I have finished DA about a month ago, but wasn't in the mood to start writing a review right away because I had (have) too much to say about it and needed a pause from this... DA experience.
Lets start with some facts to put things into perspective.
I planned to have a party of 3 characters, with my PC being a rogue and take Wynne and Zevran in the party. So I did.
Wynne because she's an older female mage whose concept I liked. Zevran because I was curious to try the gay romance. Also, I wanted characters from different writers.
Wanting to spice things up (make the game a bit more challenging) and include a touch of rp I let the game level up Wynne and Zevran automatically. Therefore, I didn't have some of the strongest mage spells and combos available.
I played on hard.
And now the meat.
I found myself, at a certain point in the game, playing *just* to finish it and find how it ends. While the story was engaging enough for me to force myself to play the game to the end, it definitely wasn't engaging enough to counter-balance all the drawbacks of this game and make me awe before the story alone. Or replay it. Namely, the story itself was ok and interesting at certain points, but that isn't sufficient to thoroughly enjoy a game in my book, at all.
What went wrong? I'll try to arrange elements of this game I found bad in order from most to least damaging to the game experience.
1) Everything level scales.
Enemies and items, and the scaling range *is* wide.
Much have been said about why level scaling is **** already so I don't want to reiterate the discussion in depth. I'll just say that this element alone makes the game feel artificial like Monopoly money.
It doesn't help that you have to fight hordes and hordes of enemies with a combat ruleset that has a lot of holes big like Australia.
Monster level scaling wasn't enough for Bioware? Of course it wasn't! Not only are you deprived of enjoying power progression earned by levelling (since most monsters you'll be fighting are exactly your level +- 1), but the quality of items you'll get is entirely dependant on your level as well. Don't be surprised if your low level character cannot get anything better than an iron weapon - you'll get silverite ones from every chest in (*activates level-scaling calculator*) 10 levels. Oh, and don't forget that if you sell an item to a merchant you'll get it appropriately level scaled and ready for buying. Bioware thought about everything.
The real problem is that Bioware (or certain bio-employees to be precise; hi George Zoeller) thinks that non-linear rpgs cannot coexist well with set levels. This is untrue.
Lets take for example Dragon Age which consists of main quest area clusters available on the world map.
So here we have George Z. going with this absurd line of thought: "We have to scale everything, otherwise the player would be forced to explore everything in a set order and that can't happen because designers want DA to be a non-linear game for a change!" No George.
When you finish the linear part of the game, i.e. after the battle of Ostagar, you're already about level 5. From there you can go to several places on the world map. Main quest locations on the world map consist of several areas. These places could have been intelligently designed to contain low level monsters in the initial area(s) (around level 5) and then would advance in levels as you get deeper in said area cluster. So you could still pick which place to start exploring first and then, as you go further into the area cluster, decide if the difficulty is worth the reward (exp and loot). If it's not, you simply change area and get xp in other (1st level easier than 2nd etc.) areas.
See, it can be done. Non-linear exploration *and* set levels.
Also, certain individuals spread misinformation; BG did not have scaling at all. BG 2 had a very limited and totally different type of scaling from DA's; i.e. some additional monsters were added in *specific* places depending on your level, with the rest of the monsters being unchanged. Therefore, the vast majority of enemies (including all the unique/named ones) were static.
2) Combat mechanics/design/AI.
Where do I start...
Three words: Imbalanced. Utterly random. Uninspiring.
-Lets start from the base; they decided to use a d100 as the combat die. The problem with such a big random span is that a +1 (in defense or attack for example) practically means nothing. In D&D if you have 5 points in attack more than the enemy has in defense (AC) you'll hit 75% of the times. In DA, you'll have a miserable + 5% (1 in 20) chance to hit.
The point is I'd like every number to have an impact, but in a d100 system you just notice extremes.
-Weapon damage vs bonus damage from attributes. Here we have a big flaw. Just in 3 levels (and this is a cca 20 levels game) you can double your weapon's damage. Strength SHOULDN'T give +1 damage per point invested. In fact, the bonus damage from attributes should be halved.
With a ridiculous +3 damage per level, the importance of weapon damage is minuscule.
"Ahh, wow, this cool powerful sword does 2 more damage on average than the iron one I had." Who cares? I can quintuple that number in a few levels. Weapon damage should be considerable and important compared to your attribute boni so you can actually ENJOY finding better weapons.
-Armor. Useless.
What's the deal with armor; when you're able to get the good armor (you need str requirements, fighting lvl 129 revenants), enemies do so much damage (thanks to the scaling system) that its protection keeps being laughable.
In case you didn't know, the value you see for armor is misleading. Every time an enemy hits you the armor rolls a number from half to max the armor value. When you couple that with armor penetration not much remains.
-Attributes. On one hand we have stats which are completely ignored like constitution or willpower (w. for non-mages at least) because they're objectively not even close in usefulness to some other stats, and on the other hand we have a stat like dexterity which is absurdly overpowered.
My main character had all pumped into dexterity (I regret I spent any points on strength and above 22 in cunning) and he was practically untouchable later on and dealt tons of damage with dual-wielding.
