966 réponses à ce sujet

[Khayness]

Well, my opinion about the family aspect is spoilerish, so let's just say whatever you do, your family interactions will be very limited pretty soon.

Wasted potential, it could have been much more.

[Edli]

Reinveil wrote...

Edli wrote...

Maverick827 wrote...

Reinveil wrote...

And if the story is supposed to be "family-centric", they did an incredibly poor job of executing it.

The story is supposed to be family-centric, and they did an incredible job of executing it.

Oh no, I stated an opinion without any relevent argument to sustain it: what shall you do now?!

They did such a good job that the majority of the players wanted to bang Bethany. It's not easy treating a family-centric story in a game. It should first and foremost make you care about this family. What the game does is it kills one of the siblings in the first minutes and expect for you to be sad about that only because it's the sister of your character. That's ridiculous and everyones reaction to that was "meh, whatever let's move on". Then you're off with this irritating brother of yours for hours. I can look past some problems with my real brother because I grew up and really care about him. The game expects from me to care about Carver because he is the brother of my character even though he is annoying for the entire time you spend with him. What about the mother, what a shallow character she was.

So yeah, I didn't care when Bethany died in the beginning, didn't care when Carver and the mother dies too. It was a poor job executing a family centric story because it didn't made that family interesting, I didn't care about them. The game just expected from me to feel sorry because they were "the family"

And just to add to this, outside of a few dialogue scenes, there aren't many missions that even directly deal with them.  Indirectly, I suppose there are the dozens of fetch quests in act 1 you have to slog through to make money.  But I didn't do those out of some deep-seeded need to help my mother (I mostly found her to be whiny shrew quick to blame me for everything), I did them because that's what I needed to do to advance the game.  Just like every other character in DAII, the members of your family either aren't developed enough or come across as one-dimensional archetypes.

Growing to care because of character development>caring because the game tells me I do

Imo the game should have started in Lothering. At least the first hour should have been about the family and building up the relationship. Maybe even watching the warden passing by down the road. Seeing with your own eyes the destruction of your house and you and your family fleeing would have had a much stronger impact. Maybe Bioware was afraid that the players would get bored without action from the get go.

[Blastback]

Volourn wrote...

DA1 story; all about the archdemon

DA2 story: all about the PC

da2 > da1

Actaully, gotta disagree with you here.  Origins was about the Warden rallying various people under his/her banner to defeat the archdemon.  You were the one leading the action against the Blight.

DA2, yeah, the first two parts were about Hawke.  But the third chapter felt to me like it was really about Orsino and Merideth, with Hawke caught in the middle. 

[Tpiom]

I get the feeling that the DA2 team really hated the first game.

Raising the difficulty is not the answer to the problem. You can't even take advantage of certain elements when new waves spawn - for instance like you kill the mage (in DA: Origins) and deal with the rest... in DA2 a new mage can spawn instantly, so it doesn't matter if you deal with the (first) mage first or not.

Also, the danger in DA, for me, wasn't the archdemon - it was the crisis that purged the kingdom (Landsmeet solves it - and each "planet" ).

Modifié par Tpiom, 14 avril 2011 - 09:27 .

[abnocte]

Sad Dragon wrote...

Sad Dragon wrote...

This is something I have been wondering. At times it feels like the ability gets delayed untill after the animation of the standard attack gets finished (especialy bad for the mages) . Not sure this is the case or if its simple a targening issue and I just happened to not have any mob 'hard targeted' at the time.

Is this just me or is it just a series of bad targeting incidents?

- TSD

To answer my own question: The animation is stopping the spell from being casted -- though i think the targeting was also part of my problem as the spell gets queued directly after the animation ends, and I'm sure I kept hitting the button for more then the animation time.

