Brentra wrote...
First, as a former developer I assure you, no matter how small an adjustment you decide to make in a finished product, it's rarely going to be easy and it's almost never going to be fact. The patch would still have to pass QA and it still would be an expenditure of time and money no matter how you look at it.
Secondly, are you suggesting that it is reasonable to expect that medieval warriors could not only quantify the exact damage output made with every their weapons but to also name them accordingly, like Shovel of Skull Crushing +7? Again, this is something early-age RPGs invented to compensate for the lack of content. In reality, we do a lot of things in the real world without having any single idea how they work. Our entire lifes are little but collections of rough estimations created from gathering and extracting pieces of information from vague sets of data. Why would a game where is a game in which you asume the role of a fictional character should be any different?
By the way, it's not like you can't, as you said, to know whether your fireball or lightning bolt is more effective by casting them against things and observing the destruction. You can see final damage values every single time you cast a spell. For a math addict, it really shouldn't be that hard to extrapolate the values from there. What I'm trying to say here is that with today's technology can we at least consider the idea of letting go of the past and thinking of new, more challenging and interactive ways to increase complexity of gameplay without receding to those age-old raw character numbers.
You are correct, any change to a finished product requires a fair bit of testing overhead before it can be released safely. However, my understanding is that Bioware plans to continue releasing new content, which means that the overhead involved in integrating more functionalty to the UI can be absorbed in their existing plans. My point was that they're not designing a battle log from scratch; they'd be adapting one they've already got.
I am not suggesting that a warrior would measure the newtons of force they would generate from every club swing and calculate the damage dealt by factoring in the harness of their target. I am suggesting that that warrior probably has a good grasp (intuitive or learned) by which he or she can say "I do better with this weapon here than that weapon there". Likewise, mages would, through a lifetime of practice, be able to say "boy, the explosion I get from my fireball is much bigger/much smaller than the explosion I get from chain lightning".
I'm quite aware that you can test abilities, see what the numbers are and compare it to other abilites. That's what I'm making myself do now and it's quite tedious. In order to compare spells I've had to create a save where I have three skill books saved up so that I can compare one end-line spell to another. Naturally I've got no way to factor in spell combos, but it's yeilding useful information regardless. It just detracts from the game that I have to sit and do that instead of being able to look at a spell description and go "oh, look, fireball scales up from spellpower only a third as quickly as cone of cold. I guess that'll make it a good choice for Wynne who has lots of willpower, and morrigan can use cone of cold."
I'm all for innovative new ways to handle combat in RPGs. However, the rules of the system will always define the system. *This* system demands tactical thinking and careful ability use. Mana is limited, and level up choices are irrevocable. This is a game where combat is handled using damage values. That being the case, we should be able to see what those damage values are going to be.
More than that, there's a lot of general information that's missing too. There's never any mention of the size of an AOE for an effect. There's no mention of whether a spell has a cast time (therefore no mention of how long it is). Mass Paralyze seemed awesome until I got it and realized that sleep is a lot more useful in most situations. Course by that point I'd already sunk the 4 points for a spell that didn't do what I thought it did. Does the spellpower bonus from wisp increase? If it does, by what? Spellpower? Level? Amount of gold onhand? When a spell says it gives "a bonus to mana regeneration" what does it mean? Will it double the character's current mana regen? That'd be great for Wynne, but very poor for my Arcane Warrior. Does it add a flat amount? If it's a flat amount does the amount go up with spellpower? Which gives more mana regen to the group, mass rejuv or spellbloom? Does the duration of Mass Paralyze go up with spellpower? Does sleep's duration increase with spellpower? Do they increase at the same rate, or does one get more duration from spellpower than the other?
Yes, I can play through the game 10 times, try out all these spells and get a good feel for how they work. Heck, that's what I've done on all my other games. But boy, that first playthrough would have been a lot more fun if I hadn't had to abandon it because I had a character full of useless magic.
Short Version: tooltips should contain detailed spell information, otherwise we cannot make informed tactical decisions.
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