340 réponses à ce sujet

[Kileyan]

If the idea of the faster combat in DA2 was to create a more fluid combat game, for me it did the total opposite.

With my party members jumping, zooming zipping and flip flopping all over the map constantly, I ended up pausing the game far far more in DA2 than I ever did in DAO. It didn't achieve the intended affect.

In DAO, I could set up a decent plan, watch the battle unfold and tend to my main guy mostly. In DA2, I had to pause frequently to wrangle in all the zip zam zoom guys and keep them in some semblance of a strategic group.

[Renmiri1]

Sylvianus wrote...

I'm sorry, that was just crap. There's nothing you can say to defend and justify that nonsense. Thanks. Now I remember why before all the patches I was bored with DAII combat. ( it is not even really fixed anyways... )

You are following a strategy, it is working, and suddenly waves of enemies are dropping from the sky, from nowhere, beside you and your companions.  Who the **** can take this seriously ? That's just not fair, that just makes no sense and it is absolutely boring. I hated the fact that I could die because of that glitch. Yes for me it is one. It is indeed hardly what we could call unpredictable lol. This isn't anymore about strategy there.

Yes because all enemies fight full out frontal assault and do not hide - on their own territory - and try to flank your party. Riiight

So tell me, what was Loghain supposed to do at Ostagar, when our Wardens lit the torch ? 
Come from the back of the darkspawn horde ? Surprise them with all of a sudden a lot more soldiers ? From a different direction ?
Imagine that. Not commititng all your forces AT ONCE, on the same spot..
SURPRISING the enemy, by having your second wave of soldiers attack from a flank/ back
Why you would almost think Loghain had some kind off.. oh i don't know.. strategy ?!
According to you all the soldiers should have been by Caillan's side at the same spot from the battle's start. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair to the Darkspawn. 

You are right of course, it isn't about strategy anymore. It is about awareness, reflexes and not going AFK after you setup the chess play. Usually battles are not fought with complete dummies, you know ?

We fight hardened guilds of raiders and bandits, on their territory. They have had years to plan the defense of their strongholds. DA2 execution may have lacked and made the waves look like paratroopers, but the different waves flanking your party make a lot of sense. Unless you are convinced the Carta and raiders got where they are by being braindead  

Modifié par Renmiri1, 11 septembre 2012 - 02:17 .

[Todd23]

No.

[Sylvianus]

Renmiri1 wrote...

Sylvianus wrote...

I'm sorry, that was just crap. There's nothing you can say to defend and justify that nonsense. Thanks. Now I remember why before all the patches I was bored with DAII combat. ( it is not even really fixed anyways... )

You are following a strategy, it is working, and suddenly waves of enemies are dropping from the sky, from nowhere, beside you and your companions.  Who the **** can take this seriously ? That's just not fair, that just makes no sense and it is absolutely boring. I hated the fact that I could die because of that glitch. Yes for me it is one. It is indeed hardly what we could call unpredictable lol. This isn't anymore about strategy there.

Yes because all enemies fight full out frontal assault and do not hide - on their own territory - and try to flank your party. Riiight

So tell me, what was Loghain supposed to do at Ostagar, when our Wardens lit the torch ? 
Come from the back of the darkspawn horde ? Surprise them with all of a sudden a lot more soldiers ? From a different direction ?
Imagine that. Not commititng all your forces AT ONCE, on the same spot..
SURPRISING the enemy, by having your second wave of soldiers attack from a flank/ back
Why you would almost think Loghain had some kind off.. oh i don't know.. strategy ?!
According to you all the soldiers should have been by Caillan's side at the same spot from the battle's start. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair to the Darkspawn. 

You are right of course, it isn't about strategy anymore. It is about awareness, reflexes and not going AFK after you setup the chess play. Usually battles are not fought with complete dummies, you know ?

We fight hardened guilds of raiders and bandits, on their territory. They have had years to plan the defense of their strongholds. DA2 execution may have lacked and made the waves look like paratroopers, but the different waves flanking your party make a lot of sense. Unless you are convinced the Carta and raiders got where they are by being braindead  

Not sure if serious. Your post makes no sense. Enemies are dropping FROM THE SKY,  FROM NOWHERE, NEXT TO YOU ! THAT'S JUST NONSENSE ! DID YOU SEE IN THE LORE THAT ANYONE COULD FLY ?

