242 réponses à ce sujet

[Lux]

You post this and yet have an avatar picture of BG.....Didn't see the health regen in that game (resting is awfully dangerous in place with mind flayers for example) and it's still considered one of the best RPG to date (both gameplay and story wise). Do you see the irony?

I believe that health regen is well suited for modern exploration in wide open areas while still considering the Baldur's Gate series as one of the best games I ever played. And as we were able to rest nearly anywhere in BG, here you'll have to get back to a pre set camp and then travel back to where you were. I see an obvious problem here, made worse by a strict dependency on fixed points.

[Paul E Dangerously]

how is it less limiting? you got cooldown so you can just stand there and wait for it to comes back and you have up to 12 (if I'm not mistaken by what i saw on videos and streams) healing potions. Camps are not that far away and you don't really have to endanger yourself when resting (also you can actually run away from combat). Tougher enemies are also there for a reason. they are used as an artificial gate so that you don't go wandering in the "wrong" zone

 

Yeah, I loved that about New Vegas. "Let's shove these tough monsters into the obvious zones so you have to go the long way around the map to stall for time".

 

Don't get me wrong, I loved not having level scaled monsters in some games (Morrowind), I've just seen it abused too damned many times by developers.

[KoorahUK]

I believe that health regen is well suited for modern exploration in wide open areas while still considering the Baldur's Gate series as one of the best games I ever played. And as we were able to rest nearly anywhere in BG, here you'll have to get back to a pre set camp and then travel back to where you were. I see an obvious problem here, made worse by a strict dependency on fixed points.

No you won't you'll need to make it to the next camp and not fight everything you see if your health is low. Risk:reward vs zero risk. 

[PhroXenGold]

Seriously though, it just seems like they're shifting heal spam to barrier/guard spam for DAI. I wager it's going to work exactly the same way, just pre-fight instead of during or post-fight.

 

Within a single battle, yes, you can argue that it is similar to healspam in previous games. Where the DA:I system differs is the effects of multiple battles. In previous games, you always entered a battle on full health. That will no longer be the case, particularly a long distance away from camps or other potion replenishment areas. This allows for much more interesting and varied encounter design, instead of having every battle based on bursting you down from full health, the developers can build a series of encounters focused on wearing you down over the course of them.

 

You know, I really think the majority of the gameplay complaints about this change are based on the assumption that it would be like playing DA:O without healing and health regeneration. It won't be. It's a complately different design philosophy built in from the ground up.

[Lux]

No you won't you'll need to make it to the next camp and not fight everything you see if your health is low. Risk:reward vs zero risk.

Is it too much to ask not to feel obligated to go back to a camp because health is too low? What if I want to risk taking a new camp with no potions but with replenished health? Backtracking makes for a boring game experience, imo.

[Paul E Dangerously]

Within a single battle, yes, you can argue that it is similar to healspam in previous games. Where the DA:I system differs is the effects of multiple battles. In previous games, you always entered a battle on full health. That will no longer be the case, particularly a long distance away from camps or other potion replenishment areas. This allows for much more interesting and varied encounter design, instead of having every battle based on bursting you down from full health, the developers can build a series of encounters focused on wearing you down over the course of them.

 

You know, I really think the majority of the gameplay complaints about this change are based on the assumption that it would be like playing DA:O without healing and health regeneration. It won't be. It's a complately different design philosophy built in from the ground up.

 

Oh, it sounds good. It always sounds good. The problem is that I can very easily see this descending into trial-and-error style tedium that involves a lot of running to camp.

 

As far as the rest..I'm not even sure how it's similar to DAO any longer. Aside from the races, it's almost like they've tried to sweep it under the rug in favor of DA2's changes, most of which are still firmly hammered into place.

[Blisscolas]

Yeah, I loved that about New Vegas. "Let's shove these tough monsters into the obvious zones so you have to go the long way around the map to stall for time".

 

Don't get me wrong, I loved not having level scaled monsters in some games (Morrowind), I've just seen it abused too damned many times by developers.

 

We all have to try the game before being able to say it's good or bad. After the whole combat system has been redone and apparently was still not well balanced (according to the stream from a few weeks ago with Mike Laidlaw).

