206 réponses à ce sujet

[Haexpane]

Sidney wrote...

 

On the downside:
The NPC's, well the good ones, made me want to kill them. Aerie and Anomen are awfully annoying.
 
The AD&D ruleset still stinks
The game after spellhold felt like one long dungeon on rails and highlighted the weakest part of the game (combat) over the story telling

DAO fixes most of the BG2 problems.
I didn't hate any of the NPC's, even the annoying Allistair was interesting.
 
The new ruleset is a much better version than the AD&D rules.
 did.

I understand people might not like Aerie, but Anomen?   Idk I loved her.

I thought that BG2 combat was fantastic, and my favorite part of the game combined w/ the art direction.  This is a big divide for DAO fans.  Some people will only talk about the story and the lore, I was not really into either story or lore in DAO, it was decent but outside of MOrrigan and Captain Janeway's story, I was a little meh on it.

I am literally shocked to hear someone say the rule set in DAO is better than BG2's interpretation of the AD&D rules... seriously?  Linear pick a path and hope it works in the end, oh it sucked how about a respec was better for you?  

Magic/Warrior/Rogue as the ONLY classes was better for you than Druid/Mage/Cleric/Ranger/Warrior/Bard/Thief etc...?  Seriously?

Only 3 classes IMO was the weakest part of DAO and the skill progression of "just pick whatever is the most powerful"  or if you were working on Allistair "bash, bash harder, bash hardest" IDK.. seemed weak sauce to me

[plastic golem]

Sidney wrote...

BG2's inventory system was a tragedy.

I don't see how this is the case. BG's inventory was an improvement over what came before. In general, I think DA:O improved over BG, but that's what I would expect to happen with subsequent iterations.

At the same time, inventory management has traditionally been part of the challenge of a CRPG: you could only carry so much stuff, so you had to decide what to take and what to leave behind. Each character having a half dozen suits of armour was, in some earlier games, an impossibility. Having arrows take up space dramatically changes the role and effectiveness of missile weapons, for allies and enemies alike. Having each item belong to a specific character means that the character's loss meant the loss of that gear, and also that it couldn't be given to someone else in the heat of combat. Simplified inventories are less fiddly, but that often comes at the cost of removing inventory management as a challenge. Whether the tradeoff is worth it is hardly an open and shut case. I think that the doubling of ammunition stacks between BG1 and BG2 dramatically altered the power of missile weapons. If you use Tutu to run BG1, where missile weapons are already an advantage, the tweak that lets you use BG2 (or, worse, unlimited) ammunition stacks does more than reduce inventory headaches: it makes bows dramatically more powerful.

The new ruleset is a much better version than the AD&D rules.

Since this is an opinion and not a fact, I would be interested to know exactly why you think this. I think that not being an Official D&D product gave DA:O a lot of room to innovate, but the rules they came up with seem flat and boring; not too different from the direction that 3.5/4E D&D seemed to be heading in, where warriors were basically mages with spells of a different name and the total elimination of resource management over a span of several encounters in favour of per-encounter powers or even shorter refresh cycles. I found the rules to be a disappointment, because they sacrificed variety and a certain amount of mystery and whimsicality (which was more prevalent in earlier versions of D&D than the 2nd Ed. rules that BG was based on) for a sort of bland monotony based on a handful of effects. That too is an opinion, but those are some of my reasons for it. I also found that the effects of various bonuses were hard to understand in terms of how they translated into real in-game effectiveness. In the real world, you don't know that a sword does +5% fire damage, but you have real sensual feedback; in an RPG, your only real feedback is through the numbers, and when you don't understand what the numbers mean, that means you have no real feedback. As a result, I never found myself getting very excited about finding a new weapon or armor; I just kind of compared it to what I was already using and tried to guess which one was more effective based on some bland and fairly uninformative stats. +10% fire resistance vs. +2 cunning doesn't offer the same kind of comparison as  "improved invisibility once per day" versus "regenerate 1 hit point every 6 seconds".

[Haexpane]

Yeah I'd have to say the special bonuses on weapons are almost hard to even notice unless it's STUN in DAO

[CybAnt1]

I also disagree that 3D is the way forward.  

That's the problem, unfortunately -- whether you're right or wrong, very few developers are agreeing with you. Forgetting Bio, the handful of others still doing CRPGs, like Obsidian, Bethesda, etc. aren't sticking with your viewpoint. 