- TSD

I remember a battle where I was controlling Anders. At some point Anders got hit  and while his "knocked back" animation was playing I selected one of his spells, it took me a while to realize that the reason he wasn't casting the spell was that there is no "action queue", so I had to match my button pressing with the end of the animation for it to work. Of course, he was hit again before the animation ended so he died because I suck at smashing buttons.... <_<

[sami jo]

What becomes more clear every time Laidlaw opens his mouth is that he doesn't like Origins or games like it and would prefer to work on Mass Effect. Mass Effect is a perfectly good series, one that manages to combine action/fps elements with a solid story. I don't dislike it, but it isn't the same genre as Origins. DA:O was all about the story. The combat system needed work, the graphics needed work (especially on the consoles) and it was and still is buggy, but the one thing it got right was the story telling. Of course there could have been more: there were missed opportunities to add depth and things that were clearly cut at the last minute; but the story telling and characters <i>worked</i>.

DA2 can't decide what it wants to be, and what Origins fans wanted was an RPG. That means epic stories, lots of dialog, lots of options and the sense that the player has a real effect on the world. Hawke is a person with reasonable combat skills who gets railroaded into starting a war between the Templars and the mages. Hawke- the accidental champion who can't even get his/her lover to say hello back when s/he wants to talk.

DA2 isn't an awful game, but it isn't as good as DA:O. It would be lovely if the lead designer would stop telling all of us who enjoyed the first game that we were idiots for liking it and that we are idiots for not liking the changes. Repeatedly insulting your most loyal customers is never a good idea. I am not an idiot for enjoying more traditional RPG elements. I am not an idiot for expecting some variety in level design. I am not an idiot for enjoying more tactical gameplay. I'm not opposed to the devs trying new things. I did not want a clone of Origins. I just wanted a good story. Instead I got a bunch of characters with the potential to be very interesting who interacted more with each other than with Hawke, a ludicrous number of pointless hunt-and-fetch missions, combat that was different but not necessarily an improvement and a story arc that is decidedly less than epic. Aveline got a more epic storyline than Hawke. Plus, the game is more buggy than a plague of locusts on a termite mound. No, Mr. Laidlaw, I am not a hopelessly backwards idiot for suggesting that this is not an improvement on Origins.

[Rylor Tormtor]

Volourn wrote...

"Its not about ignoring flaws in Origins ... im sure they were all pointed out ... but making the same mistakes AGAIN, while adding a lot of more ... its nothing they (Bioware) should be proud of ...

and still DA:O is by far superior to DA2 since the actual content outshine the flaws, which is not DA2 case ..."

No, no it realy isn't. The writing, the characters, and the story are all superior in DA2. The only things DA1 does outright better is the character system (i want to be a dwarf!!!), and the environemnts aren't repetive.

Otherwise equal.

"I don't know Mr. Laidlaw. I have no idea who he is. But please stop him. Do not let him continue. He is making everything worse. He is projecting his own likes and dislikes into an RPG (as far as my personal opinion of what an RPG is), and it fails terribly because he knows not what that even is, at least that what I get from the interviews."

Laidlaw could be fired today, and BIO will still make the same games. The docs are the bosses so they make the final decisions.

Screaming your opinion like a child does not make it any more "factual".  Personally, I felt the the writing, story and the characters were horrible in DA2.* I think through-out the build up and release of DA2 Laidlaw and company were emphasizing what they saw as flaws in DA:) in order to justify their own vision of the game. It sounded like they hated Bioware's best selling game of all time, which is a poor buisness strategy to set yourself up as your own strawman. 


*In fact, I found these qualities so bad that my enthusiasm for SW:ToR has cooled a bit, even if they are being made by different branches of the studio.

[Halo Quea]

Killer3000ad wrote...

Yup Mike's totally not aware of the backlash or he's buried his head in the sands on this one and is sticking to his guns. Still no admission that reusing the same cave or same house 20 times is pure laziness cause it's okay as long as there was more content. I got news for you Mike, your additional content boiled down to fetch quests that ended with,"here I found this!", "oh thank you! I don't know what I'd do without it".  Even the responses on GameSpot is pretty harsh.

