Dragon Age - official Codex verdict

[Vibalist]

I didn't say potions weren't needed during a fight. In this you are correct, for they mostly are since at times combat sadly degrades into the usual "stare at health bar and press potion hotkey when health is low" of typical, artificially long battles against insanely-high-HP monsters/bosses.

How many of these battles are there, though, where you just hack away at some huge troll that takes 5 minutes to die? I've had 2 so far. The bulk of difficult fights have been against regular sized opponents with a regular amount of hp, where I've had to use many combinations of skills, spells and abilities in order to win.

I was actually complaining about their out-of-combat use. They should be needed to use as well.

I get that some games benefit from having an aspect of potion managing, but why is it so vital that Dragon Age has it too? The combat/dungeon crawling can be enjoyed regardless, as it is still solid without it.

 

[AlaCarcuss]

Yeah, that didn't exactly come out the way I intended - but anyway. How should it work after say, a tough battle and the whole party's at 10% health? .

Gee, I dunno.

So your party should find a campfire to rest at?

KotC is a completly different type of game, it's turn-based and it's DnD - magic is not mana based. Given that DA is a real-time (RTwP) dungeon-crawler, I just think it would make it incredibly tedious if you had to go searching for a rejuvination station after every battle. Fuck that - let's just get on with it.

I'm with Vibalist on this one. Each individual encounter is where the fun is to be had.

 

[Grifthin]

That and the fact that I never seem to find any medical kits. so if someone dies the injuries start becoming a royal pain in the arse. It's actually easy to end up without someone as a primary healer. And potions don't help for crap if you stunned/paralyzed/frozen and the enemy is all gang banging your fighter. I'm enjoying the game thus far.

 

[MetalCraze]

Given that DA is a real-time (RTwP) dungeon-crawler

Hahaha, you really haven't played any games besides 5-6 overrated Codex RPGs?

I just think it would make it incredibly tedious if you had to go searching for a rejuvination station after every battle

Because you haven't played any games that came out more than 4-5 years ago?
Just a pro-tip - even in an overrated BG you couldn't rest after each combat and sometimes you could have had a hugeass area with resting completely disabled. So you had to survive with what you have. And can you imagine - it was possible to survive albeit very hard at times.
But having exactly this challenge in the game " would make it incredibly tedious" as you said yourself because not running around in panic after you've burned a bit of your HP and mana is like totally forced on you. Casuals these days.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

KotC is a completly different type of game, it's turn-based and it's DnD - magic is not mana based.

Yeah, and it's actually good and didn't require a massive amount of resources to make it. It's fun, tactical, fast-paced and weirdly charming vs. DA's boring, repetitive, slow and tasteless.

Just a pro-tip - even in an overrated BG you couldn't rest after each combat and sometimes you could have had a hugeass area with resting completely disabled.

Huh, where? I don't remember resting being ever restricted in BG. But monsters could appear and do some dick thing like bite your wizard's 1hp ass. But think about Fallout - you couldn't really just rest all wounds off because it took a lot of time and the game had a time limit, (unlike Fallout 2 where you'd constantly rest). Or, heck, Fallout 3 where you can run out of healing supplies in the harder difficulties as you can't rest in owned beds, however stupid that is.

Not having free healing also makes it more sensible to try not getting wounded, which should be pretty natural if you think about it, of course no such thing in DA where there's not very realistic options on handling encounters in a smart way, so they just decided to make it up to luck and exploitation if you can survive some friggin' peasant ambush and give you free healing if you survive. It's like they made a survival horror game where you can out-attrition the zombies.

 

[Darth Roxor]

And yet those are the only options at present.

Except that they aren't. How about limiting resting? Or making resting dangerous?

You wanna rest? Alright, find a suitable place. Or make it everywhere but with a very high chance of getting attacked while sleeping in a dangerous place. Or make resting in the wilderness a lot less beneficial than in an inn. Or make resting just plain and simply fuck you up - "so, the villain is about to steal the holy macguffin of total world destruction?!?!?!?! Nevermind lads, let's sleep for a whole day, get ready and all that, because he's a gentleman and won't try to steal it before we show up! *24 hours have passed, mission failed*. "

Fuck that - let's just get on with it.

The key to understand modern gaming.

 

[Korgan]

That and the fact that I never seem to find any medical kits. so if someone dies the injuries start becoming a royal pain in the arse.

