88 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvius the Mad]

Was that because it was far too easy? It was basically button-mashing. I enjoyed TW2, but only completed it by going the mage route and stunning all my enemies then swording them to death (and, OK, playing on Easy).

I find repetitive button pressing extremely irritating. I don't want to click 8 times to make my character attack 8 times. Especially if the timing matters (as it does in The Witcher).

All turning down the difficulty did was provide more visual cues about when to click; I still had to click in a specifc sequence.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Now we have enormous technical improvements--voice acting, character models that can interact and have facial expressions, awesome graphics . . . and nobody's happy.

Because we can no longer play in our preferred style.

[Muspade]

I, for one, am fairly satisfied.

[Sylvius the Mad]

I do feel compelled to point out that the combat systems of TW and TW 2 are very different. (It's still action combat, though.)


TW 2 wasn't particularly easy, certainly not on higher difficulties. And button mashing doesn't really get you all that far. I mean, sure, on 'easy' it's well...easy. But then again, so are all the Dragon Age games. And since 'normal' is the new 'easy', playing a game on 'normal' doesn't really count either. Anything below 'hard' doesn't tell you anything about a game anymore.

I found The Witcher's combat interminable, even in easy.

It didn't matter how difficult it was; it just wasn't fun.

[metatheurgist]

Now we have enormous technical improvements--voice acting, character models that can interact and have facial expressions, awesome graphics . . . and nobody's happy.

I would love to have old style RPGs with all the new bells and whistles, problem is they don't make them. I'm only in Bioware for the story and characters now, not the game mechanics. I find the current game mechanics boring and pedestrian, and the boredom only increases the more action based it becomes.

[bazzag]

I play games for the story, but at the same time enjoy the game that i'm playing. for example, i tend to only play games in easy because, well, i enjoy that difficulty, and it means that i get to enjoy the story, as opposed to getting stuck and getting frustrated and rage quitting.

 

If i wanted story without playing the game i'd read a bloody book

[Icefalcon]

I'll happily admit to being in the first group. I play rpg's for the action and am quite happy to build a character that can literally walk through combat as the combat is only a side issue in the game for me.

 

I've always sort of felt that combat should become more complicated on higher levels so at the top level you can have bosses that require mini games to defeat and hordes of respawning monsters every time you travel the same corridor. That's great for those who like it. To me easy level or story level if you prefer should be monster crosses hero (& friends/party) monster pays rather quickly with it's life and the story moves on.

 

It could work by way of the engine being able to cope with the high level combat, but all the preliminary attacks on each tentacle or limb are considered done and you just beat the hell out of the main part on story mode. Should be possible for a studio like Bioware to do I would think, but I'm not a programmer.

[Sylvius the Mad]

In theory, that's where all RPGs lie (or once lied), isn't it? The intersection of an engaging world (from a lore perspective) and plot, along with uncommon difficulty that requires tactical thought?

I think action RPGs like TES where the ones to start changing that to simplistic combat where one approach (hit it with the pointy bit!) solved pretty much all your problems. The previous DA games, for example, definitely had their areas of difficulty, where multiple different techniques were almost needed simultaneously (the tank to draw aggro, the damage dealer to deal damage, the healer to heal--it's simple, but it's more complex than most action RPGs like Skyrim or ME).

It's funny you say that, because the one thing I think the TES games do badly is the combat.

Arena was originally supposed to be just that, an arena, and the combat was designed that. It was an arena combat game that grew into an open world RPG. But the sloppy action combat remained, and it still does.

In recent games, TES has actually started to streamline some other features to its detriment (like Skyrim's stats and abilities), while at the same time fixing some of the fundamental problems of the eariler games (Oblivion's broken level mechanics), but it sticks with the action combat. Worse, BethSoft has recently demonstrated that they can do combat better than that, with the VATS in FO3, but they still don't improve it in TES.

[Nukekitten]

Maybe the reason why big-budget games like Dragon Age are vanishing is *because*, qua game, they're a strange leftover of a type of game that, for a brief period of time managed to get an audience by uniting several groups of gamers with completely opposing interests.

