Dragon Age restored my faith in next gen RPG

[Soulforged]

(...) The areas are small and the game doesn't appear to be able to support many NPCs on the screen at once. This really hurts the game in what is supposed to be a "big" city. The big cities in the Infinity Engine were way better.

That's completly false. Areas are as big as you can make them, the engine supports a lot of creatures at the same time on the same place (or stage if you want), the City of Denerim was badly designed anyway, but it has nothing to do with the engine, it certainly felt that way at least if you compare it with the city of Amn, but that's an unfair comparison, every design element has to respond to a wider design plan, and that has a lot to do with the setting: in Dragon Age you have a horde of evil monsters persuing you and therefore making an expansive city with interesting areas and lots of quests in Denerim will feel out of place.

Also, most of the dungeons drag on for about one level too long. The dungeon to get the Urn of Sacred Ashes is a frigging marathon. Bioware hasn't been able to design interesting dungeons since Throne of Bhaal.

With this I agree, but this only goes to show how areas are really big sometimes, too big for their own sake in fact.

 

[made]

in Dragon Age you have a horde of evil monsters persuing you and therefore making an expansive city with interesting areas and lots of quests in Denerim will feel out of place.

I'm not sure I follow your logic. Are you saying Denerim is intentionally bland and uninspired because otherwise it would take away the focus from the equally bland and uninspired Darkspawn horde?

Anyway, TW's Wyzima is a perfect example of how capital city worth the name should be realized in modern game. While not as expansive as Tarant or Britain, it's very atmospheric and creates a perfect illusion that the areas you can visit are only part of a much larger whole. In the fucking NWN engine no less.

 

[Soulforged]

I'm not sure I follow your logic. Are you saying Denerim is intentionally bland and uninspired because otherwise it would take away the focus from the equally bland and uninspired Darkspawn horde?

Yes it's intentionally that way, wheter it's bland or not is a matter of personal perception. In Baldur's Gate 2 you were not rushed to do anything so you could explore and disperse yourself in various tasks across a sprawning city. The same cannot be said about Dragon Age.

And yes I do feel many things about the design are uninspired.

 

[Sodomy]

In Baldur's Gate 2 you were not rushed to do anything so you could explore and disperse yourself in various tasks across a sprawning city .

lolwut?

Your sister being kidnapped, and, presumably, tortured, isn't a reason to hurry?

 

[CarnivalBizarre]

Dragon age is fun, I'm on the end of a second play-through. While some people spend their time bitching about a game I had alot of fun Worth every penny I say...

 

[doctor_kaz]

(...) The areas are small and the game doesn't appear to be able to support many NPCs on the screen at once. This really hurts the game in what is supposed to be a "big" city. The big cities in the Infinity Engine were way better.

That's completly false. Areas are as big as you can make them, the engine supports a lot of creatures at the same time on the same place (or stage if you want), the City of Denerim was badly designed anyway, but it has nothing to do with the engine, it certainly felt that way at least if you compare it with the city of Amn, but that's an unfair comparison, every design element has to respond to a wider design plan, and that has a lot to do with the setting: in Dragon Age you have a horde of evil monsters persuing you and therefore making an expansive city with interesting areas and lots of quests in Denerim will feel out of place.

I have read this about the technology elsewhere, but I have yet to see proof. The big zombie fight in RedCliffe, for example, wasn't very impressive. You clear out one wave of about 8 and then another wave magically appears so that your frame rate won't take a dive. That is one area where having the entire group of enemies on screen would have made the encounter more fun.

 

[Emotional Vampire]

Dragon age is fun, I'm on the end of a second play-through. While some people spend their time bitching about a game I had alot of fun Worth every penny I say...

I know what you mean, I have a blast every time I shit into my own mouth and there are people who just flush it.

Morans

 

[CarnivalBizarre]

Dragon age is fun, I'm on the end of a second play-through. While some people spend their time bitching about a game I had alot of fun Worth every penny I say...

