Drexion
Well-known member
This game is really frustrating me, and considering the rave reviews it has gotten all round I can't help but think I must be the one at fault. But reading around a bit it seems I am not the only one who has become frustrated with the game. I played for about 18 hours so far, and I am truly wowed by everything in the game, like the plot/characters/story/quests/dialogue etc etc - wowed by everything except the gameplay and game design. This is why it's frustrating me, the game to me seems to be a masterpiece on every level, except the gameplay and game design.
So wtf am I doing wrong ? (I completed the elves and now am doing the dwarves) I think my primary problem is my character classes - but I'm early in the game so I don't really get many class choices or many characters to choose from.
Things in the gameplay/game design that frustrate me:
(1) Game's over-reliance on locked chests for distributing loot.
Every few rooms there is a locked chest, 80% the tough battles you fight the loot rewards are in a locked chest, 80% the loot you find from exploring the wilderness is in a locked chest, 80% the chests you find exploring the cities/random houses are locked chests, 80% the chests in the fuggin game are locked chests. So you are fuggin screwed over if you're playing a warrior or some other class that doesn't have easy access to lock picking skills.
And even when you do eventually get a character with lock picking skills, 80% of the time it's now "insufficient skill", so you're still farked. As a result your characters economy is screwed up. You have to play very thoroughly/obsessively compulsively about loot/exploring/doing quests etc or your character can't even afford the utmost basic necessities to play the game, further more even stuff like recipes or potions.
How do other games solve this ?
(1) You find some loot or beat a tough fight or mini-boss battle etc - put the loot on the fuggin ground or on a corpse, not in a friggin locked chest.
(2) Allow melee types to use their "bash" skills on locks, thus you don't screw them over if you game heavily relies upon locked chests like DA does.
(2) Access to utmost basic necessary items is not available in all zones.
I'm currently in the dwarf zone.
Number of vendors who sell health potions: 0
Number of vendors who sell flasks: 0
Number of vendors who sell fatigue kits: 0
Number of vendors who sell useful ingredients: 0
Number of places to loot useful ingredients: 0
How the hell is it a good idea to restrict the UTMOST BASIC common necessities by zone ? Oh yeah, we have toilets but you need to travel 500 miles if you want some toilet paper, you see we spread the basic necessities around the world for god knows what reason. ugh
How do other games solve this ?
You have a vendors in every city which sells the basic loot that the player needs! How hard is that ?
(3) Costliness of bare necessities.
The game is tough, more difficult that most games of it's type. That's great - many players of this genre like a challenge. Problem is, when the economy is easily broken (see (1)) - and you require certain key items just to play the game (health potions, fatigue kits for example) - and you price them high then it becomes an issue.
Merchant: "Wow that is an awesome uber rare diamond gem studded necklace. I'll give you 10 copper for it. You want to buy this health potion ? Sure, 10 gold." I've probably played more than 50% of the game with my character(s) having a death debuff or two, simply because of the rarity and cost of fatigue kits.
How do other games solve this ?
By not having utmost basic necessities like potions (the weakest potions especially) cost an arm and a leg. Their availability is already balanced by their usage having a cooldown.
(4) Game difficulty and character behavior
Many people have commented on the game's difficulty - and as I mentioned before it's great that it's tough as many people who play this genre like a challenge, some people also resorted to play easy difficulty. The problem is that it doesn't seem to scale properly at times, and enemy effects (like knockdown) affects your character and party way too much.
It's no fun when you're fighting multiple enemies that 1-shot and 2-shot your characters.
It's no fun when enemies have AoE knockdowns, AoE stuns, and 2-shot you at the same time.
It's no fun when your retarded character takes 1 minute to get up off the ground after being knocked down, cause he's dead before he can recover.
It's no fun when potions heal you for 20 life but the enemy does 150 damage on a hit.
It's no fun when no matter how much you micro or how well equipped your characters are, nothing you do matters because they get knocked down and 2-shotted. It's not like you can leave, level up and come back - cause many of the battles in the game are level scaled.
How do other games solve these issues ?
Higher difficulty doesn't mean enemies 2-shot you or have twice the life, it simply means they increase their level of tactics. Changing the level of difficulty should be as an effect of how well the player can micro or use tactics, however due to the character behavior and game mechanics changing the difficulty feels less about tactics/micro and more about "please don't 1-shot me anymore" or "fark it, I just want to get past this bit".
