You’ve ruffled no feathers. I’m just poking you with a stick because this has all been debated to death and we should stop taking ourselves so seriously. Carry on.
Mazuo
3262
Alrighty, understood then. Sorry for the overreaction. Just seems to have always been a hornet’s nest when discussing this.
See, none of this is stuff I minded. In fact, I actively applaud much of what you mention here. That stuff was what kept me playing despite a combat model I found repetitive, lacking in substance and drawn out beyond reason. (Although I wish Anders had been the character he was in Awakening, where he was my favorite of a generally excellent cast.) Unfortunately, then Act 3 hit.
PS: NWN2 wasn’t a Bioware game.
I concede the point, lol.
hong
3266
But I never called DA2 cartoonish!
hong
3267
Yeah, I think that’s more likely to be ME3.
and to boot, yes, it’s very cartoonish. Facts is facts.
DA2 is not cartoonish. If DA2 is cartoonish, then DAO is even more cartoonish, with its even more exaggerated set of magical superpowers.
hong
3268
Yeah, there were some points in Act 3 that brought to mind the suckiness of Fallout 3’s Tenpenny Towers debacle. Nonetheless, I think the good points outweighed the bad, especially if what you were playing for was the character-driven stuff.
hong
3269
The problem basically is that DAO was a D&D-style, old-school RPG. Now there is one thing that old-school RPGs excel at, and that is tickling the obsessive-compulsive gene: go everywhere, loot everything, talk to everyone, accumulate large collections of shiny bits (levels, items, abilities) like a packrat, and so on. So naturally, they tend to attract ppl who will have difficulty letting things go.
You can see this phenomenon in places like NMA, DumpShock, and plenty of MMO fansites. The rec.games.frp.dnd newsgroup was infamous for year-long wars on the topic of alignment; in fact, each war never really ended but rather segued seamlessly from one to the next. Actually, rgfd was probably the rudest place I’ve ever been to, not in terms of raw abuse, but by how any contentious topic would spawn an unending stream of aggressive, insistent, argumentative posts. It got invaded once, and the invaders got chased out after a few days by the regulars basically arguing them into the ground. The same thing happens now in a less overtly in-your-face fashion on RPGnet’s D&D board, although the mods there are trying to stamp it out.
Aeon221
3273
I never got the appeal of the loot model in games. I personally prefer equipment to be a thing I upgrade while seeking out a cohesive look, rather than something I have to endlessly compare to drops across multiple characters. One makes me happy, the other feels like busywork that I mostly scrap in favor of overpowered builds that can kill everything bare handed.
Dunno why they don’t scrap inherent item mods in favor of a much expanded runing system, but whatever.
Keeping my eyes out for a source of Dragon Blood now that I’ve picked up the ambrosia. Also found out that I missed a few armor upgrades for allies and apparently they don’t just carried over to the next act. Welp, that’s fucking stupid. Bioware has an annoyingly “har har har fuck you” attitude to players in a lot of little ways like that. For instance, Ambrosia and Dragon’s Blood are both found on side quests. Don’t look everywhere compulsively and you’ll miss them (and the high end recipes won’t work as a result).
I just wish the game was more like Fable in some ways, and more like Panzer General in others. I don’t mind crunching complex battlefield scenarios in my head, but I get offended when asked to compare various items. I dunno why.
It was Bioware, then it wasn’t. I’m not sure what to make of it so I attribute it to both. But it bears all the hallmarks of a Bioware title sooo.
Not sure why you think the combat is repetitive, as I found it anything but. If anything, it feels like an homage to Guild Wars. A compliment of the highest order in my eyes, as that’s by far one of the best RPGs around.
You really ought to always have a respec mod loaded for a Bioware game. They always lock you into a single build, which is the dumbest shit ever and totally kills my desire to play. I keep flipping my build every play session to keep myself interested, and swap around companions to change things up. Like, I’m trying to come up with an all squishy build that I can use to crush enemy bosses. I’m guessing that it’ll take some doing, but I feel like creative maneuvering and loads of healing will make it work.
