Anyone else looking forward to Dragon Age? (Spoilers and plot discussion here)

[Berkut]

Kind of stupidly so, actually. It takes away from the immersion, everyone walking around looking like Carrie all the time.

[Tamas]

I'll give you my expert opinion tonight.

[Martinus]

I'll give you my expert opinion tonight.

OMG is it better than Vanguard? 

[Razgovory]

I think I'll finish playing the Witcher before I start this one.  I am enjoying that game.

[Scipio]

Mein copy vill be delivered today!

[Caliga]

Kind of stupidly so, actually. It takes away from the immersion, everyone walking around looking like Carrie all the time.

If they're constantly hacking shit to pieces, should they not be bloody?  Or are they bloody even when it's been a while since they've fought and presumably would have had time to clean up?

[Berkut]

Kind of stupidly so, actually. It takes away from the immersion, everyone walking around looking like Carrie all the time.

If they're constantly hacking shit to pieces, should they not be bloody?  Or are they bloody even when it's been a while since they've fought and presumably would have had time to clean up?

A little of both - sometimes the main character is all bloody, but not the others.

But really, it is just over the top. I mean, everyone kind of looks red all the time, because they are soaked in blood.

Someone at Bioware came up with some cool "blood spatter on the models" tech, and ridiculously overused it.

[Faeelin]

Destructoid isn't happy:

Even worse is the fact that no amount of tactics can craft a team capable of dealing with the myriad obstacles constantly thrown at players. Be it tank-like enemy warriors that love to gang up on one player and systematically take the team down, archers that hide away and stun players with flights of arrows, or mages that can stun, freeze, drain and explode the allied party, often at once, there is too much to deal with at any given time, and players can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer clusterfuck of battle. I'd say you need a party of eight to deal with some of the huge battles in the game. Four doesn't feel like enough when twenty armed soldiers jump you and they have two mages with fireball spells backing them up.

The difficulty in Dragon Age is erratic at best and completely unbalanced at worst. Some dungeons are a breeze to get through for the first hour, and then suddenly there will be a room full of enemies that seem ludicrously powered up and completely overrun the player's team. These difficulty spikes appear randomly and without warning.

The game clearly wants to be treated like some sort of RTS, encouraging players to move allies into prime positions depending on their class. However, battles are just too chaotic and messy for any real RTS elements to shine through. This isn't helped by the fact that the only way to accurately position allies is to manually take control of them, but as soon as you give control back to the A.I, it will just carry on doing what it does best -- getting bullied by the enemy and dying within seconds. In the same way that Mass Effect tried to be a methodical shooter but put players up against fast-paced melee attackers, Dragon Age desperately wants to be a strategy game, but has made the game look, feel and play like a mindless, crazy hack n' slash.

It's worth noting that PC gamers get a more tactical perspective of battle and have access to hotkeys. These additions will surely help and make the PC game the infinitely superior choice. In comparison, the console versions cannot handle the kind of battles BioWare have created. This game probably should not have been released on the PS3 or Xbox 360. Even with the extra tools, however, the PC version still seems to suffer from many of the same problems, from what I have played of that version.

http://www.destructoid.com/review-dragon-age-origins-153764.phtml

More criticisms there.

[Tamas]

I may be proven wrong of course, having not played the game yet, but it is sort of a shame to live in gaming days when it is considered a fault that enemy stacks employ proper basic tacitcs 101 (archers hiding, mages fireballing, warriors piling on a single target)

[DisturbedPervert]

These additions will surely help and make the PC game the infinitely superior choice. In comparison, the console versions cannot handle the kind of battles BioWare have created.

[Cecil]

I may be proven wrong of course, having not played the game yet, but it is sort of a shame to live in gaming days when it is considered a fault that enemy stacks employ proper basic tacitcs 101 (archers hiding, mages fireballing, warriors piling on a single target)

A good summary of whats wrong with todays gaming....well one of the bigger things anyhow. If someone sets the game on the hardest difficulty then dies once the game is broken....eh? I totally gets what Yathzee is saying when he rants about regenerative health bars in shooters, games are getting too dumbed down.

[grumbler]

I may be proven wrong of course, having not played the game yet, but it is sort of a shame to live in gaming days when it is considered a fault that enemy stacks employ proper basic tacitcs 101 (archers hiding, mages fireballing, warriors piling on a single target)

Well, it is a fault if the enemy does that but you cannot.  It becomes only moderately irritating if the enemy does that and it is just hard for you to do the same.

The basic problem here is the same problem that you encounter in pretty much any computer game:  the computer isn't able to adjust tactics based on what the player does, so it gets numbers and quality bumps to make up for it.  If the player surprises the computer party, it can be a fair fight.  If ambushed by superior numbers of individually better units, though, the player has no chance of winning.  As far back as Jagged Alliance, players who tried to play through a whole game without saving couldn't make it through because their characters would get bounced at least once and always died when that happened.

[grumbler]

A good summary of whats wrong with todays gaming....well one of the bigger things anyhow. If someone sets the game on the hardest difficulty then dies once the game is broken....eh?

I don't see how this follows.

I totally gets what Yathzee is saying when he rants about regenerative health bars in shooters, games are getting too dumbed down.

I think he (like you) protesteth too much.  Regeneration, I am sure, makes sense in many circumstances/games where the gameplay would be crippled by the need to hunt down healing stations (or whatever), and health potions or whatever make sense I other circumstances.  The only thing "dumbed down" in this debate is those debaters who insist any position not in accordance with their personal references is "dumbed down."

The "realism" argument is so laughable that it deserves no response.

[Martinus]

Can anyone tell me if the storyline in the console version is somehow truncated or simplified compared to the PC version or are the differences only "mechanical"?

[DisturbedPervert]

I totally gets what Yathzee is saying when he rants about regenerative health bars in shooters, games are getting too dumbed down.

Yeah, I could never really get in to CoD4 multiplayer because of this.  Not a fan of regenerative health in FPS.