(5) Game does not scale properly based on class layout.
Reading around the net it seems that having 1-2 characters that can AoE makes many fights MUCH MUCH MUCH easier than if you have direct damage characters. Or having characters that heal. This early in the game I don't have many characters to choose from, none have AoE, and none have decent healing.
So now my game is doubly hard - whereas someone else who randomly chose another class or character might have a game which is doubly easy. It's friggin ridiculous. You shouldn't need certain class layouts to beat certain fights, at least not on easy and normal difficulties and certainly not early in the game.
How do other games solve this ?
Any group of characters of any class, once decently played should have a chance of winning a certain fight. What's the point of giving players all these class choices when only a few really matter ?
Saw this post on a another forum and it seems to fit just fine:
"The game's combat system is far from balanced and you'll find fights were either too easy, or extremely unbalanced and at those points you luck your way through with multiple reloads. Hope you like reloading."
(6) Micro gets exponentially more difficult depending on class layout.
You have a bunch of AoE characters and you get attacked by 15 mobs ? You can beat the game blindfolded. You don't even need to micro. Whereas if you have classes like warriors or rogues you need to micro your ass off, but being direct damage classes you'll probably lose the fight anyway.
The game needs to scale the number of enemies you fight based on the classes of your characters. Getting zerged when you're playing a warrior class is NOT FUN.
How do other games solve this ?
When the game zergs the player, each mob's strength is reduced based on the number of mobs. So you fight 1 super tough badass enemy, or 2 really tough enemies, or 3 tough enemies, or 4 average enemies, or 5 mediocre enemies, or 6 below par enemies etc. Not like DA where its 2+ badasses, 5+ super tough enemies, and another 5 average at the same time.
(7) Piss poor mob drops
As mentioned before decent loot seems to be heavily distributed in locked chests which the player cannot open and will never get to use and is a total waste of farking time to put in the fark game fark you biowarre fark you. err As I was saying, the result seems to be now that the loot which mobs drop are often worthless, worth almost nothing, and are rarely the items you do want.
You expect something as basic as the bare necessities (HEALTH POTIONS AND FATIGUE KITS BIOWARE FARK YOU) would be dropped by mobs, especially after a tough fight against a large group of mobs. Nope, you get 10 copper and a crappy worthless trinket.
See, if mobs actually dropped SOMEWHAT useful loot, then the problem of vendors not selling basic necessity items wouldn't be such an issue.
How do other games solve this ?
Enemies drop loot. They drop lots of loot. Useful loot, rare loot, basic necessities loot, ingredients loot, valuable loot etc etc. Something that actually makes the player's life easier and is a reward for beating that tough battle. And they don't distribute loot (especially after killing a boss) in a locked chest.
(8) In-completable quests
Not talking about bugs - which are forgivable and fixable - I'm talking about game design.
So I enter a wilderness zone. Pickup a quest. Head toward the quest location. Step on an invisible trigger which starts a cutscene, at end of cutscene your party is kicked out of the zone and cannot return to it. ARGH!! (example when you meet Morrigan for the first time, you get kicked back to the castle area and can't re-enter the zone).
Also very annoying that there are backpacks you cannot ever purchase once you leave certain zones. It should really just be transferred to another vendor in another zone.
How other games solve this ?
Before leaving a zone to which you can't return it prompts you "Are you sure you want to leave, you cannot return Y/N ?".
(9) Access to too many impossible bosses.
I'm only about 18 hours in and I've had to pass-up/ignore maybe about 10 or so boss fights so far, where the game allows you to spawn a boss or have access to him - but he's way way higher level than you, or way way more powerful than you, and it's a guaranteed loss. (for example the tombstone bosses in the elven forest, I did the elves questline first.)
The game does not allow you to see enemy levels, and doesn't show the level of quests so you don't know you're just wasting your time attempting to fight this battle. I mean there was a couple of these deep inside dungeons which I will never go back to on this playthrough but they still put way higher level bosses there ?
Really just a sad waste of time. Probably wasted an hour on those. What makes it more frustrating is that when you do end up fighting some overpowered boss that you should be fighting (like the first dragon I met), you don't know if the reason you're getting your arse kicked is that its just a boss way higher level than you that you are not supposed to be fighting, or not and you're the one at fault - so it's just more time wasted.
How do other games solve this ?
