Preview Dragon Age II Review Tidbits

[curry]

I'm doing it now, oh the impatient one, but I'm at work and constantly interrupted.

Forget what I said. Don't reply to him. Finish AoD instead :D

I thought it's well established by now that AoD is vapourware.

 

[Mangoose]

Because the vast majority of quests are fairly simplistic "kill x".

snip

To both sides, proving that the majority of quests is simplistic or not simplistic doesn't mean giving a multi-paragraph example of a single quest.

I'm trying to follow this discussion but it's all "this quest proves my point" "but wait this quest proves my point" "but you should consider this quest, not that quest" "wait what about this quest."

Decline of RPGCodex (ex-) admins.

 

[Grunker]

I thought Origins was a decent RPG, and certainly a lot better than I expected. I really thought that if they removed a lot of the filler combat and followed through on the consequences in places like Redcliffe instead of pussing out, the game would have legitimately been very good.

You're clearly retarded. How to turn DA:O into atleast a mediocre RPG: Remove Alistair, Morrigan, Zevran, Wynne and Leliana. Remove all areas and get a team with some programming experience to do it instead. Hire artists with actual schooling. Get a director with some D&D experience if possible to come up with skills that aren't so dull and unbalanced. Also get same director to come up with names that aren't so utterly shitty and an actual plot. Hire a team, obviously europeans, to write up interesting side quests, just one will do.

The edginess is strong in this one.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

How would you have designed it differently if given the chance?

Dammit Jaesun

I'm a lowly peasant consumer of prestigious rpgs, not a designer. Don't you know that people who criticise things don't have the talent to come up with something better?

I will have to half ass this.

I really do not remember much of the lore here so here's what I remember: The entire tower is now crawling with uglies. There's a powerful mage up at the highest level possessed by a pride demon and below him is a sloth demon who puts you on an express ride to the fade, and below that a couple of encounters like the desire demon and unscathed survivors.

After Wynne lets you in or you let yourself in forcibly, the Sloth demon should be waiting for you pretty much immediately and do his thing. The party willingly breaks itself up and seperates. If Wynne is with the party, her little guardian thing manages to give her self-awareness back just after the demon leaves. You go through her own nightmare, which should be at a low difficulty and perhaps make her out to be more badass than you expected. Emotional engagement!

You now have to use Wynne for the first bit until you reach your main on the first floor, which is trapped in a dream relevant to his origin.

The rest of the characters are spread out throughout the floors and this pattern is set and rearranged every time you recruit a character in the game so you don't get to reload until morrigan's the character you save after you get out so you start owning shit with two mages.

Do each character's nightmare thing like smaller and more focused fade bits, except with more actual mindfuckery and twisted versions of the real world, none of this purple alien landscape business.

Assign a specific type of demon tailored for each character with his own ways of twisting their memories, and when your wynne/your main with the help of wynne transferring him in somehow gets into the dream, have him assume a character with skills and stats and a role in that dream that symbolically opposes that demon. None of this herp you now have mouse form business. Basically this means more time spent on saving characters and less wanking about with puzzles and mazes.

I'm lazy and don't want to think of more so yeah, something like this. Yes I am aware I did not even add delicious new choices and consequences. That requires branching and I am lazy. But the gameplay and flow structure has been altered sufficiently.

 

[Mangoose]

I'm a lowly peasant consumer of prestigious rpgs, not a designer. Don't you know that people who criticise things don't have the talent to come up with something better?

Might sig this.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

There were no real choices and consequences, self-contained or otherwise, in the standard Bio design.

Maybe I wasn't clear. Let me try and enumerate on what I meant.

In the typical Bioware design, the sorts of choices you make only have a mechanical effect on the game within the quest or questline barring a few persistent elements, namely alignment shifts (Reputation, Light/Dark side, Wimp/EXTREME points) or character rewards (stats, experience, gold, and items).

For example, in BG1, you have the choice between siding with a merchant in the woods, or a band of druids. If you side with the merchant, you can pick up a quest later from him. If you don't, you lose out on the quest; also his brother, plus a few goons will jump you later when you reach the city of Baldur's Gate. There are no real branching paths as far as the main game goes, just a choice with consequences within the questline, completely contained within it. Outside of the questline, your actions influence nothing really. Every other quest or questline is entered with a blank slate.

This applies to Dragon Age as well. All of your actions in the four different hubs are, essentially, contained only in their respective questlines. What you do in the Forest doesn't effect much in the Underground or the Mage Tower (yes...I know the example with the mages in Redcliffe, but that's more an outlier than a standard, and is terribly easy to game around). Yes, choices do influence the allies you have in the final battle, but nothing drastic is changed in the gameworld. The only external things influenced by your actions are ending slides, which while nice, don't really effect gameplay much, they're more flavor. That isn't to discredit what flavor can do; as anyone who has played Arcanum knows, even a simple series of fetch quests can be quite entertaining given proper flavoring.

