Dragon Age - TTLG Forums

Phatose on 28/11/2009 at 22:49

The whittle-them-down approach has some pretty honking major downsides as well, and in my experience is seldom a sign of good or imaginative game design. It promotes paranoid conservation, and OCD inventory management - useful if you're making a survival horror game, I suppose, but typically not conducive to fun.

More problematically, it expect players to be prepared for the dungeon/adventure/boss or suffer accordingly, but almost never gives them sufficient information to figure out what exactly constitutes preparedness. You're seldom given any forewarning about how long a particular challenge/dungeon ect might be, and often you're given only the most basic idea of what to expect there.

This means players are either going to need to reach paranoid apocalyptic levels of preparedness, or just go in and see if they die or not. The former tends to be unfun in the extreme, and the latter promotes trial-and-error gameplay of the worst kind.

Swiss Mercenary on 29/11/2009 at 01:31

Quote Posted by Zygoptera

By the sounds of things you need it. Just because you can crawl from encounter to encounter, reloading if anything bad happens and resting after each one does not mean you have to. If you rested all the time you're either obsessive or just plain not very good.

Which still fails to address why abstracting resting away, so you don't get the OKAY DUNGEON REST FOUR SECOND CUTSCENE immersion killer after every 3-5 minutes of gameplay is a worse alternative.

What's the problem, again? Are you unhappy because auto-regen "Forces" you to rest? Don't pull the realism card - there's nothing realistic about CRPG resting.

Or are you just waving your e-peen around, because anyone who disagrees with you CLEARLY NEEDS HAND-HOLDING?

Zygoptera on 29/11/2009 at 02:38

My dear fellow, if I were waving my epeen around there wouldn't be a post standing within miles and it would take weeks to recover from being on the receiving end, if you ever did.

You don't need to rest every 3-5 minutes, you simply do not need to- stick a floppy hat on it and that argument could be used as an improvised means of keeping birds from eating crops. It's a plain, straight, 24 carat fallacy. If you're resting every 3-5 minutes it's your choice and you're doing it because you're either not very good or compulsive.

No RPG is ever realistic, just read it as showing verisimilitude and not being obviously unbelievable within the confines of its fiction and the limitations of games as a medium.

I primarily dislike regen because in a game like DAO it's just fucking lazy and infects everything else it touches with the same laziness- usually in the form of game padding via generic waves of generic enemies swarming all out from behind generic door X, Y and Z as you open them sequentially all done with a minimum of imagination required, makes resource (potion/ scroll/ spell) management almost totally irrelevant, promotes bait and swarm gameplay and leads to game systems which feel bland. It's fine in something like Halo because, frankly, that's exactly what you want from a relatively simple game; 'dumb' shooting action with lots of enemies.

Quote Posted by Phatose

I largely agree, except for the paranoid conservation part. Much as with deciding to rest every three minutes in BG2 that's a personal gameplay choice- I made pretty liberal use of them in the Infinity Engine games and only ran out on very few occasions, and there are plenty of containers available to store them in and plenty of vendors to buy them from.

Then again I've always found the idea of not buying a rod of resurrection (or equivalent) and using it when necessary- when you've got ten of thousands of gold- to be preposterous.

Rolander on 29/11/2009 at 03:32

Zygoptera, I have to agree with Swiss Mercenary that you are making too much of DA:O's mechanics. Just because you have something personal against regen doesn't make regen bad in itself. We should see how it meshes with the rest of the game.

I think Bioware did try to match the combat challenge with regen in-between battles, and the overall gameplay is to my satisfaction. Instead of hoarding my spells as in BG2, I can unlease them to my mage's fullest protential for every significant fight (limited by the game's mana/stamina system). Same goes with my warrior's / rogue's talents.

Different games use different system, and difference is not necessary bad. If you have something well-thought out about how regen doesn't work right in DA:O, put it down clearly and concisely and I'll read and consider it.

Koki on 29/11/2009 at 07:34

Quote Posted by AxTng1

I'm going to do a proper write-up on another forum, but the important bit is that DA is as good as it can be. I treated it like the IW to Baldur's Gate's DX - an immersive version for normal people, with charming flaws.

Yeah, all in all... it's... it's... good for what it is ahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAH

Ahem. Sorry about that.

Tonight on TTLG. Why should we rest in RPGs? Why should we even pretend we're a part of the game world anymore? Why not just drop the pretense and do it jRPG style, with battles switching to Battle Plane where getting hit by a planet is a mid-game move? Why should we be worried that while we're resting some deadline might pass us by? And how it all relates to the fact that Dragon Age is also available for Playstation 3 and XBox 360? Tune in for that and much more, at 11.