For the love of god.

This isn't even fun, it isn't either about awareness nor reflexes. I've been playing games that require reflexes since a long time. This isn't the issue.  Please think. You just totally missed the point.

A minimum of decency and realism with combats. With a minimum of rules of engagement. It's not complicated. In Mass Effect 3 you do not see anyone falling from the sky ( except when it is justified with technology ) and yet there are waves too.

Legacy has also made ​​the necessary corrections. No more people falling from the sky where there are no buildings, you see people out of doors, or hiding, behind, in front of you, running, in ambush. etc etc.

There is absolutely no point to make a strategy against something like that, even if that implies reflexes. Even a fight that requires only reflexes, it wouldn't make sense.

The fight is distorted, with a result that will not be satisfactory whatever the outcome of the fight.. You are not aware of possible reinforcements while you thought it was over, you do not know where they appear, how or when, where they come from. They are just falling from everywhere.  You're entrenched in a position to have nobody behind you, and suddenly * poof * you have many paratroopers fell from the sky behind you inexplicably, even when there is a ceiling above your head.

Don't you think that there is a problem ?

Modifié par Sylvianus, 11 septembre 2012 - 04:13 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

Renmiri1 wrote...

Yes because all enemies fight full out frontal assault and do not hide - on their own territory - and try to flank your party. Riiight

So tell me, what was Loghain supposed to do at Ostagar, when our Wardens lit the torch ? 
Come from the back of the darkspawn horde ? Surprise them with all of a sudden a lot more soldiers ? From a different direction ?
Imagine that. Not commititng all your forces AT ONCE, on the same spot..
SURPRISING the enemy, by having your second wave of soldiers attack from a flank/ back
Why you would almost think Loghain had some kind off.. oh i don't know.. strategy ?!
According to you all the soldiers should have been by Caillan's side at the same spot from the battle's start. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair to the Darkspawn. 

You are right of course, it isn't about strategy anymore. It is about awareness, reflexes and not going AFK after you setup the chess play. Usually battles are not fought with complete dummies, you know ?

We fight hardened guilds of raiders and bandits, on their territory. They have had years to plan the defense of their strongholds. DA2 execution may have lacked and made the waves look like paratroopers, but the different waves flanking your party make a lot of sense. Unless you are convinced the Carta and raiders got where they are by being braindead 

That would have been great if they'd done two things differently.

First, if those reinforcements actually existed somewhere before they parachuted in.  They literally appeared from nowhere, and that breaks the setting.  But if they were hiding somewhere, and then rushed in (though hopefully they would only do this when there was a tactical advantage in doing so - those three golems in Legacy that only attacked one a time would have been much more challenging ifthey'd attacked together), that would be fine.

Second, if they'd retained the stealth gameplay from DAO.  If the reinforcements actually exist in the setting prior to attacking, then we should be able to find them.  That would let us pick of the reinforcements in advance and ambush our opponents rather than them ambushing us all of the time.  DA2 never let Hawke take the initiative in combat - he was constantly reacting to his enemies' plans rather than implementing his own.

It is because of DA2's simplistic overall design that the waved combat doesn't work.  Waved combat can work, sure, but it didn't in DA2, and the way it was implemented was laughable.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Renmiri1 wrote...

I didn't ignore it

That didn't address my points at all.  I wasn't claiming WoW isn't fun (I think it isn't, but that's a matter of preference).  I'm claiming that the tank-based combat design strains credulity within the setting.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Yrkoon wrote...

Renmiri1 wrote...

I think we have at least arrived to some conclusions: It seems we find DA2 combat please people who like having combat unpredictable,

Wait.... where did we come up with the notion that DA2's combat was unpredictable?   It was nothing of the sort.   it was  monotonously predictable.  Completely unvaried.

Absolutely true.  Retreating to a choke point pretty much always worked, and rendered the reinforcement waves trivial.  Since the reinforcements for each encounter appeared in a fixed location, simply taking the battle to a different location prevented you from ever being surrounded by subsequent waves.