Yes I agree there is a hand-crafted look to things in BG2 which is beautiful -- too bad I can't zoom in and look at any of them any closer: there's no camera that moves. What a wonderful panoply of items for my character to wear -- too bad that other than a simple view of them on his/her "ragdoll", I'll never see what they look like on their tiny body moving around the screen. 

It just seems strange, looking back at the visual world of BG2, that it seems to be made of nothing but floors; it's like everything in the world is just a floor, slanted at an angle; but there are no real walls, ceilings, or stairs ... 

3D means: quicker development time (you don't care about it, but they do) and Toolsets that can be put in community hands. So everybody can put wagons wherever they feel like; unfortunately yes all the wagons look the same. That's the tradeoff. 

I still maintain that there is an almost fundamental difference between the two games that matters a great deal to me: BG2 had no Toolset. As a result, yes, there were mods for the game (I used some of them, hell I even helped write a guide on how to make custom items using a hacked-together tool for doing so somebody else I knew made), but they were far and few between. They were just too hard to make. 

There has been only one other CRPG so far with a Toolset: NWN2. And we can debate this back and forth, but I would still argue that prior to Storm of Zehir, NWN and NWN2 was not really a single-player party-based game, per se, still more oriented toward multiplayer. None of its "OCs" were ever as good a single-player experience as DA:O is. It's just never been a single player oriented game, more an attempt to replicate "multi player tabletop on the computer". (The other tragedy is that from my POV D & D has, for better or worse, probably become the most crpg-friendly ruleset so far with 4E, but NWN2 is still using 3E.) 

I kept saying on the NWN forums: when o when will there be a single-player oriented CRPG with a Toolset? And guess what: here we have it! DAO! And again here's where we have to make a value judgement...

What's more important? A world that will have fairly small amounts of custom content and mods but is beautifully handmade by its developers (that was BG2) ... or one that looks a little bit bric-a-brac due to its toolset placeables, but I know that in the future I will be seeing more things made for it by its own fans? 

The fact that I choose the latter, wholeheartedly, is one of the reasons why I'm here.

[CybAnt1]

On the issue of using D & D rules: the other aspect that makes BG2 feel "dated" is that it is still using the 2E ruleset of AD & D. Now, at the time, there was as much debate over moving from 2E to 3E then, as there is over moving from 3E to 4E now ... but I will say this, although I was hesitant at first, I found the class/multi-classing/prestige classing system of 3E ultimately so much more interesting in variety than that of 2E. I really enjoyed building character builds in NWN2 and the only thing I didn't enjoy was finding no campaigns where I was able to use six of them at once in a party I made (ahhh IWD2 now there's some more aura of nostalgia)..... but anyway. 

And so now we have 4E ... which IMHO is the most CRPG-friendly ruleset from WotC yet ... you can't help but look at the way things are described in the new rules and realize they were almost designed from the outset to be friendly to implementation in CRPGs and MMORPGs. Complete with powers with cooldowns! So love or hate what it might do to tabletop (and my initial reaction was negative but I'm reassessing) ... it looks rather tasty for use in CRPGs, too bad nobody's using it ... yet. 

Playing a 2E game ... now ... after having played a 3E game, and at least tried out 4E for tabletop, feels so incredibly "retro" at this point. 

Now it's an interesting question ... what would the real "successor" to BG2 look like ... the BG3 that people were waiting like slavering dogs for just a few years ago and speculating about like mad... a modern 2010 game that is 2.5d isometric, but now running at the resolution of today's computer monitors; that uses the 4E ruleset instead of the 2E ruleset; that lets you once again use a party of six (whether based on six chars you make, or five NPCs you take, or even a clever way to let you use a mix of both -- like in ToEE) ... it would be amazing. I'd play it even without a Toolset or many mods likely to be available. But:

You're going to have to find somebody to make it. I can't see the current big three (Bio, Obs, Bethesda) doing it. 

[Killian Kalthorne]

You know what Dragon Age needs? Lilacor! A smart-mouthed talking sword. Could be a Tevinter artifact you pick up. Each time you swing it will say something, or if you do a critical hit it screams out "HOT BUTTAH!" That would be kind of cool.

