mothra on 9/11/2009 at 11:46
Quote:
Gameplay isn't just combat, although there's a lot of it. But, show me another modern game where you can settle an agreement with a demon to slay his target, go to his target, make an agreement with him to kill the demon, betray the man and kill him, and finally, betray the demon and kill him as well Just this makes this game so bloody awesome Btw. You can turn that ridiculous blood spatter in the game menu, I did.
vampire bloodlines has almost the same mission structure you talk about with the same permutations, only there it's a vampire, not a demon. so, yeah, Dragon Age:
Pros:
- many locations and missions
- party banter and your party-approval system handled very good
- voiceovers expertly done
- combat is awesome
- many, many, many permutations of quest-related dialogues, I replayed only 1 scene with Alistair and could discuss myself into 4 different endings, not to speak of if you are male/female or which class you took or how you handled previous missions - impressive
Cons:
- Bioware (aka "didn't I play/meet this guy already 4 times in the former Bioware games ?")
- ugly, ugly, ugly engine (low-rez ftw)
- generic, uninteresting bland design of world, cities, environment, clothes
- cliche fantasy writing with pseudo-hard-edge that comes across pretty juvenile (as does the bloodsplatter and barby underwear)
- Party AI is stupid, combat slots are needless if you really wanna shine in fights, so don't invest anything in those skills
- small fugly UI (the quest codex is bad to read on big screens with high rez)
- annoying background music
- bad handling of DLC: you have a guy standing in camp with a "(!)" over his head asking you to pay money to EA so you he can give you a mission. stupid advertising, they should only spawn the guy IF you HAVE the dlc
I won't say otherwise, I got this game only for the combat and in that it does deliver ! fighting my first ogre was awesome and I love micromanagement of all of my party crew. that way I did only use 2 health potions at all since I started my 2 playthroughs (rogue and mage in paralell)
so I can recommend it with above restrictions, I appreciate the work put behind it but it does not have any impact in the game besides having a large world map and many locations to choose. when you get there on the other hand it's back in "corridor & invisible barrier land". everything is restricted in the game (you can't just kill any NPC), it feels very MMO'ish.
but combat is awesome, i swear.
Malf on 9/11/2009 at 12:47
Quote Posted by Thirith
What would it take, in your opinion, to make the game a spiritual successor of
Baldur's Gate 2? I'm pretty much on the fence about
Dragon Age, so I'd be very interested in hearing what's missing.
It's really hard to say. You could say Minsc, but that's ridiculous.
You could say beautifully hand-drawn environments and character portraits, but a 2D epic RPG no longer seems to be a valid prospect. It's a shame, as I think Troika were on the right path with ToEE: 3D characters in a 2D world.
The ability to kill or not kill everyone as you choose rather than the game dictating would be awesome, but seems to have become a lost art among modern RPG makers. I'm sure that political correctness is to blame here.
And that's the core issue I think; even when they're trying to be "edgy" or "gritty", modern Bioware games feel like they're afraid to offend anybody. It feels like they're afraid to give the player a truly open set of RPG tools in case the player does something really nasty with them. It feels like I'm being baby-sat while I'm playing. It's a bit like your friend's dad who's trying to be hip and down with the kids, yet is afraid to expose you to anything truly sleazy so ends up overcompensating.
Maybe the real problem here is that Bioware think they're making games for kids whereas Troika and the Fallout team were making games for their contemporaries.
It certainly feels that way.
Sorry for the fluff, but trying to pin down exactly what the problem is with Bioware games is not an easy task.
(
http://gza.gameriot.com/content/images/orig_320200_1_1257581825.png) This chart helps however :)
Thirith on 9/11/2009 at 13:05
Cool, thanks for the reply. Strange thing is, I couldn't tell you how Baldur's Gate 2 does these things differently - most likely it doesn't, but it still felt fresher back then. I'd probably say that BG2 is the pinnacle of Bioware's work (with KotOR a close second), but most of what they've done since has felt like a retread. They're still pretty competent at doing relatively generic RPGs (how's that for damning with faint praise?), but the games lack the spark that Black Isle or Obsidian at their best have/had.
dvrabel on 9/11/2009 at 13:08
I'm not really seeing the similarities between the characters in Dragon Age and BioWare's previous games. Could you give some (spoiler lite) examples?
