After watching the stream I have several conclusions. I might be wrong though - didn't personally play the game.
DA3 looks like a rpg for people that never played an rpg. It's closer to Sims Medieval than to Dragon Age Origins.
1. Replacing the wound system with ME3 health system and making "death" of player characters meaningless.
It appears that Dragon Age 3 will feature a regen health system. The life bar will be divided into segments that will refill. If the enemy isn't able to bring one of the segments beyond zero hit points it will go back to full capacity after the battle. It makes usage of potions and conversing health through a dungeon crawl less of an issue. Which sucks. Also the penalty for dying isn't a wound that will bring down your stats. The punishment this time is it taking one your health segments away. While the wound system wasn't perfect (medkits were just another form of potions and there were too many of them) you still tried to avoid getting them. Now a fallen hero after getting up is just as effective as he was before getting slain. We wouldn't want any difficulty in our game would we?
On top of that, now anyone can revive downed PC. Instead of the classic revive spell (which should be rare and costly) now we have health grenades (WTF?!) and even a warrior can revive people just interacting with them. ME3 multiplayer style.
Losing a fight with features like that will be really hard.
2. Warrior range abilities and retarded challenge skill.
I can stress enough how stupid the grappling chain attack is (similar to Scorpion's attack from MK) But beside looking ridiculous it also gives the warrior the ability to compensate for archers, mages and other ranged enemies. Instead of making archers a formidable challenge for a melee character, now you can grab them and bring them to you one by one, so you and your other warrior buddies can hack them to pieces. Are they really afraid people will throw their gamepad (because it's their target audience) at the wall after an encounter with an archer team where the PC got killed because he charged directly at them like an idiot?
Challenge skill seems game breaking to me. In the stream Cassandra runes toward a heavy shield enemy (such a lazy enemy design) challenges him and he instantly faces her and get assraped by Varric and Vivienie who shoot him in the back. It feels like taken from a MMO and yeah I know DAO had aggro skill which was also kinda lame. But there it could at least fail and lasted limited period of time. In the stream it looked like it's an ability with 100% effectiveness. It always works so people will just spam the shit out of it.
Again it seems like Bioware is trying to hold my hand. Because I'm too stupid to position the characters to attack myself.
3. Respawning enemies and level "suggestions".
Laidlaw stated that certain areas will have respawning enemies and only big enemies like Dragons and plot based enemies won't respawn. What the fuck is this? Age of Diablos? (It's already Age of Dildos judging by the LGBT squad-mates but that's a separate issue) It smells to me like combat filler and incoming level grind. God forbid if you will have to backtrack to complete a quest in the area that you already been to, but the quest unlocks at a higher level. Killing the same enemies in the same area for 5th time sure will be fun.
I think all of this is tied to the level suggested plot quest. Game will tell the player what level he should have before activating main storyline quest. Why won't you let me fail Bioware? Why won't you let me get my ass handed to me? Even worse the suggestion thing looks like it's taken out of TOR where planets had suggested levels written below them.
What is this training wheels bullshit?
4. Stationary enemies.
During one of the fights someone asked if you can run away. And Laidlaw responded that - yes - when the combat becomes too hard for you, player can just retreat and the enemy won't follow you. The fuck? Is this some way to get rid of kiting or did they fear that the player might die, so they'll let him get away and pat him on the head when he cries that a big bad Templar kicked them in the ankle? Seems like the latter. I understand that enemies that are guarding something won't give chase, but when a group of knights have a clear advantage they should run them (PCs) down and finish them off. But the player can't get frustrated - they have to prevent that at all cost.
5.
Difficulty level.
The chat spewed out a question about how hard will the Normal Difficulty level be (which was played during the stream). Laidlaw shifted his giant gut and belched out that it is designed to be pretty easy. Ok... so how easy is the Easy Difficulty? Will be it like in ME3 but with different names, so people won't get pissed this time?
Easy - Plot
Normal - Easy
Hard - Normal.
Jesus, I hope not.
6. Ledges.
Ledges now can be used to push your enemies into bottomless pits and kill them. Cool. But, why when the PC character falls instead of game over he just respaws in the place where the fight started? Are they putting in some platform jumping levels - Ultima 8 style - or are they just afraid that people are too stupid to use a bridge without dying 30 times?
Basically it feels like they are aiming at non-gamers and are making the game as streamlined and as easy as possible. If this is true, this game will be even worse than I expect it to be.