[Yrkoon]

Renmiri1 wrote...

You are right of course, it isn't about strategy anymore. It is about awareness, reflexes and not going AFK after you setup the chess play.

Nonsense.  Unless you have a cognitive disorder that prevents you from remembering how the previous encounter you had 10 minutes earlier went (and the one before that, and the one before that), you don't need any "awareness"  whatsoever in DA2 combat, since every single battle plays out exactly the same. 

Ditto with "reflexes". You don't need reflexes to win fights in DA2.  Enemies in DA2 move and attack in slow motion.   They LITERALLY move and attack at half your party's speed.


And I find it hilarious that you keep harping about "Setting up chess play".   Are you  being deliberally sarcastic? DA2's tactics screen is vastly expanded  on from DA:O's!  Which means you can actually more comprehensively set your party's every action to play out in far more detail than you could in DA:O!   But I digress, to liken DA2's combat to chess is to  grotesquely insult chess.  DA2's combat is  far more simplistic.  It's more like tic-tac-toe.

Modifié par Yrkoon, 11 septembre 2012 - 06:16 .

[SpunkyMonkey]

eroeru wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

It still seemed pretty irrelevant when discussing video game combat mechanics.

Especially given that WoW is actually an exceptionally math heavy combat system.

Not for the player it isn't.

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

DA2's speed combined with DA2's back-loaded animations worked together to make the game far less responsive in combat.  Maybe the increased speed would have worked if the animations had operated like they did in DAO, but BioWare changed both things so now we can't tell which caused the problem.

 

Well said.

---

One more thing, the slower animations really were neat not only because they allowed for more flexibility and clarity, but they really inspired fear in fights, in my honest opinion.

It's like like Suspiria or The Shining vs modern horror bull-**** (you can figure out which is ][ by my opinion).

The former two got the pacing right, and gave a feeling of imminence and relevance via restrictions to the movement of the scene. Modern horror is so eclectic yet brain-free that if you don't get epilepsy, you'll not be scared. It just cluster****s meaningless signs of gore and speed, ruining the true horror aspect of them.
Have in mind I'm only talking about mainstream horror. The bad in today's horror scenes isn't because it's today (a recently seen counter-example from animation: "Ghost Hound"), it's because some aspects of the industry has deteriorated the mainstream, objectively and with bad reason to it (much like in video games, which isn't ruled first and foremost by gaming experts but rather essentially ignoramus salesmen). /rant

Also, believability via a gritty or naturalistic design helps heaps into the immersiveness.

Or take for example Resident Evil, or Silent Hill 2- they were slow! And this is how it worked. The feeling of the player-character not being an almighty god does need to come through in battle-situations, if you want thrill. Thrill comes only from the constant feeling of a possibility of demise (in combat specifically).

DA:O worked in this aspect. It held back a bit in this sphere, and delightfully so - it felt subtle yet immersing. And it wasn't for players with a non-existent attention span - yet ][ showed NO effort in inspiring attention, it worked rather painfully against it, especially so for a more needy computer player (who thankfully still holds some reins in this industry).

Bang on - it was that slightly slower pacing and gritty/naturalistic design which made you feel as if every blow counted and added to the immersion and tension no end. If anything I would have had DA:O a touch slower so you could really feel the satisfaction of killer blows landing and that knife edge on whether someone would make their swing/shot in time could be reveled in a bit longer.

Was playing DA:O last night again (on 360) and it's just sooooo good. The tension created by it's style of combat is great and when you do pause the game because you need to it's a joy to view close-up stills of the combat in action - it's just so cool.

[nightscrawl]

Realmzmaster wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

SKRemaks wrote...

It's great fun for me.  I've only managed to finish DA:O once since DA2 came out.  The horrible, slow combat, the lack of voice, and the terrible wooden facial expression of the Warden drive me nuts, now.

Imagine a plotless dungeon crawl with nothing but combat encounter after combat encounter.

Would you rather play that game with DAO's combat, or DA2's combat?  I'd choose DAO's combat every time.