The use of the Tevinter Imperium ruins in many areas gives a common theme to otherwise disjoint locations which I rather like. I'd also say the art style was more realistic (female leather armor excepted) than bland or generic.
Combat is fantastic but I don't half suck at it. I currently have 2 mages, a sword-and-board fighter and a bow/dual-wielding rogue. Any tips?
mothra on 9/11/2009 at 15:22
2 mages, soldier + rogue: instant win
you can't possible loose with 2 mages: 1 is healing, the other is buffing or stunning, my soldier holds the frontline and the rogue stabs everybody in the back or drops poision bombs on them. mages take turns in crowd-control spells. Worked without any problems for me (so far)
and sorry, the game screams generic. even the women's clothes are generically sexist as in most fantasy works. Their interiors look like gamelevels, not rooms somebody would live in. their is almost no detail in the world. If you are a playing a woman you can have a funny "women are so much smarter" dialogue with Morrigan that reverses the sexismn the other way so the boys don't feel guilty if they let the women run around naked (or in their barbie costume) in camp. anyways, never bought a bioware game for the story since BG. MassEffects' combat sucked but I liked the setting, DragonAge's combat is the awesome but I don't like the setting. For all the magic and wonder that is in the DragonAge (or all of its history) the settings are especially "un-magical". Something as sinister-sounding and potentially dangerous as the "Kokari Wilds" is just a mud-road through a little swamp, nothing magical or menacing about the environment, you even have clear view, no fog. They really failed to create a distinctive place like the artdesign for e.g. TheWitcher did. Their swamp had feeling, soul, you could almost feel the moist and smell the strange odors. in DragonAge it all looks like some 8bit 2d background projected on a 100 polymodell from 1980. boy, their engine is ugly or their artists just don't know how to use it proper.
but I love the myriad of combat combinations. with the right application of spells and talents I managed to fight very long without ever using a healthpotion, the moment I get sloppy or let the AI decide: it's drinking time
I hope the story goes more places than what has been said after the tutorial, it's pretty much standard fare, your motivation is again to save the world, your mission to find allies and you can then decide where to go first. BG successor it is not, they don't even have a persistent world, no drops......
i did redcliffe first and it felt ok, the battle was a little tedious, instead of waves upon wave upon wave of the same enemies they could have done smaller groups with more variations, this way it was a real drag after my party was actually the only ones left fighting in the whole village. PAUSE is your friend.
I hope combat varies up more or it will come boring soon and that's when there's nothing really interesting in dragonAge left for me.
Rolander on 9/11/2009 at 21:50
Quote Posted by denisv
Sorry, there is no demo. What I meant was that I downloaded the full game to see if it was worth the purchase (it isn't.).
Quote Posted by denisv
In more detail though, comparing with BG2.
Graphics: Mostly bad with occasionally nice environments (the mage origins seemed the prettiest). Indoor lightning is atmospheric. The blood and character animations are just bad. Water effects... wait, what water effects?
Camera control: Horrible. Can't use the overhead camera because archers and mages have ridiculous ranges and can't use behind camera because then you only see 1/3 of the battle at a time and you have to constantly rotate and fiddle with it.
Can't say much on graphics, but I'm fine with it. I'm admitting that I have fairly high tolerance for such things.
Camera control can definitely use some work, but maybe there's more control options that I didn't explore - I'm too busy enjoying the game.
Quote Posted by denisv
Difficulty: Hard, and because of the level scaling, encounters don't get any easier either. I didn't appreciate the difficulty, though.
Normal difficulty is already tough, but sometimes I think I should have started on the next level because I don't have a perchant for Spells of Mass Destruction, so having full friendly fire should actually work in my favour agains the enemy AI.
Party AI can be dumb at first, until you realise that it also depends on YOU setting the AI tactics properly for your party members. I kept wondering why my archer NPC kept running into the frontline until I realise she was following my custom tactics to shoot at the most dangerous opponent who sometimes happen to be far from the frontlines because of my tendency to fall back and make enemies come to me piecemeat.