Why, Bioware, why.
DA3 looks like a rpg for people that never played an rpg. It's closer to Sims Medieval than to Dragon Age Origins.
1. Replacing the wound system with ME3 health system and making "death" of player characters meaningless.
It appears that Dragon Age 3 will feature a regen health system. The life bar will be divided into segments that will refill. If the enemy isn't able to bring one of the segments beyond zero hit points it will go back to full capacity after the battle. It makes usage of potions and conversing health through a dungeon crawl less of an issue. Which sucks. Also the penalty for dying isn't a wound that will bring down your stats. The punishment this time is it taking one your health segments away. While the wound system wasn't perfect (medkits were just another form of potions and there were too many of them) you still tried to avoid getting them. Now a fallen hero after getting up is just as effective as he was before getting slain. We wouldn't want any difficulty in our game would we?
On top of that, now anyone can revive downed PC. Instead of the classic revive spell (which should be rare and costly) now we have health grenades (WTF?!) and even a warrior can revive people just interacting with them. ME3 multiplayer style.
Losing a fight with features like that will be really hard.
2. Warrior range abilities and retarded challenge skill.
I can stress enough how stupid the grappling chain attack is (similar to Scorpion's attack from MK) But beside looking ridiculous it also gives the warrior the ability to compensate for archers, mages and other ranged enemies. Instead of making archers a formidable challenge for a melee character, now you can grab them and bring them to you one by one, so you and your other warrior buddies can hack them to pieces. Are they really afraid people will throw their gamepad (because it's their target audience) at the wall after an encounter with an archer team where the PC got killed because he charged directly at them like an idiot?
Challenge skill seems game breaking to me. In the stream Cassandra runes toward a heavy shield enemy (such a lazy enemy design) challenges him and he instantly faces her and get assraped by Varric and Vivienie who shoot him in the back. It feels like taken from a MMO and yeah I know DAO had aggro skill which was also kinda lame. But there it could at least fail and lasted limited period of time. In the stream it looked like it's an ability with 100% effectiveness. It always works so people will just spam the shit out of it.
Again it seems like Bioware is trying to hold my hand. Because I'm too stupid to position the characters to attack myself.
3. Respawning enemies and level "suggestions".
Laidlaw stated that certain areas will have respawning enemies and only big enemies like Dragons and plot based enemies won't respawn. What the fuck is this? Age of Diablos? (It's already Age of Dildos judging by the LGBT squad-mates but that's a separate issue) It smells to me like combat filler and incoming level grind. God forbid if you will have to backtrack to complete a quest in the area that you already been to, but the quest unlocks at a higher level. Killing the same enemies in the same area for 5th time sure will be fun.
I think all of this is tied to the level suggested plot quest. Game will tell the player what level he should have before activating main storyline quest. Why won't you let me fail Bioware? Why won't you let me get my ass handed to me? Even worse the suggestion thing looks like it's taken out of TOR where planets had suggested levels written below them.
What is this training wheels bullshit?
4. Stationary enemies.
During one of the fights someone asked if you can run away. And Laidlaw responded that - yes - when the combat becomes too hard for you, player can just retreat and the enemy won't follow you. The fuck? Is this some way to get rid of kiting or did they fear that the player might die, so they'll let him get away and pat him on the head when he cries that a big bad Templar kicked them in the ankle? Seems like the latter. I understand that enemies that are guarding something won't give chase, but when a group of knights have a clear advantage they should run them (PCs) down and finish them off. But the player can't get frustrated - they have to prevent that at all cost.
5.
Difficulty level.
The chat spewed out a question about how hard will the Normal Difficulty level be (which was played during the stream). Laidlaw shifted his giant gut and belched out that it is designed to be pretty easy. Ok... so how easy is the Easy Difficulty? Will be it like in ME3 but with different names, so people won't get pissed this time?
Easy - Plot
Normal - Easy
Hard - Normal.
Jesus, I hope not.
6. Ledges.
Ledges now can be used to push your enemies into bottomless pits and kill them. Cool. But, why when the PC character falls instead of game over he just respaws in the place where the fight started? Are they putting in some platform jumping levels - Ultima 8 style - or are they just afraid that people are too stupid to use a bridge without dying 30 times?
Basically it feels like they are aiming at non-gamers and are making the game as streamlined and as easy as possible. If this is true, this game will be even worse than I expect it to be.
Why, Bioware, why.
