Game News Dragon Age is too hard; 1st patch makes it easier

[DarkUnderlord]

Tags: Dragon Age

According to <a href="http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/11/06/download-dragon-age-origins-v1-01a-patch/">the patch notes</a>:
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<blockquote> * Fixed potential corruption of character statistics
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* Fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable
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* Character Creator Fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable
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* <b>Character Creator Made Easy difficulty easier</b>
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* <b>Slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty</b>
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* Fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays</blockquote>
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lulz.
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Thanks <b>SuicideBunny</b>!

 

[Melcar]

 

[circ]

Nice priorities there BioWare. Instead of say I don't know, putting together a team to redesign the armor and textures and dildoswords, you make a stupidly easy game even easier. Well, I guess the BioWare fans spoke and you listened.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Well at least they didn't touch the harder difficulties.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Well at least they didn't touch the harder difficulties.

Indeed. Bioware reacted pretty well to the (stupid) reviewers who pretty much universally bashed the game for requiring more thought then Diablo 2.

 

[Gragt]

Different game but that reminds me of the morons who now complain that the first patch for Torchlight made enchanting less overpowered by raising the cost as well as the failure rate by 2% for each new enchant on each item.

 

[M_I_C_K_E_Y_M_O_U_S_E]

I wonder how many of you found it easy on the hardest setting. And it's perfectly fine to make the easy difficulty setting a stroll on the beach, DAO is blatantly designed for people who want to spend more time reading, role playing and talking than actually playing the game for the combat.

 

[CrusaderTemplar]

Nightmare is easy =/ I did spend most of the time reading and just finished the game today. Then I had to finish it 2 more times using previous saves to see the endings. I'm thinking the 4th one might need to be backtrack a whole lot.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Nightmare is easy =/ I did spend most of the time reading and just finished the game today. Then I had to finish it 2 more times using previous saves to see the endings. I'm thinking the 4th one might need to be backtrack a whole lot.

Didn't it only come out a few days ago? And you have finished it 3 times? How short is this thing?

 

[Overweight Manatee]

I wonder how many of you found it easy on the hardest setting. And it's perfectly fine to make the easy difficulty setting a stroll on the beach, DAO is blatantly designed for people who want to spend more time reading, role playing and talking than actually playing the game for the combat.

It feels moderately challenging as a mage so far (@ 20% completion), if I restarted now knowing how the system works and how to maximize character power it would probably be pretty easy. But I feel playing a warrior would be a bit harder and rogues would be significantly harder, unless there is something I'm missing. At the least, it would require a lot more micromanagment.

 

[racofer]

BUT GUISE I HEARD BANGING AGE ORIGINS IS SO AWESOME AND INTENSE

 

[aries202]

Easy really should be easy as in "I just want to play this game for the story" and "I just want to have (more) fun in combat i.e. running and gunning people and monsters down"

From what I've seen this

"Slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty."

feature (of the patch) does not make the game that much easier. Anyway, if you, on normal, find the game, to easy, please crank up the difficulty to hardcore or nightmare...

Don't demean others that play on the easy difficulty...

 

[Nael]

Easy really should be easy as in "I just want to play this game for the story" and "I just want to have (more) fun in combat i.e. running and gunning people and monsters down"

From what I've seen this

"Slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty."

feature (of the patch) does not make the game that much easier. Anyway, if you, on normal, find the game, to easy, please crank up the difficulty to hardcore or nightmare...

Don't demean others that play on the easy difficulty...

Agreed. I played it on Hard, but I turned it down to normal first, and then to easy for the defense of Red Cliff part because I wanted to try and finish it without losing any of the defenders. I didn't see much difference between Normal and Easy. So this patch makes some sense from my experience.

 

[ChristofferC]

Maybe I can progress in the game after installing this patch. I've reached a fight against 12 trash mobs, one mage and a boss guy. The boss guy two shots my tank and one shots my other characters on easy.

EDIT: yay I did it

 

[MapMan]

Im playing the game on hard as a dwarf warrior tank. From what I learned already, playing mage is the easiest. Some fights were really hard and I had to abuse to win(Taunt + run around while rest of the team kills the mob(s) ).

