83 réponses à ce sujet

[Desalbert]

Gacatar wrote...

Oh, you're playing on 360.
Seriously, get it for the PC. It's almost a different game.

Damn. This is what I was afriad of. Would someone mind casually expressing what makes it so different, if it's no trouble?

[Derengard]

Character creation and development were designed for needs of a computergame rather than for playing with pen&paper. You can make of that what you want, compare it to Mass Effect, or say that it's a mistake, however, this seems to be the core of it.

[HemisH]

Desalbert wrote...

Also, I wonder if my expirience on 360 in being more action focused is hurting my ability to see the "baldur's gate" in this. After all, it's quite a difficult thing to place and position characters strategically on the xbox...

To that end, too, does the pc offer mouse-click character movement?

Oh no wonder then.

You don't have the best PC features which is the Bladur's Gate camera angle

[Desalbert]

Noo! You mean I'm missing space-bar pausing?? And Mouse-click movement?? No, for the love of God, no!! :'(.

*stares at xbox 360 collectors edition with a sudden surge of disappointment*

Modifié par Desalbert, 07 novembre 2009 - 07:49 .

[gcanders]

Go trade it in, dude. Games like Dragonage is why PC gaming will never die, unless the games die, or the world ends...which is gonna happen, but maybe we can live in a collapsed universe and still play games. I imagine 360 games will break pretty easily in a collapsing universe, too.

[Gacatar]

Let't see...

On PC, you also have an isometric tactical view. The camera is no longer focused on your character, but you can pan it freely.

Space bar pausing.

Precise area effect spell placement with mouse.

Character movement with mouse clicking.



Harder game in general. The 360 version is balanced around controlling a single character, enemies hit for less, healing spells are not as necessary. On PC, you are expected to pause a lot. Also, 360 version has no friendly fire on normal difficulty. On PC, you have 50% on normal, and eat 100% of your fireballs on hard.

[HemisH]

Desalbert wrote...

Noo! You mean I'm missing space-bar pausing?? And Mouse-click movement?? No, for the love of God, no!! :'(.

You can mouse click movement if you wish too. For one character or severals. I find it godsent to quickly select one character in the isometric (spelling?)view, click at his destination, repeat for all party members. Unpause. adjust on the slide.

I guess when you switch characters on 360 your camera just jumps from shoulders to shoulder? I love the PC where you can see all characters with the same view of the camera, switching character does nothing to the camera angle. Easier to position myself than when I want to get a closer feel to the action and select the same camera angle as the Xbox.

[Grimmwor Runeforger]

The death of the D&D classic was WotC and 4th Edition...had nothing to do with BioWare or DA:O

[Gacatar]

Oh, and more hotkeys. Xbox has only 6. On PC, it can go anywhere from 12 to 40+ depending on your resolution.

[Zilod]

well i'm pretty happy with the system so far, chars can get a decent specialization and skill are essential but usefull



speaking about mages in D&D they get a crapload of spells, but the really usefull ones where quite few also many (due to saving throws and capped dmg are just upgrades)



here you have fewer spells but all of them seem quite effective and actually usefull... the "memorize" thing is not tha bad... consider that D&D alredy had sorcs and locks that had not the same restriction as wizards, also personally i always found a bit silly to encamp after a few fight in dangerous places...



eg... we have to escape from this prison before the archevil guys come back!... ok that fight with the deamon was tought lets sleep 8 hours... damn this clone fight was hard, lets sleep another 8 hours and so on



this is something that i never liked that much for D&D games, it works ok for pnp as the combat is way less but on games imo is a bit meh... the only game that kinda restricted sleep was nwn2 motb and got lot of complains about that



in games like these with lot of action a mana system is way better, you can fight more and be more versatile as mage, covering different roles "on the fly".



about death... well there are pro and cons... death is more "realistic" but that untill you dont reload a game, if you have just to reload and try again to "cheat" it, then is just annoying... the DAO system is way better for these games, even if a guy goes down you can still win the battle and heal him later rather than to reload when your first char die

[HemisH]

The only magic thing I miss from the good ol' D&D Baldur's Gate days is the number of spells vs how many you can select for one day. It added one more tactical element where you had to select the RIGHT spells for the situation. Not just have access to everything you can use all the time. This is the only thing I miss I think.

