Nightmare Players - thoughts on difficulty throughout the franchise
Jan 1, 2017 21:53:29 GMT
ioannisdenton likes this
Post by stunlocked on Jan 1, 2017 21:53:29 GMT
With this topic I want to examine how consistent the Nightmare challenge has been through the franchise, and whether or not it's on a good path, and I'd like to hear how others feel about it.
For me the nightmare difficulty in Origins was superb, and still is. A lot of CC, characters quite fragile to certain things, but most importantly very few bullet sponge enemies, and fights felt more or less realistic - you saw the field, you made a plan, and you took out the opposition as systematically as possible. On my first run ( i switched from hard up to nightmare about halfway through) it felt like it scaled quite sharply towards the end, and it was suitably intimidating, it made the finale intense.
Then there was Awakenings, and I felt it was too easy, especially compared to the challenge that came before it. We were given new abilities a lot more frequently than in the base game, and there weren't enough obstacles in between to test them. I rarely go back to it for this reason, even though there's a lot of good things about that release.
Then... Golems of Amgarrak, or whatever it's called, and the final boss room, which has a random number of zillion-HP zombies chasing after you, remains to this day the most outrageous difficulty spike I've ever played in any game. I beat it, eventually, but I will never play it again on nightmare difficulty. Did anyone find this fight fun?
For some reason, maybe someone can tell me why, reinforcement waves were introduced for every fight in Dragon Age 2, and it did undermine the strategic positioning that was so important in Origins, and that's a shame, but on each play-through it's not something that bothers me too much. What does bother me, greatly, and more and more each time, is the game relying on cheese elites to slow progress. Two types in particular stand out - rogues who spam stealth and can one-shot - without warning - everyone but the tank, and lieutenants who regenerate health so fast it takes all 4 party members spamming auto attack to bring them down, literally if you have one guy on the floor it can't be done. So so silly.
I love DA2, and the rift/walking bomb party comp I built initially was well able to handle the challenge (and it felt great), but it has just become tedious dealing with these enemy types each time, the kind of attention they demand does not at all feel in sync with the rest of the game.
I'm not too clear on how balanced the dlc for DA2 was as I played the first one halfway through my second run, and I was way under-leveled for the Leopold fight, it took me a long time to beat it, but it was my own fault, I just didn't feel like going back to an earlier save to level up before replaying the whole dlc over again.
Other than that they didn't feel too out of whack with the base game, but I haven't played them enough to know for sure.
The difficulty in Inquisition felt pretty good to me, I started out using pause heavily, then in mid-game I had a synergy I could work without pausing at all and that felt satisfying. One thing I do not like about Inquisition is the way the open world environment makes positioning even more unreliable than in DA2. I mean it's clear they maybe wanted to go back to the way fights worked in Origins, but the terrain, and the number of move skills available, keeps messing things up. The other major problem I have with Inquisition is the prevalence of the bullet sponge enemy - bears with with 5 billion hit points. When I see a bear in Inquisition it's like seeing someone on the street that I really don't want to talk to, I pretend I didn't see them and walk the other way. Killing them is not a challenge, and it takes way too long.
Progession-wise it felt like the dynamic was the opposite of Origins, where the challenge climbed towards the end, my party in Inquisition felt quite powerful towards the end, but that's fine, that makes sense, it works.
By the same token the sudden shift with Jaws of Hakkon feels pretty ridiculous. All of a sudden I go to a new area and I'm powerless. It just doesn't fit, it's jarring. Random mobs can one-shot me, and I have to wail on them and wail on them and wail on them. It is essentially a dlc full of bears, who re-spawn! What an actual nightmare!
The re-spawning is a problem in general, the satisfaction of clearing an area is no longer a thing and again it feels like the open world is working against the nature of the combat.
Overall, at this point, it feels to me that the challenge of Nightmare has finally spun out of control, and it's barely recognizable from what it once was. I mean I don't think they'll try to do another open world game, because of the amount of bugs it caused, maybe I'm wrong but the main problem for me anyway is the enemies with too many hit points. Surely they can scale things back, and up the numbers instead, so that it feels real again.
I haven't tried the other Inquisition dlc's yet, can someone tell me how they compare?
