136 réponses à ce sujet

[Wulfram]

I think the main problem with the Arishok dual was not conveying very well that you can dodge his attacks by stepping behind or to the side of him. If you play the fight that way, it's not too bad. As long as you have enough HP that the impale attack isn't an instant kill, anyway.

But I started out trying to dodge backwards, and for some reason his attacks have a really really huge reach in front of him, so I got the impression that they were undodgable, leaving only the really boring options available to fight him.

edit:  Though I'd also say that the DA style of combat simply doesn't lend itself well to one on one duals, and that they should therefore generally be avoid it.

Modifié par Wulfram, 13 décembre 2012 - 03:15 .

[CELL55]

Not sure if anyone's mentioned this yet, but the Arishok fight becomes a lot better if you play Yakety Sax while you're running away from him: www.youtube.com/watch

Modifié par CELL55, 13 décembre 2012 - 04:02 .

[philippe willaume]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

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.

well, I hate defending DA:2 combat, but the Arishok fight, is
like the rest of the game if you play a vanguard berserker (and i suspect it is
the same with optimal build). To be fair it is the same in DA:0  if you
play with two mages in the group).



DA:2 is more rapidly punishing for sub-optima
builds and the player has much less options to compensate build Deficiency with
astuteness of play than there is in DA:0. 

Hence whittling ad nauseam in DA:2



That why i prefer DA:0 combat to DA:2, in DA:0 i
can develop char and companion as i see fit to role i see then in and i can
compensate the crapiness of the build by being a tad more creative in fight.

and that more than compensate when you have to
slug it out with occasional super monster.



as for the difficulty, may be you don't need to
change the tactic as such. In flight sim, the difference in the a I experience
is based on how often he re-re-evaluate the situation and how close the max envelope
he can make the plane move.

may be DA could have something similar? ie
how often the re-prioritise targets, change script they use (i.e. defensive, counter,
attack, full on) and melee or ranged. As well as how well they set up combos
with other badies

 

Phil

[PsychoBlonde]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

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.

If you really want to be mean in Nightmare, just up the attack and movement speed for all enemies while leaving it the same for party members.  This alone would have people screaming and tearing their hair.  Or, even better, don't let them pause the game.   This would be an enormously more difficult experience with very little additional programming required.  Heck, leave enemy health and damage the same for all difficulties above normal, just up the enemy speed on hard and disallow pausing on Nightmare.  Fun times.

I think friendly fire for Nightmare as it was implemented in DA2 was a spectacularly bad idea, because of the HUGE STUPID ENORMOUS difference between enemy HP and party HP.  If enemies and party members do roughly the same amount of damage and have roughly the same amount of HP, friendly fire works.  When enemies have thousands or tens of thousands of HP compared to players and party members with . . . 300, it doesn't work so well.  I would have played on Nightmare which I found plenty easy--I just annihilated my entire party with one spell too many times, which sent it from Interesting into Tedious.

What makes combat Tedious for me in DA and similar games is when I have to stop to issue a ton of orders even in trash combats.  The more annoying it is for me to issue orders (such as having to switch to another character's perspective, reposition them, then order them to use some special), the worse this gets.  Most of the time, I just want to run my character in combat.  I'd be amazingly happy if you guys did up the interface in such a way that I can put ALL the special abilties i want access to on a SINGLE HOTBAR that ALWAYS STAYS UP NO MATTER WHO I HAVE SELECTED.  (especially if I can ZOMG ASSIGN HOTKEYS to that bar)  When every companion has a different hotbar, I find it difficult to keep track of what ability is where on whose bar (especially since I'm constantly swapping companions in and out) and this drags even the most fun combat down when every single command is preceded by "where the **** did I put Taunt?"  This gets worse later in the game when companions have 15+ abilities each.  I can't find ANYTHING.

Yes, I could assign them tactics, and I do, but they STILL DO DUMB **** and sometimes I want them to activate an ability at a more convenient time.  So, please, please, please, let's have a meta hot bar. I know you guys listen because you implemented the super-awesome "next enemy" button I asked for in DA2 (yes, it qualified as an awesome button as far as I was concerned).  :happy: 

[abaris]

PsychoBlonde wrote...

I think friendly fire for Nightmare as it was implemented in DA2 was a spectacularly bad idea, because of the HUGE STUPID ENORMOUS difference between enemy HP and party HP.

I think implementing friendly fire only on hardcore was in itself a spectacularly bad idea. Playing it easy and casual doesn't mean you want to switch off brainpower too. Unleashing a cone of cold or fire into your own allies should have an effect. The absence thereoff only added to the impression of playing something from the Tom and Jerry universe.

