3281

Of course you did.

3282

No I generally dislike most things DA2, I think you completely misunderstood how important plot and story are to me… even if waves of enemies appearing out of nowhere somehow made DA 2 better mechanically.

3283

Are you interested in having an actual discussion, or would you prefer I just trolled you until you shut up and went away so that Malkav and I could go back to chatting?

Make up your mind here.

3284

I am not sure why you are getting upset. I made a point, you agreed by linking those two statements. If you want to call that trolling, go for it.

3285

Not really, although this is a matter of opinion. Usually I found I had a better option than Walking Bomb for most fights, although Virulent was much fun and fairly efficient.

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.

I agree that DA2 limited your ability to splash into trees, but depending on the thing you splash to it can work out alright. I dunno, I think that’s more a disagreement on build direction: broad builds with lots of splashing, or tall builds with a small number of trees completely maxed. I tend to prefer systems that reward tall builds, DAO was definitely a broad build game where splashing was encouraged.

That said, I’d love to see the next game incorporate Guild Wars style Glyphs for on the fly spell modification. Think DnD 3.5 Sorcerer Metamagic; you pick a Glyph and use it, and then you pick a skill and use it. The skill is modified in a standard way, and you are happy. Then you don’t need stuff like Walking Bomb + Virulent Walking Bomb; instead, you take Arcane Echo (copies the next spell cast), drop Walking Bomb on a target, hit a Glyph up and drop Glyph’d Walking Bomb Copy on another target. Yay!

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Glyph

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.

Yes and no. Balance is always gonna be an issue, and I think they did a decent job compared to DAO where you could basically consider the game solved by grabbing Glyph of Para, Glyph of Repul and Mana Clash + Blood Mage (for Blood Wound). This spell set run by the player is completely unstoppable. Mana Clash cast at the beginning of the fight is a save or die against any enemy caster, including endgame bosses. I used Disintegrate to basically break NWN2 in a similar manner; max out the relevant stuff, spam Disintegrate, win.

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.

ME2 worked well enough to make me happy inv wise, but I agree it could have done a few things better in that department. DA2 could have won inventory by skipping gear drops entirely and allowing the player to just upgrade stuff and change the cosmetic appearance of gear.

Imagine being able to rune your gear out with a selection of the mods currently used in the inherent system, plus change the look to whatever you consider cool.

GW basically sets the standard for what I consider excellent gear management. Armor is from crafters. You give it the bonuses you want with insignia and runes. No set of armor is mechanically superior to another… Weapons can be found in drops, or crafted. It can be inscribed and modded with stats of your choice. Green (unique) weapons can also be dropped with unique looks and mods that cannot be affected. No weapon in a class is mechanically superior to any other weapon of the same tier. Most importantly, all players have easy access to crafters who can make affordable max tier kit.

It’s a great system with loads of customization that focuses on looks and modularity rather than forcing you to pick a certain look to get the best bonus. If Bioware just stole it and used it in their games, I would be massively happy. You get all the joy of finding unique looking gear with all the modularity that guarantees you can pick your look. Why antediluvian systems based around drops and non-standard gear values are still used, I have no idea. It removes choice! Silly, silly, silly.

3286

I’ve heard good things about this system. I will likely be in GW2 to actually expierence it and make up my mind. There were drops in DA:O that made me hate the look of the character but I wanted that set.

3287

While they’ve gotten rid of filler abilities/spells the result hasn’t been to make every build similar, combat is quite different depending on whether you play a damager, controller or debiltator.

3288

I am currently playing DA:2…and I can’t remember but, in DA:O weren’t area spells damaging to everyone, friend and foe? While in DA:2 they magically only hurt foe.

3289

It depends on the difficulty level. I think in DA2 there is no friendly-fire on normal or below.

3290

Well, I can’t say that either spell was a go to choice for me because with friendly fire active I liked more predictable AoE effects. I’m just saying that having both spells is not wasted if that’s how you want to play the game.

I agree that DA2 limited your ability to splash into trees, but depending on the thing you splash to it can work out alright. I dunno, I think that’s more a disagreement on build direction: broad builds with lots of splashing, or tall builds with a small number of trees completely maxed. I tend to prefer systems that reward tall builds, DAO was definitely a broad build game where splashing was encouraged.

