Total War is exactly like the detached camera in DA:O. They limit how far you can move it away from the units, but within that limited space you can get a better angle to position them quickly and effectively.
Positioning (flanking, manevuering) is one of my favorite game mechanics. It spans multiple genres. It provides depth for people who want to micromanage. I think they’ve de-emphasized it in DA2 with a few things I mentioned the other day. You can still do it here. It’s simply more tedious.
Jeez, am I completely forgetting how it worked in DA:O? Maybe the top down view was all the extra space I needed to position party members effectively, and I’m thinking of another camera system like Total War.
In any case, either way works. The close-up view and detached camera is a good compromise where everyone can be happy, except oddly confused people who argue for something simply because that’s the way it’s been done.
I don’t know, maybe if you played DAO on a console. I think it’s a pretty much universal opinion now that DAO (at least on PC) was a pretty hard game even on Normal. Your “hardly ever needed to pause” opinion seems to contradict that (and my own experience).
On contrary, in the demo, I think I paused maybe 3 or 4 times because really there is no need to. You simply attack whoever is the closest and mash whatever ability is off the cooldown. I haven’t even switched between the characters, except for a couple of times just to see how it works, not because I needed to.
You seem to confuse “can pause” and “need to pause”. In DAO you needed to pause because you had to carefully position your characters and position/time your spells because if you don’t, you will most likely hit half of your party with your spell and most likely lose the encounter. In DA2, you can pause but you can also take a few seconds to look around in real time, zip to the next enemy and proceed to mashing your abilities while your mage is showering you with fireballs.
More mobility has more effects on the game than just look pretty and more dynamic. Enemies are faster --> player has less time to react --> enemies often get through to your mages --> mages need to be buffed up to be able to survive in melee --> melee chars don’t need to hurry to save mages --> crowd control is not required --> friendly fire causes too many problems (mobs/chars move as fast as fireballs), so it’s removed --> ranged enemies/chars are less effective (I can get to an archer across the room faster than he can reload his bow). etc.
All of the above are not bad things per se, all those changes may result in a damn fun action oriented game. Only we already have a whole bunch of those (including the ME series, which is from the same developers and a new one is being released in the same year) and as Razgon pointed out some people expected (or hoped) that DA2 will be true to its more tactical predecessor. Which is sadly not true. Well sadly for some. :)
Please don’t say “well I can still pause so the tactical combat is still there”. :)
Which is a better game DA2 or Tomb Raider? :) Just joking.
I would suggest reading my earlier post quoting Mike Laidlaw talking about difficulty levels: Normal is intentionally easier than normal was in DA:O. If you want to be forced to manage your party tactically, then you should play on hard. You can see in several demos how later fights can and will require more tactical planning than the demo fights, which are all early in the game (and on the difficulty which is supposed to allow people to play through without constant pause/play party management).
One of the reasons that pausing isn’t as necessary is that characters actually do a good job of getting into combat and don’t require the shuffling around that DA:O did. Abilities are cheaper and easier to use, but I see that as a good thing. DA:O was annoying in that you could only really use 1-2 of your abilities on a melee character before running out of stamina, especially later once you had multiple sustained actions going. On a similar note, you can’t spam heal in DA2 (It has a significant cooldown) like you could in DA:O. Isn’t this a big tactical improvement as you really have to be careful with how you engage and take damage?
It sounds like they’re taking the same approach as ME2. I’ll have to see whether Nightmare is playable or just tedious.
Isn’t this a big tactical improvement as you really have to be careful with how you engage and take damage?
I’m not a game designer so I can’t really describe the kind of challenge I like. (Maybe Chris Park has written something about difficulty in games?) But I’ve always felt that lowering the threshold for complete wipeout is more annoying than challenging. There are more retries from the last checkpoint and it’s more of a grind. I’d rather have interesting decisions to make with a careful illusion of danger. That’s better than attrition management**. Spamming super moves and getting backed into a corner unable to heal seems like it’s going in the wrong direction.
Also, someone mentioned the Spirit Healer spec is better designed for healing. They just gave the Heal spell (in whatever tree that is) a longer cooldown.