Buy a recipe. Who the fuck designed the camp, BTW? You buy a lot of components there, but can't actually craft anything as only the protagonist is active, and he should get other skills first.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

Have you ever played Jagged Alliance 2? Because I've yet to see a party real-time game where you can do that just as well and with surgeon precision like it is in turn-based games where one move takes less than a second of real game time. When it comes to real-time it's a mess - you need to constantly pause the game (which defeats the whole purprose of real-time) and even assign AI scripts to your party-members which also defeats a purpose of a party-based game.

Played JA 1.


How does the pause defeat the purpose of RT? Thats like saying 'bending TB combat so you can use tactics that require simultaneous movement defeats the purpose of TB combat'. That doesnt make sense to me. The purpose is up to the developer and what they want from the combat.

Show me such RT game.

My only examples were scratching time for drinking potions and tripping. DA has a decent potion drinking animation and any base wrestling game will let you trip people. Yes bad example, but some think RT combat is so limited that you cant do simple stuff like that.

 

[Volourn]

"Try better - scarce healing. Like it was - you know - in BG"

What? healing was not scarce in BG. Why lie?


"Just a pro-tip - even in an overrated BG you couldn't rest after each combat"

Lie. You can rest between battles just fine. In fact, some epople even brag about doing so.


" and sometimes you could have had a hugeass area with resting completely disabled."

EXtreme rare, and unique ones. can you name these areas?

 

[theverybigslayer]

I always suspected this game was shit. And when I saw this:

I knew that I was right.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

*Volourn*
Did you realize he was complimenting BG?
There were places in BG 1 and 2 where you couldn't rest.

Compared to some games potions were pretty scarce. The game was certainly designed for parties with at least one healer.

DA would need an overhaul to remove autoregen. Its just not built for it. That said, I wish it was if it meant we would see less filler combat, strategic resting places, and less combat attack accuracy. Most likely we would have seen another game with potion IVs so we are probably better off with the regenerations.

 

[Castanova]

To be fair, I don't think KotC's campfire system was worthy of very much praise either. There were very few instances, indeed, where you were forced to fight through multiple tough encounters before being allowed to rest. You could move in and out of most dungeons freely so, if necessary, you could travel back to town and rest. Even dungeons that closed up behind you could be solved by saving at the beginning and doing some exploratory runs until you found where the campfire was.

The problem with the campfire system is that, once you find the campfire, the whole mechanic is just a nuisance rather than a limiting factor on the player. So, then, the CORE mechanic of KotC's campfire system is FINDING the campfire. Then finding the campfire becomes a negligible challenge thanks to saving and loading. The limit the campfire introduces is not a function of your skill at managing your party's resources but rather your patience with walking back to a rest area.

A better solution, if you're intent on having a resource-management aspect to the game that stretches across discrete battles, seems to be breaking up a dungeon into "bite-sized" chunks. Within each of these sections, there is no resting - only between them. The chunks are also not so large that, if the player makes it to the last battle but is literally incapable of winning, they need to replay 2 hours of dungeon to get back to the same spot.

 

[MetalCraze]

What? healing was not scarce in BG. Why lie?

It was. If you spammed all of those limited heals here and there your cleric had you were dooming yourself because even if you decided to go try and rest most often than not you were raped by some ambushing mobs - so sometimes it was easier to complete a dungeon in a one or two goes.

Lie. You can rest between battles just fine. In fact, some epople even brag about doing so.

I dunno Volly, many dungeons have that "can't rest at this time" and all - especially not until you'll clear all mobs out of them. You should refresh your memory.

EXtreme rare, and unique ones. can you name these areas?

No I vaguely remember them because I played the game long time ago. What I do remember however is that these areas were much better than the piece of shit regen.
And then there are many other RPGs except BG which by some miracle worked without the casual regen and even had permadeaths. BG had it too. And you couldn't rest the death of your party members off.

How does the pause defeat the purpose of RT? Thats like saying 'bending TB combat so you can use tactics that require simultaneous movement defeats the purpose of TB combat'. That doesnt make sense to me. The purpose is up to the developer and what they want from the combat.

Failing at reading comprehension seems to be the very popular new shit on the Codex.
I'll repeat a game - what's the point in having a real-time combat when it turns into an uncontrollable mess unless you constantly twitch the pause key?

Show me such RT game.

