132 réponses à ce sujet

[Grobvolk]

 Making a game more shallow (or "casual") is NEVER a good idea. NEVER. It will not appeal to a wider audience that way it will not "streamline" anything. What Bioware did with Dragon Age 2 was not increasing the action or anything, it did quite the contrary, it reduced gameplay depth, and that generally makes games less fun to play.
Things like discarding the secondary skills or companions armor simply take more gameplay out of the game. And the less gameplay the game has the more it becomes just a movie. In this case one with bland and uninspired costume design to boot.

Bioware virtually improved nothing in DA2. The graphical improvements are there but miniscule. Basically a waste of time and money if you ask me. Both of which could have been better spent on _adding_ gameplay depth instead of taking it away. They even discarded the ability to detach the camera from your character and zoom out properly to examine the battlefield, in what seems to be an attempt to alienate PC gamers (I'm not buying any "technical" excuses for that).

The conversation wheel is alright but I can't imagine anyone really caring for that.
Having played quite a bit on Nightmare difficulty I have to say the balancing is the worst part of the game. Some fights are managable and challanging but some others are just ridiculous. I feel like I'm the first person to play the game like that. There's no way this has been properly beta tested.
My party heavily relies on electricity damage and that has proven to be a bad decision for fighting Qunari, since they're completely immune to that, which makes some parts of the game absolutely insurmountable. There was one quest that had me traverse an underground passage and fight a horde of Qunari on the other side with no option to flee. I was lucky I had a savegame from immediately before I entered the underground passege.
Frankly I find myself quite often in a situation where I have to abandon a quest for a while because a certain encounter is ridiculously tough.
I'm sure there are some character skillsets that completely reverse that trend and make it way too easy, just like in DA:O.

Anyway... the writing is still good I guess, as in DA:O. DA 2 still has the same flaws as it's predecessor and improved upon none of them. The AI is still bonkers and it's still hard to bridle your party if you want them to not charge into desaster for a second. Sometimes it looks like Bioware looked at what's wrong with the game, made a plan to better it and then did the opposite.
If anything DA 2 needed MORE rpg elements, like more items with more stats and bonuses on them and a more extensive crafting system, just more control over your characters equipment and skill development.

Come to think of it there is one thing that's gotten better and that's the little skilltrees with upgrades on them and the debuffs that benefit other classes. I'll give them that. Cheers Bioware!


Well... what was this thread about? yes, whittling down gameplay mechanics. No, it is not good to drop any part of them that is not directly aggravating to the player.

[Nick Fox]

OP: If you ask me then yes its totally unaceptable. If BW wants to change a franschise midway then have the balls to tell the truth about what kind of game you'll realese, now they said something towards "trust us you'll like it".
Nope, sure dont and many are pissed off on a grand scale.
Imagine CoD becomming a racing game without you knowing it, or Halo a sims ?
That is what  feel happend here.

[mordarwarlock]

why should RPG elements be taken out to or overall an RPG being "dumbed down" to appease a Crowd that never cared about RPG's at all?

Modifié par mordarwarlock, 13 mars 2011 - 08:20 .

[addiction21]

simfamSP wrote...

Rubbish Hero wrote...

Yes.

OMG where the hell have YOU been?

Look at the date of the post...

[Jademoon121]

Maybe. In my observations, the RPG that was supposed to appeal to a wider audience was ME. It had the character creation, lore, customization and story of an RPG, but had the combat and setting of a typical shooter. It's best of both worlds, even more so in ME2.
DAO was made to appeal to Bioware purists, people who love story, lore and tactical combat. It was supposed to be Balder's Gate's successor. DA2 ruins this formula by borrowing from ME2 instead of taking and improving aspects from DAO and what might've been better, Balder's Gate, to become a more unique game.

I love DA2 as a great RPG, but not as a true 'n blue sequel.

Modifié par Jademoon121, 13 mars 2011 - 08:47 .

[zambixi]

OP: Maybe.

If we were getting to the point in the gaming world where RPG 'purists' were dying out, so to speak, then obviously the franchise would need to adapt in order to sell enough games to make profits. I imagine what happened here is that Bioware saw how well ME2 did once they tweaked that system and wanted to go with something similar. Still, I thought DA:O did well enough (especially considering all the expansions) that they wouldn't need or want to do a re-design as drastic as the one in DA2.

Combat is roughly the same in the 360 version, and I enjoy the faster pace. There are some things missing in DA2, but for me involved combat isn't one of those things.

[Funker Shepard]

pprrff wrote...

