To clarify, my instinct is to give it a 9/10. However with all the issues I've encountered that number just keeps getting knocked down. The fact that there are SO many issues and I only knocked it down 7/10 is actually a testament to how good I think the game is, on a whole.
Now, if they fix all the bugs, that alone would bump it up to an 8/10. The rest of the issues aren't really fixable without a major content release that changes some fundamental aspects of the game, like the exceptionally vanilla perk trees that dominate (especially the spell trees) the game.
It's not about comparing ME2 with Skyrim. My ratings are given within a vacuum, considering only the game itself. I only offered the ratings as a means to give a sense of what I consider to be a quality game. The ME series is generally of very high quality, whilst I feel Skyrim is let down by quality issues, hence the lower rating.
Kingdoms of Amalur I won't give a rating because of my bias against cartoony games. I feel like I should be at least 26 years younger just to be playing it.
Part of what bothers each person can differ though. Skyrim has some crazy bugs apparently. But I've been playing for 100 hours, and haven't run into very many. A flying dog, one quest I can't finish, and a misbehaving quest with a jester....but that one started working correctly by reloading a save from 2 minutes before I got that quest.
DA had problems. Wonderful game, but if you don't know what you're doing, you could easily get to the end of the game and be unable to finish it. For a friend of mine, it was one of his first experiences with an RPG. Given the flexibility to kill some NPCs before they joined the party, or to argue with them and have them leave, he was playing a warrior, killed one of the available spellcasters, refused to let the other join (or got rid of her), and didn't even find some of the others. I think he only had 4 NPCs plus the dog. He didn't know about "optimal" speccing of characters and was absolutely unable to finish the game as a result. He couldn't kill the arch dragon. Now....does that mean it was buggy? No, but from a design perspective, according to standards we've heard applied to D&D, it's apparently a poor design, because it shouldn't be possible through lack of experience to create a character that is suboptimal to the degree they literally *can't* compete. He was told by the staff at his local EB that many of their customers, who weren't as familiar with RPGs had the same problems. For me, with greater knowledge of how to win in RPGs, I beat the final battle on my first try. It was long, and took me about an hour to win....but I did win.
DA2 (for instance) had all kinds of problems. Unbalanced combat, magically spawning enemies mid-encounter, inappropriate challenge levels in spots etc. Recycled environments, etc. I gave up about 10 hours into the game, and haven't gone back.
Are either of those "bugs"? No, but I would think they're game design issues.
Skyrim ain't perfect....but given that they effectively created a world, and let you loose in it to play around and do whatever, it works pretty darned well for the most part.
There's nothing wrong with liking one over the other. It's just personal preference. Me? I'm willing to deal with flying elephants if I get an open world and the beauty of the environment that I have in Skyrim. Are parts of it shallow, such as NPC interaction? Absolutely. But the exploration is darned cool. It's like *every* dungeon's as visually stimulating and interesting as the one by that ruined temple with the dragon, in DA1. But the whole world is like that.
You want to chase butterflies, you can. You want to climb to a monument that's on top of a mountain, and watch the sun rise, you can. You want to face a dragon and have an epic fight? You can.
The dragon battles in DA were *tougher*.....but viscerally, I find those in Skyrim more *interesting*. I can remember most of them, and I've killed like 20. Do I one shot them? No. I guess my character isn't optimized enough. But I don't care. I can be talking to an NPC, and a dragon flies out of nowhere, picks him up, carries him into the sky and throws him off the side of a mountain. Or I can have a fight in the middle of a thunderstorm, at night, and see the dragon literally landing on a thatch roofed home, and see the dust and debris swirl into the air from the dragon landing, listen to it scream right before breathing flaming death on local villagers that I'm now running to try and save......I've stood on a mountain top, exchanging lightning bolts with a dragon as it wheeled over a valley and did swooping runs on me, then circled off into the distance to come back and strafe again. Watched it pick up my brand new horse and throw it, in a broken heap, to the ground. And had a battle with a dragon interrupted by a giant and a pair of mammoths, who assisted against the dragon, and then faced me.
I don't know.....to me, those "feelings" and dynamic setups are worth a lot. I'm willing to put up with the relatively minor bugs I've seen.....and the lack of an explicitly laid out storyline, in return for this kind of dynamic experience.
To be clear, I really, really like Bioware games. But they have their own problems. I think some people gravitate to certain styles of games, and are more willing to overlook the faults.
I think what's pretty darned cool is that, as RPG fans, and computer gaming fans, we've had Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2, and Skyrim, all in one year. These are great days to be an RPG fan, after years of what looked like the slow death of the traditional RPG. Whether you only like one of those games or all of them, there are some awesome games to play at the moment, and that's a good thing
Banshee
