Peter Thomas confirms no Friendly Fire in Dragon Age 2

[Overweight Manatee]

Listen, I'm by no means a graphics whore, but one thing I absolutely CANNOT STAND is this trend on the current generation of consoles of not implementing any anti-aliasing WHATSOEVER.

Contradiction detected.

There is no contradiction. Crim's just a bit of a graphics slut.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

P.S. the graphics are fine. Not the best, but PAG.

No, they don't. Even if we ignore that they look like shit from a technical standpoint, that particular screenshot (and most we've seen of DA2) also look shit artistically. There's nothing, absolutely nothing positive you could say about DA2's visuals. Nil. Zero. Nada. Nichts. Nothing.

Animations?

 

[Multidirectional]

Listen, I'm by no means a graphics whore, but one thing I absolutely CANNOT STAND is this trend on the current generation of consoles of not implementing any anti-aliasing WHATSOEVER.

Contradiction detected.

Lack of antialiasing can be very distracting. Nothing wrong with wanting a clean image to look at. It doesn't have to be shiny, it just needs to not be a horribly pixelated mess.
Lack of AA is a big problem with GTA 4 for example, especially considering it's high level of detail.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

How many other games have made friendly fire toggleable?

I can't remember having played any. Of course, some would introduce FF in higher difficulty levels, but so does DA2. For all the things you can bash DA2 for, non-toggleable FF is the most irrelevant.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

How many other games have made friendly fire toggleable?

I can't remember having played any. Of course, some would introduce FF in higher difficulty levels, but so does DA2. For all the things you can bash DA2 for, non-toggleable FF is the most irrelevant.

No, but you can bash DA2 for not having friendly fire on any difficulty other then Nightmare. DA had FF on normal difficulty. That is a considerable amount of dumbing down. The toggleable-ness of FF is only humorous in light of Gaider's quote earlier in the thread about how turning it on could mess up stupid people.

 

[Multidirectional]

All games should have "Customize difficulty" option. It just makes sense. And it would add to replayability. I remember liking that a lot in Soldier of Fortune 2. I could make enemie toughness at max while at the same time letting myself carry same amounts of ammo as if I would be playing on easiest as well as adjusting some other things. And it was great. You can't make difficulty presets to suit all people anyway. And purists would just have a choice of not using the custom difficulty. Everyone wins. But no, some theoretical people who would be dumbfucks anyway could change the settings and not like what they changed, so everyone else doesn't get to do it either.

 

[Excommunicator]

I am with CrimHead on the AA. Don't care about the complexity of models (I enjoyed DK2 and WC3 models, and didn't enjoy Witcher/NWN2 ones), but AA is a bare minimum for any game that has graphics that requires my computer to do work. That DA2 screenshot is about the least appealing screenshot I have seen in a high budget game in the past 10 years, probably more. Just kill it.

 

[KalosKagathos]

Lack of antialiasing can be very distracting.

No. I hadn't even noticed it in the DA 2 screenshot until you whiners pointed it out.

 

[Multidirectional]

Lack of antialiasing can be very distracting.

No. I hadn't even noticed it in the DA 2 screenshot until you whiners pointed it out.

What size is your screen? Plus, aliasing can be even more bothersome in motion.

 

[Silellak]

Lack of antialiasing can be very distracting.

No. It didn't distract me personally, so clearly, it's not distracting to anyone anywhere.

Fixed.

 

[Azrael the cat]

How many other games have made friendly fire toggleable?

I can't remember having played any. Of course, some would introduce FF in higher difficulty levels, but so does DA2. For all the things you can bash DA2 for, non-toggleable FF is the most irrelevant.

No, but you can bash DA2 for not having friendly fire on any difficulty other then Nightmare. DA had FF on normal difficulty. That is a considerable amount of dumbing down. The toggleable-ness of FF is only humorous in light of Gaider's quote earlier in the thread about how turning it on could mess up stupid people.

I'm fairly certain that NWN2 and its expansions let you toggle friendly fire. I wouldn't normally complain about the lack of individual toggling, but this style of game (party-based crpg where FF is toggled on or off 'under the hood' when the difficulty changes) should have had it as standard a long time ago. It's just asking for something that's there under the hood to be made available to the player - I'll be surprised if there isn't even a command prompt means of toggling it. It's the denying the player an option that the developers have already implemented as toggleable (in order to implement the nightmare difficulty) purely on the assumption that players are so stupid that they'll turn it on without thinking to switch it back off if they don't like it.

If the toggle actually required the developers to implement a new feature, rather than simply revealing an existing feature, I wouldn't have such a problem with it.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Togglable friendly-fire. I can't believe that they managed to decline even more after Baldur's Gate.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Some interesting quotes fromEscapist's DA2 preview:

The combat in Origins had many failings, beginning with its unbalanced difficulty. "Was the default setting, especially on PC, too hard? Yeah," admits Laidlaw. "'Normal' felt more like 'Hard' to me."

The design team also decided to inject a bit of common sense into the combat. "If you're a mage, and you're carrying around this big stick, why can't you hit someone with it?" asks Laidlaw, pointing out that ranged combatants, like mages and archers, had little recourse when the fighting got up close and personal.

The linear progression of the skill trees in Origins meant that you frequently had to spend valuable points on talents you never had any intention of using so that you could get to the one you actually wanted. It was a well-established and accepted system, but it oftentimes sapped a lot of the enjoyment out of leveling up. The skill trees in DA2 are actually webs, more circular in nature and offering more than one path to the really Hot Stuff skills

Kirkwall is awash in color and composed like artwork. Matt Goldman took inspiration from sources as diverse as Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Pieter Breugel's "Triumph of Death." The aim is to not only make players "excited about what they're seeing," says Laidlaw, but also to "make sure that the story being told is about the character, and that the scenery is drawing focus to the people."

