Review Dragon Age II Is Mediocre, BioWare Is Becoming Terrible

[Crooked Bee]

R00fles!

 

[MrJones]

In both Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age, the first thing I did was turning the terrible AI off and managing everything manually - despite in Dragon Age it was a lot harder since some stupid tactics were always in force and would cause random undesired switch in attack target and it took me some time to find all the switches to just turn it all off.

Then again as already stated, in Dragon Age it didn't matter too much since for some fights it worked to have your party members just attack random persons and even get away with it.

One reason is missing perma-death.

DA:O mistake in tactics? Well just do some excessive potion spam with the remaining party members and you get away with it.

BG mistake in tactics? Character is dead and in most cases you do not want that to happen (or it is your main char and the game ends right away), so you will have to reload and restart the whole thing. Surely makes for a different approach about being careful what you do in a battle!

 

[Volourn]

What mistakes in BG? L0LZ Bg was a cakewalk comapred to DA let alone DA2. LMFAO

 

[Alec McCabe]

And even some of the more unique encounters were complete drek. Take for example Flemeth and/or the High Dragon. Both fights mandated that you have a designated "tank" to endure copious amounts of punishment from the scaly beast and draw it's attacks, and that you have a healer or two to keep them alive, while the rest of the party slowly chips away. This leads to absurdly stupid gameplay where Alistair is being thrown about for a good 20 minutes in the dragon's mouth, meanwhile my party mages are healing him periodically and pew-pewing the dragon to death with their staves. Any deviation from this strategy results in instant death.

This basically describes the Firkraag fight in BG2, with the slight tweak that where in DA:O you had to have a Mage to heal, in BG2 you had to have a Cleric or a Druid to heal and a Wizard or Sorceror for anti-magic duty. BG2 had you having to dedicate a lot of your magic resources to counteracting charms, fears, paralysis and the metaphorical 5 inches-thick covering of magical protections every enemy capable of casting spells had, against which your rogues, warriors and so on were completely unable to deal with, unless they'd picked up Carsomyr or something, which you couldn't even do before the Firkraag fight. Besides that, the mechanics are essentially the same; your guys fighting up close'll take a battering, the cleric heals them up, the mage dispels fear, the archers and the other melee fighters do the whittling. It's even got the same tail swipes and knockdowns.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

[attackfighter]

And even some of the more unique encounters were complete drek. Take for example Flemeth and/or the High Dragon. Both fights mandated that you have a designated "tank" to endure copious amounts of punishment from the scaly beast and draw it's attacks, and that you have a healer or two to keep them alive, while the rest of the party slowly chips away. This leads to absurdly stupid gameplay where Alistair is being thrown about for a good 20 minutes in the dragon's mouth, meanwhile my party mages are healing him periodically and pew-pewing the dragon to death with their staves. Any deviation from this strategy results in instant death.

This basically describes the Firkraag fight in BG2, with the slight tweak that where in DA:O you had to have a Mage to heal, in BG2 you had to have a Cleric or a Druid to heal and a Wizard or Sorceror for anti-magic duty. BG2 had you having to dedicate a lot of your magic resources to counteracting charms, fears, paralysis and the metaphorical 5 inches-thick covering of magical protections every enemy capable of casting spells had, against which your rogues, warriors and so on were completely unable to deal with, unless they'd picked up Carsomyr or something, which you couldn't even do before the Firkraag fight. Besides that, the mechanics are essentially the same; your guys fighting up close'll take a battering, the cleric heals them up, the mage dispels fear, the archers and the other melee fighters do the whittling. It's even got the same tail swipes and knockdowns.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Not true, there're plenty of different ways to take down Firkragg and most other tough encounters. You can abuse traps, lower resistance + finger of death (or some other spell I forget), summon a shitload of cannon fodder, summon a greater demon (they're immune to Firkragg's attacks btw), and plenty more.

