Dragon Age - Twitter Review @ Twenty Sided
 

Shamus Young has decided to experiment with a new format for his Dragon Age review, Tweeting quick comments as he plays and then coming back to flesh it out. It's not a format that works for me and I suspect it inherently favours a negative vibe but that's Shamus' schtick, anyway. Here's a bit on difficulty from Part 3:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
More information.

You know, on principle I despise Twitter because I'm old and crotchety and I hate being reminded that 16 year olds are going to be around 20 years after I'm dead , even though they're annoying little pricks, and how's that fair exactly? But that notwithstanding…

I like the format of the review exactly because it hits upon the negative points that might otherwise get glossed over or forgotten. I'll say again that we're inherently predisposed to like CRPGs, and I don't need someone telling me how much fun it is to run a party around and collect gear and level up. Just tell me what's annoying, because there's always annoying stuff. Oh is there. And the real question isn't whether I'll like the tried-and-true formula we've all been gaming with for more than a decade, but whether the annoying shit in this particular iteration manages to kiill the fun.

He's right about the difficulty. I've read plenty of posts by people saying "It's not that hard if you just use basic tactics" and then you realize they're talking about casting these spells you just don't have, possibly because you're not even playing a mage and the premade ones come with some pretty sub-optimal builds. Once you get two characters with AOE and two characters with forcefield, yes the fights are basic. But try playing through with a warrior main and Wynne as your only mage, and you have to pick your skills very carefully. That's just hard to do the first time through, especially since the game completely hides the ball as far as any numbers are concerned.

I agree with the difficulty of the game being somewhat broken.

It’s all about having mages… or not.

I started playing the game with a group composed of my main character as a fighter (shield), Sten, Leliana and Wynne. The game happened to be *very* difficult. Despite having Wynne, I had to use insane amount of poultice to win several fights… then I changed Leliana for Morrigan. Sure, I couldn’t open some locks… but suddenly, every fights (except a handful like a certain dragon) became easy. Morrigan seems a must for anyone whose main character isn’t a mage.

A few things I blame:
Level scaling. You have little sense of progressing. Street thugs mid-game are tougher than fully armoured knights in early games. Actually, some of the toughest fights are against street thugs!
Mana-based spells coupled with the fact you always have full mana at the beginning of every fights.
You obtain very powerful spells really early in the game.

The rich background, the story and the still very fun tactical fights keep this game great, but I can’t help myself thinking that the game could have been even better.

Well, I'll admit I'm neither a fan of Shamus nor Twitter, so I'm predisposed not to like this.

I would suggest a good reviewer doesn't gloss over or forget these minor points but, instead, uses them in a different way. Without suggesting I am a good reviewer, I take copious notes when doing a review - almost exactly the same as these tweets. "Load times are too long, "too many rats", "too many mouse clicks to access char stats" and so on. I often note the irritations more readily than the positive points.

The difference is, I then sit back and contemplate the entire product - as I'd expect most reviewers do. I'll often decide [minor irritation #3] is insignificant in the scheme of the game and not worth highlighting.

For example, Shamus' latest Dragon Age article is about how the character model for Wynn is like a supermodel and therefore ridiculous. Maybe even sexist? But if you don't isolate that one, little, tiny point, you realise all the models for every "type" is the same (all males, all Qunari etc), so it may be less immersive but it certainly doesn't say anything about the philosophy or intent of the developers.

Anyway: bah, humbug.

I liked Shamus comic but am split on agreeing and disagreeing … and have spoken enough about Twitter here ;)

It was interesting - his blog was on my RSS, and based on some stuff I had been reading that was a jazz CD review by a couple of guys going back & forth on Twitter, I had started to write one of my Torchlight reviews (I have 2 review copies!) as a series of Tweets … then I saw he was doing it doe Dragon Age … I had to rethink it …

I can't wait for the Twitter fad to end…

But it never will end, and calling it a 'fad' is no different than those who wanted the 'rock & roll fad' or 'mp3 fad' or 'internet fad' or 'social media fad' to end … the term is 'luddite'. ;)

Twitter itself is somewhat of a transitional technology, meaning it will morph and change sort of the way that MySpace is now irrelevant but there is no way you could call the fundamental impact it had a fad that has ended.

Well, predicting the future is pretty hard.

Eventually, I think these social site things will become truly vital and useful tools.

I suppose they already are, to an extent - but I don't see myself using them until all the fluff and pop-culture crap is gone.

However, the concept of sharing thoughts and experiences via the Net - as old as that may be - is a solid one, and one we can benefit from greatly.

Well I disagree about the difficulty. It sounds to me like Shamus made some bad choices and now he's trying to blame the developers for it. All the spells are described quite well, IMHO. You level up pretty quickly, too, so missing good spells can be rectified fairly quickly.

