132 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvius the Mad]

Arcane Warrior Mage Hawke wrote...

Most people aren't fond of slow and clunky gameplay these days hence mostly outdated.

Clunkiness is subjective.  Popularity is unrelated to quality.

I don't  like slow gameplay and I prefer direct control over my character*I despise auto attack for this reason* hence I prefered 2's gameplay.

I like direct control over my character, as well.  And twitch gameplay denies me that by placing my own physical skills as a filter between my intention and the character's action.

[giveamanafish...]

Rylor Tormtor wrote...

IMHO, I do not believe that my ability to use a controller to quickly push a button should have any affect on my character's ability in a party based crpg. For example if I am controlling a companion or the PC and that character has low dexterity and dodge capability my reflex skill with the controller should not compensate. What is the point in building a character if by using my reflexes alone I can win. I want to put my strategic and tactical abilities to work.

Already addressed that. To be clear:

1) A lot of the animations in DAO -- one of the key reasons combat was slow and unresponsive --,included setup moves involving distancing that would be irrelevant to the kind of gameplay you seem to want. If space and time is irrelevant to the outcome of an attack or a defense move, why even have an animated combat sequence. Make it pure turn-based combat.

2) Twitch combat only effects the controlled character not the party as a whole. Twitch combat does not in any way presuppose that stats are irrelevant.

3) In real life no defensive move is purely defensive. Same opposite for an offensive. You're setting up for a follow-up or a reaction to the opponent's reaction and so on. In the game you're not going to be just "quickly pushing a button", you'll be looking to flank the enemy, maybe so you can use a powevful special attack to where the opponent is most vulnerable.

Rylor Tormtor wrote...

I think this at the crux of the issue. I feel, and I think not an in signifigant portion of people on the boards (although I think a shrinking demographic), that a character's combat efficacy should be based on the build of the character, not the reflexes or coordination of the player. Hence, you are going to miss a lot at lower levels of development, and hit more at higher levels and have greater options. I think many people (and I will generalize here by saying most of them were console players) were not expecting this with DAO, so when running around Ostagar and missing all the time they felt that their character was unresponsive and got frustrated. The devs then went to a DA2 style combat, where they tried to blend responsive with tactics. In my mind, they failed, but others obviously have different opinions. 

Already addressed that. Slow was a problem because it involved irrelevant animations and highlighted a faulty AI.
Including the player's ability to control a single party member in the calculation of a combat outcome does not take away the relevance of the character build. The problem you are talking about in DAO also has less to do with combat movement but more to do with a lack of balance in the game as you level up: at the early levels (always nightmare), fights are really difficult or actually really easy than suddenly impossibly hard; but by the time you have completed three of the main missions, you have to get a boss fight to get any kind of challenge. 

Rylor Tormtor wrote...

The thing is, there is evolution, and there are different games. The Dragon Age franchise was explicitly trying to recall types of PC games where combat success was determined by character build as well as tactical and strategic savy. Now, that is not the only quality of the genre that Bioware was trying to evoke, but it was one of them. Not ARPG combat, not Third-person shooter combat. 

Can the devs have changed there mind? Sure, but trying to make a game all things to all players is an untenable design philosophy. The OP loved DA2 combat. I loathed it. I found it gimmicy, over the top, requiring very litte fore thought, and above all tedious. I just started up a DAO game (man, I looked at my old saves, I have well over 400 hours stored up there, I think I have an issue), and you know what, I felt the combat was more responsive than I remembered (or maybe the memory overlay that all the complaining on the boards has given me) as well as tactically interesting. I know that I am not getting that combat in DAI, even though I would like it. What I am hoping for is a combat system that more nuanced than DA2, which fewer enemies who seem to have explosive allergies to metal. 

Are you arguing for or against evolution?  Whatever your experience with DAO may be, I have found that many fights including some of the more challenging ones can be won by drawing agro to your weakest party (Wynne usually) and having her run around while the other party members just auto-attack. This is tactical by the way.