[PsychoBlonde]

abaris wrote...

I think implementing friendly fire only on hardcore was in itself a spectacularly bad idea. Playing it easy and casual doesn't mean you want to switch off brainpower too. Unleashing a cone of cold or fire into your own allies should have an effect.

Except that it was much more difficult to control positioning in DA2, particularly on consoles.  So friendly fire was overall just a poor concept for that game.

And don't talk about "realism".  This is a game.  There are tons of good games out there where you can't shoot your allies, intentionally or otherwise.  The presence or absence of friendly fire being a good idea depends on how the game is put together, not whether this is or is not "realistic".

[Pedrak]

abaris wrote...

PsychoBlonde wrote...

I think friendly fire for Nightmare as it was implemented in DA2 was a spectacularly bad idea, because of the HUGE STUPID ENORMOUS difference between enemy HP and party HP.

I think implementing friendly fire only on hardcore was in itself a spectacularly bad idea. Playing it easy and casual doesn't mean you want to switch off brainpower too. Unleashing a cone of cold or fire into your own allies should have an effect. The absence thereoff only added to the impression of playing something from the Tom and Jerry universe.

It was indeed terrible - and probably the main reason "normal" difficulty was a joke. I mean, I'm not one of those macho gamers who do solo and speed runs and try dozens of builds to find the best one, and yet playing DA2 on normal with a warrior was almost embarrassing. The first time I died I was maybe 6 hours into the game, and I think there is a single encounter in the whole game where they really kicked me in the rear and I had to try lots of times. The rest was all "wack-a-mole the waves while AoE spells rain on me without hurting".

Modifié par Pedrak, 13 décembre 2012 - 07:41 .

[Anomaly-]

Tigerman123 wrote...

It makes no sense to scale up enemy ai when only a small number of players actually use the higher difficulties, in fact even if there was an even distribution it still would be a poor use of resources given that AI is feature akin to the graphics or the user interface, it should be at an optimal level for all customers regardless of their tolerance for combat.

Why is that? FPSs do it all the time. An RPG is a little different, sure, but I'm not talking about handicapping pathing or anything like that. Things like reaction time, or as someone else said, switching targets/working together. My own solution to this when modding DA:O was to create additional enemy packages to further differentiate enemy 'ranks' with more specialized skillsets. As I said, what is really important is that enemies play by the same rules as the player.

Presumably there are technical limitations as to the number of enemies that can be on screen at any given moment

Didn't stop jonpetro from doing it with his mod: dragonage.nexusmods.com/mods/1406 (by the way, how the hell do you embed links in text here?)

That mod was done with some fairly simple scripting in the DA:O toolset. If Frostbite is all it's cracked up to be, Bioware should be able to improve on that significantly.

changing values in a database is much easier than modifying a level to increase the number of critters

I never claimed it was trivial, but I believe the payoff is more than worth it.

The game works very well at that level if you have a properly set up party,

Which is one of the biggest problems: it limits your options. Cross class combos are no longer a strategy, but a necessity.

in fact the higher enemy HP values are necessary to provide any obstacle at all, if it weren't like that everything would die more or less instantaneously , which wouldn't be very fun.

That's only because the player and enemies don't play by the same rules. If they do, and the ai is relatively competent, then they are capable of killing you just as quickly if you're not careful. Having such mismatched stats is also what completely compromised the friendly fire feature on higher difficulties.

What are the supposedly inflated stats high relative to?

Your own. It completely trivializes the setting and mechanics. If I happen to be fighting alongside a common guard, and he/she merely doesn't die in one hit, then I am left wondering why the hell they aren't the star of the show instead of me/my companions who have to run around in circles while slowly whittling down the immense health pool of a common baddie, dying instantly if we should happen to stumble into a mouse trap.

Modifié par Anomaly-, 13 décembre 2012 - 09:49 .

[abaris]

PsychoBlonde wrote...

There are tons of good games out there where you can't shoot your allies, intentionally or otherwise.  The presence or absence of friendly fire being a good idea depends on how the game is put together, not whether this is or is not "realistic".

Are there? If so I didn't play them. At least not in the last decade.

Truth is, the whole DAII style didn't appeal to me and that's quite of an understatement. So much so that I didn't even make it through the demo, let alone considered buying the whole game.

I usually play RPGs on casual or normal. The fights are secondary to me, but if something like a fireball not doing any damage to my friends crops up, it's a bit too much easyness for me.

[Rawgrim]

abaris wrote...

