Interview "A lot of faith, and a good head for risk": How two men risked their livelihoods for a new Torment

[Orma]

Roguey sure gave me a headache.

 

[Stabwound]

Fighting the darkspawn after that first starting city is the most boring combat of any game I have every played in my life. Nothing else is even close. Not WoW. Not the original NWN campaign. I truly cannot think of anything. I never made it past the second city because I just couldn't stand the idea of ever fighting one of those things again. There was also some important part of the combat system, something besides the awful cooldowns I think, which I just couldn't take.

...

No enemy variety? It had a lot more enemy variety than DA:O. At least as far as I got. DA:O only seemed to have one enemy type: darkspawn. I didn't see any mages in DA:O, probably due to the fact that I didn't have the masochistic level of patience necessary to get through all of those endless darkspawn fights. I searched for some mod that would just teleport me immedietaly to an area with more interesting combat and no darkspawn (I never wanted to fight one of those things again), but I could never find one. FOV and class customization compared to endless waves of boring, identical trash mobs? There is no comparison.
.

That's basically DA:O in a nutshell. An endless string of darkspawn trash mobs. Sure, there are some mage enemies, but they're still all darkspawn. The Dragon Age setting is one of the worst fantasy settings I've ever seen, far worse than any D&D game. And the turd on the cake is that the combat is basically Korean MMORPG circa 2002 combat where you stand there and press 1-2-3-4 repeatedly while waiting for cooldowns to expire.

Combine that with how the equipment system works, finding very small incremental upgrades every 5 minutes and tons of junk items and you have quite the pile of garbage.

 

[Volourn]

DAO has as much variety as BG1. It has a much better character system than PST. It has more avriety of spells and skills than PST. Anyone who tries to pretend that PST has better gameplay/combat than DAO is retarted. L0LZ

 

[Scruffy]

"I don’t want to make generalizations about the target metric and age for Dragon Age, but it's retarded kids".

 

[Roguey]

click-cooldown-click-cooldown-click-cooldown
Clearly superior to PST combat.

Yep, that already shows more involvement than Ctrl + A click ctrl + A click etc. Some battles require being particular about when you use those abilities which makes it even better.

I did not enjoy a single combat in DA:O. Granted, I gave up on this game after playing through 1/5 of it, so maybe I missed something awesome later (are Deep Roads any fun?).

It suffers the most from too-much-trivial-content on the crit path. I liked some of it.

Oh yes, because DA:O's enemies were so distinct from each other You had to adjust tactics to every one of them, instead of clicking an ability and waiting for the cooldown to end.

Some of them, yes. "Every battle in Dragon Age is exactly the same" is an echo chamber exaggeration as a result of too much time-padding content on the crit path and too many unbalanced aspects in the system for which Bioware deserves a lot of criticism.

If you think party size is meaningless, there is no real point in discussing RPG combat with you, because you're just trolling [/captain obvious mode].

Knights of the Chalice only allows four character parties. It is far more tactical than Planescape Torment, a game that allows six. "Large number = better than" divorced from everything else is an absurd statement to make.

Morte has skills (or abilities, whatever). Fall-From-Grace has them too. Can't remember how it is with the others.

Morte's abilities: A MMO-style taunt (hey like Dragon Age!) and a spell that does damage to a character from a distance (generic enough).

Grace's abilities: A touch attack that drains life from an enemy and gives it to Grace and a touch that takes away HP from Grace and gives it to the recipient. Nothing special; there are comparable spells in DA.

The others have nothing.

As for the spells, I'll take D&D derivative spell variety over generic DAO crap any day.

"I'll take derivative over generic." Okay.

Which is still better than DA:O, which had no enemy variety,

I've already provided links to show this is false.

no interesting battles at all (at least, as far as I've played),

Fights I liked from Ostagar: The first battle in the tower with the hurlock archers supported by a genlock emissary who sets the grease trap near the entrance on fire with a fireball and the fight immediately after where there are two rooms and no matter which one you open, the noise of the fight will alert the enemies in the other and you'll find yourself flanked. The ogre boss is fun too, a shame one can low-effort it by kiting.

generic tiered weapons and armor

There are plenty of good items you can acquire from completing optional content. Fighting a rage demon boss in the mage tower gives you a dragon-killing two-handed sword, killing the (not level scaled) high dragon gives you a ton of awesome loot for various characters, and so on. DA2 definitely fucked up with its smooth equipment treadmill, DA:O lets you jump ahead of tiers in many places.

poor area control due to corridor-like level design.

Torment didn't have this? Some of those maps were wide.

 

[Rake]

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/13/index/15532880/5
Gaider answered.
And he has donated in T:ToN

 

[Infinitron]

Nothing cold about that. I certainly didn't give them money to make a BioWare RPG. There are, after all, people who want RPG's other than the ones we make-- and if they can make one more reactive and with a more involved storyline than us? Awesome. If it's anything like Planescape: Torment, that's exactly what it'll be. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

sup Roguey

 

[Jaesun]

BioWare makes games that are reactive?

