150 réponses à ce sujet

[DarthLaxian]

DAI is a new game that none of us have played.

DAI has a new combat system.

DAI has a new ability tree system.

Hence, none of us are remotely qualified to make a judgement on how limiting this new system is.
Speculate all you want but please don't state your assumptions as objective truth.

I personally think that since the Inquisition is focused on organized planning and decision making, compared to the last two DA games, the game won't be as limiting as some may think.

A good and likely scenario is that all the different major categories are introduced in the early stages of the game to provide us with relevant dossiers that we can use to plan our hot key selections, with the occasional wild card.

 

Of course it will be as limiting as we think - If we only had 9 spells, it would still be limiting (even if the one spell we leave out is the most useless kind of bullcrap imaginable, it is still limiting (and as limiting as we think, as they have told us how limiting it is...8 sockets for spells and abilities))

 

greetings LAX

ps: as for planing and all that - if you subtract the agents and the army managing (which does not sound like all that much), you have DAO, as it also had politics etc.

[Morroian]

There are maybe 3-4 extra points even with the DLC bonuses plus the scrolls you get. But even if we assume something as high as 6, and we assuming all DLCs so level 28 or so for Hawke, that should give you 17 abilities, including both sustained and active. DAI will not have sustained at all, so what we really care about are the active abilities. If we go very high for a mage (basically assume you just invested in rock armour and maybe 2 more) that puts you at around 14 total unique abilities, minus say 2-3 if you pick the passive bonus at the end of a tree, so more like 11-12 unique abilities max.

 

At the end of the 2nd DLC I had 18 active abilities. And yes by the end I was playing on nightmare.

[Morroian]

Guild Wars 2 has LESS than 8, Its 4 plus 4 utilities.

 

 

8 is ALOT.

 

5 weapon abilities, 1 heal, 3 utilities and 1 ultimate. Utilities are abilities independent of weapons so you have 10 abilities on the hotbar. But you have a choice of dozens of utilities and several weapons. This is a major difference, and even then it can be too restrictive eg. staff elementalist.

[Gtdef]

Of course it will be as limiting as we think - If we only had 9 spells, it would still be limiting (even if the one spell we leave out is the most useless kind of bullcrap imaginable, it is still limiting (and as limiting as we think, as they have told us how limiting it is...8 sockets for spells and abilities))

 

greetings LAX

ps: as for planing and all that - if you subtract the agents and the army managing (which does not sound like all that much), you have DAO, as it also had politics etc.

 

By that logic DAO is limiting as well, cause I can think of more useful slotted abilities/items than the amount of slots available. We can get about 35 spells (all of them active and toggles) by the end game, plus consumables. I think the bar maximum is 25 or something.

 

And then we have awakening with higher level cap. No point going there.

 

As long as it's functional it's ok. If your complaint is that we will probably have less active abilities all around then that's fine, but still it's not indicative of a more limited game. For example I think that most of these abilities of DAO (and DA2) are fillers which I'm forced to take so I can unlock the better skills. If DAI makes less active abilities but more impactful and attainable earlier without having to go through all of these fillers, I'll be very happy.

[deathhawk2]

I don't think this will be that bad for me personally, since in DAO, with all the skills/spells you could get, If I remember correctly for a mage character, I think I might of used 6 spells maybe 7 through most of the game. I actually finished the base game without even using all my skill points or taking a spec. for the character.

 

I am going have to wait and see for myself how it all works together, depending on the skills and what works well together.

[In Exile]

At the end of the 2nd DLC I had 18 active abilities. And yes by the end I was playing on nightmare.

Just what abilities were you using? Because I have a very hard time believing that.

And what do you mean "by the end" you were on nightmare?

[The Hierophant]

Reminds me of Dragon's Dogma's skill system. This seems like it'll further specialise player builds and the party's capabilities with each encounter, while requiring the player to switch setups in order to remain an effective fighting force. This news annoys me a little but hopefully this isn't too tedious. Unlike DD's system. Thank god we don't have to return to an inn or camp in order to switch out talents.

[andar91]

This is a supposition on your part that doesn't pan out based on gameplay videos. You have plenty of time to know a dragon fight is ahead based on E3. And even if you don't, you can run away and respec guys! It'll take like 2 minutes.

 

I've thought this as well.

 

They said ages ago that they try to allow you to see the enemies ahead of time so you're aware you're entering a fight since health no longer regenerates, and you can also run away. So switching stuff out, if needed, should be a possibility, I think.