** It’s like trench warfare versus maneuver warfare. One’s a brutal grind and the other lets you do brilliant things.
I think you’re remembering correctly. The leash isn’t that long (unless you’re scrolling downwards for some reason), but you can move the camera around freely between your characters, so it’s possible cover a fairly large area if they’re spread out.
I agree that higher difficulty can force you to be more thoughtful of what you are doing but, if what we’ve heard is true, you can still shower your party with fireballs/cones of cold on hard. Which removes a lot of need for planning, positioning and timing from the gameplay. Gone are the days when we had to outfit the tank with fire resistance items so he could withstand the occasional friendly fireball. Or having to position a mage in front of your party so she could freeze the incoming enemies and retreat.
No, not really. It just makes your party rely less on the mages and more on healing potions (Diablo-style) making your party members more self sufficient and allowing the mages to do “more fun” stuff, like spamming fireballs.
Eh, I know it’s a pedantic quirk of mine but why can’t they just tweak damage down rather than having characters guzzling potions in the middle of combat. That’s always bugged me in most CRPGs. I want to get them beer hardhats or something.
I much prefer guzzling poultices.
The top down view had some uses for things like positioning, I suppose, but I played mage heavy and the things I wanted to do mostly involved targetting spells well away from my mage (since I don’t want them in melee), which was possible (though annoying and difficult to get into just the right position) in over the shoulder and was actively impossible due to the tight character focus in top down.
Mmmmph…POULTICES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.
This is humour people. Tim knows what a poultice is.
You know, I buy essentially 100% of RPGs released, above indie level at least. New Vegas hasn’t come my way yet, but that’s basically it. Nehrim, Arcania, Two Worlds 2, River of Time etc etc. Played em all. But this is now right down at the ‘not especially bothered’ level. I think it’s great Bio actually bothered with a demo, but for me it’s basically said budget buy. I hope they get the new sales they want.
This might be where some of the disconnect comes from. I played a rogue. Moving him behind enemies was half the fun (for me, anyway; I know a lot of people hated the NPC rogues). That gets a little awkward when the enemy’s selection box is standing in the way of the ground I want to click on.
I guess flanking is good enough, but hey, wait a minute… didn’t they give rogues a super power to teleport behind an enemy? Ah ha! At least I know the designers understand exactly what I’m talking about, and tried to put a bandaid on it so I can do something similar from third person perspective. To make up for the lack of convenient positioning, they made the new special ability pretty kickass.
Wasn’t it originally a Tom Chick observation? Maybe it got lost with Fidgit.
With the camera this close and the area so overcrowded, I don’t think you are supposed to click to move anymore, just WASD. Yes, it sucks when you want to move multiple party members at the same time but you really won’t have to and WASD makes fights more fun and dynamic! :)
Played on the console, and wasn’t spectacularly thrilled. Kind of bored, even. Going with rent-to-see for now.
The mechanics ultimately felt like halfway between an action game and a strategic RPG, with neither being very satisfied.
For most of the special attacks I ended up paying more attention to the fill-boxes than the on-screen action. My party sure doesn’t need my help, and I just have to hit X until the wave of bad guys goes away.
Well, using the tactical position that is apparently impossible and the pausing that isn’t necessary, I beat the second ogre encounter with no healing or potions.
Well sure, Angie, but we’re not as l33t as you ;) More seriously, I’m glad at least some of ou guys are saying positive things about it. Maybe I will give the demo a spin if it isn’t that broken of an experience. IDo you think that it’s going to be fairly representative of what’s in store in the full release?
Tactical positioning is still possible. It’s just going to get old to rotate the camera around a character’s axis to click the set of pixels I want, then repeat the process for the other characters. I might get tired of that the 20,000th time I have to do it.
I thought they were supposed to streamline this game!
It seemed to me possible, but wholly inelegant. I dropped out before getting to the second ogre, but the first I beat by rhythmically pressing the attack buttons until I could hit the super attack button again.
The ogre wasn’t quite so much the problem for me as were the gibbering horde rushes.
