143 réponses à ce sujet

[Ancalimohtar]

First off, my biases (updated for the last three years): I've played BG, BG2, BG2:TOB, Torment, IWD, IWDII, TOEE, KOTOR, KOTORII, Jade Empire, NWN, NWN2, and Mass Effect. I have considered, for basically the last decade, BG2/TOB to be the best computer game I've ever played. I despised NWN1, never got past the first act, skipped SoU, enjoyed HotU, and though I liked NWN2 for the most part, never replayed it because it had serious, fundamental flaws for me. Because of this, I quit halfway through Mask of the Betrayer and never went back. Combat is what provides these games replayability—once I’ve played an RPG in this genre (epic world-saving against a mysterious evil force), I know the story, I know the other characters’ backstories, I know what’s going to happen, so what keeps me coming back is the combat, probably with a different party or main character at least. And NWN2’s combat sucked (not as much as NWN1, which again, was unplayable) so I didn’t feel the desire to replay it.

This (http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/myviewtopic.html?topic=522005&forum=110) was the 8-post review I wrote for NWN2 three years ago. Rereading it really gave me the sense that, although BioWare did not make NWN2, and although it’s not based on D&D game mechanics, you guys learned from the mistakes made by your friends at Obsidian (and really, your own mistakes earlier on NWN1). You really, really listened to the fans. Most all of the points I and other people made in that thread seem to have specifically gotten special attention and fixed for DA. So thank you BioWare. I was kind of annoyed at the sales pitch (“spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series”) because I was sure DA would be yet another Jade Empire or NWN type game, but I was wrong. It has definitely lived up to that billing. It’s been eight years—conservatively, four full generations in the gaming industry—coming, but it’s finally here.

I played DA through the first time with a (poorly built) tank, switched it from Hard to Nightmare as soon as I got Wynne, and had my socks knocked off by how awesome the game was. I’m on my second time through, now with all the DLC content and on a mage, and I’m realizing how the balance of the game breaks down when you’ve got three mages and a golem tank. Here are the main points of praise or complaint I have for Dragon Age. Many are directly in response to complaints I made about NWN2 in that thread above.


Praise

Solved Aurora/Electron engine sluggishness

Overall, there is something seriously wrong with the feel of [NWN2]... [it's] so far from tabletop, it simply does not possess even the same level of strategic decision-making as either BG2 or tabletop. I thought about this for a good portion of the beginning of the game, then realized what the problem really was.

The best word to sum it up is "sluggish." NWN2 feels sluggish, in every way. From the littlest things to the biggest things. It just don't have the same crisp, responsive feel as BG2 or other games--even games in other genres. Even the little things are sluggish. The camera (more on that lovely... thing later) is sluggish. Point-to-move is sluggish.

[...]

I think the biggest problem is spellcasting sluggishness. In tabletop or TOEE (tabletop's most faithful translation), everything is turn-based, so when it's the wizard's turn to go, he can decide which spell to cast, where to cast it, begin casting it, finish casting it, and have the spell take its effect all instantaneously. In NWN2, this is not the case. For this reason alone, spellcasters are an order of magnitude weaker than they are in tabletop--they simply can't do what they're supposed to.

Easy example: Battle starts, Sand wants to cast a fireball at some githyanki. He starts casting it at a piece of ground where it would do the most damage, hitting 5 gith. Excellent. He begins casting. Now at this point, two things can happen. 1) Sand's buddies Khelgar, Neeskha, and Blackguard run off to attack the gith, which ends up badly, as by the time Sand finishes casting the spell and the fireball travels to the point, everybody's already engaged in melee and the fireball rips through Sand's friends. Not desirable, not cool, not even the way D&D spellcasters were supposed to function.2) Sand tells his buddies not to move before he does this. The gith instead come to Sand's party. By the time the fireball lands, it might hit the straggler who hasn't reached the party yet, but that's it.

[...]

Just look at (god forbid) Meteor Swarm. Oh my painful intestines. After the spell is cast, it takes about a whole round before the first meteor hits, and another round for the other 3 to hit. The effect looks amazing, very flashy, me likes me likes. But come on, it severely diminishes the effectiveness of Meteor Swarm. I can get two more spells to hit before the last meteor hits. I mean, the monster even changes targets and comes after Sand in between meteors. How ridiculous is that?

In DA/the Eclipse engine, this problem is much minimized. Spells cast much faster. The little “ball” of magic that flies toward its target to release the actual spell effect flies much faster. And in some cases, it appears AOE spells’ targets are chosen when you cast the spell during a paused game, based on which targets are highlighted, even if the spell effects don’t take hold for a second. I love using cone of cold, and if Creature A is highlighted when I’m casting the spell during a pause, even if he moves out of the projected cone of effect before Morrigan actally gets the spell off, he’ll still get hit. This is really, really good. Also, while characters don’t have World of Warcraft-like crispness, they’re still much, much more responsive than NWN and NWN2 characters, and move around pretty well and efficiently.

Look, I’m a proponent of the philosophy that player control is king. Players don’t like choosing to take an action based on a certain set of expected consequences, and then having those expectations ripped away every single time. Why try to play tactically if you’re just going to get screwed? Games that are hard for reasons outside the player’s control are not hard in the right way. They’re not fun. It’s fun to be rewarded for doing something right and punished for doing something wrong. It’s not fun to be punished even when you do something right. The way the NWNs tried to make up for the lack of player control was to reduce how often the player got punished, i.e., easymode:


Solved NWN2’s easymode

The difficulty, or lack thereof, with the [NWN2] OC really was a big problem... Eventually, I would just cast Stoneskin on [my main], give him permahaste boots and a regeneration ring, and let him run through stuff. It was kind of absurd. I didn't even bother upgrading weapons--I had an entire tab of metal and gems, only used two King's Tears and two Beljuril for wondrous items…I mean, what happened to the good ol' mage fights of BG2? I added on Wes Weimer's smarter mages, Tactics, the Ascension mod, oh my goodness each battle was like a game of chess. It was awesome.

With player control firmly back in the player’s hands, Dragon Age can afford to be hard without frustrating the player. And by providing a challenge, it has really returned to tactical pause-and-play—because the player is forced to pay attention to the details, position his characters correctly, cast all the right spells in the right order and think about exactly how to take down the enemies, in which order, splitting which of his characters on which targets, and using which abilities. This is really, in my opinion, what this genre of games is all about. Even though I complained about auto-rezzing in NWN2 and consequences for resting to regain spells (and DA takes this a step further to auto-heal and refresh all spells for free after combat), this doesn’t bother me. In fact, I think this is another improvement, because you guys…


Finally got rid of D&D

I was a big proponent of 3.5E rules for combat, and really loved them and lobbied for more faithful translations into past games, but I now think trying to use them at all for a real-time game was really one of the biggest problems with the NWN series. Even the KOTOR series, which was much better, still had to be too easy to compensate for a lot of the problems with translating the pen-and-paper d20 ruleset for a real time CRPG. Ultimately, I think it’s hard to argue that rules made specifically for turn-based combat can ever be as good when translated to realtime as rules made natively for realtime. Minus Baldur’s Gate II, the best games BioWare/Black Isle-Obsidian has made are Dragon Age and Mass Effect, both games on proprietary rulesets. (I’d consider Jade Empire’s proprietary combat system a beta run; hopefully none of us will be subjected to that ever again.)

