110 réponses à ce sujet

[AreleX]

I think people are missing the point.

The overall point is not that the game was made easier (it was already easy), and nobody is complaining about the very welcomed bug fixes, but that it took a lot of the things that people enjoyed out of the game for absolutely no reason.

This patch took just about all the things that made playing the game fun, and shat all over them. Why? The game is even easier now, things go even faster now, and encounters are still total facerolls, albeit in a slightly different manner, using slightly different tactics, so what was the point?

The story in DA2 was a HUGE disappointment for me (well-documented by just about every poster in the universe, so I won't go into that), and the only thing that kept me playing the game was all the fun stuff I could do with the combat system. That's all gone now.

The patch would've been GREAT if it just corrected the bugs and broken abilities, but instead, it added a bunch of changes that NOBODY asked for.

THAT is why it pissed me off so much. Not difficulty, but FUN.

[Lucav5]

mr_afk wrote...

I agree with the OP. Changes this drastic should only be made really soon after the release of the game or not made at all.

I'm talking about the changes that nobody asked for, e.g. the massive nerf-age to reavers/warriors on a whole and the huge buffing to shadow.

Fixing bugs is alright and I could live with haste and pinning shot working properly but changing some of the core aspects of the combat seems just silly. Most of the "min-maxers" seemed to find the combat quite bearable and enjoyable so why was there a need to change anything?

I didn't even hear that many combat-related complaints besides that of knockbacks, assassins, (and waves but that doesn't count) - and those were all manageable via certain learnable strategies. Figuring ways around those challenges were what made the game fun. I wrote a whole guide to how-to-deal with assassins and this patch has turned them into a joke.

And the game doesn't even feel more 'balanced'. (Unless making things ridiculously easy counts as balancing)
Oh well, at least I can find solace in how this patch owns Arelex's guides waaaay more 

I agree with just about everything you said here. Sweeping balance changes months after a games release (single player game mind you!) only serve to alienate those of us that are entertained by the games combat. 2h warriors were destroyed by this patch, and for what? Was anybody complaining about the combat system aside from small nitpicks like knockdown and "invinci-flip"?
I will not be updating the game, and if dlcs require the current patch, count me out.  

[john-in-france]

I installed 1.03 and am having video issues and problems, that my wife who has not installed any patches does not experience at all.

Instead she runs the standard game with mods for magic, rogues and warriors from Dragonage Nexus. She can even equip her entire party with different armour. There is even a mod to strip the secondary armour/robe requirement, so blood mages do not have to boost willpower when they don't use it, for equipping mage robes. She seems to be having more fun than I am.

It seems that the modding route (via override file) is giving a better game than the official patches, and all for free!

Just pointing out that you have options...

[Firefeng]

AreleX wrote...

I think people are missing the point.

The overall point is not that the game was made easier (it was already easy), and nobody is complaining about the very welcomed bug fixes, but that it took a lot of the things that people enjoyed out of the game for absolutely no reason.

This patch took just about all the things that made playing the game fun, and shat all over them. Why? The game is even easier now, things go even faster now, and encounters are still total facerolls, albeit in a slightly different manner, using slightly different tactics, so what was the point?

Actually, one of the biggest complaints with the battle system was that, while the game was too easy in most circumstances, most bosses and elites had entirely too much HP, leading to the sense that killing them was akin to killing a raid boss in an MMO.  You may have been able to drop elite bosses in 30-60 seconds in Nightmare difficulty, but a majority of the playerbase were hardly playing under your conditions or with your expertise.  The changes to the battle system lowered the difficulty and the banal repetition of some of the boss fights but increased the difficulty of fights involving larger numbers of normals and elites.  

Do I think they need to add another difficulty on top of Nightmare?  Sure.  But the worst thing this update did was brick Warriors using Sunder, unnecessarily nerf 2-handed Warriors (who needed a buff in the first place, with dual wielding rogues needing the nerf), and trivialize Archer Rogues--this last bit is personally annoying to me, actually, since I was in the middle of a playthrough with my elemental Archer Hawke, and was enjoying how utterly broken he was.  

And, a bit of an aside to BioWare, but considering that one of the first annoying bugs was one where stats were compoundingly subtracted from your character with each reload, that Sunder bug really shouldn't have gotten through QA (although I do know how difficult it can be to account for unforeseen circumstances in the interaction of every bit of code...sometimes the ghost in the machine tosses egg in all our faces while laughing maniacally.)  

Just sayin'.  :happy:

I installed 1.03 and am having video issues and problems, that my wife who has not installed any patches does not experience at all.

Stupid question, I know, but do you have the latest video drivers installed for your graphics card?  I was having a few problems with DA2 after the patch until I updated mine, and I was still using DirectX 9.0, which shouldn't have even been affected.  

