What I believe needs to be changed or improved for
Dragon Age III:A New Visual Style and Art Direction: I understand that, with DA2, BioWare wanted to create an "ownable" artistic style as opposed to what has been called the "generic fantasy" style of DA:O. But what we got was not particularly unique or "ownable," but rather felt like a hodge-podge of styles borrowed from other games. Take the characters of Fenris and Flemeth, for instance. Fenris' appearance instantly calls to mind Cloud Strife, Sephiroth, or any other number of JRPG characters. Flemeth looks like a geriatric version of Ultimecia from FFVIII. It creates the impression that these characers aren't original creations but instead the result of someone playing, say,
Final Fantasy and going "Oooh, that character looks cool! Let's do that!"
Secondly, the
cartoonish, over-the-top combat, with people exploding into blossoms of gore and characters leaping thirty feet through the air, needs to go. DA2 wants to tell this dark, mature story involving such themes as oppression, religious fanaticism, racism, and so on, yet the combat (which makes up the overwhelming majority of the game) nears
Team Fortress 2 levels of absurdity. It creates a sense of dissonance; as if the
game doesn't know what sort of tone it's trying to strike.Interesting and Unique Encounters: Part of what made the
Baldur's Gate series so enjoyable was the breadth of enemy encounters. In one dungeon you might encounter a diverse number of foes such as umber hulks, mind flayers, beholders, vampires, and so on, all of which
required different strategies to overcome. And not only that, there were opportunities to
initate combat on your own terms. You could have your thief enter stealth to scout out ahead and assess what sort of monsters you would face. You could then have the thief sets traps, or backstab the most dangerous enemy to eliminate it before battle commenced. Or you could send in summoned creatures to weaken your enemies and force their spellcasters to waste their spells. In short, there were a multitude of ways to defeat your foes, and the game
rewarded thinking ahead and devising strategies.DA:O did not fare quite so well in this regard; there were a bit too many encounters were you were rushed by mobs of enemies, particularly in the Deep Roads. But there were still opportunities to employ strategies and tactics to win the day. You could still begin encounters on your own terms. For example, if your Survival skill was high enough you could detect enemies in the rooms ahead, allowing you to lay down traps or create an ambush.
Dragon Age III needs to bring back this element. Give us fewer enemy encounters (so that combat doesn't end up becoming a tedious chore), but make the encounters more interesting, give us a greater variety of enemies with a greater variety of abilities that we must account for. Have some encounters be ambushes, where the player has to think up a strategy on the spot, and yet have encounters be something that a saavy player can see coming and prepare for accordingly. In DA2,
nearly every encounter was an ambush and involved almost entirely
enemies that had no special abilities beyond basic melee or ranged attacks. Combined with the frequency of combat in DA2, I think this is the reason so many people found DA2's combat so dull.
Allow the Player to Properly Role-play Their PC: I found that Hawke occupied an unhappy middle ground between being
too bland a character to care about and yet
too well-defined to allow me to role-play. The reasons for this are numerous. First of all,
Hawke knows things I don't and is acquainted with people that I am not. The game's opening throws you into the midst of your family's flight from Lothering without ever giving us a chance to get to know your family. After the first year in Kirkwall, Hawke is apparently acquainted with several people that we have never encountered in the game until that point.
The way that quests are handled only exacerbates the problem. Instead of getting quests from my companions by talking to them and bringing up certain topics, my journal now oh-so-helpfully informs that Merrill, Varric, or whoever wants to talk to me. The question I kept asking myself is,
"How does Hawke know this?" How does Hawke know that this one item he found in a warehouse somewhere belongs to one particular individual up in Hightown? In the same vein, how does Hawke know that the individual with the big arrow above his head has a quest for him? I'd like to see BioWare get rid of the quest-giver marker entirely and let the player discover quests on his own, which, to me, at least, is one of things I enjoy about RPGS - finding things out on your own rather than having the game spoon-feed them to you. Look at how
Oblivion handled this, for example. There were no arrows hanging over peoples' heads that screamed "QUEST HERE!" No, you actually had to talk to townsfolk and other NPCs to get quests. This is more realistic and creates a greater sense of player agency than simply telling you information
that your character cannot know.The dialogue wheel also hurts DA2's roleplaying element, because I
only have an educated guess as to what my character will say whenever I choose a particular dialogue option. Worse, every single response is now
clearly pigeon-holed into "nice," "mean," and "LOL U MAD?" Since I cannot control exactly what Hawke wil lsay, It felt like, rather than directly controlling my character, I am now merely making suggestions to him as to how he should act. The way of fixing this, I think, is rather simple.