He mustn't touch DA3!

Oh man, I hated those things!   

"Thank the Maker! Where did you find this?!"

I kept thinking how does Hawke even know who these things even belong to?  He doesn't talk with the people in Kirkwall so how does he know who owns what or who is looking for something?  In Origins if you talked with someone you learned what they had lost or what they were looking for.   In DA2 Hawke is just picking things up and bringing them back, no prior conversations needed.  

It's really just so nutty when any of DA2's designer/creators comes out seemingly oblivious as to just how silly so many things in the game are.  

[Sanguinerin]

You know, I'm just happy that I didn't have to see the phrase "resting on our laurels" or some of the other terrible marketing lines that they've put out with this game.

As for the "switch to the hard difficulty setting" response, I don't care about combat at all. My only complaint about combat was the enemies jumping in from the sky into a battle. That's as much as I care about combat. I play RPGs for a good story, and combat just so happens to be present in most of them. Switching difficulty settings won't make me enjoy this game.

Doing some more work and improving what we have with better choices and consequences, more in-depth conversations, changes to companions considering this game takes place over ten seven years, giving more life to the overall dead city of Kirkwall so that it's different in year one as it is in year seven, cutting out so many of the NPC copies of each other or at least placing them more appropriately so that the world doesn't consist of so many twins in a cutscene, and ... so on and so forth.

If changing the combat difficulty setting to hard does all of that, then I will happily change my settings up and follow Mr. Laidlaw's advice so that the game no longer feels quite so simple.

Modifié par HallowedWarden, 14 avril 2011 - 09:38 .

[Miashi]

jds1bio wrote...
And as for Hard/Nightmare, how else should they scale up the difficulty?  If they leave all the HP and stat checks the same, what other variables can they tweak?  They could be more hasty I guess, getting in two attacks for every one of yours.  They could do the opposite and decide to sit a round of attacks out also.  What is the solution?

Sorry this is a quote a few pages back, but I'm catching up on this thread:

Add/combine more fight mechanics. That's what they do in world of warcraft heroic bosses; they add or mix multiple mechanics together, on top of the standard more hp more damage thing. Doesn't always have to be more waves of adds, more hp and more damage only.

[Melca36]

Halo Quea wrote...

Killer3000ad wrote...

Yup Mike's totally not aware of the backlash or he's buried his head in the sands on this one and is sticking to his guns. Still no admission that reusing the same cave or same house 20 times is pure laziness cause it's okay as long as there was more content. I got news for you Mike, your additional content boiled down to fetch quests that ended with,"here I found this!", "oh thank you! I don't know what I'd do without it".  Even the responses on GameSpot is pretty harsh.

He mustn't touch DA3!

Oh man, I hated those things!   

"Thank the Maker! Where did you find this?!"

I kept thinking how does Hawke even know who these things even belong to?  He doesn't talk with the people in Kirkwall so how does he know who owns what or who is looking for something?  In Origins if you talked with someone you learned what they had lost or what they were looking for.   In DA2 Hawke is just picking things up and bringing them back, no prior conversations needed.  

It's really just so nutty when any of DA2's designer/creators comes out seemingly oblivious as to just how silly so many things in the game are.  

I found those delivery quests insulting to my intelligence as a gamer.

[Sanguinerin]

Melca36 wrote...

Halo Quea wrote...

Killer3000ad wrote...

Yup Mike's totally not aware of the backlash or he's buried his head in the sands on this one and is sticking to his guns. Still no admission that reusing the same cave or same house 20 times is pure laziness cause it's okay as long as there was more content. I got news for you Mike, your additional content boiled down to fetch quests that ended with,"here I found this!", "oh thank you! I don't know what I'd do without it".  Even the responses on GameSpot is pretty harsh.

He mustn't touch DA3!

Oh man, I hated those things!   

"Thank the Maker! Where did you find this?!"