With the freedom from D&D rules, a lot of the other problems that had plagued this genre for almost a decade were solved. D&D rules (especially 3.5E) traditionally were about simulation of any situation players could come across. They were supposed to explain the game world to people who were pretending to live in it. To force players to rest (and explain why people should), you had fatigue and spells/day; you had to explain how wounds got healed or dead players resurrected in a reasonable way and impose costs for that. But in computer games, nobody knows if you’ve slept, nobody cares if you rested and got your healing spells back to heal your party so you could move on in the dungeon. There were no real consequences for this, because nothing is time sensitive (you can rest hundred times in Irenicus’ dungeon or five times, either way when you come out Irenicus is in the middle of roasting Cowled Wizards). And if you really got to a point where you could not survive, you would just load. Getting rid of daily limits on spells and abilities, auto-healing and ressing out of combat, these are really just quality-of-life improvements. Almost cosmetic. It allows you to fight interesting battles and progress through the game.

(Although I will say that within one encounter itself, some abilities should not endlessly cooldown and refresh. X-per-encounter abilities are something that’s missing from this game, I think.)


Solved NWN2’s Party A(lack of)I

Here's a 100% true story about my party that should sum up the problems: My main character, along with Neeshka and Khelgar, is whacking some monsters. Qara decides to fireball us all. We get fireballed. Brilliant. Fine. I take control of Qara and cast a few spells that don't destroy the party. Meanwhile, my character decides to Frenzy, starts losing 12hp a round, and because of this, starts drinking potions of Cure Light nonstop--even though I specifically turned off Use Items and Use Abilities and all that jazz in the AI tab. Fine. I switch back to him, and start giving him directions to whack. There is only one monster left. Qara decides to fireball again. She kills the last monster, but for some reason UNFATHOMABLE to me, there is still fighting going on. Neeshka is hitting something. Neeshka is sneak attacking something. Neeshka is sneak attacking Qara. I control her, tell her to move instead of attack, and zone into a new level of the building. (I think this was the Gith building, or maybe Moire's warehouse, don't remember.) We zone in, and everybody's bunched together. Qara, unknown to me until now, has already begun retaliating against Neeshka for retaliating against her. She shoots a fireball. There are no enemies in sight. The fireball goes ten pixels and kills Neeshka and Qara, and hurts my main character and Khelgar. Waiting for the two of them to get up off the ground, I realize the problem--my Frenzied Berserker is still in the unwanted Frenzy, and thus the party is still "in battle," and I have to wait another couple rounds before he has hurt himself enough for the two chicks to get up.

Although I’ve stopped using the tactics setup (for everything except auras) in favor of having full control of my characters, I have to say that the DA party AI/tactics system works pretty well. For players who are a little bit less interested in all the micromanaging, this is an awesome innovation to the genre.


Other fixes to problems mentioned in the NWN2 thread

• Now when you select a spell to cast while paused, the character doesn’t actually start casting (and thus commit to that spell, using it and that round of combat up, preventing you from changing your mind before you unpause). Now you’re not “locked in” and can change your mind before you pause without consequences, the way it should be. (Caveat: If you accidentally click off an aura, you are committed to that. And with cooldowns… sigh.)
• Buff and debuff icons are back to being itemized by the effect itself, not its component stat effects.
• Autopause! Even though I wish there were more complex conditions. More on that below.
• Autosave quite frequent! More than one autosave slot!
• Enemy health bars on mouseover and tab! No more having to target a mob to find out!
• Stealth in combat! Basically like the WOW rogue’s vanish.
• Dialogue scripting seems to be done excellently. Haven’t come across any mistakes yet.
• Pathfinding partially fixed. At least a huge improvement over NWN/NWN2
• Goes back to KOTOR/KOTOR2 style stronghold as opposed to NWN2, which was terrible and clunky
• Zones not being taken off the world map unless they’re destroyed!
• Both a consolidated party-inventory to avoid inventory tetris AND categorization of items in said inventory for ease of browsing!
• ESC to skip lines in cutscenes, even lines that include scripted movement or actions (improvement over Mass Effect’s system even)!
• Got rid of capes entirely, which is great. Capes are all you see since you look at your character’s back the entire time, so an ugly cape you have to wear for stats is a huge eyesore.
• No more mouse radial menus, which was a really awkward and annoying thing in the NWNs (and also ToEE, by the way)

I mean, look at that list. Those are actual complaints in that one thread, addressed and fixed in this game. Really impressive. You can’t deny that this game is just incredibly polished.


Other praise:

• I think the game looks gorgeous as a whole. I love the environments. The Circle Tower, Redcliffe, the Cultist Temple, all beautiful and believable. And Ostagar is awe-inspiring. I love the art style—a perfect balance between, say, the classic realism of the LOTR movies and the more exaggerated shapes and sheens of most fantasy games. I’m also a big fan of the realistic scale of everything. I know this probably contributes to the problem with the camera zoom, but it gives the whole game a very satisfying feel. I will include two caveats to this, though: 1) There could be slightly more daring colors, particularly in Denerim, the “big city,” and 2) The weak point of the graphics are hair and skin. Oh I lied, third caveat: Hair choices are really lame, and helmets suck ass, particularly every single mage helm.
• Fireball does something other than damage! I’m a big fan of the knockdown, nice innovation.
• No more light/dark or good/evil objective morality meter! Only influence.
• Party banter when entering a place of interest related to the place
• The concept of each party member having a "target." This is something I can only imagine comes from MMOs, but it's nice that your party member preserves his target even when given a command to move somewhere or take some action.

Modifié par Ancalimohtar, 05 janvier 2010 - 08:42 .

[Ancalimohtar]

Complaints

I know DA to BG1 is probably a more fair comparison than to BG2 (for many many reasons) but at the same time, it’s hard to ignore that a lot of the strengths of BG2 are lacking in DA, so a lot of the below will relate to BG2. This section is really intended to hopefully give some meaningful feedback to the devs for the purposes of a better expansion or DA2.


Only partially fixed Aurora/Electron engine’s camera

While the camera is way better than NWN2’s (and it’s nice to note that in the NWN2 thread I suggested there only need be two camera modes, which is what DA has) it is still a serious problem, probably the single worst thing about DA:

Mainly, tactical mode doesn’t let you see very far. You’d want to either angle up to look farther away, zoom out further to see more at once, or failing all that, pan horizontally over it. But you can’t angle the camera in tactical mode, you can’t zoom out any further, and there’s a limit on how far you can pan. So sometimes, when the enemies are far away, I have to go to third-person drive mode just to be able to put the spell reticule where I want. It’s a bit silly that the range at which Wynne and Morrigan can shoot magic out of their staffs at enemies is basically the max distance of my tactical camera. The fact that the majority of the time you don’t have the freedom to pan around and get a good look at the battlefield is just an unnecessary quality of life issue. I don’t understand, is this supposed to be like a fog of war thing, where you are intentionally restricted to what is within 40 yards of your characters, or is this an attempt to keep the number of polygons your computer has to render to a minimum? I would definitely like to zoom out more.

