We saw a lot of people disengaging at hour one, hour two. Not pursuing it, right?" explains Laidlaw. The Dragon Age team might have chalked some of those lost players up to rentals, but the statistics didn't back it up: a significant number of people simply stopped playing Dragon Age: Origins after a few hours.
Sounds like a problem, right? After all when you put a lot of hard work into a product you want people to play it for a little more than an hour or two. Their solution:
So they fixed it, right? No more boring, endless filler combat. No more stabbing or hacking a guy 10 times before he dies. No more 2-3 hours of excruciating filler combat before the game proper even starts. Right?"I think what it really spoke to is something RPGs have been
wrestling with for a long time: that first impression," says Laidlaw.
"You get to an RPG and fire it up, and ... it hits you in the face with a
thousand stats. Those stats are very cool, but you may not be mentally
or emotionally prepared to deal with them as your first thing to do in
the game," he says.
DA had 6 attributes, a handful of derived stats and a pretty simple skill/talent system, most of which were not even available to a level 1 character. Now it's possible that a beginner might find it daunting. However, Laidlaw says they played for an hour or two. You know what that tells me? That they figured out how to play the actual game, even if at a superficial level and are not, in fact, daunted by the stats anymore. The first hour or two generally covers:
The origin
The wilderness
Ostagar Tower
Now, I'll readily admit that on average, I drop my characters somewhere along those lines. I've finished ostagar tower with two, maybe three characters. So I know what those people feel, I was just perseverent enough to get a couple of mages past Ostagar. I will say it outright that after the origins (which vary wildly in quality, with the mage one probably being the worst one of those I played so far, which is sad because I find the other classes virtually unplayable) comes the most tedious and boring part of the game. Exploring the wilderness and especially ostagar is full of filler battle with HP bloated enemies that take forever to finish, generally provide very little challange, and due to the low level of your character your options are pretty much spamming the same handful of abilities over and over and over. I can see why people quit. And what has Bioware done to correct this? When I loaded up the DA2 demo I enjoyed the exaggerated intro part. I thought "finally, the dark spawn are easy to kill. it's ok for the game to be full of filler combat because they're entertaining to kill and I will presumably still have somewhat challenging boss battles ahead of me."
As soon as the exaggerated intro tutorial was over my face splattered all over the cold asphalt of reality. Dark spawn were, in fact, as tedious and boring to kill as in origins. The more EXCITING animations were just a gimmick that quickly wore off. Bioware has not, based on the demo, learned its lesson at all. HP bloated enemies that are a pain to kill are still there. Review tales of woe regarding repetitive caves just bring back horrible nightmares of the ruined temple or the deep roads or ostagar. As the underlying issues with the system have not changed merely by adding EXCITEMENT and AWESOME to the visuals, I suspect the kind of person who is unwilling to put up with the tedium will not suddenly change with DA as well. The Bioware dev team's insistance that some of the players are somehow too stupid to comprehend DA's fairly simple stat system (or worse, accidentally changes difficulty levels or friendly fire toggles) is not just supremely condescending but outright wrong. So there it is, some concrete feedback from a player who has abandoned DA within an hour or two a lot more often than he has bothered to stick to it. I never finished it and I wonder if I will ever bother to. I certainly won't even buy DA2 barring a sudden 180 on design policy and either the reduction of pointless filler combat or the reduction of enemy (and player, to keep it fair) HP bloat so they end quickly and brutally.
Modifié par Darth Executor, 03 mars 2011 - 02:37 .
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