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After playing through The Witcher 2 and seeing that the game made many of the same decisions that Dragon Age 2 made that people usually criticize DA2 for, I'm trying to rationalize why TW2 gets so much more praise. I sure that for some, it might be becuase TW2 has recently managed to one-up Crysis 2 and Metro 2033 as a graphics benchmark (let's face it, this game is beautiful and ubersampling is unplayable, making it a perfect benchmark game) but I'm looking more at this from a perspective of game design rather than graphics. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.
1. A three-act structure.
DA2 got a lot of criticism for taking a world that was once open and then making it both confined and linear. TW2 did the same thing but the difference was that each act took place in a different location. DA2 could have been improved if either Kirkwall changed with each act or if the game took place in a different city in each act. Moreover, TW2 whet players' appetites for more while DA2 just made people happy that the game was over due to the reused dungeons and A button mashing. Also, TW2 built up to act 3, DA2 simply dumped the final act onto you abruptly and then randomly hit you with the fianl quest just as quickly. There was no real indication of what players where going to fight or what they were doing in DA2 while TW2 gives us Letho as an antagonist right off the bat. TW2 simply told a better story because of it due to it being more focused since a linear story needs an objective set for the protagonists right off the bat.
2. The took a turned based system and made it hack and slash
The real issue with DA2 was that it went halfway there and as a result felt clunky while TW2 feels fluid as an action RPG. DA2 is just uneven and I find my self mashing the A button as fast as possible to make sure that I increase my DPS instead of focusing on mobility like a true action RPG should be doing. DA3 should be either a pure action RPG with the ability to dodge and more interesting boss fights and less of a turn-based/real time hybrid or go back to DAO's combat system. The current combat system tries to appeal to everyone and instead appeals to nobody. Giving consoles auto-attack back made the game feel like DAO again which fixed this problem but did so far too late and DA3 should have this available as the default option.
3. Too few abilities and too many upgrades
This is actually a criticism with TW2 that I have but no game is truly perfect. It needs to be improved with both games and is really my biggest complaint with TW2. Hopefully both series will offer players more options for abilities in combat intead of wasting level-ups on upgrading abilities that the player already has and DA3 will actually go back to allowing players to select lockpicking upon level up instead of taking four levels to learn how to lockpick at the cost of other stats.
4. A cliffhanging ending that sets up an expansion pack to nickle and dime players
The issue here is that TW2 whet players appetites for more while DA2 made gamers happy that it was finally over since they no longer had to deal with the tedium. Less pointless delivery quests and reused environments would have gone a long way towards making gamers feel like they wanted to buy the post-endgame DLC. Also, months after release, DA2 didn't solve the conflict that the endgame created, we only got an item pack that nobody wanted.
5. Bugs at launch
TW2 currently has a number of bugs, including a memory leak. DA2 was also incredibly buggy at release. The difference is that CDProject have said that we'll be getting a patch in a few days, DA2 took a month to patch. The same comparison could be made with Fallout: New Vegas, the game was patched only about two weeks after launch which cleared up a number of issues. Bioware not fixing their product in a timely manner showed that they didn't care about their fans.
6. A Mass Effect-style dialog system
The real problem was the fact that Hawke's personalities were forced on players, instead of letting players choose what they wanted to say in each conversation rather than selecting their version of Hawke at the beginning of the game. Also, TW2 gave players more persuade options and Geralt's personality was mostly based on persuade choices that upgraded the more you used them. DA2's dialog system was a wreck and didn't even give players a neutral/laconic option on the wheel while persuades were few and far between. The dialog wheel is fine, but ditch the personalities and give players more situations to persuade people
Now for things that TW2 did right that Bioware could learn form
1. Optimization
TW2's low settings actually run very, very well on most people's machines while DA2 on the 360 had characters expanding and contracting during cutscenes which said to me that DA2 was a bad PC to console port that didn't take advantage of lesser hardware. This was really a slap in the face after Bioware promised that DA2 would run better on consoles. Crysis 2 is yet another good example of a good PC to console port while the Assassin's Creed games are good examples of good console to PC ports (if you ignore Ubisoft Montreal's horrible DRM). If consoles are that much of a priority. Just remember to not punish players for not having a gaming PC or choosing one platform over another.
2. Minigames
TW2 offers some good minigames that were genuinely fun to play. Final Fantasy VII and Fable 2 are also good examples of this. DA2 only offered distractions in the form of delivery quests that had no story behind them for a miniscule amount of gold.
3. Graphics
Playing TW2 at medium or higher is a great experience but DA2 stylized their graphics just to get away with cutting corners. While DA2 will probably age better, it's still a low-poly game that didn't detail its world enough.
4. QTE's
I personally loved these as they made conversations and cutscenes interactive and reminded me of Heavy Rain. It's a shame that DA2 didn't have these since ME2 did.
5. Exploration
I LOVED exploring in TW2, particularly since I'd frequently discover areas that sideqests wouldn't take me to. DA2's Wounded Coast was just a linear strip of land that could have been expanded.
6. Choices that actually matter
Act 2 in TW2 played out completely differently depending on how you planned on resolving the final quest of Act 1. DA2 played out the same way regardless with only a handful of decisions truly mattering. More mutually exclusive quests and ways to change the plot over the course of the game would have gone a long way to improving DA2.
7. Uncensored Nudity
The sex scenes in both DA games just looked awkward. They were done better in DA2 but mostly because the devs didn't bother to model underwear with invisible male genitalia sticking out penetrating through a pair of panties anymore due to a short dev cycle.
So that's probably why TW2 gets less crap than DA2 when they both made many of the same design decisions. So please, don't look at DA2 as a success vindicated by TW2 doing the same thing. CDProjekt simply made a MUCH better version of the same game, probably because they took four years to make it and didn't rush it out the door.
Modifié par Dasher1010, 22 mai 2011 - 09:02 .
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