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| HERE BE DRAGONS, or what the fuck were these games ever supposed to be? by Worm 12/30/2014, 12:24pm PST | ||||
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| I don't know if it's just me and WITTGENSTEIN still playing this but holy shit are the dragon fights a great argument for why Bioware should never design their own combat systems or scenarios. Hopefully they just eventually ask Platinum Games to figure it out for them. I'm playing the game on Hard so YMMV.
The Dragon in Crestwood is almost amazing. He uses a mechanic directly out of WoW(and every fucking MMO), puts a circle on each party member and if they're next to one another they take damage. Now this ability can be dispelled if you have a Mage or Cassandra(or you're using her boring Warrior specialization). Sometimes after putting the circles on you he'll do an ability that forces you to group up, effectively fucking you. Most of my experience with the fights was an RNG cluster fuck of NPC pathing vs. how long I could make my potions last. Making a player micromanage the position of four party members until a timer on a debuff runs out, or gather them up for a dispel, all the while wrestling with the awful tactical system and the dragon that is randomly pushing them in different directions, is so far beyond incompetence. They must have not even cared or it was supposed to be an encounter where each person is separately in control of a character. This is not a mechanic that is fun when you're not playing with friends. Nor is CC, nor are stun rotations, nor is tanking, nor are cooldowns. I realize I have major rose tinted glasses with the old Infinity engine games, but I really did have fun with that combat, and sometimes I have fun with Inquisitions combat too, but so much of it feels like it was meant to be a 4 player coop game. With Neverwinter going from being a 4 player coop RPG to a F2P MMO and Kingdoms of Amalur being constructed out of the corpse of Copernicus, I'm wondering how unlikely this is some scrapped Dragon Age online. Certainly Dragon Age has always been a series that is heavily influenced by MMOs, even the whole "Origins system" was ultimately a glorified MMO newbie zone. Though well it became pretty obvious that DA2 was half baked and thrown together in half a year, I'm beginning to wonder if all the idiosyncrasies in DA:I hint at something similar. Especially the War Map and various filler shit in there. It's really hard to tell if it was added because it was popular or if EA was looking to sell "War Map Speed Ups". Alternatively it might just be that given enough time they decided to just stuff the game full of Freemium, MMO, and Metroidvania shit rather than making enjoyable battle encounters and tightening up the awful NPC idle animations(Iron Bull's buddy drinking through his eye socket. Josephine writing non-stop while speaking with you) It's just so amazing to have the same issue with game after game as they apparently are trying to make the series more "action oriented". I'm looking foward to if they steal mechanics from Sapphiron. |
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HERE BE DRAGONS, or what the fuck were these games ever supposed to be? by 12/30/2014, 12:24pm PST  |
