Dragon Age 2 - The decline of the Classic RPG at Hooked Gamers

Alrik Fassbauer said:

What I - personally - fear, is, that the following mechanism will be startet :

Dragon Age 1 -> "old school" RPG -> RPGers rejoice _> pendulum swings into one direction

Dragon Age 2 -> much more action-oriented (although not exactly an Action-RPG) -> RPGers cry out in pain about it -> pendulum swings into the opposite direction

Dragon Age 3 -> "okay, we went too much into the direction of action in DA2, so, that's why we'regoing to correct it with DA3" -> pendulum swings again into the opposite direction (of THAT), and that is into the direction of DA1 …

I visualze these games as swings of a pendulum - and at one point in the future they might have reached the "Golden Rule", from which on there is no progress anymore (why should it ? - from the maker's point of view - why go away from a "Golden Rule" at all ?)

This is what I fear will be happening.

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maybe they're just trying shit out, or they're lying about DA:O success.

rune_74 said:

You played the witcher by any chance?

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Yup. Didn't finish it.

Captain Buzzkill said:

Yup. Didn't finish it.

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Then you do realize that it is based off of twitch reflex for their combat, even more so then dragon age 2. But it is held as great around here. I like the game a lot myself.

DoctorNarrative said:

Couldn't disagree more. I played the demo by pausing constantly, just as I always play these games, and I frankly HAD to play tactically and with pause to beat the second ogre. I turned off my party's pre-set tactics, paused and ordered everything myself, and it played pretty much exactly like Origins.

People seem really thrown by the fast animations, as if it HAS to be an action game because of them. I feel the opposite, I feel like the fast and exciting combat which is still pause-and-play tactical is a very exciting development for the genre. I would go as far as to say it's a massive improvement.

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Massive improvement? I don't quite understand how, from a purely tactical perspective…for me, it played like an action RPG and not at all like a tactical RPG; I played through the entire demo without ever pausing and didn't have a single party member get knocked unconscious along the way. A game is not automatically a tactical experience just because it has an active-pause mechanic. By that logic, Divinity 2 is just as much of a tactical RPG as DA2. Pausing in DA2 is completely unnecessary to me - the design is clearly geared towards real-time hack n' slash, so pausing does not add to the experience unless the game is simply too fast for those not used to such radical speed (much like the optional pause mechanic in Divinity 2).

Remember that once again, I'm not declaring anything about the quality of the game, just observations. But people who claim that DA2 is exactly the same as Origins, just faster, are over-compensating in their defense of the game. Again, nothing wrong with enjoying the game (I personally don't, but that's simply because it doesn't appeal to me), but just look at it for what is is - a story-driven action-RPG built around cinematics. But don't call it a tactical RPG; it's simply not the case and is misleading.

To continue a little bit about Brent Knowles, here's a rather interesting about his time at Bioware during the year 2001-2002 and about the creation of Neverwinter Nights. And finally, some reason behind why we couldn't continue our adventures in BG2 in Neverwinter Nights. http://blog.brentknowles.com/2009/10/14/1824/

Definitely a stressful time, and unfortunately this change required further revisions to the revisions we had already started as we were forced to remove certain characters inherited from BioWare’s previous Baldur’s Gate games (such as Minsc and Boo) as they were not protected by the lawsuit.

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More on topic:
I like the new UI of DA2, I also like the new dialogue system, and the faster combat animations. I also had to pause and play a lot when I played the demo. Only things that irritates me is how the rogues backstab abilities now functions; rogues now, at least in this respect, seem to be some sort of ninja, performing leaping actions to backstab enemies - in the game, of course.

And what short cooldown of the powers? Using the spell 'healing' now has a 60 secconds cooldown from from the start, warriors powers such a shield bash has about the same or longer cool down periods as in DA: Origins. Some people must be really good at playing DA2 and DA: Origins as well in realtime combat. I, however, am not.

Zloth said:

Funny, it seemed to work just fine for me. But then, I didn't go into the demo eager to prove it was horrible. The only problem I had was the lack of friendly fire - and we know that gets turned on by increasing the difficulty.

The hypocracy going on is downright insane. Do you think the Witcher had anything close to the tactics that are in DA2? Not a chance. Did the 'classic' games encourage us to roleplay with their dialog choices? No, they encouraged us to go through EVERY option in the dialog tree. When they did start to add options, there were only two - naughty and nice. But we're supposed to forget about that and pretend we had a roleplaying extravagandza because our characters may or may not have pointy ears.

It's sad, too, because a lot of people are going to miss out on great games because of this. It's like a bunch of old folks refusing to watch modern movies because no actor today is as good as Clark Gable. And the response from the developer community to this "growing storm" is the exact same reponse anyone would give to those old folks watching the same movies over and over again…

"Yeah, whatever."