I know what you mean, I have a blast every time I shit into my own mouth and there are people who just flush it.

Morans

Somehow I don't doubt you do, probably a family thing, no?

 

[entertainer]

Dragon age is shit, I didn't even torrent it. While some people spend their time defending a game this shit Waste of money I say...

 

[Soulforged]

Your sister being kidnapped, and, presumably, tortured, isn't a reason to hurry?

The world was not going to end or millions of cratures were going to be slain just because you did not rescure her. It's certainly not the same.

EDIT: Also, perhaps you simply didn't care for her?

I have read this about the technology elsewhere, but I have yet to see proof. The big zombie fight in RedCliffe, for example, wasn't very impressive. You clear out one wave of about 8 and then another wave magically appears so that your frame rate won't take a dive. That is one area where having the entire group of enemies on screen would have made the encounter more fun.

That's not possible with either of the engines. Besides do you imagine fighting all those monsters at the same time? Considering the encounter design and level scaling in the game, and that the fight is not fun at its current state, given how long it drags, I think it would have been very frustrating.

 

[janjetina]

In Baldur's Gate 2 you were not rushed to do anything so you could explore and disperse yourself in various tasks across a sprawning city .

lolwut?

Your sister being kidnapped, and, presumably, tortured, isn't a reason to hurry?

It is not, unless the game compels you to hurry, by imposing certain time based penalties. Otherwise, you are only LARPing that you have to hurry (this is the right context for the use of that word).

 

[TNO]

Soulforged:

The issue is interesting, but the point is wrong. Bioware almost always messes up the sense of urgency by giving you some urgent save the world and find the mcguffin or everyone dies plot arc and then add in a load of stupid shit as sidequests.

Mass effect is the best (though not only) example. I reckon you could easily finish the game in 10 ish hours by doing what they tell you. From the citadel, collect the plot coupons, go to Virmire, and then hit the endgame sequence. This is what any sensible commander would do. You're spoonfed exactly where you should go and what to do to stop Saren and EVERY SECOND COUNTS. Why on earth are you going to fuck around going to all the other systems and doing some crap like flagging <5t mineral deposits?

You might go it is fine for the developer to give the players the choice of being a really incompetent commander. But I reckon about half of an ME 'completionist' play through (no idea why you would) would be this tangential stuff. Furthermore, because it is bioware, and other bits of metagame (no timer) you know no matter how long you spend dicking around you'll still stop Saren in the nick of time. Bioware are relying on you having as little a commitment to verisilmitude as they do their sidequests.

Contrast a game which does sprawling exploration right: Fallout. Not only are the sidequests/non-essential stuff actually worth playing in the first place, you aren't led by the nose to where you need to go and what you need to do to save the world: you get leads, but they don't always help (V15 is a dead end, for instance.) This, combined with the long travel time between settlements means your character doesn't have to be retarded to explore and do some side-quests: for a start, it might gather information for your goal, and secondly there's no great loss in hanging around an hour or two to help out.

Most importantly, there is a timer to keep you in urgency - first time through, you have no idea how much time you're going to need to get the water chip, so you don't want to waste time. Although (post patch) the final set of objectives don't have much of a time-limit, there is an imperative to explore: gather your forces and attack the bad dudes.

Bioware's 'the world revolves around the player character' style fuck up both these motives. They treat the player like an idiot and they tell him EXACTLY WHAT TO DO AND WHERE TO GO TO PROGRES THE PLOT (eg. find the star maps! investigate these planets! Convince these allies, they're here!) so you eliminate the need for 'fact finding' exploration. You do have supposed immanent death of the galaxy to stop so, unlike Fallouts mutant army, there is no sense of exploring around and biding your time to get in the best possible position to assault - in theory, you know you don't have time for that. However, because it is bioware, you know that, in fact, you have plenty of time - the antagonists will conveniently wait until you decide you want to progress the story before almost getting to the apocalypse you need to stop.