My only examples were scratching time for drinking potions and tripping. DA has a decent potion drinking animation and any base wrestling game will let you trip people. Yes bad example, but some think RT combat is so limited that you cant do simple stuff like that.

Yes bad example.

TB is superior for party-based games, RT is superior for single-char games. That's how it always worked and works the best.
Good party based game always provide complex and in-depth micromanagement which is very tedious in real-time. That's why all real-time party-based games are so simplistic and/or dumbed down.

 

[Volourn]

"*Volourn*
Did you realize he was complimenting BG?
There were places in BG 1 and 2 where you couldn't rest. "

FUCK BG FUCK KC FUCK FUCK FUCK

Anyine who claims BG is a better game than DA or any other BIO game (barring ones I haven't) is fuckin' a moronic piece of shit.

Yeah, I went there.

 

[draexem]

What? healing was not scarce in BG. Why lie?

It was.

It wasn't, you had a decent amount of heal spells from your cleric, you had 2 light heal skills, and potions were abundant.

If you spammed all of those limited heals here and there your cleric had you were dooming yourself because even if you decided to go try and rest most often than not you were raped by some ambushing mobs

Easily got around by spamming the reload button... and don't look at me like I'm cheating

I dunno Volly, many dungeons have that "can't rest at this time" and all - especially not until you'll clear all mobs out of them. You should refresh your memory.

You can rest in dungeons just fine as long as there are no monsters in the immediate area. I know this because I just replayed BG the week before DA was released, so the gameplay's pretty fresh in my mind. I didn't get to finish the game so I'm not sure whether this applies to all dungeons, but I'm most of the way through the game and I haven't come across a dungeon yet I haven't been able to rest in. I would have replayed BG2 but my disc no longer worked for some reason.

 

[MetalCraze]

It wasn't, you had a decent amount of heal spells from your cleric, you had 2 light heal skills, and potions were abundant.

It was a decent amount only if you knew how to play - it wasn't a spammage of healing spells like it is in DA which return to you after each combat encounter. This is so challenging.

Easily got around by spamming the reload button... and don't look at me like I'm cheating

Only spamming the reload button? Why not punching one of those god mode cheats in right away?

You can rest in dungeons just fine as long as there are no monsters in the immediate area

Which sometimes is pretty hard as they can easily get aggroed even beyond edges of the screen. BG is not ideal by far but rest wasn't something that you spammed like in NWN2 and BG's system aka DnD system is way way way better than regen which kills all interesting moments and struggle for survival present in older RPGs. Besides as I've said there is such thing as permadeath - which DA lacks and this alone is much like god mode already.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

There are two heal spells in DA, and one of them you have to have the spirit healer specialization... There is what, a ten second cooldown (OMG COOLDOWN NOOBS LOLOL) on the heal, and the effectiveness of the heal is dependent on the target's magic score (so your tank will most likely not have a high score)...

This leads to heal spamming not being much of a problem. I guess it boils down to this. I would put even money on you (skyway) having not played the game. Basically, you're bitching about a combat engine you have no experience with. You hear a few buzzwords (real time, auto-regen) and decide to rail on the mechanic with no experience with it, despite the fact the vast majority of people even on the illustrious codex that have played the game say that this particular mechanic, while it wouldn't be their first choice, works well.

So... yeah, basically you're just trolling and acting like a 4chan faggot. Congratulations, the evolution is complete.

 

[Texas Red]

There are two heal spells in DA, and one of them you have to have the spirit healer specialization... There is what, a ten second cooldown (OMG COOLDOWN NOOBS LOLOL) on the heal, and the effectiveness of the heal is dependent on the target's magic score (so your tank will most likely not have a high score)...

This leads to heal spamming not being much of a problem. I guess it boils down to this. I would put even money on you (skyway) having not played the game. Basically, you're bitching about a combat engine you have no experience with. You hear a few buzzwords (real time, auto-regen) and decide to rail on the mechanic with no experience with it, despite the fact the vast majority of people even on the illustrious codex that have played the game say that this particular mechanic, while it wouldn't be their first choice, works well.

So... yeah, basically you're just trolling and acting like a 4chan faggot. Congratulations, the evolution is complete.

I bet he didn't play it and if he did, he got the wrong experience. I remember him telling that he had a shit computer and, while he could play ME, it lagged horribly.

Skyway is perhaps the worse Codexer I have ever seen. Not even Volourn in his prime wasn't as annoying.

