Dragon Age vs. Oblivion

[dragon wench]

Hmm...
I'm actually not sure what connection politics has to either DA:O or Oblivion..

However, I perceive Oblivion as something designed by and for dullards.. and I'd have probably voted for Obama were I American. (I mean, look at the alternatives....)
*shrug*

[Xandax]

<snip>
I'd bet $10,000 that anybody who likes Oblivion better than Dragon Age also voted for, or would have voted for, Obama.

Completely irrelevant statement.
Don't drag your American politics/bias and lack of understanding of same into this discussion. It does not belong. If you want to discuss, and by discuss I do not mean rant or whine or post silly statements - you can take it to Speak Your Mind forum.

(And you would loose a lot of money on that as well if you actually stood behind your statement)

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[flix]

Hmm...
I'm actually not sure what connection politics has to either DA:O or Oblivion..

However, I perceive Oblivion as something designed by and for dullards.. and I'd have probably voted for Obama were I American. (I mean, look at the alternatives....)
*shrug*

Yes. Same here. Just a trollish statement better ignored.

[fable]

Completely irrelevant statement.
Don't drag your American politics/bias and lack of understanding of same into this discussion.

Please, let's not even throw "American" into that, as if other USians like myself agree with such a bizarre reductio ad absurdum. Suffice to say, equating a political point of view you dislike with preferring a game your audience doesn't enjoy is hackery.

Back to subject: I'm still trying to find anything I can say to compare the two titles with any degree of meaning, but really can't. They represent completely different approaches to a deceptively broad game genre.

[RPGguy]

If you re-read the original post, maybe you'll agree with me that the OP is just a kid who is starting to discover these types of games and really enjoyed both.

I'm certain he just wanted to talk about it and find someone who kind of shares his buzz.

I think we've adequately made the point that Oblivion is substandard and I'm more concerned that the OP won't come back and participate any more because we've piled it on a bit thick at this point. No?

[Wildeyn]

Fair enough, RPGguy.

Glad to have you posting, DataSage. I enjoyed Oblivion for several days until I figured out that it all sort of went nowhere, and I am glad that you made your post so as to give several of us another chance to criticize Oblivion - hehe. You have a full right to your opinion, but I would ask you to change it, in order that better games might be encouraged to be made in the future.

What bothers me about Oblivion, and what prompted my political metaphor, was that Oblivion seems to RELY on the player not realizing that so much is pointless. It is like, to continue to enjoy the game, you need to not realize that each cave respawns randomly, and that quests give you nothing at all for completing them, except gear that is worse than you can make yourself.

And, most of all, you have to not realize that you can give yourself 100% chameleon, or else you have to self-police yourself, which, to me, takes the fun out of any game.

I think that the annoyance I have towards Oblivion is sort of like if you watch a movie and are enjoying it, and then you find out that it is all a dream or something that invalidates the past hour and a half that you enjoyed. I played Oblivion, enjoyed it for a while, enjoyed working on my character... and then it all fell apart due to the reasons that I have already stated.

I made a metaphor at the end of my last post to something else that I believe relies upon people not realizing what is really going on. When Forest Gump compared life to a box of chocolates, it didn't make sense to reply, "what does chocolate have to do with this movie!?" Chocolate was relevant as a metaphor. My political reference was relevant as a metaphor. I was making a point about Oblivion, not politics. But, the problem with my metaphor was that, apparently, some people aren't aware of what they would need to be, to get the metaphor.

By the way, dragon wench, you committed the fallacy of the inverse when trying to disagree with me. ~p -> ~q is not a consequence of p -> q, so if ~p -> ~q is false, that doesn't imply that the original conditional was incorrect. I won't translate what I just explained into the actual example, because using political metaphors seems to tick people off. "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" ended last year, and I forgot about that.

[fable]

My political reference was relevant as a metaphor. I was making a point about Oblivion, not politics. But, the problem with my metaphor was that, apparently, some people aren't aware of what they would need to be, to get the metaphor.

No, the point is that you brought up a political leader by comparing him to a game you don't like, and we don't have political discussions outside of our SYM (Speak Your Mind) area. That's it. It isn't about metaphors, or analogies, or similes, because if you'd made a simile comparing Oblivion to, say, a car or film you didn't like, and then stated your reasons, that would have been fine. Bringing up politics isn't.

So if you want to attack Obama, feel free to do so in SYM. Not here. Not whether its Obama, McCain, John Randolph, or Thomas Jefferson. And no more explanations are necessary, or desired.

[Lady Dragonfly]

Both games suck but Oblivion is more entertaining. I could not recall any other BioWare game as boring as DAO. It is 75% crappy filler combat, 15% interactive movie of the worst sort (unless you can't get enough of the ancient cliches) and only 10% good stuff - some c&c, some dialogues, some quests (mostly in the beginning). The area design is piss poor, zero exploration, glued to the spot NPC's, low quality lore packed in the numbered Codex, generic MMORPG-esque sidequests, cookie-cutter "random" encounters, LEVEL SCALING. And same-o combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat... The endless sea of boredom. Meh.

