Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Dragon age Origins - Next gen RPG

As someone who does not have any form of nostalgic value in DA:O and installed/started playing it less than a week ago (thanks again, Abits!) - the graphics are fine, really. I was pleasantly surprised.

The combat however... Oh god, I am not sure whenever I just suck at it in general or if it is my severe distaste for real-time action in solo-player games showing but MAN... I played on the normal/standard difficulty, and I died so many times just trying to clear out the 3 bandit camps that I nearly lost it. ; _ ; And I don't even wanna talk about how long it took me to survive the night outside the haunted kid's castle. , _ ,

The entire thing about pausing live-action and being able to select ONE ability at the time when paused is driving me insane. I am at a point where I have to quick-save after pretty much every single encounter or dialog. XD (but that is not entirely due to difficulty, I am also having weird crashes, probably due to the game's age)

And regarding the camera management... Please no , _ , The scrolled-in option is making me motion sick and the scrolled-out option is clunky when out of combat. I personally absolutely adore the turn-based combat and camera angle in Xcom, DOS2 and BG3. Turnbased combat has really turned out to be something I am much better at than live-action . _ . I couldn't even finish The Witcher, Mirror's Edge or FF XV because I just can't handle the live action combat - I absolutely hate it. >.< So I ended up just watching the entire stories on YouTube instead.

Part of it being the first actual RPG I ever played, and I think i was just at the right age when playing it to be like really affected by the storytelling. Also, despite the fact that the later games ruined most of it, I really like the setting and general lore that DA:O sets up! I know calling it my favorite game is... controversial, especially in these nerdy RPG spaces lol. But I just like it a lot!

Welp. Lol I guess this proves my point in a way, since I never even noticed the ceiling I don't really find it important.

I'm in the same camp as you with DAO being one of my favorite games of all time. But I enjoyed it for the story, for the companions, and for origins, not for combat. Combat was super tedious unless you were playing a mage and at least had cool spells at your disposal. But I also really loved DA2, which I know is rare, and absolutely hated Inquisition, which is also rare heh.

I think the good thing DAO and all dragon age games did was the over-the-shoulder camera. BG3 camera feels very restricting when you are trying to zoom into your character and the cut off from the sky makes me dizzy. I tend to want to push further to see whats there in the sky. It might not be a tactical gimmick but more the feeling of the option given which only goes half-way. If the option to view the characters from the back is there, then why not go all the way and add WASD controls and a full camera view.

I love DA:O too, but I actually liked the characters and character stories in Dragon Age II a little more.

Agree with you both about DA:O. Love that game, and do not at all agree it was shallow in any way. Very interesting story, very interesting characters. I am very strongly in favor of classes and hate classless systems, so the game being weak on classes was my only complaint. However, I disagree on combat. I found DA:O combat to be the perfect iteration of RTwP combat, and thoroughly enjoyed how it worked in that game. Very engaging, dynamic, and easy to handle. Also, I did enjoy DA2 as well, but also DA:I, so the DA franchise now is my favorite overall franchise for modern, party-based cRPGs.

Yeah I have always been very puzzled with many people's reaction to DA2. I found it to be a really good game. I completely agree about how irritating it was to have the level designs being constantly reused. But we also know why that happened, because EA forced Bioware to rush the game out the door. But other than that issue, the game was very good.

Agree with you both about DA:O. Love that game, and do not at all agree it was shallow in any way. Very interesting story, very interesting characters. I am very strongly in favor of classes and hate classless systems, so the game being weak on classes was my only complaint. However, I disagree on combat. I found DA:O combat to be the perfect iteration of RTwP combat, and thoroughly enjoyed how it worked in that game. Very engaging, dynamic, and easy to handle. Also, I did enjoy DA2 as well, but also DA:I, so the DA franchise now is my favorite overall franchise for modern, party-based cRPGs.

My biggest problem was how terrible the fights are. Every single fight happens in waves. Every. Single. One. Except a few like dueling the Qunari leader, of course. But you can never just fight a group of thugs in an alleyway. You fight them and their ten buddies who were just hanging out on the nearby rooftops AND their ten friends who also hang out on rooftops but arrive late to parties. It is ridiculously gamey, really breaks my immersion, and makes fighting feel like a chore. It’s the only reason I couldn’t play that game more than once.

The class system wasn't bad, you could pick a class and 2 subclasses, there were tons of customization there. The only thing it lacked were multiclasses.

Also liked the fact that you had to complete quests to unlock the subclasses.

Running same locations again and again doesn't help either.

The class system wasn't bad, you could pick a class and 2 subclasses, there were tons of customization there. The only thing it lacked were multiclasses.

Ill go on a limb and say that BG3 combat is also kind of tedious. There is always a best move per turn, and it seems to always (for my mage) to be Hex - scorching ray. So i would say that there is more or equal to do in combat any given time in DAO given the real time combat.

As for combat in any RPG and D&D in particular, the D&D rule set is not very engaging, 5e classes are built to have 2 or 3 tricks with most mobs designed to work around them...with little choice on your end as to how you 'solve the puzzle' of an encounter...

The problem for me with DA2 is how much hp the mobs have in relation to the damage the team is doing.
The fights aren't even tough, I'd say most of the deaths in DA2 were caused by friendly fire.

I think that along with the waves mechanic was honestly just an attempt to pad out the game time. DAO is a loooong game. DA2 is less so, which is understandable considering the truncated production. DA2 was only about 70 hours for me as opposed to the well over 100 hours for a DAO playthrough, but I would have been more than okay with a 40 to 50 hour game with better designed encounters. I imagine BioWare / EA thought many of their fans might feel cheated, though.