I suspect big budget games are vanishing because their iteration rate is very low. Indie games come along and they don't have as high a quality but they can iterate relatively fast until they find something that works. Then larger companies form around this and can milk it for a time.

But I think anyone who thinks they've hit on a kind of game mechanic that will always be popular unaltered is kidding themselves. And when you realise that the emphasis for long term survival switches to, 'How much can you test against the market?' not just 'How much money can you sink into producing the brightest assets?'

Then again I may be wrong. COD and Assassin's Creed are still around, for the time being

[Icy Magebane]

If a game doesn't have interesting mechanics, a good story probably won't be enough to keep me hooked... but on the other hand, I'm not that difficult to please.  I'll tell you right now that I don't like the sound of some of the game mechanics in DA:I, but there are others, such as crafting and active dodging/blocking that sound like they will be a lot of fun.  Plus, I've played many lousy games in the past.  This game would have to be a real lemon for me to not enjoy it on some level... the way I see it, the DA:O combat ship has sailed, and it seems that it was a one way trip.  DA:I has taken the DA2 system and removed enemy waves randomly jumping out of the sky, so there is at least one overwhelmingly positive change that should balance out whatever issues we may each have with the final product.

 

As for the rest of this topic, all I can really say is that I agree with those who have pointed out the polarizing effects of message boards.  It's nothing to be overly concerned with, no matter the topic... I mean, none of us would be here if we didn't have strong feelings one way or the other towards DA:I, and most of us feel inclined to debate others from time to time.  That doesn't mean that Bioware is facing a crisis in game design or that they need to narrowly focus on a smaller target audience.  I think it's possible to appease a wide variety of gamers to an extent, but there will always be those who aren't satisfied.  As the OP points out, even among those who value game mechanics over story, there is no agreement over which mechanics are important and which aren't.

[Elhanan]

It's funny you say that, because the one thing I think the TES games do badly is the combat.

Arena was originally supposed to be just that, an arena, and the combat was designed that. It was an arena combat game that grew into an open world RPG. But the sloppy action combat remained, and it still does.

In recent games, TES has actually started to streamline some other features to its detriment (like Skyrim's stats and abilities), while at the same time fixing some of the fundamental problems of the eariler games (Oblivion's broken level mechanics), but it sticks with the action combat. Worse, BethSoft has recently demonstrated that they can do combat better than that, with the VATS in FO3, but they still don't improve it in TES.

While I am not a fan of the Skyrim 1st person S&S look and mechanics, 2H is better, and Archery is about the best I have experienced in any system that I can recall. And it is possible to be played in 3rd person; have 70+ hrs of this initially to insure it was viable, which improves the look at least.

[PsychoBlonde]

I would love to have old style RPGs with all the new bells and whistles, problem is they don't make them. I'm only in Bioware for the story and characters now, not the game mechanics. I find the current game mechanics boring and pedestrian, and the boredom only increases the more action based it becomes.

Check out Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity.  I've done beta on both (Wasteland 2 releases TOMORROW) and they're both looking quite fun.

[Sylvius the Mad]

While I am not a fan of the Skyrim 1st person S&S look and mechanics, 2H is better, and Archery is about the best I have experienced in any system that I can recall. And it is possible to be played in 3rd person; have 70+ hrs of this initially to insure it was viable, which improves the look at least.

Certainly. If not for archery and the third-person view, Skyrim would have been unplayable.

[PsychoBlonde]

It's funny you say that, because the one thing I think the TES games do badly is the combat.

Arena was originally supposed to be just that, an arena, and the combat was designed that. It was an arena combat game that grew into an open world RPG. But the sloppy action combat remained, and it still does.

In recent games, TES has actually started to streamline some other features to its detriment (like Skyrim's stats and abilities), while at the same time fixing some of the fundamental problems of the eariler games (Oblivion's broken level mechanics), but it sticks with the action combat. Worse, BethSoft has recently demonstrated that they can do combat better than that, with the VATS in FO3, but they still don't improve it in TES.

