7 réponses à ce sujet

[Zenbry]

I'm the kind of person that not only plays on casual,*Pause to let the "not a real gamer" storm pass*, but I also check every barrel, do every side quest, go down every conversation path, collect every possible rare item, and get in every possible side battle so that I am at a level were when I fight I feel like a god. This is fun for me. I realize I'm strange, but there it is. The dragon age series has always been a favorite, because of it's emphasis on story, the connections to your companions and the world at large. A couple of things have come up though that make me worry about the difficultly level of DA:I.

 

1. Timed events- This was seen in the PAX Prime demo last year. My concern here is the inability to take a breath between battles. The pressure to continually be running ahead to stop the damage leaves little time to take stock of how the last fight left you, to get in the best position for the next fight, or to check that pretty barrel in the corner over there. Also in an event such as the one shown it lends itself to the, "If you do this event fast enough you can save both the town and the keep" Which for a slower, more cautious player is, well, more difficult, and less fun.

 

2. Access to healing- It's been reported in XBox magazine and other places that there will be no regenerating health, mages will be unable to spam healing spells, and our carry for health potions will be limited. Can I just say yikes! I hate dying. Am I going to be dying more often?

 

3. Inability to explore fully- I may be taking this out of context, but it was reported by Lady Insanity from PAX East, that you can't explore everything on your first play-through. Now this might just be a function of the "you make this choice, you either lose x or y" Which I'm good with. I love my actions having consequences. But what I worry this means is events will pop up, like you have to go to the dormant reaper ship now, and this will make it so that you can't go back to certain areas and thus might miss fun content or important leveling opportunities, making the end game harder.

 

Honestly, I am super excited for this game and it can't show up soon enough in my opinion. I just have the concern that I will get to a certain point in the game, and the difficulty will take the fun out of it for me. Anyone else feeling this way? Anyone feeling the opposite?

[Allan Schumacher]

It's more just about a style. I think the dev comments about them wanting players to be aware of the entire adventure rather than just individual encounters is a good one. It's not there to "punish" players. It's there to change their perceptions.

 

 

Yeah this is a big thing.  The feeling of accomplishment, and progression, from being able to make it past that difficult encounter that tended to be costly on your adventuring resources.  It's less to do with a "difficulty" thing, and it also means that during combat design, smaller encounters can still be meaningful.  We don't need to throw a dozen bad guys your way because a combat doesn't need to be threatening to the player outright to be a meaningful combat.  This means that a 4v4 fight can still provide some level of strategic challenge (or even a 4v1 fight), whereas in a game with more aggressive health regeneration, it's a minor speed bump.

 

That said, we do know that there's a variety of skillsets that our audience has.  We do have difficulty levels again, and there will be a variety of things that we can juggle around with to ensure the game experience is enjoyable for what people want out of a particular difficulty level.

[Allan Schumacher]

How often will we be able to skip combat, given this? I love this idea if it means, for example, we can plausibly avoid that bandit camp at the beginning of the forest level to save our resources for what might be coming later in the level.

 

 

Skipping combat is part of the idea of dealing the strategic challenge, so to speak.  I couldn't speak in absolutes, but some combats can be missed, some won't be able to for a variety of reasons.  Combats can serve as a gate, for example, and stuff like that.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'm not really qualified to say if the game is genuinely difficult or not.  I don't really play through the content in real game levels.  I do know the goals of what we seek to achieve with the combat system, however.

 

This will probably change closer to ship, but not right now.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'm not sure if it's necessary for an RPG that combat get progressively more difficult as the game goes on.  That tends to NOT be the case in a lot of RPGs I play, in large part because my character becomes very powerful.

 

Certainly there should still be some level of challenging progression, but it's always an interesting challenge given the non-linearity of the game.

[Allan Schumacher]

I likely do fit into the vagueishly defined term of "hardcore gamers" but I think such labeling is silly.

 

I don't care if someone else enjoys a game differently than I do, as long as I enjoy the game.  Now if there's concerns that BioWare isn't making a game that is enjoyable to you because it features things that are more enjoyable to a different style of gamer, that's one thing.  But then, gaming seems to be continuing to grow and while I think Dark Souls is a bit overrated on its punitive nature (I found the game excellently designed, where the game rarely kills you just because, but rather it kills you because you didn't notice something or failed at execution), I consider it an excellent game and it's success shows that there is diversity in game difficulty.  Now if the hope is that all (or even most) games get catered specifically to your tastes, then that's not being very reasonable.

 

I prefer PC as a platform, but don't even joke about being a part of the PC master race anymore.  We're all gamers, that share gaming.  I don't judge because your hobby is only really, really close in details to mine, as opposed to precisely the same.

[Allan Schumacher]

Immersion is subjective and tends to reflect on what someone does or does not like in the game.

[Allan Schumacher]

I agree it's subjective, but I'm not sure it's as simple as whether or not someone likes a gameplay element. There are plenty of gameplay elements I can enjoy in one title where immersion's unceremoniously tossed out the window, but it may not mesh as well in a title taking a more realistic stance i.e. DA:I. There was one topic long ago discussing doors getting magically locked in Dragon Age, With a game like Mega Man, the immersion value of the locked door after entering a boss room isn't as relevant.

 

When I am talking about immersion being subjective, I mean that within the context of a particular game, things that a particular person likes will often be cited as a list of positive immersion features (or at the very least, not brought up as an example of removing immersion), while things that a player finds annoying will be portrayed as hurting immersion.

 

Someone will say that no level scaling helps with their immersion, when it's just as valid for someone else to say that level scaling helps with the immersion.