Last bit o' soapboxing before I actually make myself productive in the real world:  All of these changes have actually prompted me to play DA2 even more.  I was getting bored with the battle system (since the story doesn't diverge enough to warrant multiple playthroughs after you've been nice, a wise-ass, and an **** in each one), so now I've endeavored to play through it some more with some different builds just to see how it plays out.

Modifié par Firefeng, 13 juin 2011 - 01:40 .

[AreleX]

I don't care about their HP being nerfed, that's one of the things I put in the 'don't mind either way' category, I'm talking about nerfing Warriors, Nerfing Assassinate (one of my favorite things, huge numbers), buffing the **** out of Shadow (which was already the best spec next to Assassin), etc.

I don't NEED any of the above things back to do well, but they are what made the game FUN for me. I couldn't care less about the HP nerf, in the grand scheme of things. That's not what bothers me.

[aftohsix]

 This forum has died out because all the trolls, critics and Witcher 2 shills have chased off many of the people who would come here to actually discuss DA2.

[snackrat]

Here's an idea: don't download it. e_e

[uberdowzen]

@ OP,

Uh...but it looks like it makes the game a lot more fun. I haven't installed it yet (hadn't realised that they'd released a new patch until I saw this thread) but reading over the patch notes it looks like it makes the game more tactical, reduces some of the pointless micromanagement and means that I don't have to constantly hold down the tab key any more. You want all that gone because it makes some walkthroughs and speedruns irrelevant? (The latter of which very few gamers care about)

[Boiny Bunny]

I appreciate what you're trying to get at TC, but surely it won't be long before a new series of videos emerge showcasing incredible feats using the new balance system?

From my perspective, this patch was enough to get me wanting to do a second playthrough (I started one then gave up a bit into Act 1) - the balance changes make the game far more fair and fun to play. I hope that there are more balance changes down the road too - though probably not quite as extreme as this one in one go.

[AreleX]

uberdowzen wrote...

@ OP,

Uh...but it looks like it makes the game a lot more fun. I haven't installed it yet (hadn't realised that they'd released a new patch until I saw this thread) but reading over the patch notes it looks like it makes the game more tactical, reduces some of the pointless micromanagement and means that I don't have to constantly hold down the tab key any more. You want all that gone because it makes some walkthroughs and speedruns irrelevant? (The latter of which very few gamers care about)

it doesn't make the game more tactical or do any of the other things you said, but i'm not this patch's target audience at all, so take that with a grain of salt

[FlyingWalrus]

panchamkauns wrote...

Please consider this, Bioware, when patching future games. Fix bugs by all means, but don’t tinker like this with balance and gameplay mechanics. Even if you think – even if you know you can better them, consider them set in stone. Because gamers will.

This is an awful mindset.

I don't care about your 1337 speed runs or ridiculously imbalanced min-maxed builds. I care about having a game that is enjoyable to play and not frustratingly mired in ten thousand poor design choices, oversights and bugs. In this day and age of post-release game support it would be addled-minded to NOT fix bugs and gameplay.

[uberdowzen]

AreleX wrote...

it doesn't make the game more tactical or do any of the other things you said, but i'm not this patch's target audience at all, so take that with a grain of salt

If you say so but could I just point out...

it makes the game more
tactical

In many fights, enemies now move less quickly at the start of combat.
This slower initial pace makes tactical positioning more useful and
important.

reduces some of the pointless micromanagement

If the force of an enemy attack interrupts a party member's current
action, the party member now resumes the action once he or she has
recovered.

don't have to constantly hold down the tab key any more

In the gameplay options menu, It is now possible to enable persistent
highlighting on usable objects, similar to holding down the tab key

[mr_afk]

FlyingWalrus wrote...

panchamkauns wrote...

Please consider this, Bioware, when patching future games. Fix bugs by all means, but don’t tinker like this with balance and gameplay mechanics. Even if you think – even if you know you can better them, consider them set in stone. Because gamers will.

This is an awful mindset.

I don't care about your 1337 speed runs or ridiculously imbalanced min-maxed builds. I care about having a game that is enjoyable to play and not frustratingly mired in ten thousand poor design choices, oversights and bugs. In this day and age of post-release game support it would be addled-minded to NOT fix bugs and gameplay.

I think the problem is that this isn't an mmorpg and we should be getting the 'finished' product from the outset (with the exception of dlc etc). The gameplay mechanics thus should be polished enough to provide the balance and challenge that was intended. Bugs are understandable, and patches are there to fix them, but the core mechanics are not 'bugs' that need to be fixed.

