I should also, because I'm well aware how much work has gone into this and how onerous unconstructive forum posts can be for moderators and other players alike, I suppose, cover the things about the game that are absolutely uncontestably awesome.
So lets start with The Positives:
- Fantastic storyline that just drags you in and makes you want to play 10 hours a day til you're done.
- Absolutely stunning characters and personalities you really care about and want to interact with and get to know.
- Some of the most meaningful and engaging cinematic work done in any game not created by Hideo Kojima and probably far better in relation to presentation and overall drama than any done anywhere to this date.
The Negatives:
Micromanagement as a Game Dynamic. Headaches, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Other Sundry:
This is probably the largest are of concern for me in regards to this title. The gameplay is incredibly stunted by the absolutely contradictory elements being used in conjunction with each other.
- You have a hotbar, a hot bar means you have action rpg elements that are currently in vogue with online RPG titles allowing for action based play.
- You have 3 other idiots that you literally have to micro-manage to the point of frustration to ensure they play their roles specifically.
- The "Tactics" section for each character seems a great way to manage how your NPC companions deal with combat situations, letting you get down to the nitty gritty of enjoying the carnage but this is not the case, irregardless of HOW you set up your tactics for Leilana, the bow specialized bard, if you dare to give her a dagger or a sword she will immediately abandon ALL ranged attacks in favor of fighting on the front line, regardless of how you have her tactics set to bard and bow abilities...which is patently dumb and why she's probably brain dead from all the head trauma by the end and still thinks the story is going to go on.
But to me, if you add a hotbar and click and toggle abilities you are quite obviously shooting for action and real time RPG play, which means that your stupid NPC companions should not require you to hold their hands every 10 to 20 seconds in an engagement to ensure they don't end up sucking down yet another Injury Kit.
Whats more, within all this micro management there is simply no way to toggle through a mass of targets and hit a key that says "attack what I currently have targetted", no..you have to MOUSE CLICK a target to attack it, which, in and of itself shouldn't be so bad except all your idiot companions and all the idiot enemies are all clustered up and you can't click on a target efficiently without moving into "tactical view" (archaic throwbacks for the win) or ah ha...hitting pause again.
This one area of the games combat system dynamic is probably its greatest and most obvious flaw which drags it down from potentially the greatest RPG game of our time to something only slightly better than The Witcher, simply because of the obvious amount of work that went into it. And to be frank the action element was far better in The Witcher, than it is in DA:O.
Tactics:
I'm not sure if this is just a lazy way for programmers to make up for bad NPC AI or simply a sham attempt at giving the player "total control" of what their NPCs do.
As a systems designer myself I know exactly what I'm looking at its a logarithmic rule based if/else if/on event script interface that attempts to allow the user to program the NPC AI via a GUI interface probably .lua based at that.
As stated and touched upon in the previous part of this post, it fails abyssmally at even the most basic control of the NPC AI, in regards to the games own stated warning "Be ready for anything, make sure all your characters are equipped with both ranged and melee weapons!".
Uh...no, don't equip ALL your characters with ranged and melee weapons unless you want to see Morrigan abandon her ranged based casting to fight like an idiot with a dagger, or watch Leilana constantly die using two rogue attacks and captivating song when she could be using Chorus of Valor and the OMGNICE bow I gave her and actually use her extremely well developed BOW talents...that she will absolutely ignore if you put a dagger/sword in her inventory regardless of what her tactics are set up to do. The only way she will remain in a ranged posture is if she does not have a melee weapon, this goes the same for both Morrigan and Wynne as well....its absolutely mind numbing.
Whats more, regardless of "tactics" even a PC human "tank" warrior with shield and sword has so much trouble keeping everything focused on him that your ranged characters, if you can get them to stay out of general melee range (NOT EASY AT ALL without telling them to hold positions in certain areas with ye olde pause button..which detracts heavily from the overall action enjoyment of the game heavily) get swarmed and overwhelmed quickly anyways...what to do about that? Taunt/Threaten doesn't seem to be enough wearing "heavy armor" is supposed to draw more threat than wearing light armor...largely from what I can tell Darkspawn and every other enemy in the game ignores these so called axioms of the games dynamic in favor of the more chaos theory based method of "attack anything attacking me regardless of what the variables involved are".
Difficulty Modes:
Easy - Expect to die still, invariably in many situations that you wouldn't even NORMALLY expect to die...why? Cause of dumb AI. Leilana goes "trap right ahead!" then runs right through it and sets everyone on fire just as you're trying to adjust to the information that theres a trap ahead while trying to come up with a plan to deal with the 8 archers at the other end of the hall firing on you while your twitty companions run TOWARDS the archers to attack them with a DAGGER regardless of the OMGNICE bow they have in their hotswap slot. Ugh.
Normal - Expect to die far more often, occasionally even to general area spawns simply because of the same reasons stated above. You will likely break a keyboards QuickSave/QuickLoad keys on this setting.
Hard - Are you kidding? You think I'd try this game on hard?
Nightmare - No thanks, I'm not this masochistic.
Crafting - Oh Joy!:
This part of the game was slightly underwhelming and I'll qualify that with several statements.
Coercion and Combat Training are a must, of course, at least for the PC, by the time you've leveled up enough to have gotten those maxed out the best you can do is a couple more tradeskill points into something else you might find helpful. Since both Wynne and Morrigan have Herbalism somewhat covered, I put the last few into Traps....and it was more or less useless. Why? ...well, since i'm a warrior I can hardly stealth around and place traps BEFORE an engagement and in almost 90% of combat scenarios combat was initiated before I'd have had the chance to do so (traps would have been nice at Redcliffe though, thats for sure).