And the tactics you described are pretty vague. You're drawing the conclusion that BG lacks tactical variety on the premise that the different classes are relegated to certain roles. Yeah, sure a cleric is essentially always going to be buffing, but the manner in which he does so is very different depending on whether he's in a 'standard' party, or a party with 5 warriors. And of course other factors such as what enemiy he's facing, or what the battlefield looks like are also going to play roles. YOu can't really pass a judgement based on the broad generalizations you're making.

 

[Alec McCabe]

Not true, there're plenty of different ways to take down Firkragg and most other tough encounters. You can abuse traps, lower resistance + finger of death (or some other spell I forget), summon a shitload of cannon fodder, summon a greater demon (they're immune to Firkragg's attacks btw), and plenty more.

And the tactics you described are pretty vague. You're drawing the conclusion that BG lacks tactical variety on the premise that the different classes are relegated to certain roles. Yeah, sure a cleric is essentially always going to be buffing, but the manner in which he does so is very different depending on whether he's in a 'standard' party, or a party with 5 warriors. And of course other factors such as what enemiy he's facing, or what the battlefield looks like are also going to play roles. YOu can't really pass a judgement based on the broad generalizations you're making.

Besides the traps abuse - which as you said is abuse, and funnily enough there is a dragon fight in DA:O that can be won with traps spam, and that's Flemeth - the rest of your ideas basically boil down to the same thing: you need a spellcaster. And one of the decent ones, too - a Bard won't be able to pull that stuff off short of scrolls, and good luck with that.

And classes are relegated into certain roles in BG2, if they're the only ones in the group. A cleric with 5 warriors is going to be healing and buffing a lot; just as a mage in a party of warriors and rogues is going to be doing the same in DA:O. Put a second spellcaster in either party, and they both have more freedom. And the harder the fight, the more the classes became relegated to these roles, because to make those fights harder, the bad guy melee damage/spellcasting prowess becomes so high, the non-spellcasters are often out of options until Throne of Bhaal and epic abilities.

As fir BG2's tactical variety, the vast amount of battles in BG2 were basically trash fights with one gimmick. Whether it was kobolds with their fire arrows, vampires with charm, shadows with level drain, werewolves with... nothing, ogres with nothing, orcs with nothing... it was often the same thing. Sometimes you'd come across a group of 'combined arms' bad guys with some ranged power, a spellcaster etc, just as you do in DA:O. The enemies you're facing are very much the same; the difference between the two is very much in the characters you've got.

If there is a difference between the two, it's in the way the party is handled. In BG2 you take 5 party members and do your best to build them to be able to face anything. In DA:O you have a slightly larger stable of characters and you can build each one of them (almost from scratch, if you add in that character respec mod) to be good at something; and you can swop them out. Playing DA:O like BG2, and having a fixed roster throughout the game, is going to result in the kind of situation you describe, in which you do the same things over and over. It is quite possible to tank with a non-shield warrior or a rogue, for example, or even a mage, if you build them right.

As an aside, I don't think DA:O needs the plethora of weird and wacky magical items that BG2 had. In BG2, you needed those items to keep your warriors, rogues, bards etc competitive. In DA:O, that's already taken care of with the various battlefield control and aoe powers they get.

 

[Jim Cojones]

What mistakes in BG? L0LZ Bg was a cakewalk comapred to DA let alone DA2. LMFAO

Lolz. Even TOEE is difficult in comparison to DAO. I used the very same tactic every fight and had to reload maybe 2 - three times, completing almost half of the game before quitting out of boredom. Having one of the party members unconscious was rather rare. On nightmare. Just have to use spells that immobilise enemies whenever you can. Heal when you need. Win.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BG2 had you having to dedicate a lot of your magic resources to counteracting charms, fears, paralysis and the metaphorical 5 inches-thick covering of magical protections every enemy capable of casting spells had, against which your rogues, warriors and so on were completely unable to deal with

And that's bad because? In most modern RPGs mages are just ranged DPS machines with sparkling blue lights coming out of their finger tips. In BG2 they actually felt like mages.