 

Let's see how it plays out and talk about this again at that time.

[Blisscolas]

Is it too much to ask not to feel obligated to go back to a camp because health is too low? What if I want to risk taking a new camp with no potions but with replenished health? Backtracking makes for a boring game experience, imo.

 

Decisions, decisions....aren't Bioware games about decisions? You get to decide on every level now

 

edit: Sorry for double post

[KoorahUK]

Is it too much to ask not to feel obligated to go back to a camp because health is too low? What if I want to risk taking a new camp with no potions but with replenished health? Backtracking makes for a boring game experience, imo.

Where is the risk in self replenishing health may I ask?

"Boring" is a subjective term,

• I find encounters that are self contained and have no other impact on anything that occurs after it to be boring.
• I find exploration with zero risk boring.
• I find not having to assess whether a fight is worth enagaging in to be boring.
• I find being constantly stunned, cc'd and alpha striked to instant death in an attempt to overhwelm my virtually infinite health pool pretty boring too.

We've had two games with regenerating health and combat balanced to deal with it and I'm ready for a new challenge.

[PhroXenGold]

Is it too much to ask not to feel obligated to go back to a camp because health is too low? What if I want to risk taking a new camp with no potions but with replenished health? Backtracking makes for a boring game experience, imo.

 

Then either turn the difficulty down or improve your management of combat. If you find yourself backtracking too often, then you're probably doing something wrong.

[Jester]

i

 

 It's only made worse by the fact that they added a function that will in short force a large portion of the fanbase to play on easy, but also they decided that they had to cater to the elitist with a nightmare and hard trophy. 

Well, achievements are supposed to be just that. Achievements. Some achivements are supposed to be hard, and not to be gained by everybody - only by those with enough skill/patience/dedication.

 

Seriously though, it just seems like they're shifting heal spam to barrier/guard spam for DAI. I wager it's going to work exactly the same way, just pre-fight instead of during or post-fight.

That's not how it works. Guard cannot be 'spammed' - it's build up by using active talents. Barrier also cannot be spammed - it has to be used stratigically. You have to predict when it will be useful - not use it post-fact.

 

 

Instead, it becomes walk for five minutes to the camp and back - after every battle.

 

Am I to understand, that after your characters died in battle in DA:O/DA2 you went all the way back to camp? Or did you by any chance used an injury kit (which were quite few in number/expensive) or just pressed through despite having a weakened party?

 

Because the all the evidence (i.e. existing games that don't regenerate health) predicts non-regenerating health is a bad idea.

Can you give examples? For example, most FPS'es with regenerating health are absolutely terrible. On the other hand, those with resource-based health regeneration are much more enjoyable.

Check the reception of single player old-school FPS games - Duke Nuke'em, Serious Sam, Shadow Warrior, Hexen, Doom... and more modern games like Bioshock series, first two F.E.A.R games, Far Cry series and several others, with Modern Military Shooters like Battlefield, CoD, new Medal of Honors...

In FPS genre, introducing regenerating health (and a bunch of generic, modern, similarly working weapons, but that's another story) killed the whole exploration aspect and most of the enjoyability that those kind of games provide.

In third person games, many have non-regenerating health (although sometimes supplemented by preventative mechanic...armor, barriers): Dead Space, Mass Effect 1&3, most third-person survival horror games (like Resident Evil and variations)... From those that I played lastly - only Tomb Raider had regenerating health, and I'm convenced that it would profit from not having one.

 

It's about like DA2's healing, if the cooldowns are even remotely similar. It's just "prevent X damage" instead of "restore X damage dealt".

"Prevent X damage" is a completely different gameplay mechanic to "restore x damage dealt". Their tactical (and strategical) applications are completely different. Prevent promotes awareness. Heal (especially post-combat free heal) promotes carelessness. In healing variant, you can treat health as an expendable resource - it doesn't matter if your whole party finishes combat almost dead - you're still just as good as a guy who strategized the whole battle and didn't take any damage.

[10K]

Where is the risk in self replenishing health may I ask?
"Boring" is a subjective term,

• I find encounters that are self contained and have no other impact on anything that occurs after it to be boring.
• I find exploration with zero risk boring.
• I find not having to assess whether a fight is worth enagaging in to be boring.
• I find being constantly stunned, cc'd and alpha striked to instant death in an attempt to overhwelm my virtually infinite health pool pretty boring too.