What's especially annoying is that this is very, very easy to fix. All you need to do is stop spoonfeeding information to the player, and let him find him for himself. Let the council say something vague like 'Geth attacks are coming from this bit of the galaxy, perhaps start there?' and then subsequent exploration could then refer you on to the right places (find a record of Benezia's movements, a scientist who knows of this prothean specialist called liara, contact lost with a colony on feros) or something like that (hell, for real non-linearity, add dead ends and red herrings). Obviously, more work needs to be done so the player feels that he can't waste time or the antagonist is going to win (good reasons for explicit timers are hard to come by, but perhaps progressive bad guy attacks knocking out more and more of the map to give a measure of how long you've got left) but at least it would be a goddamn start.

 

[Sodomy]

In Baldur's Gate 2 you were not rushed to do anything so you could explore and disperse yourself in various tasks across a sprawning city .

lolwut?

Your sister being kidnapped, and, presumably, tortured, isn't a reason to hurry?

It is not, unless the game compels you to hurry, by imposing certain time based penalties. Otherwise, you are only LARPing that you have to hurry (this is the right context for the use of that word).

Learn to understand context. Since DA didn't put a time-based penalty on the player, either, and he was comparing DA to BG2, your argument only makes you look like a dumbass.

EDIT: Also, perhaps you simply didn't care for her?

Too bad you're not given that option because you still, eventually, have to go fucking rescue her.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

The more I play DA the more amazed I am. The game gets most of the major things right yet it fails at the little things. The contradictions are amusing.

How do you spend that much time in development and end up with a unified inventory?

How do you produce a game thats built ground up for the PC thats so loaded with technical shortcomings and limitations?

Why such horrible encounters with such splendid qwest structure?

Didnt anyone see a problem with the scaling?

 

[VasectomyOmega]

I find it amusing that Arl Eamon is morbidly sick from the start of the game, but you could not visit Redcliffe and spend your sweet time doing other quests and he'd still be alive by the time you visit Redcliffe. But then the Darkspawn invasion forces you to go to Denerim. What a contrast in "urgency."

At least they set themselves up for a better sequel, storywise, with Morrigan having my baby and whatnot.

 

[janjetina]

Learn to understand context. Since DA didn't put a time-based penalty on the player, either, and he was comparing DA to BG2, your argument only makes you look like a dumbass.

I don't care about his argument or the millionth DA thread, the only thing that concerned me was your eyestabbingly dumb sentence. Context and the fact that similar reasoning can be applied to the darkspawn invasion (and other plot elements) in Dragon Age are irrelevant to the fact that your argument is invalid, which was the only thing I was trying to point, with no bearing on the discussion as a whole. My post was written clearly and concisely, so stop attributing additional imaginary meanings to it, i.e. stop (once again) LARPing. So, try harder next time, take a lesson in reading comprehension, learn to express yourself coherently, try to use your brain for something other than brain farts etc.

 

[Good Ol' Drog]

I'd go as far as to say that Dragon Age has revitalized the hardcore RPG genre. Seriously, it's so much more complex and deep than ye olde Fallout/Arcanum/Baldur's Gate 2. It has heaps of content, and that content is not stick figures with floating text over their heads. Get real, it's 2010.

 

[SerratedBiz]

This summer: Good Ol' Drog ain't good no more.

 

[denizsi]

I bought a second hand Dragon Ace CE with game guide. I loved how this new fucked up partnership ownership between BW and EA has reflected on everything from poorly done game menus to poorly working DLCs and auto-patches, shitload of issues caused just by this merging, trying to make everything accessible from within the game while also forcing you to visit both BW and EA websites for registration and whatnot. You can tell it's shit before you even start playing.

 

[Soulforged]

The issue is interesting, but the point is wrong. Bioware almost always messes up the sense of urgency by giving you some urgent save the world and find the mcguffin or everyone dies plot arc and then add in a load of stupid shit as sidequests.

