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Post by DragonKingReborn on Dec 14, 2016 21:11:43 GMT
This thread started off as a bit of a spin-off from the "... Action Based Combat" thread. As far as adding more action-based elements, nothing's confirmed, but there have been a few rumblings that they may be looking to explore that (at an overall slower pace). The general thought there being if they do introduce a little more player skill to the game (block/evade/etc.), the increase in self-sufficiency could in turn help with these solo side-excursions & major single combat events (like the Arishok). Didn't they kind implement such skills as talents in DAI? Rogues had an evade skill and warriors had block. Mages had... ghost step I think it was called? Rogues also had a block in the DD tree - Fade Step, is what you're thinking of, I believe - part of the Ice tree - and a lot of fun, especially once upgraded
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Post by Heimdall on Dec 14, 2016 21:15:51 GMT
This thread started off as a bit of a spin-off from the "... Action Based Combat" thread. As far as adding more action-based elements, nothing's confirmed, but there have been a few rumblings that they may be looking to explore that (at an overall slower pace). The general thought there being if they do introduce a little more player skill to the game (block/evade/etc.), the increase in self-sufficiency could in turn help with these solo side-excursions & major single combat events (like the Arishok). That's fair. I just thought that the Arishok battle worked without the action-y combat, so why change it? It's ok though, you can't stop progress I guess. Such is life! The Arishok duel was epic, narratively speaking, but... well, see the previously posted video about the Arishok duel with a mage. There's room for improvement. I don't want full-Witcher style action combat either, but if your character is built for support or distance dps the lone wolf thing can lead to comedic kiting antics.
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Post by DragonKingReborn on Dec 14, 2016 21:20:08 GMT
My second Hawke was a Spirit Healer Mage and my first playthrough I'd gone the full party fight route....After 10 (or so) attempts, I just dropped the difficulty to casual and moved on with my life
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Post by Heimdall on Dec 14, 2016 21:24:38 GMT
My second Hawke was a Spirit Healer Mage and my first playthrough I'd gone the full party fight route....After 10 (or so) attempts, I just dropped the difficulty to casual and moved on with my life I managed it with Spirit Healer for my canon Hawke, but... well, let's just say it was a very long and repetitive kiting process. Not fun
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Post by DragonKingReborn on Dec 14, 2016 21:40:25 GMT
It got worse for my fourth...because I didn't learn....
I was a S&S Hawke who had - I think it was called 'Shield Defence' on....I was virtually unkillable, but I might as well have been hitting him with a rubber chicken.
Took a couple of attempts at that before I realised I needed to turn it off to do some damage.
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Post by Hrungr on Dec 15, 2016 3:38:43 GMT
Speaking of branching into related areas, "lone wolf" content touches on the player skill vs. character skill conundrum. Consider a character who is a veteran warrior with years of combat experience. You'd expect such a character to do well in a Fight Club, ye olde tournament or gauntlet situation, right? But what if the player is a fumble fingers? Is the lone wolf content a way to train the player up to match the skill of the character, or should the game "fill in" for the player's lack of skill with auto-targeting, choreographed give and take of blows, or maybe put the whole thing into cutscene mode? The reverse problem is also evident. Say the player is very skilled in FRP combat, but the character is an introverted scholar who's never struck anything in anger? Joseph Anderson pointed out this same problem in his analysis of Fallout 4 -- the male character is a war veteran, but the female character is lawyer and mom to an infant child. But the mom is just as badass at swinging a rocket-assisted sledgehammer and a laser rifle as the male, without any explanation? The game can certainly simulate the character getting better and better at combat skills, but will the player have the patience to put up with that? Or should this always be the basis for the game-intro tutorial? Should all PC's start out as unskilled? I obviously don't have all the answers, but I am curious about how lone wolf content could be used to address these issues. Good questions... where do you even begin... DA games tend to put you in the role of someone who has basic training, but little in the way life & death combat experience. The games are, in a way, your first foray into "the real world". You don't start out as a hero already like Shepard for example. If DA shifts more into player skill territory, I'd like to see an open-ended tutorial stage where you can practice without consequence and sparring opportunities in your camp/base (like FF15) until you felt comfortable with the controls. Things to consider - the game's overall speed, how forgiving/unforgiving mistakes are, classes/gear/builds that feed into player skill and ones that that permit a more relaxed style of play... The good thing about these big RPGs though is you get a lot of practice. "Lone Wolf" style side quests don't always have to be about combat, but they should be about a challenge. Taking inspiration from DA:O here... While you might enter into a Grand Proving/Duels to sharpen your single-combat skills, Thieving Quests are all about avoiding combat. Assassination Quests could be either... or both.