I kept thinking how does Hawke even know who these things even belong to?  He doesn't talk with the people in Kirkwall so how does he know who owns what or who is looking for something?  In Origins if you talked with someone you learned what they had lost or what they were looking for.   In DA2 Hawke is just picking things up and bringing them back, no prior conversations needed.  

It's really just so nutty when any of DA2's designer/creators comes out seemingly oblivious as to just how silly so many things in the game are.  

I found those delivery quests insulting to my intelligence as a gamer.

I think everyone in Kirkwall engraves their names and general hang-out locations into everything they own, so that if it goes missing it can easily be returned to the owner.

[Miashi]

Volourn wrote...

"DAO was about the Warden. "

Nope, it was about the archdemon.

DA:2 was about Anders.

[Vice-Admiral von Titsling]

HallowedWarden wrote...
I think everyone in Kirkwall engraves their names and general hang-out locations into everything they own, so that if it goes missing it can easily be returned to the owner.

This is clearly the wrong time to point out that Kirkwall used to be a large slavery trading hub, isn't it?

[Bostur]

jds1bio wrote...

I think I agree, but I'm not sure.  Tell me if I'm misinterpreting this, but I think you're saying that in the lower difficulty levels there are no tactics because you don't need to think, but at the higher difficulty levels there are tactics.  But, there should be tactics at all levels, just smarter ones at higher difficulty settings.

If I got that right, I get your viewpoint.  But isn't it still up to the player to decide what abilities to get, and when/how to use them?

And as for Hard/Nightmare, how else should they scale up the difficulty?  If they leave all the HP and stat checks the same, what other variables can they tweak?  They could be more hasty I guess, getting in two attacks for every one of yours.  They could do the opposite and decide to sit a round of attacks out also.  What is the solution?

Theres the lazy approach of running a script to add +10 to all stats in the game and then forget about it. Then theres the quality approach of playing through on all difficulty levels to make sure they work right. Maybe some fights needs to be tweaked at certain levels, maybe composition of enemy forces needs to be diffferent at some levels. Sometimes this might turn up problems in the core combat mechanics that could be improved upon.

A fight that works great in normal mode may break completely at a higher difficulty and that should be accounted for. My experience at hard level was that the difficulty was very uneven, some fights incredibly easy others very hard. There also seemed to be a lot of luck involved, random occurences that was hard to counter or react to.

My experience in DAO on hard was that using a different approach, trying out other tactics had a very big impact. This wasn't really the case in DA2. In DA2 the most important factor was how quick I was able to manually move my characters, giving orders was too buggy and inefficient and the tactics window completely useless. It felt more like playing a 3rd person shooter. The end result for me was frustration and boredom.

Ideally I want difficulty to be about clever playing and less about quick reactions or frequent pausing.

But in DA2 when archers were shooting at me from a distance, and
sword-wielders were picking on the weakest ranged character, while mages
stood back and tried to separate my tank duos, I thought they were
using tactics.  When enemy assasins would appear from the shadows and
assassinate the character that was attacking the strongest melee enemy,
were they not using tactics?  Or were they being really dumb?

Yes archers and mages were stationary and shooting. Thats not clever tactics thats just the definition of those types of enemies. ;-) Seems to me enemies pretty much just moved as little as possible and attacked the closest target, or had a priority list. Its easy to flank an enemy when you can teleport to the battle, and of course the NPCs was often lucky to end up next to a mage when they teleported in all the time. It all seemed pretty random to me.

Modifié par Bostur, 14 avril 2011 - 10:01 .

[Reinveil]

Miashi wrote...

Volourn wrote...

"DAO was about the Warden. "

Nope, it was about the archdemon.

DA:2 was about Anders.

In part, yes.

[DraCZeQQ]

Miashi wrote...

Volourn wrote...

"DAO was about the Warden. "

Nope, it was about the archdemon.

DA:2 was about Anders.

