Age, then. However, they end up playing second fiddle to the real innovation Inquisition makes: the titular Inquisition itself. Since I knew nothing about this game before I bought it I expected the Inquisition to be the bad guys — it’s hardly a name bereft of cultural association — but about an hour into the game the player character is put in practical command of it³ and you get access to its resources and personnel. This alone puts a hugely different spin on how the game feels; you’re in charge of an army, not a handful of emotionally-damaged NPCs, and the flavour of your activities in-game changes dramatically as a result. You goal is to build the Inquisition’s power from a small group of religious fanatics into a continent-bestriding colossus that rivals nations in its power, which means that your day-to-day concerns go some way beyond acquiring a sharper axe or a shinier suit of armour. Instead you’re sending out spies to investigate rumours, lending your soldiers to the efforts of fending off attacks by bandits, darkspawn and other nasties, and dispatching diplomats to smooth things over with a cranky noble class.

Because you do a lot through your agents in this game you need some way of interacting with them, which is where the War Room comes in. This is a map of Thedas that’s liberally covered in mission markers for you to attempt; you have three advisors representing your spies, your military and your diplomatic corps, each of whom can turn their attention to a mission on the map. The advisors each have a different approach, and so the outcome of a mission can change depending on who you pick to tackle it. Once an advisor is assigned to one mission they’re rendered unavailable for other missions until a completion timer counts down, and this can be anything from a few minutes to twenty hours long. Thankfully it counts down when you’re not playing the game too so it’s not totally unreasonable, but even if you’re stretching your playthrough out over a sane amount of time it’s impossible to do even half of what’s on the map in a single game.

I have mixed feelings about this way of doing things. Yes, the whole timer business is a little too much like a Facebook game, but in this case it’s meant to force you into some hard choices; you can’t do everything, so you have to pick and choose what’s most important. I don’t really have a problem with the timers. Where I do have a problem is the missions themselves; some of them do lead to other missions unlocking on the map, some of them have pretty good rewards, and some of them are inherently entertaining in and of themselves even though they’re just text in a box. Unfortunately there’s far too many missions that are just plain inconsequential, where the reward you get for committing your advisor is two sentences of flavour text and sixty gold. These don’t exactly make me feel like I’m spreading my influence through the world; instead they feel like a smaller version of the issue with the open world maps, where there’s a lot of trivial shit stuffed into the thing in order to make it look like there’s plenty to do.

The missions also represent something of a missed opportunity when it comes to your unused party members. Bioware games have had this problem since the dawn of time, where you run around the universe with your bestest buddies and everyone else gets left on the ship to twiddle their thumbs; except for Garrus and his calibrations, exactly what they got up when you weren’t there was something of a mystery. Involving them in the missions would have given them something to do, and while it might have disrupted that feeling of having to make hard choices with limited resources that feeling is arguably a mirage anyway thanks to how pointless most of the missions are beyond their flavour.

Speaking of party members, I think Inquisition falls down a bit here in an area where Bioware is traditionally so strong. Not since Knights of the Old Republic have I wanted to punch so many of my party members right in the face; Cassandra, Varric and Iron Bull are all pretty cool (Cassandra and Varric in particular have so many lines needling each other that I was still hearing new ones twenty hours into the game) but there isn’t a single recruitable mage who isn’t completely insufferable, while Sera is the walking embodiment of “lol so quirky!” that fans of Bioware games inevitably latch on to and repeat phrases from ad infinitum. There were nameless Inquisition footsoldiers who were more likeable than this lot, and I resented having to save the world with such a bunch of jerks.