I do have to say that the design behind the two modes is solid. The WASD third person cam is perfect for non-combat, and the fact that you can see ceilings in this mode makes the graphics and effects and settings look amazing. And the tactical camera was something people asked for since NWN1 and only partially got in NWN2.


Non-transparent rules/mechanics, no combat log

These are separate problems that nonetheless all stem from the same philosophy.

First, nobody understands what the hell stats mean, or what the formulas are, or almost any of the crunch. How does armor penetration actually translate to damage? How does spellpower multiply into damage? Hell, I still don’t know how the game does its equivalent of the “attack roll”—by what percentage does 5 more defense points reduce my chance of getting hit? My first time through the game, I played a tank, putting free stats into Constitution. And even though he was pretty alright at his job, it turns out that’s not at all how you build a tank; apparently, you want everything in Dex because scales your avoidance really well. No wonder I had to kite bosses around and had to rely on so much healing. It’s pretty stupid that I had no idea, and without reading forums (which I don’t think should be something players should have to do just to understand basic concepts), I wouldn’t have ever known.

Second, there’s no combat log. What? Even the NWNs had a combat log. Only How could you not have one in this game? To compound this—and this is one I simply cannot understand even a little bit—the only indicator of how much damage a character or monster took, or what spell the enemy mages cast (the little floaty text) disappear lightning fast, regardless of whether the game is paused! And without a combat log, you will never ever know what happened. Really, who thought of this one?

I’m not sure whether this whole thing is because you don’t want to scare the casual player with complicated stats and formulas, whether you subscribe to the MMO model of “let the player community test and discover the formulas,” or whether you truly want to hide your game mechanics from players, but in all three cases I disapprove heavily. If you’re concerned about overwhelming casual players, just add all the reference rules and formulas to a codex category, and make the combat log hideable. The MMO model of relying on a player community for testing is not appropriate for a single player game, and I’m not even going to address the last possibility.


Encounter design problem, Part A: Repetitive, simplistic monsters

One of the many reasons BG2 was so awesome was how diverse and colorful the encounters were. Every enemy felt different. Every mage seemed to have a different set of spells. There were tons of special monsters that did special things--beholders, vampires, illithids, djinn, mephits, elementals, different types of golems (all of which had different attacks and strengths and weaknesses), liches, sahuagin, kuo-toas, the list goes on. Every encounter you had to figure out how to handle a bunch of unique, diverse characters, and balance your characters getting pounded from all sides (that's what she said).

Meanwhile, in DA the enemies are incredibly repetitive. The only thing that helps keep encounters themselves from being too repetitive is the different positioning of the enemies, and the fact that tactical positioning concerns are important in DA. Even so, I'm pretty tired of the game's most popular enemy, Generic Darkspawn/Dwarf/Bandit/Undead Archer. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure I could tell you a single difference between genlocks, hurlocks, "darkspawn," dwarves, human bandits, and undead, because they all do the same damn thing when given a bow (or a 2h, or a sword and shield). 80% of the game's enemies fall under one of: 1) melee, 2) archer, 3) shield melee, 4) emissaries/mages, and 5) animals (who are distinct only because they overwhelm). There are maybe five other non-boss enemies in the game total: 6) ogres, 7) revenants, 8) melee demons, 9) caster demons, and 10) fire demons. Really, the only interesting enemies are bosses.

This makes 99% of combat about positioning. Don't get me wrong, I love tactical positioning concerns, and they've been sorely lacking in the NWNs and KOTORs, but they can't be the only tactical combat element. Unlike BG2, you never have to worry about immunities and specific resistances, or special attacks (poison/dots, confusion, paralysis, charm, etc.), enemies are rarely coming out of stealth and backstabbing you, and enemy casters never do anything truly dangerous except fireball and chain lightning. The two main sources of difficulty in DA are 1) in ambushes of numerical and tactical superiority (archers and mages up cliffs), and 2) bosses with incredible amounts of life and damage.


Encounter design problem, Part B: Enemy ranks

That brings me to enemy ranks. I’m really not a fan of this need to neatly categorize something’s difficulty and broadcast it to the player; it probably comes from 4E, but is unnecessary and detracts from the game. More importantly, it forces a “boss + minions” encounter design philosophy.

Whatever happened to the BG model of party-based combat? The last fight in BG1 was Sarevok, another fighter, a mage, and I think an archer or maybe second mage. And they were all quite tough. It wasn’t just super-Sarevok and a dozen archers chain stunning you. Mencar Pebblecrusher & Co. in Waukeen’s Promenade in BG2 had the dwarf, a mage, his imp familiar, a human fighter, and a backstabbing thief, all really deadly if you didn’t think carefully about how, and in what order you were going to deal with them. It wasn’t just super-Mencar and a dozen archers chain stunning you. The Twisted Rune had the lich, the beholder, the human mage, the vampire, and I think some kind of fighter. Think about that. Remember that fight? You had to plan out how you would deal with each one and their strengths and weaknesses. It wasn’t just super-freaking-Shangalar and a dozen freaking archers chain freaking stunning you.
 
What fight in DA do you ever have to deal with an interesting mix of unique enemies? In every boss fight, the same formula holds: the one boss is overpowered, and the minions are retarded. Bosses themselves have the same properties: short durations on all debuffs or status effects, always have a ton of life, always have high magic resist.  I really liked the Jarvia fight for example, that was quite fun; why not have a fight with Jarvia, Branka, a Revenant, and the blood mage slaver guy, and balance by reducing their damage and health by 50-75%? That would be fun and interesting.


Aggro and tanking

My first playthrough, my tank could not hold aggro for his life. It was frustrating as hell; sometimes the mages would get chased after not doing a single thing, while the monster was being hit continuously by the tank. All my fights with revenants had the Benny Hill theme going, with a mage running in circles being chased by the revenant, who was being chased by the tank. This time through, Shale just AOE taunts, does his little AOE stun, and nobody ever runs off to the mages. It just lets me unload spectacularly unfair spell combinations onto them with no fear of reprisal. Come on, there’s got to be a happy median somewhere here. Tanks should not hold aggro with AOE taunt like they do, but they should be able to do something to prevent enemies from getting by them to chase mages when they do lose aggro.

The ultimate utility of the tank should be to protect the ranged characters via positioning tricks. Maybe shield bash is something you can use frequently to control enemies and slow them down. Maybe tanks gain larger physical spaces that prevents enemies from overlapping their “circles” and walking right by them. (It was particularly frustrating my first time through Redcliffe when I had two tanks perfectly positioned to block a doorway, and they would literally move aside to allow the enemy mabari past. COME ON.) Perhaps tanks get the Intercept ability from World of Warcraft, a charge + stun that saves the mage. Hell, how about just giving them a slowing aura?  Or reinstate attacks of opportunity (though I know these have never been implemented bug-free in the NWNs). Just something that makes actual sense. It’s not fun to just run in your tank, hit taunt, and then nuke to oblivion. (Or worse, have to scale back your mages’ damage to stay under the tank on the invisible aggro list.)