 

[circ]

What mistakes in BG? L0LZ Bg was a cakewalk comapred to DA let alone DA2. LMFAO

Lolz. Even TOEE is difficult in comparison to DAO. I used the very same tactic every fight and had to reload maybe 2 - three times, completing almost half of the game before quitting out of boredom. Having one of the party members unconscious was rather rare. On nightmare. Just have to use spells that immobilise enemies whenever you can. Heal when you need. Win.

Yeah, what the fuck. When I first played ToEE, I couldn't even get past the fucking frogs. And that was after spending 20 odd years playing RPG's. I eventually relearned the system, but the bandits kept fucking me up, then it was the barbarian leader. Gnolls. Lareth, etc. Now I can finish the game in a day or so, but the combat's still excellent. Compare that to never dying in DA2 dude, other than Aveline to some ogre here and there. Derp derp derp. Try kiting in ToEE.

 

[Volourn]

TOEE is one of the fukkin' easiest RPGs fukkin' ever. FFS


"You can abuse traps"

You mean cheese because no way a dragon 9and this includes Flemeth) woudl just stand there and watch you litter their home (outside their home) with traps. L0LZ

 

[Alec McCabe]

And that's bad because? In most modern RPGs mages are just ranged DPS machines with sparkling blue lights coming out of their finger tips. In BG2 they actually felt like mages.

But we're not talking about most modern rpgs, are we? We're talking about Dragon Age: Origins. And in DA:O, although you could play a mage as a ranged dps machine, that wasn't the most interesting or even the most useful thing they could do. There's whole trees of abilities focusing on buffs, debuffs and battlefield control, even before you get into the specialisation trees. These were certainly the most dangerous things the enemy mages could do, even if you didn't.

Anyway. Why is it bad? We have a situation in which you will have extreme difficulty overcoming it unless you have a particular class with a particular set of abilities (dispel magic, spell breach etc). Are you saying that's good? What does 'felt like mages' actually mean?

I'm well alongside anyone saying that BG2's overall narrative and quest design was superior, but in terms of the combat mechanics, I think we're looking at BG2 through some very rose-tinted glasses here.

 

[Serious_Business]

Not true, there're plenty of different ways to take down Firkragg and most other tough encounters. You can abuse traps, lower resistance + finger of death (or some other spell I forget), summon a shitload of cannon fodder, summon a greater demon (they're immune to Firkragg's attacks btw), and plenty more.

And the tactics you described are pretty vague. You're drawing the conclusion that BG lacks tactical variety on the premise that the different classes are relegated to certain roles. Yeah, sure a cleric is essentially always going to be buffing, but the manner in which he does so is very different depending on whether he's in a 'standard' party, or a party with 5 warriors. And of course other factors such as what enemiy he's facing, or what the battlefield looks like are also going to play roles. YOu can't really pass a judgement based on the broad generalizations you're making.

Besides the traps abuse - which as you said is abuse, and funnily enough there is a dragon fight in DA:O that can be won with traps spam, and that's Flemeth - the rest of your ideas basically boil down to the same thing: you need a spellcaster. And one of the decent ones, too - a Bard won't be able to pull that stuff off short of scrolls, and good luck with that.

And classes are relegated into certain roles in BG2, if they're the only ones in the group. A cleric with 5 warriors is going to be healing and buffing a lot; just as a mage in a party of warriors and rogues is going to be doing the same in DA:O. Put a second spellcaster in either party, and they both have more freedom. And the harder the fight, the more the classes became relegated to these roles, because to make those fights harder, the bad guy melee damage/spellcasting prowess becomes so high, the non-spellcasters are often out of options until Throne of Bhaal and epic abilities.