Anyway, back to the War Room. The missions are a bit of a mixed bag, yes, but I do like the idea and they succeed in promoting the idea that you’re in charge of an organisation with influence that goes beyond the room you’re currently standing in. A better use of the War Room, though, is in how you open up new areas. As you complete quests and slay demons in the world you’re rewarded with the usual experience and loot, but also something called Power. Power represents the support and influence your Inquisition can bring to bear on a problem; amass enough of it and you can spend it in the War Room to establish a beachhead in new areas. This makes thematic sense as well as being a neat mechanic to govern progression — of course fighting your way into a region infested by monsters is going to take expendable manpower — and the really nice thing about it is that it’s occasionally used to unlock new areas within a map by repairing a bridge or clearing a rockslide, so spending your Power in the War Room directly changes the world you’re exploring. Inquisition is pretty on the ball in rationalising abstract game mechanics we take for granted as the result of your organisation working to achieve your goals — for example, the fast travel points ubiquitous to open world games are presented here as your Inquisition forces setting up camps in the regions you’re exploring.  In certain areas you can capture and claim forts that are subsequently inhabited by Inquisition troops, while there are missions on the War Room map that let you build docks and other facilities in areas you’ve been through and cleared. It’s nothing particularly meaningful in terms of what it gets you in terms of loot and experience, but it does paint a convincing picture of the world changing in response to your actions.

The bulk of Inquisition’s gameplay is about expanding the Inquisition’s power in this way. Opening up more areas and conquering more land is pretty engrossing, which is why I got pretty annoyed that this thing called “the plot” kept intruding on my War Room scheming. Mainly this was because Inquisition’s plot is both paper thin and incredibly bad; it starts with a huge explosion taking out a peace summit between warring factions of mages and templars which subsequently creates rips in reality that spawn demons. I thought that closing these dimensional rifts was going to be the focus of the game — which would have been fine, it’s pretty world-threatening and I’m sure you can work in some additional threats trying to take advantage of it — but unfortunately the writers apparently get bored of it about ten hours in and hit you with the real bad guy, who is some nobody from Dragon Age 2 that I don’t even remember. This might be Bioware’s obsession with characters from tie-in fiction receiving prominent roles in their games, but he’s presented with little to no explanation of who he is or why I should care about him, and proceeds to sit on his ass for nearly the entire rest of the game. I’m fairly sure that in the thirty hour gap between him showing up and me burying a mace in his skull during the final boss battle he made a grand total of one appearance in person and one as a sort of hologram type thing, and I actually forgot he existed for large portions of the game, which should tell you something about how effective he is as a villain.

The rest of the plot isn’t much better; it’s used as an excuse for some pretty fun quests but the actual story behind it is incomprehensible rubbish. It’s also painfully obvious that the “choices” presented to you during the course of it are meaningless; a typical example is when you’re asked which character should stay behind to sacrifice themselves for the cause, except it doesn’t matter because the survivor is immediately hustled out of the story rather than create any inconveniently branching plotlines. I will say that despite spending a good half hour setting up my game state in Dragon Age Keep it apparently didn’t import correctly and I ended up with the default version, which is really, really dull. Maybe if those choices had made it through I wouldn’t have experienced such a bland playthrough.

Still, for once you’re not playing a Bioware title for the plot. You’re playing it for the world and for the atmosphere, and it really does deliver on both those counts. It’s the biggest RPG Bioware have put out in years, and it is for the most part a very enjoyable one. It also comes with a co-op multiplayer mode that’s patterned after Mass Effect 3′s unexpectedly excellent one, which has allowed them to refine their combat system in a similar manner; it suffers from control issues but as long as you’re content with controlling one character at a time it’s a hell of a lot of fun. It took me forty hours before I even started to get bored, and I only invoked the end of the game because I thought the Keep import issue meant I was getting less out of it than I should. I want to play through it again when I have a graphics card that can do its world full justice. I want to see all the areas and secrets I missed. I want to kill all of the dragons. There is so much to do in this game, and while those forty hours have gone some way beyond scratching the surface I haven’t even come close to seeing all of what Dragon Age Inquisition has to offer. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s pretty, engaging and scratches that exploration itch, and in this way it’s the closest title to the original Baldur’s Gate that Bioware have made since. Given how much I like Baldur’s Gate, this is high praise indeed.

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The post Thoughts: Dragon Age Inquisition appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This part of the review has more spoilers. I’m not going to reveal important plot specifics, but I am going to talk about the story structure and how some of the more promising mechanics actually panned out at the end of the game.

