[quote]hoorayforicecream wrote...
I don't think they are that drastically different. I personally like the new combat pacing a lot, though you may not. I find it flows better and makes the fights seem more interesting.[/quote]
I do agree the Origins pacing could have been improved, but for me, the change in DA2 created more problems. Ridiculous animations, buggy behaviour like enemy names becoming out of synch with their bodies, and any action I give a companion like moving somewhere is immediately interrupted by taking damage. Telling them to drink potions and they mysteriously don't do so. I actually found Origins combat much less awkward, and more realistic.
[quote]I thought that DAO combat tended to drag on, and was badly paced - every fight was front-loaded in difficulty (the first 25% of any fight where I am finding and killing the high importance targets like mages was much more exciting than the trailing 75% where all I do is cleanup), and I didn't like that.[/quote]
"He who strikes the first blow, if struck hard enough, may have no need to strike again". I don't remember who made that quote, but it refers to this very tactic. That's how real battles work, you try to overwhelm your opposition early, because that's your best chance of success. Afterwards, you pick off the rest who are likely injured/demoralized by that time. This is what you will see in any realistic depictions of battle in cinema or otherwise. What you won't see is reinforcements dropping out of the sky after the battle seemed to be over, when they would have been better served to attack from the start.
[quote]
I didn't think the issues were out of left field. Origins didn't really have any unified art direction. In that regard, practically everything was just haphazard and "generic fantasy". This is one thing I like much more about DA2. Wardens now have a uniform. Templars have uniforms. Guardsmen have uniforms. Kirkwall has architecture. Things are visually coherent. Not everything is perfect; the commoner people are copies of each other, and the generic people tend to look pretty ugly (likely a cost-saving measure for better console performance), and they had to reuse a lot of environments simply because they didn't have the time to make more. But that's not really art direction, so much as execution.[/quote]
Environment reuse and cutting corners you can see as execution, yes. What about the totally redesigned darkspawn, elves, and several important characters? Personally, I preferred Origins' style, whatever it was. I found it more realistic, and it just fit that dark fantasy theme they were going for. With DA2, it just seems like they've taken a step back. Human cauliflower ears look like garbage, the new darkspawn look nonsensical and much less intimidating, elves look like some weird Na'vi spin-off, returning characters like Alistair and Zevran look worse. They could have saved a lot of time and effort better spent elsewhere, had they not completely overhauled these things that weren't broken. I'm not against trying new things, but they knew their deadline, and it's small wonder they had to cut so many corners.
[quote]
But beyond all that, there were loads upon loads of complaints about DAO's Fade and Deep Roads sections - long dungeon crawling segments that were not well paced in terms of story advancement. The mod for "Skip the fade" in DAO has hundreds of thousands of downloads.If you look at DA2, the experience is much smoother overall.[/quote]
I'm aware of that, though personally, I actually liked those segments in DA:O. Along with the urn quest, they felt like real dungeon crawls and excursions. As for DA2, I disagree it was smoother. It bored the crap out of me. There were no real dungeon crawls, every place you went was a matter of simply staring at the compass, seeing at a glance which path goes to a dead end (which you can be assured contains a chest, and a fight that will drop from the ceiling), and which path continues forward. It was a lot like playing Diablo 2 with a maphack. Though, to be honest, by halfway through the game you didn't even need the compass anymore as you had already been through this place at least twice before.
[quote]
The skill system in DAO was lackluster too. You spent your first 12 levels or so getting Coercion, and then you might pick up Herbalism for the quest in Orzammar.
[/quote]
Personally, that's not how I would spend my skill points.
[quote]
There are those who loved the Fade, the Deep Roads, the gifts, and the skill system though, for a variety of reasons. It isn't necessarily that they're wrong, but the designers decided that such things weren't really that fun for whatever reason, so those aspects of the game were changed.
[/quote]
The issue I have is that they weren't changed, they were removed. Instead of simply improving on them, they were taken out completely. They're not hard to improve upon, I've worked to do so in my own mod, and the end result is one that I
much prefer to removing them.
