Comments on: Dragon Age, and the unending battle of fluff vs crunch

By: Dragonhate? « Procrastination Amplification

Dragonhate? « Procrastination Amplification — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:46:14 +0000

[...] for. Sure, it isn’t perfect, but who is? Imagine my surprise when I find (with the help of Spinks and Google Reader) A barrage of blog posts damning the game into the ground. Not a revolution [...]

By: Tier

Tier — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:13:16 +0000

I do like a bit more crunch than fluff myself. I think the fluff and the crunch is good in DOA. The problem I have is you tend to get them both in large quantities. You have two hours of gameplay crunch with only a minute or two of fluff or an hour or so of fluff without any crunch.

How do you queue up actions?

By: spinks

spinks — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:10:40 +0000

In my personal view you were right, and a player should always be able to say to the GM, “would my character be able to think of anything else that I haven’t thought of.” But back in the 80s, a lot of GMs would have taken the approach that your GM did, because it was more ‘in vogue’ then to put actual puzzles for the player in the game.

By: vlad

*vlad* — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:19:13 +0000

“How DO you play a character who’s smarter or more persuasive than you are in real life?”

Back in the 80s, I used to play an RPG called Space Opera.
In one adventure, our ship was looking for something in a solar system, and we failed to find it.

Now the GM told me that if I had launched a recce probe to some gas giant and done blah blah whatever, we would have found the missing something.

My argument was, that I, “the gamer”, was completely unfamiliar with the technology and science of the game, but my character, having a considerably higher IQ than my own, as well as years of experience of spaceships and probes etc, would have known what to do.

Who was right?

By: evizaer

evizaer — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:20:30 +0000

DA:O’s storytelling is very good. I find the party members to be well-written and relatable. The problem is that most of the NPCs are way too easy to persuade and manipulate. When they fold like houses of cards after one measly half-sentence out of my character, it really hurts immersion.

By: Longasc

Longasc — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:53:23 +0000

I think you must force Bex to add you to this special Google Wave full of bloggers. I posted my thoughts regarding inventory space woes and excessive item collection there.

But let me sum up the gist of my idea: NPCs should not pay for crap. Then you would not need to collect every crap for money. I.e. NPCs should not pay you for broken swords, unless this npc requires this for a quest. I remember Fallout 3 and Morrowind, I basically picked the Wasteland and the imperial province of Cyrodiil clean… – and Morrowind even made me become some kind of thief, I basically emptied every city house I entered… even if the sale value was next to nothing. Talk about compulsive behaviour on my part.

The other idea is to have a dedicated quest item tab like in Age of Conan, yup, this game has also lots of good features despite all problems.