The problem with VATS is that it was a kind of homage to Fallout instead of being a feature that they included in order to improve the combat.  I used it a lot, but then my idea of a fun way to play Fallout 3 was to pump everything into a rifle, get Lincoln's Repeater, and headshot everything at 300 yards.  I'm not as picky about action combat, but that's probably a result of the fact that I played Gothic (a game that I LOVED) which had the JANKIEST ACTION COMBAT EVER CONCEIVED BY MAN.  After learning to play that sucker, anything that came after looked like a piece of cake.  I still remember that design.  You had to hold down an "action key" to convert movement into directional weapon swings, so of course you could not both MOVE and SWING--AND you had to time it just right because if you didn't hit the follow-up swing at precisely the right moment your character would pause and stand there like a dope. 

I think I killed everything in the game with exactly the same attack because it was the only one I could consistently time correctly.  I was like some kind of adventuring lumberjack.  My character had Repetitive Stress Syndrome by the end.

[Deviija]

Everything that Inquisition is offering sounds manageable to good for me, and that's from someone that is critical about story over mechanics.  I can enjoy mechanics if it is not twitch-based and one mistake ends in party wipes.  There is a lot I'm willing to bend to do for a game if the story, representation, characters, and world-building is engaging enough.  The 90s was a grindfest in most popular RPGs and I still hung in there.  I don't even like shooters and I played ME1 and played ME3's multiplayer for almost a year, for example.  (And the rest of the series out of obligation to finish FemShep's story, even though I came to loathe the series, story, and most characters, sigh.)  I've replayed the Baldur's Gate and Infinity Engine games too many times to count over the last 14 years, and I don't even like AD&D and assorted mechanics as implemented in the games.  A game with good elements can make me "like" or put up with the combat/assorted mechanics.  

 

Having difficulty levels that players can choose from does help in trying to bridge the gameplay and interactive story camps.  I prefer to play on the lowest difficulty level in my RPGs, so I can focus on story and exploration and sneezing on enemy encounters to win them in order to quickly get back to the meaty story and companion content.  I'd actually be very interested in seeing a game developer create a chunky RPG with combat focused on the more combat-oriented and gamplay-focused crowd, yet add in a "skip combat" function (in addition to levels of difficulty) for those that prefer just to get to the story.  

[PsychoBlonde]

Also this thread is now apparently a general discussion of gameplay mechanics, so bring it on.

[PsychoBlonde]

Everything that Inquisition is offering sounds manageable to good for me, and that's from someone that is critical about story over mechanics.  I can enjoy mechanics if it is not twitch-based and one mistake ends in party wipes.  There is a lot I'm willing to bend to do for a game if the story, representation, characters, and world-building is engaging enough.  The 90s was a grindfest in most popular RPGs and I still hung in there.  I don't even like shooters and I played ME1 and played ME3's multiplayer for almost a year, for example.  (And the rest of the series out of obligation to finish FemShep's story, even though I came to loathe the series, story, and most characters, sigh.)  I've replayed the Baldur's Gate and Infinity Engine games too many times to count over the last 14 years, and I don't even like AD&D and assorted mechanics as implemented in the games.  A game with good elements can make me "like" or put up with the combat/assorted mechanics.  

 

Having difficulty levels that players can choose from does help in trying to bridge the gameplay and interactive story camps.  I prefer to play on the lowest difficulty level in my RPGs, so I can focus on story and exploration and sneezing on enemy encounters to win them in order to quickly get back to the meaty story and companion content.  I'd actually be very interested in seeing a game developer create a chunky RPG with combat focused on the more combat-oriented and gamplay-focused crowd, yet add in a "skip combat" function (in addition to levels of difficulty) for those that prefer just to get to the story.  

One thing I really miss about "old school" RPG's is that there were often LEGITIMATE ways to "skip combat" or otherwise make it MUCH easier.  This is one of the things I like about DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) even though it's not fully consistent.  You can use stealth and invisibility to completely circumvent many enemies, or climb around the terrain to get past them.  There are even quests with "stealth objectives" where you get extra XP if you complete certain tasks without alerting the monsters.  (They're also some of the most difficult objectives to do in the game--a real gameplay challenge that ISN'T combat.)  Or, if there are too many enemies grouped around a door, you can use the Bluff skill to pull them down the hall to you and kill them one at a time.  You aren't stuck fighting everything at once the instant combat starts.

