sea
inXile Entertainment
- Joined
- May 3, 2011
- Messages
- 5,698
Okay, I admit, the kobold and gnoll caves are a bit trashy. However they get bonus points for fun scenarios (the obvious trap with big red arrows pointing you towards a chest, for instance), and they are still much shorter than anything in the original campaign. As you get better items earlier on and are leveled faster, too, combat goes by more quickly.The fact is even early on there is trash combat: The kobolds and the Gnolls. The only GOOD encounter you missed in the review is the Cave with the Mummy, which has Bugbears. The game does NOT repeat a better non boss encounter until you reach the Formian stronghold.
Also, I have no idea which characters you liked. All of them are shallow and boring. The Dwarf is pure bile. The Orc is one trick pony who can't even keep up with that. Deekin is Jar jar.
I also would not call it fast pased. Because of the ridiculousness of the dungeons it stalls a lot.
The half-orc was entertaining for me. One trick pony, yes, but that doesn't mean he wasn't well-written and entertaining. Same goes for Deekin. Their jokes got some laughs out of me, they were used well but not over-used, and they had a lot of good customization options that gave control over how they leveled and used equipment and spells, while still retaining the sense that they are hirelings rather than player characters.
I'm not saying that SoU was an awesome and amazing experience or anything, even it's better stuff is still just "good." However, as it goes for the less serious angle, I am liable to judge it by different standards than any number of more serious, "deep and mature" RPGs out there. I am capable of liking stuff that's "simple fun" and as far as that goes, the first half of SoU does a good job.
Interesting, thanks. Pretty lame that their conclusion is "scripting complex plots is teh ahrd" though. His suggestion on "many ways to get the same couple of outcomes" is very good, but they obviously didn't follow through with this past the beginning. It sounds like they learned something though, and to be fair BioWare's C&C got a lot better after Neverwinter Nights even if the quality of the writing itself didn't necessarily.David Gaider said he wrote most of SoU's first chapter in this Codex interview: http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=148
He also said the expansion was Bioware's attempt at ~experimenting~ with multiple solutions and they decided all the scripting involved was more trouble than it was worth. http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/role-playing-in-dragon-age.18984/
As far as individual quests, there will generally be options as to how to complete them but there's never going to be every option. I remember in the beginning of Hordes there was an encounter with some kobolds holed up in a bar that had something like six different methods of completion -- and while it was an interesting experiment, that one tiny encounter required so much work it was almost mind-boggling and almost got cut because the complexity introduced too many bugs. So the idea, I think, is to strike a line somewhere in the middle.
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Ah, yes, it was in SoU. I always mix those up. And there were only two consequences, if I remember right -- either you saved the kobolds or you didn't. There were just many ways of saving them or not saving them, probably more then were really necessary. In terms of the roleplaying it offered, it was very much in the neat-but-over-the-top category.