ibortolis wrote...
worth reading it
http://www.hookedgam...lassic_rpg.html
a small summary,thanks to gamebanshee:
"None of this would be so much of an issue if BioWare lived up to their
promises and actually provided two viable styles of playing the game.
Everyone can sympathise with their decision to add real-time combat to
the game and make it easier for new players to get into the game, in
fact we support it. The more people you can get to play your game the
better; cRPGs are notoriously hard to start off with so making things a
bit easier for beginners is great. However, the issue arises when you
change the very core of the game. The real time combat should in fact be
harder to play. At the beginning of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall,
players were asked if they would like high or low player reflexes
enabled, the slower being easier because players could adopt “a more
cautious and thoughtful playstyle”. This is the kind of option that
should be given in Dragon Age 2. Instead the game only truly caters to
the fast, button-mashing style.
Playing with these kinds of
settings just isn’t right for the traditional pause-play style. People
have argued that if you want that traditional experience then you can
simply play on a harder game mode, but this does not solve it. The
difficulty simply makes the game harder with modifiers such as friendly
fire (in nightmare mode) tougher enemies and so on, but it is still
played as an Action-RPG. While playing the demo, pausing the game to
issue an attack on an enemy just felt completely ridiculous, as they
would have already landed 3 attacks on you by the time you have done
one. The only possible way to do it is to pause and unpause the game
every half a second, therefore forcing players to simply mash buttons
until the enemy is dead. Dragon Age 2 is a real-time Action-RPG, and so
having the pause-play (that only really works with the slower pace of
turn-based RPG’s) is just an unnecessary feature rather than another way
to play through the game.
Like many other developers, BioWare
have made their three main cRPG series into Action-RPGs with Mass Effect
2, Dragon Age 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. There is no doubt that
these will be great games, but the problem is that they have been
sculpted to what will sell, rather than making the gaming experience
that a number of players are struggling to find nowadays. The market has
always been driven by sales, but nowadays the publishers and producers
are sacrificing genres in order to make more money. As said previously,
Dragon Age: Origins was a commercial success so there was no real need
to change the game so dramatically. This declination is inextricably
tied in to the popularity of consoles over PCs amongst today’s gamers.
As gaming spreads to mass audiences, producers and publishers are lured
by the money that comes along with it. In this case it seems that EA
have encouraged BioWare to open up the game to a bigger audience, and in
doing so have lost many aspects of the genre it once was.
Worse still, there are signs that the game has been rushed out to meet
publisher demands. The graphics are not going to mesmerise anyone, in
fact they don’t look any better compared to Origins, environments are
fairly dull looking but worst of all is weak level design. The review in
PC Games has said that the majority of Dragon Age 2 plays out very much
like the demo, meaning a lot of copy-pasted and narrow paths - ugly.
Narrow paths in an RPG is actually an oxymoron as the genre requires
freedom and an open world and should not be bottle-necking its players.
What this effect does however, is focus the game more towards combat as
is the nature of an action-RPG. It’s quite understandable that all of
these shortcomings have occurred as BioWare are making an effort to
bring out all three of their big RPGs in one year. Given that Dragon Age
2 has only had a maximum of two years in development, many of us
suspected that the game would fall short in some areas. This lack of an
open world, combined with the simple combat means that the game slides
even further from its origins. "
I totally agree with the article. In fact: I'm not getting DA2 because of it. I'm not much of a gamer anyway, the last game I've played was Mass Effect 2, and I would have had a hard time deciding between DA2 or The Witcher 2, but I guess I have to thank BioWare for making the decision easy!
Hopefully their next game will be worth considering...
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