In the grander scheme of things, aggro is an MMO concept that should just be avoided in a single player game. Look, I played World of Warcraft at an extremely competitive level. I tanked for a US top-20 guild, server firsts and all that jazz. I know more about the mechanics of tanking than I could ever explain in this post. So trust me, I’m not just a reactionary anti-MMO goon. I just find the “spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate” a particularly unfortunate game in which to implement MMO-style aggro design. I’m down with having shield-bearing defensive characters as viable party members, but they should hold the attention of enemies based on tactical concerns, not because they have an ability that basically manipulates enemy AI. D&D always accomplished this with attacks of opportunity, or trips, or some other way of penalizing enemies who tried to get by you. The underlying principle was always that the enemies weren’t being tricked into attacking the most defensive target, but were choosing to do so because it was better than fruitlessly chasing the others. But sometimes, some enemies SHOULD chase the mages because they’re built for it. You can’t expect to be able to trick every powerful demon or ancient creature into attacking the one wearing all the armor, especially when they could be successful mage hunting. And speaking of mages…


Mages are overpowered

First of all, the best party bar none is 3 mages + tank. Tell me what’s wrong with this picture: With 3 mages in my current party, playing on Nightmare, I have one-shot every single encounter so far, including Flemeth at level 11 (and that obviously only allowed me two mages). Standard routine is to run in Shale, taunt everything, and have the mages go to town with resist hexes, paralysis explosion, virulent walking bomb, and possibly entropic death, all while Shale is happily force fielded. There’s just no way to lose. If there are mages or scattered enemies, some AOEs or crushing prisons keep them occupied. It’s like PuzzleQuest Galactrix, once you put together the pieces to your build, you just execute the same tactics, hit the same abilities in the same order, and it’s an auto-win. It’s no longer fun, and I’m quitting this playthrough and restarting with a one-mage party. I like mages to be powerful and tactical characters too, but not i-win buttons.

• The only ways to defend against spells seems to be to straight up resist it completely, or have reduced duration due to yellow or orange rank. Even in D&D where wizards were admittedly unbelievably powerful, spells had saving throws. In my go-to tactic above, none of those AOE spells are ever resisted by, say, half the targets. Nothing is ever immune to magic, or spirit damage (or any damage, except ice on revenants); nothing gets healed by spirit damage (you’d think maybe demons would be?); nothing is immune to paralysis; nothing shakes off debuffs except by rank; nothing teleports or charges my mages forcing them to use spells defensively; enemy mages never even start off combat with spell protections, which by the way don’t exist; there are no legitimate anti-mage enemies in the entire game; the list goes on.
• Staves do too much damage. Being at range is just better than being melee to begin with, particularly when dragons and ogres and revenants are all melee-unfriendly. At least in BG2 your mages were pretty docile after expending their spells.
• Spell combos are great and lots of fun, but they’re way too powerful, especially since 1) they encourage mage-stacking, and 2) non-mage talent trees don’t have combos. In fact, there’s just way more synergy for magic than for martial. You have negative resist hexes, you’ve got gear that boosts spirit (or cold or whatever) damage, you’ve got spell combos, and warriors and rogues are left in the cold.
• Mages actually have really good defenses, while other non-tanks don’t. An entire room could be coming at Morrigan, and with one cone of cold or sleep I can run her safely away. Put down a glyph of repulsion and she’s basically untouchable by melee. Sten only really has pommel strike and then he’s screwed. Not like his armor or defense is going to help any. Either give them better armor and defenses, or give him an aoe stun or aggro drop, or maybe some kind of rage ability that lets him take only 25% damage for a short while.
• Any mage can get healing with one talent point. Really? Combining wizard and cleric wasn’t enough, you had to give the single defining characteristic of divine magic essentially for free? And with spirit healer, group heal is another single talent point. In fact, this is part of a greater problem:

Talents and talent trees are screwy

Mages’ talent trees need to be split into at least two builds, while warriors and rogues need to have their talent trees opened up. The way it is now, even though everybody, including mages, has to follow prereqs within a tree, mages can cherry-pick their trees from separate schools. You can’t have one character with amazing damage, CC, utility, and healing, all obtainable with ONE build. One solution, for example, would be to 1) add two more trees to each school to make them a bit more well-rounded, 2) add level requirements to every spell, and then 3) force a mage to have a primary and a secondary school. Spells learned from the secondary school have their level requirements doubled. There, bam.

Contrast the current situation with Warriors and rogues: they’re basically forced into one school, because they’re weapon style- and stat-dependent. Every 2H build looks the same—everything under Two-Handed. And it’s not all that interesting. You’ve got a few different auras, then you’ve got one stun, two crits, two sunders, and an aoe. Even if you were to branch into archery, it wouldn’t help you any because all your stats are in Strength, so you’re a crappy archer. This is just bad design.

First, make most warrior or rogue talents non-weapon dependent, and group talents by some other criterion than weapon-style. Why does Assault require a shield (and three other shield skills)? Why is flurry two-weapon only? Second, introduce cooler talents. Look to 3.5E’s Tome of Battle for inspiration for cool abilities for martial combatants. I know some are a bit too “anime,” but there are definitely lots of abilities that would fit the flavor of Dragon Age.

One more thing about the talent trees: Getting a new ability every level is a pretty sweet deal for melee coming from a D&D background, but mages only getting one spell per level means you guys probably couldn’t give meaningful resistances or immunities to enemies (the stuff I talked about in the Mages-overpowered section above) or else mages would run into situations where they simply didn’t have the tools to do anything. Perhaps another way to change mages’ talent trees would be to tone down each spell’s effect/duration, double the number of spells in the game, and allow mages two spells per level instead of one. That way, mages would be better-rounded and won’t get caught with their pants down, but each spell would also be less beastly.


Complaints about the setting

• The need to derive every kingdom in Thedas from a real-world European civilization: I just don’t see why even the accents had to be stolen from European history. What’s the point of creating an entire homebrew setting if it’s not even… created? Just unnecessary and immersion-breaking.
• Elves and dwarves, really? At least elves get to have a diaspora, the stupid dwarves are just chillin underground… making weapons and armor… and drinking… I get that it’s probably really hard to sell a new fantasy setting with unfamiliar homebrew races, but at least change up the stereotypes, especially the ones that make no sense. For example, why are tree-hugging elves always so elegant? As long as you’re looking at real-life Europe, why not look at real-life South America? Human societies in the Amazon are quite primitive and don’t resemble Lothlorien at all. It’d actually be cool if elves were, for once, not prissy and dainty but primitive and savage.
• I hate underground dwarves and underground caverns and the stupid Deep Roads and how they go on and on and on and on and the color scheme and the boring ass hurlocks and the genlocks that never end killmenow.
• “Ser,” the single most pretentious and unnecessary piece of manufactured culture in the entire setting. Unwilling to change even slightly the sound or function of the word, you literally just changed the spelling. Wow. Two thumbs down.

