The only one I have played is Mass Effect 1 and KotoR 1. I think they are both meh.psychic_dream wrote: ↑ May 15th, 2025, 20:54What are your favorite RPGs made by BioWare, and how would you rank them? In your opinion, which game marked their inevitable decline into mediocrity?
I remember that getting the game to work was an exercise in frustration. I was playing with a controller. Installing mods for ME1 is frustrating, because you have to install all of your mods before your graphics mods, so if you want to change anything, you have to reinstall the game again and do all of the mod installations all over. To play with the controller, I had to install a controller mod, but it disables mouse and keyboard controls, so I'm stuck playing with the controller, and playing FPS on controller is awful. Had I known I would have lost mouse and keyboard controls, I wouldn't have installed the controller mod in the first place.
I dropped ME1 after the tropical planet when you leave the other guy party member behind after having fought Saren, and then I got a dialogue choice with Ashley and clicked the neutral or professional option but then it led to casual sex when I did not want to romance any of those characters as I found none of them to be marriage material. Dropped right there.
I was overall not enjoying the game. I kept waiting for it to become amazing like everyone said it would be, but it never happened. The moment to moment experience is walking through unattractive grey corridors. Shepard isn't very fun to move around or look at from the behind from over the shoulder. I was not enjoying the combat.
I found the writing to be mediocre. Lots of huge leaps in logic, antagonists to the player act cartoonishly, dialogue is stilted at times, the story can't decide if being a Spectre means being revered like a Jedi Knight or being super secret and treated with suspicion like Section 31, etc. The Council 180s on Saren just because you played a soundbite without investigating it. Just because I outted Saren does not mean I should get promoted to their top agent and get all of these authorizations and top secrets. I think the "cinematic" presentation with the camera angles and closeup shots of highly detailed photorealistic faces and the depth of field is what people liked.
The story did not justify well why these characters were squatting on the ship. It seemed to be a very modern Western realistic story, as opposed to having a more romanticized fantasy feel where people can hang around with no pressing obligations or just due to true friendship. They don't really have a personal stake in our quest and aren't really our friends. I don't really know why Ashley, Tali, and Liara are tagging along.
I found most of the characters to be unlikeable. I only somewhat liked Garrus and Wrex (1-to-1 Rytlock Brimstone expy... or is it the other way around? It's Steve Blum voicing a snarky proud warrior man ofcourse I'm bringing him).
I did like how you could get into an angry confrontation with Wrex, which made him feel more real. Too often party members feel like the are an amorphous good guy team blob that nod their head in unison, whereas with Wrex in that moment he was more realized as a person agonizing over the fate of his kinsmen and in that moment panics and becomes desperate, doing the first thing that comes up off the top of his head.
I thought it was disappointing that the party members did not really talk to each other. They each stand alone in some part of the ship waiting for Shepard to talk to them. I think maybe your two party members could talk to each other during the elevator rides at the Citadel.
At character creation, the game did not make it clear to be how each of the classes really played in gameplay, and had to do extensive out of game research trying to figure out what each class was like. In the end I think I went with the esper or mage/biotics/whatever class (Adept, I think?) hoping I would get to do something more cool than shoot a gun, but IIRC the gameplay boiled down to mainly shooting and occasionally using a power to knock people around, I can't remember. The bullet sponges felt terrible. Maybe the stealth class would have been more interesting but I don't think the corridor levels would be able to support that.
Driving the rover around and touring the scenery is pretty fun... until I have to stop and try to meticulously aim with the turret trying to pick off tiny targets.
The setting is okay. The Citadel and the Council don't feel like alien societies and organizations. They feel like the modern US but in space. The Citadel has human style bars and clubs... that have been operated by aliens for decades long before humanity was admitted. The cities on the Citadel are organized like human cities. The council uses modern 21st century American logic that worships laws and constitutions and is skeptical of esoterism. Nothing about the Citadel or the Council feels like it an alliance of non-human races at all.
The Turians and the Krogan and the Volus have interesting faces to look at (Saren looks really good!), but ME's aliens for the most part suffer from rubberhead alien syndrome, where everyone has the same posture and proportions as a human. The floating evangelical alien at the citadel, and that ambassador who stood on four legs were visually quite unique, but sadly there are no party members that are unique like that. I really liked how the Sovani in the The Last Remnant had 4 arms (and could quad wield 1 handed weapons, or dual wield 2 handers), or how the Charr in GW2 were hunched over and even ran on all fours. Really made those races stand out in my mind.
The soundtrack was forgettable.
I just did not see what the hype was about.
KotoR 1. I played and completed it last year for the HQ's adventurer's guild, after having started it years before and getting bored on Taris and dropped it. When I first played it, I found the boring MMO autoattack combat to be boring, and dropped it shortly after the "1, 2, 3" scene at the bar. I am not going to relitigate my issues with it again but I thought it was also grossly overrated and did not see what the fuss was about. The moment to moment gameplay is a lot of boring running around and near constantly getting involved in random fights that drain your force or HP bar and your potions/medpacks/whatever they were called. Very tedious. It was never really fun. I also had to do a lot of out of game research trying to parse the different level up traits and which traits I needed to beat the game with, which was not fun.
Aesthetically, the game is a disappointment. It is yet another rehash of the Original Trilogy aesthetics with blocky ships and rusted paint and evil empire vs rebels and so on. It wasn't the unique, brand new setting and aesthetics that the actual Prequel Trilogy brought that differentiated itself from the OT. The plot feels like fanfiction. None of the characters stuck with me. I also thought that the game was poor at nuance. There was no option to say "I am not a bootlicker of the Jedi Order, but you are evil and I will oppose you!". No, you are only given the choice between being intimidated into toeing the Jedi Order's line, or going evil.
Taris is an awful first zone to begin a game. Really should have begun on the much more scenic and pleasant farming world that had the Jedis.
I thought it was odd how you could not bring your two party members with you to the final boss fight. The duel was not fun as it amounted to me having to spam force push him down over and over again to keep him from attacking me, and if he did attack me it amounted to constantly pausing the game to open up my inventory and use a medpak.
Music was also forgettable.
I have DAO on Steam, but after my experiences with ME1 and KotOR, I am not really interested in playing it.
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