I love the game so far... Im playing it on hard, since Im still learning the tactic system, my second play through will be on nightmare and Im going to take my time and set everything up right. I tried nightmare at the start but the friendly fire makes everything really hard and you have to use positioning and watch what spells/abilitys you use so that you don't dmg your guys. Still don't see why people are complaining about the game, guess some people are never happy.
I disagree with you. I like DAII better than one. The combat is a lot better than the first one. The cutscenes and dialogue are very good. And it just feels like an interactive movie to me. And I have no problem with the overload of mobs. It makes it chaotic which is fun to me. Or should I say heroic?
Cut scenes never make a game. Cut scenes a few years back were used spearly to make a small point now is seems that Bioware has used to to explain a whole game. Look at NWN and Baldurs gate both of these games which were true rpg's made Bioware what is is didn't have what new games have today and thats substance.
In this case, the cutscenes ARE what make the game, though, imo. I don't even care about the combat in the game most of the time - I just set it on casual and blow shit up... every now and then I have to pause and use a health or stamina potion. I'm having way more fun with that than I have with a higher difficulty, as I'm playing mainly just to see what happens, not out of any major thrill from gameplay necessarily.
It's exactly the same as DAO. The combat was bland, but the story/cutscenes made it worth playing.
I disagree with you. I like DAII better than one. The combat is a lot better than the first one. The cutscenes and dialogue are very good. And it just feels like an interactive movie to me. And I have no problem with the overload of mobs. It makes it chaotic which is fun to me. Or should I say heroic?
Cut scenes never make a game. Cut scenes a few years back were used spearly to make a small point now is seems that Bioware has used to to explain a whole game. Look at NWN and Baldurs gate both of these games which were true rpg's made Bioware what is is didn't have what new games have today and thats substance.
In this case, the cutscenes ARE what make the game, though, imo. I don't even care about the combat in the game most of the time - I just set it on casual and blow shit up... every now and then I have to pause and use a health or stamina potion. I'm having way more fun with that than I have with a higher difficulty, as I'm playing mainly just to see what happens, not out of any major thrill from gameplay necessarily.
It's exactly the same as DAO. The combat was bland, but the story/cutscenes made it worth playing.
Yup, that's how I am playing DAO and DA2 and most RPGs in general
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
To be honest I even thought Dragon Age 1 wasn't very good, and never understood why people gave it such high reviews. I had the PC version, which was suposedly the superior version, and thought that the party combat AI was absolutely horrible and the mini-games while at camp (i.e., talking to your party members and giving them gifts) was just plain boring and pointless.
I couldn't even count the number of times Alistair would run straight into a whirlwind of fire from one of my spells and burn himself to a crisp for no reason. Having to micromanage the battles to prevent this, and constantly pause the game, became very tedious. I just don't know why Bioware continues to implement party systems like this when they have such atrocious party AI. It just doesn't work. Bethesda I think is much smarter for dropping this party mechanic entirely and going with the single hero which at least you can control naturally in a real-time way.
I actually think the pseudo-realtime battle mechanics that Bioware introduced in Baldur's Gate way back when ruined party-based PC RPGs. Real-time and pseudo real time just does not work for party based RPGs that have such atrocious AI. If you need to pause several times during battles just stop pretending and make it turn based like the good old shool games did.
For this reason I haven't bothered to get Dragon Age 2, but I'm fairly certain based on reviews that it is even worse than 1.
I think Bioware's Mass Effect series battle mechanics works better (despite another horrible party AI implementation) simply because the action oriented mechanic at least made playing your main more fun, and just letting your 2 party members kill themselves in some usually idiotic manner didn't really matter: it never really affected the outcome of the battles for me and they just woke up after I finished the enemies off.
I like Bioware's story telling abilities, but they are light years away from a capable party-based AI implementation...
GW2 "built from the ground up with microtransactions in mind" 1) Cash->Gems->Gold->Influence->WvWvWBoosts = PAY2WIN 2) Mystic Chests = Crass in-game cash shop advertisements
DA2 is a blast on PS3. Loving every minute and glad Bioware changed towards a more Mass Effect style...let's hope for tons of DLC and an expansion between now and Mass Effect 3.
I have not played this game, but so far I've been hearing quite some complaints about the game, and about Bioware, and EA...
Ha, half those metacritic reviews read like they're written by the same pissed off guy. All first reviews, with a 0 score and every third sentence has a comment in brackets.
I do not know, I really enjoyed DA:0 and Awakening but the demo felt as many posters have said. In short, for me, the problem s include lack of openness, excessive directional guidance and a different platform feeling to it. I will not be purchusing the game however, a freind of mine is just about done and I get the next rounds if I want.
