Review RPG Codex Review: Tyranny - Kyros Demands Better

[Prime Junta]

it's somewhat challenging in the oldwalls

Um... where? I didn't rely on AoE attacks much, AoE spells even less, and the Oldwalls fights were just as grindy and same-y as everything else. Yeah sure there were a couple of bosses but all there was to them was to pull back a little so you could whack the scrubs one by one, then go after the lone boss, while healing as applicable.

I sometimes just wonder who and how playtests combat in RPGs. Remember Slicken in PoE? I mean, being a playtester you would at least try 1st level spells.

The first betas of Pillars were utterly, hilariously broken. Slicken was the least of the problems. There was that one build where chanter summons never expired so if playing one you would end up a mini-Lord of Darkness commanding a skeleton army and faceroll everything. At that point it was barely playable; Obsidz playtesters hadn't even started on it.

The biggest ability derp that made it into production was the way low-level spells would become per-encounter for Vancian casters when they hit level 9 etc. It took them a while to fix that; the "spell mastery" thing where you only get to pick one is much better.

 

[Infinitron]

Game developers are terrible at playtesting and tuning the "late game". It seems to be an industry-wide systemic failure.

 

[Shadenuat]

The biggest ability derp that made it into production was the way low-level spells would become per-encounter for Vancian casters when they hit level 9 etc. It took them a while to fix that; the "spell mastery" thing where you only get to pick one is much better.

I think per-encounter abilities from PoE and mana potions from DA:O are both crap. One gives you unlimited resources strategically, the other tactically (99 lyrium potions ftw). But since you can always replenish both by resting anyway, I'm not seeing an easy way out of this.

 

[Grunker]

I sometimes just wonder who and how playtests combat in RPGs. Remember Slicken in PoE? I mean, being a playtester you would at least try 1st level spells.

Playtesters find these things 99% of the time. Time and money are the constraints.

Hence the term 'Known Shippable' for identified bugs that will be fixed after release/ignored.

 

[Delterius]

The biggest ability derp that made it into production was the way low-level spells would become per-encounter for Vancian casters when they hit level 9 etc. It took them a while to fix that; the "spell mastery" thing where you only get to pick one is much better.

I think per-encounter abilities from PoE and mana potions from DA:O are both crap. One gives you unlimited resources strategically, the other tactically (99 lyrium potions ftw). But since you can always replenish both by resting anyway, I'm not seeing an easy way out of this.

Well, potions can be easily ignored in DA:O. Per-encounter abilities in PoE are a class feature. BioWare tends to design their games in spite of potions. That is, potions are a crutch for the lazy and or shitty. Whereas I'd expect PoE's fine tuning to consider Per-encounters in its design.

 

[Prime Junta]

I think per-encounter abilities from PoE and mana potions from DA:O are both crap. One gives you unlimited resources strategically, the other tactically (99 lyrium potions ftw). But since you can always replenish both by resting anyway, I'm not seeing an easy way out of this.

Some PoE classes certainly have way too many per-encounters (or equivalents), the cipher being the worst offender, and towards the end of the game you do have rather too many in general. In moderation they can be pretty good though: I like Knockdown, the Crippling/Blinding Strike, Lay on Hands, Flames of Devotion + some of the Exhortations (although paladins do have too many in the late game), and a few others. Problem is when they take over so you always spam them instead of going with your per-rests.

 

[Roguey]

But Dragon Age Origins currently holds the shit-dripping trophy for worst RTwP combat I have ever suffered through

See you didn't bother with DA2 or Inquisition (or kotor 1/2 or NWN 1/2 for that matter).

The problem is that, like Tyranny, (and unlike Pillars) it doesn't get all that much harder when you turn up the difficulty level, the fights just take longer.

Mm, I disagree. DA:O difficulty settings don't increase enemy health or anything, and the amount of increased damage resistance is negligible, the D&D equivalent of a +1 http://web.archive.org/web/20101115173807/http://dragonage.gulbsoft.org/doku.php/difficulty

It was balanced for hard, tuned down twice, and tuned up once.