[Morroian]

Just what abilities were you using? Because I have a very hard time believing that.

And what do you mean "by the end" you were on nightmare?

 

Almost maxed blood, force and primal mage with some offensive and defensive abilities from other trees.

 

ETA: I was level 29 with 41 ability points spent so there were a lot of bonus ability points.

 

This was my main/first character, I started playing the game on hard and upped the diffculty to nightmare part way through when I was comfortable with it.

[Reaverwind]

5 weapon abilities, 1 heal, 3 utilities and 1 ultimate. Utilities are abilities independent of weapons so you have 10 abilities on the hotbar. But you have a choice of dozens of utilities and several weapons. This is a major difference, and even then it can be too restrictive eg. staff elementalist.

 

Elementalist actually has more than 5 per weapon - it's 5 per element, which can be changed on the fly. That's quite a bit more than what DA:I will feature.

[Treacherous J Slither]

Reminds me of Dragon's Dogma's skill system. This seems like it'll further specialise player builds and the party's capabilities with each encounter, while requiring the player to switch setups in order to remain an effective fighting force. This news annoys me a little but hopefully this isn't too tedious. Unlike DD's system. Thank god we don't have to return to an inn or camp in order to switch out talents.

 

Reminds me DD's system as well but in DD your character is fully capable of wiining a fight without using skills by using the basic moves and avoiding damage by running, jumping, dodging, blocking, levitating, or taking the high ground. Many a time i've had to fight dragonkin with my skills being locked from that roar of theirs. It only prolonged the inevitable.

 

DA on the other hand has been more about standing there auto attacking and spamming skills than actively engaging the enemy by reading their moves and attacking and counter attacking when appropriate. Personally i'd love it if DA was made more action oriented over it's previous system but that doesn't excuse the lack of a radial menu option for your unmapped skills.

[AtreiyaN7]

Hold it!

 

*slams desk

 

That requires too much trial and error, saving and reloading rather than on the fly strategy changes during combat. It also forces metagaming where most combinations of abilities are never used because they don't work well with other few abilities, theres probably gonna be 1 combination that is always the best because there aren't that many abilities to choose from in the first place. If you had access to all abilities you chose you could be more situational with tactics. Many people don't like that kind of limitation in a rpg like this. 

 

 

But if they are going this route, I'm sure BioWare has taken clear actions to prevent this.  When do you believe a character will reach more than 8 active abilities knowing that a lot of previous active/concentration abilities have turned in to a passive?

 

There are 253 distinct types of bitterness in coffee. But to pick out each one requires total concentration and the use of all the senses.

 

*brews a pot of coffee watching Phoenix Wright and Godot argue*

 

I'm sure that there will be synergistic combos that are going to be the player's go-to moves in a particular combat situation, but I believe that the focus skills are going to prevent us from doing the equivalent of spamming Storm of the Century nonstop in DA:I. If  we can't spam the DA:I version of SotC, then presumably we'll all have to figure something else to do while waiting for our uber-combo(s) to become available. Additionally, I assume that we'll face mixed groups in which the enemies have different elemental/physical resistances and weakeness that prevent us from spamming one particular combo.

 

At any rate, the only thing anyone knows for sure right now is that we'll be limited to having eight abilities mapped to the hotbar. I think that (per what I said about TSW in a semi-recent post) saveable and swappable loadouts would probably render people's issues with the current hotbar limitation moot if it could be implemented. That and/or allowing players to access all abilities through some kind of contextual hotbar that has all a player's available abilities pop up while paused and in tactical mode would be a good idea.

 

I sort of wish that BW had done one of those two things, as I think that something along these lines would be an acceptable compromise between having a ridiculously long hotbar and keeping the UI clean. Meanwhile, I'm feeling this strange urge to go look for a Franziska von Karma avatar for some strange reason...

[Gtdef]

I hope people don't add fireball into their "active abilities" list ^^. Let's analyze a common DA2 mage build.

 

A common optimized nuker mage would end up getting

4 actives from elemental (ball, firestorm, grasp, cone) 8 talents

3 actives from spirit (bolt, bomb, filler dispel to get the mastery) 8 talents

2 from blood (sacrifice, wound) 5 talents

4 from force (push, pull, maker fist, ring) 6 talents

3 from arcane (blast, barrier, prison) 5 talents

 

That's 16 abilities and 32 talents that you can barely get by the end of the game at level 28 with all the extra talents from tomes and arcane emporium.

