Been playing a bunch of DA:O recently, and for the most part; Giant, effing high five Bioware. It's been a long long time since i enjoyed a party based RPG this much, and it really does feel like it harks back to the BG2 days. The world struck me as hopelessly generic at first, but it's coming into its own, particularly with the notion of the Fade.
 
The only thing that really bothers me with it right now is the whole weird sorta-creepy relationship stuff. On one hand, it feels hilariously awesome to see such transparent dating game nonsense in such a big budget high profile release, but on the other it feels disappointing to have Bioware create these massive characters to get to know, and boil down the process of getting to know them into manipulating what's essentially a progress bar. As getting closer to a character has real game benefits in terms of upgrades and such, you want to get that bar as far right as possible; It's only natural as a player. So instead of gradually getting to know these characters over time, like BG2 did for instance, you can for the most part simply go to camp, spam gifts on a character and save/reload conversations to optimize your "score". It reduces well written characters to machines you can manipulate. That the peak of a relationship tends to be an awkward dry humping session set to this overbearing epic "romance theme" doesn't help either.
 
The funny thing is, this really influenced the way i role played my character. I went in wanting to be all goodie two shoes and help everybody, like i always have. However, now, a little over 20 hours in, i'm a lying, cheating, conniving, manipulative bastard, who will HELP DEMONS to get the best out of every deal.
 
This is actually pretty cool. It's literally a new perspective for me as an RPG player. Where i was previously absolutely incapable of being mean to anyone in Fallout 3, i will do the meanest shit to ANYONE for kicks in DA:O, because the role-play aspect of the game feels like a machine to mess around with, and not a world in which my actions are judged.
 
But cool or not, it feels like Bioware are selling themselves short. All this depth and all this dialog, and it's all reduced to a graphs and numbers.
 
I feel like a lot of this could have been changed around simply by hiding the numbers. If you'd hid for me the effects of a conversation, i'd feel less inclined to retry them and optimize their results. If i didn't have that bar to look at, i'd rather have to read a character's opinion of me out of their behavior. I wish this was an option.
 
How about the rest of you; feel like DA:O's roleplay aspect plays out differently than other recent RPGs?

I'm not gonna be a douche and say it's going to be a bad game, because, shit, i was ready to hate MW, and that game ate up god knows how many hours of my time. I'm not a big fan of "realistic" gun porn for various reasons; Borderlands' brand of crazy bullshit is more my kind of videogame tea. But still. MW played mad tight, had a mostly interesting campaign with great, memorable moments, and i'm sure MW2 will do its best to outdo its predecessor.
 
But man, that online play.. 
 
It's awesome. Maybe too awesome? MW became one of those games, like R6 Vegas or Gears, where if you didn't spend every waking moment playing, the community simply ran off. The R6 community became so abrasively idiosyncratic it became absolutely impossible to get into a game without being kicked for breaking some unwritten rule, or simply because you didn't have a high enough rank. That's right; You were routinely banned for not having played enough. On the Gears tip, that game just became chock full of god damn specialists who would pop your head off with sniper rifle hip shots. It just made the game less fun to play. 
 
MW didn't sink that far, but trying to get into a MW game today after a good while of not playing it is absolutely impossible to enjoy yourself. The community is simply too damn hard core, and too damn good, and in most cases, very happy to tell you just how bad you are at the game.
 
So i have this feeling, with MW2, there won't even be that lull post release full of inexperienced players. I'm pretty sure a lot of MW2-players will be returning MW players, and god knows they are prepared.  I don't know of a solution for this thing. On the 360, Trueskill has been a less than successful method of matchmaking over time, simply because the overall skill level is so high. I suppose today's "fix" for this problem is to throw in a coop survival mode, but, my god do i hate survival modes.
 
The result is, i'm not sure there's going to be any multiplayer for me to get into, and to be honest, with IW's style of super-scripted campaigns (MW in particular had notorious bits of Endlessly Respawning Russians where the only way to beat the enemy was to.. Charge ahead until the respawn stopped?), i'm expecting to see huge heaps of MW2 on the resale market. Which is honestly where i'll probably pick up my copy.
 