I though it was about Variic. Either way definetly not about Hawke ...

[dantares83]

i don't mind him making a lesser game than DAO but please, I hope he would just admit that recycling dungeons is so NOT FUN!

[Miashi]

Well, I'd care to elaborate more if we weren't in a non-spoiler forums, but I'm following Volourn's logic. If DA:O is about the archdemon, then DA:2 is about Anders.

[fchopin]

Miashi wrote...

Well, I'd care to elaborate more if we weren't in a non-spoiler forums, but I'm following Volourn's logic. If DA:O is about the archdemon, then DA:2 is about Anders.

Not for me, he was never in my team.
 
Anders was Bioware's story, he invented the atom bomb just like the ending had Greek or Roman statues waking up from the dead.
 
In DA3 we will have ray guns to make up for the big explosions in DA2.

[Perles75]

I can understand that Laidlaw has his own ideas on what a RPG should be and, having been in charge of DA2, he tried to implement his ideas in the new game. This said from a person (me) that thinks that making a game more interesting and less hardcore does not necessarily mean "bet everything on combat and on the personal stories of the companions". (and thus thinks that DAO and DA2 are not going in the direction I would like to see in a RPG, regarding game mechanics)

What I cannot accept at all is when he tries to sell evident faults of the game (as the recycled maps) for something ok or even positive.

[Reinveil]

Miashi wrote...

Well, I'd care to elaborate more if we weren't in a non-spoiler forums, but I'm following Volourn's logic. If DA:O is about the archdemon, then DA:2 is about Anders.

The archdemon is the primary antagonist of Origins and what you spend the entire game working towards defeating.
 
In DAII the...uh...errr...mages...Qunari...templars...darkspawn...umm...lyrium relics...

In DAII losing your patience is the primary antagonist and what you spend the entire game working towards preventing.

[DraCZeQQ]

Reinveil wrote...

Miashi wrote...

Well, I'd care to elaborate more if we weren't in a non-spoiler forums, but I'm following Volourn's logic. If DA:O is about the archdemon, then DA:2 is about Anders.

The archdemon is the primary antagonist of Origins and what you spend the entire game working towards defeating.
 
In DAII the...uh...errr...mages...Qunari...templars...darkspawn...umm...lyrium relics...

In DAII losing your patience is the primary antagonist and what you spend the entire game working towards preventing.

Yea and AFTER you lost all the patience ... the Anders shows up and does absolutly retarded thing that negate any of your ingame progress or effort ...

[Boiny Bunny]

Volourn wrote...

"BUT THE MANUAL SAYS."

Nowhere in his blog does he claimM Laidlaw did nothing for the game.

He's an ex employee pouting over his ex company so his opinions, at best, are coloured.

Why would BIO credit Laidlaw as a lead designer if that was not his duty? What motivation does BIO have to lie about that?

The ridiculous idiocy to try to pretend otherwise by the silly gooses here is mind numbing stupidity.

Laidlaw was a Lead Designer on DA1. This is FACT.

Let let give you tip.  When you know absolutely nothing about a topic, don't bother posting rampant speculation about it - this will get you nowhere.

If you had been following Dragon Age Origins through it's entire development cycle, you would be well aware that Laidlaw was only attached to the project AFTER the entire game had been completed on the PC.  Laidlaw was put in charge of porting it to consoles.

Take from that whatever you will.  Those are the FACTS.

He took a completed game (which had 2 lead developers - James Ohlen who was the lead developer early on and left, then Brent Knowles, who was the lead developer for nearly the entire game's development until the PC version was finished and ready for release), and ported it.  Laidlaw developed the console versions from the PC version, which was already done.

So yes, Laidlaw was a lead designer for Origins by title.  He was the lead designer for the console versions.

But all that he actually did, was port a finished game to the consoles.

And one could well argue, that he did a terrible job at even that (the console versions of DA:O had numerous large problems - but that's beyond the scope of this discussion).