[SniXSniPe]

In terms of characters:

BG2 had characters of all sorts, good / neutral / evil--- compared to Dragon Age, it seems the majority are all good with like 1 or 2 evil/neutral characters.

Who could forget Minsc? Or the dialogue between Minsc and Jan Jansen (and I rarely used Jan, though I admit he was entertaining)?

How about evil characters like Korgan and Edwin?

And better yet, the main villain for BG2 (while TOB Melissan was okay...), Jon Irenicus was certainly portrayed 100x more of a bad ass and a much more entertaining villain than the @#@tty archdemon. Seriously?

An undead-looking dragon? Oh wow, "*RAWWWWWWWWR* *BREATH FIRE* *RAWWWWR*

Heck, I still remember the part in BG2 where Irenicus is all like "I cannot be caged! (kills cowled wizard) I cannot be controlled! (kills another?) Understand this as you die, ever-pathetic, ever-fools! (kills the rest)".

I just hate how Bioware is all like, "Old NPCs are no fun! Therefor we should try to make all the new characters in expansions new!". Throne of Bhaal had only 1 new NPC, and STILL worked out quite well, even though that NPC in fact was from the original game itself.

BG2 was just a prodigy in it's time.

-Special quests based on classes?
-3 possible lengthy-well done romances?
-Possibility to form an all-good or all-evil party?
-The incredible NPC interaction you saw in your party (NPC's fighting, chatting, etc.)
-Tons of side quests structured with many possible solutions
-Items had their own querks--- being able to forge powerful items, something as a reward for the player who chooses to do many side quest and stumble upon something
   Plus, a talking sword!
-A huge variety of spells and the such, and even having a possible quest from one of these spells?
-More NPCs than any other game made by Bioware/whatever--- and yet there was still PLENTY of character interaction going around
-DIFFICULT OPTIONAL BOSS FIGHTS (firkrag for example...)
-etc....

Modifié par SniXSniPe, 20 février 2010 - 03:24 .

[CybAnt1]

No doubt about it... Irenicus is one of the best, and most tragic, villains of all time. Up there with Anakin Skywalker.

Sarevok and Melissan just didn't compare. ToB ends the Bhaalspawn saga. Too bad your final foe just doesn't seem to have the depth of the one you faced before.

Modifié par CybAnt1, 20 février 2010 - 03:28 .

[Ima Nutcracker]

Yaga Shura says you must cut out your heart and throw it into a fire. Only then will you be invulnerable.



I like the way BGII makes me feel. If I am going to spend time in an alternative realm, I might as well be godly powerful. I like that I can be a truly evil sod if I want to be. I love the complexity of the magic system and the fact that a well developed sorcerer can just dominate everything, even when soloing. Jon Irenicus? Hah! By the time I face him on that tree, he is no match for me, and then I get the pleasure of murdering him a second time in Hell. My wounds have barely healed and I discover that there are other Bhaalspawn that are nearly, but not quite, as powerful as me. I want to murder them, too, and, oh, yes, I surely will.



I think DAO is awesome, too, even if I am not so powerful and not really allowed to be evil. Being chaotic good can be almost as much fun. Suck it, Anora. And jeez, the graphics are just so much better. Sometimes I just walk around and look at stuff. Exploring is fun again. Am I the only person that prefers walking to running?



So, yeah, I like them both. More, please. Much much more.

[AmstradHero]

For those arguing how BG2 is longer, I'd like to compare a search I did for quest lists within both games. The total number of quests for each game are:
BG2: 99
DA:O 115

And note that some of these quests for DAO are main quests like "Paragon Of Her Kind". Admittedly, some of the BG2 ones are fairly long too... but not that long.

I'm going to keep bringing up the issue of nostalgia reviewing until a few more people get it. I loved BG2's characters to bits, but in all honesty, a lot of them were fairly straightforward characters.  Hilarious and fun, no doubt, but most of them weren't as complicated as DA:O's or even ME's characters.  The one big thing that BG2 wins in terms of character interaction is the amount of interaction that was initiated by your party members.  Obviously party size and the desire to not cut out character development is the reason for BioWare's shift towards a camp where you do most of your interaction, but it does put a small dampener on their overall personality.  Adding interjections is a good means for improving it, but it's still not quite the same as your love interest interrupting you as you're wandering around and having a deep and meaningful conversation with you.

