I did with a warrior. It requires running around a pillar for half an hour (ok, so i don’t remember how long it took me as i didn’t time it, but it was a LONG TIME), stopping every so often to alpha strike him with all of my abilities and then running again. Taking potions when damaged of course.
He does too much damage, stuns too much and has too much health (not to mention he uses potions a few times) for a warrior to be able to kill him without gaming the system to sickening degrees.
Equis
3082
I used a rogue and it’s the same. Not being a warrior means I can get hit only like 3 or 4 times before dying, and with the Potion Cooldown, and no other way to heal myself, it really was just kiting, avoidance and waiting for CD.
That really was a shit fight.
And with a mage, you don’t even get the option. It’s just an immediate routing into a full party fight. Which is kind of funny considering DA:O had no qualms about putting mage PCs into a similar one-on-one fight in the late game (with Loghain), though I suppose it allowed you to pick a substitute… me, I just Cone of Colded him and beat on him while he was frozen, rinse repeat.
No it isn’t, my mage had the option. I dueled him because IMHO it was more in line with the character I was roleplaying. With a mage you have no choice but to kite.
Really? I wonder why I didn’t, then.
if i remember right it is a star dialog option and thus requires you to have explored certain dialog paths before that point.
I had the exact same experience. There really is no other way about it. I can only wonder… what the hell was BioWare thinking with that fight? If I was a QA tester on the game I would have screamed at the BioWare producer/programmers to address it.
I’m one of those people who loved DA2 combat, and even I hated those boss fights. I could see how the Rock Wraith fight was supposed to play out after dying a few times, but I didn’t have the patience for a drawn-out WoW-style puzzle boss fight, so I dropped the difficulty down and blew through it. I ended up doing the same thing later with the 1-on-1 boss, after spending half an hour running around a pillar and using up all my potions. Reloaded, dropped the difficulty, and just wailed on him for a few minutes until he died.
Those fights sucked. I still loved the game, though.
I got the option because Fenris was in my party at the time of the confrontation and he quoted some passage from the Qun granting me the right to resolve the matter by single combat.
25 minutes of kiting later, the Arishok was dead. That was perhaps one of the better story moments in the game, totally ruined by some of the worst encounter design I’ve ever seen in an RPG.
I still can’t accept that the Arishok fight was supposed to be winnable. I also don’t think it makes sense to have a “metaphysically winnable, cheatingly winnable, honestly unwinnable fight,” but they had to know that it required a total break in immersion and game-reality to win that.
The other boss fights I pretty much liked. ARW was the sort of learning curve that Valve would have focus-grouped into oblivion, but it was good conceptually and fun enough once I stopped doing it wrong.
And that would have been reasonable to me if it had been either balanced towards various parties, or not the dead end of a long miserable branch at which I was explicitly forced into locking down a potentially untenable party, and would have to completely restart with only my fingers crossed that a reconfigured party would be sufficient.
I mean, fuck - they bluntly make a point about choosing your party members carefully, but you have no information that would inform your decision … And they don’t simply let you make a grievous mistake and force you to with the consequences; your only options are to win or restart …
It’s as though it had been intentionally designed to be fucked.
It appears at least someone at Bioware was listening…
“We were clearly disappointed with some of the response from the fanbase, because we want them to be as excited about it as we are,” EA Games Label boss Frank Gibeau told Eurogamer.
"We’re very proud of the game. We tried to innovate and do some different things with the combat system and some of the way we told story. For some fans it worked well. In fact, we brought a lot of new fans into the Dragon Age franchise.
“But to be honest, we lost some fans as well. They were not pleased with some of the innovations and things we’d done. We understand that and we’re listening.”
EA will take on fan feedback for Dragon Age 3, Gibeau promised.
“As we think about where we take the franchise next, we’re going to take that into consideration and really engage them,” he said.
It’s all bollocks until the rubber meets the road, but at least they are saying something about it…
What puzzles me is, didn’t they realize they’d get a reaction like that?
I mean, here comes DA:O, a return to somewhat old-skool play, and it’s a smash hit - so for the sequel they simplify it and make it more like the games DA:O was different from?
Huh?
It’s as if the designers designed DA:O, it was a success, and then a bunch of suits saw the success of it and made the designers make the game more like other successful games so it would have even moar success, not realising that it was DA:O’s peculiar charms that made it a success in the first place.
If I’m not mistaken this scenario has been played out a hundred times in game development (and in many other artistic professional fields), but it’s surprising to see a company like BioWare falling for it.
AKA, DLC not being bought.
That’s really the litmus test of a franchise’s popularity in the brave new world of downloadable content. People buying DLC means they like the game and want to keep playing. Not buying DLC, while it doesn’t necessarily mean that people dislike the game per se as, after all, the DLC could just suck, but well made DLC should be popular with players, and if it’s not, it probably means players aren’t enjoying what the original game offered. Another great resource is Steam’s playing time stat, which will show developers whether a game grabbed a fan or not. Doesn’t BioWare also collect stats from some hidden game widget when you log in? Seeing players not play Dragon Age 2 much after purchase, esp., compared to previous BioWare titles, has to be a wake up call if so.
I still really, really want to see sales numbers.
For someone at EA to admit something like that publicly and with the complete and utter lack of DLC/expansion announcements coming out of Bioware… it must have been fucking bad.
maxle
3096
I’ll believe it when I see it.
DA2 is a compromised game; it’s this generations Phantasy Star 3. Combine some neat ideas and some gameplay innovations with a inane, one-step backward combat system and, more or less, completely fourth wall breaking reuse of tilesets. That they were too lazy to even make new cave layouts with the same timeset (ala Bethesda and it’s Games of a Thousand Generic Caves), they just reused the SAME layout but occassionally shut one or another area off with a not very well hidden door in the face of the rock.
But, yea, i’d like to see some numbers as well.
Numbers from VGchartz are generally not considered reliable for som reason.
Think they really ought to have just branched the development. It would’ve been so easy to call this Dragon Age: Derfyderf and preserved Origins as its own line. That seems to be doing well in so many avenues presently … Mitigates the risk to your franchise, while still letting you hook the product to it.
