Dragon Age - Preview @ G4TV
 

G4TV serves up hands-on impressions of Dragon Age from a previewer who likens it to "old" RPGs like World of Warcraft:
More information.

Oh noes!!!!

What? This summary reads exactly like a troll! How can any mainstream gaming website be this uninformed? Or maybe BioWare really *did* mess this up badly?

Oh, brother…

And there we have it.

WoW = old RPG?

Looks like this person is the perfect guy to preview a supposedly "hardcore" CRPG.

Eh eh eh. This guy at G4TV is really a CRPG expert!
THE TRUTH BEHIND THE SCENES: after starting a Sacred 2 game session hiding the start menu, somebody told him he was playing the Dragon Age demo.

The more I hear about this game, the better I like it.

Button mashing is listed as a positive trait? (which DA doesn't have in melee combat) I guess everyone likes different things (that's my way of saying sheesh).

I guess the newest trailer will spun more of similar articles :).
Marketing, previews and interviews surrounding this game are so all over the place that I´m somewhat starting to feel sorry for the whole thing.
And I´m also looking forward to it. I´m sure it will be fun, intended or not.

-ehm-

Dragon Age, is last time, I checked, still not an action game - although the recently released trailer certainly makes it appear to be exactly that - it is (still) an traditional rpg, also in its combat-sequences.

I guess the Bioware devs. decided to go for making melee combat as realistic as possible in DA: Orgins. This actually means that a sword fight will play out like a real swordfight did in medieval times on the battleground. And yes, he who is stronger or has better weapons will win - just like in medieval times.

And this is why I do think Bioware's latest trailer advertising this trailer weren't a great idea. I mean, this guy apparently thinks that DA is some kind of action game?
Based on what happened when Fallout 3 and Mass Effect I will guess that many action gamers and fps gamers will flock to the Bioware DA forums and complain about (mostly) the combat and (maybe) the booring dialogue…

Yeah I thought the same thing when I read that. And when I played Ultima II back in the early 80s on my Apple II computer, I could see the dinasaurs grazing the plants outside my window.

"How can any mainstream gaming website be this uninformed?"

I assume you don't watch G4. It is the "Idiocracy" Entertainment Network. With the exception of one or two review editors, they generally are completely braindead on games and gaming history. However, they do have hawt chickz, rad robots, and rockin' youtube vids for the W1N!

I wounder how long it will take game developer to realise that almost all weapon based combat is not about exchanging blows……………

g4tv…
as usal an perfect source for douchebaggery

That was my thought - they are marketing it to twitcheriffic kiddies who will be appalled about the non-actiony combat.

Bingo! This is the other side of their double-edged marketing sword, although it's appalling some of those kiddies are mainstream game journos.

There you go, everyone who was put off by the trailer, this must surely restore your confidence! If the moron-action-kids can't quite comprehend the game, it mustn't be completely dumbed-down. And the action doen't keep up with his button-mashing, maybe there is some thought into the combat after all :D

It's not a matter of realizing it. It's a matter of animation budget and AI constraints. Early versions of Dragon Age had a very… insert hype-y word… combat animation style, where people were blocking, catching things on shields, and whatnot, in a ways that looked incredibly impressive. Here's why that turned out to be a bad idea:

1) Those great animations looked nice if you zoomed in, but nobody zoomed in when they were actually playing the game, so all that beautiful work? Wasted.

2) Those great animations only worked when you were fighting one person. As soon as it became you against two guys, the pretty animation trees of blocking and parrying and countering didn't work, because you'd be blocking and countering while someone else attacked you, and you'd either have to react to that OR you'd have to just ignore it, which would look even worse, since the viewer was set up to expect realistic melee combat.

3) Those great animations dramatically limited the weapon choices and enemy types. As soon as you get people saying "Well, we had to cut this (weapon) / (monster) because we couldn't get axe-and-shield combat looking good with it," you have to ask which is more valuable -- an animation nobody is going to see, or an additional unique creature?

4) As soon as you add in things like shields and the type of armor you're wearing, the animation gets more complex. As I understand it, when you fight in heavy armor or with a heavy shield, you're not so much worried about the dodge as you are the glance -- you don't need the enemy to completely miss you, just reduce a direct hit with an impact weapon to a blow that skitters off the side of the armor or shield. Having somebody acrobatically dodge in plate armor looked bad. Having somebody block a greatsword swing with a tiny wooden wrist bracer looked bad. Trying to figure out what animation to use if someone was wearing plate armor and using a tiny wooden wrist bracer starts to make people bleed from the ears.

I'm not saying that these issues weren't solvable, but Dragon Age isn't, as others have noted, an action RPG. It's an RPG. The focus isn't on creating something that is either hyper-realistic or even action-movie-choreography realistic. Doing that would take time and money that the animators could instead be using to make more monsters and more weapon types.

That's actually a damn good explanation why The Witcher went with one single weapon and one single armor, and mostly humanoid monsters.

I'm glad you didn't, by the way -- I loved The Witcher and will get seriously upset if CDP goes belly-up and never produces a sequel, but I wouldn't want every game to play like The Witcher.