So, is it just me, or is the difficulty in this franchise in particular (compared to Mass Effect for example) horribly inconsistent between content? Interested to hear other perspectives.
For me the nightmare difficulty in Origins was superb, and still is. A lot of CC, characters quite fragile to certain things, but most importantly very few bullet sponge enemies, and fights felt more or less realistic - you saw the field, you made a plan, and you took out the opposition as systematically as possible. On my first run ( i switched from hard up to nightmare about halfway through) it felt like it scaled quite sharply towards the end, and it was suitably intimidating, it made the finale intense.
Then there was Awakenings, and I felt it was too easy, especially compared to the challenge that came before it. We were given new abilities a lot more frequently than in the base game, and there weren't enough obstacles in between to test them. I rarely go back to it for this reason, even though there's a lot of good things about that release.
Then... Golems of Amgarrak, or whatever it's called, and the final boss room, which has a random number of zillion-HP zombies chasing after you, remains to this day the most outrageous difficulty spike I've ever played in any game. I beat it, eventually, but I will never play it again on nightmare difficulty. Did anyone find this fight fun?
For some reason, maybe someone can tell me why, reinforcement waves were introduced for every fight in Dragon Age 2, and it did undermine the strategic positioning that was so important in Origins, and that's a shame, but on each play-through it's not something that bothers me too much. What does bother me, greatly, and more and more each time, is the game relying on cheese elites to slow progress. Two types in particular stand out - rogues who spam stealth and can one-shot - without warning - everyone but the tank, and lieutenants who regenerate health so fast it takes all 4 party members spamming auto attack to bring them down, literally if you have one guy on the floor it can't be done. So so silly.
I love DA2, and the rift/walking bomb party comp I built initially was well able to handle the challenge (and it felt great), but it has just become tedious dealing with these enemy types each time, the kind of attention they demand does not at all feel in sync with the rest of the game.
I'm not too clear on how balanced the dlc for DA2 was as I played the first one halfway through my second run, and I was way under-leveled for the Leopold fight, it took me a long time to beat it, but it was my own fault, I just didn't feel like going back to an earlier save to level up before replaying the whole dlc over again.
Other than that they didn't feel too out of whack with the base game, but I haven't played them enough to know for sure.
The difficulty in Inquisition felt pretty good to me, I started out using pause heavily, then in mid-game I had a synergy I could work without pausing at all and that felt satisfying. One thing I do not like about Inquisition is the way the open world environment makes positioning even more unreliable than in DA2. I mean it's clear they maybe wanted to go back to the way fights worked in Origins, but the terrain, and the number of move skills available, keeps messing things up. The other major problem I have with Inquisition is the prevalence of the bullet sponge enemy - bears with with 5 billion hit points. When I see a bear in Inquisition it's like seeing someone on the street that I really don't want to talk to, I pretend I didn't see them and walk the other way. Killing them is not a challenge, and it takes way too long.
Progession-wise it felt like the dynamic was the opposite of Origins, where the challenge climbed towards the end, my party in Inquisition felt quite powerful towards the end, but that's fine, that makes sense, it works.
By the same token the sudden shift with Jaws of Hakkon feels pretty ridiculous. All of a sudden I go to a new area and I'm powerless. It just doesn't fit, it's jarring. Random mobs can one-shot me, and I have to wail on them and wail on them and wail on them. It is essentially a dlc full of bears, who re-spawn! What an actual nightmare!
The re-spawning is a problem in general, the satisfaction of clearing an area is no longer a thing and again it feels like the open world is working against the nature of the combat.
Overall, at this point, it feels to me that the challenge of Nightmare has finally spun out of control, and it's barely recognizable from what it once was. I mean I don't think they'll try to do another open world game, because of the amount of bugs it caused, maybe I'm wrong but the main problem for me anyway is the enemies with too many hit points. Surely they can scale things back, and up the numbers instead, so that it feels real again.
I haven't tried the other Inquisition dlc's yet, can someone tell me how they compare?
So, is it just me, or is the difficulty in this franchise in particular (compared to Mass Effect for example) horribly inconsistent between content? Interested to hear other perspectives.
