Critical Miss: Erin Hawke: Explorer

[bob-2000]

Now is that a Rogue Mage, as in a person who has both the talents of a rouge& a mage. Or a rogue Mage as in a Mage who has gone awall?!

-M

I'm so sorry that I'm nerdy and sad enough to answer this, but its for apostates. They are mages who escaped the circle and are now hunted by the chantry (the primary religious group).

I'll go to my corner now.

 

[jonyboy13]

I was really disappointed in DA2 and thus is one of the reasons why. Good comic anyways. Also, is erin going through rouge, warrior and mage classes throughout the panels? Rouge armor, then iron armor with sword, then mage champion armor?

Actually, you can see the sword in the third pic so I think it's just showing that you'll get to the same freakin spot 45478 times, with diffrent gear and crap.

That or regardless of class you'll get to the same spot

 

[Cenequus]

Yeah I'm not sure what they we're thinking when they decided to copy/paste the same dungeon over and over again. It's one of those question when you'll make an interview with someone from Bioware you HAVE to ask "WTF?!". Also DAO too had this issue but in a smaller scale. In the Deep roads the was always this room that was cut in half by rocks with darkspawn behind,a ruble in the corner etc. So you knew it wasn't just a model reused but the same damn room since it had all the details.

Nonetheless the game is still worth it since it uses this long period of time and seeing during gameplay how you decisions affected the game is way better than getting a recap at the end of what happened because of what you did(DAO,Fallout 3 etc).

 

[caladors]

If I have to pick the story or the map design.
I know which I hope they invest time in.
And I think they did, I don't agree with all of it.
So they repeat some maps at least your not the 'Spartan' mage.
Btw comic mask ftw.

 

[Buchichu]

hahaha...so, so true. I thought I was going crazy at first, not realizing they were *purposely* reusing every environment. I was like - damn, haven't I been here before? Damn, why does every house look exactly like Fenris' mansion? what? why can't I go through this door when the map clearly indicated there's more over there and I'm pretty sure I've been there before?

Oh Bioware, how you've cheaped out.

 

[Echo136]

Took me a minute to get it. Everyone kept complaining that the game was cookiecutter.

 

[Jaded Scribe]

That's pretty much the thing that really put me down in DA2, otherwise good gamne, but the recycling of the sames fews maps over and over again.... That's what happen when you develop a game like that in one year and half

I doubt that spent that little time developing it. Just because it was announced a year and half ago doesn't mean they weren't well into development.

It didn't bother me that much. I know how difficult, time-consuming, and expensive it is to develop this kind of stuff. Having the same maps here and there cut down drastically on development costs.

Besides, at least with the exterior caves, you were often going into the same location anyways. After you clear out the pirate band or whatever in Act I, mages took over use of the cage in Act II. For the areas inside the city, it still kinda makes sense that warehouses etc will either be reused by someone, or at least have a standard layout. They were dealing with a much smaller area in which to put caves and stuff, and the increase to graphics quality was a big step.

Clearly a lot of work went into DAII. I'm willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt that reusing maps was an artifact of time and dev constraints rather than "Lol, we so lazy".

 

[olfelix]

Funny comic, but this is just about how I feel about this strip as of late. Was this some kind of tongue in cheek then in relation to how lazy this comic has gotten?

 

[Quantupus]

Apparently I'm the only one not bothered by this. You can't expect Bioware to make a brand new area for every single little cave you enter. And even if they had made twice as many different maps to switch between, everyone would still be just as pissed because they dared to do even a little recycling.

 

[cainx10a]

Apparently I'm the only one not bothered by this. You can't expect Bioware to make a brand new area for every single little cave you enter. And even if they had made twice as many different maps to switch between, everyone would still be just as pissed because they dared to do even a little recycling.

They should have. Playing a BioWare game ain't just about the romance minigame, why the fuck would a templar set office in the same cave where I was fighting some spiders only a few hours ago, it's like, oh, they won't expect us there now that it's clear from beasties ... guess they never took the quest waypoint in consideration. Silly NPCs.

 

[Talvrae]

That's pretty much the thing that really put me down in DA2, otherwise good gamne, but the recycling of the sames fews maps over and over again.... That's what happen when you develop a game like that in one year and half

I doubt that spent that little time developing it. Just because it was announced a year and half ago doesn't mean they weren't well into development.