[Sidney]

Haexpane wrote...

I thought that BG2 combat was fantastic, and my favorite part of the game combined w/ the art direction.  This is a big divide for DAO fans.  Some people will only talk about the story and the lore, I was not really into either story or lore in DAO, it was decent but outside of MOrrigan and Captain Janeway's story, I was a little meh on it.

I am literally shocked to hear someone say the rule set in DAO is better than BG2's interpretation of the AD&D rules... seriously?  Linear pick a path and hope it works in the end, oh it sucked how about a respec was better for you?  

Magic/Warrior/Rogue as the ONLY classes was better for you than Druid/Mage/Cleric/Ranger/Warrior/Bard/Thief etc...?  Seriously?

Only 3 classes IMO was the weakest part of DAO and the skill progression of "just pick whatever is the most powerful"  or if you were working on Allistair "bash, bash harder, bash hardest" IDK.. seemed weak sauce to me

BG2 combat was up and down. There were some good fights but as you moved on and got more of the rock,paper, siscors of sequencers and protection spells and the dance to hit the right order of breach, pierce and dispell foo it dragged down. Frankly, by the time you reached high enough levels the AD&D rules just seemed to hit a huge wall where they could not provide a meaningful challenege anymore, The rules seem poor at like levels 1-3 and anything over 14 or 15 so it was the start of BG2 and the end of BG that really gave the best show of the rules.

Beyond that the BG2/AD&D magic system was terrible. You can "know" a ton of spells but only memorize X. I'm sure someone will say "challenge" but really it was just a crappy way to try and hobble mages and the effect on game mechanics was lousy. It usually resulted in a handful of spells being fired off and then off to rest because those same spells would be needed if you ran into more of the same critters you just fought.  The DAO system allows you mage to be a lot more useful and flexible. Mages are more fun if they can, you know, cast spells something that mages in BG couldn't do often enough w/o rest, although the higher levels in BG2 helped this enormously over the basically pointless use of mages in BG.

The whole AD&D combat mechansim of the THACO was lousy, I get it in a pen and paper realm it is easier to make leather armor and a lot of dexterity mean the same thing as wearing splint mail but they aren't. DAO gets it right - being hard to hit and hard to hurt are two different things. I also never really used any special attacks in BG2. Just wasn't needed since your characters were eqipped with tons of stat enhancers, mega-magical swords and really high base stats.

classes aren't something that excites me - fallout and the SPECIAL system was always a better way to build a character. DAO still uses classes but with the ability to pick up all the same base skills you can at least have a bit more flexibility than the AD&D rigidity of who can do X and who can't do Y. Plus, the skills in BG2 for a warrior were what, mastery and grandmastery so they weren't loaded either.

BG2 always felt like a great game bogged down in bad game mechanics.

[Sidney]

plastic golem wrote...

At the same time, inventory management has traditionally been part of the challenge of a CRPG: you could only carry so much stuff, so you had to decide what to take and what to leave behind.

That too is an opinion, but those are some of my reasons for it. I also found that the effects of various bonuses were hard to understand in terms of how they translated into real in-game effectiveness. I

Inventory management isn't a "challenge" it was an annoyance built around a Monty Haul system. You've loaded tons of rationalizations about how limited inventory challenges players.

Functionally my problem was never not having enough room for meaningful stuff but rather managing the deluge of vendor trash. There was no game challenge created by inventory for my characters but only about the challenge to me, the player, to keep all that stuff in line.

DAO is a lot more black boxed than BG2 because the printed THACO tables were out in the wild and also in the massive, and sorely missed, manual that came with the game. I agree that they went a bit too far in the black box because it is hard to understand the effects or to make a good choice between +3 armor and +3 defense. Then again, I'm also not all that interested in the min/maxing of tweaking out everything to the best effect so I'm ok with a more relative understand of good>better>best.

[AlanC9]

Haexpane wrote...

DAO again, great score on metacritic, but curious disparity between critic reviews and user reviews.
BG2 critic/user reviews are closer..

I didn't think it was all that curious. Bio has the Mass Effect franchise and a strong console presence these days, and therefore they attract a lot of fans who aren't all that into the sort of game that DA:O is made to be. I think ME was great, but I can see how someone can be an ME fan without liking DA:O all that much . You won't see this effect with critics because part of the job is to be able to play in all genres and styles.