 

Of them, fireball, push, blast, maker fist, dispel are either completely useless, or become obsolete the moment you get the better abilities. This leaves us with 11 worthwhile by midgame, which of them, arcane bolt and wintergrasp become situational by the time the staff dps starts becoming respectful. This brings it down to 9 useful and 2 situational (wintergrasp to trigger a brittle for varric to take advantage of, spirit bolt for disorients.

 

You can also invest on horror early and respec out of it with a maker's sigh earlier. It's good for some encounters in the very early game.

 

Essentially the gamestyle from there goes ring->pull->firestorm->walking bomb->wound, with cone as reset, barrier on standby, prison on staggers or elite melee damage dealers and sacrifice to control the healthpool.

 

Mage is the most ability intensive character. Rogue and warrior can literally get away with 5 abilities. decoy, marked for death and the 3 nukes, while warrior assault , scatter, sacrificial, barrage, cleave (and perhaps a devour, not too important if the party is good though). It's not too far fetched to design the system for 8 active abilities max.

 

Sure these are very optimized builds. For example a lot of people may want to play templar 2h warrior that has many more active abilities, or a mage may want to forgo spirit mastery and invest in primal or entropy, or don't want to upgrade barrier, which increases the number of active abilities he can get. And that's fine. But keep in mind that the mage build becomes complete at a VERY late stage that a lot of people won't even reach. He always has enough spells to play, but getting a better spell makes the old ones obsolete. That's healthy. Just because you can get 50 abilities, doesn't mean that all of them count as far as design is concerned.

 

Personally I don't like fillers till I get the later stronger abilities. I prefer to fill the void between acquiring these abilities with passives and specialize the gear to cover the weakness of not having a complete build.

[PopeUrban]

I hope people don't add fireball into their "active abilities" list ^^. Let's analyze a common DA2 mage build.

 

-snip-

 

Personally I don't like fillers till I get the later stronger abilities. I prefer to fill the void between acquiring these abilities with passives and specialize the gear to cover the weakness of not having a complete build.

 

This exactly. If "firestorm" is simply a better version of "fire vortex" then it's just plain silly for both spells to exist, where the better system is that you can in stead choose to upgrade firestorm to become fire vortex. Similarly, if a spell only removes lice from monsters with hair at 3:78 on tuesdays in july if you're a redheaded dwarf, it's not worth having if there's a spell that says "banishes insects".

 

This is the primary reason RPGS in general are progressively moving away from "five elemental and four physical damage types!" to "Damage types are magic, slashing, and blunt" type systems.

 

When you remove extraneous repetition from the system, the gameplay remains the same, you've just drastically reduced the level of unneeded complexity. You don't need four versions of dispel to dispel four versions of the same DoT, and have four separate stats for resistance to various samey damage types when functionally they do the same thing. You can in stead have "dispels DoTs" and "resistance to DoTs" which is a much more direct translation for stat and ability types to gameplay effects and actual tactical play.

 

Selecting the correct damage type out of four different spells that do the exact same thing aside from icon color to use on monsters weak to it is not tactical. It's hotbar whack-a-mole.

 

"fire spells deal fire damage" is not meaninful gameplay. "Fire spells start fires that can spread to other nearby enemies" is. When you break down spells and skills to the core philosophy of "what does this do in terms of game mechanics" you start to find out that most of the stuff in a lot of games is uneccessary, and removing or condensing that stuff doesn't change the way the game plays at all.

 

Case in point: Rogues in DAO have a trait that lets them backstab enemies that are incapacitated from any direction. This included paralyzed, stunned, and knocked down. Rogues kew what the rest of the game forgot. Stunned, paralyzed, and knocked down are all the exact same thing. They prevent the affected target from moving or taking action.

 

That same philosophy should be present across the whole system, but for some reason there were multiple copies of "ranged persistant AOE" There only ever NEEDS to be one spell avaliable to a mage that does a ranged persistant AOE. There only NEEDS to be one skill on a warrior that does a PBAOE knockback.The only reason to have more is if your game runs on a resourceless cooldown system. If your game runs on a mana/stamina system with short skill cooldowns you're just copypasting the same stuff over and over for no reason, and asking players to fill up the screen with hotbars that have no actual gameplay utility.

[Gtdef]

I like what World of Warcraft started doing the past year, adding charges to abilities. For example Hunter has an ability called Deterrence that increases his avoidance rating to 100% for some seconds, and an ability called readiness that instantly finishes the cooldown of deterrence among some other spells.

