Kilshrek, buddy, she said assume these things are true for the sake of this discussion, not debate wether or not they are. Mind you, I do agree with them by and large myself. (I know many people who played the game, including several who convinced me to buy it, for example. I only know one other person who beat it, though, and he wasn't even one of the ones who sold me on it, either.) Still, whether or not I do is irrelevant, and so, on to the relevant parts!
Disclaimer: I don't mean to imply the notions and questions I raise were not thouht of by the designers. These are just notions and suggestions that came to my mind, and strike me as having potential but that would have to be play tested and balanced before implementation. These are not things I think would be awesome and fix everything. Some of this I've actually had on my mind for a while. Some of it, such as at least half of the class reconfiguration, is more or less off the top of my head.
Okay, first thing's first, dungeon overhaul. We need to cut down on the number of visually similar places with identical enemies the player has to go through in each section. It pads on unucessary hours and slows the pace of the game. Inestead, we should focus on the main point of the game, which has long been bioware's strength: an epic story with variable paths and dynamic characters. Have the following rule with respect to dungeons: unless neccesary, don't design an area that requires a player to go through three zones worth of dungeon to get through it. For example: East Brecelian Forest, West Brecelian Forest, Upper Ruins, Lower Ruins, Lair would be unacceptable. The Dwarven Thaigs and passages were the same way. Cut them down. Leave the same amount of story in them. Make the different sections visually distinct from each other. (Nature of the Beast did this well. Forest and Ruins. In Orzammer, most deep roads locations were pretty samey.) Have unique enemies or combat/puzzle elements in each locale. (Possibilites include: Werewolves charge in fast and use traps. Undead lie on the floor among corpses, untargetable until a certain point when they rise up around you. Dwarves have riduculous defence and slowly march their little destructive selves towards you while their rogues disappear and reappear to harry you from behind. Bandits make heavy use of barricades and ledges and attack you from a distance.) Add more puzzles, but not necessarily of the people asking riddles variety. Make the the added volume as unobstrusive (i.e. less like a puzzle section you solve before going into the next combat section, and perhaps more like the spirit anvil variety.) as possible while adding distiction to the area. Never reuse puzzles. Shorten corridors players have to run through just to get to the next battle just to get to the next corridor just to get to the next battle, etc. Limit or completely eliminate/redesign quests that pad on extra time by making the player run between multiple different zones.
- Outdated Visuals and Lack of distinct art style.
If we have time, rewrite the graphics engine. If we don't, stylize it. The Old Republic chose to go with a look that they hoped, rather than being realistic now and outdated in five years, would by stylistic and a timeless. Follow a similar philosophy. Don't focus on super-realitic textures. Focus on solid designs that look clean and dynamic and flow well. Do as much as you can to get rid of the terrible clipping that frequently popped up. Add in some more variation. Try to avoid making outfits that are reskins of others, ala mage robes. Focus most heavily on those things the players will interact with and observe most, characters and equipment. Make sure they interact well with each other. Give designs a basic litmus test: Does this look like something that could unobstrusively fit in another game? If it does in any substantive way, scrap it unless it's really, really good. There's nothing wring with having plate mail that looks like plate mail, and thus is similar to plate mail in other games by that virtue. Platemail that whose artistic design makes it look like something that could have easily come from some other game is what I refer to. Make the first task of the art team designing the overall look and style of the world and create the design of each individual section with these princpled in mind. Maybe after they construct the overarching design principles, split them into teams (who still interact with each other) and give each team a region or area to design individually. Also, when designing something significant, ask what the design says of the subject. If you're in the manor of a significant figure and the inside of the manor says only that the owner is rich, the same as owners of all manors everywhere, then consider redesigning it.
- Combat is sluggish, slow and crude.
Again, rewrite the engine if possible to allow jumping, dodging, and attacking while moving. (Sort of like Kingdon Hearts) If this is possible, make dexterity effect your movement speed in combat. If not, well, crap. Nevermind, then. The first and easiest thing that can be done is to make the classes more dynamic, with greater variation between them. classes should not share identical skill sets. Give each class a prevailing role and design ethic (For example: While warriors can hold a small area
and do more damage to it than a rogue can, rogues can take down a single
target like nobody's business.), and then make each skill tree a different way to fulfil that or perhaps even a role within that ethic. Perhaps classes should have fewer skills with shorter refresh times to ensure less time watching as your character auto-attacks.