I on the other hand would pick DA2 especially given DAO's mages and rogues.

Same here. I have played a game with a "plotless dungeon crawl with nothing but combat encounter after combat encounter," it's called Diablo III (by the by, my first and only Diablo game). Plowing though enemies can be fun, but only if you enjoy the style of combat. For you Sylvius, it's DAO style, for me it's DA2.

That said, while I do find DA2's combat more entertaining, I don't play Bioware games for the combat. In the end, I'll go with whatever combat system they throw at me (well... to a degree, I don't want DA Pokemon or something), get though the fights because they are necessary, to play the part of the game I enjoy the most: character interaction and story development.

[TEWR]

Not really fun for me.

From the rushed story to the combat that has a massive disparity between party and foe to pretty much most other aspects of it, I do not find DAII fun.

[Direwolf0294]

I had fun. Overall probably more fun than I had in DA:O, though my first experience in DA:O where I played through the City Elf origin and had no idea what I was doing and ended up running through the whole castle/kidnapping section with my character still wearing her wedding dress, now blood splattered, instead of armour is still the funnest experience I've ever had with the series.

Reading Allan's replies to this thread, I have no idea what the conversation was, but WoW and DA:O have an increadibly similar combat system. DA:O is pretty much just WoW slowed down and with the ability to pause. At least, that's how it always seemed to me. I guess since they're both click on something to target it and then activate abilities that are hotkeyed to a bar along the bottom of your screen than I have a hard time telling any real difference between the two.

[Xewaka]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
Absolutely true.  Retreating to a choke point pretty much always worked, and rendered the reinforcement waves trivial.  Since the reinforcements for each encounter appeared in a fixed location, simply taking the battle to a different location prevented you from ever being surrounded by subsequent waves.

True. The only combats that were remotely challenging were those in which access to chokepoints was restricted due to pathways being shut as the encounter started. Otherwise, DA2 combat design was painfully easy to play around.

[eroeru]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

DA2's speed combined with DA2's back-loaded animations worked together to make the game far less responsive in combat.  Maybe the increased speed would have worked if the animations had operated like they did in DAO, but BioWare changed both things so now we can't tell which caused the problem.

Aah, I think I misread a bit the last time I quoted you, though my memory does not serve to be exact.

Still, well said - and I'd agree with you in principle. Yet I can think of many things that are wrong with the *type* of faster combat DA2 did.

So I strongly suspect both this type of faster combat, and its non-responsive system caused problems.

Modifié par eroeru, 11 septembre 2012 - 11:47 .

[Teddie Sage]

For me it was hell~a fun. I just wish they never cancelled The Exalted March.
I miss my Hawke and the followers...

[wsandista]

Yrkoon wrote...

Renmiri1 wrote...

You are right of course, it isn't about strategy anymore. It is about awareness, reflexes and not going AFK after you setup the chess play.

Nonsense.  Unless you have a cognitive disorder that prevents you from remembering how the previous encounter you had 10 minutes earlier went (and the one before that, and the one before that), you don't need any "awareness"  whatsoever in DA2 combat, since every single battle plays out exactly the same. 

Ditto with "reflexes". You don't need reflexes to win fights in DA2.  Enemies in DA2 move and attack in slow motion.   They LITERALLY move and attack at half your party's speed.


And I find it hilarious that you keep harping about "Setting up chess play".   Are you  being deliberally sarcastic? DA2's tactics screen is vastly expanded  on from DA:O's!  Which means you can actually more comprehensively set your party's every action to play out in far more detail than you could in DA:O!   But I digress, to liken DA2's combat to chess is to  grotesquely insult chess.  DA2's combat is  far more simplistic.  It's more like tic-tac-toe.

Lets not insult tic-tac-toe now.

DA2 combat is like a horrible combat system that attempts to be both party and character based and actiony at the same time. It fails on both fronts.

Neither is like chess(that would be a turn-based RPG, DA is realtime w/ pause) The biggest difference is the foes. In DAO, they use the same mechanics as the party, and many appear to use the same abilities. In DA2, they play by a completely different set of rules. This makes DA2 combat suck seeing as many foes attack at 25% of the party speed, have only a small list of abilities to utilize(they were bad too, anyone remember where the guy would just stand there swinging his sword?), and had exponentially higher hp while simultaneously doing exponentially less damage.

