DISCLAIMER: After I finished typing this, I noticed that I had written a pretty substantial wall o' text. Sorry about that. This is a pretty dumb topic to get worked up about anyway, as this has already been discussed several million times over the past 5 years with every RPG ever released since TES: IV. I also noticed that some of what I say below may come across as aggressive/angry/ranting and would like to stress that I did not intend it in that way at all. We all like games but sometimes we like different kinds. That's alright, and I don't want to change it. Everyone should be able to decide for themselves.
IndyAnna wrote...
In oblivion, I can go back to unlock a chest, in fallout 3 I can go back and hack that computer, and in dragonage I have to leave all chests behind never knowing what was in them and watch my party level much faster than my player character. Unless I SOLO a PARTY BASED GAME.
In DA:O, there are only
two areas in the entire game that you can never go back to later. Yes, there are also a few small rooms and buildings but that's it. Two maps and less than half a dozen small buildings that I know of. Combined, you're missing out on perhaps 25-35 small chests and 3-5 chests with fairly valuable items. Fairly valuable right now, but not by the time you could come back later if BioWare had let you. Why is this an issue?
As for the XP issue that you mention, I quite literally have no idea what you're talking about. Companions level up faster than you? Since when? I know that some characters are a single level higher than you when they first join your party, and that if you keep them in your party for the rest of the game, you will never catch up to them, but that is only because
the companions who are with you at any given moment gather XP at exactly the same rate as you while in your 'main' squad. If you leave them in camp for a while, you will surpass them, but they will still level up right behind you. The ONLY way you can stop them from gaining experience is to make them leave your party and/or kill them. Even if you do decide to kick them out of your party, they will magically level up to within 1 level of you if you ever decide to take them back.
I cannot stress this enough:
Your party members will always be either 1 level higher, the same level, or 1 level lower than you. You cannot keep them from gaining experience without killing them.IndyAnna wrote...
I don't like the new XP system and I can't get far enough into the story to ignore my puny little player character. Who will always be puny because I can't get the levels I need to make her good enough to be a contributing member of the party.
Yes dragonage is a great game but if I want XP, I have to solo to get a decent amount.
Your companions use the same attributes as your character has access to. Your companions use the same skills and talents that your character has access to (excluding the Mabari and Shale). Your companions gather xp even if you leave them in camp for the entire game. If you solo the game all the way to the end and reach level 25
all by yourself in an attempt to out-level your companions, you will find that at the final battle, they will all be level 24. Right behind you all the way. You are simply incorrect about the XP issue. Sorry to break it to you, but you've been wasting your time playing the game wrong and missing out on a lot of great dialogue and banter along the way.
Now before anyone jumps on me and starts yelling, let me point out that playing solo
is a perfectly valid way to play
if you enjoy it (possiby for the challenge). Playing that way to try to sidestep game mechanics is simply wrong, though.
On-topic: Oblivion may be considered a great game, but I believe it to be a fallacy to call it an RPG. It is not a Role-Playing-Game. It is a Life Simulator in a fantasy world. For it to be an RPG, you would need to fill a role while playing and Oblivion does not have you do that. In fact, one of it's main selling points is that you can ignore the main quest and everything that has anything to do with it. So long as you don't go to a certain town and talk to a certain person, the plot will never progress and no more Oblivion gates will ever open. The game does not have you fill a role. You get to make your own role. The only problem with that is that you cannot truly make a role for yourself without modding in the content to go with that role, otherwise your are simply imagining things. For example, you might decide to play as a pirate, but guess what? You can't talk like a pirate or dress like a pirate or act like a pirate or even sail a ship without modding those things in. "Now", you might say, "just a minute there. You can't do that in Dragon Age: Origins either." True, but DA:O and other role-playing games give you an aternative role to play. You might not be able to play the role you really want to, but you can play the role that the developers designed for you to play. In DA:O, you can play as a nice person, mean person, ruthless person, benevolent person, selfish person, etc. In Oblivion, Bethesda purposefully decided not to give you a role to play. The world is wide open. There are some interesting quests if only for the reading material, but your options are either to click the conversation-keep-moving-along-button or kill the NPC's. That's about it. I tried it for several dozen hours, with several different characters and using different builds each time but I just could not get into it at all. Some of the mods are truly fabulous, but they only serve to highlight my conclusion that the Bethesda that made Oblivion did not know how to make a great game. The fans and modders knew how to make a great game, but Bethesda did not. They had a collection of elements that sounded good on paper, and flirted with your gaming sensibilities on the screen, but never actually came together. Fallout 3 was way better, and fully qualified as an RPG. It has some flaws, yes, but I can overlook them, or supplement the game with mods. A game does not have to be great or fantastic to hold my attention, but it has to have at least a little bit of heart and soul to it. There has to be a hook. Oblivion is more like The Sims than any RPG I know of.
Just so I'm clear about where I stand on this: I do not hate Oblivion. I do not hate The Sims either. I simply don't enjoy them, which is fine. My enjoyment or lack thereof should not have any bearing on your enjoyment or lack thereof. I am quite adamant about the lack of RPG elements in Oblivion though. It's not an issue of snobbery; it's an issue of logic. A Role-Playing-Game needs to have a Role for you to Play the Game as. A PnP RPG is wonderful, because you can come up with any role you like and the DM can adapt the story however it is deemed appropriate. A CRPG is less great, but still quite nice, because the developers can design multiple possible roles and you get to choose which one you want to have. With a well-made CRPG, you can also mix and match, holding your specific role/character/avatar in your head and making decisions as that role/character/avatar would. With Oblivion, it falls apart, as you are never given anything to work with. You either do exactly what someone wants you to do, ignore someone, or you kill someone. There are no true conversations like you might have with a DM or a well-written NPC, there is simply a YesQuestMeUp/NoShutUp option and a chance to kill them after the 'conversation' is over.
As for graphics, I will quote Bill the Cat: Phbbbtt! The game Bethesda shipped was not very pretty, and it was almost too buggy to play. Many patches and mods later (especially the Unique Landscapes collection), it's quite pretty, yes, but Bethesda can't take credit for that. True, the expanse of the open world and RAM limitations are the main reasons behind the original game's graphical failings, but those being understandable does not make them nonexistant. DA:O is prettier, has better art design, has better animation quality, has NPC's that don't make you want to put white-out on your monitor, and has far fewer crashes. Yeah, I've found some bugs (I never said it was perfect) and had a couple freezes over the course of a month of playing, but it's pretty good. Open-world is an over-rated feature and will continue to be so until someone makes a game that does everything procedurally. Unless my actions can actually have an effect on the places I go, it might as well all be linear.
Retour en haut
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