Show enemy levels. Show quest levels. Don't allow playes to spawn bosses 3 times their level. Don't allow player to have access to quests 3 times their level while making it seem like its doable atm. It's just annoying and frustrating.
(10) Death traps
'Death traps' refer to "instant death" rooms which immediately kill you no matter what, which were common in the hardcore rpgs/muds back in the early 90s (and probably Korean MMOs as well though I'm not familiar with those), when rpg gaming wasn't exactly mainstream. They served no point whatsoever, except to waste your time by killing your characters instantly.
Once rpg gaming went more mainstream in the past decade developers of course stopped using death traps as they only piss of gamers. So of course I was very surprised to encounter such a death trap in the game (the hidden 'camp' in the elven forest with the Shade who insta kills 3 of your party while you're all asleep). Annoying, though it's probably beatable later in the game.
How other games solve this ?
No death traps. Simple.
(11) Disappearing buffs, and time taken to buff
You know you're about to get into a major fight, so you buff up, poison your sword, etc. Except the fight starts and you have no buffs/poisons cause they all magically disappeared during the pre-fight cutscene. ARGH
or
You get ambushed, and decide to apply a poison to your weapon. TAKES AN ENTIRE "round" TO DO. ARGH. Crap like that should be fuggin INSTANTANEOUS.
What makes it worse is that you can only assign one task at a time, so that poisoning your sword or buffing etc removes whatever command was there previously. ANNOYING, even if there was a "command queue" it should still be instantaneous.
How do other games solve this ?
One word, INSTANTANEOUS. No need for retarded animations to apply poisons to sword etc. Gameplay > realism. And yes, the witcher suffered from this issue as well.
-----------------------------------------------------
Anyhow there's a lot more I can touch on, but these are just some of my issues with the game design - right now I'm in the dwarven tunnels and I feel no motivation to continue except the game's reputation of being a masterpiece (which it is in some aspects from what I've seen). I have almost no fatigue kits, almost no potions, characters with death debuffs on them, and every pull 1-2 of my characters die, usually from a knockdown or being zerged by 10+ enemies. Even on easy difficulty something doesn't feel "right", like I'm missing some key ingredient to the game play which I'm doing horribly wrong.
I think I'm just gonna delete my saves and start over as a mage, reading around the net it seems the game is MUCH MUCH easier if you play as a mage and have another mage in the party. Or maybe stop playing and come back to the game in a couple months when I'm not so frustrated at it. But that's 20 hours of my gametime down the fuggin drain. Fark you bioware, fark you.
So wtf am I doing wrong ? (I completed the elves and now am doing the dwarves) I think my primary problem is my character classes - but I'm early in the game so I don't really get many class choices or many characters to choose from.
Things in the gameplay/game design that frustrate me:
(1) Game's over-reliance on locked chests for distributing loot.
Every few rooms there is a locked chest, 80% the tough battles you fight the loot rewards are in a locked chest, 80% the loot you find from exploring the wilderness is in a locked chest, 80% the chests you find exploring the cities/random houses are locked chests, 80% the chests in the fuggin game are locked chests. So you are fuggin screwed over if you're playing a warrior or some other class that doesn't have easy access to lock picking skills.
And even when you do eventually get a character with lock picking skills, 80% of the time it's now "insufficient skill", so you're still farked. As a result your characters economy is screwed up. You have to play very thoroughly/obsessively compulsively about loot/exploring/doing quests etc or your character can't even afford the utmost basic necessities to play the game, further more even stuff like recipes or potions.
How do other games solve this ?
(1) You find some loot or beat a tough fight or mini-boss battle etc - put the loot on the fuggin ground or on a corpse, not in a friggin locked chest.
(2) Allow melee types to use their "bash" skills on locks, thus you don't screw them over if you game heavily relies upon locked chests like DA does.
(2) Access to utmost basic necessary items is not available in all zones.
I'm currently in the dwarf zone.
Number of vendors who sell health potions: 0
Number of vendors who sell flasks: 0
Number of vendors who sell fatigue kits: 0
Number of vendors who sell useful ingredients: 0
Number of places to loot useful ingredients: 0
How the hell is it a good idea to restrict the UTMOST BASIC common necessities by zone ? Oh yeah, we have toilets but you need to travel 500 miles if you want some toilet paper, you see we spread the basic necessities around the world for god knows what reason. ugh
How do other games solve this ?
You have a vendors in every city which sells the basic loot that the player needs! How hard is that ?
(3) Costliness of bare necessities.