[AlanC9]

Haexpane wrote...
I am literally shocked to hear someone say the rule set in DAO is better than BG2's interpretation of the AD&D rules... seriously?  Linear pick a path and hope it works in the end, oh it sucked how about a respec was better for you?  

As opposed to D&D, where you pick a class and.... well, just live with it, whatever happens. Full stop.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "hope it works." A player who isn't a fool can figure out what's working and what isn't, and adjust his build accordingly. Sure, a mage won't be completely efficient that way, but what of it? Even an inefficiently built mage is powerful enough to win the game without any particular difficulty.

If anything, the problem with DA is that it's too friendly to optimized builds. In a sense, the system punishes thoughtful players by making the game too easy for them

[AlanC9]

BG2 had characters of all sorts, good / neutral / evil--- compared to Dragon Age, it seems the majority are all good with like 1 or 2 evil/neutral characters.

Depends on how you define evil, doesn't it?

[maxernst]

I would have said most of the characters in DA:O tended toward neutral, like real people.

[RangerSG]

maxernst wrote...

I would have said most of the characters in DA:O tended toward neutral, like real people.

I don't think real people tend towards true neutral, to be honest. I think they tend towards Lawful Evil, if we're talking D&D. Human nature is such that most people will do what they can as long as they won't get punished for it.

I would say most characters in DA tend towards having grey on grey morality. Which is realistic. It's much more in line with the tropes of "new fantasy" (Glen Cook, Martin, Steven Erikson) than traditional fantasy, where heroes are heroes and villians are black and white with the occasional grey turning black who is usually a fallen hero. The exception which subverts this is Alistair, who is too good for his own good. Possibly due to excessive naivite. Morrigan is probably the most 'charcoal' of the party, but even she has moments where at some compassion breaks through.

[Macadami]

Real people are boring.



Extravagant personalities are interesting. Giant space hamsters? Even more so.

[maxernst]

Haexpane wrote...

Sidney wrote...

 

On the downside:
The NPC's, well the good ones, made me want to kill them. Aerie and Anomen are awfully annoying.
 
The AD&D ruleset still stinks
The game after spellhold felt like one long dungeon on rails and highlighted the weakest part of the game (combat) over the story telling

DAO fixes most of the BG2 problems.
I didn't hate any of the NPC's, even the annoying Allistair was interesting.
 
The new ruleset is a much better version than the AD&D rules.
 did.

I understand people might not like Aerie, but Anomen?   Idk I loved her.

Are you sure you're thinking of the right character.  Anomen was a man.  He was arrogant, self-righteous, humorless and possibly the most obnoxious character I can think of in any game.  One of the things I disliked about BG2 is that in D&D you just have to have a cleric or druid of some kind and the choices were Anomen, Jaheira (my least favorite character from BG1 though not quite as irritating in BG2), and Viconia...and while Viconia was interesting, she was an awkward character for a dominantly good party.

[IAN9786]

BG2 looks like RS (runescape), and RS compared to DA:O is like comparing Rosie O'Donnell naked:sick:   to Megan Fox naked:O . Now tell me who wins.
 

[AlanC9]

I'm pretty sure Haexpane just reversed Aerie and Anomen

[Kats_RK]

IAN9786 wrote...

BG2 looks like RS (runescape), and RS compared to DA:O is like comparing Rosie O'Donnell naked:sick:   to Megan Fox naked:O . Now tell me who wins.
 

[plastic golem]

Sidney wrote...

Inventory management isn't a "challenge" it was an annoyance built around a Monty Haul system. You've loaded tons of rationalizations about how limited inventory challenges players.

Functionally my problem was never not having enough room for meaningful stuff but rather managing the deluge of vendor trash. There was no game challenge created by inventory for my characters but only about the challenge to me, the player, to keep all that stuff in line.

Too much crap is a different issue from being able to horde everything you find in a common pool versus making inventory something you had to manage strategically.

Baldur's Gate is guilty of loading you down with lots of low-value stuff that had little significance in the game except that it could be sold for some money and, collectively, was worth a lot. DA:O is at least as guilty of this, but it makes it a little easier for you to haul the stuff around until you can sell it, though you have to pay handsomely for the privilege of hauling a little extra. That has more to do with the "loot everything in site" mentality of both games than any issue of inventory management.