[Varenus Luckmann]

It is a great game. It is, however, as much a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, as Mask of the Betrayer was to Planescape: Torment. That is to say not at all.

Why market something under a banner to which it has no relation? It is a great game in it's own right. It's the marketing department that should be raped and shot, nothing else.

[greenas]

Desalbert wrote...

I feared I might get such a response. What my argument though is, is that the game is in no way any kind of successor to that Baldur's Gate style...spiritual or otherwise. I understand it's not a D&D game...that much is clear. But does the fact that it isn't mean that maybe even Bioware is moving from that design for good?

That is my interest here. On your grounds, you are quite correct. But that is obvious.

It is actually the spiritual successor.
It doesnt have to have all the characteristics of Baldur's Gate, or at least most of them, to make it a spiritual successor.
Or at least it is the spiritual successor in the way that Bioware intended for us to interpret, as their first venture back into medievil RPG's. That is all they meant by spiritual successor. Not that it had to be in any way similar to Baldurs Gate.

[Gacatar]

Speaking of the magic system, I hated the mana at first. However, I found out that it's really well thought out. Mana is very limited, you can't just spam spells mindlessly. Also, having as few as 2-3 powerful buffs active can cut your mana in half.

This reminds me a bit of the old system, where you could only cast a few of the really powerful spells.



Of course, this is almost made pointless thanks to the cheapness of mana potions if you're a herbalist.

[Gacatar]

HemisH wrote...

The only magic thing I miss from the good ol' D&D Baldur's Gate days is the number of spells vs how many you can select for one day. It added one more tactical element where you had to select the RIGHT spells for the situation. Not just have access to everything you can use all the time. This is the only thing I miss I think.

That system wasn't THAT great. Actually, it was completely crap from a gameplay standpoint. Sure, you could memorize spells in advance once you knew the game inside out at the 5th replay. However, it really required a lot of "reload knowledge".
Did you enter a vampire lair without negative energy protection and death ward memorized? Time to go back to the tavern and rearrange your spell book. Did you enter a regular room that happened to have a mid-boss in it with no warning? Time to reload and buff up.

A developer talked about the changes to the magic system. It doesn't take a minute to fully buff your party and you don't have to prepare spells because you shouldn't need to know the fights in advance. You can change buffs relatively freely in DA thanks to the upkeep system.

[Kraptor79]

May be I do too live in the past, but I think BG has a better combat system. DOA not bad but BG is just better (for me). But I can live with that, cause I still have BG, so not a big problem. Actually mx biggest gripe with the game is that too linear, there are no huge opens spaces like there were in BG (especially BG).

[GODzilla]

@TOPIC STARTER:

As valid and accepted as your opinion is, some points are really making no sense to me.

Just to mention a few of your points:

1.) The whole thing about dying party members in Baldurs Gate...well it definitely made the fights harder. But it also meant a lot retries and a lot savegame loading. This can also ruin the immersion of a game, because it breaks the flow of the gameplay.

In Baldurs Gate 2 you got several staffs of resurrcetion when you weren't even half throught the game, rendering this part of the gameplay mechanics nonrelevant. So tell me: If the creators of Baldurs Gate meant permanently dying party members as a way to make the game more demanding and complex (=better), why did they put in these staffs?

2.) The thing about prepared and limited spells: Okay, it also made the game harder, now did it? NO, it did not. What it did was to force the player to constantly sleep, either because they had to (ran out of spells, different enemies ahead) or because they just feel saver with a fully equipped mage.

In the sewers, in the slums, in the underworld, everywhere they slept. Sometimes this lead to random fights when your sleeping place of choice turned out to be a place overrun with monsters (like in 90% of the cases, because you mostly ran out of spells in the more demanding sections of the game obviously) and this in turn lead to more tries to successfully sleep. And again and again and again until it eventually worked.

