Aw, come on guys, don’t burn down the Chantry. What would Andraste think? Combat in Dragon Age II has most of the same tools as in Dragon Age: Origins, but that doesn’t mean the challenges are equally sophisticated.
In an earlier post, I discussed Dragon Age II’s Dialog System, and looked at what it was designed to do and how some frustrated fans interpreted it. Another common complaint about Dragon Age II is that its combat is less tactical than its predecessor, Dragon Age: Origins, reducing the sequel to just hack and slash, rather than the thoughtful combat tactics of its predecessor. I agree, but only partly; Dragon Age II remains a tactical action RPG, but several design decisions in Dragon Age II have noticeably degraded the depth of combat. Let’s dive right in.
Multiple Waves in Every Battle: Possibly the Single Worst Design Decision in Dragon Age II
In Dragon Age II, in almost every battle, enemies attack in waves. In some battles, having enemies attack in waves makes sense. For example, the game’s introduction involves darkspawn attacking from all sides, and they keep coming as you kill them. That’s great, and in small doses, this frantic disruption in your combat awareness is exciting. But when you’re fighting a street gang at night, having a dozen archers spawn all around the battlefield just as you think the battle is ending is absurd, and the novelty and surprise is wasted when nearly every encounter in the game does this. Having multiple waves to most battles has two severely detrimental effects on combat tactics.
First, it destroys your positioning. You might have your archer and mage standing on a hill, raining destruction on the melee below, only to have four enemies spawn on top them. Enemies often appear from multiple directions simultaneously, including sides that have no logical explanation for how the enemies got there — just because a part of the battlefield looks like it’s a safe high ground or corner against a wall doesn’t mean that your squishy characters won’t suddenly have an enemy assassin on top of them.
Second, it destroys your ability pacing and healing. Most abilities are on cooldown, and with enemies coming in waves, you can’t effectively assess when to use powerful abilities, since the full list of enemies isn’t disclosed at the start of the battle. You can’t judge whether you need to use a healing item or can just finish the enemy off, since it’s never certain if the encounter is going to end after all the visible enemies are killed, or if a bunch of ranged enemies are about to appear and rain death on your weakened tank if you don’t notice quickly enough.
Having waves of enemies is interesting for a few encounters, but having it as the staple is ridiculous. It doesn’t make sense and it just cripples your ability to judge a situation and reason about it. Tactical games that make an ever-present threat of enemy reinforcements an interesting challenge invariably give you information about where the reinforcements are likely to appear, so you can take that into account; here you just have to cross your fingers and hope the enemy doesn’t spawn two feet in front of your mages.
Five More Ways Dragon Age II Simplifies Combat
1. Reduced positional incentives for rogues. In Dragon Age: Origins, rogues gained automatic critical hits for attacking enemies from behind, with a different combat animation showing their improved attacking ability. Dragon Age II removes this special backstab bonus in favor of a general increased chance of critical hit to all classes, and unlockable abilities to give rogues automatic critical hits later on. This is nice in the sense that it gives everyone an incentive to get behind the enemy, regardless of class, and rogues still benefit most from it, since they have the highest critical hit bonuses on average. However, on the whole, rogues still benefit less from standing behind enemies than they did before, and the ratio of damage gained by moving to attacks missed while moving is so bad now that it’s rarely worthwhile to walk around an enemy instead of slicing it up from the front. Most enemies just die too fast to make strafing around them for a critical hit chance bonus worthwhile. Later on, rogues can pick up an ability to give them automatic critical hits regardless of where they stand, as long as the enemy is engaging another character.
2. No friendly fire except on the highest difficulty. In Dragon Age: Origins, standard difficulty had area of effect attacks doing half damage to your party, full to the enemy. The lowest difficulty removed friendly fire; the higher difficulties brought friendly fire to full damage. Friendly fire prevents you from spamming your best area effect spells on packs of enemies crowded around the tank, unless you’re willing to maul your tank in the process. By removing it for all but the hardest difficulties, many encounters are solved with a skeleton key tactical formula: 1) Your rogue rushes the enemy mages. 2) Your tank gathers the melee enemies. 3) Your mage spams area effect spells on the tank. 4) Everyone cleans up the archers.
3. No traps. In Dragon Age: Origins, you could lay traps in strategic positions before initiating combat. Combining this with rogues scouting ahead was often a significant tactical advantage. Traps were never a huge part of the game, and I don’t completely disagree with the decision to remove them, but it definitely contributes to an inability to control the flow of battle.
4. No ability to detect enemies that use stealth. In Dragon Age: Origins, characters in stealth had a chance to be detected. Now you just have to sit around after the enemy assassin vanishes and hope they try to backstab your tank instead of your mage. The only tactical consideration stealth has for you is that you should stun enemy assassins so they don’t vanish while you’re trying to focus them down. Enemies with stealth would be far more interesting if you could throw down detection fields or otherwise burn abilities trying to compensate for the fact that the enemies have stealth.