It’s not really about “splashing” or “tall builds”. I like every level to be rewarding in an RPG, and every spell or ability to be worthwhile as soon as it’s picked. Since so many aren’t worthwhile at the start (including the spell they start mages with, to my dismay), and upgrades often don’t become available for several levels thereafter, DA2 fails miserably on this front. It’s also a bad design because if a spell is ineffective to start with, it’s not exactly tempting to invest in upgrades for it, even if they would prove to make it really potent. Hell, maybe that starting mage spell is somehow useful with upgrades, but it was such a waste of time to begin with that I never spent any more points on it.

That said, I’d love to see the next game incorporate Guild Wars style Glyphs for on the fly spell modification. Think DnD 3.5 Sorcerer Metamagic; you pick a Glyph and use it, and then you pick a skill and use it. The skill is modified in a standard way, and you are happy. Then you don’t need stuff like Walking Bomb + Virulent Walking Bomb; instead, you take Arcane Echo (copies the next spell cast), drop Walking Bomb on a target, hit a Glyph up and drop Glyph’d Walking Bomb Copy on another target. Yay!

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Glyph

I’d have to experience it in play, but that could potentially be fun, sure.

Yes and no. Balance is always gonna be an issue, and I think they did a decent job compared to DAO where you could basically consider the game solved by grabbing Glyph of Para, Glyph of Repul and Mana Clash + Blood Mage (for Blood Wound). This spell set run by the player is completely unstoppable. Mana Clash cast at the beginning of the fight is a save or die against any enemy caster, including endgame bosses. I used Disintegrate to basically break NWN2 in a similar manner; max out the relevant stuff, spam Disintegrate, win.

Evidently I’m not a powergamer, because I found DA:O mechanically rich and challenging in a way DA2 entirely failed to be. But then, I never even picked up Mana Clash.

GW basically sets the standard for what I consider excellent gear management. Armor is from crafters. You give it the bonuses you want with insignia and runes. No set of armor is mechanically superior to another… Weapons can be found in drops, or crafted. It can be inscribed and modded with stats of your choice. Green (unique) weapons can also be dropped with unique looks and mods that cannot be affected. No weapon in a class is mechanically superior to any other weapon of the same tier. Most importantly, all players have easy access to crafters who can make affordable max tier kit.

It’s a great system with loads of customization that focuses on looks and modularity rather than forcing you to pick a certain look to get the best bonus. If Bioware just stole it and used it in their games, I would be massively happy. You get all the joy of finding unique looking gear with all the modularity that guarantees you can pick your look. Why antediluvian systems based around drops and non-standard gear values are still used, I have no idea. It removes choice! Silly, silly, silly.

See, I can’t agree with this at all. I like Guild Wars. I really do. The worldbuilding is cool and the skill system rocks. But the gear? So bland. So boring. Everything is interchangeable, none of the drops matter or are exciting in any way. It’s all just fodder for the crafting system, but they make you buy and carry around disassembly kits anyway, and, worse yet, manually disassemble everything. I mean, I’m not a loot whore. Of the two typical RPG advancement axes, character abilities and equipment, I find the former almost invariably far more interesting. But part of that is that I am getting new abilities or substantial alterations to old ones from the former system (at least in a well designed game), and in the latter, my numbers go up. I think Bastion, even though it’s not really all that much of an RPG and is fairly lightweight, represents a good example of something closer to my ideal loot system. Every level has a new weapon (with significantly different features and usage profile), or an upgrade piece for a weapon, or a special skill (maybe connected to a weapon, maybe not), or more than one of the above, or some other doodad that significantly changes the gameplay experience and gives you more options and more choices in how you approach things. Plus there are items that give you nuggets of story, which is another nice reward for exploration.

3291

There’s no friendly fire in DA2 on anything other than the hardest difficulty level. In DA:O, on PC every difficulty level except the lowest had some friendly fire, although Normal only had half damage on friendly fire. The console versions shifted that up a level, so Casual and Normal had none, Hard had half damage, and Nightmare had full.

3292

Let me add helpful translation to what I feel many are saying here:
Sure, the game was rushed, reused artwork, had lame combat, empty/streamlined systems, but it was fun to me, so it wasn’t any of those things!

I realize that’s not what people are saying. But when you blow people off that dearly loved the first with comments like, “no, it’s deep, check out me using three skills!” (paraphrased) I start to wonder if we’re even talking about DA2 at all.

3293

Malkav I disagree about point allocation system, but I don’t remember what skills mages start with because I respec’d immediately. I feel like it was the Elemental tree starter spells, which are all pretty good, so I’m not sure what the complaint is with that choice. I do think it was limiting of them to pre-assign any skills, as the player really ought to have full build control in a game without a built in respec system, but I don’t have complaints about the Elemental tree.

