The "yet another thread ruined by ABF" Thread

[A Black Falcon]

Most fun part of the game? Maybe if you're playing Simcity.

Think of it as a strategy game, GR. BG-style RPGs are in some ways a lot like strategy games... and in Warcraft would you ever want the computer to control your guys for you while you do nothing? Never! Same here.

Honestly, controlling my whole party fully is something I want out of an RPG, ALL RPGs, too. AI is for enemies . Give me control of my people, as full as possible. Aside from that movement issue though, the control is as full as it can get. I will say that yes, people do get left behind. I will ALSO say I ADAPTED to that though, and learned to make SURE people were with me, and I always checked behind me when walking around corners, or through doorways... or just whenever. Anyway, movement. Yeah, they could have let you tell them where to move. Just target an area of the ground and.... oh... OOOOH! I get what overhead helps with now! Eh, honestly locking the camera above you, nah, but letting us have the freedom to rotate it up there when needed would have been nice.

YAY! Someone understands my case! :) :) I knew OB1 would never admit that I had a point, and GR obviously doesn't have enough experience with PC RPGs to get it, but I thought it was hopeless to get anyone else to read much of this... I know Smoke would agree with me though.

I completely agree about the AI. I don't want it deciding for me. It's less effective and less efficient and slower to do what would be best, if it does it at all. So of course I'd always want to control the whole party! I don't see why any RPG or strategy game fan wouldn't! Only impatient action game fans would think like that, I would think.

And yes, I will have to learn to adapt better like you did... checking to make sure people aren't too far behind before I get into combat (though when enemies surprise you that is impossible... in that case as I said all you can do is run...), or open a door, or round a corner... it's just not natural, so it has to be an acquired skill. And they don't talk about such things at all in the game, so you just have to figure out that you have to do it... that's not particularly good design and it mars a fantastic game and battle system somewhat.

Oh, I've played third person RPG-type games (single character, though, not party-based) where you can click on the ground on screen and have your character go there. It's not exactly unheard of in the genre. The only reason I can think of that it isn't here is because they didn't really spend enough time on the PC port to optimize it fully for a mouse... and knowing Bioware that surprises me because I wouldn't usually expect them to do something like that. It's dissapointing.

On this topic (combat specifically) the advantage of topdown is multifold. First, you can control your whole party at once, not just one person. Huge advantage. Second, it makes it really easy to have you able to target any opponent in any PC (Player Character)'s sightrange, unlike this game where you can only target people in your own -- perhaps slightly more realistic (though only somewhat, given that in real life you could talk to people around the corner and tell them where to go/who to attack) which is a huge advantage in combat. And last, the perspective allows you to move around in combat without unpausing, as long as the pause system was well designed. Which is a massive gameplay improvement that greatly helps your effectiveness in combat, and the more so the larger your party is. Without on-pause movement ordering, I don't think I'd ever want a party larger than KotOR's three, that's for sure! Five or six would be an impossible mess between all of these issues.

Now, it's not like first/third person has no advantages. For instance, I think the third-person conversations with NPCs, when added with the speech for everything, is much more immersive. In that, I really like the third person camera. It's just a hassle for combat.

Eh, honestly locking the camera above you, nah, but letting us have the freedom to rotate it up there when needed would have been nice.

Yeah, a full free camera that can be moved around, or even better a camera that defaults to behind your character while adventuring but then zooms up when you get into combat, would be best... As for switching characters, you know how when you are adventuring clicking on your other party members initiates Talk? So instead of that have one of those little bars with the three buttons pop up. Well, two. :) One for Talk, another for Switch (character that you are controlling). It seems so simple... if the camera had to stay in that perspective that, being able to click on the ground to move to a location, and better auto-targetting from the other two players (so that when player one gets in combat and players two and three can see the enemy they also automatically enter combat mode and move to the range they can fire from -- something they, in the game as it is, they do not do), then the combat system would be much better. And those four things would be a WHOLE lot easier to implement than some kind of movable or free camera -- that's really something you'd have to build into the engine from the start, I think. Which obviously did not happen in this game. But these four things, they could even be added in a patch and made options in one of the menus...