We've had two games with regenerating health and combat balanced to deal with it and I'm ready for a new challenge.

This. I'm ready for a new and real challenge. Both DA2 and Origins had no real challenge. You could practically go through both games with just your PC. I want to be pushed to actually use tactics and think before I engage enemies.

[Blisscolas]

I think the gameplay mechanic would also help players make their playstyle evolve throughout the adventure

[Lux]

Instead, it becomes walk for five minutes to the camp and back - after every battle.

AFAIK, you can teleport to a discovered camp. The issue, at least for me, is with having to get to a camp every time your health is low whereas with regen you had the option to go further, with less time wasted for exploration.

I'm all for game innovation except when a useful game mechanic is scrapped. I don't understand why health regen outside combat can't coexist with the new combat system. They don't exactly overlap. This creates an over dependency of camps and potentially disgruntled players.

EDIT: I've modified the thread title for accuracy and to avoid confusion between what happens during combat and outside of it.

[KoorahUK]

 I don't understand why health regen outside combat can't coexist with the new combat system. They don't exactly overlap. This creates an over dependency of camps and potentially disgruntled players.

 

The below post explains why regenerating health won't work with the new combat system. 

 

A lot of people are picturing trying to play DAO/2 with no heals. Of course that wouldn't work, those games weren't balanced for that. But how well were they balanced with heals, really? I'm not a numbers guy, but I like a good fight. And here's what made it make sense for me.

There's a very simple reason why this is a good decision, and it's also why the balance in DAO/2 was all over the map. It's in the question "How many health points does a player have?" Because we need to know this before we can design an encounter and know how balanced it is.

So, how many HP? Well, we'd hope it starts with "somewhere between the minimum for a mage and the max for a warrior, varied based on party makeup." Okay, good place to start. That's a real number. We can build encounters that do somewhere within that range of total damage + effects.

Now add in healing. How many HP does the player have? "Somewhere between the minimum for a mage and the max for a warrior, plus somewhere between the minimum and maximum number of healing spells/potions and between the min/max of their mana/potions."

Okay, how much HP is that exactly? Since potions restore mana, and potions also restored HP, the actual number of potential HP was somewhere between the minimum for a mage and the total amount of gold you had available to spend on potions. And the later in the game it was, the more the top reached astronomical numbers. And so the greatest power the player had in previous games was not any one of their abilities, it was the ability to make the number of HP impossible to estimate.

And to counter effectively infinite HP, "balance" meant we needed to hit the player with far more potential damage than their characters could withstand, and do it all but instantly. In effect, replacing HP damage (unknown limits) with death/resurrection (known limits). Or we had to stop them from chaining potions, meaning more enemies that put them to sleep or confused them, or otherwise made the player not able to take action. Alpha strikes and crowd control, neither of which were tactics that were fun to face again and again, because they "balanced" by removing actions, by removing control.

Now in Inquisition, by reducing healing, by actually defining HP to a range that can have real numbers in it, we can better balance encounters. And no, players can't rely on chaining potions. So what do they get instead?

Abilities/gear/choices that actually have an effect on the battle that is greater than infinite health on your belt. And because your greatest ability isn't chugging potions, we need less effects that shut you down. You spend more time in control of your characters making more varied decisions to have a greater effect on the flow of the battle. You have regen from spells and potions and gear. You have effects you can craft that grant health on enemy deaths. You have damage mitigation through abilities and buffs and crafting. Limiting health and balancing enemies accordingly makes more tactical choices viable while keeping the challenge.

Does this make it more difficult? On Nightmare, Well, you asked for a challenge, and you'll have one that you can overcome in many more viable ways than previously possible.

But what about Easy? Well, last weekend, on Easy/Casual, starting the game with a mage and me not saying a word, my seven year old played for two hours that included many battles, including rifts and beating the crap out of a low level Pride demon. No party wipes. I covered his ears once.

I think you'll be fine.

 

[Lux]

The below post explains why regenerating health won't work with the new combat system.