BTW, DA is one of the most enjoyable games I played in quite a while, plus it is a good RPG. Definitely will play this again a few times.

 

[draexem]

BTW, DA is one of the most enjoyable games I played in quite a while, plus it is a good RPG. Definitely will play this again a few times.

It's been a long time since I've played a Western RPG as good as Dragon Age. It's not perfect but it's about as good as you're gonna get these days.

 

[Vibalist]

I'm kind of disappointed with how underdeveloped the city of Denerim seems. 2 districts Bioware? Meh. I guess Athkatla spoiled me, but still. They had a chance of creating a sprawling metropolis and went with this.

Also, has anyone defeated Flemeth in battle? She turned my party into charcoal in 20 seconds.

 

[Marsal]

Use fire resistance potions/equipment, equip ranged weapons on everyone regardless of skills, spread out, heal with Wynne(?) and drink potions if needed.

 

[Volourn]

Sorry MC. Youa re full of shit. BG had basically unlimited healing potions and crap. You would have to be a HORRIBLE player to run out of ways to heal yourself. And, rest was allowed pretty much everywhere. AGAIN, people constantly brag about how they rested after every battle in BG (and other IE games) which would be impossible if it was disallowed. Just admit you are full of shit.



"Skyway is perhaps the worse Codexer I have ever seen. Not even Volourn in his prime wasn't as annoying."

Screw you, jerk off. I didn't earn Pretty Princess plus multiple (temporary) bannings by accident. Nor, did I get a bunch of yahoos fighting for my reinstatement through flukeliness.


"kind of disappointed with how underdeveloped the city of Denerim seems. 2 districts Bioware? Meh. I guess Athkatla spoiled me, but still. They had a chance of creating a sprawling metropolis and went with this. "

Just reached Denerim. I see more than 1 district but I guess what this means is that some of those districts are just small areas.


As for Flemeth. I've only tried once so far. She kicked my ass. I'll go back, eventually. <>


btw, Doesn't everyone love the world map and the traveling. Outside of the random bandit area set up with a mass of archers, the overland encounters are awesomely varied and almost always involve some type of side quest so it makes them matter more.

One of the best world map/traveling systems EVAR.

 

[Trash]

One of the best world map/traveling systems EVAR.

Never played Darklands or Realms of Arkania: Star Trail now did you?

 

[kris]

I'm kind of disappointed with how underdeveloped the city of Denerim seems. 2 districts Bioware? Meh. I guess Athkatla spoiled me, but still. They had a chance of creating a sprawling metropolis and went with this.

There is at least three districts. Market, Elf one and noble one. Not counting several small locations in the city that appear in quests.

 

[AlaCarcuss]

Given that DA is a real-time (RTwP) dungeon-crawler

Hahaha, you really haven't played any games besides 5-6 overrated Codex RPGs?

I just think it would make it incredibly tedious if you had to go searching for a rejuvination station after every battle

Because you haven't played any games that came out more than 4-5 years ago?
Just a pro-tip - even in an overrated BG you couldn't rest after each combat and sometimes you could have had a hugeass area with resting completely disabled. So you had to survive with what you have. And can you imagine - it was possible to survive albeit very hard at times.
But having exactly this challenge in the game " would make it incredibly tedious" as you said yourself because not running around in panic after you've burned a bit of your HP and mana is like totally forced on you. Casuals these days.

Listen pip-squeak, I'd almost guarantee I'm old enough to be your father (in fact I'm probably older that your father) and I've been playing video games since before you were born. I cut my teeth on space invaders in the late '70's.

I've played some of the old Gold Box games, Ultima series, M&M, Wiz and of course the Fallouts and all the Black Isle and IE games.

Unlike some of the yougsters around here, I accept that times change. The game industry is not what it used to be - and never will be again. It's no longer a niche industry who's primary demographic was fat, pastey, pimply face nerds dwelling in their parents basements (like you I'm betting). It's a multi-billion dollar industry, that now has to cater to the masses.

That being said, I too hate the dumbing down of our beloved RPG's, but it is what it is. Though, DA:O is a bit of a throw back to the old days in terms of length and complexity - at least compared to what we've had to deal with in the last few years, and Bioware should be congradulated for that.

So yes, I found the resting mechanic you mentioned in BG very tedious and IMO, somthing similar in DA:O would ruin the free flowing nature of the encounters.

Now take the pacifier out of your nose and stop eating your own snot. There's a good boy.