[quote]
I disagree about it being hard to tell where design decision ends and lack of polish begins. I look at Legacy as a good example of that. Legacy embodies all of the design principles of DA2. Cinematic emphasis, character-driven storyline, branching plot that converges near the end, faster paced combat, etc. Many of the detractors of DA2 have even stated that Legacy is probably the best DLC Bioware's ever put out - and it is, because they actually had sufficient time to polish it.
[/quote]
And yet, I've not bought Legacy, and nor do I plan to. This is simply because, even with the polish there, the art style, animations, combat, poor attribute/talent system, gutting of crafting/non-combat skills, poor dialogue, lack of self/companion customization, nonsensical quest conclusion/lack of initiative by Hawke and overall design direction are still present. Sure, it was all made worse by the lack of polish in DA2, but the issue for myself and many others like me are the design decisions. Obviously, I didn't expect a DLC to make any drastic changes, but what little information we have had up to this point suggests they intend to continue largely on the DA2 path.
[quote]
If I honestly had to guess, I'd say that DA2's development was probably a casualty of TOR.
[/quote]
The lack of polish? Perhaps. I'd say the design changes are a casualty of the growing trend of appealing to a broader audience, while sacrificing the type of experience that myself and others like me have come to enjoy. I don't really hold what people like against them. It wouldn't be such a big deal to me if the games I like weren't becoming a dying breed. It's the attitude and the philosophy that I am so opposed to.
[quote]
These forums (like practically any forum group on the internet) represent only the most hard core fans out there. The numbers really aren't representative. Don't get me wrong - it's still useful feedback. What a lot of people don't understand is that the forum is only one avenue of gathering feedback. They also have focus groups, kleenex playtesters, telemetry data, surveys, reviews, etc. to interpret. It's useful to be sure, but I think that many overvalue the importance of the forums.
[/quote]
True, but I do believe the forums are still a pretty accurate depiction of what's going on. Everywhere I look, whether it's other gaming sites, metacritic, or people I know who don't even frequent any internet forums (and who would be considered casual gamers), the consensus is the same. Pretty much split down the middle, with an edge to people disliking DA2 (especially among people I know).
[quote]
He's claiming to be misquoted, but it's pretty clear from his word choice and his statements that he wants some sort of mea culpa from Bioware because of DA2, but he's not going to get it.[/quote]
Perhaps he is, I don't know. What I do know is the other guy kept quoting him saying that the whole DA2 team should be fired, which simply wasn't true.
[quote]
Despite thinking that Origins is an overall superior product, I still like DA2. I like many things about DA2 more than I liked Origins. I think that if they had the time to polish DA2 like they had for Origins, I would like DA2 more than Origins by a good margin.[/quote]
I guess this is where we'll just have to differ. Even if DA2 were equally as polished as Origins, the changes and the new direction simply wouldn't appeal to me nearly as much. Games like DA2 are already out there in spades, what they had in Origins I felt was special and more unique, and I'll be sad to see it go.
[quote]
I don't think many of the supporters of DA2 think that it's flawless. I haven't seen anyone say that DA2 is flawless. But by the same token, those die-hard DAO fans aren't exactly falling all over themselves to acknowledge the flaws there either. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. When you take the discussion from the game to the company, you make that jump from relevance to irrelevance, be you a supporter or detractor.
[/quote]
I've always acknowledged the flaws of Origins. That's the whole reason I started my Origins mod. I've certainly never claimed it was perfect, only superior, and that instead of changing those things in Origins that would have made it perfect, they instead changed many of the things that brought it close in the first place. As for the company, I've never made any personal insults toward them, and my focus has always been on the game itself.
[quote]In Exile wrote...
You know what? No. Bioware has to share some fault. At the end of the day, if the timeline was
so harsh that DA2 could only have 20hrs of decent content, then DA2 should have only had 1 Act and 20 hrs of decent content.
It would be one thing for Bioware to release a good, short game.
[/quote]
Honestly, I agree. When I first wrote my review of the game, I even noted that Bioware themselves were the ones who decided what they did with that time, so much of that responsibility is theirs. My par for the course comment was simply referring to the fact that most people like to just blame EA.
Modifié par Anomaly-, 03 septembre 2011 - 10:52 .
Ce sujet est fermé
Retour en haut
Don't buy the game stop being a party pooper, go away and play something else quietly