As your party mature in ability and you mature in party management, you might find it easier for routine fights. Once my PC warrior max out her Shield Talents, she is pretty much a tank when her Shield Wall talent is up.
Quote Posted by denisv
Interface: Dull, confusing. Text is all over the place, instead of the console like in BG2. There's no information about rolls or anything. Presumably this is to hide some sort of adaptive difficulty. Inventory is limited by the number of items, not their weight. You can carry 70 types of feathers or 70 types of Plate Mail.
Another sign of an ***** playing the game. Some things like arrowss, ingredients, and potions stack up to a certain limit. So far, I only seen special arrows hitting the stacking cap at 99 because I tend to hoard them (no need to purchase normal arrows/bolts for missile weapons).
Quote Posted by denisv
Magic: Remember BG2, where mages ruled? I do. There was a combination of spells for every occasion. I played through it with only a magic user (sorcerer, mage, cleric/mage) several times. Half the spells I saw in DA:O were party buffs and the rest were pewpewpew damage spells that made my mage into an archer who shoots fire/ice/whatever arrows. Kinda like, ya know, MMORPGs. Not that I've played any MMORPGs :)
Yet one more sign of an *****. Though mages can no longer dominate the battlefield, their have more than mere projectile spells to throw. My favourite spell tree so far is the Mindblast line under Spirit school.
Early on, I have my mage run up to the frontlines to cast Mindblast on the mobs swarming my frontlines to buy my warriors a breather. Later, dangerous entities get neutralised in force fields while my warriors deal with the cannon fodder, then my whole party fall upon the former when the field wears off. Telekinesis Weapons is nothing special but it helps me more since I have two frontliners.
Crushing Prison, if not resisted, can kill enemy mages outright on their own (I have yet to see a human/elven mage survive it, once a Desiree Demon survived with only 20% health before my warriors swatted her down) and can hold tougher foes like ogres helpless while your team piles on the damage (unlike Force Field, your team can hurt an enemy held by Crushing Prision with impunity).
Quote Posted by denisv
Environments: Generic Greco-Roman combined with some Gothic and... Disney/Pixar. Lots of invisible barriers. To me it looked poorly thought-out, as if they had a bunch of clipart and put it together somehow without really giving it any thought.
Writing: The worst part of the game. The writing is consistently horrifyingly bad. I'm going to have to leave it at that, as it's too big a subject to tackle.
Characters: Way too pretty, modern, serious-emo. It was like watching Xena The Warrior Princess, but without any of the humor.
Enemies: I got really sick of constantly fighting Orcs and Bandits. Especially since my level made no difference.
Ok, I'm no judge on enviroment/writing/character, but as mentioned previously, this ***** is way off on the enemies part.
Quote Posted by denisv
I think giving DA:O more than 2/10 would be nonsense, since it fails across the board and is a huge step back from Baldur's Gate.
Considering how much things this ***** miss out, I strongly recommend you ignore his *****.
All I say is, I'm enjoying DA:O.
Aerothorn on 9/11/2009 at 22:10
I honestly have no idea what word you're asterisking out.
Phatose on 9/11/2009 at 23:31
I'm curious about that as well.
Though why bother writing all that? Really, anyone reading the first sentence of Denisv's post can quickly work out 'Wow, pirate steals game, then declares it's not worth playing for. Wonder how often that happens.'
gunsmoke on 9/11/2009 at 23:48
Quote Posted by Rolander
***** ***** ***** ***** *****.
Quote Posted by Aerothorn
I honestly have no idea what word you're asterisking out.
This. And btw, it doesn't say much for your post when the only part that stuck with me was the *****s. GG though bruh.
Rolander on 10/11/2009 at 06:02
Apologies, I try to avoid profanities in real life and net life. When I put "*****", I am leaving the interpretation of it to reader choice - it is generally a very negative one, and I believe most forum readers are intelligent enough to infer it.
DA:O is not flawless, and that pirate might not be wrong about everything. For instance, I am more forgiving of graphics and more able to immerse myself into a gameworld than most, so what I accept as perfectly fine may not apply to the average player out there.
I am not able to refute his every complaint, but I can put in my 2 cents worth on what I feel he is absolutely wrong about, if nothing else than to show him that we know how shallow he is.
