That's odd, I can throw them as fast as I want.
Not sure what to tell you. Using a grenade was like using a special ability. The moment you use it there was a cooldown before you could use that tool again. The cooldown also wouldn't begin until after you detonate the actual grenade.
I think it was a missed chance to not have Hawke & co react to fighting those refugees as soon as they arrived in Kirkwall. Especially mage Hawke would only have fought darkspawn until that moment, and that's pretty different from slaughtering desperate people who are in the same position as you. I also missed the opportunity to reflect on being forced into working in the criminal underworld of Kirkwall.
Its a video game, not an interactive movie. Its supposed to be "gamey." If you didn't have those combat parts (you know, the actual gameplay?) then DA:I would just be a really well done visual novel.
I think there are several issues mixed up in this thread. I'll try to differentiate:
(1) Some games present us with a war scenario. People kill in war, they do so without thinking much of their enemies because they are, for some reason you may question but which has no impact on the combatants' mindsets, classified as legitimate targets, while our companions are close to us and their deaths evokes emotions. This is just how war works, and to make it different except in some exceptional cases would result in an oddly unreal presentation.
(2) Then there is the general tendency of video games to use combat as "what you do in these games". Unless it is a war scenario, I find this, indeed, horribly one-sided at the least, and in a game like DA2, where you're wandering your home city and you're not at war, options for dealing with situations in non-violent ways should be the norm rather than the exception, and in such scenarios, killing a single person should be, as a rule, a big thing. Also, in such scenarios, once you *have* killed a number of, say, bandits, people should be increasingly afraid of trying to rob or kill you. Keeping the "combat is what you do in these games" mindset up is going to result in an oddly unreal presentation, and that's exactly what happened in DA2.
(3) Historically, rpg implementations on computers suffered from an overabundance of combat because that was the only thing computers did well: applying simple mathematical rules to situations. Dialog is much harder to implement, and games were much slower to use it for plot resolution. Bioware is actually at the forefront of making roleplaying games about more than combat, which is to be commended. If there is *still* an absolutely insane overabundance of combat in their games, that just shows how insane things have been in the past.
However, from the published material about DAI I get good impressions. DAI has a war scenario, so some large-scale killing is justified, but within that scenario things appear to be appropriately varied. There appear to be fewer but stronger enemies instead of hordes of trash like in DA2, and we can avoid combat by sneaking around people or things we do not want to engage in combat. How much non-violent solutions will be part of the story remains to be seen.
War has never been presented realistically in BioWare games. I hope for the sake of everybody here that it never is. War is not pretty and video games and Hollywood dress it in a way that makes it easily digestible.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with Dragon Age, but it's an incredibly-violent and unrelenting world. People die constantly for better or for worse. If you don't kill, you die in the process. You only times you are at risk of combat in DA2 are generally at night in Kirkwall, or in the Wounded Coast or other areas outside the city. None of these areas are well-fortified or defended, so of course less-than-reputable characters will be there dealing in illegal activities such as slavery, drugs, prostitution, and who knows what else. Killing actually makes a lot of sense.
I see this third argument as a fallacy and inaccurate. For one, combat is a thing to do because people actually "enjoy" combat. It's human instinct to be engaged in competition of some sort, whether it's sports, martial arts, or even actual war. Humanity is an incredibly violent species and our games merely reflect our tastes. Also, dialogue was actually much more of a focus in games thirty years ago than it is today. BioWare isn't at the forefront of anything as RPGs have actually gone away from dialogue in favor of more interactivity and better combat.
If people wanted to be engaged with dialogue all day long, they would just watch a film or a television show. The truth of the matter is people play video games because they have control over what happens. They aren't just the audience, but they are actually the hero in the experience. Many of these games take place in very violent worlds where the occupation is generally a warrior, mage, or a rogue. It also makes more sense when we are playing the hero, of which is not the commoner and is the exception to the rule.
I think you may end up being disappointed by DAI if you are hoping to avoid combat. While there is semblance of a war going on, the Inquisition isn't really part of it. The focus of the game is closing the Breach and defeating the Elder One. Really, the Inquisition is nothing more than an emergency task for to clean up all the demon fodder that comes into Thedas. While you will certainly be able to avoid scenarios to some extent by running away, you'll likely find that many quest points and rare items will be hidden behind hordes of enemies.
I can guarantee you DAI will primarily be mindless killing and nothing else really, with the occasional dialogue here and there to break of the monotony. Welcome to the world of RPGs.