This sort of thing is actually the reason why I'm glad they got rid of the instant-recharge-after-fights gameplay from Origins and 2.  It seems like a lot of people don't realize it, but that mechanic actually prevents the existence of complex gameplay, because there can't be trash fights--fights that don't matter and pose little to no threat to the party individually.  And if you don't have "trash", then they can't just let you blithely skip past the fights--they have to MAKE you fight the mobs. 

 

Skipping fights in a game with real attrition is just another form of resource tradeoff.  You lose whatever you might have gotten by killing those mobs, but on the other hand you DON'T lose whatever you would have spent in killing them, too.  Then if you make stealthing require some skill and attention (you can't move too fast, you have to stick to the shadows, you can't get too close to or directly in front of mobs), you've got two modes of interesting gameplay that exist side-by-side.  You've effectively doubled your gameplay.  How about a third mode?  Now you can talk to the mobs and persuade them to leave.  This doesn't even have to involve actual "conversation" and cinematics, it can all be skill-based.  Have several different skills (intimidation, bluff, diplomacy, performance) that work in conjunction, but, say, you have to use them in a specific order for the attempt to be successful overall--and different mobs have different success threshholds for different skills.  Give the mobs some animations to show whether the attempt is taking or not.  If you hit the threshold, you get to try another skill.  If you get the correct order, they clear off (taking their loot with them).  Every time you use a skill, the threshold for all skills increases slightly.  Now you have THREE times as much gameplay--for the same amount of game!  And how about a distraction mechanic?  Make this a skill AND part of crafting, where you can either use a skill to separate mobs so that they can be killed individually or in small groups, and also have traps/noisemakers/lures you can use.  They have destructible terrain in DA2, but from what I've seen they use it in kind of a lame way where the enemies are already on top of the destructible terrain.  What if you instead had to *locate* the terrain, build your trap or whatever there, and then lure enemies into it?  Much more interesting.  So now you have FOUR times as much gameplay for the same amount of game.  I could go on and on--add a "bribe" mechanic where you can get intelligent foes to leave or even turn on their former allies--but you lose money or consumables for using it.  Now you have a distinction between "intelligent" and "non-intelligent" foes.

THIS is the stuff I miss.  THIS is the stuff that REALLY enables people to "play their way" and *allows* for that big audience with really diverse interests. 

[Bayonet Hipshot]

Interactive movies and hardcore gaming are two separate things. An RPG should strive to cater for the hardcore gamer, not the interactive movie watcher. Interactive movie gamers can download the cutscenes from Youtube. 

 

What Bioware is doing now is leaning to the interactive movie gamer in favor of profits. Hence we see the increase in flashyness and the way the game is structured to work with action play.

 

In Bioware games, as of late, the game has turned into a "lets mash a few abilities into oblivion !" + "MMO philosophy infection" fest.

 

Bioware now no longer cater to the hardcore or the roleplayer.

 

If they did they would give us more roleplaying options like more specializations or more class archetypes. In DA:I mages all seem to be elementalists, rogues seem to be pure DPS, warriors seem to be just tanks. The whole rogues as DPS, warrior as tanks, mages as glass cannons came out of the MMO genre. Older RPGs always allowed players to be supportive rogues or intelligence based warriors, etc.

 

I dislike this greatly but they are making them profits so....

 

Still, the gaming industry is a free market of sorts. There is something for everybody. There is something for the roleplayer, something for the hardcore gamer, something for the interactive movie gamer....

 

Just because Bioware no longer does the catering it used to doesn't mean its the end of the world...

 

Who knows, perhaps what Bioware is doing is to "encourage a real sense of exploration" in a sense that exploration means exploring other RPG games and other RPG developers...I mean I got into Elder Scrolls and The Witcher after the disappointment of DA 2, I got into Deus Ex Human Revolution after the disappointment of ME3, most likely I will go Cyberpunk 2077 as opposed to Mass Effect 4. 

 

[Lennard Testarossa]

This sort of thing is actually the reason why I'm glad they got rid of the instant-recharge-after-fights gameplay from Origins and 2.  It seems like a lot of people don't realize it, but that mechanic actually prevents the existence of complex gameplay, because there can't be trash fights--fights that don't matter and pose little to no threat to the party individually.  And if you don't have "trash", then they can't just let you blithely skip past the fights--they have to MAKE you fight the mobs.

