Dragon Age is actually a pretty crappy game for role-playing, I find. There's a lot of great dialogue and the like in there, and the lack of a moral compass is very nice, but there are too many broken game systems dragging it down.
For one, the moral compass is gone, but it's replaced with companion approval. This means that you are constantly gaming the system to maximise your +'s and minimise your -'s, which can lead to not bringing characters to certain places, or not asking certain hard questions of them. The consequences for maintaining approval are so dire (party members leaving you), and the benefits so great (massive and arbitrary stat bonuses) that they effectively prevent you from roleplaying. This would simply not be an issue if there were no obvious numbers available to the player, since you'd have to rely upon things like dialogue responses and behaviour, rather than numbers.
Another major problem is that BioWare have a very bad habit of giving highly differential rewards for different choices. It's one thing to give you a certain reward for one option and another reward for another; it's totally something else entirely to give you wholly different rewards in a totally unpredictable way. Although this isn't so bad playing the first time through the game, it means that on subsequent plays, you're almost guaranteed to pick the option with the best rewards, rather than the one with the best role-playing potential. The ultimate example of this is in Redcliffe: choosing to abandon the town rather than save it foreits a massive amount of the game, including quests not directly related to Redcliffe itself. Furthermore, it opens up absolutely no new options to compensate for it. This means that even as an "evil" or just "jerkass" character, the rewards for doing the "right" thing vastly outweigh any other possibilities.
The third biggest problem with roleplaying is that sometimes the quests shoehorn you into particular goals. Part of this is simply because all games have to be at least somewhat linear, but part of it is also due to bad design. Let's examine a few quests: although Dragon Age's main quests are pretty good in terms of letting you do X, Y, or Z, the side-quests are very different. Side-quests in Dragon Age tend to have only one possible outcome, and they very often only have one method for solving them. The Blackstone Irregulars in particular have quite a few of these, such as bringing in people for desertion. While it seems totally logical to expect to be able to do any number of things (accept a bribe, persuade them to return to the Irregulars, lure them into a trap, use magic to brainwash them, etc.), you only have one option, which is to kill them. The game attempts to pass this off by claiming that it was "the only way" or some such, but this sort of explanation rarely stands up under any scrutiny.
This wouldn't be such a huge deal if it wasn't for the fact that this is an RPG we're talking about, and an open-ended one at that. What is absolutely integral to RPGs, and Western RPGs especially, is that the player has freedom to explore and negotiate a very realistic, multi-faceted world, and has a large amount of choice in resolving situations. The ultimate example of this might be Fallout, but there are other games that pull it off - some of them from BioWare, in fact. I would actually argue that it's more important for side-quests to contain major decision-making and player freedom than it is for the main storyline, because a) side-quests are by nature optional, and so choices can have less bearing on the story, but still have high emotional value, and
side-quests are where the world is most fleshed out; they tend to have more variety than the main story and allow for the world to shine through not just in terms of epic set pieces, but also in terms of day-to-day life.
I feel like one of the reasons Dragon Age has such limited opportunity with role-playing, especially when it comes to side-quests, is because of the way the game mechanics are structured. Many old-school PC RPGs have discrete skills for a wide variety of situations; to use Fallout again, you have combat skills, but also non-combat skills like Speech, Science, Repair, Outdoorsman, etc. These skills have just as much effect on your progress through the game as your core combat skills, to the point where I usually prioritise them.
By contrast, in Dragon Age, most skills are centred around killing things, with only a few exceptions for persuasion and pickpocketing. As a result, Dragon Age has to use dialogue for a large number of these role-playing elements. You can't "interact" with the world using your Nature skill, you can only at best do a skill check in dialogue, and even then this happens about once in the game, if I remember correctly. That you can't go into combat at any point in the game is also extremely limiting to how you can resolve situations. Limitations are necessary in games to keep content bloat under control, but by smartly designing game systems and scenarios, much of this work can be done for you already, and appears out of the player's own actions and choices through gameplay, rather than through a menu.
Modifié par searanox, 10 mai 2010 - 06:32 .
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I couldn't even use Force Grip / Lightning in Jedi Knight : Dark Forces 2