It didn't bother me that much. I know how difficult, time-consuming, and expensive it is to develop this kind of stuff. Having the same maps here and there cut down drastically on development costs.

Besides, at least with the exterior caves, you were often going into the same location anyways. After you clear out the pirate band or whatever in Act I, mages took over use of the cage in Act II. For the areas inside the city, it still kinda makes sense that warehouses etc will either be reused by someone, or at least have a standard layout. They were dealing with a much smaller area in which to put caves and stuff, and the increase to graphics quality was a big step.

Clearly a lot of work went into DAII. I'm willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt that reusing maps was an artifact of time and dev constraints rather than "Lol, we so lazy".

Bioware did state that the developement of DA2 started only after the release of DA:O (it's said amount other place in the collector edition stategies guide) you can do the math how much developement time that gived them

 

[Jaded Scribe]

That's pretty much the thing that really put me down in DA2, otherwise good gamne, but the recycling of the sames fews maps over and over again.... That's what happen when you develop a game like that in one year and half

I doubt that spent that little time developing it. Just because it was announced a year and half ago doesn't mean they weren't well into development.

It didn't bother me that much. I know how difficult, time-consuming, and expensive it is to develop this kind of stuff. Having the same maps here and there cut down drastically on development costs.

Besides, at least with the exterior caves, you were often going into the same location anyways. After you clear out the pirate band or whatever in Act I, mages took over use of the cage in Act II. For the areas inside the city, it still kinda makes sense that warehouses etc will either be reused by someone, or at least have a standard layout. They were dealing with a much smaller area in which to put caves and stuff, and the increase to graphics quality was a big step.

Clearly a lot of work went into DAII. I'm willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt that reusing maps was an artifact of time and dev constraints rather than "Lol, we so lazy".

Bioware did state that the developement of DA2 started only after the release of DA:O (it's said amount other place in the collector edition stategies guide) you can do the math how much developement time that gived them

Ah, didn't know that. Thanks for the correction.

 

[Quantupus]

Apparently I'm the only one not bothered by this. You can't expect Bioware to make a brand new area for every single little cave you enter. And even if they had made twice as many different maps to switch between, everyone would still be just as pissed because they dared to do even a little recycling.

They should have. Playing a BioWare game ain't just about the romance minigame, why the fuck would a templar set office in the same cave where I was fighting some spiders only a few hours ago, it's like, oh, they won't expect us there now that it's clear from beasties ... guess they never took the quest waypoint in consideration. Silly NPCs.

Think of how many different caves you enter. Way too much time would be wasted making dozens of caves from scratch when you can use the same cave template for multiple caves and just adjusting the routs by blocking doorways. Though I do think they could have benefited from at least changing the color schemes.

 

[dubious_wolf]

The new art styles, I likes it.

 

[Dice Warwick]

maybe that's why I stopped half way through my second play. Kirkwall is awesome and all, but it still lacked scale, and discovery. In DA Awakening, each zone had it's own plot story, with the town, and base as event zones, but for the most part peaceful. Kirkwall is all of it warped into one awesome story, but because each area is sectioned off, it's scale becomes much smaller.

as for the caves, there is like only 2-3 of then, it's just that they are each used up to 10 times, but with some passageways open or closed off.

 

[D Moness]

I'm just sayin...

Varric is really unreliable when it comes to actual level designs.

I figure his main thing is to say "We went to a cave, we kicked ass" so the Chantry has to decide by themselves the layout of the caves.

I need to remember that one.

I think we should blame Varric he is a city dwarf he doesn't know the difference between all those caves they all look the same to him.

 

[Agamemnon582bc]

Apparently I'm the only one not bothered by this. You can't expect Bioware to make a brand new area for every single little cave you enter. And even if they had made twice as many different maps to switch between, everyone would still be just as pissed because they dared to do even a little recycling.

I guess you missed out on Neverwinter Nights?

Bioware has the tools to create different layouts with the same materials. If they did that people wouldn't be complaining about the fact that they use the SAME LAYOUT for multiple "different" areas. The company has definitely fallen far from the quality of work it used to produce.

 

[yndsu]

Seriously, i have NEVER ever before been pissed off by a game using the same locations.
And i use to play COD4 for 9 hours a day online when i was unemployed.

 

[Mr.Squishy]

Was that a The Offspring reference at the bottom? If it was, I love this comic forever (well, okay, it's still pretty good without references).