Dragon Age Detail
 

I know its unfair to compare 2 games especially when they were made so far apart. But it just bugged me more and more as I went through Dragon Age where items and armour that were picked up as I went along did not seem to change from place to place.

Apart from the basic types of weapons and armour (such as longsword, dagger. Or leather / chain armour) they all seem pretty generic to me. Even the supposed unique weapons have the same generic inventory icons with just a name and a few stats to go with it. It did not feel like you had aquired a special item that you would go out of your way or face down a hard boss to get. Only on the odd occasion would you get something that when equipped looked any different from a cheap sword from a bandit.

In BG2 when you picked up a special item you could see it clearly on your charachter, whether by colour or by its effect. You felt an attachment to that item and for example in another run of the game you would go out of your way (even completing a complicated side quest chain) to get this item again.

To be honest if I played through DAO again there are only 1 or 2 items I could even remember where I found let alone want to bother trying to get a second time around.

Did anyone else get this sense? I felt that the basics of it and intention were there but a different name and stats are not enough. For an example what weapon could you compare in DAO to say the Flail of the Ages?

Re: Dragon Age Detail
 

The game has several weaknesses, IMO, as follows;

1. The Fatigue factor. If the game maker wants you to not be able to use your abilities, then just increase cooldown. No need to have 3 or 4 factors influenceing whether or not you can use an ability.--Digression...there are mods that introduce decent stamina potions.
2. Magic is underpowered. The "friendly fire" penalty makes many spells undesirable to use, so the game kinda forces you into the "crowd control" magics.--Digression...BioWare obviously disagrees with me, since their patches have done much to nerf magic even more.
3. Enchanted weapons and armors. My only real gripe is there don't seem to be enough runes in the game to use them in all the weapons that can take them.--Digression...there are mods that introduce more runes into the game, AND there is a mod that improves Boss drops.
4. Cut scenes ruining party setup. That seems to be just part of the game,,,I don't know if could be modded away.

Well, those are my gripes. I might find more on my second playthrough.

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I agree with most of your points. Most definately, increase cooldowns rather than have to pop pots to simply perform your characters defining abilities. There's nothing more annoying than seeing your coolest skills greyed out most of the time due to lack of stamina. It's like a mage popping mana potions every 3 mins in WoW just to grind. There seems to be an imbalance in this game as far as the stam/ability ratio goes. Needs some tweaking to bridge the gap between fun and balance. At the moment, if you maxxed stam to a point where you could perform your skills as needed, you'd have little else left to put into damage or crit or con. So it kinda defeats itself.

Friendly fire does indeed turn me off the mage class. It makes magic a very tricky business, and takes the fun out of hurtling spells. But then, there are mods which can turn friendly fire off which then makes magic incredibly overpowered, as you just cast firestorm around your party + blizzard + various bomb-like aoes and watch everything die. There needs to be a middle rode. Perhaps a 30% chance of friendly fire when party is caught in an aoe effect - or something like this.

Cutscenes have always annoyed me as you will see in my previous posts.

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Don't get me wrong there were some good things to like about the game too and tbh it kept me busy for a couple of weeks on and off but maybe its just that its been so long since a really good rpg that now an only average effort gets rave reviews?

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My favorite character is a mage and friendly fire never stopped me from using Area of effects. I send my tank in the fray so he gather the enemies around him and then cast cone of cold/fire/electricity on them. Sure he gets hurt, but he always survives. Same for the big area of effect zone spells. I send the tank in and then start spamming those. All you have to do is avoid casting on your squishies.

And the cones aren't hard to aim in melee either. By moving my mage around I can usually hit 2-3 enemies without hitting my allies. And it's not like Morigan for example can't survive 2-3 spells, so if I really have to I don't mind hitting an ally every once in a while.

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Oh I still use AOE's and suffer through the friendly fire - it just bugs me that my group is half dead by the time it's over. I wouldn't even mind a spell that you have to maintain which decreases the chance of a party member being hit by your mage's spells. I would gladly pay the stamina price for maintaining it.

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If friendly fire bother you guys so much, play at the easiest difficulty. In this way your mages can cast aoe spells such as "Storm of the Century" without any repercussion.

Speaking of mages, do you all notice that mages don't have much choice in term of equipment compare to melee or bow/crossbow classes? While my warrior (sword and shield tank) changes his equipment every now and then. At the end of the game, Wrynn and Morigan basically still use almost the same starting equipment when you recruit them?

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I found that a major issue throughout the game. Whereas especially melee fighters ended up with multiple sets of special armour or weapons (albiet they still seemed pretty generic to me), most new gear I found for mages along the way were still lvl 1/2 staffs or some budget cloth armor!

There was I think a half decent staff at some point along the game but that was maybe 3/4 through the playthrough and even then it wasnt anything special. Made me glad I ended up going Arcane Warrior tbh since then I had some decent armor to use.

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Yeah there's only about 3 staff worth it. I did find a couple of decent robes at the arcane shop in Denerim after I had completed 3 main quests. Reaper's Robes or something like that.

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And even then it felt like it was more getting lucky finding something to buy that you could barely afford. I remember having to pass up on a lot of new items simply because they were only for sale at steep prices that cost too much.