PsychoBlonde wrote...

There are tons of good games out there where you can't shoot your allies, intentionally or otherwise.  The presence or absence of friendly fire being a good idea depends on how the game is put together, not whether this is or is not "realistic".

Are there? If so I didn't play them. At least not in the last decade.

Truth is, the whole DAII style didn't appeal to me and that's quite of an understatement. So much so that I didn't even make it through the demo, let alone considered buying the whole game.

I usually play RPGs on casual or normal. The fights are secondary to me, but if something like a fireball not doing any damage to my friends crops up, it's a bit too much easyness for me.

I know. Might as well have a "win" button.

[TheRealJayDee]

CELL55 wrote...

Not sure if anyone's mentioned this yet, but the Arishok fight becomes a lot better if you play Yakety Sax while you're running away from him: www.youtube.com/watch

Love this video!  

Yeah, I was actually thinking about this music while playing the fight for the first time. Memorable fights should not make you think of Benny Hill. Because you really can't take things seriously if they instantly make you think of Benny Hill.

Rawgrim wrote...

abaris wrote...

PsychoBlonde wrote...

There are tons of good games out there where you can't shoot your allies, intentionally or otherwise.  The presence or absence of friendly fire being a good idea depends on how the game is put together, not whether this is or is not "realistic".

Are there? If so I didn't play them. At least not in the last decade.

Truth is, the whole DAII style didn't appeal to me and that's quite of an understatement. So much so that I didn't even make it through the demo, let alone considered buying the whole game.

I usually play RPGs on casual or normal. The fights are secondary to me, but if something like a fireball not doing any damage to my friends crops up, it's a bit too much easyness for me.

I know. Might as well have a "win" button.

Last time I had this discussion whoever I had it with told me to stop trying to ruin the game for him by wanting a fireball shot directly in the back of an ally to actually hurt him. "If you want stuff like that, well, play on Nightmare then". No, I don't want to play on the highest difficulty. I seldom do, and especially not if it's broken like in DA2. What I do want is to play in a world that has some internal consistency.

[esper]

PsychoBlonde wrote...

abaris wrote...

I think implementing friendly fire only on hardcore was in itself a spectacularly bad idea. Playing it easy and casual doesn't mean you want to switch off brainpower too. Unleashing a cone of cold or fire into your own allies should have an effect.

Except that it was much more difficult to control positioning in DA2, particularly on consoles.  So friendly fire was overall just a poor concept for that game.

And don't talk about "realism".  This is a game.  There are tons of good games out there where you can't shoot your allies, intentionally or otherwise.  The presence or absence of friendly fire being a good idea depends on how the game is put together, not whether this is or is not "realistic".

Actually on a console it was easier to control position, because we now had a 'move to point' something the ps3 da:o version didn't seem to have. (at least I didn't have it)

[PsychoBlonde]

esper wrote...

Actually on a console it was easier to control position, because we now had a 'move to point' something the ps3 da:o version didn't seem to have. (at least I didn't have it)

Sorry, I meant more specifically that it wasn't as easy as it was on the PC in Origins.  I know the console play was HUGELY improved from DA:O to DA2.  PC was pretty much the same in a lot of respects, also now your characters have abilities that cause them to launch themselves halfway across the field right into your fireball.

[PsychoBlonde]

TheRealJayDee wrote...

Last time I had this discussion whoever I had it with told me to stop trying to ruin the game for him by wanting a fireball shot directly in the back of an ally to actually hurt him. "If you want stuff like that, well, play on Nightmare then". No, I don't want to play on the highest difficulty. I seldom do, and especially not if it's broken like in DA2. What I do want is to play in a world that has some internal consistency.

How is it not "internally consistent" that mages can direct their spells around friends?  There's nothing in the game that contradicts it.  You mean you want a GAME to be consistent with how you imagine fireballs work in REAL LIFE.  Which is a hilarious conceit considering that nothing in the game is actually consistent with how ANYTHING works in real life.

If you like friendly fire because you like friendly fire, fine and dandy.  More power to you.  If you like it because you think it's "incorrect" not to have it, you are mistaken.

[philippe willaume]

i would say that friendly fire is kind of a straw-man argument.
you can ring, potion or rune up to the point where it cease to be an issue anyway and it has no definitive consequences. So it is not really a difficulty differentiating factor.

Phil

[TheRealJayDee]

PsychoBlonde wrote...

How is it not "internally consistent" that mages can direct their spells around friends?  There's nothing in the game that contradicts it.  You mean you want a GAME to be consistent with how you imagine fireballs work in REAL LIFE.  Which is a hilarious conceit considering that nothing in the game is actually consistent with how ANYTHING works in real life.