It's an excellent post on the new combat system which needs to be tried hands on to see if its development has hit the sweet spot on combat innovation.

But again, what does that have to do with health regeneration outside combat?

[Blisscolas]

It's an excellent post on the new combat system which needs to be tried hands on to see if its development has hit the sweet spot on combat innovation.

But again, what does that have to do with health regeneration outside combat?

 

Balancing and new gameplay approach?

[Paul E Dangerously]

It's an excellent post on the new combat system which needs to be tried hands on to see if its development has hit the sweet spot on combat innovation.

But again, what does that have to do with health regeneration outside combat?

 

Unless they've given it the murder knife recently (and they may have, who knows) you're supposed to regenerate to a threshold according to the current difficulty level. Something like normal is a particular (low-ish) percentage, and "press x to win" difficulty is higher.

[MasterPrudent]

I think people are vastly overestimating the extent to which they'll have to backtrack. Camps seem to be spread pretty evenly throughout the maps. By the looks of it players will have more incentive to push on towards a new camp then return to the old one. Unless you get into deep trouble immediately after having restocked all your potions, in which case you should probably bump the difficulty down.

[KoorahUK]

It's an excellent post on the new combat system which needs to be tried hands on to see if its development has hit the sweet spot on combat innovation.

But again, what does that have to do with health regeneration outside combat?

Health regeneration outside combat means the devs have to assume you are at full health each and every encounter. This means each and every encounter must try to outright kill the entire party to have any meaning whatsoever. 

 

In a combat system that is designed to wear the party down over time, the combat designers have more flexible options.

Now in Inquisition, by reducing healing, by actually defining HP to a range that can have real numbers in it, we can better balance encounters. And no, players can't rely on chaining potions. So what do they get instead?

Abilities/gear/choices that actually have an effect on the battle that is greater than infinite health on your belt. And because your greatest ability isn't chugging potions, we need less effects that shut you down. You spend more time in control of your characters making more varied decisions to have a greater effect on the flow of the battle. You have regen from spells and potions and gear. You have effects you can craft that grant health on enemy deaths. You have damage mitigation through abilities and buffs and crafting. Limiting health and balancing enemies accordingly makes more tactical choices viable while keeping the challenge.

[Paul E Dangerously]

I think people are vastly overestimating the extent to which they'll have to backtrack. Camps seem to be spread pretty evenly throughout the maps. By the looks of it players will have more incentive to push on towards a new camp then return to the old one. Unless you get into deep trouble immediately after having restocked all your potions, in which case you should probably bump the difficulty down.

 

You're the head of the Inquisition and can't get some poor recruit to carry a sack of health potions and jog a distance behind the party? I call shenanigans. Or possibly DLC.

[Lux]

Nothing wrong with being dependant on camps.
 
 
Because health regen is NOT artificial ?

Well, I usually don't take any medicine when I'm mildly sick or let a flesh wound regenerate by itself when it's not serious.

I meant that in a gameplay viewpoint, the removal of a useful mechanic for the sake of narrowing the healing process to a fixed medium is not only artificial but detrimental to a player's experience.

[KoorahUK]

Unless they've given it the murder knife recently (and they may have, who knows) you're supposed to regenerate to a threshold according to the current difficulty level. Something like normal is a particular (low-ish) percentage, and "press x to win" difficulty is higher.

You regen health on revival after being downed. 50% on Easy. 25% on Normal and 10% on hard (I think?)

[MasterPrudent]

You're the head of the Inquisition and can't get some poor recruit to carry a sack of health potions and jog a distance behind the party? I call shenanigans. Or possibly DLC.

Eh, you may as well complain about DA:I being a fantasy RPG. "Why, when I have a tremendous army at my disposal and the fate of the world hangs in the balance, can I only take along four party members? Why isn't this game an RTS?"

[Paul E Dangerously]

Eh, you may as well complain about DA:I being a fantasy RPG. "Why when I have a tremendous army at my disposal and the fate of the world hangs in the balance can I only take along four party members? Why isn't this game an RTS?"

 

I do like it when they actually give all those party members something to do in the pivotal moments. ME seems to be better with this than Dragon Age, though the Battle of Denerim counts, I suppose. What does everyone do when the Warden's out fighting a High Dragon?