[saintjimmy43]

People are going to judge DA: I based on the speed of its combat. At face value, it's going to come down to how fast you can attack and how fast you can cast spells or abilities. I feel like they're going to hit the nail on the head.

Da2s combat was too fast. As a rogue, it was way too easy to just hammer the r button and auto attack all over until everyone was dead. as a mage, it was barely worth it to cast a buff spell. that's not twitch combat, it's wait-and-see-if-your-health-stat-is-high-enough combat.

[Rylor Tormtor]

Sir JK wrote...

Now, controlling every individual dodge or strike is a bit too much and indeed more micro-management than tactics. Dodging a charging ogre after a visual cue (or indeed, the ARW) is however something I think is fine. I too would also like to see placing the rogue behind the targets (and stealth) return. It expands on the manouvering side. There's very little difference between them to. It's about spotting windows of opportunity and move the characters there in time.
If the rumours about terrain is true, that too sounds excellent since it'd up the importance of manouvering. Which is great.

Overall, I do think that most actions relating to casting spells, aiming AoE and manouvering (including putting the rogue in position and dodging charging ogres) are things that should be player- as opposed to character-controlled.

Personally, when I am speaking of player vs. character skill, this is not what I am talking. Dodging the ogre charge in the prologue in DA2 is perfectly within a non-twitch realm, especially with a pause function. But where do you draw the line? The dodging in GW2 to my mind is twitchy and really turned me off the game. Likewise, there is a difference between player input to character actions, i.e. selecting the best area to drop your fireball while paused, and character actions that are based solely on the player's coordination and dexterity (i.e. shooting a crossbow bolt at a clay jar full of oil with free aim while running away from a troll while in FP view without a pause function). One is a function of the player's descision making abilities, which is an integral part of the roleplaying input (albeit it should be lenses through what the character may or may not know) and one is a function of the player's reaction time and ability to manipulate the input devices. One of these does not neccesarily make a better game than the other, but they DO make different games, and the Dragon Age series was explicitly trying to evoke the former in Origins. 

[Shevy]

SKRemaks wrote...

This is it exactly.  When you know precisely how the battle is going to play out, ala DA:O, there's no surprises.  You can literally set everything up beforehand.  Where's the fun in that?   Once I had enemy placement memorized, I never once died.  Not even on nightmare.  It was boring.
The waves in DA2 made for a more fluid, dynamic battlefield.

Of course, when you're playing the game for the xith time, it's not surprising or challenging anymore. It's the case with every game. Today I'm rushing through Dark Souls and wondering myself how I could ever die in some passages.

Origins on nightmare without a mage overload party, arcane mage or dexterity rogue tank was pretty tactical the first time I played it on nightmare. Without micromanagement and custom tactics for the companions it wouldn't have been successfull.

In DA II on the other hand the only "challenges" on nightmare were absolutly ridiculous resistences and HP sponges which used theirs 1-2 attacks and auto-attack. Default tactics for my companions? No problem. Only "tactic": AoE killing the trash mobs, tank&spank the sponges til the end.

Randomly dropping waves on the battlefield isn't something I would call challenging or a good feature to make combat more tactical in the first place. MotA and Legacy did it way better, because they came out of doors, side streets and so forth, you could actually place your companions near these possible spots to nuke them the moment they appear.

[billy the squid]

Arcane Warrior Mage Hawke wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Arcane Warrior Mage Hawke wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

The slow movement in DAO meant that movement had a cost. You had to decide whether moving was actually worth it.

That's something most modern games simply don't do.

That only applies somewhat*as sometimes the game would force you to move to cast spells* if you used a ranged character.

That's because it's a mostly outdated design.

What does "outdated" mean when you use it like this?  You're using it like it's meaningful, and leads to some obvious conclusion, but I have no idea what you think it might be.

And, the game never forced to you to move to cast spells unless you put yourself in the wrong position in the first place.  Again, movement - and its static counterpart, placement - had a cost.  That was a good thing.