From my understanding, lots of these changes were made for the more casual non-min-maxing crowd who didn't really care much for the combat in the first place. Complaints about things like knock-backs are fair enough as they take some time to get accustomed to and I'm not sure how many people have played DA2 the number of times the 'min-maxing crowd' has. Sure, I suppose you could consider the having too hard a difficulty for the more casual difficulties (e.g. for those playing only for the storyline) an oversight, but it also means that when we optimise our builds/strategies to get the best results we end up researching and learning all these core aspects of the combat, figuring ways around them such that they no longer become a problem.

Thus changes outside of maybe toggles or lower/higher difficulties means that they are re-shaping the entire landscape of the combat. And not in a good way.
We're not complaining about increased challenge (god no, that would actually be a worthy change to make). I'm not even complaining that all our previous theory-crafting has been rendered somewhat redundant. (though sucks to be Arelex with all those guides to maintain )

We're actually disappointed that these changes make 'l33t speedruns' even faster and 'ridiculously imbalanced min-maxed builds'  even more imbalanced. Added to this, there were lots of arbitary changes which were there for no apparent reason which just serve to mess up old strategies and require new ones.

It may look like they were intending to increase the length of battles but they didn't. Overall they made nightmare a joke with hardly any challenge to cater for the complaints of casual gamers who don't even play on nightmare. If Arelex is right about how they nerfed warriors because people on normal difficulty were saying it was too easy...I don't know what to say.

Modifié par mr_afk, 15 juin 2011 - 05:19 .

[Mezinger]

Fantastic! The game desperately needed rebalancing! I look forward to patching and trying to once more push through my 2nd play through... rebalancing, patches, DLC that actually allows for more of a story, bring it on! The legions of DA fans quietly await a sequel worthy of it's origins.

[erynnar]

I must admit, with the new patch considering a third playthrough.

[AreleX]

uberdowzen wrote...

stuff

These are all things that are irrelevant to me, since I have had very little to no difficulty with any of them, hence why I said 'I'm not the target audience for this patch'.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Dragon Age 2 is a zero-sum game. The only thing that matters is damage. If you're doing enough damage, everything else is negligible. When you don't know how to go about doing this is when you run into problems.

mr_afk wrote...

It may look like they were intending to increase the length of battles but they didn't. Overall they made nightmare a joke with hardly any challenge to cater for the complaints of casual gamers who don't even play on nightmare. If Arelex is right about how they nerfed warriors because people on normal difficultywere saying it was too easy...I don't know what to say.

Read my patch notes thread. When the issue of 'wtf why nerf warriors they aren't even that great' was brought up, Luke Barrett basically says 'Well, you must remember that most people play this game on normal...'.

Look, guys. I'm for some of the ideas implemented in the patch, and I've talked to Luke Barrett, so I know he is not trying to ruin the game, take away people's fun, or anything like that. His heart is in the right place, and I can tell that he does care about game balance and difficulty, but this patch went about doing those things in the complete wrong way in most areas.

Modifié par AreleX, 15 juin 2011 - 05:58 .

[mr_afk]

Yeah, Luke's pretty cool. If only he could create that uber-nightmare difficulty he talks about.
I just find it ridiculous that I have to do a solo run to find any sort of challenge now. But I suppose I might not fall into the target audience either...

And I suppose the patch did inspire a few more playthroughs for me, just to test out all the changes etc. If only they maintained some of the challenge while removing issues such as invinci-flips....

[AreleX]

mr_afk wrote...
But I suppose I might not fall into the target audience either...

no, you are definitely in the target audience

mr afk is the worst player

[mr_afk]

 I suppose I set myself up for that one 

[Gunso91]

It's.. kinda odd to try to reason out why they'd wanna balance the game for those who play on Normal.. you'd think if people found the game too easy on normal they'd just up the difficulty, either via new playthrough or just Esc -> Options -> Gameplay-- one can always speculate that they might've been more succesful by making the AI smarter in the harder difficulties.. maybe give enemies some more abilities rather than changing the character builds people have been familiarizing themselves with for about 2-3 months now?

At any rate the patch doesn't ruin the game for me and fixes a lot of bothersome bugs (although introducing the Sunder one which is annoying) but I can't help but get a lil' sad frown when I look at my warriors now

[In Exile]

AreleX wrote...

I think people are missing the point.

The overall point is not that the game was made easier (it was already easy), and nobody is complaining about the very welcomed bug fixes, but that it took a lot of the things that people enjoyed out of the game for absolutely no reason.

But you just gave an excellent reason - the gamers that played on normal had a potentially suboptimal experience.

If Bioware's data says: 65% that still play play on normal, and 1.6% that still play play on nightmare, then it's obvious which group ought to be catered to with respect to the gameplay.

The patch would've been GREAT if it just corrected the bugs and broken abilities, but instead, it added a bunch of changes that NOBODY asked for.

THAT is why it pissed me off so much. Not difficulty, but FUN.

I think it's significantly more fun than before. For example, if you don't want to play on nightmare with an assasin, the game no longer tells you to go **** yourself.