Okay, let's go with warriors first. Aggro management is no longer in the base tree. Base tree is focused around helping the warrior take punishment and charge into battle, or crucial areas thereof. Two-handed weapons focuses on grabbing aggro through high damage output. They also gain a significant amount of stun, daze, knockdown, which they can use to control aggro if they chose. They do the most damage of the two. Sword and shield has much higher defence and deflection, only one knockdown in shield bash, but more skills to engage, disengage, or shift aggro. (By shift I mean instead of dropping agrro, giving another character aggro) If the engine can handle it. If the engine allows it, give them skills to screen ranged attacks. Bows...hmmm...toy with the idea of splitting bow use between crossbows and shortbows/longbows. Giving the warrior and rogue different trees to rely on. (i.e. warriors get a longbow skill tree, and longbows get modified by strength, reflecting the power needed to and tranferred by drawing a strong bow. Rogues get a crossbow tree, and crossbows get modified by cunning, reflecting how good the rogue is at picking their shot.) If it doesn't work, cut bows from the warrior wholesale. Ranged combat doesn't fit the warrior design ethic well, and bows, as a whole, are a more important element of how rogues would operate.
Rogues get dodgier. If the combat system can get overhauled, give them activated skils that let actively jump/roll from side to side and/or deflect attacks. Get rid of backstabs. Positioning them can get finicky, especially on consoles. Give them bonuses when flanking, and let them crit more often and for more damage than other classes. Make those the main tree. Give all rogues an inherent ability to detect traps and pick locks that scales with their stats. Either that or cut down the number of skills for these and make them scale more based on a rogue's stats. If warriors don't get bows, split the rogue abilites into ranged and melee, melee by default going with two-weapons. Give both trees skills that work better, have additional effects, or deal more damage if the target is suffering from a condition. Vary the conditions ranged rogues and melee rogues inflict and take advantage of. (e.g. ranged gets pin and knockback while melee gets bleeding and stun) Give melee rogues abilities that help them rush into combat towards specific targets and retreat. Give ranged rogues abilities that help them stay undetected in combat, redirect aggro, and fall back.
Mages probably get the largest changes. Give them runes they can put on theirs staffs to effect how they cast spells nd skills that do the same. (For example, a rune might make a spell last longer or reduce modal spells' fatigue penalty at the cost of an increaced reserve requirement.)
Distill down the spell selection. There are four different AoE DOTs. If you want to take someone out of combat for a little while, you can
use paralyze, a stun glyph, freeze him, petrify him, forcefield him, or
crushing prison him. That's too much redundancy. Instead of doing the same thing with different elements, think of what each spell is meant to accomplish, and give the players a couple different way of doing that that he can modify. Here's a possible example: You have two lines of damage spells that deal damage in different ways. Perhaps one is direct damage, and the other is damage over time. When you level, you can buy skills to effect these lines instead of more buying spells, if you so chose. These skills can be used to, say, modally imbue spells with elemental effects/damage at no cost. The level of spells so affected could be directly propotionate to the level of skills you have purchased) Spells get refresh reductions available through skills on equal
proportion to the amount of distillation they've had their effect type distilled.
Give mages a line of spells to affect their melee ability with staffs. Allow them to set off various effects and deal useful amounts of damage, but never let their melee damage outpace the other classes on a regular basis without significant cost. (Outpacing them for as long as their mana lasts for a particularly hungy enchantment, for example, might be okay.)
If the engine allows it, make spells interact with each other more, and not simply to set off spell combinations. E.g. Winter's Grasp wouldn't go off, or at least could't freeze, within a Firestorm. With the ability to swap elements modally as long as you have the skills to do so, two mages casting elemental spells at each other could gain a new degree of strategy. Also, give them more spells to support allies.
