For me Deep Roads is one of the best part of the game, the slog not only helped to emphasise just how harsh was the place but also created another world inside the gameworld.
Are you serious? Thanks to the free out-of-combat recovery, all those trash encounters don't even serve as a proper resource attrition threat. They're just time-wasting loot & exp collection.
https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/Arcane_Warrior_spellcasting
You're still a mage, man. Every spell with an S can be used as part of an opener, before you unSheathe your weapon. Every spell with a D can be cast with normal weapons drawn. Death Cloud, Inferno, the Crushing Prison / Force Field combo, Glyph combos and such are all cool options that don't break the game too badly.
But why even bother with normal weapons when you can just equip a staff and enjoy massive spellpower? There's nothing really appealing about auto-attacking. The autoattack of a staff is usually comparable to a good weapon anyway, since it has a higher attack speed and you can stack elemental multipliers and resistance penalties, and it scales off of spellpower anyhow. The only thing melee has going for it is the ability to stack a lot of paralysis/stun procs but you can just cast paralysis effects anyway. That and using Death Hex with a lot of critical damage multipliers, but you can also cast the Entropic Death spell combo if you just want to destroy enemies.
The thing about Dragon Age combat is that it was never good. Origins lacked the encounter design, the minimal balance second pass and the bug fixing needed to make it work. DA2 put the series in a limbo, where it doesn't know what genre it is so it doesn't do Action or Strategy very well at all. DAI refined DA2's combat without fixing its fundamental issues, adding a lot of ideas poached from different Action RPG subgenres without making any of them work in concert with each other. But at least when I go back to Origins I see the beta of something that could be interesting. When I go to DA2 I see the beta or something that is just bad. When I go to DAI I see that badness is now feature complete and very well polished, revealing thus that the problem is how, again, it is a game that does a lot of things and none of them particularly well.
Eh, their combat is pretty bland and bad, honestly. It's like World of Warcraft, but worse. At least WoW had some notion of instant attacks, the importance of mobility, and trying to offer a slightly varied toolkit to classes (except Paladins, and admittedly WoW handles versatility pretty badly overall). In DAO the Warrior and Rogue classes are very contingent on specializations to really get any interesting abilities and are mostly just blind attackers. I'd easily take WoW's Rogue and Warrior classes over DAO's.
Neither the combat system nor the encounter design held much promise. I mean, sure, if they overhauled almost all the abilities of the Rogue and Warrior classes (and the Mage class if we're trying to keep the game challenging), reconsidered their Stamina as mana-in-all-but-name approach, reworked crowd control mechanics and AI, and drastically improved encounter design and enemy variety, it might be better, but I'd also want to nuke the garbage threat-based aggro system honestly and kill a lot of of the stupid WoW-based design. I also think automatic out-of-combat healing is a dumb idea, tbh, since it turns a lot of trash encounter fights into total filler.
BioWare is dead, really. The part of the studio that still exists is BioWare Austin, ie the mmo people. But I'm sure the only thing they lack is a good systems designer who can just sit down and say 'We are literally going to make Dragon's Dogma, OR Dark Souls, OR Baldur's Gate, OR The Witcher 3, OR World of Warcraft. Not everything at the same time. We have a fanbase. They like us for our cutscenes. We need to cultivate that and build a game with a clear subgenre around it. That's all. No stupid tacked on features like Multiplayer. No ephemeral chimeras of whatever is popular at the moment'. If that was even possible within an EA managed brand they could easily sell 10 million copies or more one day.
They closed down the Canadian offices?
Can imagine some people going there first and having a bad time because most of their interesting abilities are locked. But the game tells you the deep roads are dangerous every 5 minutes.
Agreed.
It is a shame how much effort went into the Origins toolset and all they really did with it was create an expansion pack. It had many advanced features that you don't usually see in the first release of an IP.
Should have open sourced it as a game engine and taken a cut of any retail products that were built on it.
Are you serious? That's something Dungeon Siege should've done, not DAO. At least Dungeon Siege was a persuasive tech demo. DAO was hot garbage under the hood and their toolset had a real talent for making everything more challenging and time-consuming than it needed to be. There's a reason why NWN modders looked at DAO and decided to stick with NWN.
