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[Direwolf0294]

Dragon Age has had some pretty terrible fights over its two games, one expansion pack and multiple DLCs. Two that immediately spring to mind are the Rock Wraith fight at the end of Act 1 in DA2 and the High Dragon in Act 3. Simply put, these fights are not fun. It's not that they're too difficult or anything, because they're not, it's that spending 10 - 15 minutes beating on the same monster is just mind numbingly boring.

Going into DA3, can we perhapes avoid more fights like this and instead replace them with shorter fights that are more difficult? If a fight really must last more than 10 minutes, can you spruce it up a bit? Give the boss multiple forms that are visually quite different, give them dialogue to say during the fight, have the enviroment change during the course of the battle (for example, you start the fight in the castle and end up out in the courtyard). Anything to make them more interesting.

[David Gaider]

Direwolf0294 wrote...
Dragon Age has had some pretty terrible fights over its two games, one expansion pack and multiple DLCs. Two that immediately spring to mind are the Rock Wraith fight at the end of Act 1 in DA2 and the High Dragon in Act 3. Simply put, these fights are not fun. It's not that they're too difficult or anything, because they're not, it's that spending 10 - 15 minutes beating on the same monster is just mind numbingly boring.

Going into DA3, can we perhapes avoid more fights like this and instead replace them with shorter fights that are more difficult? If a fight really must last more than 10 minutes, can you spruce it up a bit? Give the boss multiple forms that are visually quite different, give them dialogue to say during the fight, have the enviroment change during the course of the battle (for example, you start the fight in the castle and end up out in the courtyard). Anything to make them more interesting.

Having more interesting big combats (and also less "trash fights") is indeed one of the focuses of the combat team. It's nothing we can really talk about at this point, however.

[David Gaider]

sea- wrote...
Wasn't that a goal with Dragon Age 2 as well?  No offense, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Hence why we're waiting to discuss the matter further until we can actually show what we're working on. Until then, you'd only have us saying "this is our intention" and your only response would be to state your skepticism. Which is fair. If your expectation, however, is that we'd lay out all our plans without anything to show, engendering all sorts of questions which we could only answer with verbal description... then, no, that's not going to happen.

[Allan Schumacher]

Both of you stop it, before I strip you of your respective Captaincies.

[Allan Schumacher]

Note, I did some minor edits to some of the more recent posts since they had been quoted, but I will be deleting posts that do little more than continue the bickering.

[Allan Schumacher]

I think it's reasonable to say that we never intend to make combat tedious.

I did some quick looks through Combat's tasking, and at no point did the word "tedious" come up.

So in that regards, we recognize that there are aspects that people find of DA2 and DAO combat that are tedious.

In some ways we hope to alleviate that, but unfortunately what some people find interesting, others may find tedious, so I can't promise no one will find things tedious.

[Allan Schumacher]

Please, this time around bother with balancing Nightmare instead of bloating enemy HP & Damage and throwing immunities in. Fighting half an hour the same creature is not funny (and who tested the duel with Arishok?). Maybe having enemy powers and tactics depend on difficulty level?

Arishok is a situation where I realized that even as "Tech QA" I should still find a way (somewhow) to play the game. I didn't get to that part until after the game was submitted to Cert and I wholeheartedly agree that it's poorly done as a 1-on-1 fight.

As for Nightmare, the unfortunate thing is that Nightmare targets a particularly niche crowd. It's a lot more valuable to have people making sure normal difficulty is working, and less so for Nightmare. Which sucks to hear if you're a nightmare fan.

Now we could do things differently with Nightmare than we did with DA2. What you suggest would indicate that the creature's level could be bumped up (this would unlock other skills, on top of providing additional resources). This works regardless of level scaling or not (with no level scaling, we bump the level up. With level scaling, we still bump the level up).

Changing tactics is muuuuuuuuuuch harder. This works in a game like Chess, because all difficulty levels do in a board game is limit the search space (they don't see as many moves into the future). Having actual AI routines that only come into play for Nightmare difficult would not be a trivial thing to do. Furthermore, if those AI routines are interesting and make the AI behave in a more plausible way, there's probably a value case for such routines to exist for all difficulty levels.