Dragon Age Poll: RPG-ness

[Zenicetus]

I like Fallout’s SPECIAL system too. That offers quite organic character growth.

Sure, but the game gave you so many points to use, along with other things like Bobbleheads for free points, that you could max out all the SPECIAL abilities by the end of the game instead of having to make choices. There's no skill or challenge involved in a game that hands you everything on a silver platter and doesn't force trade-offs (IMO).

Mass Effect was like that too. When I started the game, I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to upgrade my character during each level-up. I thought I was being forced to make real decisions, but it only made a difference in the early levels. By the end of the game it didn't matter because just about every slot was full. I could just as easily have rolled dice for a random number each time I made a selection, and ended up with almost the same character stats at the end of the game. That's not my personal definition of an RPG.

[frogbeastegg]

Sure, but the game gave you so many points to use, along with other things like Bobbleheads for free points, that you could max out all the SPECIAL abilities by the end of the game instead of having to make choices. There's no skill or challenge involved in a game that hands you everything on a silver platter and doesn't force trade-offs (IMO).

There's more to the series than Fallout 3. The two earlier games didn't have the bobble heads and each skill went to 200 instead of 100. There were also more perks and traits to choose between, and fewer completely useless ones.

Fallout 3 was fine until around character level 10. At that point I'd have all of my core skills up to a high level and basically spend the rest of the game dumping points into skills I didn't care about. I'm not much of a Fallout 3 fan to be honest.

EDIT: Ninja stealth Tincow post snuck in while I was typing

IWD2 is just like IWD1... no roleplaying, just lots of killing and looting. If you didn't like that about IWD1, then you probably won't like it about IWD2. They should be thought of as tactical combat games, not RPGs.

Yes. At the time I expected IWD1 to be like BG because the game hadn't received much coverage and I picked it up the week it hit shop shelves. It didn't help that the game was a throwback to BG1 and so was rather inferior to BG2 with its better visuals, tweaked engine and wider variety of character classes.

I am in complete agreement with you on character creation. IWD2 used a hybrid system... it used a lot of 3E rules, but it was still in the old IE engine which made implementing the entire rule set difficult. In particular, they had difficulty adding in the feats system and had to do it with a run-around version that utilized a heavily modified version of the weapon-specialization mechanism. The end result is a character system that is far better than the other IE games, but not as good as the NWN games. It's still nice to be able to play a pure mage that uses a long-sword in an IE game though.

Hmm. :crosses IDW1 off her list of games to play, shunts IDW2 up a few places: Might play it before the big Baldur's Gate replay then.

[LeftEyeNine]

I wonder what kind of deviation the same poll would indicate in 3 months of time.