As fir BG2's tactical variety, the vast amount of battles in BG2 were basically trash fights with one gimmick. Whether it was kobolds with their fire arrows, vampires with charm, shadows with level drain, werewolves with... nothing, ogres with nothing, orcs with nothing... it was often the same thing. Sometimes you'd come across a group of 'combined arms' bad guys with some ranged power, a spellcaster etc, just as you do in DA:O. The enemies you're facing are very much the same; the difference between the two is very much in the characters you've got.

If there is a difference between the two, it's in the way the party is handled. In BG2 you take 5 party members and do your best to build them to be able to face anything. In DA:O you have a slightly larger stable of characters and you can build each one of them (almost from scratch, if you add in that character respec mod) to be good at something; and you can swop them out. Playing DA:O like BG2, and having a fixed roster throughout the game, is going to result in the kind of situation you describe, in which you do the same things over and over. It is quite possible to tank with a non-shield warrior or a rogue, for example, or even a mage, if you build them right.

As an aside, I don't think DA:O needs the plethora of weird and wacky magical items that BG2 had. In BG2, you needed those items to keep your warriors, rogues, bards etc competitive. In DA:O, that's already taken care of with the various battlefield control and aoe powers they get.

That's a good post. I tend to forget sometimes that you people are not just faggots discussing inane shit, you also make efforts in constructing coherent arguments. Congratulation.

More seriously speaking, I've been wondering about what makes DA's combat so bland and repetitive. I'm not sure if comparing it to infinity engine combat is the best idea to highlight DA's blandness, because both are pretty bland and Bioware. However, I'll give that BG series were more varied than DA. But how? As you say, essentially it does come down to the same shit. But then, I don't know man. It certainly felt different.

I don't know how to tackle this, so I'm going back on your argument about the dragon fights in BG2 vs DA. I don't really agree that it comes down to the same patterns. As Edward said, in DA there is fundamentally ONE tactic that you need to pull off to get through that fight, whatever your choices might have been in character building, or previous explorations that might have gotten you different loot to tackle the situation in a more optimized way. Here's what I remember from one of my BG2 playthrough : I fought the red dragon while making sure I was higher level with better items, playing as a paladin I believe, I soloed the dragon out of principle. I remember that felt pretty cool, and it's certainly not the kind of thing you'd see in DA. The character system in BG is much more flexible and allows more varied gameplay. I agree that fundamentally, it's very similar, but there are small nuances that make all the difference in the world.

 

[attackfighter]

Not true, there're plenty of different ways to take down Firkragg and most other tough encounters. You can abuse traps, lower resistance + finger of death (or some other spell I forget), summon a shitload of cannon fodder, summon a greater demon (they're immune to Firkragg's attacks btw), and plenty more.

And the tactics you described are pretty vague. You're drawing the conclusion that BG lacks tactical variety on the premise that the different classes are relegated to certain roles. Yeah, sure a cleric is essentially always going to be buffing, but the manner in which he does so is very different depending on whether he's in a 'standard' party, or a party with 5 warriors. And of course other factors such as what enemiy he's facing, or what the battlefield looks like are also going to play roles. YOu can't really pass a judgement based on the broad generalizations you're making.

Besides the traps abuse - which as you said is abuse, and funnily enough there is a dragon fight in DA:O that can be won with traps spam, and that's Flemeth - the rest of your ideas basically boil down to the same thing: you need a spellcaster. And one of the decent ones, too - a Bard won't be able to pull that stuff off short of scrolls, and good luck with that.

And classes are relegated into certain roles in BG2, if they're the only ones in the group. A cleric with 5 warriors is going to be healing and buffing a lot; just as a mage in a party of warriors and rogues is going to be doing the same in DA:O. Put a second spellcaster in either party, and they both have more freedom. And the harder the fight, the more the classes became relegated to these roles, because to make those fights harder, the bad guy melee damage/spellcasting prowess becomes so high, the non-spellcasters are often out of options until Throne of Bhaal and epic abilities.