So Shepard’s goal in ME3 is to defeat the Reapers, and she’s going to do this by gathering forces for a final showdown while the Systems Alliance builds the Crucible, a magical MacGuffin which can apparently wipe out the Reapers in one fell swoop. It’s a bit of a crappy way to defeat them, but honestly given the way the Reapers have been built up over the course of the series it’s the only real way to do it; they can’t be defeated in conventional war and they can’t be talked down, so the only way to do it is via deus ex machina.  For most of the game construction of the Crucible proceeds autonomously without Shepard’s input – she can find items and recruit groups who help in its construction, but they’re just added to the War Asset list rather than having a tangible affect on the outcome – but then about halfway through it turns out they need a MacGuffin to make the MacGuffin work. They don’t know what the MacGuffin MacGuffin is, but Shepard gets a tip; she has to go to a certain planet to find yet another MacGuffin to discover what the second MacGuffin is so that the first MacGuffin will work. At this point I was just about ready to put my fist through my monitor if the game revealed one more hitherto completely-unsuspected galactic artefact of phenomenal cosmic power, but the worst was yet to come.

For much of the game you’re not fighting the Reapers. You’re fighting Cerberus and the Illusive Man, who are now full-on cartoonishly evil rather than interestingly and ambiguously evil. During my trip to find the MacGuffin MacGuffin MacGuffin, I was confronted by the Illusive Man’s henchman who also wanted it, and promptly beat the shit out of him in a gunfight. Unfortunately that wasn’t good enough for the game, which then switched to a cutscene where the henchman effortlessly takes out Shepard and her party and swipes the MacGuffin. Afterwards, Shepard is really cut up about her failure to retrieve the MacGuffin and stop the Reaper invasion.

Only, it wasn’t her failure, was it? She succeeded. I succeeded. It wasn’t the henchman or the Illusive Man or the Reapers who stopped her, it was the game designers, who thought that it was entirely okay to remove all player control over the outcome of that mission and have it play out entirely via cutscene. Shepard’s reaction to her failure therefore isn’t heart-wrenching or tragic in any way, it’s just annoying. Annoying because it’s an artificial reaction to a contrived situation. Annoying because this is my Shepard, who I’ve built up over the course of three games now, and she’s acting completely out of character because Bioware think she should be undergoing some emotional conflict at this point in the storyline.

This sort of railroading is prevalent throughout the main plotline. There’s loads of things you can do to add more numbers to the War Asset list, but at the end of the day that’s all it is: a number. It doesn’t even have any effect on the way the end of the game plays out beyond a very slightly different cutscene at the end. The things Shepard does to affect the outcome of the war are very, very linear and restricted, and when the explanation for a certain thing happening is “Because plot” I start to wonder whether this can even be called an RPG-lite any more.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the ending. The retaking of Earth was a little underwhelming, but what I thought was the ending – the battle to deploy the Crucible – was quite well done. I would have been very satisfied if the game had ended there. Unfortunately Mass Effect 3 then proceeds on to the real ending. which comes completely out of fucking nowhere and makes literally zero sense, being a choice between three utterly contrived situations. It is pretty much Human Revolution’s “Push a button to pick an ending” only worse, because the endings make even less sense, are extremely vague and inconclusive and are frankly an insulting, unnatural and awkward way to round off the trilogy. I was later told that the head writer on the first two games, Drew Karpyshyn, left development on ME3 halfway through to work on The Old Republic, which goes some way towards explaining why the conclusion to ME3 is so disjointed and nonsensical, but I still have trouble believing that the entire rest of Bioware saw the plans for this ending and said “Yeah, looks good!”