OP, you do realize DA IS a video game, right?
Every time you kill an enemy, a little piece of information about them should pop up on screen.
@Revan Reborn:
I guess you have never played classics like Planescape:Torment. Not that it didn't have plenty of combat as well, but almost every important plot could be resolved by dialogue if you so chose. This game is generally regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time.
I maintain that the mindset "combat is what we do in these games" is horribly one-sided. BTW, I recently replayed DXHR where it's quite possible to have a very satisfying experience while killing nobody at all but the chapter bosses. City scenarios in Dragon Age could learn a lot from that.
This is exactly my point and where you contradicted yourself. Older gamers historically actually had a lot more dialogue than games do today, even compared to BioWare. Also, it's one thing to have dialogue and non-violent options for "important plot" points. It's entirely something else where you are making this a choice for each and every mindless goon you come across.
I'm not disagreeing at all. I'm stating people actually want combat and that's largely what makes video games compelling for people. I still haven't gotten around to playing Deux Ex yet, however I did play Dishonored which had a similar approach. If you wanted to gain low chaos (good guy ending) for each mission, you could not kill enemies and you had to use non-lethal means of dealing with bosses.
I would not have add an issue with this (other than the fact I lose choice in how I want to play) if not for the fact that 90% of my tools and weapons were built for killing. So essentially most of the my arsenal was useless and served no purpose other than being a constant reminder of how incredibly frustrating and limited I was to taking out enemies in non-lethal ways.
My point is there is a place and time for these kinds of scenarios. I believe to some degree there should be more moral dilemmas when dealing with the choice of killing or saving anyone. I just don't believe it should be every time, otherwise it will lose its appeal and charm. If there will be the option of having non-lethal combat, there should also be more than one or two ways to achieve it, rather than what ME1 did with the tranquilizer grenade or Dishonored did by having to essentially sneak up behind everyone and knock them unconscious or use sleep darts.
I think this is a fabicated issue designed to create a faux intellectual conversation.
When I see combat vets using video games to decompress from combat it shows me that games are not in anyway shape or form like combat and they are not intended to be. CSI doesn't use real forensic science it tells stories, its not designed to educate the public in forensic science. MOST Video games are not design to educate or be a tool to open the topic of violence. CSI is there to entertain so they don't wory about accuracy in teh science and they have zero need to. DA:I's combat is there to entertain so Bioware doesn't need to worry that violence isn't protrayed in a realistic way.
Simply because something isn't designed to educate doesn't diminish its value. The structure of your argument and the words used to construct it imply that you think because game violence is used to entertain is has less value. You can't prove that it does have les value because entertainment is valueable to mental health, if we never do things that give us enjoyment we are not in a healthy mental state. So there is inherent value in games NOT being serious about violence.
But don't you think that its a LITTLE conflicting to have a game that wants you to be seriously engaged for the Story parts that handle ALL of the mature themes but then wants you to be totally Desensitised to the other 60% of the game which is combat where the player racks up an insane body count?
If one set of mechanics like the roleplaying, characters & plot are designed to feel as "real" & morally complex as possible then why make an exception for the MAJORITY of the game which is combat?
Watch dogs is a great example of this problem, Aden was meant to be on a noble Revenge story but ended up causing countless deaths & Millions in property damage where the only in game consequence was some stupid binary morality metre. At least games like GTA5 (Still pretentious at times) & especially Saints row embrace how wacky & ridiculous the gameplay is so they write their story to go hand in hand with the gameplay.
The gameplay & the narrative don't mix in most games. Why should "It's meant to be entertaining" be an excuse when the Designers obviously want you to take the story part of it seriously but not the gameplay?
Short answer: I don't care about the bad guys. They picked the wrong side.
But then you are left with a binary Good vs Evil Story that's there to stroke the players ego & pander to their hero fantasy. That's Boring & has been done a Million times
I don't have a problem with gamey violence. I have a problem with pointless enemies. In Devil May Cry I don't care. The story exists to add to the gameplay and add to the sense of accomplishment. Beating all the baddies is sweeter if you get the girl and save the world in the process. But a "story driven" game should make different considerations.
For example, fighting darkspawn every time you travel is perfectly fine. Darkspawn raid, they have a lot of numbers. Encountering bandit ambushes most of the times you try to travel between cities is perfectly fine as well. The roads can't be safe with the blight, everyone tries to take advantage. The gamey part here is that a group of 4 can destroy a small army in an open terrain. This is fine. Not realistic, but perfectly acceptable.