 

[Grunker]

Agreed. I play DA:O with Nightmare + difficulty mods, and fights being longer certainly isn't a result of general bloat.

 

[ZagorTeNej]

Agreed. I play DA:O with Nightmare + difficulty mods, and fights being longer certainly isn't a result of general bloat.

What difficulty mods? Is there a DA:O equivalent of SCS? I've been contemplating playing it again (and finishing Awakening this time) so I'm looking for something to spice up the gameplay.

 

[Grunker]

Agreed. I play DA:O with Nightmare + difficulty mods, and fights being longer certainly isn't a result of general bloat.

What difficulty mods? Is there a DA:O equivalent of SCS? I've been contemplating playing it again (and finishing Awakening this time) so I'm looking for something to spice up the gameplay.

It's been years, but the best one was an item revamp mod that changed the entire tiering system and also equipped new items to enemies and changed their AI to use consumables more effectively. It doesn't seem to be on the Nexus though (no DA nexus back then).

 

[Israfael]

Um... where? I didn't rely on AoE attacks much, AoE spells even less, and the Oldwalls fights were just as grindy and same-y as everything else. Yeah sure there were a couple of bosses but all there was to them was to pull back a little so you could whack the scrubs one by one, then go after the lone boss, while healing as applicable.

YMMV, as always, but i had relatively more troubles and had to think a bit of what i was doing when i was tackling a 10+ swarms of banes (if i had not picked up seemingly shitty cone attack and explosion attack perks in the mage tree, i'd be probably fucked), who ignore armor, have perma-purge aura and other bad stuff. They aren't as bad as ghost creatures in PoE, but almost as bad as them. I may be a noob, but that's what I experienced

 

[Roguey]

By the way, for additional proof of DA:O combat>Tyranny combat, just take a look at what notoriously bad player John Walker had to say about both.

On DA:

Jim: Warrior, I hope the balance does change. At the moment I’m only winning fights by dint of heals.
John: I played most the game on Easy. Don’t feel ashamed to lower it – they fucked up, not you. It doesn’t change. The difficulty is not set right.
Jim: Well I feel like it’s an okay challenge, I mean i don’t want to win every fight, but the balance seems odd. It’s like there should be some other aspect to it that I’m missing
Kieron: I admit, you chaps have lost me a little here. I mean, if you’re winning with the resources you have… you’re winning. It’s not as if you’re failing. Healing management has always been part of RPGs, hasn’t it?
John: Yeah – going back up to Normal is worthwhile when you realise you’re breezing through stuff.

Dragon Age playing masses, the 1.01 patch is out, and it’s likely essential. Those who’ve seen my PC Gamer review, and indeed very many others saying the same, will have noticed complaints that the Easy difficulty level at certain points isn’t altogether that easy. And I’ll wager many playing on Normal aren’t exactly finding it a breeze. The patch notes explain that they’ve, “made Easy difficulty easier”, and crucially, “slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty.” I’ve yet to check what difference it actually makes, but hopefully this will address my one major complaint with the game.

On Tyranny:

I grew so fed up of the fight after fight after fight after fight after fight that I switched it down to Easy and just let them play themselves out.

Which is a shame, clearly, as they put together a decent combat system here. A strange mix of real-time (you pause it at will to issue orders), but turn based (your characters and theirs then take turns to carry out those orders, presumably ordered by invisible dice rolls), it embellishes the usual icon clicking with the lovely idea of combo moves between paired characters, and spells that you can craft yourself from an ever-growing collection of glyphs. And I found myself thinking of Dragon Age, of those wonderful fights where I sank myself into the combat system, performed the battles like a conductor of an orchestra, issuing attacks and heals and spells and tactics to glorious effect… Right up until I realised that I really wasn’t. Because for the most part, the game could happily play itself. I could switch all that automation off in the intricate options, of course, and were fights occasional and spectacular, I would have. But they’re not – they’re every three footsteps, and they’re the same every single time.