So you really gonna tell me that this was fun? These constant random fights, these constant tries to get a nap and the constant reloading of samgames?

Don't get me wrong, Baldurs Gate and Baldurs Gate 2 are godlike to me, but that's the problem: In retrospective we tend to believe something had no flaws, something was better, we make it "larger than life and twice as tall" *g*. It's absolutely normal though, it's typical for us humans. ^^ What we see and what we remember has not only run through a complex mechanism of "selective perception", it is then also interpreted based on our personality and experience.

...which in the end leads to topics like this.

Modifié par GODzilla_GSPB, 07 novembre 2009 - 08:23 .

[Wretched Gnu]

Personally, I have always loathed the D&D system. It is horribly designed. Its purpose is not to have a well-interlocked game system, but rather to create a proliferation of redundant spells, abilities, items, etc. It's not a game system: it's just an indulgence in encyclopedic content, which is entirely inimical to a game, technically speaking.

If the D&D people created their own version of chess, their philosophy would be: sure, two knights are good -- therefore six knights would make an even better game! And let's add some more squares... you can never have enough squares...

To me, the logical and well-interlocked system Bioware has in Dragon Age is much, much better -- as a game, mind you, in its strict definition -- than D&D.

Modifié par Wretched Gnu, 07 novembre 2009 - 08:22 .

[Sainta117]

Desalbert wrote...

Gacatar wrote...

Oh, you're playing on 360.
Seriously, get it for the PC. It's almost a different game.

Damn. This is what I was afriad of. Would someone mind casually expressing what makes it so different, if it's no trouble?

At the risk of upsetting you further, I should add that even the venerable "ctrl+a" that was graven into our parietal lobes by BG2 is included here. That, along with the fairly stiff difficulty - I can't tell you how many times I fought that first troll before I managed to kill it (great death animations, by the way, make for a genuine improvement over the BG series - the death stroke looks clearly different from all the other attacks, and far more lethal).

One feature I do miss from BG that doesn't make it into DA is the "formations" option - that extended "T" got me all over the sword coast in one piece. Tangentially, one related gameplay difference that does bother me is the inability to maintain a solid wall of front-line fighters, in a doorway for instance. Enemies just seem to slide by alistair and my dwarven tank like ghosts to thump on my spellcasters, which is quite frustrating ,and a departure from the BG and NWN series.

At any rate, to speak to your underlying question,  I think the modification of the old hardcore DnD-style rulesets to CRPGs has actually progressed far slower than it should have - the turn and round system was never well suited to a visual interactive medium, and resulted in weird effects - like all my frontline fighters watching stupidly while the enemy marched away from them and making no attempt to pursue because they had already carried out actions this round and were waiting for the next to perform new actions.

[VeeVito]

While I have fond memories of and still occasionally fire up BG2 and IWD2, there were some things such as spells per day, resting to recharge spells, and maybe some other things about the rule sets that were mildly annoying to me, so their dissapearance is welcome for me.

I can feel the "spiritual successor" in the game.

I think that the main thing that takes away from the BG2 feeling or any D&D feeling isn't the gameplay as much as the much darker and violent cinematic depth that Dragon Age has. BG wasn't like this really. And of course a brand new setting. Meaning that I can very much imagine a BG2 "redux" using this engine and ruleset and I would feel pretty much at home.

So, anyway, from a gameplay standpoint they came pretty close even with their own rules. As I said, I think it's the much darker/violent setting that puts any wedge between DAO and D&D. They could have used the BG2 ruleset and it would still feel different because of that.

I would say that classic D&D rules for computer rpg's is a day gone by though. Having said that, i'd probably buy one if they did make a game using those rules. It isn't a deal breaker for me.

Modifié par VeeVito, 07 novembre 2009 - 08:40 .

