Dragon Age? What the hell happened to you?

^ Fuck, that's bad news. Means we're getting another NWN (before addons).

Long, linear dungeons with lots of boring monsters? Check.
Stupid NPCs? Check
Sorceror pwns all? Check

They just do not learn, do they?

Is it really true that NPCs don't have even a day/night cycle, or some sort of routine? I'm surprised anyone would even DARE to release an RPG these days without that.
 
Yes, as far as I know, there is no day/night cycle. I personally don't think that this is a 100% bad thing, but the rest is bad... NPCs don't react on stealing, you can try as often as you want, also they don't move away from their positions, etc.

And yeah, combat is a bit buggy too. If one of your people is knocking out a enemy, they don't go on with attacking. You have to manually give the order again. Thats what you do all the time in combat anyway: Pause the game every two seconds and giving orders.

A turn based combat system would have come very handy in here, but well... we all know it's crappy system from the past, where it wasn't possible in games to have realtime combat... or so.
 
I think not having a cycle is really really bad. I mean fuck, if you try to create an atmosphere, that's about the first step. There's nothing more boring in an RPG than a cardboard world setup. The hell, the characters moved around in games as old as Baldur's Gate, plus with the thug attacks by night, etc.

My worst fear may have come true. Welcome to NWN.

Also, I hear they stole the whole racism thing from Witcher :roll:

On the other hand, I've seen a review give it a lot of credit for a reasonably complex consequence system (although then one has to wonder how much of that is actually true).

Lexx said:
And yeah, combat is a bit buggy too. If one of your people is knocking out a enemy, they don't go on with attacking. You have to manually give the order again. Thats what you do all the time in combat anyway: Pause the game every two seconds and giving orders.
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RTwP strikes baaaack! Possibly the worst and most annoying combat system ever conceived of. A "team rpg" just doesn't work well with it. Could've been bearable in something like NWN (but then it was so slow and boring that it would've been better off with an actual TB system).

Srsly, RTwP has to die.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
Also, I hear they stole the whole racism thing from Witcher :roll:
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That's what came to my mind, as well - in both cases we have humans persecuting elves and dwarves and locking them up tight in their cities.
 
Lexx said:
Yes, as far as I know, there is no day/night cycle. I personally don't think that this is a 100% bad thing, but the rest is bad... NPCs don't react on stealing, you can try as often as you want, also they don't move away from their positions, etc.
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Don't worry, I bet they'll make a DLC that will adress just that. For a price, of course.
 
When you say DLC... I've read in a review that there are NPCs ingame who somehow want to "sell" DLCs to you. I don't know how this works in detail but well... you buy a game without DLCs just to get NPCs ingame who want to sell the DLCs to you... eh.
 
they are probably NPCs that are part of the DLC quests and such who have parts in the DLC... and what they do is instead of not having those dialogue lines at all, they have dialogue lines that tell you to get the DLC...

"I would offer you a quest if you had the DLC "Shadows of ElfSuckling!"
 
Never liked or saw the point of the real time turn based combat. Is there a living person who prefers it over just TB or RT? In a game like Dragon Age, I'd rather they do RT with an option to TB (not something like VATS, I mean the actual TB). I was hoping BG2 would be the last game I'd have to suffer through the RTTB.

Also, those NPC's talking with blood on their faces just look silly. I can't be the only one who thinks so.
 
mulaalia said:
There is a relatively good review of DA on eurogamer, they made a good call on Risen so....

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/dragon-age-origins-review
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Their Risen review is terrible. If you want further confirmation of Eurogamer's validity look no further than their Oblivion review.

Lexx said:
When you say DLC... I've read in a review that there are NPCs ingame who somehow want to "sell" DLCs to you. I don't know how this works in detail but well... you buy a game without DLCs just to get NPCs ingame who want to sell the DLCs to you... eh.
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I've heard that they just pitch their quest line and if you accept you get linked to a download.


Apparently the Warden's Keep DLC with its storage space is almost a necessity given the limited inventory.

[url=http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/11/dragon_age_the_hidden_seven_do.php said:
Fidgit[/url]]The bottom line is this: the lack of inventory space is a problem given the way the game was designed. The solution to this problem will cost you seven dollars above and beyond the money you paid when you bought the game
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maximaz said:
Never liked or saw the point of the real time turn based combat. Is there a living person who prefers it over just TB or RT? In a game like Dragon Age, I'd rather they do RT with an option to TB (not something like VATS, I mean the actual TB). I was hoping BG2 would be the last game I'd have to suffer through the RTTB.

Also, those NPC's talking with blood on their faces just look silly. I can't be the only one who thinks so.
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Well, I haven't played Dragon age or Baldur's gate, but KOTOR had RTTB combat, right?

I actually really enjoyed the combat system in the KOTOR games so there are people out there who like RTTB...but I guess there aren't very many of us..

