Okay, there's (at least) two workarounds to this:
-Mod the game to severely restrict resting; take out the leniency the developers left in, likely as a crutch for newbies.
-Don't exploit oversights in the game that greatly damage the integrity of the system. Not rest-cheesing is easy, and makes the game so much more interesting.
Both of these work well and are relatively simple fixes. The excision of one "broken" aspect quickly rights the system as a whole, because it is fundamentally sound (not saying it's perfect, however).
I agree, I'd only rather that the rest restrictions were enforced on the dev-level, because many, many,
many players
will rest to replenish their spells when they run out, thinking nothing of it. Resting whenever a player feels the need to in the IE games also doesn't seem to be an exploit of an oversight, but rather
dev intent.
The same can't be said of DA:O. There's no clear cut restrictions the player can place upon themselves to correct the system. Spamming mana potions is pretty much integral to mage gameplay by the way the game is balanced. Restricting use of each spell to a set number of casts-per-day is silly, because there's no common-sense judgments easily made; it's one thing to not restspam in a hostile dungeon but a whole different matter to only cast Misdirection Hex twice per dungeon.
Firstly, the player should never have to self-impose a restriction such as not-resting or not-waiting in the first place, this is a fundamental mechanic devs need to get right. Secondly, in Origins I rarely find my mages quaffing potions of any kind with too much regularity, even on Nightmare. It might happen once or twice per encounter, that's it, which is hardly spamming. Also, there are spells and items which increase health and mana regen and a sensible investment in Willpower further reduces the need (think Wynne build), as does setting potion use up in the tactical framework system. I just really think you and others are over-selling the "spam" of Origins.
Not really, as outside of boss fights there's only a couple of instances where the player is in prolonged combat, namely the undead attack on Redcliffe and the final sequences in Denerim (where most of the Darkspawn are there for show and die in one hit). Everything else goes down pretty quickly (played Nightmare on release; don't know if mods/patches significantly altered things) as long as you aren't playing some sort of gimp party and know what you are doing. Decent parties have immense amounts of firepower they can bring to bear in every encounter making short work of most anything.
I agree the Denerim and Redcliffe fights are woeful, but they're not the ones I had in mind. I didn't play Origins on release, so I'd say the patches changed a heap of things. I know for a fact that Ultimate Edition on Nightmare throws many more and powerful enemies at the player, also increasing their AI and resistances. In some cases, Nightmare throws twice as many enemies at you. Some enemies keep their ground and some hangback entirely, so in a more drawnout fight, of which there's quite a few - even in random encounters - you'll have to deal with a few stages of combat. Bioware should have made Nightmare
default difficulty, and omitted the difficulty slider entirely. But then, how many devs have the guts to do that...
What resources? In any fight that isn't a prolonged combat (i.e. a boss battle), the battle is usually "over" within one cycle of abilities. And then, after combat is over, you have all your abilities back. I also don't recall any consumables being particularly useful and scarce.
Again, not on Nightmare from my experience. Many times halfway thru a fight my quickbar starts to show signs of total cooldown and I have to re-appraise the situation, carefully. And if you don't have a herbalist then expect to run out of healing salves and lyrium potions, as they're not confetti loot, they're not cheap to buy, and unlike in IE games, cash doesn't fall from the sky in thick wads.
Basically, DA:O plays the same as an IE games does with rest-spamming...except Origins was designed that way, whereas the IE games were exploited.
Don't get me wrong, DA:O was good for what is was, but a lot of the systems weren't very well thought out.
I'd argue that the IE games
weren't exploited and it isn't the players' fault, that it was dev-intent that the player can rest whenever and wherever they wish. This is supported by small, specific ARs being flagged as unrestable and all the others just left wide open to rest abuse, plus there's a serious lack of resource-draining on-rest respawns in most ARs, maybe to let the player spam rest if they forgot to turn on "Rest Until Healed" or in case they need to force-trigger a romance or other dialogue. But I would argue that the Vancian magic system
is exploited or cheapened by IE's implementation: Goldbox, ToEE and some NWN1 modules did a decent job by threatening a player who absent-mindedly spams with tedium as punishment.
