Dragon Age 2

So anyways... Dragon Age...

I find I have more gripes than praise for this game so far. Some things that really chap my ass:

Enemy encounters that are preceded by a cut scene which, when complete, leave your party clustered together in the middle of a swarm of enemies thus making it impossible to exercise tactical preparation.

Taking out all but one of a band of enemies, only to have 10 more enemies magically appear out of thin air, usually right next to my ranged attackers who are holding back from the front line.

Nightmare difficulty. It is more difficult, not because the enemies are smarter and use better tactics, but because they make me feel like my party is equipped with wooden spoons instead of real weapons. Still in act 1 and already numerous encounters find my mage PC the last standing having to spam the toughest enemy to death: run away while the enemy is mid-swing, throw one or two attacks, let him start to swing and run away again. This may have to be repeated 50 times if the enemy is equipped with healing potions. If my mage takes a hit, he will be knocked to the ground every single time making it possible for one enemy to chop him to death without ever letting him run away or get in a spell or attack. If he is the last standing and the enemy has ranged attack capability, it's game over.

The 'injury' system. As I am playing on Nightmare, I'm usually reduced to one party member standing after every combat. All those who go down receive an 'injury' and their max health is reduced. So after two consecutive combats, my entire party becomes combat ineffective. If there were an 'injury kit' lying under every stone and bush in the game, it might be enough. But as I've only found 3 of them thus far, I have to return to my base of operations in order to heal injuries. In many cases this is not possible because there is a quest that has to be completed before I can leave an area. So I've had to reload previous saves and go in search of easier pickings a number of times.

More later. It's dinner time.

 

You now find resources and order potions/runes/poisons from your home. Once you find a source of resource (reminds me of NWN2) it never depletes.

 

Isn't this true of nearly all games? I can only think of two games I have ever played where increasing the dfficulty actually changes the AI's behaviour rather than just giving it material advantages. Those two games are "Galactic Civilizations" and "Chess".

Actually, Unreal Tournament had some pretty smart bots, but I never saw anything at the higher levels that made me think they hadn't just changed the values of the "reaction time" and "firing accuracy" variables.

 

Wow, I haven't been keeping up necessarily, but that last post seems to be 100% content and 0% troll.

 

Hush, you're spoiling it for the others.

 

I've started over. It occurred to me that maybe I was 'playing the game wrong'. So I decided to go a different direction with my mage and focus on healing and buffs rather than (ineffectual) damage spells, and my warrior npc's focus on damage, thus taking most of the aggro. Working out better so far.

Another gripe: the 'backstab' and 'stealth' abilities. Success is not a percentage of chance based on attributes, it is a button you push to magically disappear for a few seconds or disappear and reappear behind the enemy for a backstab. My real gripe is that the enemy rogues have the same 100% chance of scoring a backstab. Apparently, this can only be prevented by avoiding melée engagements with enemy rogues.

 

But it looks cool...

 

Personally, I'm seeing a lot of the gripes that everyone has with the game as faults in DA:O as well.

Mind you, I haven't got the game yet -- but there was still an injury system in DA:O, still tonnes of filler combat and backstabbing/stealth was still screwed. Maybe it's different now considering it's a new game, but I think a lot of the perceived flaws come from the expectation that it'd be better than DA:O; which was hardly perfect in the first place.

Personally, I expected it to be ignorant mainstream "gamer" bullshit so if I get to fuck a demon again I'll be over the moon.

Keeping in mind that I've already shelled out $70 on the thing so stiff shit for me if it ends up in the hate bin.

 

Maybe I didn't notice some of these things in DAO because I never played it on the hardest setting. I have since come to realize that most games released these days are not worth even a single replay so I might as well play on the hardest setting the first time.

 

"How will I escape when that happens?"

"Maybe you'll do what I do and turn into a dragon. Hahahahahahahaha. Oh, you could never be a dragon."

Finer lines have never escaped Kate Mulgrew's lips.

 

http://www.ag.ru/games/dragon_age_2

Scroll down to see reviewer score (left) and average user score (right).

I haven't seen a discrepancy this big since the review of STALKER: Call of Pripyat.

 

I think, Charonte, that they expected those flaws that were present in DAO to be cleaned up and fixed in DA2. The fact that it wasn't would probably annoy most people. I know it would me, but I still haven't played Awakenings because my laptop is too damned old to play it and I don't own a PS3 or Xbox 360.

 

From that it follows that they expected a sequel to DA:O (and that's partially the names fault. It's not, in my eyes. It looks like something completely different.

Good, though. Avoid Awakenings, you'll only lesser yourself. I would have thought however that if you could run DA:O on your laptop that Awakenings would function as well?

 

I can run it on minimum settings, but everything from the landsmeet on grinds almost to a halt due to lag.

 

I can't even run NWN 2 due to lag issues, though I have a 360. Still, I'm too poor to buy any new games as of yet. My impression of DA 2 is that it's not quite a sequel, from what's been posted here.

 

Awakening can be considered just a big DLC, it's over pretty quickly and really easy (your character becomes 10 times more powerful), even on nightmare mode.

I'm almost done with DA 2 and while it's not as good as DA:O, I really got into the story! There were times (when I wasn't trying to complete all the stupid and repetitive side quests) that I didn't want to stop playing, I needed to find out what happened!

It shouldn't be considered a sequel (or else it would've been called Dragon Age: Origins 2) but it is a game worth playing at least once. One thing is for sure though, is that I"m not buying ANY of the DLCs.

Now the wait for Witcher 2 begins.

 

I hate that we have reached a point where DLC is being marketed before a game even hits the shelves.

 

DA2 has basically nothing at all to do with DA:O, other than being in the same world. It's a different continent, another country and takes place a years after the events in DA:O.

Only thing in common is some of the characters from DA:O appears in DA2 and there are some mentioning of "the Hero of Ferelden".