Ugh. What I’m trying to get across here is that ME3 follows a markedly different philosophy of scenario design from the previous two games. Mechanically, the game is a triumph, and the characters – always Bioware’s strong suit – are as excellent as ever. As far as resolving the overplot is concerned, though, ME3 is an abject, pathetic failure. It’s why I said Bioware very nearly proved me wrong; I was all ready to reconsider my opinion of them until I actually finished the game, at which point they merely resoundingly confirmed it. While they have displayed an ability to improve and refine the nitty-gritty of actually playing the game, ME3 proves beyond a doubt that they have absolutely lost what little ability they had to satisfyingly resolve a story – and given that Bioware’s games are often referred to as “Guns and Conversation” rather than “RPGs”, not being able to get the Conversation part right rather sabotages the entire thing, I think.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy ME3. I was enjoying it immensely up until that final hour, and there’s actually a reason to shell out for it beyond wrapping up the plotline now because the multiplayer is also excellent fun. If your primary interest in the game is to find out what happens at the end, though, I think you’re better off saving your money and making up your own conclusion to the trilogy in your head. I can guarantee that whatever you come up with will make more sense than what actually happens, even if it involves 400 foot tall purple platypus bears with pink horns and silver wings; that, at least, would be self-conscious in its absurdity, rather than the all-too-serious mystical New Age bollocks the game confronts you with. As it is I’ve come out of it with a sense of crushing disappointment rather than the complete satisfaction I craved, and so ultimately I can only call ME3 a brave failure; one which pushes forward mechanically, but which completes Bioware’s regression away from making RPGs. I don’t know what ME3 is, but it’s not an RPG. Calling it an RPG would suggest that I had some control over the outcome besides pushing a button, and that is the one area where ME3 doesn’t just fail; it doesn’t even try.

The post Thoughts: Mass Effect 3, Part Two. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is going to be split into two parts: non-spoiler where I talk about the mechanics of the game and how I feel it pulls them off in as vague a way as possible, and then another part where I go into slightly more spoily plot details. This is the non-spoiler half of the review, but please bear in mind I have to talk about some really, really general plot points like the basic premise of the game in order to explain how certain bits and pieces work. It’s only stuff that’s revealed in basically all the marketing material for the game, but if you’ve somehow managed to avoid that and want to remain unspoiled I’d stop reading now.

It’s always puzzled me how there seem to be two Biowares. They’re an inherently schizophrenic developer, responsible over the last few years for both the fine RPG-lite that was Mass Effect 2 and the nadir of “RPG” design represented by Dragon Age II as well as the DLC/expansions for the original Dragon Age. DA II was very nearly the straw that broke the comel’s back as far as I was concerned; I had become convinced I was watching the rapid deterioration of what had once been the biggest and best developer of western RPGs in the world. Mass Effect 3 was their last hurrah, a game I was buying more for old time’s sake and to round off the triology than I was out of any real expectation that it would actually be good. I was all ready to hate it, condemn it, cut tites permanently and move on with my gaming life. Having played through and finished it now, I’ve come to the bittersweet realisation that Bioware very nearly proved me wrong.

The short way to describe Mass Effect 3 would be “Mass Effect 2, except a bit better.” It uses the same engine, same textures, some of the same maps, same locations, same galaxy map and many of the game characters. It’s a fair bet that if you enjoyed ME2 at all you will also enjoy ME3. And yet to describe it this way would be to do ME3 a disservice despite the massive superficial similarities, as ME3 makes a huge number of significant under-the-hood changes that have a sizeable impact on how the game plays.

Somewhat ironically – given my initial reaction to the news that they were going to shoehorn a multiplayer mode into a game that seemed to need it like a majestic wildebeest needs an attack by a pack of blood-crazed, starving hyenas – I am forced to concede the multiplayer has actually had a very positive effect on how ME3 plays. ME3’s multiplayer is light, disposable fun rather than the half-assed effort I was expecting, and in order to make this work Bioware have had to pay a lot of attention to the one area of Mass Effect that always seemed like a bit of an afterthought: the combat.

In the two previous ME games I didn’t bother with the combat – didn’t understand it, didn’t enjoy it, and didn’t want to. It seemed like an annoyance, like a series of mindless shooting galleries whose sole purpose was to provide breaks in between the conversations and cutscenes, and consequently I stuck the difficulty down to Easy and blasted through it as quickly as possible. Probably ME3’s greatest accomplishment is that it makes the combat fun, that it’s something I looked forward to – or at least, didn’t try to actively avoid – rather than having to grin and bear it. There’s much more to do than just running and gunning this time around; the biotic system has finally reached the point where it’s quick and easy enough to use that it’s a viable choice over just shooting someone in the face, while the added melee is also a lot of fun and actually encourages you to close with the baddies and engage them at close-range. For the first time ever I started using a shotgun, which was satisfying; and then I stuck a bayonet on it, which was hilarious; and finally I upgraded it to the Graal Spike Thrower, which was utterly brutal.

