Game News Dragon Age 2 Redefines Visceral Combat

[Relay]

1. The game is pitifully easy and it's nigh impossible to be brought down by "mobs".

If you chickened out and played on normal, sure.

2. The enemies always ignore any kind of aggro management you try to use, because Bioware can't code. So the enemies will go for your casters, leaving your 2hander to either mop up enemy casters or slowly follow the enemies to your caster and start his attack animation only for the enemies to have moved on before he finishes...

Complete lies. The enemies at the opening of the battle go for the guy who has the biggest armor and since early in the game Alistair has low strength compared to my 2h I was always taking the hit instead of the fucking tank. They only go for the caster if he casts a spell that attracts them because of the "threat" (some spells will almost always attract the enemy attention while others won't matter).

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

DA was easy even on insane. Example: Gaxxkang, life expectancy 10 seconds.
And they made it even easier in patches.

 

[Black]

DA was easy even on insane. Example: Gaxxkang, life expectancy 10 seconds.
And they made it even easier in patches.

One of the enemies was named Gaxxkang?
Oh wow, I see how did they come up with "spiritual successor to bg".

If you chickened out and played on normal, sure.

Another dumb newfag.
Fun fact, kiddo- NORMAL is supposed to be the optimal difficulty setting for every game- not too easy, not too hard. If you need to change the diffulty to hardest to get at least a bit of challenge (which isn't the case in DA from what Vod is saying) then it's a shitty game design.
And in most cases- increasing the difficulty doesn't change anything- just makes you waste more ammo, more time in combat etc- see: fallout 3, ass erect 2.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

One of the enemies was named Gaxxkang?
Oh wow, I see how did they come up with "spiritual successor to bg".
.

Yes, a hidden boss fight. Pathetic compared to the real deal Kangaxx.

 

[Roguey]

Fun fact, kiddo- NORMAL is supposed to be the optimal difficulty setting for every game- not too easy, not too hard. If you need to change the diffulty to hardest to get at least a bit of challenge (which isn't the case in DA from what Vod is saying) then it's a shitty game design.

Not too easy, not too hard for whom? Because my impression is that most people thought Dragon Age was too hard on normal. RPG veterans aren't the target audience, they made it clear on their forums that hard/nightmare was the recommended setting for people who play more than a few games a year. Should have made it more difficult without cheating, but that's the way it goes.

Pathetic compared to the real deal Kangaxx.

My memory of beating Kangaxx: Laying down a mess of traps, using a protection against magic scroll, initiating dialogue, instant lichdeath, hacking the demilich form for a few seconds till death. Rock/paper/scissors trial and effort versus slightly-more-than-minimal effort, which one is worse and why?

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Everyone knows absurdly difficult combat is what makes RPGs truly worth playing.

 

[Micmu]

A good RPG will have at least one insanely difficult encounter, not necessarily mandatory to complete the game, but it should be there.
Challenge areas in Geneforge games are awesome.
Of course, they can't put this into "modern" 20-hour AAA pieces of shit, intended to be completed by anyone in one go and never to be touched again. God forbid a "journalist" stumbled upon this encounter and said the game is shit.

 

[Shannow]

1. The game is pitifully easy and it's nigh impossible to be brought down by "mobs".

If you chickened out and played on normal, sure.

Nope. Talking about Awakening on nightmare here, since that was my last impression. OC on hard has 4-5 battles that aren't pittifully easy. 4-5 out of 4000-5000. I stand by my statement.

2. The enemies always ignore any kind of aggro management you try to use, because Bioware can't code. So the enemies will go for your casters, leaving your 2hander to either mop up enemy casters or slowly follow the enemies to your caster and start his attack animation only for the enemies to have moved on before he finishes...

The enemies at the opening of the battle go for the guy who has the biggest armor and since early in the game Alistair has low strength compared to my 2h I was always taking the hit instead of the fucking tank. They only go for the caster if he casts a spell that attracts them because of the "threat" (some spells will almost always attract the enemy attention while others won't matter).

fixed

 

[Shannow]

Coming up with a strategy to get by an especially difficult encouter vs auto-attacking through everything. Which is better and why?