Other complaints

• The four “main sidequests” are too much of the game, I think. BG2 had this done perfectly—Chapter 2 was the part of the game where you could go wherever you wanted and do whatever you wanted to give people that kind of open-ended freedom, but once you paid your 15k, you were taken on a long epic journey through graveyards, a mage asylum, an underwater fish city, the underdark, an elven forest city, and even the nine hells. In DA, when the sidequests are over, the game is pretty much over. There’s one short romp through a destroyed Denerim, culminating with a rather anticlimactic fight, and the game ends. BG2 allowed you to have your cake and eat it too—both the freedom of an open-ended RPG and the robustness of a strong single player story campaign carrying through to a satisfying final battle.
• No action queue—this is a step backwards from NWN2, not sure why.
• Autopause very simplistic: I was hoping there’d be the BG2-style option to autopause whenever a character finished its previous action (or, if there were an action queue, when it was finished with its queue). This would obviously allow the player to waste absolutely zero combat time, but whatever.
• Pathfinding is mostly problem-free, but at the very beginning of combat, characters lose their instructions as soon as combat “officially” starts and run toward the diamond formation (which by the way, you can’t change).
• Lockpicking can only be done by rogues, which is fine in a BG-style game with a six-man party, but when you have 4 in the party, and lockpicking is dependent on cunning, which your party rogue could easily not be built around, this becomes a problem. You can say lockpicking is something unique that rogues bring to the party, but you can always go back on a “loot run” so this is really just a bad design decision with no excuse, a straight up drop in quality of life.
• No pausing during a cutscene—I thought this existed in Mass Effect? Step backwards.
• Inventory is taken up 75% by garbage crafting loot that I never use because it costs money to buy recipes, money that is better saved so I can buy things like Staff of the Magister Lord and +1 Talent tomes.
• Take another page from World of Warcraft: Allow players to toggle off “Show helm.”

Modifié par Ancalimohtar, 05 janvier 2010 - 08:14 .

[Ancalimohtar]

Conclusion

Even though the Complaints section above is really (really) long, the strengths of DA way, way outshine its weaknesses. All the little things we asked for and got prove that DA is a finished, polished game, but at its core, the fundamental game design decisions in DA seems to have been built with our feedback from the NWNs et al in mind. The biggest issues that remain are the camera, no combat log, repetitive enemies, and lack of party-based boss encounters.

Once again, thanks for trying to give longtime Baldur’s Gate fans what they wanted. I hope that for the expansion or DA2, you guys pay just as much attention to our feedback on DA. This isn't a perfect game, and I wouldn't put it at the BG2/TOB level, but if DA2 improves from DAO by the same amount that BG2 did from BG1, we fans will have nothing to complain about at all.

P.S. Just bought some points for Return to Ostagar. Looking forward to it.

Modifié par Ancalimohtar, 05 janvier 2010 - 06:28 .

[stillnotking]

That's a good and comprehensive review. I agree with most of it and with your suggestions for improvement.

On the lack of transparency in combat mechanics: the good (?) news is that combat mechanics are, in fact, extremely simple. For example, Armor is an integer reduction to physical attacks, while Armor Penetration is an integer reduction (ignore X) of enemy Armor. Attack and Defense act in similar direct linear opposition. I assume that Bioware either thought all this would be obvious, or thought that players would just open up the console and figure it out. The lack of a combat log is a serious omission, though.

On elves and dwarves: Tolkien created the conceptual spaces for them over fifty years ago, and changing them significantly is a hard sell. DA did get outside the box a little bit with the dwarves, introducing a caste system, the eternal war against darkspawn/Legion of the Dead, etc. Honestly, though, when fantasy fans see "dwarf" and "elf", we know what to expect, and any radical departure is more likely to be jarring than interesting.

On using European archetypes for countries: I have no problem with this, and the links are not totally obvious except in the case of Orlais. (It is a bit silly that Fereldan accents are all over the map, from cockney to Irish to American South.) It's hard to create believable languages and cultures from scratch, and there really isn't a reason to. It would have been nice if the Orlesians were less blatantly French, however.

On threat: I honestly believe this problem could be solved merely by reducing the effectiveness of Taunt. If you use an Arcane Warrior tank, you will have trouble with threat in a more "realistic" way. Taunt, and to a lesser extent the auto-threat generation of massive armor, just feel like a kludge: the developers couldn't figure out a way to keep rogues/mages/DPS warriors safe, so they put in a "tanking button". Much more elegant solutions are possible and I like your suggestions.

[JJM152]

Get a blog. This forum is for discussion, not attention whoring.

[ccf6799]

First of all, you praise DA for implementing a good tactical turn base combat but then criticize D&D for not suited for real time combat, so which do you really prefer, turn base or real time combat? If I'm not wrong D&D 4E is much more tuned for real time combatl.

The problem with DA power balance and repetitive enemies is all because of moving away from D&D. With D&D thorough research for power balance as well as vast number of monster has already been provided for. To create a D&D universe the same number of people, if not more, that are needed to create a game project would be needed. Thus for DA to have a game as good as BG or BG2, they will need double the amount of people, one team to create the rule set and universe, the other to create the game. This is very hard for management to agree to. I might be wrong but looking at DA, they have 1 team doing both task. 3 class with 4 specialization each is not equivalent to 12 D&D class, no matter how you look at it. D&D's Cleric is so much different from D&D's mage whereas for DA, a normal mage is not so much different from a mage who specialize in Spirit-healing. This all boils down to not enough people creating the rule set and universe. Moving away from D&D is definitely not a plus point for me, esp. when DA itself is turn base.

Actually your argument for moving away from D&D, is not about real time combat, it is about D&D 3.5E or below not suited for a computer game. In fact this is what D&D 4E solved and why some die hard D&D fans dislike 4E. Pen and paper does not have problem with player resting and reloading too much because the DM will discourage such things. Thus maybe computer RPG should be done in such a way to discourage such things but it is easily said then done. That's why D&D 4E came about and thus I've been waiting for a CRPG that uses D&D 4E. In my opinion, if DA had use D&D 4E, it would be the best game of the century! Imagine the amount of time they can use to solve other issues like AI and so on, since rule set and universe has been taken care of. I can safely says that BG2 would not be as good without D&D.

Modifié par ccf6799, 05 janvier 2010 - 08:21 .

[countersubject]

First of all, a decent review, i disagree on some points and agree on many.
But i have to say it's interesting how the complaints list is *always* longer, then ending with 'but the game is basically awesome'. Sometimes i do that too, but for the sake of fairness make a list that's at least equally big for things you liked if (and only if) your overall experience was very positive. Because let's call a spade a spade, players these days are incredibly spoiled and expect nothing less than perfection. As a dev i would be annoyed. Don't take things for granted, take notice of what you like.