This movement cost created a disincentive to rely solely on melee abilities.  This movement cost created an incentive to use the ranged crowd control abilities (as they would increase the movement cost borne by enemies).  Having movement have a cost is hugely valuable.

You can see this modelled explicitly in the new Shadowrun Returns game, which uses a system much like Fallout's action points.

Most people aren't fond of slow and clunky gameplay these days hence mostly outdated.
Would be nice for the game to tell me that
Unless you used a melee class to you maybe I don't  like slow gameplay and I prefer direct control over my character*I despise auto attack for this reason* hence I prefered 2's gameplay.

Really? That's why magna/ anime games are so incredibly popular.... oh wait.

Frankly if we're going down that route I'd rather push my fingers into my eyeballs, for all the enjoyment of the mind numbing hack and slash mentality it provides, the button awesome is widely derided and mocked as horrifyingly bad marketing and concept for DA2 and it's rightly discarded to the dustbin of design for this kind of game.

If anything, the style of combat from TEs, TW2 and the first AC are the kind of thing that is aimed for, it doesn't devolve into hammering one button at manic rates, and the blows are measured and timed, failure to do so results in a painful counter and repost, and despite being real time, one can still cast spells easy enough without the D&D predetermined feel of DAO.

[Angrywolves]

no.

[giveamanafish...]

So I had a chance to think about this. What the Dragon Age series did in terms of combat was to take the conventions and mechanisms of classic board games and turn-based RPGs -- all largely based on medieval and mythic-historical weaponry and combat where cover is less relevant -- and put them in the context of real time and 3 dimensional space. Once you do this it automatically creates a situation where player decisions about character movement should matter -- you have to include time and space factors into the calculation of a combat outcome otherwise you setup really weird situations eg. where a melee fighter with high attack stat. can by swinging in the air easily take out an archer or mage with a low defence and armour rating even if that enemy is halfway down the hall (like I said already this almost happens in the Loghain fight in DAO).

To me this is not an issue, it adds another level of challenge to the game. This can only go so far though: because of processor limitations you should not for the forseeable future be able to have the level of nuance in individual character movement you might get in a dedicated one on one fighter game -- eg. where you can choose where you want on the opponent you want to attack and with what (punch, strike, swing, kick; left or right), not just your geographic position relative to the opponent.

It is kind of interesting to think what you could do with a boss fight particularly with an oversized opponent like a high dragon. If people notice, one of the weirder experiences in both DAO and DAII occur in the high-dragon - arch demon fights. Despite the size of these beasts when you try targeting these things with the attack wheel (left trigger on XBox) you generally have to cycle thru various other objects before you get the "X - Dragon" flag. I have always laughed when after manuvering a tank like Aveline to the rear end of this hugh-poops-trucks thing in order to get more damage, i had to pause and re-target while she stands there. Redheads are tough. You're actually not targeting the object you seem to looking for the name tag. I don't know if it would make such fights more interesting or make them too easy if you could select sub-targets on bigger opponents. (Eg. shoot wing, distract, break legs. distract. sun don't shine).

People's concern about speed as opposed to level of movement nuance. It, I think, has long been announced that DAInQ will be somewhere between DAO and DAII in terms of speed.

EDIT: Billy the Squid:

Actually, in DAII, most distancing moves used by melee warriors are special moves -- like Fenris's charge -- which use up stamina and thus do have a movement cost. I think its only where you send a controlled character who is a melee fighter on a attack against a distant enemy where you get that quick charge w/o stamina being used up. I agree that that should  go or have the speed reduced to more realistic levels or have a stamina cost.

The  DAII manual is quite explicit that ranged characters may have to move to be able to attack with effect -- they can target thru a wall or pillar but there will be no damage. That means there is also a movement cost there -- if for instance you want Varric to use knockback against an enemy targeting an ally on the verge of death you may run out of time if you need Varric to reposition himself.\\

Again, more generally if your concern is with unrealistic speed, I think it has already been stated that DAInq will be looking for a happy medium.

Modifié par ismoketoomuch, 11 août 2013 - 07:56 .