[Salidin54]

OBLIVION BY A LANDSLIDE. DA:O looked so generic that I didn't even think twice about not buying it, also there's this: The Escapist : Video Galleries : Zero Punctuation : Dragon Age: Origins

Edit: I didn't read anyone else's post becauce frankly it's not going to change my mind.

[ouiouiwewe]

By the way, dragon wench, you committed the fallacy of the inverse when trying to disagree with me. ~p -> ~q is not a consequence of p -> q, so if ~p -> ~q is false, that doesn't imply that the original conditional was incorrect.

Except she wasn't trying to contradict whatever claim you tried to make. But, I can understand how first years like to show off their knowledge of predicate logic.

[Excalibur_2102]

Both games suck but Oblivion is more entertaining. I could not recall any other BioWare game as boring as DAO. It is 75% crappy filler combat, 15% interactive movie of the worst sort (unless you can't get enough of the ancient cliches) and only 10% good stuff - some c&c, some dialogues, some quests (mostly in the beginning). The area design is piss poor, zero exploration, glued to the spot NPC's, low quality lore packed in the numbered Codex, generic MMORPG-esque sidequests, cookie-cutter "random" encounters, LEVEL SCALING. And same-o combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat... The endless sea of boredom. Meh.

Im not going to convince you to like the game, as it seems you've made up your mind and wont be swayed either way, but you have to realise that you're in the minority as far as your opinion of DAO is concerned. Alot of my friends who enjoyed baldurs gate/fallout and planescape pretty much all agree that DA is the best RPG since those days. Gamebanshee gave it GoTY and also said a similar thing. I dont know why you hate the game, but oh well, Im enjoying it and thats all that matters I spose.

As for oblivion vs DA, ive pretty much given my answer in this post. I always said that Oblivion wasnt really a bad game, it just didnt suit me. Though reading dragon wenches post I agree with most of what she says.

[fable]

Im not going to convince you to like the game, as it seems you've made up your mind and wont be swayed either way, but you have to realise that you're in the minority as far as your opinion of DAO is concerned.

Could you tell me what being in the majority in strongly favoring DA:O brings? Do you get access to a secret health spa?

[Wildeyn]

1) If a new rpg came out, and what happened in it was that 1/3 of the way through, you find an item that causes all of the enemies to stand still and absolutely never attack you while you kill them, without exception, then wouldn't we consider that an essentially gamebreaking flaw that any decent designer would avoid? (100% chameleon in Oblivion does exactly that.)

2) If a new rpg came out that had 20 caves and dungeons, all of which were totally randomized, and that had no useful loot, and each respawned anyway so that the latter 19 of the caves and dungeons were totally worthless to find, wouldn't that be an essentially gamebreaking flaw? An RPG in which exploration is worthless?

Oblivion has those 2 flaws that I assert are essentially gamebreaking. On top of that, it has other features that are basically pathetic, such as that you level up far better in the privacy of your own room (in game) fighting summoned skeletons and jumping up and down and running in circles around the bed than you do by exploring and fighting and doing quests, or that the npc's are wooden and have silly cycles that involve hours of things like staring at the fence, which was hailed by Bethseda as a breakthrough in imersive realism.

Complaints about DragonAge are essentially generic and non-specific like "there is lots of repetitive combat." Every role playing game ever made, or at least 98% of them, could be accused (generally unfairly) of the same. Maybe a few rpg's exist that have something like a dozen carefully crafted special fights the whole game, and no "filler" in between, but I haven't seen such a game myself.

Bioware's effort in creating DragonAge is pretty heroic. Sure, we can all come up with a dozen armchair quarterback types of suggestions for how it could have been even better, and those suggestions might even improve the sequel. But condemning DragonAge in a sort of blanket yet vague way is pretty invalid, I say. That said, I have no problem with a person saying, "I understand that many may legitimately like this game, but I don't."

[Wildeyn]

uninterrupted walks in the forest!

lol - hehe.

I just read over the previous posts in this thread for any specific claims of how Oblivion was better than Dragon Age. Other than graphics and soundrack, there was one other idea listed, and I'm not making this up: uninterrupted walks in the forest.

Actually, if you clean out the Brecillian Forest a couple of times, you can walk for hours, days, or even weeks in real time, through the forest in Dragon Age. So, Dragon Age is even equal to Oblivion if you play rpgs to wander uninterrupted through the forest enjoying the scenery and soundtrack.

The fun need never end! Gosh... instead of claiming 50 hours of gameplay, Dragon Age could have catered to the "uninterrupted walks through the forest" crowd and claimed thousands of hours of gameplay for one playthrough!

[fable]

I just read over the previous posts in this thread for any specific claims of how Oblivion was better than Dragon Age. Other than graphics and soundrack, there was one other idea listed, and I'm not making this up: uninterrupted walks in the forest.

