Dragon Age: Origins isn't doing it for me. Should I keep going?

[brucethemoose]

Y'all are going around in circles critiquing the combat, but for me that's the whole problem: manual combat is a pain, full AI combat was tedious and boring to configure.

And the game is mostly combat. Slogging it out just to get the dialogue in between wasn't worth it to me.

KOTOR had simpler auto combat (and perhaps had a lower combat/other stuff ratio?), which is why I think I tolerated it better.

 

[DoPo]

KOTOR had simpler auto combat (and perhaps had a lower combat/other stuff ratio?), which is why I think I tolerated it better.

I guess one advantage it had was actually being turn based. Even if you didn't run a pause at each turn, it meant that actions were still performed discrete time slices. DA:O's real time with pause means that timing is all over the place - actions don't always take the same time and some can overlap or mismatch. Tracking timings is also harder - if something takes 9 seconds but you pause twice in the mean time, it's harder to remember what time passed, while if something takes three turns, you can very easily just know how many time slices has it been.

Also, I'm pretty sure the combat was easier. I remember being able to wipe whole groups within moments, while DA:O throws more enemies at you at a time and it doesn't have abilities that are too OP...well, it does OP ones, but not in the same way as KOTOR where you could easily one-shot an enemy or even several. The OP abilities in DA:O just allow you to assuredly win, but you still need time to kill guys.

 

[brucethemoose]

KOTOR had simpler auto combat (and perhaps had a lower combat/other stuff ratio?), which is why I think I tolerated it better.

I guess one advantage it had was actually being turn based. Even if you didn't run a pause at each turn, it meant that actions were still performed discrete time slices. DA:O's real time with pause means that timing is all over the place - actions don't always take the same time and some can overlap or mismatch. Tracking timings is also harder - if something takes 9 seconds but you pause twice in the mean time, it's harder to remember what time passed, while if something takes three turns, you can very easily just know how many time slices has it been.

Also, I'm pretty sure the combat was easier. I remember being able to wipe whole groups within moments, while DA:O throws more enemies at you at a time and it doesn't have abilities that are too OP...well, it does OP ones, but not in the same way as KOTOR where you could easily one-shot an enemy or even several. The OP abilities in DA:O just allow you to assuredly win, but you still need time to kill guys.

Yeah, from what I remember you could clear mooks out faster than DA:O.

That's a big negative trend in all of gaming, I think. There's this tendency to make enemies (and sometimes players/allies) more bullet spongy, as it stretches out combat and makes it more forgiving while being a dead simple to program and balance. But it also takes the edge and fun out of it.


If we're talking about Bioware RPGs, that trend peaked with SWTOR, which has absolutely dreadful combat.

 

[DoPo]

If we're talking about Bioware RPGs, that trend peaked with SWTOR, which has absolutely dreadful combat.

Hmm, never played it, but I'll take your word for it. I've tried playing ME1 and ME2 on Insanity, though and I thought that would make the game harder, yet it just made everything a bullet sponge. It wasn't more difficult, it was actually more boring, since fights now last longer. ME 2 at least threw some more mechanics in your face - every enemy had at least armour or energy shields...but then again, it still amounted to the same thing. It now just meant that you had a rock, paper, scissors thing on top - some abilities do more damage to shields, but don't harm armour and vice versa. it was still just bullet sponges, but now they managed to mop up some bullets better than others.

I had to eventually drop down the difficulty to get rid of the tedium.

 

[brucethemoose]

If we're talking about Bioware RPGs, that trend peaked with SWTOR, which has absolutely dreadful combat.

Hmm, never played it, but I'll take your word for it. I've tried playing ME1 and ME2 on Insanity, though and I thought that would make the game harder, yet it just made everything a bullet sponge. It wasn't more difficult, it was actually more boring, since fights now last longer. ME 2 at least threw some more mechanics in your face - every enemy had at least armour or energy shields...but then again, it still amounted to the same thing. It now just meant that you had a rock, paper, scissors thing on top - some abilities do more damage to shields, but don't harm armour and vice versa. it was still just bullet sponges, but now they managed to mop up some bullets better than others.

I had to eventually drop down the difficulty to get rid of the tedium.

Yeah, all of ME suffered from it. Insanity on 1 and 2 felt like a chore, and that is coming from a ME fanboy who spent alot of time in the whole trilogy on insanity.


ME3 and Andromeda are great on the player side of things though. At high difficulties, the powers and guns have this finely-tuned rhythm you can get into that makes them immensely powerful, but risky, as your character is highly mobile and frail. You have to balance on a knife's edge between being overly aggressive and losing your rhythm/getting over-run.

It's exhilerating, and utterly fantastic. 3 and Andromeda are easily my favorite shooters anywhere, as my rather disturbing ME3MP hour count will show.

EDIT:

SWTOR, on the other hand, is classic WoW hotbar-mashing gameplay. I can't even watch the animations because I have to watch my hotbar for cooldowns, and that's after figuring out my new keybindings every time I level up and gain a power. It's somehow tedious, exhausting AND boring all at once.

One of these days I might sit down and macro the whole process, since the dialogue and worlds underneath that awful gameplay are kind of interesting. Morso than DA:O, as I'm kind of a sucker for sci-fi/sci-fantasy and it helps scratch a KOTOR itch I have.

 

[springheeljack]

For me I was invested with Dragon Age Origins from the moment the Battle of Ostagar took place I still think that is still one of the best cutscenes I have ever watched and it carried me through the whole game even through the boring bits

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I hated the combat in the game. I started playing as an archer, then I tried as a fighter. Both times I was struggling to get through the tutorial area due to lack of healing. When I played a healing spec'd mage, it was a breeze.