The game is tough, more difficult that most games of it's type. That's great - many players of this genre like a challenge. Problem is, when the economy is easily broken (see (1)) - and you require certain key items just to play the game (health potions, fatigue kits for example) - and you price them high then it becomes an issue.
Merchant: "Wow that is an awesome uber rare diamond gem studded necklace. I'll give you 10 copper for it. You want to buy this health potion ? Sure, 10 gold." I've probably played more than 50% of the game with my character(s) having a death debuff or two, simply because of the rarity and cost of fatigue kits.
How do other games solve this ?
By not having utmost basic necessities like potions (the weakest potions especially) cost an arm and a leg. Their availability is already balanced by their usage having a cooldown.
(4) Game difficulty and character behavior
Many people have commented on the game's difficulty - and as I mentioned before it's great that it's tough as many people who play this genre like a challenge, some people also resorted to play easy difficulty. The problem is that it doesn't seem to scale properly at times, and enemy effects (like knockdown) affects your character and party way too much.
It's no fun when you're fighting multiple enemies that 1-shot and 2-shot your characters.
It's no fun when enemies have AoE knockdowns, AoE stuns, and 2-shot you at the same time.
It's no fun when your retarded character takes 1 minute to get up off the ground after being knocked down, cause he's dead before he can recover.
It's no fun when potions heal you for 20 life but the enemy does 150 damage on a hit.
It's no fun when no matter how much you micro or how well equipped your characters are, nothing you do matters because they get knocked down and 2-shotted. It's not like you can leave, level up and come back - cause many of the battles in the game are level scaled.
How do other games solve these issues ?
Higher difficulty doesn't mean enemies 2-shot you or have twice the life, it simply means they increase their level of tactics. Changing the level of difficulty should be as an effect of how well the player can micro or use tactics, however due to the character behavior and game mechanics changing the difficulty feels less about tactics/micro and more about "please don't 1-shot me anymore" or "fark it, I just want to get past this bit".
(5) Game does not scale properly based on class layout.
Reading around the net it seems that having 1-2 characters that can AoE makes many fights MUCH MUCH MUCH easier than if you have direct damage characters. Or having characters that heal. This early in the game I don't have many characters to choose from, none have AoE, and none have decent healing.
So now my game is doubly hard - whereas someone else who randomly chose another class or character might have a game which is doubly easy. It's friggin ridiculous. You shouldn't need certain class layouts to beat certain fights, at least not on easy and normal difficulties and certainly not early in the game.
How do other games solve this ?
Any group of characters of any class, once decently played should have a chance of winning a certain fight. What's the point of giving players all these class choices when only a few really matter ?
Saw this post on a another forum and it seems to fit just fine:
"The game's combat system is far from balanced and you'll find fights were either too easy, or extremely unbalanced and at those points you luck your way through with multiple reloads. Hope you like reloading."
(6) Micro gets exponentially more difficult depending on class layout.
You have a bunch of AoE characters and you get attacked by 15 mobs ? You can beat the game blindfolded. You don't even need to micro. Whereas if you have classes like warriors or rogues you need to micro your ass off, but being direct damage classes you'll probably lose the fight anyway.
The game needs to scale the number of enemies you fight based on the classes of your characters. Getting zerged when you're playing a warrior class is NOT FUN.
How do other games solve this ?
When the game zergs the player, each mob's strength is reduced based on the number of mobs. So you fight 1 super tough badass enemy, or 2 really tough enemies, or 3 tough enemies, or 4 average enemies, or 5 mediocre enemies, or 6 below par enemies etc. Not like DA where its 2+ badasses, 5+ super tough enemies, and another 5 average at the same time.
(7) Piss poor mob drops
As mentioned before decent loot seems to be heavily distributed in locked chests which the player cannot open and will never get to use and is a total waste of farking time to put in the fark game fark you biowarre fark you. err As I was saying, the result seems to be now that the loot which mobs drop are often worthless, worth almost nothing, and are rarely the items you do want.
You expect something as basic as the bare necessities (HEALTH POTIONS AND FATIGUE KITS BIOWARE FARK YOU) would be dropped by mobs, especially after a tough fight against a large group of mobs. Nope, you get 10 copper and a crappy worthless trinket.
See, if mobs actually dropped SOMEWHAT useful loot, then the problem of vendors not selling basic necessity items wouldn't be such an issue.
How do other games solve this ?
