Well I admit I had no good remembering of skills in DAO. So here the list: Coercion, Stealing, Trap-Making, Survival, Herbalism, Poison-Making, Combat Training, and Combat Tactics. And with Awakening: Runecrafting, Vitality, Clarity.Wait, what? Skills were for all intents and purposes removed, you no longer put points into skills(Coercion, trap making, pick pocketing, ect). Instead, the now omitted skills are based off various stats(STR, DEX, CON, ect), which seems silly as someone with zero training yet immense dexterity/intelligence won't be able to magically unlock a door or chest. The removal of stat(tier) based non-combat skills is ridiculous, even more so when looking back at DA:O which had them…
In your arguing you are forgetting two points, it's party, there's four members in your party, but you pick them among a little army in camp.
So here a review:
- Combat Training: It opens next fighters talents, you had no choice but pick all this skill at max level for all classes but mage. Pointless because it's just mandatory for almost all classes.
- Survival, Poison-Making, Runecrafting: No choices here either, you just sacrificed one member of your camp army to learn this skill at max. Pointless because it involves no choice.
- Stealing, Trap-Making: No logic to make them general skills, it's clearly a class skill for Rogue and perhaps another if there was another like Ranger. It's good they removed from general skills, but bad if they removed them entirely, they should be Rogue talents.
- Survival: Well I don't like this skill at all, and I would have an option to just remove radar detection. But same for DAO1 and DAO2 demo.
- Combat Tactics: No choice here either, either the player want use tactics and then put point here asap, either they don't care and get an unfair advantage because they choose do it manually. As a player using tactics I was for removing this entirely from skills.
- Coercion: In DAO1 there was high requirement on combat talents so players hadn't much choices of high dex with Rogue, high intelligence with mage, high strength with 2H. How Coercion was working it was an option only for High STR so not an option for most character building.
- Vitality, Clarity: More life or more mana/stamina: Well you have already the dilemma through attributes points. I feel them quite tedious.
So yeah skills lost isn't a good thing, but if we stick with DAO1 and not RPG in general, we don't lost much, and even in term of character building choices most are fake choices and some are very bad choices like tactics. The real choices was rather limited, yeah Coercion vs Survival… How great it is, sarcasm.
If you want debate RPG in general, that will be different but from DAO1 this change a lot the picture, it's sad to quote it but DAO1 skills removal lost almost nothing here is the truth.
Many positive and I do agree it's sad it's positive:Honestly, I'm trying to see a positive in the removal of stat based skills, but I'm not having much luck… Tell me how that's a positive, beyond the obvious,
- Removal of Combat Tactics, Survival, Vitality, Clarity: Good because they was pointless or forced choices.
- Removal of Combat Training: Good because the influence on the class management was too huge and more a fake choice and a frustration when you tried skip it.
- Removal of Stealing, Trap-Making: Good because it should be Rogue talents
- Removal of Survival, Poison-Making, Runecrafting: Good because it was too easy and tedious to sacrifice a member at camp and switch when needed.
Well for your other points of your gigantic post I have some arguing too, but well I'll shorten this and will answer some quickly:
- Darkspawn looking the same: Agree on this one, but a question, is this was different in DAO1? I don't remember complains about that in Awakening or DAO1. But yeah a bit more diversity was required but not that much a big deal if there's at least some diversity per Darkspawn class and type.
- Dialogs wheel: I wonder what your brother expected when he choose "He's not alone" and "He" is a dead? I already detailed about this, there's good and bad, and it adds a trap, check my previous posts.
- "Mages seem more resistant to dmg": Play a mage and you'll disagree with yourself.
- "Backstabbing is a new teleportation technique": Not that easy to use when there are obstacle, but what's wrong, it's just very short teleportation, I don't see how this is streamlined, it's another tactical option like some other fights system has with brutal move forward attack that can be used for positioning purpose.
- "Mages do some sort of contrived choreographed dance when attacking": Why not?
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