With Wynee's defense spell he was truly untouchable.
Defense (=dexterity) >>> Armor
Dex (attack *and* defense) >> Str
-Mental and physical resistances? The way this works.. In the end, also utterly random using a scale of 100 as the base. That's why you get +10, +20 etc. to m/p resistances from items and never a small, moderate increase. Inverse from damage bonuses from attributes; in this case the bonuses are minimal. I also dislike that all stats give equal bonuses to mental and physical resistance respectively.
- Disables/stuns. Here, Bioware would need ample tutoring from a company like Blizzard who understand the power of disables. What we got in DA are ridiculously long stunning spells which utterly imbalance an already imbalanced combat system to the point of making most fights trivial. Although, they've acknowledged this mistake (at least one) and somewhat reduced the absurdly long stuns in the last patch.
- Some spells, talents, specialisations and skills are utterly useless while others are incredibly overpowered. I wonder who in their right mind would spend any skill points on combat tactics for example?
On the other side we have spells like mana clash which are insta kill buttons against enemy casters. What the hell? Even a retard would notice this spell should be nerfed hard.
- AI is atrociously bad. Why are players able to pick enemies one by one? Why don't enemies act as a group if they stand next to each other? It's BASIC AI.
Not to mention ridiculous situations when enemies don't engage in combat even if you're within their line of sight (actually, next to them) attacking their buddies (building in Denerim).
- No action queue! Why?? Come one.. give me a break.
- No combat log.
- If you have evasion and are attacked by ranged weapons every time evasion triggers your controlled character stops, forgetting the action input (stops moving to attack an enemy and you have to input the command again). This is VERY annoying, especially when facing multiple archers.
- Combat is too chaotic and fast for my taste.
I dislike the regeneration of stamina and health in and after combat, but I understand this is the concept they built the game upon. I prefer to decide myself if and when I want to regenerate my resoursces; with a resting system.
Combat encounters are repetitive and I especially disliked Denerim's random encounters against 100 archers all scaled to about my level. Deep roads and the darkspawn were also a gigantic repetitive bore.
I didn't fear casters at all; they didn't use them enough and good enough.
With all this said no wonder Bioware wanted to hide how combat mechanics work. They even made a special SPOILER! subforum about gameplay, because reading how disastrous the gameplay mechanics are will certainly spoil the game. That was a smart move.
It's kinda pathetic how Zoeller kept belittling D&D and praising DA's ruleset way before the game was released. Now we have this - something that's way weaker and less enjoying than a ruleset that was not even conceived as a computer game system; D&D.
3) Forest design.
Now, this is not about graphics. It's about a "blockbuster" game being in development for 5+ years and yet has forests with vegetation levitating above ground on every corner.
I sincerely don't understand how someone didn't take a look at their work once or twice after throwing around (that's the right word) trees, shrubs and grass with the toolset and thinking: "hmm.. those should be attached to the ground, I should fix it".
Here you are, enjoy:
http://img6.imagesha...9432268686.smil
http://img197.images...8614922egb.smil
In the second link you can also enjoy a half-head missing texture thingy..
4) The overall feel of the world.
-Empty tavern in the center of Denerim. Waitresses going around like frenzied but no one's sitting on any of the many tables?
-Copy-pasted real-world languages, sounds of names, cultures, history.. Sorry, I didn't like Zevran using Italian words or Orlais being a French colony. What's the word... ah, yes, immersion.
I know people around here hate the word immersion for dubious reasons. Because it has a subjective meaning, like, what a shock, many other words. While at the same time we have bio-devs overusing the hell out of the word "gameplay" ("for gameplay reasons", "to enhance gameplay", "gameplay > whatever" etc.) which is subjective exactly as immersion is, but nobody seems to notice the paradox.
-Dialogs.
Let's take a look at Gaider's Zevran. So I had 100 points (love) and there starts this dialog with him where he tells me, although we're in love, that he considers me such a good friend and all bla bla.
I chose "I don't consider you a friend" because I (or better said; my character) considered Zevran a lover, not a friend. Of course, there was this cheesy cliche response "You're more than a friend", but I avoided it on purpose. So I expected I'll get the opportunity to explain Zevran what I mean, why he's NOT my friend because he's actually something else.
Not. He goes QQ and -15 love broken. :/ Good job Gaider.
I often found dialog choices to be colored in a tone I'd never use or lacking obvious responses. Was it too hard to give the player the choice to say something simple and neutral instead of charging every other response option with sarcasm or what have you? I dislike the "clever" answers with a question mark, but that's a personal preference as well, naturally. Example: "Because I was eating?" So clever...
I'd also say that the introduction "What have we here?" (or similar alteration) was overused a bit too much on important NPCs.
-Side (quest) content. The difference between main quest content and side quest content is abysmal - in quality, quantity, detail. I expected some areas on the world map to be completely side quest related (and at least bigger than Flemeth's hut), but no much luck.
***
WTL; DR
No, I don't think DA is a good game and I'm glad I didn't spend any money on it.
Let the spelling/grammar checking commence!
Modifié par Paromlin, 17 décembre 2009 - 03:38 .
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