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I'd like to bring up Baldur's Gate 2, specifically the entire Jaheira romance arc, and the battle against Kangaxx. I believe that both are examples of Bioware at its best, and how they've let some of that slip over the years:

The battle against Kangaxx, while not necessary to complete the game, was one of the hardest boss fights I've ever encountered, and I've only ever played the game on normal difficulty. I played that fight for almost 2 days, and I can understand why someone wouldn't find that fun - I really do - but in the end, once I figured out the right group of people to bring, the right items and spells, and how to use them, I felt REALLY good at having been able to work it all out. Honestly, without ramping the difficulty up, I haven't had the same kind of challenge in a Bioware game since then.

As far as roleplaying is concerned, I know that there were some rather silly preprequisites for completing the Jaheira romance (not ever kicking her out of your party) but when it comes to wooing women, they make you do some rather silly things sometimes. Other things, like actions that affected your alignment, and dialogue choices, made you really think about who Jaheira was as a person, because you didn't have the option of going and getting her a pair of gloves, or a mirror, to make up for something stupid that you had done. If you messed up, you ran the risk of breaking the romance permanently. Furthermore, because the visuals weren't that great, the writing and voice acting for the character had to really engage you as a player. There was no achievement to get points from, and no sex cutscene to titillate, so the emotional connection had to be the driving force behind the relationship. That's why I'm underwhelmed by what Bioware has brought to the table recently, because neither of those examples are dependent upon graphics or a particular setting. That level of emotional depth and gameplay could be incorporated into any game they make, but people don't want that. Ever since GTA, God of War, and Gears of War hit the scene, the only thing that's mattered is A: How much blood can we get away with, and B: How close can we make this to softcore porno, and still keep an "M" rating?

rune_74 said:

Then you do realize that it is based off of twitch reflex for their combat, even more so then dragon age 2. But it is held as great around here. I like the game a lot myself.

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I'm something of an old fogey who holds certain views regarding the depiction of women in the media. Combine that with atroctious voice acting (didn't play the EE, so I don't know if it got any better) and I just got sick of it rather quickly. To be fair the combat system wasn't even what did it, really. I thought it was an interesting concept that got you more into what your character was doing when fighting, ie: different fighting styles for different types and numbers of enemies, and the idea that there were active things you could do, apart from special attacks, that could maximize your combat efficiency. While you make a good point, I still think the situation is somewhat different, in that The Witcher made you a more active participant in combat, and in DA2, they just sped the combat up by a factor of 3.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

What I - personally - fear, is, that the following mechanism will be startet :

Dragon Age 1 -> "old school" RPG -> RPGers rejoice _> pendulum swings into one direction

Dragon Age 2 -> much more action-oriented (although not exactly an Action-RPG) -> RPGers cry out in pain about it -> pendulum swings into the opposite direction

Dragon Age 3 -> "okay, we went too much into the direction of action in DA2, so, that's why we'regoing to correct it with DA3" -> pendulum swings again into the opposite direction (of THAT), and that is into the direction of DA1 …

I visualze these games as swings of a pendulum - and at one point in the future they might have reached the "Golden Rule", from which on there is no progress anymore (why should it ? - from the maker's point of view - why go away from a "Golden Rule" at all ?)

This is what I fear will be happening.

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They've already said they're going to make ME3 more rpg-ish, a compromise between ME1 and ME2, pendulum's oscillating already.

Right on Zloth.

My thoughts exactly.

KapitanUnterhosen said:

They've already said they're going to make ME3 more rpg-ish, a compromise between ME1 and ME2, pendulum's oscillating already.

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Ah … yes …

I've seen several references to the Witcher (in defense of the direction DA2 has taken)…the Witcher never was (nor claimed to be) a party-based, tactics heavy RPG, nor was it billed as the 'spiritual successor' to the Baldur's Gate series. Comparing DA:O or DA2 to the Witcher is apples and oranges and i think its disingenuous. IMHO, DA:O failed to live up to the 'spiritual successor' label, since the new game mechanics are a pale shadow of richness offered by DnD rule-set. Still, I could live with that - and assumed they would tweak and extend with future iterations. DA:O was still fun despite its shortcomings. Instead, we have been presented with a new game (still part of the 'spiritual successor to BG series, they've not said otherwise) which has been further simplified (skills removed, class/customization - former hallmarks of BG and other DnD titles- limited, tactics downplayed etc). How is this progress? How does it live up to the 'spiritual successor' billing? Or is this game not now part of that? Bioware would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had not tried to punt DA as the successor to their 'older school' series. Having played the demo I was bitterly disappointed and I am not prepared to buy the game to see if it really is that much of a step down. I do understand that the demo was simplified in some ways, but its purpose must surely be to show of the general game mechanics, and those I find pretty dismal. This will def not be a day 1 purchase for me - I really hope that enough people vote with their wallets and don't buy it, so they will realize that this is not the direction their old fans want them to go on. But realistically? I'm sure they will gather in a whole new generation of fans who don't realize what they are missing and thus won't care.