As fir BG2's tactical variety, the vast amount of battles in BG2 were basically trash fights with one gimmick. Whether it was kobolds with their fire arrows, vampires with charm, shadows with level drain, werewolves with... nothing, ogres with nothing, orcs with nothing... it was often the same thing. Sometimes you'd come across a group of 'combined arms' bad guys with some ranged power, a spellcaster etc, just as you do in DA:O. The enemies you're facing are very much the same; the difference between the two is very much in the characters you've got.

If there is a difference between the two, it's in the way the party is handled. In BG2 you take 5 party members and do your best to build them to be able to face anything. In DA:O you have a slightly larger stable of characters and you can build each one of them (almost from scratch, if you add in that character respec mod) to be good at something; and you can swop them out. Playing DA:O like BG2, and having a fixed roster throughout the game, is going to result in the kind of situation you describe, in which you do the same things over and over. It is quite possible to tank with a non-shield warrior or a rogue, for example, or even a mage, if you build them right.

As an aside, I don't think DA:O needs the plethora of weird and wacky magical items that BG2 had. In BG2, you needed those items to keep your warriors, rogues, bards etc competitive. In DA:O, that's already taken care of with the various battlefield control and aoe powers they get.

Asides from your first paragraph you haven't responded to anything I wrote. Also your following paragraphs are biased and shallow.

 

[Alec McCabe]

However, I'll give that BG series were more varied than DA. But how? As you say, essentially it does come down to the same shit. But then, I don't know man. It certainly felt different.

I will tell you why I think this is the case - and the funny thing is, it's not actually due to BG2's superior design. It is in fact due to BG2's inferior design. Because there were so many oddities, strange loopholes, weird magic items and way-out-there spells, it was unbalanced and weird as hell. DA:O is by far the more even and well-designed system; but it doesn't give us as much freedom to screw with it, to look for clever tricks, and to be, basically, rewarded for creativity.

There's a paradox there.

Asides from your first paragraph you haven't responded to anything I wrote. Also your following paragraphs are biased and shallow.

So you're responding in kind? Fair enough, I suppose.

 

[attackfighter]

Asides from your first paragraph you haven't responded to anything I wrote. Also your following paragraphs are biased and shallow.

So you're responding in kind? Fair enough, I suppose.

Correct. My first paragraph is relevant and the following paragraphs (hint: there are none) are biased and shallow.

 

[Volourn]

"As Edward said, in DA there is fundamentally ONE tactic that you need to pull off to get through that fight, "

Bullshit.

 

[deus101]

"As Edward said, in DA there is fundamentally ONE tactic that you need to pull off to get through that fight, "

Bullshit.

no

 

[Xor]

Besides the traps abuse - which as you said is abuse, and funnily enough there is a dragon fight in DA:O that can be won with traps spam, and that's Flemeth - the rest of your ideas basically boil down to the same thing: you need a spellcaster. And one of the decent ones, too - a Bard won't be able to pull that stuff off short of scrolls, and good luck with that.

You need a spellcaster in both games. I don't see how that's a bad thing? For Baldur's Gate, it's based on AD&D, and I can't think of a single game of that I've ever played where the party didn't have a spellcaster; it's pretty much expected. You have fewer party member slots in DAO, but you're still pretty much required to bring a spellcaster; they're vital for crowd control and healing.

And classes are relegated into certain roles in BG2, if they're the only ones in the group. A cleric with 5 warriors is going to be healing and buffing a lot; just as a mage in a party of warriors and rogues is going to be doing the same in DA:O. Put a second spellcaster in either party, and they both have more freedom. And the harder the fight, the more the classes became relegated to these roles, because to make those fights harder, the bad guy melee damage/spellcasting prowess becomes so high, the non-spellcasters are often out of options until Throne of Bhaal and epic abilities.