I hope this doesn't read too much like bitching about the game itself. The "problem" is that they've simply made too good and too popular an online shooter.
Or maybe i'm just being completely wrong: God knows i feared this with Halo 3 as well, and i had some fantastic times with that game. Hmm. We'll see.

 http://www.datassette.net/content/datashat-at-plex-london-september-4th-2009.mp3
 
I can not recommend this enough. This guy is a fucking hero.

So my second warranty-less 360 died a week ago, and since my economy is currently shot for a couple of months, i've returned to my other systems for gaming sustenance. The Wii has gotten a lot more play (though mostly through VC stuff), but also my PC, my Dreamcast and bizarrely my Xbox classic (got to play Oddworld Stranger again, woo!).
 
I'm struck with some really odd emotions that have taken me a couple days to process fully. The first while i actually felt sort of desperate to pick up another 360, in spite of not having money for things like, you know, food. Getting to a point where i realized i had other gaming media was immensely liberating, and i got back to playing games i haven't had time for in the longest while. I've finally finished Metroid Prime 3, i've been playing more Super Mario Galaxy, i finished Zelda 3 again, i've been getting into tournaments of Blood Bowl on the PC (which despite its bullshit frontend is really enjoyable if you're a board game kind of person), and i started replaying Freedom Force and its sequel. I even got time to plan a weekend co-op session of System Shock 2 with a friend who never played it but loved Bioshock. 
Got around to addicting my girlfriend to Rez on the PS2 as well, which is still a killer game.
 
I'm absolutely loving it. It feels.. free?

The feeling i've got is that games used to be more about plain fun for me, and the fun of playing the games themselves. I look back on the past year(s) of 360-centric gaming, and i realize how much time i've spent playing for achievements, and the sense of gentle failure at loading up a game to play and seeing how few of the 1000 points i've got. I realize for some, that adds a kind of meta-game to their hobby, but for me i have to say it mounted to kind of a painful addiction, where i'd play games almost out of spite to clear achievements and "clean up my life". I'm not even any kind of weird neat-freak (hardly), but there's a bizarre element of guilt or shame to those missing points that make me think i paid for a product that i'm not fully making use of. Games like Shadow Complex for instance wear this achievement meta-game proudly on their sleeve, and seeing there are achievements i haven't got in a game that's essentially all about completion in its purest sense makes me feel, well, shit at the game.
 
Sometimes this sensation will even make less of games i truly love. Bioshock for instance, and Bionic Commando Rearmed, both games i have played and replayed to the point where i really can't go back to them, but still there are those mother fucking achievements i didn't get. So how can i say i really finished them?
 
Frankly, the more i think about it, the more i'm certain that (for me at least) this meta-game high-score list is bullshit that brings the experience down to a really basic level. I don't feel any need to be matched up against my "peers". The gamer term is bullshit anyway; why do i want more "gamer points"? How is collecting gamer points supposed to make something i *already love* better? Can't point-centric games have their own leaderboards and lets be done with it? Should i be RATED on how i play my immersive RPGs? Having played Mass Effect twice over, have i not played it enough? Am i somehow LESS of a player for not grinding out the remaining achievements?
 
Worse yet, in some games i'm pretty sure achievements are effectively breaking some of the immersion for me. Not necessarily because they exist, but because they intrude in the gameplay experience. Again, if the game i'm playing is an emotional revenge story like The Darkness, why the fuck should i care about that achievement dialog popping up?  

The paradox of course is that i really do enjoy getting achievements. It's a reassuring little pop of success, and it always feels good. But on the whole i'm not sure they amount to anything worth caring about. Much like a cola addiction really. I love coke, but man, on the whole i'm not sure it's good to keep it a cornerstone of my life.
 
I remember reading or hearing some Nintendo quote that playing games shouldn't be incentivised, simply because playing the games should be reward enough. Considering the sense of reward i'm getting from playing achievement-free games, and replaying games from before achievements became cool beans, i'm pretty sure i agree. To be perfectly honest, at this point i wish the achievement system was opt-in. I'd love to not have that number there at all.
 
So, fair folk, take a few steps back; how do you really feel about achievements? Do you feel they have shaped or altered the way you play games?