I like it because you could easily pause whenever and issue commands and because you could easily disengage combat and run around lol..
[spoiler:ef2d6c8815] I beat Malak by disengaging combat and running around throwing my lightsaber at him. Fitting way to exact revenge if you remember how he betrayed you earlier lol[/spoiler:ef2d6c8815]
 
Yeah.

I don't really mind RTwP besides the silly people touting it as almost the same as turn based. Wouldn't mind turn based either, but there's no way that they'd implement it, and it'd be difficult to justify making it optional since most of their fanbase wouldn't use it.

maximaz said:
Also, those NPC's talking with blood on their faces just look silly. I can't be the only one who thinks so.
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Thankfully this can be turned off.
 
Tycn said:
Yeah.

I don't really mind RTwP besides the silly people touting it as almost the same as turn based.
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Most of the time it is the same. Look at BG or NWN. And it's annoying cause it loses most TB advantages without that many of its own. I mean, the charas dancing around each other in a circle while taking turns "in real time" in NWN was laughable. On the other hand, in BG everything was happening too fast to realistically micromanage in RT. Those games would gain everything and lose nothing if they were TB.

RTwP is a waste. I'd rather see them use a TB system with simultaneous turns to speed it up - like the way it was (sort of buggily) implemented in TOEE.

I strongly agree that full TB or full RT are much better than the "compromise". DA loses out much because of it. I mean, if they wanna cater to the XBOX crowd, let them use RT combat a'la Fable or Witcher (still with the pause option but not as horrible as Bioware-style RTwP); they could even include a coop mode to maintain the "team" idea. If they wanted to make a strategic complex team-based RPG (doubtfully so), then they should've used full TB, since that works best for the purpose. The way it is, it turns into a mediocre "neither this nor that".

Verd1234 said:
I like it because you could easily pause whenever and issue commands and because you could easily disengage combat and run around lol...
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Well, TB is essentially the same, 'cept there's no need to hit Space every few seconds.

And it's not like disengaging combat is impossible in TB. In FO you could walk away from combat by fleeing the location, same in Arcanum; TOEE had a D&D-style "escape" option in battle. Sure cannot be exploited the was you described, but the fact that RTwP makes such exploits possible speaks against rather than for it.

mulaalia said:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/dragon-age-origins-review
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How come it isn't a 9? :roll:
Also, if there's travel with random encounters, I hope Survival check is still there (really really hope). Or at least the encounter rate is minimal. FF1 was enough of a nightmare.
 
It feels a lot like full RT to me. You can spam out spells as fast as you can cast them, provided you have the mana for it and the spell isn't on cooldown.

Also, you can't queue up more than one action (you even need to click for each 'white' attack). It's tedious as fuck attempting to micromanage everything without being able to queue up multiple skills per character.

Oh, and that euro gamer review wasn't lying about the difficulty. You've got Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare; and Normal is seriously kicking my ass.
 
I'm 16 hours in, at the mages circle, and I'm about level 8, so far so good. The real time combat actually fits for this game, so i'm not harping on it for it's lack of turn based combat(this is bioware after all)

The C and C so far has been alright, They give a lot more dialogue options than average(i mean, last 5 years average). The presentation is great, the followers are actually pretty decent.(Except For Imoen Part Duex) There is also no alignment system, which I actually found to be pretty neat. Choices are more grey and there is a lack of black and white morality.(There still is some, but its not noble paladin or baby kicking villain anymore)

All and all, I'm having fun with it. I totally forgot about boring lands.
 
I miss the ability to queue actions...it's almost like they were attempting to compete with MMOs with this title. The world feels fairly artificial in many ways, and the day/night cycle is one of them.

In fact, I switched back to Titan Quest after spending a few hours with DA:O and had more trouble putting that down. At least with that I know what I'm getting.

I know this community appreciates the CRPG more than most, so I'm glad to be discussing this here. I just wish we had more NMAer mentality in the CRPG development world. Question is, why don't we have it? Too complex? Not enough market share for it? Lazy?
 
Because big gaming companies are more concerned with making money than with making games. Therefore the synonym of "good" as applied to the noun "game" has today is "marketable". Any recent games that aimed more for the RPG "connoisseurs" have either been indie titles, or didn't sell too well (as much as we're talking WRPG). XBAWKS being the most popular gaming console, with its limits and fanbase, only exacerbates the problem.

Pablosdog said:
There is also no alignment system, which I actually found to be pretty neat. Choices are more grey and there is a lack of black and white morality.(There still is some, but its not noble paladin or baby kicking villain anymore)
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Sounds to me like: "We didn't know how to make a good alignment system, so we got rid of it alltogether"... Rather than resorting to a setup where the choices don't have understandable consequences, imo it's better to make the usual morality setup more intelligent. I mean, Arcanum had B&W basic morality setup (choose to save the world or to wreck it), but it was in to way bland or one-dimensional, with plenty of gray areas.
 
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