Here we go. In no particular order:
1) Better character system. Two attributes for each class sucks. No non-combat skills or attributes sucks. Linear advancement sucks. Divorcing player progress from the economy sucks. Tiered and scaled loot and enemies suck. Random loot sucks. Advancement needs to offer multiple play styles that are appreciably different from one another and not "I get different animations when I mash the hotkeys". More character classes, sub-classes, specializations etc. are all appreciated too.
2a) No more filler. Dragon Age 2 (and Mass Effect 3 for that matter) were packed to the brim with padding - story-less, content-less fetch quests designed almost maliciously so as to maximize the time spent moving between A and B. This is disingenuous and transparent, and comes across not as giving the player lots of freedom and opportunity to explore the world, but as wasting time (and frankly, Dragon Age 2 was pretty much a waste of time).
2b) Same goes for all the enemy encounters, wave-based fights etc. Give all combat meaningful context and make encounters interesting through design rather than numbers. The game should be fun to play moment-to-moment, not some sort of mind-numbing MMO-style slog. If this means slightly shorter games, so be it.
3) For that matter, fire whoever designed your combat mechanics in Dragon Age 2. Its combat was terrible MMO-fied crap. When your combat relies exclusively on cooldowns and damage caps just to make it work, you have bad systems design, period. If an RPG has a well-built ruleset, you shouldn't need to resort to these sorts of stopgap measures for balance. This kind of stuff turns combat into "mash the hotkeys when the cooldowns finish" and completely kills any tactical considerations.
4) Make combat turn-based and, potentially, grid-based. Strategic overview is a must, as is full-party control. This half-assed action game crap needs to end. Nobody who cares about Dragon Age wants the game to be a bad Devil May Cry knock-off. I will settle for real-time-with-pause, but that has always been a poor compromise that usually fell apart when dealing with advanced tactics and coordination.
5) Dragon Age had a weak plot and Dragon Age 2 had a pointless plot that wasn't so much filled with holes as it was just stupid and directionless. There needs to be purpose, a goal that makes sense, and actions and events taking place that bring the player appreciably closer to that goal. None of this "three years later, nothing has changed!" and frame story garbage that adds nothing to the experience except to raise more questions.
6) No generic fantasy crap. Do something crazy and off the wall - doesn't have to be Planescape, but after "I can't believe it's not Lord of the Rings" Dragon Age, I'm sick of this stuff. Give a radically new premise, a new setting, a new story. Dragon Age 2 tried but was let down by the monotony of its story and gameplay and by reducing Hawke to an errand boy/girl. How about pirates? Monks? Barbarians? Orlesian spies? The Dragon Age universe has some interesting bits in it, so stop going for the lowest-hanging fruit.
7) No dumb endings with nonexistent choices and consequences. "Everyone goes insane and kills each other because of an item the plot forgot about 20 hours ago" is not good writing. Players develop connections to characters and locations over the course of the game, and rendering their decisions meaningless at the end is not fun. Twists are good, and not everything needs to be happy, but if none of the choices made during the game influence the outcome, what's the point? Give players ways to influence characters, places and events that are logical and have a payoff.
8) Cut back on the romances and other crap. I know some players care about this but it feels like 50% of the game is in this stuff now (and certainly 90% of the choice and "consequence" i.e. what sex scene you get, derp), and I would much, much, much (much) rather have that development effort spent on game content relevant to the narrative.
9) Quests that can be solved by more than just killing people and picking dialogue options. This will require a fundamental overhaul in the character system to allow for things like stealth and non-combat abilities to be viable, and requires designers to create situations that allow for multiple play-styles and outcomes. Is this harder than "put a bunch of monsters in a room, ask the player to kill them, rinse and repeat"? Yes, yes it is. It will also make for a game that isn't boring and monotonous. It's an RPG, so let me role-play in a way that is supported both by the story and the game mechanics and scenarios.
10) Full-party creation or easy "total respec" option for party members. Being forced to tote around people you don't like because they fill a particular gameplay role, in a word, sucks. Does this mean maybe companions won't be as unique? Yes. Guess what - I don't give a crap about Anders, or Fenris, or Leliana, or Zevran, or whatever. They're fine characters but they don't need to be in my party and I don't need to have sex with them. Put gameplay over this dating sim nonsense.
I could go on (and into far more detail about the fundamental problems modern BioWare RPGs have), but frankly I suspect none of this will actually be taken into account. Dragon Age is a multi-million-selling franchise and it will be built to maximize returns while minimizing costs, which means it'll at best be an action game with stats and an inventory. I'd be surprised at this point if it doesn't turn into a first-person open-world hack-and-slash game with online multiplayer and a cash shop.
Still, thanks for asking.
Modifié par sea-, 20 mars 2012 - 12:28 .
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