Quote: "As I code and think about my own games, something I'm finding more important now than narrative in many cases is a game's feel: from the look of the UI to how you manage your character down to the kinematics of movement. If a game doesn't feel good, I find myself tiring of it faster even if the plot is great. That explains why FF12 is still sitting unfinished (seriously, barely made it anywhere in that game) on the shelf. It has that MMO feel that Lemonade mentioned, and that sort of gameplay actually induces narcolepsy for me. Dragon Age/Baldur's Gate have that kind of combat, but have so much more meat in other elements of interaction (party dynamics, as well as conversation and the traditional D&D skills of lockpicking and persuasion) that I still find it engaging."
I gave up FF12 at 47hours in (or was it 57hours in) and that was dedication on my part (I still had a lot left to do) - most of the hours spent was levelling up, I continued because I was thinking, "maybe it's really well stretched, but I'll keep playing to see if I can get to the good bits", summoning comes in quite late for example. But it did go on and on and seemed too much like an MMORPG, but I think more or less the problem was that it got too 'samey' and the difficulty was imbalanced, so you were kind of forced to level grind, which you tend to do in an MMORPG, but killing the same enemy over and over and over can get boring quite quickly. If the difficulty was imbalanced, yet could be done if you thought about it tactically (like TLR, the bosses leveled up with you and required some kind of tactic to beat them (right team, right formation, kill the right enemies first - keep morale up, so attack enemies you can flank), TLR had the same style as FF12, so to me, TLR is what FF12 should have been), but it wasn't the case.
As for Dragon Age getting it right, it is a good example of where real-time combat is effective, magic was easy to access and become desirable to use - I quite liked having shape-shifting in the fade as well, because A: It meant seeking and acquiring shapes with the right skills to move on. and B: Certain shapes were more effective against certain enemies and I got full usage out of them...except the rat, which wasn't meant for combat use.
Though I do think a couple of classes needed a bit of spicing up - Mage I think is the one I ended up preferring because using the range of spells I had meant for a more interesting battle - yet, as I had the Arcane Warrior specialisation, I could go in and use Melee and carry heavy armour, the other two classes I found I barely used any of the special attacks, except maybe Shield Bash and Stealth, other than that, the skills were boring and didn't offer too much of an advantage to use. At least I found. So from that, I'd say that a hack n slash game works well when you can do more with it and have the desire to do so, it's no use having a load of extra attacks you have no desire of using, when button mashing suffices for the kill.
However, given there's more H&S out there, I'd be interested in seeing more indie games utilising turn based systems and re-thinking them to make them more interesting.
