I’ve never been a fan of BioWares campaign design, exactly because it disallows player initiv/direction (or role playing, if you prefer). DA:O is actually a great example for me personally: I had a hell of a time trying to decide where to go after Loathing (or whatever the name was), because I thought the Blight would come creeping across the map & cut me off from various locations - as I’m sure it would have, had anyone but BioWare designed the campaign.
Still, I can’t say that has stopped me from enjoying their games. Indeed, with the exception of Shattered Steel & the BG games, the storytelling has been by far the best thing about all of their games, in my opinion (mind, I haven’t played ME2).
As far as I’m concerned, the major flaws of DA are the ruleset and the enemy- and encounter-design.
The ruleset de-emphasised resource management to the point it almost ceased to occur, and both the basic systems and all the stuff built on top them (classes, skills, spells, the lot), were so general-purpose in nature that they didn’t have to be used strategically - all the tools in the player’s toolbox could do all things equally well, so strategy was almost exclusively a question of positioning, with a little bit of threat management thrown in.
And those problems are greatly compounded by the severely limited & same’y selection of enemies, and by the poor encounter design.
There’s something like 33 different enemy types in DA, but about 30 of those are melee or ranged opponents functionally different only in how high their damage reduction is, so in reality the game has something like 5 different types of opponents, and 3 of them are used extremely sparingly.
Unlike the BG games, encounters in DA virtually never have overwhelming strengths & crippling vulnerabilities, battlefields almost never have an impact on strategy, enemy groups are almost always positioned randomly (or stupidly, I’m not really sure), and groups of enemies - regardless of whether they’re supposedly sapient, dumb animals or something else entirely - cannot coordinate or cooperate at all.
The situation isn’t nearly as bad as I just made it sound, I’m exaggerating the problems for the sake of clarity. But my point is that these, not the storytelling, are the problems that makes DA a dull slog at times: engagement after engagement with near-identical groups of badly-positioned, uncoordinated enemies, none of whom can exploit or have any strengths or weaknesses, or can make you burn through any limited resources.
I don’t mind the combat or the 360 controls, but the game definitely looks like ass compared to the pc.
xBox of decrepitude doesn’t render as purdy pics as newfangled PC hardware of awesomeness. Who’d have thunk? :p
But speaking of looks, DA isn’t all that great on PC either. The textures are pretty low-res (some very, very much so) & frequently look a bit flat, and everything looks kind of light in the polygon department. The art direction is great, though. For a LoTR-wannabe.