 

[Tails]

Golden age of gaming is for sure now.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Yeah, I'm playing on hard, but have on occasion had to switch to normal due to a party lineup that isn't suited to the task at hand (e.g. going into the redcliffe defence against the swarms of mobs with only one mage and precious little AoE disables). I've noticed a lot of people complaining about difficulty (on official forums and gamefaqs) weren't complaining about global difficulty, but rather difficulty spikes. They could have done a lot more to help those players by improving the class balance, as the same fight can vary from a cakewalk to nigh-impossible depending on your party balance, even when comparing lineups that on paper seem balanced: e.g. 1 tank, 1 dps-warrior, 1 archer, 1 mage is awesome vs bosses (give you just enough cc, great single-target 'focus-fire' damage, and pinning shot to enable kiting of strong melee bosses) but horrible vs swarms of monsters (not enough cc, difficult to draw mobs off both the mage and archer, espec as archer doesn't have 'get-away' spells and instastuns). Whereas 2 warrior, 2 mage makes swarms absolutely trivial due to mass cc, combined AoE damage, good healing and easy to keep aggro on the warriors due to AoE stuns, but makes some boss fights unnecessarily hard.

You could keep normal difficulty as is, or even raise the difficulty somewhat, whilst giving rogues/archers an option for dropping aggro or escaping a melee combat (e.g. a 'hide in plain sight' talent - unlike mages, this wouldn't have any stun/damage effect on the opponents - it just gets you away from them once per battle), and giving warriors a DnD-style paladin build, where they can get something equivalent to the first tier healing spell - again it's far too weak to really being stealing relevance away from the mages, but it would just mean that any build that looks like it 'should' be viable on paper actually is viable.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Easy difficulty is easy, and normal is a little easier. Higher difficulties are untouched.

Seems ok to me. Shame the harder diffs weren't made harder.

 

[Lothers]

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I've never died on normal, 40% of the game. I wonder what person could find it difficult on easy.

 

[racofer]

I wonder what person could find it difficulty on easy.

 

[Lothers]

I wonder what person could find it difficulty on easy.

A pussy? That make sense.

 

[Boyarpunk]

I wonder what person could find it difficulty on easy.

I love those generic "girl gamer" photos that unrealistically depict ggs as modeleque hotties.

We all know real girl gamers are more:

 

[Fat Dragon]

They could have done a lot more to help those players by improving the class balance, as the same fight can vary from a cakewalk to nigh-impossible depending on your party balance, even when comparing lineups that on paper seem balanced: e.g. 1 tank, 1 dps-warrior, 1 archer, 1 mage is awesome vs bosses (give you just enough cc, great single-target 'focus-fire' damage, and pinning shot to enable kiting of strong melee bosses) but horrible vs swarms of monsters (not enough cc, difficult to draw mobs off both the mage and archer, espec as archer doesn't have 'get-away' spells and instastuns). Whereas 2 warrior, 2 mage makes swarms absolutely trivial due to mass cc, combined AoE damage, good healing and easy to keep aggro on the warriors due to AoE stuns, but makes some boss fights unnecessarily hard.

I'm not really seeing the problem here. Seems to me they've kept the game from having that "one true party" that excels at everything. Your party combinations will excel against certain enemy combinations but be at a disadvantage against others.

 

[JarlFrank]

I wonder what person could find it difficulty on easy.

I love those generic "girl gamer" photos that unrealistically depict ggs as modeleque hotties.

We all know real girl gamers are more:

Yeah, the gaming girls that look like the first picture usually play games on the PC and usually prefer turn-based to realtime.
True story actually since I know some (mostly Eastern European) girls who like turnbased strategy (especially Heroes 3).

 

[Zeus]

Easy really should be easy as in "I just want to play this game for the story" and "I just want to have (more) fun in combat i.e. running and gunning people and monsters down"

Yeah, I agree. There should be a mode for people who don't like any challenge (Easy), a mode for people who love challenge (Hard) and a mode for people who are too lazy to select the difficulty (Normal).