Having the same enemies spawn every 10 meters is problematic though. DA2 has pointless enemies and violence. The kirkwall gangs at night was the most dumb thing they could add to the game. They are annoying as hell, you need to kill 5-6 groups to learn the hideout and they stay even after killing their leader. The question here is "why can't I just interrogate the idiots I fought the first time. Or why don't they all attack together. And why in a very limited part of the town that the game takes place there are so many, and so on.
Same thing with the Deep Roads. What are the darkspawn waiting for. Why don't they just attack you all together? In DAO they can sense you. I'm not even going to go into Mass Effect. Open communications everywhere, the biggest badass in the universe that doesn't have the word stealth in his vocabulary is spotted in the area, what are we going to do? Break down in teams and wait our turns to die.
That's the problem of a game that suffers from identity crisis and tries too hard. I can farm enemies in Skyrim and Witcher and it doesn't affect my immersion. It actually seems sensible. Hunting mammoths and harpies for tusks and feathers. In DAI as we saw in the twitch video, if you farm a lot of bears you will get the papa bear that is probably stronger than a pride demon.
I think every time we kill an enemy, his mother should come in and weep as tragic music plays and the camera dramatically focuses on the poor henchman's last breath.
Naw but really I don't care if a video game is "gamey."
Not what I'm asking for Bro, Moral ambiguity & character development of the PC is something Bioware are trying to implement into their story telling so why not try it for gameplay. You know the other 60% of the game?
It does affect them. Level up!
The scope of games like this is way too huge to make every encounter meaningful, unless you want a 100+hours experience to be limited to two fights per hour.
- A demon has been slain! This terror demon once played dice with a demon of lust and lost his fade domain. What a loser.
LOL
Not what I'm asking for Bro, Moral ambiguity & character development of the PC is something Bioware are trying to implement into their story telling so why not try it for gameplay. You know the other 60% of the game?
I always thought that games which had opposing factions to choose from, it would be a nice touch to randomly have some of its members have names.But then you are left with a binary Good vs Evil Story that's there to stroke the players ego & pander to their hero fantasy. That's Boring & has been done a Million times
I'd say it is more like 80%.
I don't want Bioware to force mental anguish on the character simply because, either for their family dying or the fact that I killed Random Mook #297. We saw that in ME3 and it felt rather trite, honestly.
That being said, if there was some type of morale gameplay tracker that reacted to choices in and of of combat that affected things, I think that could be interesting. Darkest Dungeon is working on doing just that - your party's sanity is eroded as the dungeon, it's monsters, your characters interactions and general fear take its toll. An interesting mechanic, but not one we're going to see in DA:I.
I'm not advocating that every encounter be psychosocially damaging to the PC (Especially in a 100 hour game), but for SOME self reflection after killing more Morally ambiguous Enemies. "They were just rescuing people...& we killed them" or whatever as an Option for character development.
Maybe some of the Choices have snap second decisions that cause a **** tone of Collateral damage or lock you into conflict against more sympathetic factions. More stuff like this thrown in with the Faceless Goon #4326.
Or if a group on non-combatants that you previously wronged captured a party member, hung them, you arrive too late to save them & another companion is Demanding you kill them all. This is lifted straight out of Spec ops but its a very powerful example.
IMO having the player question their own actions sometimes can be much more memorable than the "You save the world....Again" story. Can we mix it up with these typical "pander to the players Hero fantasy" dime a dozen type of RPG's?
The gameplay & the narrative don't mix in most games. Why should "It's meant to be entertaining" be an excuse when the Designers obviously want you to take the story part of it seriously but not the gameplay?
I do believe this has been rebutted many times throughout this thread, quite frankly. The simple fact is that realism must give way to gameplay, and suspension of disbelief is required in some way by the players.
Why? Because ultimately Dragon Age - as a game - is more than an interactive story, which seems to be the type of game you're asking for. And those DO exist, after all, but they offer a wildly different gameplay than what Bioware does.
It all comes down to the kind of gameplay DAI is meant to provide. It could have been nothing but an interactive story, or a puzzle game. Maybe then they wouldn't require suspension of disbelief when it comes to taking lives (since the gameplay wouldn't involve scything through hordes of enemies), but that's not what Dragon Age gameplay is meant to be.