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Bioware Has been calling DAO The Next Baldur's Gate. Well I have to say "NOT EVEN CLOSE" The first chapter of Baldur's Gate getting a group of adventurers to the mines to find out what was screwing up the Iron has more adventure and better story content than Dragon Age before the expansion. Then after finding out that the problem is not the mines but a group of Bad guys in the far north at Baldur's Gate are the real problem and exactly what is behind the problems is still ahead. Dragon Age tells no real story it tells how and what the mission is and that you have to do to stop the Darkspawn and the Dragon God is whats causing the problems. Then in order to get one of the main base points of the game you have to buy each part of the game.
That in itself is anal I can't figure out why Bioware didn't just put everything in the game and charge for it in the first place mainly Wardens Keep as it was closer to BG type of adventure but still very short after the ghost story and some skeleton fights that were not too bad but I still can't say it's any where near as good a game as Baldur's Gate and was quite disappointed with the whole system and game story in general. It just seemed to leave too much out and replace quality and intrigue out of the game and left you with just the battles. Then there are the weapons and they were just a pile of generic want to Be's what happened to the epic magic and weapons.
Just Disappointing .
TCB

Re: Dragon Age Detail
 

If you judge the game vs. BG you will indeed be dissapointed. It is no BG. Nothing will be. It was a different time, back then. D&D games were restricted to DOS for the most part. Develepors cared about quality. Nobody charged for "premium content" because most people didn't purchase things online. When Baldurs Gate went on the market there was nothing like it at the time. There was a niche there that was filled instantly.

I agree, there is more combat than story and I would gladly take the BG narrator voice and some scrolling text tethered to some artwork as opposed to NPC cutscenes.

I don't know what to tell you. It's a good game, but not an amazing game. And it's not D&D. Things have changed in the gaming industry. I think the last memorable D&D game released was Nevewinter Nights 1. I don't know why more companies aren't trying to tap the D&D market...it is very lucrative. Blame Atari and WotC for being too rigid I guess. Let's see how Baldurs Gate 3 shapes up if and when it ever gets released.

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Have to say I flagrantly disagree with this. Mask of the Betrayer was heads and tails above vanilla NWN 1 for writing, story, choice, consequence, memorable characters, encounters etc.
Storm of Zehir also does a reasonable job also of attempting to restore an old fashioned feeling of party creation and swashbuckling adventure.

I hear where you're coming from regarding the dearth of D&D adventures though. It is a different age now.
But I definitely empathise with you tCB, check my feedback thread on Dragon Age and add your own two cents if you like. :) It was certainly a step backwards in many ways than one.

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Bah, NWN2 did itself in from the get-go. Maybe because the vanilla NWN2 was such a mess to begin with. While the story and plot in NWN 1 were indeed weak (Aribeth), I can remember I was excited just thinking about playing it. The kind of nerdy excitment that I got with Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like that about NWN2 at all. Wanted to, but didn't.

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Ahh, but have you actually played Mask of the Betrayer though?
Judging it by mere association with NWN2 (even if it is an expansion) isn't exactly doing it justice.

I'll just say that you're missing out if you don't give it a shot rather rely too heavily on logical argument.;)

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Yes, although not finished it. The engine bogs the game down so much that even when you finally get a good story, it's diluted. Who knows? I may grit my teeth and plow through it one day although, if you read other threads I have posted about it you will see I have tried doing so more than once. Also played Storm of Zehir somewhat recently and frankly, I got bored after a few hours...

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In case you guys haven't been continuing to play D&D pnp, I'll let you know that when compared to BG and BG2, not even D&D is D&D anymore. 2 things changed everything: Warhammer tabletop games and WoW.

D&D 4th ed. is basically a lame tabletop game. Roleplay has virtually disappeared. Every battle is set on a map with miniatures, and you have cards to play as your spells and abilities. There are a bazillion buffs, debuffs, auras, marks, etc. and if you don't have a set of magnetic chips to track this stuff you'll go nuts. Sometimes we'll end up with one miniature standing atop a mountaintop of chips to represent all this. Then you go to attack and the math gets horrendous.

BG and BG2 were based on 2nd Ed. D&D, which is still my favorite version, and the only one I'll ever run as DM. That game doesn't exist any longer and is out of production. It was replaced by the horrible suckfest that was 3.0 and then by the horrible OP-fest that was 3.5, and now by the tabletop WoW/Warhammer wannabe that is 4.0. I promise you, my pally in D&D 4.0 plays more like my WoW pally than any Pally to have ever existed in D&D before -- all the way down to his thrown Captn. America shield.

The 1990's have come and gone. You may rightfully, or not, think they were better or worse. But they are no more. Today's gamers are way to ADD for that stuff anymore.

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Yes, they are gone. They just don't make games like they used to. The awe I was in when BG1 came out...I couldn't stop playing it. IWD also I loved. NWN brought this awe to another level - albeit a different one. Anything after that went downhill, D&D license or not.

I have also glimpsed 4E with its "daily powers" and stuff. I think they looked at what people were playing nowadays (WoW, Magic the Gathering, Anime/Dragonball-ish stuff) and tried to reinvent D&D into a combo of all that. Why they betrayed their longtime fans with these changes I don't know...but it is a far cry from what it used to be. It's a very linear, automated feeling game as opposed to the open-endedness that AD&D 2nd edition granted you. With AD&D I always felt like the campaign world was a blank canvas of creativity, just waiting to be explored. With this thing I feel like controlled, stifled - and this is just after skimming the rules and mechanics of it. Even the core rulebooks look more like cardgame manuals than D&D manuals.

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I was very pleasantly surprised by MotB, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I can't quite work out why, however...

Maybe it has something to do with the Rashemon setting - culturally different from what we've gotten used to in other BG/NWN games. Maybe that was the spark that triggered the designers' imaginations a little bit, and maybe that extra imagination is what i appreciate about it?

Edit: on that same cultural note, the music was great too.

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I actually felt the same way. So much so that I still haven't purchased MotB.

The base game left me disappointed, along with CS from Atari. I ditched the franchise and never looked back, and won't. I'm not going to harp on it though, as I did say I would leave it alone. I have, too. Although, I will say the NWN2 toolset was easier to use than the DA one is. I still haven't really gotten into it, yet.