I just started Act 3 so Im over 2/3 of the way through the game and I have to say the story is very engaging. Then again I am an RPG fan and to me the story takes precedence. That said the emchanics for this sequal are better than in the first. Comabt is smooth and exciting and I personally love the way the map system works now. No more hours and hours wasted in endless searches for which NPC gives a quest and where in the sam hill its located. It makes it easier to stay immersed in the story. Im not really a sand-box person though and I don't have the time to spare to just endlessly search for things. They made it better for players like me who have busy lives and enjoy focus on story and combat. I also disagree with the complaint about the multiple waves of enemies... I love a good bloodbath and even more so a challenge. Bring 'em on. Just my humble opnions for all of this is subjective.
So far I think the worst part of the game are the environments. SO goddamn boring and repetitive. Combat got more interesting with a higher difficulty setting - thought it was boring at start. Best part, as usual, are the conversations, but Bioware would never mess that up.
I enjoyed DA 1 very much and I am enjoying DA 2 very much - FWIW my party is about level 16 and I'm near the end of Act II. As is usual for me, I am going through every ounce of optional content that I can find before I move on.
I enjoy both games for what they are - different games. If you were expecting DA 2 to be just like DA 1 it is likely you will be disappointed. If you can enjoy both games for what they are - different games - you will likely have a good time.
Truthfully I found that I was much more disappointed with lack of content in a certain recent MMO to be released than I was with the "streamlining" of Dragon Age, one of my all-time favorite single player games.
The lore, the racial and religous tension; the romances and interesting dialog - it's all still here and in some cases it's improved in DA 2. The combat system is... faster. I personally slightly preferred the combat system in DA 1 but a good friend of mine much prefers the combat system in DA 2. I find that the more I play with it the more I get used to it.
You can go to sites like "RPG Codex" etc and find people who are still stuck on games coming out in the early 90's as "the best example of an RPG ever, to date" and they may or may not be right. Point is, they all start sounding a lot like our parents complaining about how music/sports/whatever used to be a lot better when "they" were kids. I'm 32 now and I have to catch myself when I start doing this - kids today (and their games) aren't any less or more entertaining than the games I grew up playing - they are certainly different; but the market changes.
I honestly see gamers as a very hard lot to please, and this isn't a bad thing. I see the same outcry when ANYTHING people grow emotionally attached to "changes" - just look at the crying over people who didn't like the translation of the "True Blood" books into the HBO series because the series wasn't "true to the books" - newsflash; it never claimed that it would be. HBO is coming out with "A Game of Thrones" next and I can't wait to see it, but I also am preparing myself for the fanboi outcry every time the directors take a different path in the show as opposed to "how things were in the books" - bottom line is that we have different forms of art here and art/entertainment is very, very subjective. "Your" music isn't better than "my" music because I like classic rock and you like hip hop or pop; you can make arguments that one style or another is more difficult to perform or harder to master, but what sounds sweet to one set of ears is a personal thing. A lot of musical taste seems to be grounded in what we grew up listening to.
Honestly, Bioware has sold it's soul and it shows. Dragon Age 2 is terrible because it is an RPG with poor character development and totally lacking a story.
The only good things that I can think of:
1) Much bettere Art for armors
2) Better graphical engine / wrapper so it loads etc much faster
3) Dwarves don't look like they have downs. Like the first RPG ever that doesnt make them look terrible.
The thing that bothered me the most is the total lack of a story. Instead making just tons of Fed-Ex quests..
Even the dialogue is terrible because if you respond with something awful or something good they just continue on with the conversation like you didn;t say anything at all.
They give you the illusion of choice and rail road you instead.
Terrible story, I am not sure if I mentioned that.
Lastly, there are more blood mages than regular mages. Demons are so amok in the city that with that kind of police state it just doesn't make sense. They deserve imo no higher than 3/10
As i read all the post on this thread and watched some reviews on the net i have cancelled my purchaced of this game. As the title says "its a big letdown". I do hope Elder scolls V wont dissapoint
I have to agree with the crowd here. I tried it, everything is simplified. It was like it's tailored for console rather than PC. Lack of race choices bothers me too.
It is pretty i give you that, but even that isnt enough.
I enjoyed the cut scenes. It helped out the lackluster story (see below)
Companion banter is amusing.
I found combat to be very challenging at times, generally in a good way.
Bad:
Story feels like a typical MMOG. Collect this, kill these guys.
There is little epicness to the story. It sort of comes together in the end, but I didn't feel all that excited about it because the lead-up was not as captivating as it should be.
I would have liked even more companion interactions. I was interested in my companions (especially the hot ones), but didn't get to learn all that much about them.
The last battle was a little ridiculous.
Recycling things over and over is only good for bottles and cans. Not so good for game worlds.