[Gacatar]

Sainta117 wrote...
Tangentially, one related gameplay difference that does bother me is the inability to maintain a solid wall of front-line fighters, in a doorway for instance. Enemies just seem to slide by alistair and my dwarven tank like ghosts to thump on my spellcasters, which is quite frustrating ,and a departure from the BG and NWN series.

You can still do that in a limited way. Since the AI targeting is based on Hate values, you can lob a Fireball into a room and let your warrior standing in the door use Taunt just as the enemies reach the door. It has a decent range, usually gets most enemies.

Even if one or two gets through, with some preparation, you can give some nasty surprise for them. Mostly among the lines of Glyph spells and Traps. Or a welcoming all-ranged-characters focus fire.
Oh, and Glyph of repulsion works exceedingly well with area effect spells with a duration like Inferno. It knocks enemies back right into the middle of the spell. Lovely.
While we lost some old tools like blockading doors, we got tons of new tools.

[TheBearMage]

I definitely agree that you can feel how DA is BG's spiritual successor. I haven't been this satisfied with or so immersed in a world since the days of BG. What other game since BG has come as close as this to recreating that epic feeling?

[The-Cyber-Dave]

Ok, um, some of the comments on here about the 360 version of the game are a little bologna. A lot of people are blowing the differences between the two way out of proportion.

First of all, I have not heard anything about enemies doing less damage/needing heals less. I can tell you, heals needed to be used quite a bit. The difference in the difficulty settings is not in straight statistical damage (at least as far as I know) and rather with AoE spells. Normal has no friendly fire damage. Hard has 50% friendly fire damage. Nightmare has full friendly fire damage. This is difference from the computer version of the game (which has a lot more friendly fire damage on easier settings). If there is actually a difference in heal rates or NPC damage, that would be news to me.

Second of all, the 360 version is not balanced around playing a single character. If you try and play a single character, and ignore your other characters, you will get raped. Especially on any setting over normal. In fact, I am playing on normal right now (I find the harder settings a bit to hard for me), and I still need to regularly micromanage all of the other characters.

Third of all, the x-box DOES have the equivalent of spacebar pausing. If you hold the left trigger, the game pauses. If you don't like having to hold the left trigger, you can go into the options, and turn on the pause toggle option (instead of the pause hold option). If you do that, you pull the left trigger, and the game pauses and opens up the radial menu. You need to click the left trigger again to unpause.

Fourth of all, the 360 also offers you the full ability to tactically place spells. Whenever you use an AoE spell, the game automatically pauses. You then need to place the spell, with enemies highlighted red when they fall into its effect, and allies highlighted green when they fall into its effect. You then click A or B as necessary to accept/cancel the spell once you have it placed tactically or realize that you can not place the spell with the current enemy set up.

Other than the AoE friendly fire settings, the REAL major differences between the PC and console version is this: the console version traps you in the over the shoulder camera angle (you can zoom in and out to some degree, but nothing like the classing BG overhead angle), there is no mouseclick style movement, and the mabari hound gets access to more talents.

So, please, don't blow things out of proportion. There are some differences. The loss of the overhead camera view is sad. I don't mourn the loss of the mouseclick movement. Having more talent options for my mabari hound is nice.

The two are not two totally different games. The two are the exact same game, with some minor differences. Among those differences, it should be pretty obvious that the PC version is controlled with a mouse and keyboard, and the console version is controlled with a gaming controller. 

Modifié par The-Cyber-Dave, 07 novembre 2009 - 10:11 .

[Brentra]

Ok, um, some of the comments on here about the 360 version of the game are a little bologna. A lot of people are blowing the differences between the two way out of proportion.

In a month or two, the PC version will look and play nothing like its console counterparts, so the sole fact that the computer version is modding-friendly already makes all the difference in the world in this comparison.

[HemisH]

PC: Full camera control (can pull back to an isometric angle), the ability to select the entire party at once, full UI with a hotbar, user-made mods and access to the toolset.



Console: Camera limited to behind-the-back with some zooming, can only control one character at a time, button mapping for potions and a few of your combat talents as well as a radial menu, official DLC only, less enemies in big battles.