If you like friendly fire because you like friendly fire, fine and dandy.  More power to you.  If you like it because you think it's "incorrect" not to have it, you are mistaken.

Yes, I like friendly fire. I think friendly is something that makes sense. I also experienced the effects of friendly fire in DA:O. DA:O was my introduction to Thedas and the Dragon Age setting. Sue me if you think I'm crazy not to expect a fireball in the same world to start behaving differently from one day to the other. Then again... so much in this world changed without any good reason that maybe I AM crazy.

ut yeah, aside from all that I just haven't been presented with a compelling reason why it shouldn't be possible to have a friendly fire effect on normal or hard difficulty setting besides people like you don't liking it and balance issues that could be solved by... balancing things. FF on nightmare difficulty wasn't what I want at all

I don't like a fireball to hurt my enemy and to completely ignore my friend who's engaged in a fight with him, and I don't like a fireball to only mildly annoy my enemy while it basically disintegrates my friend. It mus be possible to work something out and I'd be very happy if Bioware would.

[TheRealJayDee]

philippe willaume wrote...

you can ring, potion or rune up to the point where it cease to be an issue anyway and it has no definitive consequences. So it is not really a difficulty differentiating factor.

Wait, so because at some point it's theoratically possible to ward yourself so effectivly against harmful effects that they barely affect you anymore it's the logical thing to just consider you completely immune against them from the start?

[Guilebrush]

It's more an argument over accepted convention than realism and I'd hope by now people wouldn't mix the two things up. It's the reason why we're completely willing to accept some of the most convoluted contrivances (say: characters surviving a meteor strike) in particular genres while having our immersion broken by otherwise mundane circumstances which "clash" with expected and accepted conventions of a setting (say: rats corpses having lootable gold). Anyway as has been pointed out above FF worked in DA:O because of the rule set it used while it worked pretty terribly in DA:2 whether or not it works in DA:I is more down to the how they implement player vs monster scalers than anything else.

That aside a pair potentially interesting ways to increase difficulty without simply resorting to stat inflation: which to be fair does have a place to play in balancing difficulty (there are after all statistical "tipping points" that can definitely impact difficulty even in positive ways) is adjusting mob positioning/the environment and adjusting entity speeds.

For the first point imagine an encounter where the player faces a party consisting of 2 melee mooks and 2 archer types. By doing something as simple as adding obstacles/barriers or if the engine is sophisticated enough maybe even cover or line of sight breakers for the archers; or hell just moving them onto a balcony, would completely change the difficulty. tempo and tactics applicable to the fight. A pretty simple solution which can have some pretty interesting applications.

As for the second point one thing that has puzzled me in a lot of these single player games is the uniformity of entity speeds in most of them where pvp concerns don't put an immediate kibosh on having significant speed variances. If say enemies (somewhat leveraged) and more importantly player controlled characters (hardly ever explored) moved at different speeds it would allow encounter designers to explore an added layer of complexity to encounters without just leaning on dialing other stats up to 11. Great now your rogue can indeed close into that group of archers in a second, but is leaving him/her exposed and alone in the enemy rear flank the most prudent decision in a particular instance? Would your other melee make it there in time to support the rogue? Maybe, maybe not, it would depend entirely on the intention and balancing of the encounter and the rule set, at the very least it brings up interesting situational choice. And that's just one simplified example.

Of course most of this hinges on the balance of the rule set used for the game and the willingness of the encounter designers in the game to explore its capabilities. ME:2,3 and DA:2 leaned a bit too much on tuning via stat inflation rather than exploring a more varied mix of different approaches. In DA:2's case specifically it didn't help that the UI conspired to exacerbate the tedium on higher levels (blanket mob elemental immunity + no weapon switching = dumb. Just saying.)

[Tigerman123]

Anomaly- wrote...

Tigerman123 wrote...

It makes no sense to scale up enemy ai when only a small number of players actually use the higher difficulties, in fact even if there was an even distribution it still would be a poor use of resources given that AI is feature akin to the graphics or the user interface, it should be at an optimal level for all customers regardless of their tolerance for combat.

Why is that? FPSs do it all the time. An RPG is a little different, sure, but I'm not talking about handicapping pathing or anything like that. Things like reaction time, or as someone else said, switching targets/working together. My own solution to this when modding DA:O was to create additional enemy packages to further differentiate enemy 'ranks' with more specialized skillsets. As I said, what is really important is that enemies play by the same rules as the player.

