[Mike F]

Watching the TotalBiscuit's Port Report and it's highlighting of the cluster fata that is the tactical view (jump to 17:00), and reading some forum posts, I'm extremely disappointed with the changes they've made to the controls for mouse & keyboard.

Here's one post from Bioware's forum:

Spoiler!

Here's how the game just "worked" for me just now: I'm running around, camera over my shoulder, using WASD to move and pressing space to jump over rocks. I can't move move with left+right mouse buttons like other RPGs and the previous DA game, but it's at least semi functional.

I see an enemy up ahead. So I zoom out to enter tactical mode. Camera pulls straight up into a tree, and I can't see a thing but tree branches. I readjust the camera so the tree isn't blocking the view, but it still doesn't zoom out far enough to see the enemies, just half my party, cause the other half is too far away, just like the enemies are too far away.

So now, I have a tactical view of tree branches and two of my character's heads. Which would be great if I had two people in my party. And we were fighting a tree. But we're not.

So I pan around. Not with my mouse cursor, but with the second cursor. Yes, there's two entirely separate cursors, and the mouse cursor doesn't pan the screen around when you put it at the edge of the screen, only the second cursor moves the screen. And I have to use the keyboard to control the second cursor, but instead of being moved with the WASD keys, like virtually every game I've ever played (and Dragon Age), it's moved via QWES- totally backwards from the keys I was just moving around the world with.

So now I want to move some of my characters into position and attack. So I click on a portrait, and the game recenters the camera on that character, so I have to re-drag the camera back over to the enemies, via cursor # 2. And I'm going to have to do this all for every single character, after every single attack.

So anyways, I set it all up, and unpause it. But it doesn't unpause, because spacebar isn't pause like every other realtime+pause RPG since Baldur's Gate, it's another key. And not even something that makes sense, like for example, the button that puts you into tactical mode.

But whatever. There's a fight going on, and I press tab to switch targets. Does it switch targets? Nope. I switches which enemy I'm getting a tooltip for. So now I'm attacking one enemy, but getting targeting details for another. Which totally makes sense, right?

I'm switching between characters now, slowing working through the fight, and I want to know what one of the tanking abilities does. So I mouse over it. What info does the tooltip give? It doesn't tell me what the ability does, or how much damage it causes, or whether it's an AOE, or anything sensible. It tells me what the keybinding for it is. But that's already given right at the corner of the ability slot, always onscreen. So why on earth is that the only info the tooltip gives?

Ten minutes of camera adjusting and tree branch staring later, the fight ends. I click on the loot, but my characters don't go get it, I have to manually run over to each piece of loot. And since the game doesn't enter/exit tactical mode when combat starts/stops, I'm still in tactical mode, and the camera is still stuck in place. So my characters run off into the distance, while the camera stays stuck next to a tree.


Edit: Oh, and I keep shooting randomly while walking around inbetween fights. Because in tactical mode, right click is attack, and left click is select, but outside tactical mode, left click is attack and right click activates objects. And you can't change your mouse button's keybindings to fix any of this.

Edit2: And did I mention that you can't select multiple characters? No selecting your three ranged/DPS guys or your melee characters and pointing them all towards an enemy, you have to set each one up separately, readjusting the camera every single time.

Edit3: And did I mention that you can't zoom out far enough to see the rifts and close them? This is a central part of the game, and you can't do it in tactical mode.

DA:O was supposed to be the "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate", something fans had been clamoring for for years. And by all accounts, it was a success with fans and reviewers, and a financial success as well.

Now, the supposedly same series has abandoned anything but the pretense of being related to the great cRPGs it was intended to follow. It's got MMO-style real time combat and controls (I abandoned SW:TOR quickly because I hated the controls) combined with a console-ized "tactical view" that is a mockery of the isometric cRPGs it's supposed to resemble.

I've loudly supported Bioware on these forums, but unless they totally revamp the controls, I won't bother buying this game.