2 réponses à ce sujet

[taine]

Hi all. I just finished playing through the new DLC, so I figured I would post impressions for people that are "On the fence" as it were. I will try to avoid any spoilers, though there's not really much in the way of plot. Since the DLC is mainly combat focused, that is what I'll mostly talk about. If you are looking for something heavy on story or character development, you're looking in the wrong place.

I played on hard mode, so some of my comments might not be valid if you are playing normal. 

I went into the module with a level 35 Rogue from the end of Awakening. There was no gear that was anywhere near as good as anything you can find in the expansion, but I don't think that's really the point, since you can't carry it back with you.

The story of the module, such as it is, is pretty threadbare. I suppose it serves its purpose, which is to get you into a lot of difficult battles. The environments are reused from Kal'Hirol in Awakening with a lot of modifications, and the atmosphere can be rather creepy. The new companions get a little bit of face time, but don't really get fleshed out at all. They are mostly there as cannon fodder. 

When they said that this module is extremely challenging, the devs are half right. Most of the encounters are trivial, but there are some which are really hard. And I don't mean hard in the sense of requiring good tactics to win, I just mean ludicrously stacked against you. I'm talking six orange golems at once stacked against you. In most of the challenging battles your companions will die within about 10 seconds, so I hope you have a very powerful character and a lot of potions. This might have been due to my being at the level cap and enemies scaling up. That said, other than the hordes of golems (which are just silly, and a horrible design) most of the combat is pretty fun and gratifying. 

The final battle is by far the most difficult fight in all of DA, partly because of the mediocre party composition forced on you, and partly because the boss is just totally unfair. SNK fighting game boss level unfair. I won't spoil it, but I'll just say that you will need to make good use of everything at your disposal to win at the higher difficulties. 

In summation, it is a fun two hour romp, with a bunch of well designed combat encounters, and a few really badly designed ones. Whether it is worth getting for you probably depends on how much you want to play your warden again, and how much you enjoy DA's combat. I enjoyed it for the most part, and it was fun to get to play around with my supah-Warden again. The relative dearth of dialogue and story was a bit disappointing, but it was basically as advertised so it is hard to complain too much. 

[Mark Barazzuol - Designer]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I was one of the core designers on the DLC and we definitely listen to the feedback and try to incorporate the general themes for the next round.



A few notes. We do DLC between projects so we only have a fraction of the resources we have for the full projects. That said we don't embark on making something unless we are certain we can deliver value with it. This DLC was meant to be lighter on story and heavier on combat. It was geared more for those players played DA and didn't find they had enough of a challenge.



We knew this wouldn't appeal the same to everyone, but this is partly what DLC allows us to do, fill niches for certain groups of fans. For those who like hardcore and nightmare, as well as many others It sounds like for the most part we've done that. And we still want to do better.



We do appreciate the support and definitely appreciate the feedback. Please keep it up!

[Mark Barazzuol - Designer]

Sappy69 wrote...

I greatly enjoyed the higher difficulty and challenge of this DLC.  My question going forward: is this higher difficulty (at least on hard and/or nightmare) something we can expect in upcoming projects, DLC or major ones?  While my issues with Awakening are many, one of them is the fact that the combat was so trivially easy, even on nightmare.  I ran around with a very un-optimized, goofball party and still found myself auto-attacking and sleepwalking through all the fights.  While we all want good story and party interaction in our RPG's, I think it's also important to have interesting (and challenging) combat.  Otherwise, the combat parts of the game become merely "those annoying parts" you slog through in between story elements.

Also, has Bioware considered releasing DLC that's a bit more ambitious in scope?  Thus far, they've generally been of the $5-$7 variety and are short, self-contained adventures.  How about something more along the lines of what Bethesda did with Fallout 3, where their DLC's were more in the $10 range but more expansive?  The Pitt, for example, was a fun self-contained adventure that had an entirely new city, new armor, weapons, NPC's, multiple ways to progress the story, multiple factions to support, and moral choices.  I feel bigger, longer DLC episodes may give Bioware more room to grow their NPC's, tell a more involving story, etc.  Or are Bioware DLC's strictly a niche thing and don't warrant a greater investment in resources? (I know that sounds like a leading question, but it's not meant to be)

For combat difficulty we have to reach a fine balance of allowing people to play and have fun and keeping it challenging for those who want that.  Even with different difficulty levels its amazing what the difference is in players skill.  We may have to look at and increase nightmare difficulty levels though.  We'll see how things work out.

For DLC size that isn't my call.  Given the tendencies of things that are successful to get bigger and better though I'd suspect that may happen.   We look to see what works, what sells well and what doesn't.  If people don't like something they don't buy it.  If they like it a lot they buy a lot of it.  We look at what is successful and do our best to keep what worked with it, improve on it, and change or update what didn't work as well.

DLC strictly speaking is something that is smaller and CAN be more risky, it isn't that we make them some sort of experiment.  It's just the smaller the project the more we can try something we feel might work.   It's definitely not a absolute formula.