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[Godeshus]

If anyone here is anything like me, you'll completely understand me when I say I get annoyed really easily by the little things. The big things just aren't an issue for me, I can take them into context and that's fine.  This post is to hear what you guys consider to be those little things that get under your skin. To make it fair ( and because ultimately I am my own devil's advocate), let's also hear those tiny little things that make the game that much more enjoyable as well. I'll start it off with the following:

1) Running away in battle. It really drives me nuts when I start running away in battle, get like 20 feet away, then the enemy swings his sword and kills me. I understand that it's because the virtual dice were rolled and it registered a hit, but still; I'm 20 feet away. What is this darkspawn, a jedi?

2)The quickbar, and clickablity. I can't count the amount of times I've clicked on my hotbar and dragged the ability/spell/whatever and dragged it off the bar instead of activating it. I mean, come on Bioware. A slight delay on the drag option wouldn't be that hard to implement. We're talking about a fraction of a second here. I find it really interrupts the flow the game.

3) Dialog choices. This is for Bioware games in general. I'd say easily 50% of the time there aren't any dialog options that I would actually choose were I in my character's situation.  For  many years now I've been wishing for some sort of text recognition AI, where you have an option to type in what you would actually want to say in a certain situation, and the AI looks at the keywords and gives you a valid response.  I have to be honest and say that DA:O is better with their options than their previous games, but there it is anyway.

4) Go F*** yourself, fluorospar. I didn't realise I was playing neverwinternights 3 when I bought this game. Fluorospar? Malachite? give me a break. A little originality goes a long way. What's the point of recycling concepts that were lame to begin with? Bioware came up with a lot of unique and interesting gameplay concepts for DO:A, and IMHO just backtracked by throwing in the same old filler content. This is a professional developer we're talking about here. Don't you have an entire department dedicated to thinking s**it up? Like, you know...the part in the development process where you conceptualize?

Anyway, maybe it is a little bit of a rant, but it just so happens that I am in a prety bad mood presently because of stuff that is in no way related to the game. My intention, however, is not to rant, and I promise I will be back with some good and pleasant things to say about DO:A. I do really enjoy the game and these little things don't even come close to ruining the game for me, but I do find them quite annoying.

And before the first troll that pops along and says "Wow! you're complaining just for the sake of complaining", I'll beat you to it and just tell you straight out that you're probably right.

All right, your turn.

[Jesse van Herk]

Godeshus: Your own post is an opinion as well - don't insult people who disagree with you, or you will have a run-in with the ban hammer.

[Gabo]

 Its ok to rant about the game and its part of what these forums are for; not everyone will be happy with all the design choices and feedback is one of the best ways we can find out what's important to improve in our games.

From this thread I'd like to mention about a few things:

1) For helmets, the feedback is clear: give an option to toggle them on/off or at least make them cooler looking.

2) Dialog choices. Indeed there are ways to input your own answers by voice or text and there are many papers and thesis on intelligent computer programs that can talk back and have a meaningful conversations. However, programming just one character to do that would require a lot more development time and hard drive space to hold all the data necessary than is feasible in a game, not to mention all the animations and plot variables that would have to exist to support a single conversation. So no, don't expect anything like that anytime soon.

The response to the dialogs in DA:O has been quite positive so we are quite happy with the results. Nevertheless, smaller improvements in conversation systems are something that we are constantly looking into, as well as improving the writing in our games.

3) Combat system. The combat is DA:O is, at its core, rules based, as was Baldur's gate. Some games have moved to a more hybrid combat system that uses physics and collisions but for this particular game we wanted to please fans of rules based systems, where tactical choices are much more important than quick reflexes. Having the occasional attack hit its target after it has moved away was one of the side effects we decided to accept of combining a rules based combat system with an elegant looking animation system. I can tell you a bit about some of the development issues involved:

a) We could make it so that if you were far enough away you couldn't be hit even if the attack had already started. But that made for some really nasty exploits where you could easily make a creature chase your character and never hit it.

We could make it so that once an attack had started, you couldn't move. That was even worse though, and it made the game feel extremely unresponsive.

So we settled for c) The attack hits you even if you have already moved away. Normally you can't move too far and at afterwards the enemy needs to move towards you to hit again, giving the expected tactical result. It was a similar issue for arrows that seem to bend towards where the target is moving.

The gameplay is different than what you would get with a physics and collision based action game and requires different skills, but, as most people have agreed, is a lot of fun.



I can't really comment on if or when we might do anything specific about these things, but you can be sure that Bioware is listening and is constantly looking for ways to improve our games.