- The controls for the console versions are far behind the PC version
Design combat with the console in mind too. The console controller's traditional gameplay strenght is the ability to fluidly contol action. This is why it's preferred for action/platform games and fighting games. It's weakness is the inability to handle complex controlls or controlls with many options well. This is why the PC is preferred for things like RTSs and an all-too-familiar kind of RPG. With this in mind, avoid putting in systems that won't work well on the console unless we're willing to take the time to code an alternative for it. Perhaps create a split with how some skills work on the PC as compared to the console. For example, on the PC there might be a skill for rogues that increases your dodge change by a great deal for five seconds that recharges in ten, meant to protect rogues if they get stuck in a bad situation just long enough for them to retreat. For the console, give it a shorter refresh, and make it an active deflection that goes off when you push the button.
- Some people felt it was too easy, some too difficult
Scale the difficulties more. Don't scale them through damage or hit chance. If possible, scale them through AI, status effects, and healing more than hard stats. Make a prominent, in-game refrence to the different difficulties. Give the option its own codex. Make nightmare harder. See if we can't find what players who found it difficult, found difficult. It may simply me problems with the UI or skill usage. Having a full skill bar on the PC seemed to make a world of difference in hard fights, for example. Write clear, accurate descriptions of exactly what effect skills, spells, potions, etc. have. (e.g. Change "moderate penalty for a short time" to "-10 penalty for 15 seconds.") This will make the mechanics clearer, thus making it easier to strategize without actually playing with the difficulty. It's very possible, after all, that people who found out precisely how the skills worked were able to use them to better effect than those who didn't, thus making it easier for them.
- Giving them more of what they want.
Pace companion dialogue. Don't let the player ever be able to ask someone a companion four different questions at one point in the game only to run out of things to talk to later in the game. Pace conversation options more gradually, or write more dialogue with the goal of never letting the player reach a point where they permanently run out of dialogue part-way through the game. They should never reach a turn-of-story event and have nothing to talk about with anyone. Give NPCs a full life outside of adventuring with you. Most of the characters from the first game were pretty solitary figures with very little of a life outside of adventuring with you or significant figures in their life that they mention outside of the party/personal quests. Change that. Have companions with family you can meet and talk to. Give them close friends approval can win you quests from. Give some companions professions they talk about getting back to or dreams for their future when the adventure is done. Give the option of discussing these. Let them develop friendly and romantic relationships with others you can help play a part in. (When romancing Morrigan, I wanted to nudge Alistair and Leliana in each other's direction more than once.) Also, give the player the option of turning to a trusted or loved companion with issues weighing on the hero's mind. Not sure you put the right person on the crown? Devastated that your love just left you? Talk to someone you've come to trust/care for about it.
Add more epilogues, and make them more consistent. Let us know what happened to that family we gave ten gold to so they could make it to Denerim and find a better life, even if they just died. You gave us a number of choices like this in the game, some more significant than others. Oddly, some got epilogues, and others didn't, with no indication of which ones would and wouldn't.
SPOILERS
Also, sometimes epilogues seemed to ignore each other, such as if we made Bhelen king, and he disolves the assembly and begins a wave of modernization, don't leave us wondering how the assembly, after a while, cracked down on the chantry as an assault against dwarven values and later claimed the death of Brother Burkel during a protest was an accident. That, in a game focused on its story, simply shouldn't ever happen.
/SPOILERS
Create banters the player can get involved in. Perhaps a button the pops up for some banters the player can press to join in on the conversation or the dialogue wheel opens up suddenly and you're given the option of chiming in or just listening.
Finally and most importantly,
give everything a toggle option so it can be turned on and off. Don't want ridiculous amounts of gore? Think the ladies assets are too sizable? Do you not want fighters using swords? There's a toggle for that. Toggles make everything better. Seriously.*
Okay, wow. That was a lot. I didn't think I would write that much, and yet I know there are things I meant to put down while writing that I didn't because I either forgot or couldn't articulate it. Either way, there you have it. Similarities between what I put here and what they're doing are coincidental. Well, likely. At no point did I think about what I heard will be in DA2 while writing this, and really, mechanics-wise I haven't been paying
too much attention. Still, it's possible it influenced me on a subconscious level. Some of this predates having even heard anything about DA2. Some things I left out because it souded like stuff they already announced. (E.g the Rival system, even though I was thining more about KotOR II when I was about to write it.) Either way, while proofreading it, I did notice similarieties. This, to my mind, is a good thing. Well, it is for me, anyway.
*No, not seriously.
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