I agree with you: gameplay wise we're talking here about a game with zero urgency, events develope driven on triggers based on game facts and not simply the passing of time, and the triggers are centered on your figure. Though to tell you the truth I do not like time restrictions much. However what I said is thatthe setting was designed for this adventure in particular imposes a sense of urgency (wheter it has any substance or not) and therefore sidequests and tourism should be kept to a minimum.

That's one of the reasons I didn't like the postboard quests, they're were uninspired quests made only for what you would call "experience point grinding", they didn't made much sense in the context of the adventure.

Mass effect (...). Why on earth are you going to fuck around going to all the other systems and doing some crap like flagging <5t mineral deposits?

Yes, I regreted a lot doing those pointless side quests and planet exploring.

I believe Bioware is always driven by the desire of two primary goals:
* Make the game epic (a thing or two at least of which coming generations will sing songs about.)
* Provide tons of content (even if that content has nothing to do with the more urgent matter.)

They also struggle to provide always a point of view from which the character, whichever his loyalties and desires, cannot ignore for his own sake (i.e. the world will be destroyed, and wheter you care or not you'll also die in that destruction.)

I believe that here we face something that deserves its own topic, but has also been discussed to death and back: quantity over quality.

Contrast a game which does sprawling exploration right: Fallout.

Fallout was the only RPG I played in which quest design was spot on in my opinion. There were not tons of side quests that had nothing to do with your main goal, and you always (as far as I recall) had a choice on how you would complete them.

But today we are in the days of the "fat generation", they've got to always get more for their money's worth, and more means much more things to do, loot to collect and achievements to get, in a more general sense of the term: distract yourself from substance by doing what Sisyphus does and grow fat of satisfaction thinking you have done something meaningful. What you do in games is always meaningless, but I think that what a person looks for in virtual worlds is the same thing they aim for in real life.

I think that the fact that they provide all the facts in your face so you can't miss them, as you go on on the next paragraphs, responds also to the same phenomenom I outlined above.

 

[Sodomy]

Learn to understand context. Since DA didn't put a time-based penalty on the player, either, and he was comparing DA to BG2, your argument only makes you look like a dumbass.

I don't care about his argument or the millionth DA thread, the only thing that concerned me was your eyestabbingly dumb sentence. Context and the fact that similar reasoning can be applied to the darkspawn invasion (and other plot elements) in Dragon Age are irrelevant to the fact that your argument is invalid, which was the only thing I was trying to point, with no bearing on the discussion as a whole. My post was written clearly and concisely, so stop attributing additional imaginary meanings to it, i.e. stop (once again) LARPing. So, try harder next time, take a lesson in reading comprehension, learn to express yourself coherently, try to use your brain for something other than brain farts etc.

Where do you morons come from? I mean, I understand that eastern europeans are all retards because you first got raped by the mongols, and then killed your entire nobility off during the Russian Revolution (lol good move there) leaving a bunch of 80-IQ peasants to form your new breeding stock, but how does every Slav mouth-breather find their way to this forum?

Seriously, you're arguing against a point that I never claimed. Let me sum it up for you:

Some dumbfuck: "Well, it made sense for BG2 to have spacious towns with tons of sidequests because its story (note that I said story, not gameplay, you dumbfuck!) isn't urgent. It's ok for DA's towns to behave that way because the game shouldn't offer you the option to explore around during an urgent storyline."

Me: "You're a dumbfuck- BG2's story was just as urgent as DA's".

You: "HAY EVERYONE, LOOK AT ME, I'M A RETARDED SLAV WHO CAN'T UNDERSTAND CONTEXT!!!@@!@!@"

Understand now? Next time, when the first-world citizens are talking, go back to your serf enclave.

 

[Raghar]

(...) The areas are small and the game doesn't appear to be able to support many NPCs on the screen at once. This really hurts the game in what is supposed to be a "big" city. The big cities in the Infinity Engine were way better.