And because you are actually serious about that question others talk about the "decline" of the codex.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

My memory of beating Kangaxx: Laying down a mess of traps, using a protection against magic scroll, initiating dialogue, instant lichdeath, hacking the demilich form for a few seconds till death. Rock/paper/scissors trial and effort versus slightly-more-than-minimal effort, which one is worse and why?

You have a point that BG2 DID contain cheesy *lol I winz* items for those who are weak enough to use them. Scrolls of Pro Magic, Pro Undead and the like.

Try pulling that trick with SCS2 installed though, where liches are aware that they're taking damage out of nowhere (Pro Undead scroll) and will do something about it. Traps otoh were greatly overpowered. So yes, if you decided to go about this encounter in the most pathetic, meta-gamey, cheesy manner with setting traps and using cheater items like pro Magic scrolls I can see that it wasn't difficult. I don't use such items so i don't have that problem. Another example is Ascension Demogorgon, DA contains nothing like that, and even there you can just set enough spiketraps to insta-kill him, which is pretty much the same like pressing CTR-Y. So long story short, using such bullshit items or cheese like trapsetting doesn't count and if you use them you automatically lose the right to comment on combat difficulty.

 

[KalosKagathos]

So long story short, using such bullshit items or cheese like trapsetting doesn't count and if you use them you automatically lose the right to comment on combat difficulty.

Of course it counts. Bad item balancing is a design flaw that shouldn't be overlooked just because.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

If the items are in the game by design, what's wrong with using them? Same goes for overpowered traps.

 

[Grunker]

If the items are in the game by design, what's wrong with using them? Same goes for overpowered traps.

Nothing is wrong per se, it just removes the game-part. It's two retarded game-design choices in a game filled with a thousand. Opt not to play with them and you'll have more fun. Simple as.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

If the items are in the game by design, what's wrong with using them? Same goes for overpowered traps.

Nonsense. The game also lets you put the cursor over an enemy and press CTRL-Y. lololo this gaem is so easy!!11! And trap-setting the area and then initiating combat and as soon as the enemy goes hostile it goes zing! : dead - that's exactly the same effort as pressing CTRL-Y. None. Or the anti-beholder shield, which reflects beholder rays, coupled with the dumb AI of the vanilla game that just means beholders will kill themselves by shooting their eye-rays at you and pose not threat at all. Using such items/tactics = cheating. The end.
The fact that a game contains possibilities to cheat, doesn't mean you can use cheater tactics as reference for combat difficulty.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Well who's the authority that decides which items and abilities are 4 n00bz 0nl7? There's obvious metagame stuff like that Ctrl-Y thing (which I didn't even know about) and there's in-character options like the scrolls of magic protection. Why is it *cheating* to use things that are found in-game?

 

[Grunker]

Well who's the authority that decides which items and abilities are 4 n00bz 0nl7? There's obvious metagame stuff like that Ctrl-Y thing (which I didn't even know about) and there's in-character options like the scrolls of magic protection. Why is it *cheating* to use things that are found in-game?

It's not. You go ahead and do it. You'll just get a tiresome and not very challenging game experience. It's pretty easy to figure out that traps are cheesy - it's like kiting. It's not that hard to figure out: "Hmm, this is poor design and probably not what they wanted to make."

Shit, I don't care how you play your game, but obvious cheese is obvious in every game out there.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

In my opinion using a scroll of Protection from Magic in the Vanilla game is cheating. Here's why:
- you fight a bunch of Mages, e.g. the Twisted Rune. They're Mages, all they have are spells, so using this scroll renders them completely powerless, it's basically the same like an I-Win button. At the same time they can't do anything about it because the scroll is undispellable and even if they could they wouldn't because of the AI

Now with SCS2 it's a bit different because
1) they can try to dispel the scroll, e.g. with Spellstrike
2) their AI has been altered, so that they recognize a Pro Magic scroll effect and will try to do something about it

So the conditions are much fairer now which makes the use of this scroll not cheating.
Or let's take a Pro Undead scroll:
- in vanilla undead don't see you and you can bash them flat effortlessly, they also don't give a shit that they're taking massive damage, they just die without fighting back; how retarded is that? Is that NOT cheating? You might as well just CTRL-Y them.
- with SCS2 undead e.g. liches will notice that somethings wrong and will use spells like remove magic etc to dispel the pro undead effect, plus even if they can't see you they will take measures to protect themselves. So again the conditions are not so one-sided now and using the scrolls isn't cheating imo