My experience was that all but a tiny handful of enemies were either a) mage, b) rogue, c) archer, d) fighter, or e) chaff, and behaved almost identically no matter what faction or race or whatever they supposedly belonged to. Then you compound that with each fight taking three times as long as it needed to because of the reinforcement waves, and it was just such a slog. And while you lauded the decision to compress down to a bare handful of abilities earlier, to me it just sharply limited my toolbox. I will grant you that once I’d picked up the core specialization abilities in Awakening I started to struggle to find useful places to spend my points, but that was something like 25 to 30 levels into the game. Before that, virtually everything my mage took was useful in at least some of the combats that were thrown at me. Perhaps you played a fighter or rogue? I definitely wouldn’t contest that those classes got raw deals in DA:O. I just don’t feel like what DA2 did to achieve parity (cripple the mages without making the other classes dramatically more interesting) was the right call.
(And I didn’t feel like cutting down the number of abilities made the ratio of useful ones much higher - multiple abilities in each class were useless crap.)
Aeon221
3275
DAO I played a mage, which comes up in one of Ander’s dialogues in DA2. Problem with my mage is that most of the abilities were useless, while a few were overpowered beyond all belief. Almost none of the mage skills were focused around just improving the mage, and many were things like Virulent Walking Bomb or whatever that did exactly what a prior version did, just better. Two copies of the same spell with one worse than the other but required? Silly. The upgrade system for spells works way better in DA2.
Another problem with DAO was that warrior/rogue play was dull in the extreme and focused around highly buffed autoattack. LAME. In DA2, melee types have loads of useful abilities centered around crowd control and smashing shit up.
The combat actually does vary pretty well between different groups, although they make much less use of abilities than I’d really like so that removes a lot of obvious differentiation from everyone other than spiders and boss mobs. Unfortunate, but shit can be fixed pretty easily just by adding some useful abilities to the AI. Boss mages stand out pretty well because they make everything go boom, and backstabbing AI mobs are very noticeable because they fuck shit up, but warrior mobs and rangers mostly autoattack. PC and Companion builds, on the other hand, are very well differentiated. You can set up warriors in massively different ways, with everything from buffing powers to serious crowd control to damage overload.
Fenris is particularly handy with his zappy time aoe ability and Lyrium Ghost madness.
The only thing that changed for the worse (arguably) was blood magic and a general toning down of mage ability to dictate the battlefield. I can no longer do stuff like swap between tanking as an Arcane Warrior and blasting/ccing everything as a Blood Mage in the same fight. That’s a good thing. I should not have been able to solo the dragon boss in DAO as an Arcane Warrior (notroll) on hard. Mages require the player to more carefully consider the battlefield due to much longer cooldowns on their spells. Like, in DAO I could Cone of Cold bosses into immobility with ease. In DA2, they’re very likely to resist freezing and just get slowed a chunk. I can no longer mass freeze and shatter enemies, Blood Wound them into immobility, or puppet enemy elite Ogres into helpful little murder machines (I trivialized the final fights in DAO by puppeting red level Ogres and mana clashing the generals, didn’t once need to summon AI reinforcements).
So while the spells could use a once over for balance fun, the game works pretty well and definitely has a better view toward balance than the original. Plus, it has moved away from the slavish imitation of DnD that really crippled DAO in a lot of unfortunate ways.
Nesrie
3276
I have no idea who decided that RPGs are supposed to be about balance and sameness, but I think the foundations of RPGs are being lost with these kind of decisions.
Aeon221
3277
Eh? I disagree entirely. If a single build is dominant, I’ll use that single build. If no build is dominant, and most builds are equally viable, I’ll try out lots of configurations.