Enemies drop loot. They drop lots of loot. Useful loot, rare loot, basic necessities loot, ingredients loot, valuable loot etc etc. Something that actually makes the player's life easier and is a reward for beating that tough battle. And they don't distribute loot (especially after killing a boss) in a locked chest.
(8) In-completable quests
Not talking about bugs - which are forgivable and fixable - I'm talking about game design.
So I enter a wilderness zone. Pickup a quest. Head toward the quest location. Step on an invisible trigger which starts a cutscene, at end of cutscene your party is kicked out of the zone and cannot return to it. ARGH!! (example when you meet Morrigan for the first time, you get kicked back to the castle area and can't re-enter the zone).
Also very annoying that there are backpacks you cannot ever purchase once you leave certain zones. It should really just be transferred to another vendor in another zone.
How other games solve this ?
Before leaving a zone to which you can't return it prompts you "Are you sure you want to leave, you cannot return Y/N ?".
(9) Access to too many impossible bosses.
I'm only about 18 hours in and I've had to pass-up/ignore maybe about 10 or so boss fights so far, where the game allows you to spawn a boss or have access to him - but he's way way higher level than you, or way way more powerful than you, and it's a guaranteed loss. (for example the tombstone bosses in the elven forest, I did the elves questline first.)
The game does not allow you to see enemy levels, and doesn't show the level of quests so you don't know you're just wasting your time attempting to fight this battle. I mean there was a couple of these deep inside dungeons which I will never go back to on this playthrough but they still put way higher level bosses there ?
Really just a sad waste of time. Probably wasted an hour on those. What makes it more frustrating is that when you do end up fighting some overpowered boss that you should be fighting (like the first dragon I met), you don't know if the reason you're getting your arse kicked is that its just a boss way higher level than you that you are not supposed to be fighting, or not and you're the one at fault - so it's just more time wasted.
How do other games solve this ?
Show enemy levels. Show quest levels. Don't allow playes to spawn bosses 3 times their level. Don't allow player to have access to quests 3 times their level while making it seem like its doable atm. It's just annoying and frustrating.
(10) Death traps
'Death traps' refer to "instant death" rooms which immediately kill you no matter what, which were common in the hardcore rpgs/muds back in the early 90s (and probably Korean MMOs as well though I'm not familiar with those), when rpg gaming wasn't exactly mainstream. They served no point whatsoever, except to waste your time by killing your characters instantly.
Once rpg gaming went more mainstream in the past decade developers of course stopped using death traps as they only piss of gamers. So of course I was very surprised to encounter such a death trap in the game (the hidden 'camp' in the elven forest with the Shade who insta kills 3 of your party while you're all asleep). Annoying, though it's probably beatable later in the game.
How other games solve this ?
No death traps. Simple.
(11) Disappearing buffs, and time taken to buff
You know you're about to get into a major fight, so you buff up, poison your sword, etc. Except the fight starts and you have no buffs/poisons cause they all magically disappeared during the pre-fight cutscene. ARGH
or
You get ambushed, and decide to apply a poison to your weapon. TAKES AN ENTIRE "round" TO DO. ARGH. Crap like that should be fuggin INSTANTANEOUS.
What makes it worse is that you can only assign one task at a time, so that poisoning your sword or buffing etc removes whatever command was there previously. ANNOYING, even if there was a "command queue" it should still be instantaneous.
How do other games solve this ?
One word, INSTANTANEOUS. No need for retarded animations to apply poisons to sword etc. Gameplay > realism. And yes, the witcher suffered from this issue as well.
-----------------------------------------------------
Anyhow there's a lot more I can touch on, but these are just some of my issues with the game design - right now I'm in the dwarven tunnels and I feel no motivation to continue except the game's reputation of being a masterpiece (which it is in some aspects from what I've seen). I have almost no fatigue kits, almost no potions, characters with death debuffs on them, and every pull 1-2 of my characters die, usually from a knockdown or being zerged by 10+ enemies. Even on easy difficulty something doesn't feel "right", like I'm missing some key ingredient to the game play which I'm doing horribly wrong.
I think I'm just gonna delete my saves and start over as a mage, reading around the net it seems the game is MUCH MUCH easier if you play as a mage and have another mage in the party. Or maybe stop playing and come back to the game in a couple months when I'm not so frustrated at it. But that's 20 hours of my gametime down the fuggin drain. Fark you bioware, fark you.