I don't see how the limited scope of classes in BG2 limits their tactical usefulness. A good BG2 party includes multiple spellcasters, but you also need melee fighters to absorb hits. The tactical part of combat is identifying what your enemies can do, dispelling their protections, and killing them, all without losing party members yourself. On the other hand, the DAO classes generally use a handful of active abilities in every fight, but that doesn't automatically make them more "tactical" than BG2. In fact, the lack of a spell-per-day system means you can abuse mana potions and crowd control to trivialize combat most of the time. That's not really "tactical" because it's a fairly obvious strategy and it's going to work against pretty much everything.

As fir BG2's tactical variety, the vast amount of battles in BG2 were basically trash fights with one gimmick. Whether it was kobolds with their fire arrows, vampires with charm, shadows with level drain, werewolves with... nothing, ogres with nothing, orcs with nothing... it was often the same thing. Sometimes you'd come across a group of 'combined arms' bad guys with some ranged power, a spellcaster etc, just as you do in DA:O. The enemies you're facing are very much the same; the difference between the two is very much in the characters you've got.

The hardest fights in BG2 were always the ones involving spellcasters, but those are winnable if you know what spells to use. As for the other fights, if you know what the fights are ahead of time, then yeah, they'll be easy. But if you aren't prepared to fight vampires your party will be wiped out in seconds by level drain. The fact is, the few examples you named is already more variety than exists in DAO, where all you do is fight the same 5-10 or so darkspawn or humans over and over and over and over...yeah. Occationally you'd fight spiders or something, but those fights aren't even dangerous. BG2's combat isn't perfect, but it's leagues ahead of DAO.

If there is a difference between the two, it's in the way the party is handled. In BG2 you take 5 party members and do your best to build them to be able to face anything. In DA:O you have a slightly larger stable of characters and you can build each one of them (almost from scratch, if you add in that character respec mod) to be good at something; and you can swop them out. Playing DA:O like BG2, and having a fixed roster throughout the game, is going to result in the kind of situation you describe, in which you do the same things over and over. It is quite possible to tank with a non-shield warrior or a rogue, for example, or even a mage, if you build them right.

I don't remember being able to swap party members in the middle of a dungeon, which is where you'd need to. Am I remembering wrong, or are you really suggesting you leave the dungeon to head back to your campsite and swap party members? At any rate, I never needed to swap party members in DAO. There didn't seem to be much of a point in swapping one rogue for another when they have practically the same abilities.

As an aside, I don't think DA:O needs the plethora of weird and wacky magical items that BG2 had. In BG2, you needed those items to keep your warriors, rogues, bards etc competitive. In DA:O, that's already taken care of with the various battlefield control and aoe powers they get.

If you're swapping out party members in DAO to handle specific situations, then I guess doing this through the character system is fine. I don't think either game handled that perfectly. In theory using items to provide specific immunities gives more tactical options, however most of those kinds of items in BG2 are ridiculously overpowered to the point that you never stop using them; Shield of Balduran is the only one I can think of that I kept in-inventory specifically for fighting Beholders.

 

[Futile Rhetoric]

However, I'll give that BG series were more varied than DA. But how? As you say, essentially it does come down to the same shit. But then, I don't know man. It certainly felt different.

I will tell you why I think this is the case - and the funny thing is, it's not actually due to BG2's superior design. It is in fact due to BG2's inferior design. Because there were so many oddities, strange loopholes, weird magic items and way-out-there spells, it was unbalanced and weird as hell. DA:O is by far the more even and well-designed system; but it doesn't give us as much freedom to screw with it, to look for clever tricks, and to be, basically, rewarded for creativity.

There's a paradox there.

It is obviously the case that a more complex system is more difficult to balance. But try as I might, I cannot come up with a reason why a "balanced" system is better for a single-player game than a system that allows for creativity. There is no paradox here.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

This basically describes the Firkraag fight in BG2, with the slight tweak that where in DA:O you had to have a Mage to heal, in BG2 you had to have a Cleric or a Druid to heal and a Wizard or Sorceror for anti-magic duty. Besides that, the mechanics are essentially the same; your guys fighting up close'll take a battering, the cleric heals them up, the mage dispels fear, the archers and the other melee fighters do the whittling. It's even got the same tail swipes and knockdowns.