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Post by Hrungr on Dec 15, 2016 3:56:39 GMT
This thread started off as a bit of a spin-off from the "... Action Based Combat" thread. As far as adding more action-based elements, nothing's confirmed, but there have been a few rumblings that they may be looking to explore that (at an overall slower pace). The general thought there being if they do introduce a little more player skill to the game (block/evade/etc.), the increase in self-sufficiency could in turn help with these solo side-excursions & major single combat events (like the Arishok). Didn't they kinda implement such skills as talents in DAI? Rogues had an evade skill and warriors had block. Mages had... ghost step I think it was called? They did, that was their first toe in the water introducing a few optional action-based skills in DA. In the next game, you might see block and/or evade as core abilities for everyone.
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Post by Sanunes on Dec 15, 2016 14:09:50 GMT
As others have said I think by Dragon Age staying with the "Holy Trinity" approach to classes I don't think I would enjoy it. It makes the game feel like a grind and punishing if you don't have an optimum build to play solo. So to make something like this enjoyable to me they would either have to make it easy enough that a Mage with no defensive abilities or a Warrior with no offensive abilities would be able to handle the situation. The other option is to balance the mission multiple times based on the type of character you have which could take away other missions in the game to make sure the solo one works well.
I think the solo style missions work better in an action style game over what BioWare is trying to do with Dragon Age, for one thing I have learned is be careful of what you want in a a game for the law of unintended side effects are always going to happen for looking at Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition are both a shining examples of that.
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Post by PCthug on Dec 15, 2016 17:03:21 GMT
I would like this, if done well. The Provings in DA:O were fun and Overlord in ME2 always makes me feel like the ultimate bad ass. But I hate the Arishok duel, for a lot of reasons already listed. I hate that it's designed against a straight up fight, you have to kite the MF'er for what feels like hours. It's beyond tedious and completely unbalanced as far as the classes go. The only time it wasn't a slog was when I had an overpowered mage (already completed Legacy and MotA w/ her) who took him down fairly quickly. Don't even know how rogue archer's manage it with rage quitting.
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Post by DragonKingReborn on Dec 15, 2016 20:40:15 GMT
In retrospect - and sorry for continuing the derail on this - but the Arishok duel might have worked better as a cutscene in the style (not pre-rendered, just content) of the DA2 Destiny trailer.
You had to EARN the right to challenge the Arishok - if I recall correctly - so it wasn't an easy route through the second Act. If you didn't earn that right, you still had the full party battle, but given that you could easily spec Hawke in a way that made defeating the Arishok extremely difficult, it might have been more satisfying to simply see a pre-scripted cutscene where Hawke defeated the Arishok and the content of it was determined by class and (for Warrior/Rogue) weapon style.
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Dec 15, 2016 21:33:37 GMT
If DA shifts more into player skill territory, I'd like to see an open-ended tutorial stage where you can practice without consequence That's a winner! The first Bayonetta and I think Remember Me had standalone combo practice modes. For Bayonetta, IIRC, the practice mode was also the loading screen! I always thought that was an excellent way to use player down-time between levels. Why don't more games do this?