Can i just play the devil's advocate and ask why is it so bad for gaming company to try and find wider market appeal for its game? Sure there are hard core fan who love the tactical combat and pause the game every battle to set everything up and micromanage everything. This is perfectly fine.

But I think those things are mechanics, not the soul of RPG. They are a legacy when RPG combat is limited by technology. The soul of RPG is that people can escape into fantasy for couple hours a day and pretend to be someone else. Getting upset of RPG's combat mechanic is to me akin to getting upset over the way your christmas presents are wrapped. Your are mistaking the mechanics of unwrapping presents for the actual presents.

Now before I get insulted I would just like to say that I don't have problems with all the classic RPG traits that DAO had. It didn't bother me at all that you need to pause the game to set everything up properly.

Yet to see any actual "rpg elements" which were dropped. Or, to be exact, weren't replaced by other RPG elements. Just because some randomly picked gameplay mechanic didn't originate on the desks of Gygax or Arneson does it "non-RPG" make. Has been a popular mantra since, well before Baldur's Gate came out (back when RTWP was going to kill RPGs forever!), but a lot more vocal since ME1-2,

Yet to play an RPG where the DM/GM gave me full control over my henchmen's gear, and ME2s gear system was essentially pulled from Spycraft 2.0.

[Gatt9]

zambixi wrote...

OP: Maybe.

If we were getting to the point in the gaming world where RPG 'purists' were dying out, so to speak, then obviously the franchise would need to adapt in order to sell enough games to make profits. I imagine what happened here is that Bioware saw how well ME2 did once they tweaked that system and wanted to go with something similar. Still, I thought DA:O did well enough (especially considering all the expansions) that they wouldn't need or want to do a re-design as drastic as the one in DA2.

Combat is roughly the same in the 360 version, and I enjoy the faster pace. There are some things missing in DA2, but for me involved combat isn't one of those things.

DAO: 3.2 million units sold.
ME: 2 million units sold.
ME2: Either 1.6 million units or 2.5 million units sold depdning on which source you want to believe.

ME2 didn't do so good.  It was outsold by DAO,  and depending on which number you use,  also outsold by ME,  The "RPG Purists!" thing is actually a lie.

The truth is,  there are three groups.

1.  RPGers,  those people consistently label as "Purists!"
2.  Gamers who want story in their games.
3.  People who think wearing the RPGer badge is cool,  but actually hate RPGs.

There's no "Dieing off",  RPG games are a hobby that some people enjoy,  and continues to retain popularity since inception.  There's no "Mass abandonment" of the hobby,  Gencon still pulls ridiculous numbers of people. 

It's that the people in Group 2 and Group 3 hate RPGs,  they're not,  and never will be RPGers,  they hate the mechanics necessary to the gameplay.  They have their motivations,  Group 2 is of particular note because it's a lack of quality in other genres that drive them to the narrative-heavy RPG genre.

So they get here,  and they immediately start demanding changes.  What they want to play is Doom or Gears of War with a good story,  so they demand RPGs play like them.  When faced with an RPGer,  who outlines why things work the way they work,  and what they mean,  generally they become extremely resistant. 

From there,  it takes a grand total of about 2 posts for them to start insisting that RPG mechanics are "Dated! Archaic! Old!" and that FPS/TPS is "New tech! The way of the future!".  The RPGer gets labelled a "Purist" because he points out that those games are not RPGs.  Mainly because these groups completely lack any real counter arguement,  so rather than try to deal with the fact that mechanics are necessary to be an RPG,  they'll try to minimalize the RPGers as some undesirable element.

Take our erstwhile OP for instance...

But I think those things are mechanics, not the soul of RPG. They are a legacy when RPG combat is limited by technology.

Apparently he read it somewhere on some forum from someone in groups 2 or 3,  and believes it to be true.  Except everything he claims was a limitation wasn't.  FPS and TPS gameplay existed on the C64,  as did RT twitchy combat. (Gateway to Apshai,  Arctic Fox,  etc).  The truth is,  there never were technical limitations.  The mechanics existed for a reason,  removing them lands you squarely in a different genre (ME2 -> TPS for instance).

Ironically,  all of the early commercial games were RT twitch games,  from Pong to the Atari/Coleco/Intellivision libraries. 

Essentially what it boils down to is that there's a population that hates RPGs,  but plays them anyways,  demands they play like some other game,  and lacking any kind of counterarguement falls back on the age-old message board tactic of trying to minimalize RPGers as some kind of tiny element in order to try and shame them into going away.

Modifié par Gatt9, 13 mars 2011 - 10:18 .