Herbalism is useful but the components for it are in such short supply that its patently obvious the reason the gave Bodahn 99x vials that never go away was because they realized this, but, his 99x Elfroot DOESN'T reappear, and since the world isn't open to exploration, elfroot finds are relatively few and far between, and Deep Mushrooms are even worse in this regard. So which I could generally make all the Lesser Health Poultices I wanted, the elements needed for stuff better than that were always in very short supply and believe me I checked every box I could open and every vendor I could find for these items. Another complete annoyance about herbalism is tied in with the hotbar in a way and I'll explain;
As a warrior based PC character, shield specialized I ended up with like 5 primary shield centered "attacks" on my hotbar and a few toggle abilities that require sustained amounts of stamina, now me....as I said hotbar = action RPG...so I go in hurrah, throw my shield around, hit my 5 hotkeys and wait for the extremely long cooldowns, and get off maybe one more hotkeyed ability...and then I'm out of stamina, and guess what? Theres only four in combat ways to regain stamina:
- Eat a Deep Mushroom - Wasteful since theres not MUCH stamina gained from them and as stated there aren't that many of them available in the game.
- Leilana's Chorus of Valor - Extremely slow regeneration but its there, long as she doesn't get her pretty little head stoved in by a mace cause you forgot to take the damn sword out of her inventory again.
- Use a Lyrium vein - the overall gain is about as good as a Deep Mushroom (Except in the Fade) and whats more you can only do that in a certain area of the Deep Roads and thats it.
- Stop using all abilities entirely and just autoattack...which is still very slow to regain due to armor "fatigue" and whats worse is the warrior ability "Deathblow" is supposed to regenerate stamina on every killed enemy and appears to have no noticiable effect in that situation.
Survival to me, seems useless in the face of anything but the Brecillian Forest quest with the nervous Halaa, stealing is interesting but half the time you never seem to be able to find what you stole "Item Gained" is not a very clear message in that regard....maybe I stole a Lesser Health Poultice..since I've got like 9 billion of those cause they're all I can make efficiently, its probably unnoticable is it not? Tactics seems a waste of space since Tactics in general perform shoddily at best so who cares how many lines you've got when your NPC companions are going to more or less ignore them anyways? Poisons are useful for rogues but area transitions completely wipe applied effects and eventually are just more trouble than they're worth.
So what exactly was the point of this crafting system then...other than to say "deep and rich crafting system" on the box?
Lockpicking - Oh you fickle b***h, you!
Anyone understand this? Leilana gets all four levels of the rogue mechanical abilities talent, has high dexterity and cunning and yet STILL fails to pick locks on a fairly high percentile basis? What is managing this? This must be especially frustrating for rogue based characters because the mouse over information is not clear what statistics really manage the lockpicking chance, I'd assume its cunning plus the mechanical abilities talents in the rogue talents but...again, it did not seem to produce anywhere near the results I expected...and no documentation I can find is very clear on what manages it either. So while Leilana with her high cunning and 4 talents in stealing can pretty much stand right in front of people and pick their pockets (to little use usually), she ends up getting confounded by around 40% of the chests in the game at various stages of leveling her up and that percentage stays around that confusing amount even towards the end game when you've developed her as conscientiously as you can to ensure she can open stuff.
Conclusion:
These are my major areas of gripe and what I feel makes DA:O a less stellar game than it could have been had the following been given more thought:
- Allowing the game to play comfortably between both action RPG and micromanagement RTSRPG style would have been a great achievement here, unfortunately for DA:O, in its release incarnation the dart has more or less completely missed the board entirely. If micromanagement is necesssary Tactics should work(they don't work), and if they're not going to work then your NPC AI should be smart enough to look at its own Talents development and go "oh I am obviously a bow specialized bard, I will sing my songs and use a bow", this is, again, not the case and it is a major short coming
- The crafting system has major holes in it and you could effectively rip 3 - 4 of the skills out of the system and barely anyone would notice, and the skills that are valuable lack much in the area of supplies and as stated there are recipies that are vitally needed that aren't even there.
- Stamina and Fatigue mechanics make an absolute mockery of having a hotbar at all. Warrior based characters are useless before even having killed the first of 8 - 12 enemies in a group of enemies.
- Having yet ANOTHER relatively good game go "oh you finished our main storyline your game is OVER" is a little annoying especially when you have CE DLC's that you figured weren't as critical to do as the actual "stopping the BLIGHT and saving the WORLD" thing was and you figured once it was all over you'd have more or less "free play" to go around and tidy up or maybe travel around with Leilana or some of your companions and go do to the DLC content then...but no, sorry, you won the game, you now get to start over, reload a save and go do it before you go to take care of the Archdemon or, even worse, if you're really annoyed by it...simply sit around and wait for the expansions/sequels the end of this storyline so blatantly teases you with, knowing you won't see hide nor hair of them til at the very least Xmas of 2010.
Now this is not to say, you suck BioWare you did a bad game, this is far from the case you did a spectactular game that unfortunately fell on its face in some key foundational areas and had it not been for the talent of you machinimists and writers, I'd have found this game frustratingly boring, repetitive and somewhat a gigantic waste of my time other than their work which kept me dragging through all the sloggy parts to see the story.
So...largely, 7 of 10, wish I could give it a higher rating than that but 7 is pretty high already given the rather obvious fractures and instabilities in the foundational dynamics of gameplay I've pointed out here.
Modifié par SLPr0, 07 novembre 2009 - 08:42 .
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