Is it possible to burn out on Dragon Age and find it too grindy?
Yes, the single-player game. I'm currently facing a mild variant of this extreme, for the simple fact that I've identified the Dragon Age gameplay pattern.
It constitutes of a map (read: zone / level / town / city) of limited size, in which there are a number of NPCs scattered around. You run around with your character, and talk to them, entering into cinematic cutscene dialogues, making choices that may or may not have consequences and picking up quests to do. This is the Exploration phase.
Following which, there is another map (read: zone / level / dungeon / instance), wherein it contains more hostile enemy NPCs than conversation-makers. Therein lies the dungeon crawl component, where you PAUSE-ATTACK-PAUSE-ATTACK (read: die and reload wherever necessary) and bash/creep/fireball your way to the big boss at the end and map victory. This is the Action phase.
I'm currently stuck at the forefront of one such Action phase, because I'm at the bottom of a very tall tower and I strongly suspect this will involve several tower maps full of enemies to fight past before I get to another immersive conversation setpiece where I get to make seemingly meaningful dialogue choices.
Problem is, I don't find the fights very fun.
They've moved on from a strict D&D turn-phased battle mechanic to something a little more fluid and real-time. Very MMO-like, actually.
Dragon Age classes involve the warrior, rogue and mage. Customization turns mages into either ranged aoe death dealers, or healers, and I'm sure there's crowd control, buff and debuff mixed into the choice too. Rogues can be melee dual-wielding dervishes that get to stealth and backstab, or ranged machine-gun (sorry, bow/crossbow) nukers. Warriors get to be... you guessed it, shield-wielding tanks, or two-handed barbarians of destruction. They also can dual-wield, but "everybody knows" that if you wanna dual-wield, you may as well be the rogue who can do more damage.
There are a couple of tweaky options like getting your warrior to be a mage-fighting templar, some deathknight reminiscent extra skills, the mage can be an arcane warrior that wears armor and a sword, a ranger rogue can summon animals (huntard!) and so on.
But whatever. It's a very MMO combat system, if you ask me. Combat abilities/skills are fired off in real time by hitting an MMO-like sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4 buttons, that go on cooldown. The AI will play the other characters you aren't currently controlling, based on a set of tactics you can program in.
And yes, there are hate and taunt and aggro mechanics.
It's like a lopsided holy trinity because you can quaff heal potions (er, use health poultices, that is) to shore up your health if there is no spirit healer mage type.
While I'm sure this works decently well at higher levels, and is easy for all who have played World of Warcraft (read: everyone who games) to grasp, my moment of grumpiness arrives at level 3-4, when none of my characters abilities have matured, period.
Because my own protagonist character is not a mage, I was minus a mage in my first action combat map, and this turned out an exceedingly miserable state of affairs. Two warriors, two rogues, and me with no clue how to properly apply a backstab. My characters seemed to like to run off by themselves on the default AI settings to go and massacre things from the front anyhow.
There was a great deal of the supposed 'tanks' falling over and dying once I ran out of health poultices, plus a lot of the rogues overdoing damage and cheerful stealing of aggro from the warriors who weren't high enough to have a decent taunt yet.
Couple that to the final scripted encounter which consisted of a mage boss who would run away when attacked... into a pre-arranged ambush location of archers and snare traps, and proceed to snipe with these horribly lethal spells of a setting where magic is viewed as rare and powerful.
This was grotesquely unenjoyable as all four of my guys were melee. My final winning strategy involved me switching my two rogues to ranged archery, while my warriors died soaking damage long enough to whittle part of the enemy group down - including said grotesque mage boss.
I've now frozen at the second combat map as my combat layout involves 2 warriors, 1 rogue and 1 mage... with zero health poultices. Turns out, micromanagement of the mage is not very easy, and most of his spells do friendly fire damage. Yes, friendly fire damage.
I am starting to grumpily realize that I can't really roleplay a design concept if I want to be battle effective at the same time. And that ranged uber alles over melee. It's like a Champions Online kind of unhappy deflated feeling. :(
Apparently my best bet in the long run is to set up one tank (with a force field cast on him eventually for zero friendly fire), one mage spirit healer, one mage nuker, and then the rest ranged machine-gunners.
That's assuming I can tolerate the frapping dungeon crawl through goodness knows how many levels of tower first.
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