Dragon Age News Thread

You knooow, I hate to be a negative nancy, but to the bolded about not shirking from problems with the game and not only recognizing that you have a problem, but turning your full attn to it.

Um....yeah, no shit. Lol! I'm sorry, but I don't see how this is a key lesson. Didn't we know this already? Weren't we doing this already? Was this concept not already in place as a guidepost? As a general rule of life, if your thing is effed up, you work to fix it. How is this an epiphany. This is something you learn as a child. Why are we patting ourselves on the back here. 

Omg. Okay. My apologies, but I'm genuinely bewildered.

Playtest feedback. Yeah. You think? 

Omg. Okay, I'm done. I'll leave now.

...but i'm just saying.

Hey, maybe the other four key lessons were more insightful, or something. I haven't read it. Sooo, yeah. 

What's interesting is that, the combat system still isn't great (8 skill limit! regurgitated spells) so how bad was it before that they were going the dump the whole thing?

princess.‏ @faunlette
@patrickweekes any chance we'd ever see you at dragoncon?

Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes
I was there a couple years ago. Would love to go again, ideally someday when I can answer questions with something beyond, "Spoilers!"

I don't want to derail the thread any further, but for those interested Extra Credits made a nice video about the whole sunk cost fallacy (and generally a good channel if you want gaming issues explained from a developer's angle).

Amen. I couldn't agree more, but the reality is, this happens more often than not. What BW did in the article is the exception.

There are solutions to the problem. Don't hold to inflexible schedules when the unknowns vastly outnumber the knowns. Don't go 18+ months without customer feedback -- release what you have every month or two and listen to what customers say. Connect rewards (bonuses, raises) to quality, not to shipping on time.

 I had this thought too. "But DAI is the worst of the three games! what!" Glad I wasn't the only one.

The eight skill limit bothered me because, with any character and build there are always a few core skills that you use. For my SnS warrior, that is six primary skills, but even then I'm leaving a couple off due to necessity. If I add the Anchor ability, it's seven. That only leaves me with one extra slot for some skill. It was frustrating. And I say this as someone who played Guild Wars 1, which also had an eight skill limit and a similar mentality of "prepare your skill bar for the enemy you're going to be fighting," and was even more restrictive in that you could only swap skills while in a town. I'm also used to doing this in Diablo III.

Their reasoning behind it was to force the player to think about encounters and adjust skills accordingly, even allowing us the freedom to change skills anywhere outside of combat. But that doesn't make it less frustrating for me. And again I'll say that this seemed like a change put in due to MP, rather than something they thought would make for good SP Dragon Age combat. Maybe that's not the case. I don't know for sure, but it feels that way to me.

And now 8 feels liberating compared to 3 in MEA.

For DAI, if they had made the anchor and other focus abilities not one of the 8, it would have been less annoying. I barely even use Mark of the Rift anymore because of it.

Skills aren't necessarily there to be used - they're there to offer build variety. Not all abilities will be useful, even if there's a slot for them. That's sort of the fun of speccing the character - we figure out what works and what doesn't, or what situation or skill combination they will work best and all. Hook and Tackle for example doesn't really work for archer rogues, but it's a pretty great gap-closer for dual-wield, especially dual-wielding Tempests.

While story and gameplay don't necessarily have to be at odds, complaining how combat system "breaks RP" is futile. It will always break RP in some ways, because the game can hardly accommodate for all the RP scenarios we have in our heads. After all, what if a character I imagined is a unique dual-wielding mage or doesn't use staff at all? Or what about the fact that since DAO the Templar specialization doesn't come with consequences of chugging lyrium? Or what about the fact that we can fall 50 meters from the bridge and not die? Or what about the everybody in DAO somehow not knowing how to jump?

"Ludonarrative dissonance" is a term invented for a reason...

Also... I'm fairly sure that both fire and electricity schools are on separate trees, so I don't get the complaint? If you RP that your character has no affinity for fire spells then... don't make her learn it. You have choice not to do so. Case closed.

Also - learning a trick doesn't necessarily means that a trick can be performed, hence it can be "forgotten". If a character fights a fire-resistant dragon, the fire spells are useless anyhow - and some spells actually cancel each other or their effects out.

Actually, many games limit number of slots because in reality people use a limited number of skills, no matter how many slots they can have for them. They do know it's happening - they have ways to monitor skill usage by players.

Also - I assume that you're neither a combat designer or like min-maxing, so please stop with accusations of weak planning or saving resources or unbalanced combat jus because a game chooses to limit number of skills. Being able to use all skills simultaneously doesn't automatically make the combat system or battle mechanics 'balanced'. Dragon's Dogma uses only 6 abilities, doesn't let you control party members (only issue 4 types of commands) and we can't change abilities on the fly when we're out of combat, yet it is one of the most enjoyable and praised combat systems in recent RPGs.

.... Nevermind that somehow we can respec and therefore 'forget' skills and abilities too. Also, Wicther is a different game from DA and offers only one class and character - the Witcher.

I keep Mark of the Rift for big boss/dragon fights.  Other than that - yeah - don't use it.