Btw, I feel it's the story decisions in DA that make replays worthwhile and not combat. I've seen the enemies and fought them, but what i haven't seen is pouring blood into the urn or freeing connor from the demon or the kill all elves option or ....

Modifié par countersubject, 05 janvier 2010 - 09:51 .

[phordicus]

excellent. you saved me the time to write essentially the same things and the guilt i felt for not doing so.

[Bagheeris]

countersubject wrote...
But i have to say it's interesting how the complaints list is *always* longer, then ending with 'but the game is basically awesome'.

Well - people write such reviews because they like the game but at the same time they think it can get even better, and they want to share their ideas what exactly can be improved / changed so that they can like the game even more.

As a dev i would be annoyed.

I would expect that devs would be actually curious about customers' response, don't you think?
I am not a traditional RPG player, I play mostly strategies ... and WoW ofc  So i personally don't care how DA:O compares to previous games and about traditional ruleset, although i can understand it may be important for others. But i largerly agree with the review. In a nutshell, the game has excellent story but combat is lacking (tactical depth). I would say that combat is as important as story, after all you have to spend significant share of your game time fighting. 

[XWolfGhost]

(It was particularly frustrating my first time through Redcliffe when I
had two tanks perfectly positioned to block a doorway, and they would
literally move aside to allow the enemy mabari past. COME ON.)

This made me laugh

A lot of great points though. Hopefully some Devs read it, I doubt it though

[countersubject]

Not necessarily. Good story/world + mediocre, even dull combat worked well in morrowind for example. Bad story + good combat doesn't work for solo rpg. But i agree, good combat mechanics are very important - and imo, DA has that.
In any case, i'm not saying a dev doesn't want customer response, i'm saying were i a dev I would be annoyed by the pattern i described. I would feel like those players take quality as a matter of course and it's impossible to please them.
I'm not referring specifically to the review above, it's just a general statement.

Modifié par countersubject, 05 janvier 2010 - 12:43 .

[Zecele]

Take another page from World of Warcraft: Allow players to toggle off “Show helm.”

By far my biggest complaint. Helms in this game are fugly. It's also jarring that they take them off for the cutscenes any way.

[Psython]

Thanks for the thoughts. Hopefully some devs will read it.

[soteria]

Huh. Surprisingly, I agreed with a lot of it. I don't really agree with the complaints about the setting--what do you want, Final Fantasy?

[termokanden]

While I agree with many of the OPs points, I tire of the endless posts saying mages are too powerful.

Any mage can get healing with one talent point. Really? Combining wizard and cleric wasn’t enough, you had to give the single defining characteristic of divine magic essentially for free? And with spirit healer, group heal is another single talent point. In fact, this is part of a greater problem

I have plenty of experience raid healing, and I can only say that having Heal does not make you a healer. It doesn't heal all that much, and it's on a cooldown. Only by taking 3 points in both the healing line and the spirit healer line do you come close (and not even very close) to the healing capacity of a traditional healer. Oh and by the way, clerics in AD&D had plenty of damage spells, some of them even quite overpowered.

Mages’ talent trees need to be split into at least two builds, while warriors and rogues need to have their talent trees opened up. The way it is now, even though everybody, including mages, has to follow prereqs within a tree, mages can cherry-pick their trees from separate schools. You can’t have one character with amazing damage, CC, utility, and healing, all obtainable with ONE build. One solution, for example, would be to 1) add two more trees to each school to make them a bit more well-rounded, 2) add level requirements to every spell, and then 3) force a mage to have a primary and a secondary school. Spells learned from the secondary school have their level requirements doubled. There, bam.

There, bam indeed. You have now reduced the interesting mages of DAO to the narrow, boring casters of WoW. The spell system in DAO is incredible because it breaks exactly those traditions and allows so many variations of spell choices. The alternative, which I believe is what you describe, is the WoW caster. Spam the same spells over and over again, and you're only really good at one thing.

The brilliant thing about DAO mages is they can be healers as well. In WoW, you are a healer, or you are a damage dealer, not both at once. Thus, as a healer you follow your party around like a little dog, too weak to do anything on your own. Sure you're essential to the party's survival, but you're only really watching health bars. You can probably tell I've been there

In other words, the hybrid caster was never there in WoW. Even with dual specs, you are one thing at a time. DAO on the other hand DOES have hybrid casters. And with Arcane Warrior, it even has another type of hybrid. Yes, the people behind DAO really do deserve praise for this.

DAO really is a good game for all of us who have always liked playing mages. Unlike most other games, casters in this game are not subject to so much "balancing" that eventually they get outclassed by every melee class and their pets.

I will also argue that mages in this game are not TOO powerful. Any properly built melee character is also extremely powerful. My experience with a DW warrior at least is that it was as powerful as my previous mage, but in an entirely different way.

Instead of taking the McDonald's of MMOs way out and nerfing mage spells to oblivion (sadly they already started to do this in 1.02, for a single player game for crying out loud), take a look at the melee classes (and the archers as well) and try to make their abilities more interesting. Too many of them are more or less the same.

Minus Baldur’s Gate II, the best games BioWare/Black Isle-Obsidian has made are Dragon Age and Mass Effect, both games on proprietary rulesets. (I’d consider Jade Empire’s proprietary combat system a beta run; hopefully none of us will be subjected to that ever again.)

A lot of us loved Jade Empire. It may be your opinion that it's horrible, but you're making it sound like we all agree it just sucked. It had some balance issues, sure (Storm Dragon for example), but it was fun.

Also, you really think Mass Effect is better than KotOR? Oh nevermind, it's subjective anyway.

(Although I will say that within one encounter itself, some abilities should not endlessly cooldown and refresh. X-per-encounter abilities are something that’s missing from this game, I think.)

Personally, I always hated such abilities. They make your character too powerful while you're using them, and too weak while you're not. Waiting for long cooldowns is just plain boring.

I almost missed this absolute gem:

And NWN2’s combat sucked (not as much as NWN1, which again, was unplayable) so I didn’t feel the desire to replay it.

NWN was unplayable? I guess that explains a community of very enthusiastic power gamers coming up with weird builds for replaying the game over and over again.

It's fair enough if you didn't like the game. But that doesn't make it unplayable.

I personally thought NWN was amazing with the two expansions, but somewhat uninteresting without them.

Modifié par termokanden, 05 janvier 2010 - 07:21 .

[Nuclear_Pony]

I agree with your points (although I think NWN 1 rocked !) and NWN 2 was simply okay.
There hasn't been an excellent party based single player experience for me since the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series (although I frown upon the story presented by the latter).
Played Planescape Torment and TOEE as well so I definitely know where you come from.
I even played Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor for a little while wich is also based on the Forgotten Realms D&D setting (I bet no one remembers that game, hahaha !).
Ironically not even developed by Bioware.
So I'm pretty much experienced in that field as well. Along came Bioware with NWN 1 and sank this bug / bore fest like the Titanic.
It could be that the devs had enough of using the same rule set provided by TSR and wanted something of their own. 
D&D 4th Edition ruleset may be a bit hard for people to grasp.
I tried pen and paper D&D once, didn't live very long though).
By the way, don't they have to pay for the rights to use that rule set ? I wonder if it's cheaper or actually more expensive to gain those rights and just build a CRPG from it. Still, DAO is still the best RPG I've played in years.
I tried JRPG's but those were...meh... 

