Sylvius the Mad wrote...
But I really was asking a serious question there. Would you describe the speed of the characters in the game as unrealistic (using DAO's speeds as realistic to slow)?
I'm also very curious to see how acrobatic these acrobatics are. If
they're Sacred Ashes level acrobatics, then they're incredibly stupid.
But it they're Jade Empire level acrobatics that's wholly acceptable.
There's a line. I want to know if you crossed it. DAO was safely inside the line, so you have significant wiggle room.
I would say that the ground traversal speeds of the closing attack are past the upper edge of humanly possible, so it depends on where you draw that line. It's a pretty personal preference. I would say that if you felt Jade was within the realms of acceptable, you'll be fine.
Basic movement speeds, etc. are a bit faster than Origins, but only because of the animations. Nothing too significant.
Acrobatics are pretty much on par with Jade, though less common. At the most extreme I would equate them to leaping tiger.
Not to say the game you want to play wouldn't be good. It might. I have copies of some classic RPGs on a shelf 10 feet from me that suggests I have as much a taste for the old school as you do, but that's not the game I'm making.
Is that because you don't think new games with some of those featuers would sell?
DAO did.
Not in specific, no. But it's a slippery slope. Any feature can work, but it has to be woven into a larger whole. Let me risk opening the kimono for a moment:
My current thinking about RPG sales can be summed up like this: "We need to make mountains, not walls." To reference what I mean by a wall, take a look at
this.
Now, I
loved loved loved Ultima 4. I have my original boxed copy sitting right here. But I'm in my thirties. The old school games that an entire generation of us grew up and loved are, by today's standards, borderline inpenetrable. It's a wall you have to scale. No gentle slopes of increasing complexity.
Is the new generation of gamers incapable of understanding them? Not at all. But the barrier to entry is exceptionally high. You have to read, study, ponder and so on before you can even begin to engage with a game on the level it's meant to be played.
By contrast, if you've ever played World of Warcraft, whether you love it or hate it, that game does an exceptional job of easing you into the gameplay. Those convoluted talent trees that you use to spec your character are absolutely core to the WoW experience, and yet it's not that you don't get talent points until level 10...
...you cannot even open the menu until you have a point to spend.
It's rather brilliant. Those talent trees are complex. As a new gamer, or one new to RPGs, seeing one of those might scare me off, and drive me back to something simpler.
What Blizzard has chosen to do is create an experience that has emergent depth. The more you engage with the game, the more complexity it opens up for you, dragging you forward into someone who is suddenly participating in co-ordinated 20-person raids.
Setting aside any personal feelings people have about WoW, I think their subscription numbers make it self-evident that WoW does a very good job at bringing people into the fold. WoW walks its players up a hill. They might be a little winded at first, but they
don't have to worry about the rope breaking until they're into the end
game. Old school RPGs do a reasonably poor job of bringing people into the fold, becuase they present a cliff-face of comprehension that must be scaled before you can engage and see the fun. To be clear, that climb is (almost always)
totally worth it, but it's still a climb.
So, then, take that as my thought process and look at everything you know about DA2 through that lens. How does the game open? With an over-the-top combat where enemies are blown apart in single swings. Why? Because people can get that. They can register that the essence of the game is about exploding hurlocks. It's not, really. It's about exploding a wide variety of people and creatures in exotic locales and in the context of a rich, decade-spanning story, but at the very least, they're engaging with one of the core elements of the game without having to worry about a single statistic or talent tree. Those all come later, once the player's a little invested and has developed a keen interest in exploding foes.
So, then, with that in mind, let's circle back to the original question: do I think that the very hard-core features would sell? Yes, absolutely, if woven into a game that's reasonably accessible in a seamless manner. The danger, of course, is that if you have an extremely dense block of hardcore features, you will eventually find yourself having to weave more and more of them into the early game. Because it's not very fair to the player to keep the majority of features locked away until they're half way through the game, right? But then, by my rationale above, it's not great pacing to overload a player with feature after feature too early.
The tension between how quickly you get a feature into players' hands and how much systems overload you present is a constant balancing act, and very hard to get right. Even when we were trying to make Origins more friendly, I still think we overloaded a bit.
So, for DA2, we're putting a lot of effort into addressing complexity and how it's introduced into the game. Will there still be some hardcore features? Yep! The experience is very "Origins-esque," in terms of complexity, what with enchanting, tactics and so on still there in all their glory. Will I be adding even more hardcore features than Origins had? Probably not. After all, we've put a lot of effort into making combat better and figuring out how to best leverage player VO. Though once that work is done, there might be some room for more complexity in the future.
And as a final point, let's be frank. Hardcore features do not great marketing make. For every person who has mocked me saying "think like a general, but fight like a spartan" as over the top, or innaccurate, or whatever, there's a hundred people who hear that and come away with at least a vague impression that "it's like 300, but I have to think about it? Huh. I liked 300, so that's kind of cool."
Were I to go on stage and say: "Dragon Age 2 features X numbers of talents which may be upgraded by spending experience points so that you can coordinate up to four characters in combats that may be paused to give a tactical overview and provide a stronger mechanic for issuing orders such that the abilities you execute are done so in up-to-the-moment paradigm in which the animations have seen significant upgrades while the core combat remains largely the same," I would lose my audience about 5 words in. It would be more accurate, but hardly memorable.
The hard-core would be
elated, but they would probably be less elated when the game sold 100,000 copies and never saw a sequel because our messaging was, just like Ultima 4, inpenetrable to an entire generation. And the simple truth is that for my favorite genre to thrive, I need to make games that don't actively push people away from it.
Speaking of which,
this provides an interesting perspective on genre death. Another good read to bookend this epic post.
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