The story and mission structure is workmanlike at best, but what’s interesting here is that Bioware are trying something new: actions and decisions with actual, genuine, and sometimes personal consequences. Instead of the suicide mission the premise this time is that you’re gathering forces from across the galaxy for a war against the Reapers – and this provides an intriguing method of tracking the player’s actions throughout the game. The choices you’re given are still the milquetoast Bioware Good/Evil (or Good/Dick in this case) binaries; however, ME3 differs from other Bioware games that have tried the same thing in a more tedious, conventional way (step forward, Dragon Age) by providing you with about a zillion war assets you can find and add to your army. These range from single ships you can find while scanning planets and characters/factions from previous games making cameo appearances, to the fleets and ground troops of an entire race which must generally be secured by running errands for them. Most of the time once you’ve secured an asset its presence in the game is reduced to a number and an entry on the war asset list, but that number isn’t fixed and can fluctuate up and down depending on subsequent decisions you make. It’s a little bit clinical, and the ultimate consequences basically boil down to “Get this much military strength for a five second clip added on to the ending sequence”, but as a record of your actions and moral choices it’s far more effective and fluid than the now-meaningless Paragon/Renegade alignment bars. Which are still inexplicably present, by the way.

Speaking of character cameos and ultimate consequences, I think Bioware have hit much closer to the mark this time than ME2 did, especially considering the fact that they’ve now got 12-15 NPCs that all have to be dealt with. Nearly all of them get actual face time in the game (a far cry from ME2’s cop-out emails) and most of them have whole missions centred around them even though they might not be recruitable. Many of them are, but – awesomely – you’re given a choice whether or not you want to take them, and if you don’t they join the general war effort instead and show up in the asset list.

That’s if they survive, of course. ME3 doesn’t quite adequately portray the stark, relentless nature of the Reaper invasion – while individual civilizations are crushed effectively, you seem to have all the time in the world in which to save Earth – but it it pulls no punches when it comes to deciding the fate of your NPCs. I lost at least five during my playthrough, and some of those deaths I absolutely did not see coming, with the determining factor sometimes being (apparently) reliant on decisions I made in ME2. While securing the support of the larger races is somewhat underwhelming, it often necessitates the sacrifice of one of your companions – and I should stress again, those sacrifices seemed organic and natural rather than the RNG encountered at the end of ME2. Bioware seemed to be adjusting to a new paradigm, one where it is not possible to get a “good” or “best” outcome without taking some hard blows along the way. Watching Shepard’s friends die in the course of the mission brings home the stakes of the game far more effectively than war reports on the news or refugee camps in the Citadel.

This has come at something of a cost, unfortunately; there’s so many returning characters present that the game spends very little time on new ones. In fact I counted exactly one brand new recruitable NPC, a stock human male soldier who manages the impressive feat of being even blander than Kaidan Alenko. It’s a bit of a problem with the game in general, in that I feel it spends a little bit too much time revisiting the things that worked in the past and not enough time doing new stuff. For a trivial example, you know how when Portal 2 came out we were all pleasantly surprised that Valve had shown some restraint and there was nary a reference to cake or Still Alive in the whole thing? Bioware could learn a thing or two from them. The Blasto joke? That’s still going. Shepard VI? It’s here too. It’s like the game is trying a little bit too hard; like it’s jumping up and down just behind your shoulder shouting “Look! You found this vaguely amusing/fun in the first/second games so here it is again! Aren’t I clever?” The sad part is that the injokes are pretty much the only humour to be found in the game. Mass Effect 2’s premise was a suicide mission on which literally everyone could die, and yet it still found plenty of time for levity. Mass Effect 3 is incredibly grimdark in comparison, and while that’s understandable given the mass slaughter that’s going on it does make the conversation part of the game a little bit less enjoyable. There’s only so many times you can watch Shepard ruminate on the futility of her struggle against the Reapers before it starts to get a little bit old.