Most of the problems with the game are story related. The word "contrived" comes to mind. All and all, I still really enjoyed the game; good characters and good combat made that possible.
I liked the fact the story isn't 'bad stuff is coming and YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE that can do something!'
The story is about Kirkwall. You are just in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the right place at the right time).
Bioware actually did something that they don't normally do which is the moral choices are grey and those choices turns up later in a totally believable way (but not in a predictable way).
Mechanically the combat system was vastly superior than DA:O and it has more interesting characters so for me it is totally worth the $60. ^_^
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Comments
I love the game so far... Im playing it on hard, since Im still learning the tactic system, my second play through will be on nightmare and Im going to take my time and set everything up right. I tried nightmare at the start but the friendly fire makes everything really hard and you have to use positioning and watch what spells/abilitys you use so that you don't dmg your guys. Still don't see why people are complaining about the game, guess some people are never happy.
Magna Carta. Released on PS2, and a different version on the 360.
Art by Hyung Tae Kim, the same guy doing the art for Blade & Soul.
Not that... I bought both of those (Relatively crappy) games just because... of the artist... or anything.
(guilty look)
Basically think of them as somewhat budget JRPGs.
In this case, the cutscenes ARE what make the game, though, imo. I don't even care about the combat in the game most of the time - I just set it on casual and blow shit up... every now and then I have to pause and use a health or stamina potion. I'm having way more fun with that than I have with a higher difficulty, as I'm playing mainly just to see what happens, not out of any major thrill from gameplay necessarily.
It's exactly the same as DAO. The combat was bland, but the story/cutscenes made it worth playing.
Yup, that's how I am playing DAO and DA2 and most RPGs in general
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
To be honest I even thought Dragon Age 1 wasn't very good, and never understood why people gave it such high reviews. I had the PC version, which was suposedly the superior version, and thought that the party combat AI was absolutely horrible and the mini-games while at camp (i.e., talking to your party members and giving them gifts) was just plain boring and pointless.
I couldn't even count the number of times Alistair would run straight into a whirlwind of fire from one of my spells and burn himself to a crisp for no reason. Having to micromanage the battles to prevent this, and constantly pause the game, became very tedious. I just don't know why Bioware continues to implement party systems like this when they have such atrocious party AI. It just doesn't work. Bethesda I think is much smarter for dropping this party mechanic entirely and going with the single hero which at least you can control naturally in a real-time way.
I actually think the pseudo-realtime battle mechanics that Bioware introduced in Baldur's Gate way back when ruined party-based PC RPGs. Real-time and pseudo real time just does not work for party based RPGs that have such atrocious AI. If you need to pause several times during battles just stop pretending and make it turn based like the good old shool games did.
For this reason I haven't bothered to get Dragon Age 2, but I'm fairly certain based on reviews that it is even worse than 1.
I think Bioware's Mass Effect series battle mechanics works better (despite another horrible party AI implementation) simply because the action oriented mechanic at least made playing your main more fun, and just letting your 2 party members kill themselves in some usually idiotic manner didn't really matter: it never really affected the outcome of the battles for me and they just woke up after I finished the enemies off.
I like Bioware's story telling abilities, but they are light years away from a capable party-based AI implementation...
GW2 "built from the ground up with microtransactions in mind"
1) Cash->Gems->Gold->Influence->WvWvWBoosts = PAY2WIN
2) Mystic Chests = Crass in-game cash shop advertisements
I feel ya.
It feels like they just wanted to throw me right into the middle of it all, without really much of a story.
They skipped everything building up to it all, and i wound up fighting ALL the time. Rather bland tasting game to me...
Ha, half those metacritic reviews read like they're written by the same pissed off guy. All first reviews, with a 0 score and every third sentence has a comment in brackets.
I do not know, I really enjoyed DA:0 and Awakening but the demo felt as many posters have said. In short, for me, the problem s include lack of openness, excessive directional guidance and a different platform feeling to it. I will not be purchusing the game however, a freind of mine is just about done and I get the next rounds if I want.
I just started Act 3 so Im over 2/3 of the way through the game and I have to say the story is very engaging. Then again I am an RPG fan and to me the story takes precedence. That said the emchanics for this sequal are better than in the first. Comabt is smooth and exciting and I personally love the way the map system works now. No more hours and hours wasted in endless searches for which NPC gives a quest and where in the sam hill its located. It makes it easier to stay immersed in the story. Im not really a sand-box person though and I don't have the time to spare to just endlessly search for things. They made it better for players like me who have busy lives and enjoy focus on story and combat. I also disagree with the complaint about the multiple waves of enemies... I love a good bloodbath and even more so a challenge. Bring 'em on. Just my humble opnions for all of this is subjective.