Nerevarine said:

Massive improvement? I don't quite understand how, from a purely tactical perspective…for me, it played like an action RPG and not at all like a tactical RPG; I played through the entire demo without ever pausing and didn't have a single party member get knocked unconscious along the way.

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Did you leave the auto-tactics on? The other characters play themselves if you leave that on, so of course you didn't need to command them. Turn off auto-tactics and then tell me you can beat that ogre without pause and command tactics.

I wonder if this is a common thing, people leaving the other characters on auto and then complaining they didn't need to command them.

Naked Ninja said:

I like all the comments on the Bioware boards about how you shouldn't judge the game by the demo. Do they not understand that is the entire point of releasing a demo, to give an audience something to judge the end product by?

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Thank you.

It's amazing how many people can't seem to comprehend that.

It would be silly to compare The Witcher to DA2. The Witcher is an action-RPG, and a great one at that. People should expect to need some twitch reflex for that kind of game, not for DA2.

*Edit* Didn't see booboo's post before I wrote that. He pretty much summed it up perfectly imo.

DoctorNarrative said:

Did you leave the auto-tactics on? The other characters play themselves if you leave that on, so of course you didn't need to command them. Turn off auto-tactics and then tell me you can beat that ogre without pause and command tactics.

I wonder if this is a common thing, people leaving the other characters on auto and then complaining they didn't need to command them.

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Fair enough, but I still think that Origins - even with a full list of detailed tactics on - still required quite a bit of micromanaging and planning; it was simply designed to be a tactical experience. With the speed of the combat and focus on action, I just personally think that it would be a real pain to pause every couple of seconds to try to force the game to play like something it's not designed to be - a fully tactical game. I personally don't think that turning tactics completely off is a good solution because the game is simply not designed/meant to be played that way, due to numerous design elements and non-adjustable speed. If they would have included different speed settings I would absolutely play with tactics off as you suggest - but it's just not feasible within the current design and doesn't make for a good solution.

Nerevarine said:

Fair enough, but I still think that Origins - even with a full list of detailed tactics on - still required quite a bit of micromanaging and planning; it was simply designed to be a tactical experience. With the speed of the combat and focus on action, I just personally think that it would be a real pain to pause every couple of seconds to try to force the game to play like something it's not designed to be - a fully tactical game. I personally don't think that turning tactics completely off is a good solution because the game is simply not designed/meant to be played that way, due to numerous design elements and non-adjustable speed. If they would have included different speed settings I would absolutely play with tactics off as you suggest - but it's just not feasible within the current design and doesn't make for a good solution.

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The speed is in animations and such, the cooldowns are the same as in Origins if not longer... heal is longer. It just LOOKS fast and exciting.

Try the demo again with tactics off and pause to issues orders. It works very well. I honestly played the game exactly like I played Origins and it didn't feel much different other than the loss of friendly fire.

DoctorNarrative said:

The speed is in animations and such, the cooldowns are the same as in Origins if not longer… heal is longer. It just LOOKS fast and exciting.

Try the demo again with tactics off and pause to issues orders. It works very well. I honestly played the game exactly like I played Origins and it didn't feel much different other than the loss of friendly fire.

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While I disagree that the speed of the animations have no effect on the speed of the gameplay, I will certainly use your suggestion and give the demo a try with no tactics on. I couldn't objectively say that this doesn't work without trying it (I would actually love to be proven wrong and enjoy DA2; why on earth would I not want to enjoy a game for the sake of being "right?"), but I still maintain for now that the game wasn't designed to played with absolutely no tactics due to the pace of combat.

In DA:O I used a few tactics things... I had my mage set to heal when people fell below 25% health and I had all my sustained abilities set to auto-cast when battles started. Other than that though I manually did everything myself and played the whole game plus Awakening like that.

That's how I played the DA2 demo and I enjoyed myself. I plan to play on hard since Bioware devs have said on their forum that hard is for people who want to manage the whole party while normal is for those who want to have their companions on auto.

In the end the demo is what the demo is, if I enjoy it like that and you don't well... oh well. Can't win 'em all.

I have to disagree about the cooldown periods. With some exceptions, the cooldowns generally seem a lot faster in DA2.

JDR13 said:

I have to disagree about the cooldown periods. With some exceptions, the cooldowns generally seem a lot faster in DA2.

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I found the cooldowns to be a lot faster as well. The only thing that seems to have a long cooldown time is heal; everything else is sped up to match the tempo of the rest of the game (which only makes sense; faster combat but slower cooldowns wouldn't go together very well).