 

[Orma]

''There are, after all, people who want RPG's other than the ones we make-- actual RPG's. And if they can make
one more reactive and with a more involved storyline than us? Awesome...''

 

[kris]

BioWare makes games that are reactive?

I think he was brutally honest on that one. Saying they are reactive, but not as reactive as some others.

 

[Creamy Muffin]

BioWare makes games that are reactive?

They react to the awesome button being pressed mashed.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Mass Effect 4 - 'Rough Choices'

Welcome to the character creation menu!

Press A for Good Shepard
Press B for Bad Shepard

*B*

Congratulations, you made a choice! Do you wish to win game?

Press A for Win game
Press B for Win game + Purchase DLC armor

 

[Roguey]

sup Roguey

Involved story, yes. Claiming it's more reactive is the result of a hazy memory.

 

[jewboy]

I cannot imagine what Gaider must have thought when he saw that thread about him. Haha! I don't think it's fair to blame everything on him either. He's just one dev. But I guess the comments weren't really about him specifically anyway.

 

[Mangoose]

For the last time, both games suck at combat.

The difference is that PST has low frequency of combat (except for a few unfortunate parts...) whereas DAO has retarded amounts of trash combat.

 

[Spectacle]

PST has brilliant combat compared to any post-BG2 Bioware game.

 

[DwarvenFood]

Well it's a bit of a stretch saying PS:T combat is brilliant compared to DA:O combat.. didn't you hear the news, the new edgy is to not be so edgy.

:trollsurfingrazorbladebuticantbebotheredtofindthepic:

 

[Roguey]

For the last time, both games suck at combat.

The difference is that PST has low frequency of combat (except for a few unfortunate parts...) whereas DAO has retarded amounts of trash combat.

"If I keep repeating the same thing again and again I win the argument!"

 

[Mangoose]

For the last time, both games suck at combat.

The difference is that PST has low frequency of combat (except for a few unfortunate parts...) whereas DAO has retarded amounts of trash combat.

"If I keep repeating the same thing again and again I win the argument!"

That's funny, coming from the troll.

 

[MicoSelva]

Yep, that already shows more involvement than Ctrl + A click ctrl + A click etc. Some battles require being particular about when you use those abilities which makes it even better.

I'll pass on mechanical involvement that does not involve thinking and exists just to keep player occupied.

Some of them, yes. "Every battle in Dragon Age is exactly the same" is an echo chamber exaggeration as a result of too much time-padding content on the crit path and too many unbalanced aspects in the system for which Bioware deserves a lot of criticism.

If the variety was there, I haven't noticed it before quitting.

If you think party size is meaningless, there is no real point in discussing RPG combat with you, because you're just trolling [/captain obvious mode].

Knights of the Chalice only allows four character parties. It is far more tactical than Planescape Torment, a game that allows six. "Large number = better than" divorced from everything else is an absurd statement to make.

Bringing KoTC as an argument when comparing PST to DA:O is even more divorced. I liked Fallout combat better than PST and DA:O too, and You control one character only there. It doesn't matter in this discussion, though.
And yes, KoTC combat is superior to PST and DA:O, no doubt about it. It would be even better if KoTC allowed six-character parties, though.

Grace's abilities: A touch attack that drains life from an enemy and gives it to Grace and a touch that takes away HP from Grace and gives it to the recipient. Nothing special; there are comparable spells in DA.

The others have nothing.

At least You get to use these abilities with some thought, instead of clicking on the one that is not on cooldown at the moment.

I may be repeating myself, but I really do hate MMO-style combat with clicking on abilities and waiting for cooldowns to wear off. I despise it.

no interesting battles at all (at least, as far as I've played),

Fights I liked from Ostagar: The first battle in the tower with the hurlock archers supported by a genlock emissary who sets the grease trap near the entrance on fire with a fireball and the fight immediately after where there are two rooms and no matter which one you open, the noise of the fight will alert the enemies in the other and you'll find yourself flanked. The ogre boss is fun too, a shame one can low-effort it by kiting.

Okay. I did not find these fights memorable (I don't remember the first one at all, and the second one I've won by kiting), but to each his/her own.

generic tiered weapons and armor

There are plenty of good items you can acquire from completing optional content. Fighting a rage demon boss in the mage tower gives you a dragon-killing two-handed sword, killing the (not level scaled) high dragon gives you a ton of awesome loot for various characters, and so on. DA2 definitely fucked up with its smooth equipment treadmill, DA:O lets you jump ahead of tiers in many places.

This demon in mage tower kicked my ass. Multiple times. It was pretty cool.
Unfortunately, this is one of the rare exception. Most enemies are level scaled, and so is the loot. And DA:O does not have inherent huge item variety that made random scalable loot moderately interesting in Neverwinter Nights.

poor area control due to corridor-like level design.

Torment didn't have this? Some of those maps were wide.

It did, but You brought this as an argument in favour of DA:O, and they're pretty much the same in this regard.