And what is DA's gameplay meant to be? Well, the franchise is the spiritual successor of the Baldur's Gate series, which itself comes from Dungeons and Dragons, which is all about combat and getting XP from killing stuff. Thus, DAI's gameplay is about combat.
Is that any less valid? Of course not, and one would argue it's what Bioware does best: merging excellent interactive storytelling with challenging and exciting combat gameplay.
But, by its very nature, this type of gameplay requires a measure of suspension of disbelief. And not just from the lack of consequence from taking countless lives, but all SORTS of other things: How come our companions just get back up after being knocked out in combat, while our enemies stay dead? How come in combat characters can survive strikes from swords or massive boulders being hurled at them, but succumb to a singe murderknife thrust in cutscenes (shouldn't we see our characters stab the victim 20 times to wittle down their HP, after all)? How comes people "level up" and learn new tricks in an instant instead of spending months training?
And the list goes on. Combat gameplay inherently requires a good dose of suspension of disbelief, and I certainly don't see why that suspension needs to stop at the bodycount.
The fact that Bioware DOES address the horrors of war in its storytelling should be good enough (we've seen cutscenes to that effect in DAI, in fact)... and if you cannot suspend your disbelief on that topic in the actual gameplay, however, then I'd suggest looking at other genres.
Thank you.
Itkovian
This is a very interesting topic overall and I have to say i agree to OP on some extent.
Violence is never fun in video games and movies if you dont romanticize it to at least some extent. Real violence and killings is too grim for big audience to handle.
But if you slaughter over and over and over again waves of enemies that have zero impact on the world and characters the whole thing becomes just silly and disconnected from rest of the world.
I think there is a middle ground Bioware should explore where engaging into combat to the death with enemy waves would always feel meaningful at least and not every combat would end in bloody corpses. Maybe some enemies could run when they discover 98 procent of them is slaughtered?
I always say to my friends this clip below is pretty much all missions and quests in Bioware games in the nutshell:
First some very bloody violence so much you almost become bored and at the very end some dialoque and choices to remind you this is still RPG you are playing
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There are lots of inde games out there that have no killing if that is what you prefer then seek them out - Steam can probably point you toward dozens. There is a reason though that the major studios don't make them. They don't sell all that well. Like art house movies they can be beautiful well done and thought provoking. There just isn't a big enough audience for them. For every one person who bought Journey probably ten bought Call of Duty.
I would never argue BioWare games even semi-accurately depict battlefield antics. War, for one is morally ambiguous, even if the government tries to tell you otherwise. You may have an "enemy" you are trying to neutralize, but these individuals have families and friends that you remove from the world, and there are always civilian casualties that get in the way and could actually be threats, like civilian women and children. There's also the fact that some of these enemies will use these civilians as shields in order to kill your side, whereas in BioWare games you rarely have to deal with that reality. I don't think anyone actually wants BioWare games to depict actual war. The last thing people will be asking for is for their characters to suffer from PTSD.
People just want to be Shepard and save the galaxy. They don't want to be a broken and shattered individual by the time the game closes.
I don't think people are arguing for more guilt.just less killing, or at least the opportunity to do something else, accept surrender, capture, cut off supplies, block routes, be diplomatic, fight only champions, free resources. There are other ways for a game to be a game that doesn't require mountains of disintegrating bodies.
The mission in ME1 with the tranquilizer grenades was a gimmick. Sure you weren't "killing" them, but the grenade worked the same way any other grenade did. It was actually irritating having to sit there and wait for the grenade icon to go off cooldown while enemies shoot at you. It would have been one thing if you could use melee to knock out enemies without killing them or if you had other weapons like a taser of some sort.
For the record, you can melee them to knock them out instead. In fact that is primarily how I did it. You have to be directly touching them when you pull the trigger to melee. Even a little distance and you'll fire your gun. Learned that the hard way.
I know its a war game but Can we have the insane amount violence the player character commits actually affect them & their companions? I'm sure killing HUNDREDS of people MIGHT cause some psychological trauma.
We already know part of Iron Bull's character arc is going to be dealing with his form of PTSD.
Besides that, forcing psychological trauma on the PC didn't work out well in ME3, at least for many players. I actually very much enjoyed the sections where stress cracked Shepard's psyche and invaded his dreams, but others cried foul and that this was "their" character and they shouldn't be forced to have emotions (as worthless an argument as that is for PTSD situations).
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