That's not entirely true. You don't need any of those necessarily to take down Firkraag in the way you need a certain set up (tank, healer, ranged damage dude) to kill dragons in DA:O. There are different strategies to take in order to kill a dragon in BG2, even without counting exploits (traps, protection scroll glitch, etc.).

-I could do it the MMO/DA:O way. Except here it was a bit more interesting. The dragons in BG2 would use wing buffets to knock my fighters to the ends of the arena, and then go after the back row characters, forcing some sort of adjustment or reaction to this situation. Flemeth and the high dragon just kept munching on Alistair ad nauseum, oblivious to the fact that ranged attacks were murdering them. Also, in BG2, you could be a bit more clever about how you approached things to this extent, it wasn't just tank and heal. You could send summons to soak up the dragon's attacks, or even send a buffed up cleric or mage to soak up the dragon's blows, mosttly because they didn't have to do it for 20 minutes as a result of DA:O's MMO-wannabe boss health inflation.

-I could drop enough disabling/weakening spells on the dragon to be able to massacre it in melee with fighters. Blinded, enfeebled, malisoned, and a host of other maladies make dragons pretty mortal, and a lot more on the player's level. I couldn't do this in Dragon Age, believe me, I tried having Morrigan, my mage, and Wynne hex the crap out of the lizard, to let Alistair and my mage (Arcane Warrior) go in and kill it. Did not work at all. Debuffs can be good in Dragon Age, but you can't debuff bosses enough to bring them down to a level where you can actually have some chance of sending your warriors truly toe to toe.

-And there's always the alpha strike. Get enough powerful magic and abilities and try and throw everything at the dragon all at once to either kill it quick, or wound it badly enough that you can mop up. A spell trigger with some magic resistance lowering spells could let a magic-heavy party pummel the dragon with a ton of spells, dealing scores of direct HP damage.

The point I'm trying to make here is not that BG2 dragon fights were a pinnacle of RPG design, but that they illustrate just how narrow (and thus, rather boring) some of Dragon Age's "big ticket" fights are. You had different strategies you could adopt to kill Firkraag...not so with DA:O's flying lizards.

As fir BG2's tactical variety, the vast amount of battles in BG2 were basically trash fights with one gimmick. Whether it was kobolds with their fire arrows, vampires with charm, shadows with level drain, werewolves with... nothing, ogres with nothing, orcs with nothing... it was often the same thing. Sometimes you'd come across a group of 'combined arms' bad guys with some ranged power, a spellcaster etc, just as you do in DA:O. The enemies you're facing are very much the same; the difference between the two is very much in the characters you've got.

I can't say I agree with this assessment. I'll grant you that certain enemies were pretty boring and existed as only melee herp-derps in BG2. Sadly, some of the much cooler D&D foes were like this, namely elemental critters (okay, salamanders had fire shields and spells and air elementals had some whirlwind ability, but that's not nearly close to what they should be able to do, what with grapples and flight etc.). The thing is, the proportion of trash combat was much lower in BG2 than in Origins, and, as you say, even BG2's trash was differentiated with gimmicks. DA:O just sent the same stuff at you, just slightly reskinned in a lot of cases.

And also, kinda tangential here, trash combat served no purpose in Origins other than to waste time. In BG2, trash combat might waste character resources, like spells or HP, stuff that wouldn't come back. It was still trash combat, and I don't want to sound like I'm defending this, but using it more as an illustration. In Origins, all your HP and mana effectively regenerated at end of combat, allowing you to simply brute force every encounter, meaning they served absolutely no constructive purpose other than gameplay time padding.

