HighCastle

ademska:

NO GOD it’s not a fear, dingus, it’s a gameplay style!

open worlds leave themselves shallow on narrative. bioware games offer a degree of nonlinearity, through both player choice and quest systems, but what makes them special from sandbox/open worlds is their sense of pacing. by restricting the player to a linear course of events, they’re able to use basic literary techniques like suspense and foreshadowing and moving conflict in a way that open worlds just logically can’t do. in the history of gaming so far it has proved impossible to offer both an open world and a coherent, paced story. the closest you can get is a rockstar game, but even still that’s just a bioware-style story with an open world mode.

you may prefer bethesda-style games, but that is not (nor hopefully will it ever be) the aim of bioware.

Here, here. Sandboxes are fun for exploration, but have you noticed a theme with Bethesda-style games? The main narrative always seems to be lackluster. Hell, how many times have you heard people say they never even finished it, they just ran around doing what they felt like? And that’s all well and good for that style of game. BioWare’s in the business of making story-driven RPGs, though. For you to have a decent story, you need to have proper pacing. That means at some point you have to put a cap on the amount of side quests and running around so that you get the proper flow of the narrative.

There are plenty of sandboxes on the market today. What’s rarer is a game that has not just a coherent plot, but an interesting one from an analytical point. DA2—for any flaws you might perceive in it—had a narrative that functioned on many levels, that’s still being debated and analyzed by a decent chunk of the fandom. All that would be lost in a sandbox, sadly.

So yeah, I hope BioWare keeps doing what they do best.

(Source: dragonageconfessions)