5. Low camera angle. In Dragon Age: Origins, you could pull the camera back to get a bird’s eye view of the action. In Dragon Age II, this ability has been greatly reduced, to the point where it’s difficult to quickly assess the battlefield from a high angle unless everyone is clumped up. This even makes it hard to give characters instructions to run to a raised platform unless they’re standing near it. It’s not clear to me why they chose to do this; it seems more likely that it’s a technical issue with level design or graphics, rather than a gameplay decision.
But It’s Still Pretty Fun
There are nuts and bolts reasons for combat’s tactical simplicity, but they don’t make Dragon Age II a simple hack and slash. The meat of the game’s tactical combat is still there, it’s just… hampered. If you want to play a tougher tactical game than the normal difficulty provides, you can also crank the difficulty up. I don’t do this because I find the waves of enemies completely destroy my ability to play on high difficulty levels, since I can’t plan ahead. Some people make it work.
The faster pace of Dragon Age II’s combat also doesn’t hamper the tactical complexity of combat. It has faster attack animations and rapid closing attacks that have characters literally leaping several meters across the battlefield to almost instantly close distance and slam into enemies, dealing bonus damage before they open up into rapid combos. Warriors swing their large weapons and hit multiple enemies with every blow, rogues hit several times per second, and mages get a workout as they literally dance in place, blasting their autoattack spells at the enemy with flair. It certainly has a breakneck pace that seems out of place in a tactical RPG, and most of the complaints I’ve seen cite this as the biggest flaw of combat, the one thing that ruins the game’s tactical complexity. I think that’s nonsense.
Faster combat and more exciting animations doesn’t strip out the tactics, it just streamlines the action. There’s still plenty of time to react to changing situations, and your combat performance will improve dramatically if you make use of frequent pausing to direct and coordinate your party members and their abilities. Abilities still have specific areas of effect, with lots of positional modifiers and aggression management abilities, and many higher-level abilities can make use of coordinated cross-class ability combinations to deal massive damage. All the ingredients of a tactical game are still there, and they balance the difficulty such that playing without making use of good combat tactics will make it harder, and impossible on higher difficulties. The speed of combat is exciting and interesting, and I prefer it to the measured pace of its predecessor.
Finally, even if you do agree with those dramatic fans who argue the game’s combat is just ruined, try completely altering your expectations by turning the difficulty down to casual and rocking your way through the game as a hack and slash. Maybe even drop down to two or three people in your party to balance it out a bit. You might find the game is fun when you change the pace of combat, even if it’s not the same game you were expecting. Most players shouldn’t have to do this, but if the things I outlined above drive you completely crazy, give it a shot.
There’s a very good reason they simplified it: a lot of people just straight up didn’t finish the first game due to combat difficulty. Obviously as a business, they want people to get into the game as much as possible, buy the DLC, buy the sequels, etcetera, so pairing down combat was almost necessary for them, sadly.
I agree with the premise that Dragon Age’s combat was too difficult and needed to be toned down, and I agree that the reason it was too difficult is because the developers expected more tactics out of players than most were willing or able to give. However, I don’t agree that these measures were necessary to do it. Dragon Age didn’t necessarily need its combat tactics to be simplified (at least not to the extent that we see), it just needed to be easier.
Specifically, multiple waves in most battles is really a grave sin they could have done without. It’s exciting in a few cases, but it just slaughters any positional tactics you do, and Dragon Age II uses it in such a way that it grows old and gamey. It doesn’t subtract difficulty, it adds it, by killing off your strategies in mid-execution. Spawning assassins on top of your mages every other fight isn’t the solution to the Dragon Age combat difficulty. Two of the other minor issues I mentioned — inability to detect stealthed enemies and low camera angle — are also counterproductive to that effort.
No traps and reduced positional incentives for rogues fall safely into the category of changes that are conscious choices for the sake of making rogues more viable in a straight-up fight, thereby adjusting the difficulty by simplifying combat, as you describe. In this case, I don’t have a strong objection, though I would have been remiss to not mention them.
The last change I mentioned, raising the difficulty level that has friendly fire enabled all the way to the highest, is obviously a response to criticism of the difficulty of the original. But this is a blunt instrument, and they’re overcompensating by stripping fun tactical gameplay away from players that aren’t up to the challenge of playing on the highest difficulty. I see why they did it, but splitting friendly fire to a separate check box, rather than tying it to only the highest difficulty, would have been a relatively simple blessing.
As a general statement of principle, difficulty can be adjusted by encounter design and balancing of the power of the enemies relative to the player. It can involve, but certainly doesn’t require, dumbing down the game mechanics.
I would think it was because DA:O was much slower than DA2, considering that people can easily turn down the difficulty setting to casual if they’re having problems. Unless maybe if they ended up wasting most of their skill points on useless skills because of their vague descriptions. And besides, DA2 is harder than DA:O, although that’s mostly because of assassins.