Or in other words, why include tons of subpar skills and spells when you could just winnow it down to a few things that work really well and ignore the filler content. DnD and, to a lesser extent, DAO were loaded with filler content in the abilities section. DA2 is streamlined so that filler content is gone and most ability choices are viable. Reduce false choice, increase real choice.
The same thing with gear. Why include tons of filler gear that no rational player will bother with? Just winnow it down to the good stuff and make the rest into autosell junk (or nonexistent).
Nesrie
3278
I never said they should include a bunch of throw away skills, but here’s the thing. I choose my class and race, back when he had a choice in races, based on the background story and what sounds interesting to play. I don’t use a calculator to find out which one is the strongest and then get pissed off if I picked a build that was harder to play. I also don’t get angry because I have a choice in equipment or might have to run around a few places to find out if a book I picked up is worthwhile. Choice has often been the wortwhile of an RPG. It’s not just a waste of time and space.
EA/Bioware was trying to cater to two different crowds here, one that wants a streamlined oh my god everyone had better have the same experience or I am going to explode and the other that is wondering what the hell happened to the award winning game so many people liked.
Virulent Walking Bomb and Walking Bomb were separate abilities on a separate cooldown that could be placed on separate targets. That’s useful.
And I disagree that most of the mage spells were filler, or that DA2 notably reduced the filler-to-viable-spell ratio. If anything it made it worse because few of the spells were effective with a single point spent on them. Most spells only became useful or differentiated after purchasing one or both “extra” upgrades. Now, I do feel that there is a potentially interesting character building dynamic that DA2 suggested in the tension between spending points on having more tools in your toolbox (until late in the game, it wasn’t mana that limited my casting, but the ridiculously lengthy cooldowns and tiny number of spells I had) and making the tools you have more effective. But because the abilities are not properly balanced and insufficiently numerous, it winds up being more frustrating than fun.
I do tend to agree with you about loot, but no Bioware game yet has managed that. Mass Effect 2 eliminates gear-related choices almost entirely while making the effect of most gear upgrades virtually imperceptible. DA2 reduces the utility of gear by restricting huge swathes of it to the protagonist, but still drowns you under huge, largely undistinguished piles of it.
Aeon221
3280
You’re making complaints about plot and story rather than mechanics.
I think the DA2 plot and story are worlds better than that of DAO; there’s less of a focus on the tired save the world trope, the Grey Wardens are relegated to mysterious figures in the background, and in general the game is more about the various characters and their lives rather than a dominating main character and a single big bad. So while I liked 2 better, I can see why some people people preferred the by the books Bioware RPG tale that was DAO.
I don’t think there’s any argument to be made in favor of DAO mechanically. It wasn’t a very good game from a tactical combat pov, and build wise you were heavily restricted. If you were war/rogue you picked a weapon spec and maxed it, maxed out one side or the other of the class specific skills, and grabbed two of the specializations and maxed the better one. If you were mage, you picked useful spells and blood mage + spirit healer or arcane warrior depending on whether or not you wanted wynne in your party.
DA2 has far more freedom in build choice. Each of the mage talent trees is equally viable as a primary option. Merril has the hex tree maxed and it works great (entropic cloud on a boss is WIN WIN WINNING) and I’ve tried out Elemental and Primal and am gonna do Spirit next. Anders is a tool so I never use him, crying baby bitch needs to hurry up and die.
As a minmaxer this makes me happy because it doesn’t lock me into a single build; they’ve all been viable. My various rogues and warriors have their primary weapon tree unlocked, and then they skill up different stuff. I made Aveline max out the warrior talents that buff allies, and made Fenris max out the stuff that lets him daze and aoe kd enemies. Isabela has a ton of subterfuge stuff while Varric has sabotage. They all work great. I can also throw together a party comp out of any old set of three npcs and it tends to work pretty well. I have no doubt that I could put together a two rogue two mage party and blast right along without trouble. That’s also good.
So I like that better.
