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)
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 .
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