Give us the full line of dialogue, not a paraphrase. Contrary to what some people might say, the average player is not some ADD-afflicted caffeine addict who is too impatient to read a full sentence.
More Choices, and More Opportunities to Affect the Game World: DA2 was ostensibly about Hawke's "rise to power" yet no matter what I did or what choices I made, my Hawke never had much "power" at all. Without getting into spoilers,
almost nothing he did could change the outcome of any of the game events at all. Things happened with or without his intervention. And the major choice at the climax of the game
ultimately changed nothing at all. This, I believe, is something DA3
must improve on if the game is to have any shelf-life whatsoever. I played through DA:O a half-dozen times, simply to see how many different branches of the story my character could take. With DA2, I felt like I had
seen everything the game had to offer on the first run through and felt no desire to begin another play-through.
Gives us More Options to Build Our Characters: DA2 took a huge step back from DA:O in this regard. Take weapon skills, for instance. Warriors could use the sword-and-shield abilities, the dual-wield abilities, the two-handed weapon abilities, or the archery abilities. Mages could take the Arcane Warrior specialisation and wield melee weapons instead of a staff. Rogues could opt to use daggers or swords for melee, each with its own advantages. Armour wasn't firmly restricted to a class, so rogues, for example, could put a few points into their Strength stat to equip heavier armour (at the expense of increased fatigue). To sum all this up,
DA:O gave you far more options to build your character than DA2.
And the same goes for NPCs. First of all, as many, many others have pointed out,
give us back the ability to equip our companions' armour! This is one of the most inexplicable changes that DA2 made. I hear some people justify it as "maintaining each character's unique appearance," which is bollocks. One thing I ask when determining whether a character has depth or not is:
Can you describe this character without making reference to his or her appearance? - the point being that how a character looks is rather minor and superficial aspect of who they are. Is it
really so important that you're willing to have characters wear
entirely inappropriate apparel into battle? (This is the exact same complaint I had against
Mass Effect 2, where you had absurd situations like Jack wearing her barely-there outfit
in a vacuum!) Varric might be proud of his manly carpet of virility, and Isabela might want to show off her "other" assets, but would either really be so foolish as to wear that sort of thing to a fight?
The solution is obvious:
Have your companions wear whatever armour you choose during gameplay, but let them wear their "siganture outfits" in their home bases. This isn't my idea, this is exactly how
Mass Effect 1 handled companion armour! And it made perfect sense!
In addition to their armour, the player should be able to have
much more freedom in how they build their companions as well. In DA:O, Wynne was specced as a healer, while Morrigan was more geared towards offensive magic and debuffs, but that didn't mean you couldn't give Wynne offensive spells or give Morrigan healing spells. DA2
needlessly limits you in this regard. Want Aveline to be anything but a tank? Can't let you do that! Want Merrill to be a healer, because you can't stand Anders? Sorry, can't let you do that! It reached the point where I felt like I had to include certain characters in my party, because they were the only one suitable for that role and I could not mould the others into that role.
Secondly,
gear should not be strictly limited to class. Why can't my warrior wield a bow or a dagger? Does he consider it beneath him or something? Why can't my mage wear armour if he's strong enough to do so? In addition, the
attribute requirements for gear need to be dramatically scaled back. Why does my warrior need to have so much more strength/constitution to wield this one sword than any other sword? Why does my rogue need vastly more Dexterity and Cunning to wield a higher-level dagger than a lower-level one? When you get right down to it, a sword is a sword and a dagger is a dagger. It feels like a very arbitrary method of keeping higher-level equipment out of lower-level characters. Not only that, it railroads you into pumping your attribute points into whatever two attributes are required for your class's gear. Oh, warrior gear always needs STR/CON!