 

They instead took away readiness and added 2 charges on Deterrence. This way you don't need a different bind for readiness, a difference one for macro that uses readiness if deterrence is on cooldown or I don't know what else. Simple and to the point.

 

Of course there is the other end of the spectrum, where you remove abilities that do lesser damage for the increased level, but had another function, like a slow effect, or an aoe getting stealthers out of stealth, without introducing another ability or alter one to include this function, essentially nerfing the class and lowering the skill cap.

 

It's a fine line between removing the pointless button bloat and removing abilities that add depth. Luckily DA doesn't seem that have that problem at the moment, but we will wait and see.

[Altima Darkspells]

Let's also remember that, for the Inquisitor at least, there will be abilities beyond the class talents, such as the recent gameplay video showing a kill all fade creatures in a huge radius ability.

I just hope that the talents don't have really crappy cooldowns. Anything more than twelve seconds would really grate on an eight hotbar limitation.

[kipac]

I smell and sense repetition and button mash incoming...

[Reaverwind]

I smell and sense repetition and button mash incoming...

 

Ugh. I'd rather play a real shooter.

[Illyria God King of the Primordium]

I smell and sense repetition and button mash incoming...

What, like DAO, where I pretty much did exactly that?  

[TeamLexana]

Is there still a power wheel or not? Because if there is, I really don't care about the eight limit slot. Some peeps I glanced over seemed to think that there was and I would have quoted them, but for some reason, I can't get the quote thing to work because it doesn't do anything when I press quote or multiquote on the revamped forum.

[Illyria God King of the Primordium]

Is there still a power wheel or not? Because if there is, I really don't care about the eight limit slot. Some peeps I glanced over seemed to think that there was and I would have quoted them, but for some reason, I can't get the quote thing to work because it doesn't do anything when I press quote or multiquote on the revamped forum.

There's a wheel, but only for potions and such appears to be the situation.  I don't think there's a wheel for abilities - it may be available for remaps in between combat though.  

 

That's my read on the situation anyway - feel free to prove me wrong.  

[TeamLexana]

That just seems really silly to me to not have a wheel for the powers. Feels really limiting and makes the game feel small since it's kind of like saying there is only a small amount of abilities that are worth using anyways. Eight may not be such a big deal for warriors and rogues, though I personally think I'd still feel the sting of the hit on them but for MAGES, eight seems ridicules. Eight hotkeys with a wheel, sure, whatever no big deal, hotkey's are there for convenience anyways but eight and no power wheel? Oh hell no.

 

How the hell would that even work for companions if you want to switch to them in the middle of a fight and opps, you didn't map their spell/talent you wanted so your screwed, even if they know the talent/spell? Is their tactics limited to the 8 all the time and if you go over, they just won't do it by themselves off of the tactics? That seems like a LOT of "busy work" to constantly remap the 8 AND going back to get more health pots since who in their right mind is going to walk into a random cave with health missing. Suddenly the 200 hours of gameplay seems less and less impressive.

[Illyria God King of the Primordium]

you didn't map their spell/talent you wanted 

I love the idea that having one spell/talent out of 32 available not there will completely ruin your strategy for combat.  'Oh no!  Here is a situation where X spell would be perfect, but I can't use it!  I'll have to make do with one of ABCDEFG instead!'  If your build requires you to have one good spell, which you then don't have in your bar, then you deserve to be eaten by a grue.  

 

Level up smartly, and suck it up.  

[TeamLexana]

I'm not talking about dying, I'm talking about switching to a companion all excited to use an ability and then not having it there to use because of an eight talent limit. I can level up just fine, I'm pretty good at putting points where I need them. I was shocked when talking to some of my friends about their builds and lol'n at how horrible they leveled up.

[Illyria God King of the Primordium]

I'm not talking about dying, I'm talking about switching to a companion all excited to use an ability and then not having it there to use because of an eight talent limit. I can level up just fine, I'm pretty good at putting points where I need them. I was shocked when talking to some of my friends about their builds and lol'n at how horrible they leveled up.

Heh, fair enough, sorry I was rude.  

 

In that case, I can see it being disappointing (as it would be if the ability was in cooldown), but not gamebreakingly so.  There'd be something quite fun I think about 'Now I'll get Dorian to fireba- I removed it from his bar.  WELL ****.  Let's, uh, no wait, I've still got Grease, if I do that, and then get Vivienne to flame wall here, then....yes, yes!'.  I think it allows for more organic strategising than the DAO method where I just built up a collection of abilities I ran through with each character in order, or DA2 where I did the same thing but with cross person combos occasionally tossed in.