My ability to care about the combat dissipated incredibly early on, and no amount of new abilities that arrived with the frantically fast levelling (again making the pacing feel utterly bizarre) could draw me back in. I first switched the game down to Easy to try to speed up my progress when attempting to review a couple of weeks back. I then kept it on Easy simply because my team were now powerful enough to win every fight using the AI alone that way, and it meant I would keep going rather than throw myself headfirst out of the window. At one point my wife walked in and looked at my hands off the mouse/keyboard, looked at the frantic action on the monitor, and said, “Shouldn’t you be doing something?” I sighed, then grumbled.

Incidentally, what kind of dummy complains about the combat density of Tyranny (which has fewer than 2 hours of combat and only about some 400odd enemies to kill at most) but not Dragon Age (2600-2800 if you do everything in the base game)?

 

[Tigranes]

Having just reached the Oldwalls, I can't say about all the rest, but jesus christ, who designed the Bane models

"Here let's have some red and blue coloured piss particles flying around randomly, the players will totally appreciate fighting blobs that don't look like anything and also make the combat even more unclear"

 

[Suicidal]

I remember fighting one of the revenants in a tiny room and it just kept slashing at my force-fielded tank doing 0 damage and the rest of my party was just pelting it with autoattacks standing almost next to him

DA:O had unintended features that developers missed on, which players like codexers being unforgiving and lazy fucks exploited the hell out, obviously. OTOH that's what playtesters are supposed to get their pay for, no?

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

The spell is actually supposed to clear all threat drawn by a force-fielded party member, but the script supposed to do that doesn't work.

Didn't know that. Well I would definitely count that as an exploit then, but had I known that my choices would be not to use that spell, which I spent skill points to get instead of other potential spells, because I immediately saw its usefulness, or to start the game from the beginning and choose different spells, but I really have better things to do than to waste more time than necessary on fucking Dragon Age.

I remember PoE had the exact same spell but at least it made its target untargetable by both allies and enemies.

But Dragon Age Origins currently holds the shit-dripping trophy for worst RTwP combat I have ever suffered through

See you didn't bother with DA2 or Inquisition (or kotor 1/2 or NWN 1/2 for that matter).

I did play KOTOR 1 and 2 (in the 2nd one I ran into a game-breaking bug midway and had to stop) - I found the combat there superior to DA:O, because it was merely bad. It was just as boring and mindless but at least it was over quickly. NWN 1/2 I also enjoyed more simply because they were based on D&D and had more different spells and character customization. I didn't play any other Dragon Age games after the first one.

 

[Prime Junta]

Incidentally, what kind of dummy complains about the combat density of Tyranny (which has fewer than 2 hours of combat and only about some 400odd enemies to kill at most) but not Dragon Age (2600-2800 if you do everything in the base game)?

DA:O is a lot bigger game than Tyranny though. (But yeah, it has way too much pointless trash combat. They should've just kept the set pieces.)

 

[Prime Junta]

I remember PoE had the exact same spell but at least it made its target untargetable by both allies and enemies.

PoE's version was friendly-only. I liked the DA:O version specifically because it was dual-use -- you could use it to take an enemy heavy out of the equation while you focused on the scrubs, or get an ally out of trouble. (Or cheese, natch.)

 

[Suicidal]

I remember PoE had the exact same spell but at least it made its target untargetable by both allies and enemies.

PoE's version was friendly-only. I liked the DA:O version specifically because it was dual-use -- you could use it to take an enemy heavy out of the equation while you focused on the scrubs, or get an ally out of trouble. (Or cheese, natch.)

Playing on max difficulty I used it almost exclusively on friendlies because elite and boss enemies were almost completely immune (it would fail like 4 times out of 5). Pretty sure enemies had increased resistances on the max difficulty because of how often my attacks missed or failed against bosses.

 

[Roguey]

DA:O is a lot bigger game than Tyranny though. (But yeah, it has way too much pointless trash combat. They should've just kept the set pieces.)