The best comparison of the two is this: In DAO you compete against individuals of roughly your ability; In DA2 you compete against individuals who are both physically and mentally inferior to you.

Modifié par wsandista, 11 septembre 2012 - 01:56 .

[eroeru]

wsandista wrote...

Lets not insult tic-tac-toe now.

:happy:

[Beerfish]

Yes it was fun, I played it abou as many times as I played DAO and the companions as a whole were more to my liking.

[Nomen Mendax]

Direwolf0294 wrote...

I had fun. Overall probably more fun than I had in DA:O, though my first experience in DA:O where I played through the City Elf origin and had no idea what I was doing and ended up running through the whole castle/kidnapping section with my character still wearing her wedding dress, now blood splattered, instead of armour is still the funnest experience I've ever had with the series.

Reading Allan's replies to this thread, I have no idea what the conversation was, but WoW and DA:O have an increadibly similar combat system. DA:O is pretty much just WoW slowed down and with the ability to pause. At least, that's how it always seemed to me. I guess since they're both click on something to target it and then activate abilities that are hotkeyed to a bar along the bottom of your screen than I have a hard time telling any real difference between the two.

I did that intentionally, it seemed so much cooler than changing into armour.

[Melca36]

Aspects of it were fun....yes

But enemies materializing from the sky and ceiling, bodies exploding after backstabbing, and FedEx delivery quests got tedious after the subsequent playthroughs.

[Renmiri1]

eroeru wrote...

wsandista wrote...

Lets not insult tic-tac-toe now.

:happy:

Insults come when they have no valid arguments left 


DA2 combat system is by no menas perfect. I played a similar system, much more fun to play, ages ago, on Final Fantasy 12. Story was meh, lots of dungeon crawling but a very fun game. I think DA2 is missing Summons and the special moves FF12 had. Those were a lot of fun. Also the enemies there were varied and fun. Ginormous hp but still fun to defeat. One could only be downed with physical attacks, another only with magic, some other had a different twist. 

If WoW is not considered a good example, I suggest BW look at FF12. The system is almost identical to DAO / DA2 but done in a way that most players liked. I never saw the pause x active wars we see here on BSN done for FF12.

[Sylvius the Mad]

I suspect that's because people who play JRPGs have different expecations with regard to combat. Combat in JRPGs is generally designed to be impressive and engaging and fun with no consideration paid at all to how well the system fits within the game's setting. JRPGs segregate all aspects of the game into different silos: combat, exploration, story - each stands completely alone.

But western RPGs and their tabletop precursors hav typically had all of those things integrate seamlessly. If one enemy can only be defeated with magic, there needs to be a reason for that that doesn't break the rules of the setting, and the rules of the setting also can't break the story.

Personally, I have never liked JRPGs, both because of how their combat is presented as a game for the player to play rather than merely an aspect of the setting in which the characters live, but also because of how they aim to tell a story rather than let the player's character build his own.

[Anomaly-]

Arthur Cousland wrote...
In general, I think how much people liked DA2 depends on how much a person likes combat in rpgs.  Those who like to roleplay or primarily just care about the story didn't like the game much.

Combat is one of the things I enjoy most in RPGs, and I found DA2 to be a resounding disappointment.

Plaintiff wrote...
There are very few instances in DA:O or DA2 where I have to use my brain at all.

Thing is, I found I could use my brain much more in DA:O, if I chose to. In DA2 not only were opportunities far more scarce, but it seemed everytime I tried to I only ended up shooting myself in the foot.

Modifié par Anomaly-, 12 septembre 2012 - 01:59 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

Anomaly- wrote...

Combat is one of the things I enjoy most in RPGs, and I found DA2 to be a resounding disappointment.

Combat can be a rich source of roleplaying opportunities.

It wasn't in DA2.

[fchopin]

I had fun playing the game but act 3 killed all the fun for me, it made me realise that the fun was an illusion.