Rock, Paper, Shotgun

23/02/2011 at 13:16 Wizardry says:

Eh? Can’t you read? Were you ever educated?

Arcanum has a combat system that is probably even worse than Dragon Age 2′s. It could quite feasibly have the worst combat system of all time. That doesn’t mean that the game isn’t one with actual depth. Even Fallout had a pitiful combat system compared to its ancestors’ but the depth of Fallout is 100x that of Dragon Age: Origin’s. The same as Arcanum.

No.
No No No No.
No. No.

No.
No. No. No.
No. No. No. No.

No.

23/02/2011 at 14:44 Wizardry says:

Skill checks and the like. See Fallout. Dragon Age was merely fighting with conversations that were hardly ever limited by your character’s traits. This meant that it hardly mattered (outside of the awful combat) just how you’ve developed/specialised your character. Conversations played out on a largely different level to your statistical improvements. The disconnect between conversations and the combat + levelling up was huge. This wasn’t helped by having next to no non-combat abilities. “Swords & Conversation” would be an apt name for the design.

Arcanum may have had absolutely awful combat, but at least the game let you choose what to do and how to do it based on the restrictions of your character, on top of providing a far greater number of outcomes to allow for a sense of real achievement in the game world. It’s one of those seriously flawed gems. A game that has a list of faults larger than most crappy games of today, yet has a large number of fantastic ideas to make up for it. However, more importantly, Arcanum was the continuation, and end, of the Fallout school of CRPGs. A school that very much tried to inject role-playing elements into non-combat situations, and by comparison, looking at BioWare and Bethesda games, an idea that can only be seen in places (in the mainstream) throughout a select few Obsidian games.

23/02/2011 at 16:27 Wizardry says:

“I thought Dragon Age had skill checks for coersion and indimitation? Trap disabling? Lock opening? Trap spotting?”

Persuasion and intimidation were even less important than in KotOR and Mass Effect. They were also extremely one dimensional. Intimidation options were often “evil” options while persuasion options were generally a “good” or “neutral” way to achieve a similar goal. Furthermore, intimidation and persuasion mainly affected the relationship score with your party. The effect of these “abilities” on the “outside world” was minimal.

Trap disabling and spotting were only ever useful in combat because of regeneration outside of combat. This ultimately made it an environmental combat skill. But trap disabling has existed in most RPGs since the beginning of time itself. I can’t think of a single CRPG in the 80s that didn’t have traps of some kind. The thing is, 80s and 90s RPGs often did traps considerably better. For starters, you often didn’t regenerate outside of combat meaning that running into traps outside combat was actually a bad thing. Furthermore, the trap mechanisms themselves were often more complex. For example, in the majority of 80s RPGs you could use magical spells to disable traps as well as using a rogue. In some of them, you had to determine the type of trap before you could disarm them. A wrong/false diagnosis would lead to failure even if the attempt would have ordinarily succeeded.

Lock opening, again, has existed in almost every single RPG since the beginning of time. However, in Dragon Age it was made useless because the developers chose to not put anything unique or interesting inside locked chests. This meant that chests only contained vendor trash. The reason they did this was because of the very small 4 person party limit. They didn’t want players who decided not to pick a rogue to miss out on any significant content. However, what people fail to realise is that they could have solved this problem without making lock opening completely useless. In Dragon Age: Origins you cannot bash locks, nor can you cast spells to unlock chests. In D&D, for example, you can do both of these. If BioWare introduced the notion of bashing locks and casting spells to open locks, all party combinations could have the ability to open locks, meaning chests could contain decent unique equipment and even entire side quests.

To not make one of the rogue’s “special abilities” (opening locks) useless, AD&D balanced these three methods of opening locks. Bashing locks was often the method with the lowest success rate because it was based on the strength attribute that does not increase on levelling up. Spells (such as knock) cost an entire memorisation slot for each cast, meaning that memorising the knock spell disadvantaged the mage in all other situations. Dragon Age: Origins couldn’t achieve either of these because of the statistical growth system and the regenerating mana system.