Hope you see the difference. If there are items/cheesy tactics that basically amount to the same as enabling godmode (and spiketraps are the worst of this shit) it is cheating, whether the game contains said items or not doesn't matter.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

I still think this is extremely subjective. Yes, to an avid RPG player with lots of experience (such as most Codexers) this may seem like cheating, but to someone who may be playing this kind of game for the first time? You mentioned the anti-beholder shield, well, that's how I dealt with the beholder levels: equip my Paladin with the shield, have the rest of the party wait in the back of the level and kill everything before fetching them. Was I cheating? I like to think I wasn't, it didn't even occur to me that this was somehow "too easy" because this was one of the first D&D games I ever played. Hell, even pen and paper D&D is crammed with cheesy spells abilities that make nominally "appropriate" enemies a cakewalk.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Well, Grunker is right. It's your game so do what you want if you think it's fun (the objective of a game is to provide fun, after all). I personally find it counterproductive since turning scary enemies into a cakewalk defeats the point of having scary enemies in the first place.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I still think this is extremely subjective. Yes, to an avid RPG player with lots of experience (such as most Codexers) this may seem like cheating, but to someone who may be playing this kind of game for the first time? You mentioned the anti-beholder shield, well, that's how I dealt with the beholder levels: equip my Paladin with the shield, have the rest of the party wait in the back of the level and kill everything before fetching them. Was I cheating? I like to think I wasn't, it didn't even occur to me that this was somehow "too easy" because this was one of the first D&D games I ever played. Hell, even pen and paper D&D is crammed with cheesy spells abilities that make nominally "appropriate" enemies a cakewalk.

I'm sure the reason for the inclusion of said items is to enable the noobs to finish the game. And that's ok for me.

It's just that you can't go ahead and bash the difficulty of the encounters in the beholder hive when you used that shield instead of doing it properly on equal terms with the enemies.

You know, I wouldn't say anything about Pro Undead scrolls either if there were Undead using Pro Living scrolls on you.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Just for the record, I'm not saying either that every game NEEDS some n00b-friendly exploit items.

Out of curiosity, what's the best way to deal with beholders when you don't use the shield? From what I remember they randomly spammed an endless stream of petrification and other instakill magic. Could you just melee or shoot them fast enough to avoid getting TPK'd?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It's just that you can't go ahead and bash the difficulty of the encounters in the beholder hive when you used that shield instead of doing it properly on equal terms with the enemies.

Then again, if that shield is normally obtainable in the game, wouldn't it be fair to bash the difficulty of that place? Since by not using it you're limiting yourself on a legit tactic to be "fair", and all.

 

[Shannow]

Nothing wrong in abusing items or skills...if you came up with the idea yourself. Looking on the net, using a cheese build and then whining about balance is pathetic.
Hands on your hearts: who here thought of laying traps for Kanggaxx or Demigorgon themselves? Who had the protection scrolls and remembered to use them? Who managed to beat them without cheese?
I passed every single fight with luck and strategies I came up with myself and it was all the more satisfying. But if I had thought of using protection scrolls, I'd still been satisfied because I used what was given to my advantage.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Out of curiosity, what's the best way to deal with beholders when you don't use the shield? From what I remember they randomly spammed an endless stream of petrification and other instakill magic. Could you just melee or shoot them fast enough to avoid getting TPK'd?

with great difficulty, that's the difference to using the cheater shield.

It depends on the party. I'd only use one guy (most likely the PC) who's most badass, has the best saving throws ( to save vs the ray effects), equip as many items that grant magic resistance as possible and load up on invis potions so that you can go invisible if shit hits the fan. Being able to go beserk (Korgan, Minsc, a berserker PC) helps too.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Then again, if that shield is normally obtainable in the game, wouldn't it be fair to bash the difficulty of that place? Since by not using it you're limiting yourself on a legit tactic to be "fair", and all.

I think not. The same with the cloak that reflects all targeted spells. I mean, isn't that just a bit too much? If enemies had similar items it would be different, but as it is it's blatant cheating. It's the same cheating that often appears in modern games on behalf of the enemy, you know when the end boss has 20.000 HP or something. It's just silly.