Presumably there are technical limitations as to the number of enemies that can be on screen at any given moment

Didn't stop jonpetro from doing it with his mod: dragonage.nexusmods.com/mods/1406 (by the way, how the hell do you embed links in text here?)

That mod was done with some fairly simple scripting in the DA:O toolset. If Frostbite is all it's cracked up to be, Bioware should be able to improve on that significantly.

changing values in a database is much easier than modifying a level to increase the number of critters

I never claimed it was trivial, but I believe the payoff is more than worth it.

The game works very well at that level if you have a properly set up party,

Which is one of the biggest problems: it limits your options. Cross class combos are no longer a strategy, but a necessity.

in fact the higher enemy HP values are necessary to provide any obstacle at all, if it weren't like that everything would die more or less instantaneously , which wouldn't be very fun.

That's only because the player and enemies don't play by the same rules. If they do, and the ai is relatively competent, then they are capable of killing you just as quickly if you're not careful. Having such mismatched stats is also what completely compromised the friendly fire feature on higher difficulties.

What are the supposedly inflated stats high relative to?

Your own. It completely trivializes the setting and mechanics. If I happen to be fighting alongside a common guard, and he/she merely doesn't die in one hit, then I am left wondering why the hell they aren't the star of the show instead of me/my companions who have to run around in circles while slowly whittling down the immense health pool of a common baddie, dying instantly if we should happen to stumble into a mouse trap.

Idk, I sympathize with you since I enjoy combat, but like I said Bioware seemingly don't care about nightmare (which only 2% used) or hard, the game wasn't balanced around them, so my contention is that it ended up working pretty well regardless of that, but they could've stood to have been more difficult

Surely it's important to distinguish between the difficulty levels here, I don't believe that nightmare has to have the same degree of verisimilitude with regards to the setting as hard or normal, it's the unfair mode, it's supposed to force you to have a decent familiarity with game mechanics such as cross class combos or resistances.  It's inherent to CCCs that they will be more effective than any given single move, if they weren't more efficacious then there would be no reason to use them, which would be poor game design.  Given that they are more powerful then the game must be balanced around them and assume their continuous usage.  So isn't your problem with the way that they were implemented in DA2 rather than with difficulty, ie they should be very common with the right tactics setup rather than Origins' drizzle 

Shouldn't the AI to have significant advantages over the player to compensate for their inherently limited behaviors?  Why does it matter that random a guard is seemingly a better fighter that Hawke?  In fact it isn't really true that any of them are, they just have large health pools, ie they're tanks, which you can also make your party members if you choose to, but none of the mooks have the array of death dealing abilities that Hawke can dole out.  I don't think there is any point in the game where you have to kite an enemy on nightmare unless you're playing solo, with the right party set up everything goes down quickly.

[Nerevar-as]

2% Nightmare players are about 40k people according to the released sales. I´d say we are enough to get a bit of attention.

[philippe willaume]

TheRealJayDee wrote...

philippe willaume wrote...

you can ring, potion or rune up to the point where it cease to be an issue anyway and it has no definitive consequences. So it is not really a difficulty differentiating factor.

Wait, so because at some point it's theoratically possible to ward yourself so effectivly against harmful effects that they barely affect you anymore it's the logical thing to just consider you completely immune against them from the start?

yes i am waiting to have it explained how you got to that conclusion from what i wrote.
the idea is that friendly fire is not a good tool to increase the difficulty as it is something that you can make go away easilly.

Philippe

[Fast Jimmy]

TheRealJayDee wrote...

Yes, I like friendly fire. I think friendly is something that makes sense. I also experienced the effects of friendly fire in DA:O. DA:O was my introduction to Thedas and the Dragon Age setting. Sue me if you think I'm crazy not to expect a fireball in the same world to start behaving differently from one day to the other. Then again... so much in this world changed without any good reason that maybe I AM crazy.

 

Church.

[frankf43]

Wulfram wrote...

I think the main problem with the Arishok dual was not conveying very well that you can dodge his attacks by stepping behind or to the side of him. If you play the fight that way, it's not too bad. As long as you have enough HP that the impale attack isn't an instant kill, anyway.

But I started out trying to dodge backwards, and for some reason his attacks have a really really huge reach in front of him, so I got the impression that they were undodgable, leaving only the really boring options available to fight him.

edit:  Though I'd also say that the DA style of combat simply doesn't lend itself well to one on one duals, and that they should therefore generally be avoid it.

I feel that one on one duals is where the Rogue really excels. I had no problem dealing with him with my rogue but found it more problematic with a fighter.