Mastermind
Cognito Elite Material
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2010
- Messages
- 21,144
Love it or hate it, there is no denying that Dragon Age was much less unweildy than BG (that game that origins was a spiritual successor of) when it came to controlling the actions of each individual group member than Baldurs Gate. BGII was ****ing micromanagement hell, especially once you hit around epic levels and had to take on armies of giants, demons and Dragons in the BGII expansion. I kid you not when I say that I actually spent more than HALF of my gameplay time in BGII: ToB just moving characters around, casting spells and squinting through all of the speciall effects. All so I could make slight adjustments to my formations before letting the fighting proceed for fractions of a second. That type of compexity in gameplay has no place in a real time with pause game at all, and sadly a lot of that aggavation had nothing at all to do with the gameplay, but poorly designed interfaces and no obvious ways of modifying AI scripts.
See how each companion in DAO has the status bar running parallel with the skill buttons? See how an ability bubble pops up above the head of the characters whenever one is used? See how you could script characters to automatically handle basic tasks such as drinking some health whenever it drops too low? These type of design decisions are fairly obvious nowadays, but it sadly didn't occur to the BG team. And I think that PE eternity could improve the feedback even further by dividing the short term status effects from the long term. I must have been a much more patient person than I was 10 years ago, because I just can't replay BGII anymore without getting bored or frustrated at how unweildy the interface design is and how I control even the most basic actions of my group all of the time because they're dumb.
Basically, please be more like Origins and less like BGII.
See how each companion in DAO has the status bar running parallel with the skill buttons? See how an ability bubble pops up above the head of the characters whenever one is used? See how you could script characters to automatically handle basic tasks such as drinking some health whenever it drops too low? These type of design decisions are fairly obvious nowadays, but it sadly didn't occur to the BG team. And I think that PE eternity could improve the feedback even further by dividing the short term status effects from the long term. I must have been a much more patient person than I was 10 years ago, because I just can't replay BGII anymore without getting bored or frustrated at how unweildy the interface design is and how I control even the most basic actions of my group all of the time because they're dumb.
Basically, please be more like Origins and less like BGII.