Personally I don't like vanilla Oblivion, as my review here showed. (And I was one of the very, very few reviewers who said anything negative about it, much less wrote in generally disparaging terms.) That said, it achieves nothing to compare two such different games, and is unfair to claim the only things Oblivion has to offer are to be found in one half-hearted option in one comment mentioned above. You don't go to a site of French monarchist sympathizers to find a lot of support for De Gaulle, and we're pretty anti-Oblivion, here. If you want to know what it truly has to offer, you go to Bethsoft's own site, where there are some honest, intelligent assessments of its value vs those of Morrowind that finds more in its favor. And no one bothers comparing it much to anything like a more linear combat-oriented RPG, because most realize that's a futile exercise.

You do realize that your over-the-top attack on Oblivion has spurred me to actually defend a game I don't care for? And I really can't afford the time now to do this, either. Bah!

[Xandax]

Personally I don't like vanilla Oblivion, as my review here showed. (And I was one of the very, very few reviewers who said anything negative about it, much less wrote in generally disparaging terms.) That said, it achieves nothing to compare two such different games, and is unfair to claim the only things Oblivion has to offer are to be found in one half-hearted option in one comment mentioned above. You don't go to a site of French monarchist sympathizers to find a lot of support for De Gaulle, and we're pretty anti-Oblivion, here. If you want to know what it truly has to offer, you go to Bethsoft's own site, where there are some honest, intelligent assessments of its value vs those of Morrowind that finds more in its favor. And no one bothers comparing it much to anything like a more linear combat-oriented RPG, because most realize that's a futile exercise.

You do realize that your over-the-top attack on Oblivion has spurred me to actually defend a game I don't care for? And I really can't afford the time now to do this, either. Bah!

Actually - going to a pro-Bethesda site would not offer "honest, intelligent assessment". Then you'd just get the baised and subjective praise of the "best game evar" crowd where Bethesda does nothing wrong, instead of the information from people who found the flaws in it.
Simply because some of us might (strongly) dislike the game, does not mean our opinion is more invalid, unfair or biased then it if were to come from those who like it.

So while it might be unfair to compare the games because they're hardly the same genre - it is far from unfair to claim that the worth of Oblivion couldn't be found in the comments here (for example), but that it should be found on a specifically pro-Oblivion site.

[Scottg]

Could you tell me what being in the majority in strongly favoring DA:O brings? Do you get access to a secret health spa?

I was thinking *nearly* the same thing when I read it..

[fable]

Actually - going to a pro-Bethesda site would not offer "honest, intelligent assessment". Then you'd just get the baised and subjective praise of the "best game evar" crowd where Bethesda does nothing wrong, instead of the information from people who found the flaws in it.

How many years ago was the last time you checked? You'd be surprised, I think. A lot of the fanboys, having the persistence of fruitflies, have moved onto other games. The last few threads I've seen asking about Oblivion or comparing Oblivion to Morrowind have turned up quite a bit of thoughtful comment. I was surprised.

My point was that since most of us dislike vanilla Oblivion quite a lot, you're not going to find a lot of people praising its qualities, rightly or wrongly, here in this thread. But there are a number of people who enjoy vanilla Oblivion that could speak sanely to some of these things these days, on Bethsoft's board. This is accurate on both points.

I was thinking *nearly* the same thing when I read it..

I kept remembering a Woody Allen exchange in his film, Life and Death, which takes place during Napoleon's invasion of Russia:

Russian Sergeant: If they kill more of us, they win! If we kill more of them, we win!

Allen: (smiling eagerly like a game show contestant) What do we win?

Being in the majority proves nothing, and neither does being in the minority. These are matters of taste, and everybody is, of course, right, and everyone else is wrong.

[Excalibur_2102]

Could you tell me what being in the majority in strongly favoring DA:O brings? Do you get access to a secret health spa?

Maybe. I'll have to get in touch with bioware about that.

Okay I stated that as fact that she was in the minority when I dont have anything substantial to back it up with. Its just, I dont trust all the rave reviews of games (since oblivion, coincedently) anymore, instead I just tend to speak to a group of people I know well in person and on the internet who generally enjoy RPGs like BG1/2. Heck I was totally put off DAO by the whole marketing thing with Manson music, and it wasnt until I guy I knew well said hed been hooked and he felt it was the best single player experience since BG and Fallout (this was in december) that I considered buying it. I spoke to other people I knew who loved the RPGs of old and they said the same thing, so I bought it, and I agree with them.

[fable]

Okay I stated that as fact that she was in the minority when I dont have anything substantial to back it up with.

I think I'm not getting my point across. It's that being in the majority or the minority means absolutely nothing, one way or the other. There have been plenty of instances where a very small minority were factually correct, and the overwhelming majority were wrong; and the opposite is true, too. So just telling somebody, "You're in the minority," really doesn't establish anything, other than that fewer people agree with them than otherwise. Besides, as this isn't a matter of fact but of personal taste, majority and minority status doesn't matter much at all.

I strongly suspect DA:O is a lot more popular than Oblivion, but so what? And I fail to understand why anybody should feel it necessary to back up their views against somebody else's on this, as though an opposing viewpoint were the equivalent of spitting on one's grandmother's grave. I'm not saying you're doing this, but I have seen some pretty strong rhetoric in this thread (for our board; I know there are others where flames are common) based on nothing more than personal outrage over the fact that someone else disagrees on the equivalent of one's favorite color.