Hell I is a noob, I glanced over this thread while I was looking for mana and inf ammo mods BG to make it...you know...playable.... ok ok BG is a awesome and grand game but my god it makes some heavy duty OCD rddled RTS/TBS but my lord by the time you add up daily magic ammo for range weapons it just is to much. That aside lets go over what I see DA has or has not over BG.
Characters
Wow both have great and fun characters perhaps GB has more crazy ones I have not got to far into DA but I doubt I will be seeing Minsc go nuts for taking to long to go save his princess(did I mention that's around the time I stoped playing BG...oh god if it was just mana based or at the least FF1 based where you can easily regain spell slot use) but I digress. I think the BG series is a bit deeper but not by much at the end of the day they all run on pre scripted sets of data the only difference is BG has a couple more characters that are just unforgettable!
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Dialog
DA has deeper conversations with your team and a few other characters but I hate how one shot it tends to be and worse yet I am skilled in dialog and they will not show me which lines are good/bad, good/bad begin positive/negative relationship wise with the player character, I think they rushed though that a bit they tried to hard to get away from the moral slider when they merely needed to make it deeper. but with that said BG has a much richer back story and novels within it what DA has in nice shiny presentation for VA and general dialog you can't easily out do a rich text based world this is something modern gaming dose not get you are going to need to use voice altering tech to get 10-20 unique voices and pour 100 hours or more of text into a RPG to get up to the standards we have lost..... but that aside DA has solid main dialog in voice and BG perhaps even greater everything in text.
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Combat
Oh boy......... its been awhile since I played BG I can;t recall how buggy it was but DA likes to change weapon sets without my OK or what I have setup in tactics, like changing from crossbow or staff to melee weapon....like...no I do not want you doing that we are all doing range weapons to kill off things quickly now....why do you want to disperse your attacks so you die like a gimp.....
Other than that both has a good set of AI scripts and general combat commanding,I do with I could trade tactics for quqeing tho.... I'd much rather bark out 3-5 orders at a time then pause and requqe up... the gambits are nice and all er ya ya FF12 and all that they are not bad but I can't help to think there is a better way to do this.....
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Items/Equipment
Both annoy the hell out of me IN BG you can heal and revive but ammo limited and annoying as hell ,certain anti magic combo,ect in DA you can only heal self or wait till combat is over to revive someone it makes it harder and more tricky and I think its a worse mechanic but they have to do something to make it fluid and challenging, I think traditional item usage with the caveat of if you use it on another party member it takes more time cool down and the process to heal another takes 50 or 60% more time.
Reviving could be as easy as a simple 10 silver smelling salt that takes 40 seconds to cool down and gets them back up on their feet with 20% HP/Mana/Stanima
Other than that I love being able to do basic dual wielding with daggers
and I do love the the posing and bomb making that's very neat!! Tho it would help if throwing range got a boost by strength/dex..... just saying.....
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Talent/skill layout
Lets face it DA is messy you have req's so why force people to pick on a first come first served basis? maybe because you sell them so people can buy the ones they want once they meet the reqs..but some on... BG 1-2 is much more polished and know where its going with its classes I know DA is trying hard not to have such antiseptic ladders but really set basic reqs and let people pick what they want.
Otherwise its a hard pick BG is more polished and DA is more fun...I hate the old D&D "daily magic" setup tho it was not so bad in warriors of the eternal sun on the genesis but good god when time is noted like in BG it spells bad ju ju.....or bad boo....whatever *rolls eyes*
I am not to found of the live action cool down stuff mana driven or not perhaps the mechanic needs more polish like in DAs case base speed of spell archetype and cunning perhaps 1% faster up to 20 then 2% faster for every point past 20 for magic user classes,screw stun locking and such finite balancing if I can have a bit more fun by messing with my atts let me
I forget dose willpower govern to hit? since magic governs power and what yuo can learn willpower should govern magic stamina as well as if its effective on hit or not.
ack I am rambling ><
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Level layout
BG and most 2D RPGs FTW modern games do level layout poorly or not at all, it seems level designs quit thinking when they try and do something in 3D I have come to hate most FPSs these days due to the return of the corridor shooter trend...I hate nothing more than antiseptic,bland and small levels while not all modern games suffer from it its a bane of modern gaming.
Rant aside FF12 did level design well even if it had issues galore and DA dose levels fairly well I think ME was a bit more polished in level layout and scenery but DA still tries to be more than a bland simplistic layout with a few nuts scattered about for effort. Sure they are flat but what modern game is not they are a bit ..er... bland and sometimes a bit small.....(also why are we loading a whole level to see the upstairs? *kicks designers in the head*) but I have seen worse. Oh and I call Kotor/ME action games well they are adventure games really like Onimusha or Resident evil and such a simple action game with a hub'd and or winding level theme where you find a ton of crap and do more fighting than walking.
Every since 3D took off (late 90s) adventure/action kinda merged you see more action adventure games these days than straight up level by level action games which where the main stay of..er...action games... LOL whatever you call it , you can call im "lite" Bioshock is a lite adventure shooter, no mater how long FO3 is it too is a lite game because of the shallow coding DA is more a normal RPG I would not call it hard core or lite its deeper and more polished than kotor or even ME or JE so tis not a typical Bioware lite adventure RPG.
Over all story and plot
BG has a richer in game history but all in all DA is not half bad its still lacking in alot of text. Main plot/story wise BG is a bit richer but it has so much more to pull from I dunno what dose DA pull from I am loving the whole setup so far with the darkness that corrupts the dark bit it alluding to overall its a decent RPG that is flawed but still fun enough for lay-gamers I hope they go deeper/bigger/longer/more polish skill/talent wise with the next RPG they do if so they may well out do BG but DA has not outdone BG yet....
IMO its far more a "spiritual successor" to what it claims to be than that sell out of a cheap wank bioshock as much as its an ok shooter its a insult to the System shock series
oh ya it might help to mention I missed NWN completely 0-o
but arcanum,FO1-2,FOTatics,BG1 some BG2 some Nox and some Sacred not to mention daiblo 2, while D2 was pure dungeon crawling Sacred was world crawling 0-o and NOX was awesome!!!
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Oh ya because I sit on the pause button like a OCD addict I only lost 1 milltia member when I fought the zombie horde at red cliff no fire ball on my mage lvls were 5-7