That's completly false. Areas are as big as you can make them, the engine supports a lot of creatures at the same time on the same place (or stage if you want), the City of Denerim was badly designed anyway, but it has nothing to do with the engine, it certainly felt that way at least if you compare it with the city of Amn, but that's an unfair comparison, every design element has to respond to a wider design plan, and that has a lot to do with the setting: in Dragon Age you have a horde of evil monsters persuing you and therefore making an expansive city with interesting areas and lots of quests in Denerim will feel out of place.

Engine? Not a game but a some prepared component which wasn't designed for one unique game, but it can be filled by an art and scripted to pretend it's a real game?
That things Bioware used for Dragon age supported up to 4x4 km. However it was basically a large scene with inability to add other block (similar to seamless world of Morrowind), nor it allowed breakable terrain. Basically it was something like Crysis.

They didn't have even procedurally generated rooms, nor ant optimization. And what do you know about the capability of the "engine" to have multiple characters on screen at once, and its ability to process AI for large numbers of characters? Bioware's games traditionally sucked when someone tried to place slightly more characters into the game. NWN2 crawls with 30? characters. DA is unlikely to be much better.

No time for dragons had a LOT of people in cities, which while they did exactly nothing were at least interesting element.

 

[janjetina]

Where do you morons come from?

You can answer that question by looking up the cunt you emerged from.

I mean, I understand that eastern europeans are all retards because you first got raped by the mongols, and then killed your entire nobility off during the Russian Revolution (lol good move there) leaving a bunch of 80-IQ peasants to form your new breeding stock, but how does every Slav mouth-breather find their way to this forum?

No surprise there, you are just another ignorant blue collar peasant with no clue about geography or history. Keep LARPing your delusions while slaving for your the breadcrumbs your master gives you after his pets are satiated. By the way I satisfied Mensa membership requirements while you were still sucking your father's cock.

Seriously, you're arguing against a point that I never claimed.

Really? Don't blame me for the fact that your subhuman intelligence limits the ways in which you express your primitive thoughts, as evidenced in the post you made:

lolwut?
Your sister being kidnapped, and, presumably, tortured, isn't a reason to hurry?

Understand now? Next time, when the first-world citizens are talking, go back to your serf enclave.

Gauss curve for intelligence is symmetrical and even the First world has its share of imbeciles, so be aware that being one of them doesn't make you special. You're just another illiterate and uneducated individual, a genetic dead end that will be taken care of by the process of natural selection.

TLDR: Learn to express your thoughts in written English.

 

[Sodomy]

HAY GUYZ, I CAN SAY 'YOUR MOM!'

Yes, we're very impressed, untermensch. Now get back to tending the turnips.

No surprise there, you are just another ignorant blue collar peasant with no clue about geography or history. Keep LARPing your delusions while slaving for your the breadcrumbs your master gives you after his pets are satiated. By the way I satisfied Mensa membership requirements while you were still sucking your father's cock.

Everyone on the internet is a genius who is a member of MENSA.

Oh, and slaving for breadcrumbs? Wasn't that an eastern-european thing? You know, the USSR?

Really? Don't blame me for the fact that your subhuman intelligence limits the ways in which you express your primitive thoughts, as evidenced in the post you made:

lolwut?
Your sister being kidnapped, and, presumably, tortured, isn't a reason to hurry?

Wow, you can quote! I have completely underestimated the new slavs! Too bad what you quoted had nothing to do with your "argument", such as it is.

Gauss curve for intelligence is symmetrical and even the First world has its share of imbeciles, so be aware that being one of them doesn't make you special. You're just another illiterate and uneducated individual, a genetic dead end that will be taken care of by the process of natural selection.

Just because the bell curve is symmetrical doesn't mean that IQ doesn't vary with population, dumbfuck.

TLDR: Learn to express your thoughts in written English.

TLDR: you're a dumbfuck.

 

[entertainer]