Posted June 26, 2010
I never liked the change from BG to NWN and beyond in the party controls. In BG, although you had a PC, you controlled all the others equally. In NWN and beyond, you are pushed towards the centre of the action all the time, to the point where your PC has to do all the talking and all the interactions. Hard to explain exactly, but sometimes I want a game where my character isn't the focus of all the attention (strangely it never feels like that in BG, even though you are a god-child... better writing perhaps?).
A side effect of all this focussing on the PC is that the fighter classes suddenly get all these special skills, which I can only suppose came about because people were envious of mage classes getting spells each level or whatever. However, I never found many of the DAO fighter skills of any use, and it was generally a case of trying to focus on getting the passive skills during levelling.
One real positive (and it's only a positive in respect to ME1) is that they got rid of the ME1 system of all the companions joining you, whether you like it or not. I ended up killing one potential companion just because I could, which is probably the only type of meaningful choice in the entire game.
Ah... rant over. Feel a little bit better for getting that off my chest.
I can agree with most of your points, though I can also see the devs' side of it.
The enemy variety is certainly rather lacking, especially in some parts of the game (the Deep Roads maps are the worst offenders). On the other hand, that stems in part from the story. I mean, you are facing a horde of orc-zombie mixes, they have to reflect that in the gameplay by making you kill lots of them.
As for your character being the focus of attention, I think they actually moved away from that trend in Dragon Age, back to the Baldur's Gate way. I played the game exactly as I played BG: with the AI turned off, controlling every member of my party all the time. Of course, that requires a lot of pausing, which I like but you might not.
The active skills for a warrior just make playing the class a bit more interesting than in the D&D games, where it was all about rushing the tank at the enemy to keep it off your mages and then keep him/her there.
It does imply more micromanagement though, so if you don't like that, I can see why you didn't like the change.
Basically, I liked the combat, but it is heavy on micromanagement, since the tactics macros don't quite cut it.
As I said before, I'm sure there will be mods making for more enjoyable and varied combat someday, just as there are some now to make it harder.