 

Very true. One of the worst design decisions regarding combat in DA 2 (which was also present to a somewhat smaller degree in DA) is that they tried to make every single encounter 'challenging'. Rather than having small packs of bandits and casual encounters, we had to fight a bandit horde with multiple waves every single time. I honestly hadn't considered the fact that the ultimate reason for that is the instant recharge. So I guess that means we might actually have trash mobs again in DA:I. (Does it really, though? I haven't followed the news on this game. Do we already know how resource regeneration works in this game?)

 

I'm not as picky about action combat, but that's probably a result of the fact that I played Gothic (a game that I LOVED) which had the JANKIEST ACTION COMBAT EVER CONCEIVED BY MAN.

 

I think the combat of Gothic (and Gothic 2) was pretty good, at least as long you weren't fighting too many enemies at once. It's a bit unconventional, to be sure, but also pretty entertaining and skill based. It's one of the few action rpg systems in which simply pummeling your enemy almost never works. If you're good at it, you can beat Orc Elite in the first chapter, if you suck at it, you'll get fisted by pretty much everything. (Also, I think that much like Bloodlines, Gothic is a game that almost everyone who played it loved.)

[PsychoBlonde]

 

If they did they would give us more roleplaying options like more specializations or more class archetypes. In DA:I mages all seem to be elementalists, rogues seem to be pure DPS, warriors seem to be just tanks. The whole rogues as DPS, warrior as tanks, mages as glass cannons came out of the MMO genre. Older RPGs always allowed players to be supportive rogues or intelligence based warriors, etc.

 

Um, no.  This ethos was part of Original Flavor D&D which is where all the "older" RPG's originally derived.  I challenge you to pick up the ORIGINAL Pool of Radiance and play an "intelligence-based warrior".  Or even the original Baldur's Gate.  Or Neverwinter Nights, even.  By way of comparison, the MMO I play actually HAS all of this stuff.  Merely being able to swap primary stats does not fundamentally change how a given build *plays*.  Nor are specializations and class archetypes "roleplaying" options.  Many highly superior RPG's have NO classes whatsoever (Fallout, Arcanum, Wasteland).

 
A game that's geared around managing a party of 4 is going to have a lot of MMO "feels" to it unless it's completely turn-based.  Heck, the old Dark Sun game felt so much like an MMO that they actually made it into one.  (Granted, those games had serious issues, they came out right on the tail end of the DOS/Windows switchover so they were still using imbecile ideas like "base memory" that would often render them unplayable.) Dragon Age has never been geared toward the tank-healer-dps trifecta (although you CAN play it that way if that's what you're comfortable with).  I played both games generally with parties that had neither healer nor tank, just mixed dps/cc builds.  Heck, my mage in Origins was so broken that the other characters were pretty much only there for entertainment purposes.

[Steelcan]

I agree with the sentiment of the OP, but not the finer points exactly

 

 

I think this game is suffering from a lack of clear direction.

 

 

A lot of what we hear in the marketing and such is some variation of a blend between the two previous Dragon Age games.  This seems like a poor idea to me; instead they should focus on making the game unique and rolling with what they think will work best in this game.  As much as I'd like a direct sequel to DA:O with the same combat and style of character etc... Its not going to happen at this point.  The missteps of DA2 should be wholly scrapped for a new form of combat, not one that tires to blend Origins and 2.

[Sylvius the Mad]

The problem with VATS is that it was a kind of homage to Fallout instead of being a feature that they included in order to improve the combat.

But it did improve the combat. Vastly. I used VATS for nearly every attack in FO3 and NV. It was as vital to me as the pause-to-aim feature in ME.

[They call me a SpaceCowboy]

I find repetitive button pressing extremely irritating. I don't want to click 8 times to make my character attack 8 times. Especially if the timing matters (as it does in The Witcher).

All turning down the difficulty did was provide more visual cues about when to click; I still had to click in a specifc sequence.

 

I feel the same way about Witcher as you, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was almost as bad. I really hope DAI is not like those at all.