Sidney wrote...
cindercatz wrote...
Yeah, DA2 had small areas, no battlefield tactics (no shield and bow tactics, no chokepoints, no high ground, no way to set up an ambush type scenario, no defensive postion, no player traps, etc.), no change of pace and flow, incredibly large life bars, no spell combos that I noticed (like setting oil slicks ablaze, etc.), the animations were choppy fast instead of allowing the characters to approach and clash, no real synched combat animation, no finishers worth watching, no weapon switching or tactical system replacement, only one dragon battle that was messed up.
DAO was almost all small areas with only a handful of open area encounters - and those were the save the caravan nothing fights.
Tactics...I laugh that anyone claims any tactics were needed in DAO. To be blunt here's how brain dead DAO was, get 4 fighters in your party set 2 tactics options: 1. Heal Health < 25% 2. Attack Weakest on the main PC, Attack Target of Main PC on everyone else. You will win every non-boss fight in the game w/o touching the controller. Add in any use of special powers and the ease just gets higher and higher.
I'm not sure what this high ground is but you had no elevation positions in 99% of DAO. Chokepoints and defense are again impossible in any meaningful way with the slow ponderous movements.
I like that "ambushing" is now tactical as opposed to abusing bad enemy AI that lets you kite hostiles into kill zones - enemies that have zero reason in most cases to follow you. We used to call that cheap.
I get people didn't like the DA2 combat and it was lousy way too often and the waves system sucked rocks but let's not act like DAO was some sort of pinacle of combat design or even much of a challenge.
Every main area of the game was a large zone, and a large battlefield, generally non-corridor, with sidepaths, at least an alternate route somewhere (whether that be a second bridge, taking a tunnel around the other side, side rooms with different entry points in a building, etc.), with enemy defensive positions with bows and magic at range, with reasonable ambushes instead of ceaseless waves, and when things were tight, they were really tight and it was meaningful to the gameplay. There were ballista (which was a small but fun thing, and important a lot of the time in the archdemon battle), there was elevation almost every map, you could actually catch enemies or be caught/frozen etc. in doorways and halls, and the game would kill you quick if that happened.
Dragons could wipe your entire party out in a minute flat if you didn't stay on top of it. That desire demon in the Mage tower could finish you off quick if you didn't manage her and pull back into the hallway to get some space. Spikes in difficulty like that were fairly common and served to mix up the encounters.. all the time. Then you had difficulty valleys where you'd get finisher after finisher like the first floor of the signal tower and the bridge to the dead trenches. Those kinds of changes of pace (along with the quick slo-mo pauses in the finishers) and variety of encounters added immensely to the game. They're fun. They feel good. DA2 just felt monotonous.
As for tactics, if you just min/max your particular highest efficiency group and you want to sap the fun out of the game, I don't know, but you might be able to do that, with high enough certain stats and high equipment, but why in hell would you do that? My point was that the game allowed and supported the kind of play I talked about, not that it was necessary. In DA2, all of that is just gone entirely, and the combat really is braindead, with the only changeup being the dodge and hit or pattern recognition arcade type bosses, both of which I got bored to death with back in the eighties.
Practically every map in DA:O had elevation changes, raised platforms, hills, bridges, you name it. They were rarely flat and unobstructed. So you're very biased.
Ambushing, is setting up traps and position in one room so that I can open the door and retreat down the hall, so that when the entire room full of bloodmages, qunari, and archers spills in to try and get an aim on me, they end up running into my set up chokepoint at the end of the hall, with my melee successfully able to hold them in the door area to protect my mage and archer, as opposed to getting frozen and shot to death in a few seconds time on the other side of the door when I rush in. It's getting ground on the hill where you're attacked with just three mage npcs I'm trying to keep alive and forcing the enemy darkspawn to come around through a barrage of arrows and earthquakes so they can just get met at the base of the hill on the back side. I don't mean kiting. I mean ambushing.
Now when I do kite, and the entire area is charging toward me while I pick off as many of them as I can with arrows before I'm fighting the entire set of 20 or so enemies as they come on this side of the bridge in the Deep Roads, that's also an excellent gameplay moment. I love that. It's exhilirating. It's fun. You can't have that in DA2 with no defensive tactics available and no large areas to fight in and enemies just basically dropping in for your instadashkill to repeatedly.. repeat,. ad nauseum..
So yeah, I mean exactly what I say. I never said DA:O was perfect. I was just pointing out some things I loved about it that were removed from DA2, and that absolutely destroyed the fun of combat in DA2 for me. I hated it, no exaggeration. I'm just telling you why.
And I don't get this idea that if it's not incredibly hard and impossible to overcome without doing something x certain way, it somehow loses it's value as an option. There has to be a certain amount of flexibility if you're going to accomodate multiple play styles and varied character builds like DA:O had (which was another thing I loved that DA2 removed...) That's a strength in a game like this, not a flaw. I'm not a gaming masochist. I play for fun, and giving me tactics and options to play with and take advantage of is fun. Funnelling me into one playstyle and one repeated scenario is not.
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