By the way, for point 4: Enemies in Origins almost never used stealth (The only one I can remember are Gemlock Rogues), and those that do never use it in the middle of combat. Also, there is no “chance to be detected” when you’re using stealth. You’re only detected if the enemy rank is too high; otherwise, there’s no chance of being detected. You can actually solo through many of the battles in the game with combat stealth. But yes, Dragon Age 2 should have had more ways to disable assassins’ stealth. Using area of effect attacks is supposed to stop them, but that doesn’t seem to work most of the time.
One complaint I have about Dragon Age 2 is the AI of enemy mages (with the exception of a few). They seem to be programmed to do nothing but cast invincibility on themselves over and over again, which makes them incapable of attacking you while it’s active. They don’t start attacking you until after you start attacking them.
You’re right about the stealth mechanics, but I’m going to have to disagree on difficulty. Dragon Age: Origins had much more brutal combat difficulty, just going by number and power of enemies; I wonder if your differing experience is because you wisely relied on crowd control abilities to control the flow of battle, which is much harder to do in the sequel.
Whether or not someone finds Origins to be difficult depends pretty much entirely on whether or not they had a mage with cone of cold and fireball.
My memory is that primal builds with fireball were boss at lower difficulties, but more control-focused mage builds were better at higher difficulties, especially once 100% friendly fire kicks in.
i agree on point NUM 1 AND 3, but thats not a big deal..
allot of people say its dumbed down.. but never explain why they think that..
the action in da2 was more fun than in origins in my opinion, dont get me wrong, i loved origin, but the combat in it was only tactic for mages.. the combat for rogue/archer/warrior for very simple, click on enemy, attack, and done. in da2 its kinda the same, but more fun because of animation and better skills..
in my opinion, they should go with tactic with mages, or player skill with warrior/rogue/mage(like in conan the barbarian).
nice post though :)
Just noticed this blog from your link at the DF forum. What you said here is for the most part identical to my opinion of the game, but you brought up a few things I hadn’t thought of myself which gave some food for thought. I’ll keep an eye on this, and do some reading of your back-log. Keep up the good work and all that, and good luck with future endeavors.
I made the decision to play DA2 on the hardest difficulty from the beginning, and it’s pretty goddamn tough at times, but it’s certainly playable, and I’ve personally found it to be considerably more enjoyable this way. Not everyone can be as stubborn about constant defeat, though, which is totally understandable. My one and only problem with the game is that mages are terrible DPS in higher difficulty, which leaves you with the lacking array of support/debuff abilities. It gets the job done, but it can be disheartening at times, specially if you made Hawke a mage (lol me).
Derp, don’t see an edit option, but wanted to correct myself saying “one and only problem with the game”. Totally not my one and only problem, my brain just likes familiar phrases.
Complaints that DA2 is a button masher seem to come exclusively from people playing on lower difficulty settings. Frankly I like being able to just press a key to select the next enemy, rather than having to break the flow of combat by pausing to click the next (especially when my level 20+ rogue archer is causing squishies to explode with a massive critical from each arrow), but on nightmare doing only that is just not going to work, unless you’re a wizard when it comes to speccing your characters and setting up their tactics.
After several playthroughs of both Origins, and DA2, I’m actually having considerably more fun playing 2; the game’s major failing, the lack of thrilling exploration caused by flagrantly recycled environments and an episodic structure that has you revisiting the same neighborhoods year after year anyway, no longer matters much once you’ve seen everything in both games a dozen times. The combat becomes subtly complicated once you’re forced to deal with nightmare difficulty, and that challenge stands up much better over time than origins – I can now get through 95% of origins on nightmare with programmed tactics alone, not so with DA2. The greater complexities include:
* Rogues and warriors have distinctly different combat styles compared to origins, with warriors specializing in small crowds and rogues specializing in single targets – two handed warriors were “fixed” in DA2 – they could hit several enemies at once, while in Origins they were just slow – equivalent DPS to a dual wield rogue, while I once watched my rogue kill two genlocks before the two hander alongside him managed to land a single lumbering swing
* More options to maximize damage output – raw autoattack damage, critical chance, critical damage, abilities (like twin fangs, scythe, etc.), and cross class combos, all of which need to be taken into account when faced with the high level of difficulty
* More pronounced elemental resistances, and the need to pay attention to them
* A broader range of boss fights and associated tactics (while I wasn’t a huge fan of the most of the boss battles in DA2, I still think they deserve mentioning, since they did seem to require more complicated tactics than the bosses in origins)
* Assassins were a pain, but they added a major tactical problem for you to solve, a tough enemy that you absolutely needed to kill asap (could probably include blood mages in that list too). There was really nothing in origins quite like that – some mages came close, but for the most part went down too quickly to be as big of a problem
* Friendly fire from warrior AOE attacks – kind of disliked this, but it did complicate nightmare combat by forcing you to pay more attention to positioning
On the other hand, another major simplification not mentioned here, and the number two thing that I still prefer in Origins behind its exploration, was its diversity of gear and the ability to fully customize companions with it. Without expansion packs, the gear in DA2 is utterly dull, and with them, it’s still frustratingly linear – there’s some interesting stuff, but there always seems to be a single “best” set of gear at any given level.