Still, while the story doesn’t exactly blow my socks off it does work, the missions you go on are entertaining to play through, and the character interactions with both Shepard and each other are as outstanding as ever. For twenty hours I was enjoying myself and immensely, and I was all ready to declare Bioware partially rehabilitated since ME3 seemed like a fantastic return to a form that I thought they’d lost two years ago. Then at twenty hours plus one I reached the end of the game and the wheels promptly came off the wagon. Most of the flaws in the game were revealed in that hour-long finale, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in the spoiler half of the review. If you don’t want to read that, you should know that ME3 — despite its innovations — is still a Bioware game through and through: it didn’t just collapse at the end, it completely imploded, leaving me with a very bad taste in my mouth. If it had been a standalone game I wouldn’t have minded so much, but as a way to round off the trilogy it is almost comically awful. I can guarantee that almost no-one is going to come out of Mass Effect 3 feeling satisfied about the way the story of Shepard has finished.

The post Thoughts: Mass Effect 3, Part One. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I do not understand this game. I do not understand how Bioware, a company known for make solid if somewhat unimaginative RPGs, let it get past the proof-of-concept stage. It’s the first significant deviation from the formulaic approach that has served them well in the past, and as a result it is dull as fuck.

That’s not the concept’s fault, to be fair. The concept is actually pretty good – follow the life of a character, not over a few weeks, but over an entire decade. There’s about a million different things that I can think of to do with this concept. The problem is that all one million of them are far more interesting than what the developers of DA2 have shat onto my hard drive. Even the ones that are Fable. At least Fable was fun.

The failure of the concept is an inevitable result of the truncated development time – this thing was churned out in fifteen months and, contrary to my expectations, it isn’ta ten hour game. But that’s a problem in and of itself. If you’re going to have an arcadey sort of RPG a la Mass Effect you need to limit its length so that the seams don’t start to show and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. By contrast, Dragon Age 2 is nothing but seams.

First off, there’s a substantial amount of content recycled from Origins – textures, music, models; you name it, they’ve nicked it. This gives me the impression that I’m playing an inferior expansion to the original rather than a whole new game. One thing they haven’t done is outright stolen levels, but I think that’s one area where I would have given them a pass because as it stands the game contains a grand total of five. You’ve got your main hub areas for walking around in, but when you go into a dungeon you will be in one of the following environments:

• An abandoned mine.
• Another abandoned mine.
• Some sort of basement/sewer thing made of cardboard. There’s two of these, a big one and a small one.
• A nobleman’s house.

So, for example, I go to clear out a mine full of dragons at the start of the game, and find myself in an abandoned mine map. This makes sense. Then, later on, I use a secret passage to get from Darktown (hnnngh) into the Gallows! Exciting! Except not really, because the “secret passage” is the same abandoned mine map from before except I’m going through it in the other direction. This sort of thing gets old very quickly, and it doesn’t help that the game is packed full of quests that involve nothing but killing hordes of enemies in one of these five maps.

I wish I could say these quests were just the cheap filler surrounding a creamy core of RPG goodness, but since the core also consists of killing hordes of enemies in pursuit of mundane objectives I would be lying. There isn’t a single quest in the game, in fact, that doesn’t involve the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of baddies. Even the one quest I actually enjoyed a lot – the one where I’m supposed to be setting Aveline up with one of her guards she has a crush on – eventually reverted to walking along some cliffs slowly killing enemies.

This is dull. The environment design doesn’t help. Kirkwall, the place where I spent 90% of my time, is a dull mass of grey and brown stone with very little in the way of decoration or interesting architectural features. On the few occasions I went outside Kirkwall it was to some place called the Wounded Coast, which was grey with grey seas and grey clouds, or else to Sundermount, which was grey with grey clouds and grass so dark it was almost black.

