Or you could just traverse all those low obstacles with your normal movement, like in Prince of Persia. Once again: the alternative to bad design is not bad design in the other direction.Denamic said:Without a jump button, you can either have clutter in your gameworld that forces you to run around everything bigger than a pebble, or you can have a flat ground to walk on. Either way, it means a lot more invisible walls.
Honestly, a slightly inclined surface should not stop me dead in my tracks. A knee-high stump should not be an impassable obstacle. A ledge should not have a fucking force-field. Fuck not having a jump button. Fuck it all the way to heck.
If you have to press a button to move up a slightly inclined surface, that´s bad design. In Tomb Raider Lara moves around pretty well just jumping when doing something really impressive or when initiating a climbing movement.
In Dragon Age we have to hop around some areas like crazy monkeys.
You might say that DA is not an action game so it cannot be compared with Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider or even GTA. I would say that the developers should acknowledge this too and focus on making a more polished experience, less generic MMO and more Bioware. Going around obstacles is normal and that's how you will move on the game 90% of the time anyway.
A good sandbox game give players all kind of cool tools to navigate around.
A good RPG gives players a reason behind their actions. When Shepard jumps over an obstacle in Mass Effect he does it with a purpose - to flank or get closer to the enemy. He (or she) does not jumps around the Normandy.
DAI does not give us enough tools to make navigation engaging and interesting the whole game and what we have does not fit the rest of the gameplay: we literally use jump to just hop over small obstacles most of the time, which is lame.
Note that the alternative is not get stuck in the obstacle. The alternative is not having the obstacle at all, or just move over it with normal movement, but this requires design and effort and in a huge game like this they simply did not have the resources to pull it of.
To be clear: I am not against the jump mechanism. I am just saying it was poorly implemented in the game, and it was largely an unnecessary effort, since most of the terrain in the game can be traversed without it and the focus of the game is on dialogue, story and combat. The feature could have added a lot in exploration, but it is just really useful in that regard a few times