ToEE is my favourite RPG actually, but you must use the huge community modpack for it, because the vanilla game is a bugfest.

Bioware. I've just been thinking about them quite a bit.

They do have their little 'formula' of starting location -> 4 areas to explore -> End Sequence. It does get kind of obvious. There are interviews with the Bioware founders btw where they mention they've done research on how many locations people can really get involved with in a game before they stop caring, but still, shake it up a little guys.

Dragon Age. I really enjoyed it, on my first play through. I've never managed a second although I've tried a few times. This is in part because the unbelieveable stupidity and agonizingly out-of-character betrayal of Loghain keeps staring you in the face the whole time and it never does become convincing. I start to wonder why I'm saving a world full of such idiots.

Mass Effect. I'm going to be the voice of dissent here. I really enjoyed ME 1, I've replayed it many times. Some of my best gaming dollars spent. I did not enjoy ME 2 as much to be honest. I think the gameplay changes went too far and I'd much rather have seen the inventory system fixed rather than stripped out. BUT! The ME trilogy is doing something no game company in the history of ever has even attempted. To make a trilogy that tracks your choices and save states across three titles. There were dozens of choices preserved from ME 1 carrying over into 2 from minor things like how you treated your fanboy to "Who is running the Galaxy?". All these choices and dozens more made in ME 2 are then carried over into ME 3. That means they have a game which right from the get go has to deal with hundreds of possible states at it's starting point. It's no wonder they limited choices during ME 2. Did I like the limits presented? No. Would I have done things differently? Yes. Although I will say that if I do finally get to kill the Illusive man in ME 3 it will all have been worth while. If I don't ... I'll probably be done with Bioware, I've never hated any videogame character as much as I hate that smarmy, manipulative bastard.

This, by the way, is a good thing. In Bioware's language I'm 'emotionally invested' in the character of the Illusive Man. The fact that I want to hit him with a dinosaur killer is besides the point.

Bioware does some things very well. Characters are their strongest point. Everybody loved Wrex from ME 1, you feel bad if you can't save Talitha, Liara is an adorable blue dorkette. Plot? You don't look to Bioware for amazing plots. Good plots? Yes. Solid ones even. But they do come off the standard racks. Same thing with scripting and pacing. Good, maybe very good, but not amazing. But they do very little actual screwing up as far as I can tell, and that is kind of amazing. Who else can be relied on to make solid, enjoyable RPGs these days?

Kotor has the best story in any game I've seen and sold me on Bioware. NWN was very fun to play because of its size, if not its starting size. ME1 was fun and with the mako and the many worlds, it felt like you were in space trying to save the galaxy. The only game that does space better is Freelancer, yet ME1 was fun despite the crappy inventory system. DA:O was fun, for a while, yet my memory haunts me and I remember practically every single enemy in the game, and the few choices you make changes way too little for the game to be replayable for me. The combat felt weak and most abilites didn't have that impact that you would like. ME2 had great combat, I liked it a lot, it was balanced and challanging, yet did not dumb the game down to a simple shooter*.

I really don't understand why people complain. The only bad thing I have seen from Bioware since EA bought them is the DLC which I mostly ignore entirely.

*(mind you, shooters ain't that bad, if the campaign is longer than 5 hrs that is to say, Halo 1 is one of the best games made imo)

I highly doubt you played BG2 at all. BG1 wasn't all that great, but 2 was amazing.

And, anyone who claims that a storyline in any modern RPG even approaches that of Planescape: Torment is completely and utterly wrong.

Still you, man.

I don't understand fanboys. It seems a stupid way to give up consumer rights.

BG was good for its time. Its not so good anymore. Same thing with Planescape Torment. Its sorta time to move on.

I like you you just ptroed to portray your opinion as absolute fact, since my first post didn't make it I'll say it again.

If you don't like it don't buy it, kotor and jade empires were 2 fucking amazing games as far as I am concerned.

I found to Jade Empire to be surprisingly entertaining, and I liked the atmosphere, the music, the arts, pretty much everything except... it was the first game in awhile that made me want to hook up my controller because it just felt odd with my Wolfking for awhile, unfortunately they went 360 controller only route boo! Oh and they still had the good and evil thing going to the extremes with the good and bad ending pretty much based just on one decision regardless.

This is not true at all. I had only played PS:T for the first time last year, and was completely blown away by it. It's not a story that can age poorly, and because of the 2D sprites combined with the widescreen mod, I didn't even think about how old the game was (3D ages MUCH faster than 2D). Baldur's Gate is the same. I've played that game since it came out and I still play it, its replay value is insane. I don't think it's aged poorly at all. Of course games nowadays are much simpler, where a single short tutorial is pretty much all it takes to explain how a game works. This is not the case for BG2 or PS:T, so I can see new players being frustrated at the steep learning curve.

I think OP is wrong. Like others have said everystory is pretty much a retelling retooling of older stories.  I think alot of the hate towards bioware is the stupid  modern feeling that if its the most popular it must be no good. Over and over I see people trying to belittle good games, movies, ect just because they are popular. 

Except Avatar that is junk.

I thought Kevin Costner's dialogue in Avatar was a bit forced. Also, Tom Cruise's samurai armor didn't look very realistic in Avatar either. And what's up with Smurfette, why is she the only female smurf in Avatar anyway? Besides, how many drills do they have to build to reach the core of the Earth anyway? I thought Delroy Lindo had all the unobtainium he needed.

Still, Ghostbusters was better.

See. I think THIS is the main reason people can't see video games as art. In the video game world, it's a constant rat race to get to the next prettiest game, instead of trying to develop the next greatest game.

Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment are works of art in the gaming world. They're amazing regardless of the age or time. A book doesn't stop being good and neither does a movie, simply because there're books with better printing quality and movies with a higher resolution.

DA and ME are the typical action movies of the RPG world. Utterly forgettable. I couldn't even really identify any themes within the stories for analysis. Compare with Planescape Torment (identity, redemption, immortality etc as well as avoiding as many RPG stereotypes as possible) and Baldur's Gate 2 (becoming the monster, morality, doing evil for the sake of good etc).

Wait, no, I think I've identified two themes in both DA and ME. Interviews go something along the lines of this: "TITS AND VOCIE ACTING YOU CAN GET TITS AND THERE IS VOICE ACTING BEST GAME EVER ALSO MORAL CHOICES"

???

I did say that KotOR was WHEN the games started to go downhill. Never played Jade Empires.

You've not played enough Bioware games. They are the exact same story. Every. Single. Time.

My point exactly.

First off games are being seen as a art form and will continue to being seen that way for a very long time; so I don't know where you get this bs about people not seeing games as an artform. 50 years ago that statement might have been true, but in this day and age that statement is so false a lie could take lessons from it. Secondly let me repeat myself, if you don't like bioware then don't buy a damn thing from them. Bioware has done decent work, one of them being dao which you seem to hate. You can try and call me off as a fan boy or whatever, and I'll happily prove you wrong on such a point.

There is really nothing more to be said here, because I'm not here to try and change your opinion and I could careless; why? Because whether you like it or not, you can't stop bioware from doing what they do, and I doubt you hating them will make them go "OMG this dude hates us, so lets stop making games forever and put all our employees out of work."

No, they're really not. Ebert was pretty much right, a lot of games AREN'T art. Just like a terribad movie without any value isn't a piece of art, your typical game also isn't. Point to me a game you view as art.

You keep repeating the same thing that doesn't apply to the discussion at hand at all. You sound like a broken record. It seems you think it's an amazing piece of wisdom. It isn't.

I'm going to ask you to leave the thread, since you're going all over the place and making absolutely zero sense. It's awkward to watch.

Define 'Art'.

Weren't you then one who said Ebirt was a idiot; which is a truer statement then most tend to accept?

Art was is a vague term with in itself; art is a large category which derives from cooking and singing, all the way to painting, sketching, modeling. The phrase art itself is a living breathing entity forever which is forever changing and growing in way both expected and unexpected.

Then again that is my perception of it; I know people who do not accept people that do commercial work with there skills as artist at all.

No a great amount of wisdom is telling you to stfu and get over it, but no one is doing that.

Thats why I don't like his argument he defined art subjectively for his own personal view then made a judgement (games not art fools!) then didn't tell us the exact definition of art so we know why games arn't art. (I.e. its not art because he dons't like it).

So if some games are and some are not, we must know what "art" IS.

Dragon Age ... I'll buy that. I don't think there were any deep themes in it.

ME 1 & 2 (and presumably 3) are a really quite deep exploration of the themes of biological intelligence, artificial intelligence and cybernetic intelligence and whether they can all co-exist. Individuality vs corporate identity as well as free will are also themes. It's just not 'in your face' about it.

Those games are virtually unplayable today. In terms of hardware and controls input. Sorry, but BG and Planescape are games that do not age well.

And sorry, even Mass Effect's wikipedia article even says it explores themes!

I personally like the genophage thing, it sounds on the face of it like a evil plague of doom but it seems really nessesary if you look deeper.

I also like the Quarians and thier Battlestar galatica fleet of runaways lol.

Very true. Games are not considered art by pretty much anyone outside of the gaming industry. It doesn't really matter how you define art, even if it includes games, the art world does not accept it.

Your attitude is what is wrong with the gaming industry today. You've got the attention span of a pea, and art is timeless. If you can't appreciate what came before, you really have no business trying to defend Bioware today because I am sure tomorrow there will be a new bright shinny bobble for you to play with tomorrow.

And that's why we have modders, who've fixed a lot of stuff. I played it a few years ago for the first time and it was perfectly alright in terms of graphical and control quality.

Mass Effect's wikipedia article's theme section seems to be... Mainly what inspired the series. It doesn't expand on how the series explores those themes.

I'm not really certain, to be honest. If they're going to examine it, they have to examine it, and not just add it into the story or gameplay or give it a passing mention. It's not a theme if that happens. I mean, you could claim that all Bioware games an examination of morality, but that's not true when the moral choices are a) Help a person and don't accept a reward, b) Help a person and accept a reward or c) Murder a person, ravish their corpse and set fire to their children.

Mass Effect seems to be far too much of a mish mash of various sci-fi stereotypes to actually explore anything. I get a slight "doing it by the book versus Dirty Harry" vibe from it, but that just seems to cut out the third choice from the above choices.

And, yet, you did nothing of those things. Amazing how you can't manage to either support yourself or leave, isn't it? Kinda trolly to me.

Art's a pretty abstract concept. I'd say that anything that is capable of capturing a concept or examining a cultural element (telling a story beyond the story, so to speak) is pretty artistic. Unreal Tournament, despite being a game I love to play, is not artistic at all. It's just a game where I go around gunning people down. Same with Starcraft, Dawn of War etc.

Monkey Island's an adventure game I'd count as art. So is Silent Hill 2 for the survival horror genre. It needs to actively tell a story with levels of meaning beyond the obvious in order to be counted as art in the gaming world. Otherwise every single game could be counted as a work of art, and I don't think that's territory where we want to go, really.

Any games you don't like you consider art?

There are a few games that I think of as art such as Flower and Braid, but the majority are just another form of entertainment.

Later,
LAR