There isn't much to discuss when it comes to the combat system. It's very similar to DA2, with some polish here and there. Enemies have more health and don't spawn out of nowhere except from fade rifts, where it actually makes sense. Even then you only ever get two waves of enemies from those. There is also limited level scaling, from what I understand - areas have a minimum and maximum level, and things will scale to your party's level based on those caps. Combat difficulty seemed to depend heavily on my build - there were a few points where the game started getting hard and I'd respec my characters, and then it would be easier. Until near the end I found an incredibly broken build with the reaver specialty and suddenly combat became trivial.
I do want to spotlight what they call the tactical camera. It's an excellent idea - the camera zooms out and you're able to give orders to your characters RTS style, with the ability to queue multiple instructions. It's exactly the sort of thing I would love to have in a party based RTWP game. Unfortunately, like with so many other things Bioware has attempted, the execution is horribly botched. You can only zoom out a short way in tactical view, so you can almost never see enough of the battlefield and have to move the camera around. The controls in tactical view are horrible. And sometimes the AI will get bored halfway through executing your instructions and go back to what they were doing. Still, the feature itself is a great idea, so I do have to give them some credit for trying.
>>"It sounds like the vast majority of your criticisms involve the combat system. For me, that is the smallest, most insignificant aspect of a Dragon Age game (or any RPG for that matter). The combat in RPGs has been awful for decades, and nobody cares, because the rest of the game is strong."
What has caused this modern
with regards to combat is that people have lost site of what it was that made older RPG's combat complex and interesting.
For combat to be "hard" it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be difficult to drop the monster, that isn't what the complexity of monsters and encounters means. Take Trolls for instance in the old Infinity Engine D&D games. They were trash mobs in the main for the experienced player, but for someone new to the series they generated no end of hilarious threads entitled "how do you kill these Trolls, it's driving me nuts, they just stay at "Almost Dead" and there's nothing I can do - PLEEZE HELP"
So the complexity and interest of the Troll was the unique method by which you have to deal with it in combat, not anything to do with how "hard" they were. This involved many RPG aspects, in that you had to have taken the time to speak to the NPC which tells you how to defeat them (useful NPCs), you had to ensure your resources were sufficient to carry the items required to do the job (useful inventory system), elsewise you had to ensure there were characters in your party who were specialised in the weapons/spells which could do the job (useful character distinction and relevance), all of which helped make the RPG a most interesting place to inhabit.
Dragon Age, or indeed many RPGs since Neverwinter Nights, have made the combat less interesting by removing the unique monsters and not making their new enemies in any way comparably interesting. There is nothing special about any of the monsters in any Dragon Age game, nothing at all, they are all just clumps of attack numbers having pixel wars with your lump of attack numbers. It's no wonder people want to just do away with it altogether, because there's already nothing left there to gauge any interest at all.
Take Spiders, for example. Here is one traditional monster which appears in both old and new with equal measure. The primary
difference? In the old RPGs the unique function of the Spider was to poison you. In the new RPGs there isn't even a poison mechanic in the same way, the whole Heal Poison inventory item and character use has vanished, and, lo and behold, oh, who's shocked by this revelation, the combat is "less interesting". But it's more than that, because the combat is less interesting the whole game is less interesting, because you have weaker inventory, weaker character relevance and weaker NPC usefullness.
Bioware could make a living out of a niche of The Mills and Boon of video games, but there is no way anyone can argue that complex combat makes for a weaker cRPG, quite the reverse. Exactly how "complex" can you make narratives? Not very, it took Bioware 3 years to make a standard Mills and Boon narrative with virtually no C&C. Place any Dragon Age writing in a non-RPG environment and it would work equally well, Trolls and poisoning Spiders kinda really
belong in an RPG. The writing that matters in RPGs is the quest design and character motivation, and Bioware just repeat the same character motivation over and over again, they add nothing new to it, ever. Their quest design gets worse with every game.
And these are the reasons why Dragon Age games are and always will be shit games of turd, but needless to say have some entertainment value beyond the concept of playing a game.