In Origins, you were a nameless, voiceless hero, but in DA2, you are the silky-toned Hawke, a change that may be jarring to those who favored Origins's old school approach to characterization. Which, as Laidlaw tells it, is not that many players. "People generally hated the silent protagonist," he says, but that wasn't the only reason to adopt a main character who could speak for themselves; Having the hero stand stoically while drama erupted all around them "seemed to be doing a disservice to the storytelling."

The conversation in DA2 plays out much like that in Mass Effect, with players selecting a paraphrase of a dialog option from various points on a wheel. Hoping to avoid those situations where you think you're being flirty but end up sounding like a jerk, the wheel in DA2 adds an icon in the center to give you a better idea of the vibe you're about to convey. A heart is flirty, angel's wings indicate your goody-goody nature, and so on. There's still a bit of wiggle room, but you should always end up saying pretty much exactly what you meant to say. (During my playthrough, I wanted to just tell someone I thought they were cute and ended up inviting them to bed, but flirting is open to all manner of interpretation, I suppose.)

 

[SimpleComplexity]

In Origins, you were a nameless, voiceless hero, but in DA2, you are the silky-toned Hawke

Commander Hawke

 

[chzr]

Hard - Able to be beaten playing the entire party sub-optimally, either controlling directly or using custom AI tactics.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

How many other games have made friendly fire toggleable?

With NWN 2 it was in the difficulty.

Hard - Able to be beaten playing the entire party sub-optimally, either controlling directly or using custom AI tactics.

Whats wrong with that? It you force people to play optimally you nerf roleplaying. Save Nightmare for powergaming.

 

[Jools]

Some interesting quotes fromEscapist's DA2 preview:

The combat in Origins had many failings, beginning with its unbalanced difficulty. "Was the default setting, especially on PC, too hard? Yeah," admits Laidlaw. "'Normal' felt more like 'Hard' to me."

 

[Crooked Bee]

Fuck, even the devs cannot into challenge anymore.

 

[Raghar]

Some interesting quotes fromEscapist's DA2 preview:

The combat in Origins had many failings, beginning with its unbalanced difficulty. "Was the default setting, especially on PC, too hard? Yeah," admits Laidlaw. "'Normal' felt more like 'Hard' to me."

Have you played the unpatched version? And have you tried to avoid reloading?

 

[Stainless Veteran]

I've started playing unpatched version on 'hard' (finished the game when it got patched though) and the only tough fight was Dragon!Flemeth.
And I mostly played the rogue, playing mages in general and arcane warrior in particular was too easy even on hard.

 

[JarlFrank]

I remember times where normal was supposed to be a challenge, hard fucking hard and very hard only beatable for the real munchkiny pro-gamers.

 

[Jools]

Some interesting quotes fromEscapist's DA2 preview:

The combat in Origins had many failings, beginning with its unbalanced difficulty. "Was the default setting, especially on PC, too hard? Yeah," admits Laidlaw. "'Normal' felt more like 'Hard' to me."

Have you played the unpatched version? And have you tried to avoid reloading?

To both questions, yes I have. I was actually so stupid to buy the game on release, and to play it straight away. I remember the only fight that actually posed some kind of a challenge on "normal" (that is the settings I usually select for my first playthrough of a game, expecting it to be somewhat challenging but not insanely so, which would be for "hard") was Dragon Flemeth (like Stainless Veteran Said), which I had to redo a grand total of 1 times (after the first failure, I mean).

Anyway, seriously, I would expect DA:O to strike someone for many reasons, either good or bad reasons according to this someone's taste, but its "difficulty" is something that I really wouldn't have thought to be found challenging by anyone.

 

[Radisshu]

I thought the problem with DA combat was, well, first and foremost that it mostly consisted of slowly slashing your way through hordes of identical enemies - but a bigger issue was that the most difficult fight (the dragon fights) forced you to play the game really "actiony", I basically had to run around the dragons like an idiot trying to flank them, there wasn't much thinking involved at all. AWESOME DEATH ANIMATIONS THOUGH

 

[Stainless Veteran]

I wonder why nobody have reacted to new quotes about other things than difficulty. I mean this, for example

"If you're a mage, and you're carrying around this big stick, why can't you hit someone with it?" asks Laidlaw

is golden, IMO.

 

[Dantus12]

The absolutely most "awesome" thing was revealed :

Seb Hanlon :

The article is correct. You'll get Bethany if Hawke is a rogue or warrior (regardless of gender), and Carver if Hawke is a mage.

source:

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic ... /5514395/3

To elaborate:

http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Carver_Hawke

Our brother.

Another decision taken away from the player.

This is based on the discussion that started on the Bio forums after someone posted the same preview as Stainless Veteran here.

The conversation in DA2 plays out much like that in Mass Effect, with players selecting a paraphrase of a dialog option from various points on a wheel. Hoping to avoid those situations where you think you're being flirty but end up sounding like a jerk, the wheel in DA2 adds an icon in the center to give you a better idea of the vibe you're about to convey. A heart is flirty, angel's wings indicate your goody-goody nature, and so on. There's still a bit of wiggle room, but you should always end up saying pretty much exactly what you meant to say. (During my playthrough, I wanted to just tell someone I thought they were cute and ended up inviting them to bed, but flirting is open to all manner of interpretation, I suppose.

This is for all the people that complained about "accidentally" sleeping with
Zevran.
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