(That's not to say that the spells couldn't use some balancing. Slapping force field on a boss while you take care of all the minions is ridiculously effective, for instance. The duration of that spell should probably be halved and AI should be improved so it doesn't keep attacking targets that are inside a force field.)

Mages are certainly strong - particularly as the game goes on and the mages can afford to put more into willpower. They tend to be weaker against single targets, though, especially in long battles. Morrigan is great for bringing down masses of white-con enemies getting ready to rush in. However, against stronger enemies, putting a fighter in front of the the target and a rogue behind will dish out tons of damage that won't stop when the mana runs out.

Ahem…you are doing *exactly* what he and others have said they object to: 'well, if you build your character/party in *this* way it works - so there'. I happened on some spell combos that work, and they work well. But from many comments it seems that if you do not follow a certain 'formula' the games becomes stupidly hard and unpleasant. For the most part, the successful strategies people use (such as the forcefield boss lockout - which I found somewhat late) reflect crap AI,poor spell design or both - surely things that should be criticized. If having a mage in your party is a prerequisite for having an easy time - I think that shows poor balancing. among other things.

Well, at least for the first run through the game, that´s the case in a lot of party based RPGs, BG2 for example. Playing most of RPGs without spellcasters usually guarantees more difficult experience.

Agreed.

Obfuscated descriptions along with inability to change spell picks on the fly is definitely a problematic combo in DA, but game offers quite diverse portfolio of useful crowd control and area of effect spells nevertheless, so one has to be really unlucky to build a worthless mage imo.
And there are always other class abilities like bombs, traps, bard´s stun song, two handed sweep, war cry, Shale´s auras etc, etc. Aaaand the difficulty slider.

Also, seems like most of guys´ complaints about difficulty come from the fact that he went to Deep Roads very early in his first playthrough which, frankly, is his own fault.
The game states repeatedly Deep Roads are overrun with darkspawn and even though it´s understandable if one takes it just as flavour comments, I think that upon entering the area, it becomes clear quite fast that the statement is true and that it´s one of the places where having some AoE´s will make a big difference.
Plus, when one can´t beat even regular encounters on repeated tries in some areas, it should be obvious one´s not in a shape to be there at all and should return there once he´ll have more tactical arsenal at his disposal.

As for his Broodmother problems, I wonder if he tried positioning his party on solid ground, eh.

Nope imo. Letting player to have easy time regardless of party composition - that would be poor balancing.
As I see it, prerequisite for having an easier time should always be having a well balanced party. In most fantasy RPGs that means having at least one spellcaster present.
And in DA you get one right before the game starts to be more difficult, so…

Ok, you realize there are a total of three classes we're talking about here, right? So 2/4 mages is easy, but 2/4 rogues or 2/4 warriors should be hard? Seems to me that a balanced party in the context of three classes should be a little more flexible. Especially considering the number of warriors you can recruit versus everyone else.

And speaking of "balanced party", during the section where I was stuck with Wynne (on my new playthrough on Hard) I had three mages for a while. It was easier than anything I'd ever done my first playthrough on Normal as a fighter with just one mage. I guess three mages is the most balanced party you can have, yes?

I admit I'm surprised that uncle Shamus had trouble on easy as a mage. Maybe he was trying to avoid the ultimate mage cliche and so he didn't pick up Fireball. I know that's the first spell I went for. Damage, knockdown, interrupt, and DoT… but for some reason neither of the recruitable mages are interested.

I think what we're looking at here is the new paradigm (eww I said paradigm) of consuming information on the internet. As a person who writes, I recognize the process that you've laid out as definitively better for producing superior output. I completely agree. And yet, as a consumer of information, I guess I crave access to the raw forms. I'd rather hear about everything you experience, if possible, and then decide for myself what's going to piss me off or what won't detract too much from the experience. Which is weird, because again I hate new ways of doing things. And young people.

Of course, it's ironic that we're even discussing this in the context of Twitter, because one thing I expect we can agree upon is that no one wants to read bits and pieces of a review over a period of days and weeks as the reviewer is slowly working his/her way through a long game. Twitter is all about real-time communication, but there's no point in reading something like this review until it's pretty far along… So while I like the review in archive form, I can't imagine the point of reading tweet by tweet as it's twat.

Well, the game has only three classes, yes, but you can develop each in various ways which nets you a decent amount of options how to assemble a balanced party.

What I consider a party well balanced for combat is simply a party whose members can together supply all important functions.
I´m probably simplifying a bit here, but in DA it basically means having someone who can effectively dish damage, soak damage and crowd control (unlike in some other RPGs, buffs/debuffs aren´t that crucial in DA).
It just happens that achieving this functionality without a spellcaster isn´t easy.
But as I said, that´s imo the case in most of party based RPGs.