Modifié par Nuclear_Pony, 05 janvier 2010 - 07:32 .

[Jack-Nader]

I agree with most of what was said, except for this dissing of the dwarves/deep roads as IMO orzammar contains the most rich and interesting material in the entire game. I won't dwell on this as it is his opinion to which he is entitled.



My main gripes are with combat.



First of all Two Handers. The entire concept of a character with a gigantic sword and only the ability to strike 1 hostile at a time is ridiculous. We could solve all the problems with the two hand weapon type by making the AOE attack a passive.



As the poster pointed out, sword and shield should be the "tank" class and have a means of stopping enemies from simply just running past the tank to fight the mages when they lose aggro. The aggro system just doesn't work. Offensive mages always generate more aggro than any warrior with taunt/threaten. A fix for this is to make all the shield bash abilities a guaranteed knockdown if the enemy has it's back to you. It is too easy to acquire 100% resists and this makes the shield warrior quite useless. Perhaps also look into a trip/coat hanger passive ability?



Dual wielding class is fine.



Mages, well. Yes mages are most certainly overpowered but they are not even remotely as powerful as they were back in BG1 & 2. Mages were walking tactical nukes. Alactricity + timestop and you could empty your entire spell arsenal and instantly kill the entire screen or you could go the melee mage route (as I did) cast timestop and then engage and kill absolutely everything on the screen with your sword/staff before the timestop ran out.



In DA there are spells that are completely at odds with other spell lines. Take mana clash as a prime example. What is the point of the anti - magic spell line (spell sheild, dispel etc) if you can simply cast mana clash and instantly kill the hostile mage? Even worse you have 2 spell choices prior to selecting mana clash that are also made obsolete by the spell ( mana cleanse and mana drain.)



I think the staff concept needs a complete overhaul. There should be staff modes. ie various modes that allow you to debuff, repulse, hex, increase mana regen, increase spell power etc. In fact replace the entire arcane line with the staff modes. I am not a big fan of the staff doing damage unless it is a direct melee encounter.



Sustainable spells are a nice idea except for the double taxation. There has to be a better way of handling this. Some of the sustainables do not make sense. Arcane shield for instance has next to zero practical application and yet it costs more with mana expenditure than glyph of repulsion which is a vastly superior spell. I would actually like to see defensive sustainable spells removed. Most mage offensive spells already do that job. ie. Cone of cold, Winters grasp, fireball, rock fist, blood wound and crushing prison all have disabling effects. This makes melee defensive sustainables rather pointless. As a solo mage on nightmare you can run all the way to the ogre encounter with only 3 spells. (Rockfist, fireball and winters grasp.) Absolutely nothing will be able to seriously threaten you as they spend more time disabled or their ass than they do engaging you in melee. The only reason you cannot wipe the floor with the ogre is that it 100% resists knockdowns. In other words you can handily beat most encounters with these 3 spells alone.



Camera - I agree the camera still needs work. It definitely needs more zoom out or more pan. Most of the time I am guessing where to place my AOE spells as the hostiles I am engaging are outside the view area.



Variety, yep one thing that BG has over DA is variety. There were plenty of magic immune, elemental immune, melee immune monsters. Each battle you had to carefully assess what creatures you were engaging and choose the right course of action, albeit until you got alactricity and timestop



Aesthetics, UHG Mage robes and helmets are the true blight in this game. After viewing the awesome mage robes that the poster child for the mage origin is wearing, I thought finally we had a game where good looking robes are not uncommon. Sadly I am disappointed. All the robes are adorned in fury caterpillars and look absolutely hideous from the most important angle... "BEHIND" The mage helmets are truly horrific. My first impression was that my character was wearing a giant condom. I promptly removed it and did not wear another helmet until after the release of the disable helmet animation mod.

[tetracycloide]

Ancalimohtar wrote...
 Unlike BG2, you never have to worry about immunities and specific resistances

This is a good thing TM. Adding flat immunities to mobs is not good game design, the game should be balanced against all mob types with all skill sets. If my first crowd control skill is cone of cold and I run into overwhelming numbers of undead how is it good game design to punish my crowd control choice by making them immune to freezing? The current implementation, where a mob can be immune to damage types but not spell effects, is a step in the right direction; one that acknowlodges that negating a spell effect just makes a spell frustratingly unreliable.

Spell resistance is an equally silly statistic on both sides of the monitor.  It makes no sense to include element spcific resistances on gear that are capped at less than 100% but also include gear that is no element specific and is not capped.  A templar can be 100% immune to spells AND this immunity works for every school of magic, even ones that don't deal elemental damage AND it works against spell effects, something elemental resistances don't do.  As a player facing mages this is absudly balanced, as a mage facing AI resists make spells, as above, frustratingly unrelyable.  Early in the game resists against key crowd control skills don't make fight 'hard' or 'more tactical' they practically force a quickload.  At best spell resistance should increase chances of passing a resistance check which, in most cases, should result in a slightly modified result.  Slow instead of frozen and the like.

Ancalimohtar wrote...
It was particularly frustrating my first time through Redcliffe when I had two tanks perfectly positioned to block a doorway, and they would literally move aside to allow the enemy mabari past. COME ON.

This, this, oh dear nameless god of RPGS a thousand times this.  If I had a dollar every time I yelled "what the **** are you doing, block the door!" at the screen the game would have paid for itself at least twice over.  My characters cannot push revanents or ogers or even piddly little mages where they want them but for the AI it's automatic?!?  Lame.

Modifié par tetracycloide, 05 janvier 2010 - 08:16 .

[Jack-Nader]

In some respect I would agree that flat immunities is not a good option. Oblivion suffered horrendously from this and so did did NWN1..

Oblivion you could create spells that gave you 85% (maximum allowed) melee damage reduction and be 100% immune to all magic. This made your character unkillable.

NWN was actually worse. All you needed to do was acquire the three 20/- damage reduction belts, strip off all your armor and cast acid sheith, death armor and elemental shield and just stand still. Everything that touched you recieved over 120 reciprocal damage and would kill itself without any further intervention on your behalf.

Monsters should have immunities but be allowed to have their resistances lowered, ie 100% fire immune dragon could be made vulnerable by lowering it to say 50 with a spell.  I'd like to point out that BG implimented a similar system.  You could lower the magic resistence of firkrag for a short time, enough time to unleash spell fury upon his scaly ass.  Granted horrid wilting was his achilles heal but the point still stands

Modifié par Jack-Nader, 05 janvier 2010 - 08:17 .