Looking forward to this more by the day.

Yes, thanks for the explanation, PatrickWeekes. I think Bioware has been working on how to make the graphics of real time tactical combat more believable in such works as Mass Effect and especially, Jade Empire since their first console platform release, Knight of the Old Republic. So, I was wondering why Bioware didn't seem to have put too much effort to Dragon Age in this area. In fact, Gameplay videos so far showed the ugliness/unnaturalness of the combat especially when zoomed in, which has been pointed out by quite many action gamers although their vocabulary is often rather limited as you see in this example. Especially in the violence trailer, the poor engine for RT tactical combat seems to be trying too hard in making the game look like an action game but it undeniably showed the weakness in graphic area, which made the trailer look even more awkward and "tasteless", IMO.

While a game like the Witcher was more focused on the consistency and presentation of the world/story-telling and the graphics are designed in its way, better or worse, which would depend on how you see it, Bioware tends to give game-plays the priority. Among the recent games of Bioware, Dragon Age's gameplay seems to fit my taste best (even though I've gotten an impression that some parts of content such as story wouldn't do the same), so, in my case, their choice in this area is welcome.

Bioware's (or should I say, EA?) marketing felt rather problematic, though. I think Dragon Age needed to attract as much as attention possible especially before the upcoming events, but I think something like the violence trailer is rather confusing for its potential players and even non-players such as Mr. "reviewer" at G4TV here. This is O.K. to my part since I regularly do my "research" on games I'm interested in just like I normally do before shopping and Dragon Age was not an exception. However, I think I'm rather minority.

Thank you Patrick, I am very happy with your response, as for me gameplay is much more important than graphics, so I want to applaud you are not using resources on extravaganza graphics and focus on gameplay instead.

However my point when I wrote this was not only purely graphical, I also think the gameplay should reflect this fact more, in both turn based and action games. I guess the model bioware uses is the most unsuitable for this though, since you have to wait for each blow, if very few would be a hit people might get bored after waiting so long just to see a parry or a deflect.

I wonder if the animations and timing is really the issue here. Seems to me the ignorant writer was excepting a true real-time combat system, and apparently wasn't even aware of the tactical approach during combat ala BG/KOTOR.

Maybe I haven't followed DA closely enough (doesn't appear to be for me), but isn't that what it's trying to do? To bring BG style combat to a modern audience? Certainly never appeared to be true real-time - and seems to have D&D style "rounds" under the hood, and as such there's no way an informed person would expect animations that look entirely realistic or responsive. At least, I've never seen a combat system of this nature that managed to appear truly fluid.

Anyway, that's what I thought.

What PW told is that it's possible to make DA combat eye-friendly but, to do it, they would have had to give up some of the factors which keep the gameplay of DA as it is originally intended to be. My guess is that, in Mass Effect 2, Bioware will probably choose a game-play which would have fewer conflicts with graphics. The gameplay of Dragon Age was originally designed for PC platform, as a spiritual successor of BG series, and there are intrinsic limitations compared with role-playing games from Betehsda. While World of Warcraft can totally rely on PCs due to the nature of MMORPG and I've gotten an impression that DA first aimed at something like that in its earlier development stage, Bioware went for console platforms, giving up the multiplayer implementation. I understand that they need a larger denominator enough to keep a big game such as Dragon Age, whether they will rely on PC multi-player market or console market for the denominator. If the choice they did is good or not is still remains to be seen. You could make the thread into yet another console/MMORPG vs single player PC argument, but, before that, it would be suitable for you to ask yourself who should pay the bill enough to keep the development of the "traditional" gameplay with good graphics.

There's your problem - this writer clearly isn't "informed". It's perfectly reasonable for everyone to have their own biases but when you're writing a professional preview, either try to keep them balanced or make some sort of effort to understand the intended market.

Paying attention to the developer's presentation might be a start.

Not only that, but let's remember that DA is a *party* based RPG. All those detailed animations and blocks and parrys and what not may be important for single character RPGs, where you only control yourself. In a party based RPG I expect less at the micro and more at the macro level of tactics, just like in Drakensang.

And that's exactly why I said in another thread that a reviewer must be very familiar with the genre (in this case, playing 3000 hours of WoW doesn't make you familiar with the cRPG genre), and at least have played a few games in the sub-genre (he shouldn't be previewing a party-based RPG if he hasn't played BG, Drakensang or similar. I would even say Dungeon Siege doesn't apply to DA)

But 3000 hours of WoW (or 3, really) should at least teach him the difference between RPGs where your character hits, cools down, and hits again, and button mashing beat-em-ups where you click faster to hit faster. My 7 year old son has a better concept of RPGs. This reviewer's idiocy is unexplainable.

I think you are right but…somehow, despite Dhruin's apparently rational comment here, I cannot get rid of an impression that he adopted one of sacrificial rituals bad habits from hardcore RPG boards, where web hosts put a poorly written article with a cynical comment as "news," letting board members bite it off into pieces as if it were a cow fell into a pool full of piranhas. You can see yet another victim here.