Go back 30 years to Zork and you can see the complete opposite: most of the items in the game serve a distinct useful purpose, but you can only carry so many things at  a time. In Nethack, having the right item at the right time could be critical, but you could only carry so much stuff so you had to think carefully about which items you needed. In Ultima VI, each character could carry a certain amount of weight based on their strength, making that one consideration in party composition.

This whole element disappears in later games in the name of "simplified inventory management" but it also removes an important element of challenge. DA:O would be a different game if you couldn't carry around effectively unlimited health poultices and lyrium potions, just as it would be if you could only carry a finite supply of arrows, and if stocking more of one meant having to stock less of another. It would alter the required tactical balance (fewer and less powerful enemies needed to challenge a party). It would make stragegic planning as important as tactical planning (you need to ration your consumables across multiple encounters more carefully if you don't have a huge stockpile on hand).

There are many reasons why the developers might want to forego such challenges. They may think that most players don't want that kind of challenge, and they may be right. But it seems to me that, DA:O's inventory system, while significantly simplifying the strategic depth of the game, doesn't really simplify the fiddly management parts all that well. If they really wanted to simplify inventory management from a mechanical perspective, I would have recommended two basic changes to what they have: first, get rid of the carrying capacity limit. Second, convert all of the generic treasure items (silver bowls, gemstones, and ordinary weapons/armour) directly into coins so that player's don't have to go through the tedium of collecting them only to sell them at the first opportunity, as well as avoiding the annoyance of hitting the inventory limit and then having to discard daggers and leather helms in order to pick up a few slightly higher-valued pieces of junk. Even better, do both: build a system that does away with the garage sale aspect of the game but adds a strategic inventory management component.

[AlanC9]

I don't think strategic inventory management is going to come back from DA:O levels. It's never been all that popular, any more than managing personal spell resources was popular. Note that D&D-style spell resource management died out in PnP RPGs decades before it died out in CRPGs. Or rather, it was never any more prevalent than D&D itself was; D&D was always an outlier.

I'd keep DA:O inventory the way it is, except base the limit on weight rather than pure item numbers. In practice, this would mean effectively unlimited potions, but that doesn't bother me -- you can limit those by cost if you feel the need, and considering how small they are relative to other items carrying them shouldn't be an issue.

[dragon_83]

CybAnt1 wrote...


What's more important? A world that will have fairly small amounts of custom content and mods but is beautifully handmade by its developers (that was BG2) ... or one that looks a little bit bric-a-brac due to its toolset placeables, but I know that in the future I will be seeing more things made for it by its own fans?

I go with the former, if you ask me. I have a feeling, that I will never see a community made module, which is as robust and well made, as a 200 hour long Bioware campaing. Especially since it's not easy to make these modules. Making new places and modells in 3D could be hard even with the toolset. I know there will be good ones (just like in NWN),but they are not for me.

And yeah, I also liked the AD&D ruleset more than the new system. I know that DAO uses a completely new system, and it will be improved in the future, but I already hate the spell and item spamming in it. I liked memorizing the needed spells, and I never had a problem with resting. When I played BG and IWD games, I tried to last as long as possible, without resting. So I only used my mages and wizards, when I felt, that I needed their powers. Sometimes they only stood in the back and killed enemies with throwing daggers and bows. But when I saw a stronger enemy, I casted a magic missile, a cone of cold, fireball etc, to help out the melee characters. But in DAO, I'm just spamming patrification, fireball, cone of cold. I know I'm too oldschool, but for me, it is less fun.

And one more thing. It's not the nostalgia why I like BG games more than DAO. Nostalgia is this: I play a game 8-10 years ago. Then I remember it as a better game than DAO for example. But if I play BG2 now, and I'm still thinking that it is better than DAO, it's not nostalgia.

@AmstradHero
"For those arguing how BG2 is longer, I'd like to compare a search I did
for quest lists within both games. The total number of quests for each
game are:
BG2: 99
DA:O 115"

I don't know if those number are correct, but it's possible. Why not? Still, BG2 was much longer, because it had more places to go, and the world was bigger.

Modifié par dragon_83, 21 février 2010 - 08:07 .