[Dragon Age1103]

This was just a fantastic & obviously very in depth review. I really enjoyed reading it & you worded your complaints well but the only few lines I didn't care for where in some of your comparisons to previous games(ME, GB2) you didn't confirm you were correct just said you assumed or thought those games did something DA:O did not so it feels like they were going backwards.

Anyways I feel confident a major patch will come out just before or with the Awakening that will smooth over those minor annoyances. The hide helm would be very nice & I feel sorry for console owners b/c they shouldn't be robbed of user created content just b/c they do not have a good gaming PC but sadly life isn't fair. I hope the expansion & possible patch will correct lock picking, or party size, hide helm, respecs(already confirmed), minor glitches, add or change the skill tress around example trap making. You can make & set traps but you fail to disarm them! lol.



Anyways I'm done ranting about nothing really, great review over all & thank you for taking the time to so clearly express your well polished opinions on pretty much every last aspect of the game.

[tetracycloide]

I agree that mages are really overpowered in dragon age but I don't think immunities and spell resistance are the way to combat this. In my mind the proper points at which to address this are first to add anti-mage enemies to the game. Rogues with stealth, for example, should behave as they do in a party controled by the player. They should stealth and ambush squishy targets as quickly and as often as physically possible. Second to reduce the absurd incongruity between mage damage output and physical damage output. A well built mage against a high mana target can mana clash, a burst, AoE spell that does not have friendly fire, for over 1500 damage. A melee character, at best, can output 100-200 DPS if perfectly built requiring 7-15 seconds to deal the same damage as a mage can deal in a single spell. Granted mana clash only works in spcific situations (including one of the toughest mono-a-mono fights in the game) but, and this returns to one of Ancalimohtar's earlier points, thanks to encounter homogeniousness these situations tend to crop up very near one another. Of the fights where mana clash deals damage a good third, maybe even half feature enemies hurt by mana clash nearly exclusively (I'm looking at you circle tower). Meanwhile AI mages don't even get mana clash.

[tetracycloide]

termokanden wrote...

In other words, the hybrid caster was never there in WoW. Even with dual specs, you are one thing at a time. DAO on the other hand DOES have hybrid casters. And with Arcane Warrior, it even has another type of hybrid. Yes, the people behind DAO really do deserve praise for this.

I don't really see how Arcane Warrior is a hybrid of anything.  There are no warrior abilities in the Arcane Warrior line.  Sure, it allows mages to wear armor but there's nothing 'hybrid' in the play style.  You're not going to activate a melee ability and sprinkle in spells on top of that.  You're just going to auto attack with a sword, which is the same as auto attacking with a staff only the DPS is worse and the positioning more dangerous, and keep doing what the mage always do, cast spells.

[termokanden]

I will agree that Mana Clash is an overpowered spell, but otherwise I stand by statement that mages are not overpowered. You're thinking about it the wrong way: This is not WoW, where damage meters dictate who's best. It's about functioning as a party. Melee functions very well if built correctly. Sadly the NPC party members are not. The melee character I had was throughout most of the game easier to play than my mage, but I suppose that's because it's underpowered.

The AoE spells are largely responsible for the mages doing more damage, but you are forgetting that with their friendly fire, they actually have quite a huge drawback. People are exploiting game mechanics and casting spells in rooms where the mobs haven't even seen you yet. Then they complain that mages are doing the most damage, while all the melee are on hold outside the room with the AoE. What do you expect?

I find that when you care the most about your main character, that character does by far the most damage. And in fact the damage distribution in my game with a DW warrior and one with a mage were almost the same. Considering I actually found (most) of the game easier with my DW warrior, I really don't understand why mages are supposed to be overpowered.

Let's free ourselves from the vile claws of WoW and its mentality of buffing/nerfing everything all the time and realize that DAO is a single player game. It's not necessary for everything class to be measured absolutely in terms of power and that this measure then is exactly the same as for the other classes. Just play the game in the way you want. In other words: Don't like Mana Clash? Don't use it. Or modify the game, it's your choice.

I don't really see how Arcane Warrior is a hybrid of anything.  There are no warrior abilities in the Arcane Warrior line.  Sure, it allows mages to wear armor but there's nothing 'hybrid' in the play style.  You're not going to activate a melee ability and sprinkle in spells on top of that.  You're just going to auto attack with a sword, which is the same as auto attacking with a staff only the DPS is worse and the positioning more dangerous, and keep doing what the mage always do, cast spells.

The hybrid part is the part where you are actually competent with a sword and in full armor as an AW. Hybrids don't have to have EVERYTHING from two worlds.

Modifié par termokanden, 05 janvier 2010 - 08:52 .

[tetracycloide]

stillnotking wrote...

On elves and dwarves: Tolkien created the conceptual spaces for them over fifty years ago, and changing them significantly is a hard sell. DA did get outside the box a little bit with the dwarves, introducing a caste system, the eternal war against darkspawn/Legion of the Dead, etc. Honestly, though, when fantasy fans see "dwarf" and "elf", we know what to expect, and any radical departure is more likely to be jarring than interesting.

All the more reason to invent new races.  The qunari borrow heavily from fantasy tradition in their conception but are at least an original creation.  It saddens me to think we could have had 3 race as fresh and new in DA but did not.  Elves are a carbon copy of the sindar, just like nearly every elf has been since LOTR.  Dwarves, as you note, at least have the caste system as an innovation on their culture from other lores, one I adored, but they're still the stocky, cave dwelling smiths they have been since Aulë first breathed life into them.

[Jack-Nader]

If you want to see how OP a mage is vs your DW warrior/ rogue whatever, take your Mage with fireball and cast it on your DW warrior or rogue. The rogue will most likely be outright killed and the warrior serverely injured by the encounter. The definition of overpowered is being able to inflict massive damage while disabling or preventing an equal playing field. Mages are the epitome in this.

I personally love mages and I would NOT endorse a good old nerfing fix. I am for balancing out unnecessary pointless spells/functions in favor of party synergetic traits.

The AoE spells are largely responsible for the mages doing more damage, but you are forgetting that with their friendly fire, they actually have quite a huge drawback.

Very true, except that this is another case in point on how OP the mage is. Having a party of melee thugs actually "Limits" or places under restriction your mage. Try playing a solo mage and you will see just how much your party actually prevents you from completely handing hoards of hostiles their asses. You do not need to employ any such cheap tactics such as repulsing a door and casting inferno. I will give you an example.

Step 1 -> charge hostile hoard
Note -> First enemy to see you will head in your direction before the bulk of the other units because of the geometric pattern they are standing in.
Step 2 -> cast rockfist on nearest hostile
Step 3 -> Cast fireball so that it incorporates the entire mob.
Step 4 -> Cast cone of cold, walking bomb, glyph of repulsion or retreat in the opposite direction for 5 seconds and then repeat from step 1 ->

The enemy has abosolutely ZERO chance to engage you. Without a party getting in your way you are free to rain down death and destruction on anything. The only thing capable of stopping you is another mage in which you simply cast mana clash and be done with it.

Modifié par Jack-Nader, 05 janvier 2010 - 09:28 .