I started this last night. I’m only like 1 hour in. Combat in this game is horrible, for all the reasons stated. There’s absolutely zero opportunity for tactics because everyone runs around like madman and enemies spawn randomly throughout the fight.
This is the first Bioware game that’s truly annoying me. I even liked Jade Empire.
If not for the characters and story being interesting (I like just being some dude trying not to be a poor wretch, and every quest not involving world shattering events), I’d have shelved it. I’ll stick with it because I like the non-combat bits. From now on, it’s auto-level though, I don’t even care to build my character.
Just started playing, too. Combat is too fast and seems chaotic, and the second wave always spawning in at the back is really cheap. I can’t zoom out far enough to see all my characters – this close view might work for Mass Effect where your characters use mostly ranged attacks and so stay together in the rear, but here my various melee and ranged characters quickly get scattered all over the battlefield, and I have no idea what everyone is doing. Guess it won’t matter anyway on Normal, eh?
Joe_M
2963
The combat becomes less chaotic as you accustom yourself to it. I had similar thoughts an hour (or ten) into the game and now I wouldn’t trade it for anything in DA:O.
Just to expound a bit on that: you’ll slowly become better at recognizing what you’re facing and how those enemies will attempt to kill you. Rogues will try to pop on your mage, and you’ll have to save at least one cooldown ready to pry them off (two is usually safer, and never count on your mage to be able to cast anything with a rogue in their face). Mage types (as in DAO) will have to be accounted for, whether it’s with CC or by nuking them down. Bioware seems to have countered the latter tactic in several encounters, however, by allowing them to vanish from view and pop up elsewhere. Archers you generally want to engage with your melee first because they can do a whole lot of damage to anything squishy. And so on and so forth. You’ll be able to read and react to all these things as they’re happening as you become more familiar with the enemy types.
I did all that stuff in DA:O, I even customized my tactics to do it. My dog would always intercept spellcasters first, Alistair would peel off and stun/taunt anyone attacking Morrigan, and Morrigan would not use AoEs because of friendly fire, if I needed to AoE I’d switch to her and lay the spell target myself.
In DA:O I’d scout ahead with my rogue, in stealth, and position her for a first strike on a tough mob while my party waited around the corner or something. I’d fire off that first strike, then issue commands to my other people.
Since enemies just spawn from thin air in this game I can’t do that. Since enemies pour in from all angles in this game, constantly, you can’t even analyze the terrain and seek advantageous positioning.
Maybe it will get better. I don’t like it right now.
Joe M
You have adapted to the monster closets they continually use…does that actually make combat better…?
Reading John Walker’s first DA2 piece, I thought he sold the dialogue options a little short. Basically, he felt it boiled down to good/flippant/evil and that the latter two both came off as callous.
Given how he frames it it might partly be to do with his preference for DA:O dialogue. I am 100% comfortable with people liking the unvoiced, un-schemetized 4-5 choice dialogue menus; there is a whole psychological / protagonist-inhabiting argument that’s been rehashed on the forums and I respect that.
But the idea that the non-good choices were necessarily callous strikes me as reflecting some bad luck on his part in trying out the dialogue. I wanted to try to be humourous wherever possible while staying substantively uber-moral, and thought it went off very well indeed.
The “comedy-mask” purple choices tended to be “friendly” - sometimes downright nice - in contexts where a nice person could legitimately crack wise, but could also be utterly asinine in places you’d expect. The “gem” choices tended to be work in situations where cunning was perfectly desirable or cold realism might be the kindest thing for everyone, but not in situations where Hawke might be selfish or morally indifferent. Between the icons and the conversational cues I rarely said anything wankerish enough to merit a reload. And the same approach could also probably work for someone who wanted to RP a sarcastically gimlet-eyed sonofabitch, which wouldn’t be possible if the purple choices weren’t sometimes callous. DA2 also saw me take far more “aggressive/direct” dialogue options than any prior BW title, and each time I felt they stayed very much in tune with a good/funny character. I also liked that the (inevitable!) St. Crispian’s Day speech at the end was automatically given based on your conversational style.
The personality-choosing mechanism might have been done as a character preset rather than an adaptive process so that players wouldn’t feel obliged to meet their personality-maintaining-dialogue quota. “Adaptive personality” just seems like a sexed up way of implementing the same feature.
EDIT: Chris, Walla: If you’ve made up your mind about combat I’d suggest casual instead of normal. I built my characters poorly in terms of cross-class combos and compensated with careful micro, and I’d say the hardest 1/5th of fights were as challenging for me as anything in DA.
Lake
2967
I noticed that I would lose potions, during fights, without using them. I just thought it was a bug.
Corelli
2968
Seriously?
The difficulty in DA2 is so stupid and it ruins the combat. Playing through the game on hard is laughably easy once you’ve gained a couple levels, until you reach a boss and suddenly combat becomes a boneheaded war of attrition because bosses have so much health. Not to mention the waves of invisible enemies jumping in from nowhere.