Of course, I don't think I've really fleshed out the Bioware formula entirely. In fact, going off the description of self-contained questlines I've written, it would seem to encompass every quest in most every RPG. What external effects does killing Gizmo in Junktown have (besides nuking the ability to use gambling)? How does your handling of Shrouded Hill's troubles do anything later on (besides the Thieves' Guild tip)? Does anything in New Reno matter outside of it? Essentially, what makes the Codex favored games better than Dragon Age? They all follow a similar formula oftentimes, no?

The difference with those games is all about multiple approaches to problems and that different characters should likely experience content in a proportionally different way, given the choices they make, both in game and in character development. Dragon Age's Redcliffe quest...it's mostly the same when two characters run through it. Compare to the myriad of options different characters have to tackle the Fallout 1 endgame areas. Redcliffe is more comparable mechanically to BG2's Underdark and drow city section than to Mariposa, I'd think. There are a lot of choices in those two Bioware questlines, but they'll play out similarly for most characters, with some minor differentiability for different playthroughs.

In summation, I still don't see Dragon Age questlines and roleplaying as anything special. It is merely a refinement (a real one, not the BG2 to NWN/KOTOR kind) of the Bioware standard of role-playing, mostly via better flavoring. Not to say it's bad, just nothing really special.

You enter the Sahuagin City. Your goal is to leave, but you can't until you deal with a local problem. The king wants you to kill the prince. You have no choice but to go kill the prince fighting your way through the map. At that point you get a single choice: kill the prince or agree to help him and go kill the king.

To illustrate my point, let's take this example. What does this design remind you of? It should remind you of the elves/werewolves questline, in which you fight through the exact same slog of encounters no matter what, and then have a choice, which mechanically results only in a choice of boss fight. Prince or king corresponds to elf leader plus trees or wood spirit plus wolves. For the most part, the core mechanics of Bioware quest design are unchanged.

Bloodlines had a great atmosphere, writing, characters, voiceovers. The game was linear and quest design was hardly anything special. I'll be more than happy to elaborate if it's necessary.

I read your other posts on Bloodlines. Makes sense. I can agree to count Bloodlines out in terms of quest design. Thinking of it now, yeah, many quests had little in the way of differentiability or choices with consequences embeded within them.

Alpha Protocol was kinda awful. Very few redeeming features.

This, however, I have to disagree with wholeheartedly. While the combat and stealth mechanics were frankly, shit, the dialogue stance system was retarded, and it had some questionable design issues elsewhere, it most certainly had features to redeem it. Namely writing, and the way it reacted to player choice. It did a pretty good job of dealing out different possibilities depending on player choice. The endgame, especially, was a good example of how to bring all the choices you made together, much better than ME2's terrible flop of a final mission, or Dragon Age's endgame, which was the same for all choices, sans a few party members who may ditch/swap out, and what amount to combat powerups (armies and the "heroes" that might join you in the last phase of the final boss fight).

 

[Volourn]

"Namely writing, and the way it reacted to player choice. It did a pretty good job of dealing out different possibilities depending on player choice. The endgame, especially, was a good example of how to bring all the choices you made together,"

Bullshitz.

 

[commie]

"Namely writing, and the way it reacted to player choice. It did a pretty good job of dealing out different possibilities depending on player choice. The endgame, especially, was a good example of how to bring all the choices you made together,"

Bullshitz.

Stop the liez, start the truthz.

r00fles!

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Stop the liez, start the truthz.

(Perception) I see that Volourn fights the good fight with his voice.

 

[hoverdog]

Stop the liez, start the truthz.

(Perception) I see that Volourn fights the good fight with his ass.

[Repair] Fixed it for you.

 

[ironyuri]

Stop the liez, start the truthz.

(Perception) I see that Volourn fights the good fight with his assburgers.

[Repair] Fixed it for you.

[Science] I hack the console, optimising output 150%.

 

[Radisshu]

Stop the liez, start the truthz.

(Perception) I see that Volourn fights the good fight with his ass.

[Repair] Fixed it for you.

[Intelligence] This joke was of such a cerebral nature that I could enjoy it fully.

 

[racofer]

[Derp] Durrrrr derp duurrrr

 

[sgc_meltdown]

[Derp] Durrrrr derp duurrrr

(Perception) I see you hurr the good durr with your derp.