Why would I ever want to put points into anything else, then? Why give me an option when the best choice is spoon-fed to me?Make Different classes of Weaponry More Unique: Again, DA2 dispensed with something that was perfectly fine in DA:O. Axes, maces, and warhammers might have done less damage, but they had higher armour penetration rating, which realistically reflected what these weapon were designed to do. But since DA2 got rid of the Armour Penetration stat (why?) The end result is that all weapons seemed to blend together into one big category of "thing you hit people with."
What should be done is this: Make each class of weapon (maces, axes, warhammers, longswords, two-handed swords, etc.)
much more differentiated from one another. If you're facing a heavily armoured opponent, for instance, then the player should be more successful if he chooses an armour-piercing weapon like a mace or warhammer than a longsword.
No Item Scaling!: DA2 effectively made your gear obsolete after one or two level-ups, requiring to go through the tedious chore of selling off your old gear and buying the latest round of (mostly generic) new gear. And you'd end up repeating this after the next couple of level ups.
Stop it. Part of the fun of playing an RPG is finishing a particularly difficult quest or boss and obtaining some spectacular piece of gear. Remembing killing Firkraag in
Baldur's Gate 2 and getting the +5 Holy Avenger? The sword that was good enough to last you to the very end of
Throne of Bhaal? Dragon Age III needs to have this sort of thing.
Don't Create Challenge by Skewing the Game in Favour of the Enemy: In DA:O, enemy mages were a threat, but they didn't have access to abilities that player-controlled mages didn't. Come DA2, and suddenly mages can make themselves invincible (which you can't do), they can teleport (which you can't do, and is impossible according to lore), and can cast devestating AOE spells that you never have access to. This isn't challenging, this just
stacking the deck in the computer's favour. Another clear example is the ludicrous asymmetry between the HP levels of the party and enemies. I'm sorry, but I don't care how tough the Arishok is, after stabbing him two hundred times,
he should bloody die! The end result of this is that fights (boss fights, in particular) go on and on and test the player's patience more than his skill. Going back to
Baldur's Gate 2, the dragon Firkraag had only around 180 HP (barely more than some of your party member). You could finish him in less than ten seconds with the proper strategy. And somehow he was still a challenging foe despite not having a metric ton of HP.
More Limited Level Scaling, or None At All: Level scaling (where enemies increase in strength as you level up), when done badly,
effectively kills off one of the core elements of RPGs - character progression. And DA2 does it badly. How is that Hawke can still be menaced by street thugs at both level 3 and level 20? What's the point of making me put points into attributes when all I'm really doing is keeping my character on par with everyone else? A key component of RPG is
seeing your character getting stronger and more skilled compared to those around him. In
Baldur's Gate, when your character was at level 1, he was weak and rather pitiful, with battles against even low-level enemies being a life-and-death struggle. By the time of
Throne of Bhaal, however, he was strong enough to go toe-to-toe with the most powerful beings in the Realms.
That's character progression, and
Dragon Age III needs a far greater sense of it.
Eliminate the Point-and-Level Requirements for Skills in the Skill Trees: The Skill Tree was created to address the problem of players having to pick undesirable skills just to get to a skill they did want. This is all fine and good, but then they added the point-and-level requirements to skills,
effectively creating the same problem the Skill Tree system was meant to address!
Add More Non-Combat Skills: Bring back the non-combat skills from DA:O, or create new ones. Again, why were these taken out? it's not like they were useless. Survival could help you anticipate encounters, Herbalism allowed you to craft items, Poisons allowed you to buff up your weapons and created bombs, and so on. Persuade could help you avoid combat altogether in certain situations (something DA2 desperately needed!) Again
another dimension of gameplay has been taken away when there was nothing flawed with it to begin with.
And mostly importantly...
Take Your Time!: I'd be perfectly willing to wait four or five years for the next Dragon Age game if it meant that the developers could fully realise their vision, that
no corners would be cut, and that
nothing would be rushed. Of course this is just pure fantasy; I seriously doubt that EA will allow BioWare that length of time. But we can always hope, can't we?
Modifié par Redcoat, 07 juin 2011 - 05:18 .
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