The encounter design in DA:O was worlds better, in my opinion.
I haven’t played it so I don’t know if it’s better, but I can believe Joe’s first sentence. Fast-paced real time strategy combat feels chaotic at first. Then you start flowing with it better as you practice.
I had the opposite experience to John Walker - I tried out the joke options a few times at random later in the game, after a mainly goody-two-shoes “Gosh enemy soldiers, your swords look heavy, I’ll let you sheathe them in my back” play through and the lines delivered were certainly not callous.
I didn’t think the dialogue was particularly good, but I thought the Mass Effect style system worked fine, really. The only point where I felt the summary text diverged surprisingly from the dialogue delivered was at the end of Merrill’s quest sequence. Mind you I made the mistake of reading the comments on the RPS article to find someone complaining that in the original game selecting the dialogue line “Duncan got what he deserved,” resulted in a (to them) entirely unexpected negative result from the character with whom they were in dialogue, so clearly the only solution that would work for everyone would be displaying the line, the tone with which it will be delivered, and the resulting point change to your relationship.
Actually, I wish I had something like that for real life.
I think it’s more a matter of losing your surprise at how chaotic the combat is rather than becoming practiced. After a certain point you just get used to the fact that the second wave is going to spawn from behind and your party members are going to run all over combat like chickens with their heads cut off no matter what you tell them to do.
For me the combat never stopped feeling chaotic after 34 hours, but I did start to find it highly predictable.
Joe_M
2972
For those who miss futzing around with gear on their companions: a companion armor mod. I know a few folks stated their dislike for streamlined companion armor sets. There are some appearance bugs that may crop up so you may want to read the full thread.
Tim: it may also be my thorough familiarity with MMO mechanics. So much of the new combat seems inspired by WoW that I’ve had no problem picking it up and adapting to the flow. Having said that, I do pause a lot still so that I can be sure to get my spells off before they do. :)
Jag
2973
Was reading the forums and found another ‘Blue’ post that explains the damage system. Apparently for mages, your weapon damage (staff DPS) contributes significantly towards total spell damage.
Yes, the manual says that Mage spells often do damage in multiples of the staff damage (p. 18), although it doesn’t give any detailed formulae.
Yeah, 2 boss fights in particular had some complexity to the adds and the long range spells that showed some MMO boss-fight influence. DA:O boss-fights seemed very straightforward as “tank and spanks.” The whole “high dragon is harder than the Archdemon” point of view always seemed weird to me. Neither was much of a chess match but come on, one mob that doesn’t switch agro?
Actually, I was wrong. If you include the number of the Ultimate Edition, DAO actually is slightly ahead of ME2. This is strictly PC anyway, so in the grand scheme of things, it is meaningless. Just want to correct myself.
I may have a bugged game? I’ve got friendship or rivalry with several characters but I can’t seem to buy their special ability. I’ve got the spare point, the slider seemed maxed, and there’s no “red ring” or message saying I need to achieve the prerequisite. But the game just won’t allow me to buy it. It’s just grayed out.
Any idea what I’m doing wrong here?
Those aren’t abilities you buy. They’re enabled automatically whenever you reach a certain threshold of friendliness/rivalry with a companion. If you later go in the opposite direction (from friend to neutral, for example), you lose the benefit.
Mazuo
2979
Yup, both read it and watched it happen now. Rather irritating for sure, but I do like that anyone had the idea to put that in the game. Rogues have stolen and backstabbed forever, but steal my party’s healing supplies to keep yourself in the fight? Evil jerks.
As for the combat complaints, I’d really give it more of a chance than saying it’s shit after an hour. That’s a good part of why the demo combat was pretty awful as you had no abilities to use, so it was just mindless autoattack. I’m still rather stymied by the reasoning some are using for whether combat can have tactics or strategy or not.
DAO: Get killed, load, enemies are in exact same place as before, throw spells through walls, make tank invincible. This gets remembered as priceless strategic combat.
DA2: Get killed, load, enemy reinforcements come from same general areas frequently, but attack differently based on where party is at the time. Some fights turn from impossible to moderately difficult with smart repositioning of the party, indeed sometimes to another room. No way (that I’ve personally seen) to cheese, so have to plan while paused how to handle exactly what’s happening currently instead of what happened last fight.
Okay, that’s not a totally fair description, but it seems more so than these continued rants that there’s no skill or strategy use in DA2 at all.
No clue about the friend/rival skill Brian, on mine just raising a party member to a significant percentage of friendship automatically lit it up for free, no skill point required.
maxle
2980
I gave it two hours, and I wasn’t wiping particularly often–it happened, but it was an exception rather than the rule. What I realized after those two hours was that while it was doable, I wasn’t enjoying the doing. It actively annoyed me.
Bumping it down to normal made it brainless, but pleasantly so. I’d rather have a proper tactical combat game, but I’ll take driving Fenris around and roflstomping everything in my path over dealing with the existing encounter design on hard/nightmare.
