katiebour wrote...
As a fan of the Total War series, I enjoyed how I could manage my towns, resources, units, royalty, agents, etc. while having a "resolve combat automatically" option. I played for the overarching strategy and the nuggets of history, not for the nitty-gritty of how to manage x number of units on x amount of terrain against x number of enemies, etc.
I played enough of the combat to find it dull and repetitive, and much preferred focusing on the rest of the game. My own personal opinion, YMMV.
If we look at PC and party as units with health, attack, resists, etc and the enemy likewise, it'd be easy enough to do some combat rolls and resolve combat based on turns, speed of attacks, stats, etc.
The downside of a "resolve combat automatically" button might be that a character falls in battle (perhaps not getting xp for the fight as has been implemented in other games.) That's the chance you take when you auto-resolve. Depending on your gear, level, and your random rolls it might go extremely well or extremely poorly.
I agree that the devs should always work towards making combat interesting, relevant, and necessary to the plot. Something tells me that they are in fact attempting to do that anyway.
That being said, auto-resolve has been implemented with success before, and giving gamers options is generally a good thing.
The guys who make combat awesome are still going to keep their jobs, if only for the quote-unquote HARD CORE GAMERZ. Adding a button for those who choose to use it is just that, a choice.
Just my .02. YMMV, live long and prosper, IDIC. 
That option works very well for Total War, as there is a lot of gameplay elements still in play besides the combat. Managing resources and towns, for example. In addition, there is no real "wrong way" to level up in Total War. If you auto-resolve combat and your characters survive, they become stronger.
In the Dragon Age games, there are really only three main gameplay features - combat (fighting enemies through the combat screen), dialogue (choosing options through the conversation wheel) and exploration (walk/running and looting gear). There are some mild crafting elements, but these are incredibly microscale in comparisson to the other three. Also, if you level up your mage and put all points into strengrh instead of willpower or magic, you can level-up them into impotency, especially with the level scaling in-game. Granted, you could turn on the auto-level up feature and circumvent this for the most part. But that simply means that its less likely Bioware would incorporate any non-combat skills to the character skill sheet in the future, IMO.
If you skip combat in DA, then you are left with walking and talking. There are no other gameplay features to speak of. And by incorporating a Skip Button, you are forever forcing that one feature, combat, to remain one-dimensional.
Seagloom wrote...
This topic title totally misled me. I
expected this discussion would be about marrying story and gameplay
mechanics in a way very few RPGs get right--including the Dragon Age
games. There are always internal logic flaws I must willfully ignore or
it mars the entire experience.
I feel like the Skip Button conversation itself may have run its course, so I'd be completely open to discussing how to blur the line between gameplay elements and story in the DA games.
Currently, there isn't a LOT of other gameplay elements other than combat and dialogue in DA, something I'd like to see remedied. Nonetheless, instances where combat (or puzzle options like in the Urn questline or sneak sections, like in MotA) can be used to integrate story on a consistent basis (meaning outside of the one-off situations like in Redcliffe, but an experience that follows throughout the game) would be a very welcome discussion.
Retour en haut
) in such "one-for-one" fashion. You said yourself that BioWare is the master of writing in the games industry. Their verbosity is part of who they are, it's one of the reasons their worlds and characters feel so alive.