As far as an upgrade system for skills, I think that’s a matter of taste. I’d like slightly more room to splash with builds so I’ll probably add in a mod that gives me another 5 levels or so (especially since it’s act 3 and I’m level 20 already) so that I have more room to multidoodle.

Not sure what you dislike about the GW gear system, although I suppose it feels a little lame if you’re not into cosmetic stuff. Again, that’s more of a taste thing. I prefer ease of use, you appear to prefer novelty of equipment. No biggies. It’s a huge advantage to have a modular system of that sort for a game like GW; across all ten of my characters I have around two hundred npcs to gear out, so a more luck oriented system would knock me off of most of my characters entirely.

@Scuzz: there are mods to add back in FF at lower difficulty levels. I’m considering it for a warrior playthrough, but I think it’d honestly cause a lot of problems with the way the spells are designed in this game. And, honestly, I always felt limited in DAO to non-FF spells as the FF ones required more micromanagement at the highest difficulty level. So that removed a lot of potentially fun spells because using them meant micromanaging every npc mage in my party in all situations.

Let me helpfully translate your translation: herp derp.

3294

Is it really not possible to like both games? I like the first game for its story and scope (and of course the varied origin stories). I liked the second one for the far more visceral and engaging combat. Both games featured great characters (Varric and Shale, anyone?)

It’s Mass Effect versus Mass Effect 2 all over again. Better story versus better combat (respectively).

Despite the impression reading this thread may create, there are people who liked both games in both series (thus far), but for different reasons.

And no, neither game was anywhere close to perfect - does such a thing even exist?

3295

Which is exactly the same as in DAO, and in fact, in most videogames.

Then you compound that with each fight taking three times as long as it needed to because of the reinforcement waves,

You mean “take three times longer than you were expecting”, which is a problem with you, not with the game.

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.

It’s not a toolbox unless it contains six different varieties of hammer, amirite?

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.

It’s very easy to design something that will be useful in “at least some of the combats”. you could have a combat that can be won by throwing an overripe tomato at a dartboard, and a skill “throw tomato at dartboard”. Hey presto, a skill that is useful in “at least some of the combats”.

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.

The other classes did get dramatically more interesting. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t have so many ppl bleating about it in this here thread.

3296

You say this like it’s a negative thing.

3297

It never went away. It just got better. (The parts that got worse have been the parts that have not been the subject of most of the complaining.)

3298

Streamlining is good. Why would anyone complain that it wasn’t that?

I realize that’s not what people are saying. But when you blow people off that dearly loved the first with comments like, “no, it’s deep, check out me using three skills!” (paraphrased) I start to wonder if we’re even talking about DA2 at all.

It is interesting that you define depth solely in terms of having lots of shiny bits to play with.

3299

Aeon is saying that as someone who likes having lots of shiny bits to play with, he found DA2 satisfying. Which is exactly what you want from an RPG.

3300

Again, it is interesting that many ppl who have been brought up on D&D-style, old-school RPGs always play mages. This is not a coincidence. In D&D-style games, mages always have the coolest toys to play with. They can alpha-strike, buff, debuff, fast travel, and use a host of plot-device spells (teleport, invisibility, speak with dead, plane shift, etc). In general, D&D-style games tend to be about magic and the power that its wielders have over the mundane.

By contrast, everyone who doesn’t have magic is relegated to the status of supporting cast, constrained by the inconvenient realities of physics and biology in a way that magic users aren’t. (Which, incidentally, is one reason for the stacks of magic items that D&D has: it provides a way for mundanes to level the playing field while still paying lip service to realism.)

D&D-style games have been around for so long that ppl have come to view this imbalance as a feature, not a bug. Thankfully, games are now starting to reverse that trend, but clearly it will take a long time.

and upgrades often don’t become available for several levels thereafter, DA2 fails miserably on this front.

Nonsense. Your perspective is merely skewed by how games have done it previously.

Evidently I’m not a powergamer, because I found DA:O mechanically rich and challenging in a way DA2 entirely failed to be. But then, I never even picked up Mana Clash.

I think we can safely discount any further claims from you that DAO combat is better, then.

See, I can’t agree with this at all. I like Guild Wars. I really do. The worldbuilding is cool and the skill system rocks. But the gear? So bland. So boring.

That is indeed a feature, not a bug. GW is an example of a game where collecting shiny bits is deliberately deemphasised. Think of it as a way of reversing the conditioning that 20 years of D&D have programmed into your brane.