mathewgurney wrote...
Let's use Oblivion on the Xbox360 as a comparison, although flawed it is one of the best excecutions of a this-gen RPG and equalises most console vs PC and market type vs hardware arguments.
World and Camera
Oblivion is a massive free-roam, open world experience that can be played in either first person or in a zoomable third person camera.
Dragon Age is a closed linear environment where characters move between insular, locked-boundary zones at particular points in the storyline while observing only through an unzoomable third-person camera.
Oblivion has vast amounts of empty, generic landscape that you can run around in for no particular purposes. In this random landscape you will find random mosnters and random loot that serves has no purpose or reason for being there except that a bit was flipped inside the game. Dragon age, on the other hand, has a small number of highly detailed maps, with monsters that were placed by hand with an eye towards creating difficult / clever combat encounters that fit into the theme of the area where you are.
Race and class[/u][/b]
Oblivion has 8 starting races and the option to build a character however the player chooses using all or none of the skills available.
Dragon Age has the tired and unimaginative traditional 3 races, 3 preset job classes and is designed around an inflexible, cookie cutter level-up system with minor later sub-specializations.
DA provides a total of 6 unqiue origin stores, customized for your particular class and race, producing a more immersive effect when playing different class / race combinations. Oblivian provides a single origin story that is generic enough to fit any race / class that you might create.
Also the stats used to build a character are badly designed, not interacting properly and we are still waiting for a patch to fix this two weeks after release.
The game is working as the designers intended -- it is /very/ unlikely that this will ever be changed by Bioware (barring the dexterity bugs). In any case, expecting a patch in 1 week for a problem that wasn't found until after release is, well, rather silly, to say the least.
Loot[/u][/b]
In Oblivion loot is not only found on NPCs but also hidden in a huge amount of containers and placed in the world in the form of freely growing plants, food on tables and other realistic placements providing massive variety and a challenge to find.
In Dragon Age no loot is placed directly in the environment, plants and containers are at a frequency of maybe 1% the amount found in Oblivion and all loot is marked with large glowing graphical sparkles removing all immersion and difficulty of aquisition involved in the RPG loot-finding process.
In DA, loot is limited to prevent the "more money than god" problem that occurs in other games, and to limit (not enough, but somewhat) the "Stop adventuring to go back to the store to convert useless loot to gold" problem that is common in RPG games. The designers explict intent was to limit the amount of loot (and therefore gold) in the game so that endgame characters would have to pick and choose what equipment that they would purchase before the final battle.
There is a limited opportunity to get loot because the world is restricted to a finite set of areas, but Oblivion would have the same problem if it was limited to a finite group of areas.
Combat and Movement
In Oblivion combat can be conducted in either of the above-mentioned camera modes, enemies can be engaged or disengaged from at will, attacks, jumps and stealth are in real-time and caused physically by the player hitting buttons.
In Dragon Age enemies automatically engage with no option to disengage, attacks occur automatically with no option for the player to influence accuracy via controller skill, there is no jump function, stealth is so badly implemented as to be almost useless. Combat immersion is weak due to a poor control system interspersed with pauses, AI failures and the familiar huge glowing retard-proof targets around enemies.
In DA, you can disengage by selecting all characters and moving away from the combat. The character that you control can be ordered to use his / her abilities in real-time (if you choose to do so). Since DA provides a party of multiple individuals, you can only control one in real-time, but you have the option to pause and set actions for other members of your party. In Oblivion your character's allies (when he has them, which isn't most of the time) will always act on their own -- their is no way for the PC to influence the actions of his allies.
Summary[/b][/u]
In summary only in one area does Dragon Age come close to equalling Oblivion and that is in terms of the characters a player meets and the storyline that evolves through interaction with them, this factor is impossible to quantify due to personal preferences but is one facet that in my opinion Bioware does do well.
Admittedly these two games do have one large difference and that is in the system of permanent accompanying party characters, Dragon Age has to be said to be superior in this regard simply due to the fact that it contains them while Oblivion does not "without quest exploiting" but i feel the party system and the way the classes interact is so badly implemented in DA:O that it is not a benefit.
The classes interact quite well, thank you very much. If you are referring to "mages are uber and you don't need a party if you have a mage", this is irrelevent -- you can still get benfits from having other party members even if you don't /need/ other party members.
Reasoning
I originally conceived this essay simply as an excercise to put my thoughts in order and justify to myself whether i even wanted to continue playing Dragon Age or just take it back to the shop and get back to Oblivion which even after several playthroughs still entertains me greatly.
DA is a game that you play a certain number of times and then you are "done" -- you've seen all that there is to see, there is no reason to continue to play (barring DLC). This is the same as all of Bioware's titles (including KOTR, which you refer to below).
Obtusely enough im actually going to keep playing Dragon Age for a while because even with all its flaws there is just enough in terms of action gameplay and more than enough storyline to keep me interested. If this was back in the day when i played KOTOR "Kreia is still the best video game character i've ever encountered" then the combat and exploration simplicity, glitched quests, simplistic stat system and graphical failings wouldn't have bothered me so much because they were the best on offer but in this day and age i expected a lot more polish from a company with such a track record.
There are two types of single player RPGs on the market today:
1) Free-form / single player MMO games, such as the Oblivion. These games are typified by having a wide open world with many quests, all of which are procedurally (e.g. randomly) generated. They are open ended by their very nature, because you can always wander around and find something to do. On the downside, because everything is procedurally generated, the all the content tends to look the same after some time, and there is little in the way of story / overarching plot that connects everything together.
2) Closed world games, such as DA (and KOTR 1 and 2, BG 1 and 2, NWN 1 and 2, etc.) These games typically feature a finite set of discrete areas which you can play in, with each area having a finite number of quests in (or involving) that area. They are closed ended because there is a finite amount of content, all of which you will eventually experience (barring the installation of new content, either in the form of DLC or user created content). On the upside, because everything is designed by hand each quest / NPC / area is unique and designed around the requirements of an over arching story.
You were looking for an open world game in a game that is designed to be a closed world -- not suprsing that you were disappointed. I would recomend that you stay away from Bioware games in the future, as they are ***all*** closed world games (even Mass Effect -- there are only X planets you can explore, and once a planet is completed it is empty forever).
Modifié par Mason Reed, 18 novembre 2009 - 07:21 .
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