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Stabbey is going to shout at me again for saying this, but I'm really disappointed by this game. I've honestly tried to enjoy it, but I can't. It just tries to do too many different things and ends up doing none of them well. It's really hard to say which part feels the least complete, honestly. The RTS mode is probably the easiest target, if only because of how many people have complained about it already. It's not the game's only weakness, but it's probably the one people resent the most, because it's not only tedious but also more or less mandatory. It's really, really primitive, is the biggest problem. It's real-time strategy on the level of the mid-1990s. Think Warcraft 1, not StarCraft. The only thing you can actually do is to blob as many units as possible and throw them at the AI, which will try to do the exact same thing. Micro is not an option because it's outright painful and the tools for macro-level play just don't exist. No repeatable queues, no formations, no map-wide zoom level. Resource management is rudimentary and building your own base isn't even possible. The second problem is the Dragon Commander. In and of itself, the idea of having an in-game unit represent a major character - i.e. you - isn't bad. Many games do it successfully, most prominently Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2. The problem is that this isn't what they did. What they did instead was to include a half-baked third person flight simulator. Dragon mode is basically like playing a stripped-down Ace Combat game. What's worse, you can't do both at once. It's either RTS controls and no dragon or dragon and no RTS controls. The two gameplay elements actively interfere with each other. And you will always want to use your dragon, because an endgame dragon can wipe out small armies all by himself. The whole idea could've probably been salvaged by just making the dragon a unit like any other. Send him around the map, use the abilities, all fine and dandy, at least it's integrated with each other. Alternatively, make a decent shooter out of it where you only control the dragon and assault enemy armies to get an advantage for auto-resolve, or maybe even destroy the army by yourself. Either would have been better than what we got. Anyway, the turn-based strategy mode is also simple, but functional. It's not substantially worse than the Rise of Nations TBS mode, except that Rise of Nations had basically all the RTS gameplay of the Age of Empires series beneath that. Dragon Commander doesn't. You can move troops of units around provinces, build one building per province and play event cards. That's it. It's still anemic, but at least not actively out to annoy you. It doesn't even remotely begin to approach the complexity of a game like Europa Universalis or Dominions, though. Last but not least is the most fun but also the most frustrating part of the game, the diplomacy. It's definitely the most enjoyable part of the game, because the characters you get to interact with are colorful and entertaining. Again, the problem is that it just isn't realized enough. The ability to interact with these characters basically restricts itself to a sequence of questions to which you can say either yes or no. There's not really anything in-between, you don't get to persuade, negotiate or intimidate, you get to say either yes or no. The throne room even boils it down to a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down choice, but honestly, every other choice in the game could have been represented the same way. The major downside is probably that you do not actually get to see the consequences of any of the numerous choices you make. Chose to instate the draft? Now units on the world map are twenty percent cheaper and the elves are angry at you. You'll never know it, though, because the only consequence of angry elves is a lower unit cap during RTS missions. There are no angry citizens writing you letters, no assassination attempts or satisfied conservatives sending you a fruit basket. Every choice you make essentially happens in a vacuum. A game completely centered just around the character interactions and their personalities would have been worth buying all by itself, but again, anemic. You can't even interact with the rulers of the enemy factions. And, of course, it keeps getting interrupted by TBS and RTS sequences, because events progress only when you resolve a turn on the world map. You'd think they'd have learned something about mixing genres from how badly the integration of dragon form and human form worked out in Divinity 2, but I suppose not. It's really to be expected; they tried to combine five games while having only the budget to fully realize one, so it's no wonder that the whole thing ends up feeling anemic and incomplete no matter where you look. For what it's worth, the visual design of the Raven is really good and what dialogue there is is decently well-written. All in all, though, it's still not a recommended purchase.
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Sep 3, 2013 18:44
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You lose the control scheme that makes dealing with large blobs of units tolerable, though. You can fight a battle that way, but you really don't want to.
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Sep 3, 2013 19:11
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:The lesson Swen learned is that catering to retail is not worth the hassle. Retail outlets require a fixed release date, and committing to it forced them to refocus some resources at the last minute to fix a problem, meaning resources weren't going to other areas.
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Sep 20, 2013 09:47
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Well, speaking as a customer, not a developer or publisher, the biggest thing to take away from this is, in my opinion, to avoid Spore Syndrome in the future. I know you really like Larian and their games, but I was really disappointed with Dragon Commander for a number of reasons that I talked about in my previous post. It can be summed up, though, as a general feeling of the whole being smaller than the sum of its parts because they all felt only half-realized and not well-integrated with each other. "Focus more on doing only one thing, but doing it well, rather than forcing five different genres into one game," basically. I'm still optimistic about Original Sin, because it doesn't seem to be making the same mistake, but DC was a real let-down to me. Larian is at its best when doing conventional RPGs with lots of clever writing. They should play to their strengths.
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Sep 20, 2013 12:40
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Drifter posted:I think they could have made a MUCH deeper and more involved game if they had gone VA & text, instead of just VA. They didn't have the budget for it, and it led to having some interesting initial plot lines, but some rather shallow and boring interactivity during follow through and between times.
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Sep 20, 2013 19:16
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