Scars Unseen said:
Seriously, people. Was it really that difficult?
Yes, normal is way too difficult to be called normal. Example: I started my play through on casual because with pretty much every game I play I start on the easiest setting to get the lay of the land and how things work, and then I play on the higher difficulties on my play-throughs after.
Well, I was cruising through and doing everything easily. Then I went to a friends house with my box and was playing it there when I noticed that some of the small enemy mobs were being bizarrely difficult especially on casual. It was feeling more like it was on hard. Then I got to do Lillian's loyalty quest where I fight her mentor or whatever that woman was. I got into battle with her and her two henchmen, and I kept losing over and over again. After about 15 or 16 tries, my friend told me to check the difficulty setting. I did and for some reason the difficulty had changed back to the default, normal. 15 to 16 retries on a battle that is only a few hours into a game is not normal, that is hard. When it comes to difficulty in single encounters in a game, it is universal. I have played hundreds of games in my time and DA has the hardest normal setting I have ever encountered.
Over the years here is the scale I use when it comes to deciding the difficulty level of a game.
Let's use the DA names for difficulty in this as well, and this is how the difficulty should have been.
Casual: 0 retries. 1 if the player wasn't paying attention for some reason.
Normal: 2 to 5 depending on the players skill level.
Hard: 10 to 15
Nightmare: Good luck, you will beat it when you beat it, just keep telling yourself it is a matter of time.
Scars Unseen said:
Just out of curiosity, what would easy difficulty be for in that case?
Easy difficulty, or casual in the case of DA, should be for people that have never played such a game before, they need a difficulty that they can learn the ropes where they can do things like learn how to command characters at once and organize, without having to use health potions every 5 seconds. Normal is for the people that have played such games, but want to learn how the new game is different.
The settings on DA are out of whack. Casual is Normal, Normal is Hard, Hard is Ultra Hard, and Nightmare is Extremely Hard.
I find it bizarre how many health potions I go through on casual. On casual I should be going through maybe one a battle, possibly none in some encounters. I made 50 of them before I started doing the quests in Lothering and after that and a couple in Denerim, 6 or 7 encounters, I found that I had used 20.
In properly constructed difficulty scale, in no way should I be saying few hours in on the easiest setting, "I've used almost half my health potions, I hope I can find more ingredients to make more soon."
Sovvolf said:
Me'h I thought the dialog system is an improvement over the last games which seemed a little dated to me. I'd rather they have a voice, I think it makes the character and the story engaging than reading the text boxes.
Though to each their own.
I'm glad that they put in the dialog system that they had for Mass Effect.
With DA, I was looking at the usually 5 text choices to use for answers, and most of the time I sat for 3 minutes at least decided what answers were good answers and which were bad. It is the reason my first play through of the game has felt excruciating, because conversations were breaking the flow of play and my ability to easily pay attention to the story.
With ME, the dialog wheel makes it so I know what choices are good and what are bad, considering on all first play-throughs on RPGs, I want to play the nice guy. I only had to take 10 seconds at most to make my decisions on the dialog and I could pay more attention to the story.
With DA, 12 hours in a week is about as much as I could stand, and that barely got me out of Lothering and a few quests into Denerim, which was around 15 or so completed quests.
With ME, I was playing 5 hours in a sitting(just graduated from college and haven't found a job yet), 35 hours in a week. I had gotten through around a 3rd of the game. Some might say that is a high hour count for only a third of the game completed, but I one of those people that has to talk to ever single person and check ever nook and cranny of each area to see if I haven't missed anything. But, with the way ME is set up, it doesn't make my OCD-ness with such games feel like a chore. DA, feels almost unbearable with that mentality.
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