If Tyranny were three times as long as it is now and kept the combat density the same, it'd still be half the amount of DA:O.

 

[Prime Junta]

DA:O is a lot bigger game than Tyranny though. (But yeah, it has way too much pointless trash combat. They should've just kept the set pieces.)

If Tyranny were three times as long as it is now and kept the combat density the same, it'd still be half the amount of DA:O.

True, there weren't as many completely pointless trash mob encounters. Other than the Oldwalls, most fights had a reason. That's one of the things I liked about it.

 

[Shilandra]

Question. After a few playthroughs I noticed that the bane's connection to gravelight is never really expounded upon.

The Bane and the Oldwalls in general were left mysterious. Either the writers don't know themselves or they left it intentionally vague. The Oldwall dungeons are so utterly generic that it suggests the former; if they did have something in mind I would've expected to find some hints there.

That's a shame. It looked like they were trying to set up something interesting with gravelight. It would have been neat if they did things like only make certain areas of the old walls accessible through certain gravelight spells. Especially since the only way to get the terratus grave sigil is through really high loyalty with eb. So another missed c&c opportunity there.

With regards to the ongoing combat discussion. Could it have been improved by having a visible action queue Ala nwn2? Like, you can queue multiple actions with shift but you don't see anything happening when you do so it's kinda easy to lose track of actions when you do that.

 

[Prime Junta]

With regards to the ongoing combat discussion. Could it have been improved by having a visible action queue Ala nwn2? Like, you can queue multiple actions with shift but you don't see anything happening when you do so it's kinda easy to lose track of actions when you do that.

No. The problems are deeper than QoL issues.

 

[hell bovine]

That's a shame. It looked like they were trying to set up something interesting with gravelight. It would have been neat if they did things like only make certain areas of the old walls accessible through certain gravelight spells. Especially since the only way to get the terratus grave sigil is through really high loyalty with eb. So another missed c&c opportunity there.

With regards to the ongoing combat discussion. Could it have been improved by having a visible action queue Ala nwn2? Like, you can queue multiple actions with shift but you don't see anything happening when you do so it's kinda easy to lose track of actions when you do that.

You can also get gravelight if you have high fear. :D As for the oldwalls, I guess it'll be a "find out the truth about banes" dlc.

I don't think this combat system can be fixed, there are just too many issues with it (bad pathfinding & ai, copy & paste encounter design, regenerating health & wounds, engagement, random target switching). There are some things that could be done to make it more challenging, but whether it would make it also fun, I have no idea. Enemy mages need better spellbooks, because even late game they are stuck with basic spells. Enemies need a "call for help" function, because sometimes the back row doesn't even notice the frontlines are fighting for their lives. There needs to be better coordination between abilities. E.g. if frozen makes the target vulnerable to crushing damage, then put a frost mage next to a guy with a hammer and make them tag-team. And so on.

 

[Prime Junta]

I don't think this combat system can be fixed, there are just too many issues with it

Anything can be fixed. From where I'm at though a good starting point would be to throw it out and start over though, that would probably be less work.

 

[Malpercio]

(Reminder: You can sleep undead in DAO)

False.

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

The Sleep Effect can be caused by the Sleep spell.

The following creatures are immune: Golem, Broodmother, Broodmother Tentacle, Arcane Horror, Wisp, Abomination, Revenant, Rage Demon, Corpse, Shade, Ash Wraith, Witherfang, Wild Sylvan, Skeleton, Pride Demon, Archdemon, Grand Oak.

DA:O had a ton of great encounters imo. Also a significant amount of trash.

(the "but the system breaks after x levels" is pretty much the norm in RPGs, so one that doesn't would be exceptional)

... I swear I do remember sleeping the undeads during Redcliffe sequence.

 

[Prime Junta]

... I swear I do remember sleeping the undeads during Redcliffe sequence.

Perhaps you're thinking of paralysing them? The paralysis explosion does affect them.