So yes, by these criteria your warrior + 3 mages party was probably a well balanced one. It may even be the most effective of them all, I dunno.
That doesn´t mean there aren´t other options.

In this context, I definitely agree that available warriors/mages ratio is unfortunate. One more mage companion would quite significantly help at making party, eh, make up as well as roleplaying opportunities more flexible.
Two available rogues are imo sufficient since they share a lot of their talents with warriors.

Not quite. There are dozens of ways you can build your party effectively, maybe hundreds of ways. I'm saying that you need to think and experiment. If you're having a lot of trouble then look over the spells and skills next time you gain a level and see what's there that might help you. It's not a matter of just lucking into the "correct" spell choices and tactics, it's a matter of figuring out one of the better tactical systems.

For instance, I got the tempest lightning spell. Great special effects and it does some good damage but there's a major problem - the targets (I mostly aim for archers and mages so I don't hit my own folks) simply walk out of the area of effect then keep attacking. So I'm taking forever to cast the spell, burning a lot of mana, and the result is trivial to overcome. What a waste - I need a respec.

Then along come Wynne. She's got access to the earthquake spell. Somebody had thrown that at me earlier. It didn't hurt but it sure made life hard on my ranged attackers - we couldn't move 2 feet without falling down! Wait a second… couldn't move? I dusted off the old "useless" tempest spell and I've been doing horrible things to ranged attackers ever since.

That's the kind of stuff that makes this game so fun for me. Not just exploring yet another dungeon with yet another grotesque beast that needs to be murdered, but actually exploring the system.

-

Oh, Yeesh, I think there are really four classes: fighter, rogue, mage, and cleric. They combined the mage and cleric spells, though, which left them with 3 "named" classes. At least when I got her, Wynne was decked out with spells that matched the cleric class more the a magic user. There are enough healing and buff/debuff powers to keep her that way, too. If you do that then take the good old fighter/thief/magic user/cleric foursome the game will tell you that you've got a warrior, a rogue, and two mages even though you've got the classic four-class party. So yeah - there are symatic games going on here.

Er….. comparing twitter to 'rock & roll'? Um…ok.

Calling the evolution of internet communication a fad … I call us equal ;)

I'm going to assume you're being sarcastic, because I know you couldn't have been serious in regarding Twitter that highly.

It was more light-hearted joking than sarcasm … ;)

Well, what I was saying is that Twitter is merely an evolutionary step in the overall development of internet communications - and communications in general, just as the rock & roll of the 50's is an anachronism with no current relevance but an unmistakable overall importance.

The problem is that Twitter would be largely insignificant without cel-phones, so I think you're giving the internet a little too much credit there.

That information might have been true early in 2008, but most folks use it in a truly converged way between a whole host of devices and also with other integrated apps.

I think we might as well give this up, as it is clear that you really have no idea about this stuff nor do you want to, which is fine but you are coming across like someone who still contends all console games are dumbed down platformers.

I'm quite familiar with the way it's used Mike, and it's quite clear that you would defend it for whatever reason regardless of the facts.

Your condescending comparison of the whole console thing was on the fanboy level, which surprises me, but oh well….

I think that the game is hard or easy depending on your experience with similar sorts of games and your skill. The reviewer is dissing Wynne but I am playing on normal difficulty with her as my only caster right now, basically all I have her do is heal, and having no trouble at all.

I played all the way through as a damage dealing mage earlier and some parts of the game were easier for that earlier group and some for the group I am playing now.

Because you are able to build your characters however you like there is no way that the game is going to be the same difficulty for every build. That is the boon and bane of being able to do that.

BTW, I cannot imagine successfully playing on Hard or Insane difficulty but I hear about people who are.

I liked the combat system, but then again I've always enjoyed finding out how to exploit clearly unintended game mechanics. It might not be everyone's cup of tea though.

For instance, crowd control spells lasts much, much longer on your characters at harder difficulties. The problem? This also affects force field when you cast it on one of your own characters. This alone makes nightmare not very difficult if you know what you're doing. You can keep up force field forever and have plenty of mana to spare while your other characters kill of monsters beating on an invulnerable tank

Yep, there are so many cheap abuses. I totally agree with those who mention that spellcasters are unbalanced. In places like the Deep road where you can often spot groups of enemies from afar, you can just complete most fights by simply casting earthquake and Tempest, the last cold spell and chain-lightning to accelerate the process. Your fighters and rogues just have to stand aside, drink a cup of tea and watch the firework.

Normally, you would need your fighters to at least stop the wounded enemies from getting to your exhausted spellcasters but here, you don’t even need them because enemies can all be fairly easily knocked to the ground, stunned, paralyzed, frozen, cowered and for the strongest, force-fielded!