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Dec 15, 2016 21:44:58 GMT
As others have said I think by Dragon Age staying with the "Holy Trinity" approach to classes I don't think I would enjoy it. It makes the game feel like a grind and punishing if you don't have an optimum build to play solo. So to make something like this enjoyable to me they would either have to make it easy enough that a Mage with no defensive abilities or a Warrior with no offensive abilities would be able to handle the situation. The other option is to balance the mission multiple times based on the type of character you have which could take away other missions in the game to make sure the solo one works well. Let's explore this a bit, because you bring up some good points. What would you think about adding a McGuffin that's only available during the solo segment? Like a ring of petrification that only has 5 charges in it and you are required to sacrifice it to complete the solo segment? Confronted by a tough warrior-type enemy you can't overcome with your own abilities, petrify and move on. You can't spam it on everything because it only has 5 charges, so you have to do some strategic planning and figure out the best way to use it. There are obvious problems with that approach -- like a first blind run -- but maybe the pros outweight the cons?
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Post by Sanunes on Dec 15, 2016 22:13:27 GMT
As others have said I think by Dragon Age staying with the "Holy Trinity" approach to classes I don't think I would enjoy it. It makes the game feel like a grind and punishing if you don't have an optimum build to play solo. So to make something like this enjoyable to me they would either have to make it easy enough that a Mage with no defensive abilities or a Warrior with no offensive abilities would be able to handle the situation. The other option is to balance the mission multiple times based on the type of character you have which could take away other missions in the game to make sure the solo one works well. Let's explore this a bit, because you bring up some good points. What would you think about adding a McGuffin that's only available during the solo segment? Like a ring of petrification that only has 5 charges in it and you are required to sacrifice it to complete the solo segment? Confronted by a tough warrior-type enemy you can't overcome with your own abilities, petrify and move on. You can't spam it on everything because it only has 5 charges, so you have to do some strategic planning and figure out the best way to use it. There are obvious problems with that approach -- like a first blind run -- but maybe the pros outweight the cons? I think the McGuffin would depend on what they are trying to do during the solo aspect and it could work also would depend on the McGuffin, for giving a tank the ability to increase their damage or a mage to be invisible and skip content would work out. They could have situations where all players are equal with only having access to certain abilities and gear and basing the solo content off that as well, so the tank wouldn't have their shield and armor making them unable to take damage and the mage has less offensive spells because of collateral damage risks. The problem I would have with a blind run is the risk that something that isn't fun for some players to accomplish is still mandatory to complete, I know I was really annoyed with the Artiosk fight as an archery character in Dragon Age 2 and some people could walk away at that point because of frustration. Going back and looking at some of the reviews from Dragon Age: Inquisition was that people felt stuck in The Hinterlands because they hadn't fully completed everything that was being offered there, but BioWare never locked people into staying there. What kept them there was their own self-imposed restrictions and people quit and wrote off the game because of what they were experiencing there. I believe there could be a similar problem with solo based content and the aggravation it might cause if not everyone can experience it without the frustration of feeling punished for their class choices.
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Post by Heimdall on Dec 16, 2016 14:38:56 GMT
Looking back, I think the best way to handle lone wolf segments is to give you one or several non-violent ways to solve them.
I mean, I think I've made it clear that I enjoy lone wolf combat in the context of arenas and other challenges, but for story segments (particularly a main story beat) its best to provide options both for roleplaying and for when the character simply isn't built for that kind of fighting.
The other option, of course, is simply to make the lone wolf fights much easier than normal (I mean, they are usually scaled down for one anyway, but I mean made pretty much non-challenging entirely)
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Post by Reznore on Dec 16, 2016 15:04:11 GMT
I think any kind of diversity in gameplay would be good. The last Bioware games are really poor when it comes to that because there isn't much interesting gameplay beyond talking and fighting. There's no sneak , no stealing from people , not breaking into homes, due to the party of four movement and terrain placement is not the best either. You have like no speak checks.There is WEWH where you can get a failstate but it's clumsily done.Rude to Orlesian , Thedas Burns.
The war table was somehow interesting , there were failed state , sometimes you had a mix of wartable and real missions.
Anyway my point is I'm all for solo mission , puzzles , speak checks , non combat situation... When the change is not just go to circle push one button , kind of dumb dumb thing.(listening to gossip in WEWH for example)
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