[AreleX]

Suboptimal experience how? Too easy? Then TURN UP THE DIFFICULTY, don't complain and ruin things for others. Too hard? Play casual, or come over to the gameplay forums and learn something. Can't use what you really want to? Too bad, because the patch actually made for less variation ability-wise, if you want to do well and be successful.

I've said over and over and over that I'm aware people like myself are a very small percentage, a percentage that they will freely alienate if necessary. I get it. I understand.

Why are people not getting that my frustrations with the patch stem from a bunch of pointless nerfs to things that I enjoyed? That it has very little to do with the actual difficulty of the game? Even if I *DID* play on normal difficulty, I would still have a lot of the same complaints if they screwed with a bunch of things that I enjoyed for absolutely no reason. The difficulty I play has no bearing on that.

And what are you saying about Assassin? You can play Duelist/Shadow just fine, nobody is/was forcing you to play Assassin. Hell, Assassin/Shadow was already the best combo pre-patch, and they made it even BETTER by giving Shadow a ridiculous and unnecessary buff, while Duelist, which was already the worst, got basically nothing.

I just feel like no matter what I say, none of the posters here are going to get that I'm NOT stepping down from my high-horse and being an elitist, saying 'wow, this patch caters to the terrible players that can't play higher than normal', or ANYTHING like that. The gameplay/bugs fixes are welcome. A few of the changes to gameplay are welcome. What is not welcome, however, is nerfing a bunch of things that players on ALL difficulties enjoy, and will cite as a reason that they continue to play an overall very subpar and mediocre game.

Modifié par AreleX, 15 juin 2011 - 07:48 .

[kazuya246]

I can see why you are upset AreleX. This patch hardly affects me at all because i only beat the game once before the patch. So from my angle they had improved a lot of things. The things they nerfed i could really care less about because it barely affects me. I never played as a blood mage(except merril) nor do i play a 2h warriors. The one thing that had me was the change to all blood mage items to only increase the trade-off to 0.25.

[nightscrawl]

Khayness wrote...

This isn't an MMO. And the combat balance is the least of DA2's problems.

This patch is "We didn't intend for you to have fun this way, so stop having fun, here are the new rules." I quit MMOs because I didn't have 100% control over my gameplay, I don't want this stuff again in a single player game.

Hardcore RPG gamers will soon be min-maxing like hell again, they will always find loopholes. Combat rebalance in a single player game shouldn't be the top priority, I'm using 1.03 for its bugfixes. I don't give a damn about imba abilities, I want my game content what got robbed from me because of bugs.

You, and most of those here, are thinking about patches and balance issues in the wrong way. You think that they "tried to fix things that weren't broken," but I don't know if that is correct. A game dev looks at things differently from the player, and I know this from reading countless forum posts on various games, including yes, the patch-reliant MMOs (specifically World of Warcraft, which I am most familiar with.)

Balance issues, especially with combat, really are all about that word: balance. If there is a talent/skill build that everybody uses because it's "the best," players feel restricted to using that build, especially when you get to higher end content (MMO raids, nightmare modes, etc.) That is not balanced. There is no "I'm going to use such-and-such build instead because I like the 'idea' of my character having those talents for RP reasons." Or if there is, it's somewhat limited. Game devs, and I agree, consider this a problem.

Now, that is not to say that the min-maxing crowd will not still be there to find things that work best. Builds that give the largest crits, have the highest tank threat, the most efficient CC, and so forth. But balance fixes are designed so those "best of the best" builds matter less, so a player doesn't feel as obligated to use them.

With regard to single-player games being different from MMOs, and apples and oranges, I might have said that 10+ years ago when we didn't have game consoles connected to the internet. But now, you buy a hard copy of a game to play on a console and even those get patched. It used to be that console games spent years in development because everything had to be perfect. The shipped product was all there was. But that is no longer the case. True, MMOs are multi-player, but in terms of patches and updates, most games are the same now. Companies can afford to release games with some bugs because they know they can be patched at a later date. It's how things work now.


[edit to add]

I just read AreleX's post above about some of the rogue changes. There is really nothing I can say to counter that. However, my post about balance changes and the reasons for them still stand. Unfortunately, one of the problems that games suffer from is that companies have a limited number of testers and such, so changes are sometimes released that don't take advantage of every scenario that a player would experience. I've seen this many times. You get a new patch, play as you normally would and think to yourself "does anybody there actually play <class>?!" after something is broken, or buffed beyond compare.

The only way I can see for a company to respond to complaints is to explain the reasoning behind various class changes. It's been my experience that that is hardly ever the case though, unless there is a change that is clearly a response to many player comments on a given issue.

=/

Modifié par nightscrawl, 15 juin 2011 - 10:11 .

[Maria Caliban]

Patch 1.03 KILLED MY DOG.