The point here isn't that BG2 is a panacea of great combat encounters (even though I do like it quite a bit), it's that it is markedly better than Origins in this respect.

I will tell you why I think this is the case - and the funny thing is, it's not actually due to BG2's superior design. It is in fact due to BG2's inferior design. Because there were so many oddities, strange loopholes, weird magic items and way-out-there spells, it was unbalanced and weird as hell. DA:O is by far the more even and well-designed system; but it doesn't give us as much freedom to screw with it, to look for clever tricks, and to be, basically, rewarded for creativity.

Design to me is about the end goal, and in games, (at least to me) it's fun or amusement. "Balance" isn't good in and of itself in games, it's an extrinsic good in that it can lead to more fun given certain contexts. Obviously it's important in multiplayer games; it's no fun when victory is decided by choice of character/weapon/specialization alone. But in single player games, it has a different role. You want more approaches to completing the game, but you don't want them to be wildly more/less effective than one another because that can compromise the integrity of the game and throw out of whack the intended challenges. That's why I don't think balance is the end-all be-all of design; creating a system that can be experimented with and reward creativity is indicative of good design. Sure DA might have been more balanced*, but that doesn't mean it was better designed than BG2. It just means it was far more conservative in design; it didn't have a lot of imbalances, but it was a very restricted design. BG2 should at least score some points in the design category for providing that ability to innovate in combat and to do different things.

I guess my point is judging design based solely on balance makes no sense, and player freedom has to be factored in as well. You can't just say BG2 had inferior design because it failed in one design metric as compared to Dragon Age; you have to look at all the rest.

*Also, balance is a big, and nebulous concept; one that's tough to pin down. For instance, BG2 may have a lot of imbalanced items/spells, but between the classes, there was a bit more internal balance between the classes. Sure, mages certainly take the cake in BG2 having the most broken things, but other classes have their own fair share of cheese. Contrast with Dragon Age, in which mages hoard all the cheese to themselves. They're the best damage dealers, debuffers, healrers, crowd-control, buffers, anti-mages (Mana Clash is pretty much auto-win against any mage enemy, Crushing Prison to a lesser degree), and tanks (Arcane Warriors). Not very good internal balance, no? At least a high level Fighter dual-wielding The Flail of Ages and Celestial Fury can dish out a ton of damage, more efficiently in some ways than a mage can. In Dragon Age, everyone is overshadowed by mages. Terrible internal balance.

 

[Elwro]

ql;r

 

[Crooked Bee]

ql;r

 

[Dr.Faust]

So am I the only who killed flemeth with an all ranged party and the stone dude giving passive buffs? I just chugged some fire resistance potions I had saved up and nuked her down without a tank. I don't know if it's a bug, but she only spat fireballs at me when I was at range.

Seemed more like an exploit than a real tactic, but at least I wasn't forced to go the MMO route.

 

[GarfunkeL]

BG (and all IE-games) wins automatically because they do not have aggro-mechanics. That's already a crime against humanity in MMO's and adding it into SP-games is ludicrous.

 

[Alec McCabe]

I'll sum up - crux of the thing and all that - by saying that although BG2 had the edge in entertainment value, it's hard to give it the credit; if only because most of these imaginative options for dealing with encounters are the product of our imaginations and skill at playing the engine against itself, rather than any feeling of internal design decisions made on the part of the developer team. In contrast, DA:O is made in such a way that we've no option but to approach the challenges set by the devs at the level they intended, with the approaches they had in mind - so anything that's good or bad about it, we can certainly say that it's due to the developers.

(as a tangent, though - mages the best damage dealers and tanks? Rogues have the edge on them in damage, even ranged rogues, and only a very specific build of mage can out-tank a warrior - a build that renders the mage with very few spells not related to tanking, for some time.

Oh, and that both BG2 and DA:O had aggro-mechanics. That's just a way to decide what gets attacked by what. What DA:O adds, though, is a taunt mechanic.)