mathewgurney wrote...
Roleplaying games are in my opinion, the most rewarding type of game with massive potential for immersive free-world exploration, character development and storyline.
Those are essentially two opposing sides of a zero-sum game.
Oblivion was extremely dissappointing and crappy, by the way. This being someone who sunk hours and hours into Daggerfall and Morrowind.
mathewgurney wrote...
Race and class
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. 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.
Oblivion's races meant nothing. Oblivion had a classless system (which meant everyone is roughly the same) and all the races did was grant special abilities.
In terms of character mechanics, Oblivion is ridiculusly and stupidly broken because of their auto-leveling system where being too good a merchant can screw you completely and utterly over. Of course, that's not the fault of their character creation system, which has been roughly the same for years and years - compared to Dragon Age's development time, I'd be shocked if TES' creation sucked.
They're also completely different - the skill system in TES is pretty much equivilant to the
stat system of Dragon Age, determining your to-hit and such. The talent system where you get nifty moves and manouvers is completely absent from TES. The stat bugs are indeed bugs, but it's only been a few weeks since launch.
Loot
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.
Turn off the sparkles, then.
Oblivion is essentially a giant sandbox with scattered content, with a single (short) linear path that serves as its main quest. Dragon Age is basically one giant branching path that reconverges at the end. Dragon Age also seems to have less loot, period. Oblivion is more magic heavy in terms of loot diversity. You'd hate Drakensang, since the TDE system is almost entirely about characters and your equipment almost never changes.
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.
Your FPS is showing. The majority of the CRPG community (and indeed, not just the CRPG community) will tell you player skill should have nothing to do with your character's ability to hit. By the way, you know Oblivion screwed up the TES system of yore by not correctly having skill adjustments to their attacks?
Oblivion's combat is also simple (man, you couldn't even backstab with ranged weapons) - shoot/throw a ranged weapon with a click, hack/slash with a click, cast readied spell with a click. Dragon Age's positioning and combat mechanics are far more complex.
Stealth is overpoweringly awesome, by the way.
Summary
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.
This isn't a surprise.
Bethesda is renowned for awesome sandboxes populated by cardboard cutouts and flimsy stories.
I loved Oblivion for about a week (right at release) before it drove me steadily away with annoying crap. You can't delete spells known, for one - wtf. Free form? Morrowind lets you FLY, man, the entire world is one massive area - Oblivion went with loaded zones, just like DA. I'm an experienced TES min/maxer and just barely stayed ahead of the difficulty curve (indeed, you have to game the system to increase in power relative to the game world - it takes fairly indepth knowledge to run in place in terms of power, and if you're ignorant you'll most likely be massacred by random wildlife). The same stupid difficulty system finally drove me off when, after considerable effort, I gathered a full set of daedric and was way overleveled for the main quest. ...only to get attacked by a random group of bandits
using Daedric. Yeah. F- them.
Feels good to get my Oblivion rant out every once in a while.
What we need is to get Bethesda to do world building (they're awesome at it) and Bioware to do the story and characters (because Bethesda is, comparatively, absolute rubbish at it).
Modifié par Dark83, 18 novembre 2009 - 09:56 .
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