magerette
Hedgewitch
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- October 18, 2006
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For those who might be considering the console version of Bioware's Dragon Age, UK tech and gaming site bit-tech.net posts their impressions of how it"s shaping up, in terms of interface, controls, and general gameplay, not too surprisingly coming to the conclusion that the PC version will be the stronger one:
Conclusion:...Until recently we hadn’t actually had a chance to go hands on with Dragon Age: Origins on consoles and a question kept going round and round in the back of our heads – how would an epic RPG of this scale control on a console if BioWare was true to its promise of not dumbing the game down.
The answer, it turns out, was incredibly simple. It uses a radial menu...
Continuing in the vein of being as succinct and to the point as possible, we’ll go ahead and say that it doesn’t really work all that well either and the UI on consoles suffers a bit from being a bit too cluttered and not having a simple and direct interface. The PC version of the game, which we’ve played several times now, controls far better than the console one.
A handy analogy for comparing the two is that the PC interface is like being a kid in a candy store with some very generous parents – all you have to do is point at what you want and voilà! Point, click, get – easy. The console version is like the same situation, but this time both your arms are in a cast, your parents are only half paying attention and you’re diabetic. In short, it’s harder to get at what you want and, even when you do, you’re not really sure about it any more...
More information.In the end, we were left with somewhat conflicted feelings about Dragon Age. We still like the look of the game...but the console version feels weak. The BioWare team members we spoke to said they were still working out some of the details and that the final version of the console game will have a slightly different UI – but we imagine that means performance optimisations so the menus aren’t so sticky, rather than an overhaul and rethink of the entire control scheme. That makes us worried.
Dragon Age: Origins looks like it’ll be a great game, even though the more we see of it the more we start to suspect that the increasingly sexy marketing push is being used to hide some of the blandness of the fantasy world, but it’ll be at its best at PC. There it’ll run much smoother and more easily, without demanding that players coordinate all their fingers and thumbs across a dozen buttons when in reality a few mouse clicks is a better solution. That’s not to say that the console version isn’t worth a look for gamepad veterans, but if you’re undecided about the game then the PC version looks like the way to go.
- Joined
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