Dresden on 29/11/2009 at 17:45

u mad?

AxTng1 on 29/11/2009 at 19:25

Anyone here played NWN2? Where walking over an arbitrary trigger line would spawn about 12 enemies all around you AND THEN LEAVE THE LINE THERE FOR WHEN YOU CAME BACK THE OTHER WAY? Where every fight against a minor mook would use 90% of your resources because of an Oblivion-style challenge rating calculator? That is why we have OCDs about resting for HP and Spells.

Dragon Age simply does not have this problem. A few skillpoints in Survival lets you see what is coming up (not realistic but good for this style of gameplay), and the only "ambushes" are by characters that are justifiably stealth-capable. Getting ganked by two Darkspawn Assassins is OK, gankage by 14 Orc Warriors in the Old Owl Well is not. imo.

I don't think Dragon Age is perfect, I think that it is a big step back towards the right direction. I predict the first EXPANSION PACK not dlc EXPANSION PACK will probably be quite good.

Free Avellone!

Zygoptera on 29/11/2009 at 20:52

Played NWN2 on 'realistic' or 'core rules' or whatever. It isn't particularly good (though the monsters spawn only once; and the expansions are excellent and good respectively), features lots and lots and lots of filler combat- hardly a criticism unique to NWN2- would have been far better had it been around ten hours shorter and it's wholly appropriate that the lead designer left before the game shipped. I wouldn't hold it up as any great paragon of game design, certainly. Having said that, once again, I didn't find it necessary to do any protracted in dungeon resting that I recall and blew through most of the mooks like a tornado through a house of cards. Its real problem, and the reason I'd imagine most people probably rested a lot (though in NWN2's case resting consisted of a four second pause hardly different than DAO's regen) was the abysmal party AI that saw every spellcaster shoot their load over any enemy they saw no matter how trivial.

Quote Posted by Rolander

Just because you have something personal against regen doesn't make regen bad in itself [..] If you have something well-thought out about how regen doesn't work right in DA:O, put it down clearly and concisely and I'll read and consider it.

I have nothing against regen in the right context, and I think I laid out why I think it doesn't work in DAO. My major gripe is that Swiss Merc was building a man of straw with his complaints about rest spamming as that way of playing is entirely a player choice (or not being very good/ playing on too high a difficulty).

steo on 29/11/2009 at 21:25

I'm enjoying Dragon Age so far. Was initially sceptical about regenerating health and the like, but it does work within the confines of the game. The only bad points I can think of are the camera angles, which are atrocious on any maps which use the third dimension. This was something that they really managed to get right in the end with NWN2. It's a shame to see such a step back with DA, but multiple settings and configurability aren't in the simplistic vein of the game and wouldn't translate well to consoles. The AI is also crap but, just like NWN2, you can turn it all off and do everything yourself. One thing that really annoyed me in regards to tactics is the way enemies focus their attention on one member of your party. For example, the bad guys see my archer first, so they all rush towards her. Seeing this, I use my two melee fighters to block the doorway and cast tempest in the room where all the enemies are. Seems like a good plan to me, but in actuality all that happens is the undead ignore the burly warriors blocking the doorway, run straight past them to my back line, start hacking my archer to pieces and the tempest spell is completely wasted because none of the bad guys batted an eyelid at my two melee fighters positioned directly between them and my archer. I know I should get taunt, but that means I have to get precise striking and I'd prefer to focus on the shield talents with Alistair.

Also, how the hell am I supposed to kill the revenant in the forest? Using forcefield until I've taken out his cronies works well, but he can still single-handedly take out my entire party. I'm currently using Morrigan, Alistair, the assassin dude, and I'm a mage with chain lightning and nightmare as my highest level spells. The revenant seems to resist nearly everything I cast at it, Alistair's the only one who can really survive it's double strike, and I'm using health potions nearly as fast as the cooldown period.

Phatose on 30/11/2009 at 00:20

Does anyone in your party have taunt? If so, it might be worth swapping Alistair for them, and letting them be your tank - taunt with them, and after they get the revenant's attention, toss them in a forcefield. He'll keep pounding away at them, while the forcefield makes them totally invulnerable.

You also might want to consider not Forcefielding him to deal with his cronies. That way you can walking bomb his associates, and use them to put the hurt on him. Walking bomb does absurd amounts of damage.

If you're not going to do that, then swap Morrigan out for someone else. Her base spell set is cold and paralyze, and he's immune to both. Shale would be a decent replacement for this one, if you've got him. Alistair is a better tank then just about everyone else, but Shale is made of solid rock, and has a skillset entirely dedicated to tanking. Then you can swap out Al for someone who does more damage - Sten, the dwarf or the dog.