So from a visual point of view, this world that Bioware have built is fundamentally boring. What about the characters? This is an area where Origins excelled, in my opinion, and there is a slight ray of hope in that the characters aren’t actually that bad. Varric and Aveline were my favourites since they were fairly independent people who had lives that didn’t revolve around my character and – importantly – didn’t hit on her once. Isabela is total fanbait, of course, but I actually liked what little I saw of Fenris – the character designed as fangirlbait – since by a freak of writing he also appears to be fairly well-rounded when he’s not banging on about his slavery to a Tevinter mage. Rounding out the ensemble are Merrill, an insane Welsh elf I was at least able to tolerate, and finally-

WHAT IT’S FUCKING ANDERS FUCK. FUCK. You can stay in Darktown, boyo. I’ll be damned if I’m ever taking you out of there. In fact I hope the Chantry finds you and lobotomises you.

Right, so anyway the characters aren’t a total disaster. It’s a shame therefore that the plot and dialogue options you’re presented with are. I’m getting extremely frustrated that my options for every encounter consist of “Being nice”, “Being a flippant asshole”, or “Being an asshole”. I like being an asshole in games, but I get absolutely no satisfaction out of it when the asshole response I told my character to give shows no imagination – it’s all of the RAAAR I’LL KILL YOU variety rather than the hilarious putdowns seen in Mass Effect.

And the plot. Oh, the plot. I’ve been waiting for a while for an RPG that doesn’t set you up in opposition to some world-ending threat and instead gives you stakes a little more personal, and at first glance losing everything during the Blight on Ferelden and having to claw your way up from nothing in a strange land would appear to be as personal as it gets. But the thing is, in order to pull that off you need dedicated gameplay mechanics as in Fable, or at the very least a world that changes organically in response to your actions. I need to feel that this is a personal story, rather than my character wandering around randomly doing things for people.

It started with my characters family escaping from the Blight and going to Kirkwall, at which point I was presented with a choice: I could get inside, but somebody would have to bribe the guards for me and I’d have to work off the debt for a year. I could either go to a smuggler, or work for a mercenary company. I’m pretty mercenary, so I took their offer, and was told to walk around the corner and kill somebody. This took about sixty seconds. I returned, and… the game picked things up again a year later with me as a free agent. Working for the mercenary company was apparently just an excuse to advance time, since the only contact I had with them afterwards was a minor sidequest. Even worse, the passage of time had changed nothing except for my character now owning a house in the slums (and Aveline getting a job as a guard).

This is the biggest flaw running through DA2’s concept: the progression of time doesn’t actually do anything. It could just as easily take place over the course of ten weeks, or ten days, and the only way you know it’s a period measured in years is because characters occasionally tell you so. Nobody ages. Nothing changes. The merchant who you go into partnership on a mine with is still standing in the same place hawking his wares ten years after the game has started. Varric and Isabela apparently spend a decade getting drunk in a pub. Fenris doesn’t bother to renovate his stolen mansion because he likes living in a dilapidated ruin or something. The political structure of the city changes over time, but those changes are things you see in cutscenes as part of the main plot so, again, the ten years thing is completely unnecessary.

In the end, then, Dragon Age 2 is a traditional RPG masquerading as something different, and it suffers because of that – most of your quests are of the hugely trivial sidequest type and two-thirds of the way through (at the time of writing) I am still having trouble identifying the main plotline. Was it [blackout]the statue I pulled out of the Deep Roads[/blackout]? That was given a lot of weight at the time (and was also [blackout]responsible for the death of my character’s sister[/blackout]) so I thought it’d have consequences later, but I’ve yet to see them. I thought it might be the Qunari situation, but that got resolved at the end of Act 2. It’s showing signs of being the mage/templar conflict at the moment, but if that’s the case it’s being thrust into the limelight very suddenly, as evidenced by me not really giving a shit about that prior to this point.

There’s a whole lot more that’s wrong with DA2, but this is already 1500 words or something so I’ll stop there. John Walker’s actually written a negative review of a Bioware game (*gasp*) over on RPS which sums up many of these other problems pretty well. At the end of the day, I’m going to have to stand by the consensus opinion that Dragon Age 2 Isn’t Very Good.

The post Thoughts: Dragon Age 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.