Sorry, wrong topic.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
it's not that bad .
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
I actually likes it.
It isn't bad but definitely not worth the $50-$60 they are charging. Best wait for it to go on sale!
MAKER, are those Elfs ugly! I almost cried when I saw the cameo appearance of Zevran.
Elfs now look like Asia Elfs were genetically interbred with cows or sheep. Terrible. Just terrible.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
So far I think the worst part of the game are the environments. SO goddamn boring and repetitive. Combat got more interesting with a higher difficulty setting - thought it was boring at start. Best part, as usual, are the conversations, but Bioware would never mess that up.
All it takes is one bad day.
I enjoyed DA 1 very much and I am enjoying DA 2 very much - FWIW my party is about level 16 and I'm near the end of Act II. As is usual for me, I am going through every ounce of optional content that I can find before I move on.
I enjoy both games for what they are - different games. If you were expecting DA 2 to be just like DA 1 it is likely you will be disappointed. If you can enjoy both games for what they are - different games - you will likely have a good time.
Truthfully I found that I was much more disappointed with lack of content in a certain recent MMO to be released than I was with the "streamlining" of Dragon Age, one of my all-time favorite single player games.
The lore, the racial and religous tension; the romances and interesting dialog - it's all still here and in some cases it's improved in DA 2. The combat system is... faster. I personally slightly preferred the combat system in DA 1 but a good friend of mine much prefers the combat system in DA 2. I find that the more I play with it the more I get used to it.
You can go to sites like "RPG Codex" etc and find people who are still stuck on games coming out in the early 90's as "the best example of an RPG ever, to date" and they may or may not be right. Point is, they all start sounding a lot like our parents complaining about how music/sports/whatever used to be a lot better when "they" were kids. I'm 32 now and I have to catch myself when I start doing this - kids today (and their games) aren't any less or more entertaining than the games I grew up playing - they are certainly different; but the market changes.
I honestly see gamers as a very hard lot to please, and this isn't a bad thing. I see the same outcry when ANYTHING people grow emotionally attached to "changes" - just look at the crying over people who didn't like the translation of the "True Blood" books into the HBO series because the series wasn't "true to the books" - newsflash; it never claimed that it would be. HBO is coming out with "A Game of Thrones" next and I can't wait to see it, but I also am preparing myself for the fanboi outcry every time the directors take a different path in the show as opposed to "how things were in the books" - bottom line is that we have different forms of art here and art/entertainment is very, very subjective. "Your" music isn't better than "my" music because I like classic rock and you like hip hop or pop; you can make arguments that one style or another is more difficult to perform or harder to master, but what sounds sweet to one set of ears is a personal thing. A lot of musical taste seems to be grounded in what we grew up listening to.
Kinda like tastes in gaming; I've noticed.
I am not going to post the entirity of my thoughts here. I said as much as I want to say in this thread http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6505792/1 over on the Bioware sites.
Its a long post but have a read and let me know if you agree or disagree.
I really didn't like DA1 all that much. Now, a few years ago, I would have ate it up, but at this stage in my mmo / rpg life, it was just meh
So, I am not surprised by all the DA2 negativity.
Emberlord ~ Defiant to the End!
Honestly, Bioware has sold it's soul and it shows. Dragon Age 2 is terrible because it is an RPG with poor character development and totally lacking a story.
The only good things that I can think of:
1) Much bettere Art for armors
2) Better graphical engine / wrapper so it loads etc much faster
3) Dwarves don't look like they have downs. Like the first RPG ever that doesnt make them look terrible.
The thing that bothered me the most is the total lack of a story. Instead making just tons of Fed-Ex quests..
Even the dialogue is terrible because if you respond with something awful or something good they just continue on with the conversation like you didn;t say anything at all.
They give you the illusion of choice and rail road you instead.
Terrible story, I am not sure if I mentioned that.
Lastly, there are more blood mages than regular mages. Demons are so amok in the city that with that kind of police state it just doesn't make sense. They deserve imo no higher than 3/10
As i read all the post on this thread and watched some reviews on the net i have cancelled my purchaced of this game. As the title says "its a big letdown". I do hope Elder scolls V wont dissapoint
I have to agree with the crowd here. I tried it, everything is simplified. It was like it's tailored for console rather than PC. Lack of race choices bothers me too.
It is pretty i give you that, but even that isnt enough.
General consensus with the others:
Good:
Most characters are interesting.
Combat changes are great. Everything is faster
I enjoyed the cut scenes. It helped out the lackluster story (see below)
Companion banter is amusing.
I found combat to be very challenging at times, generally in a good way.
Bad:
Story feels like a typical MMOG. Collect this, kill these guys.
There is little epicness to the story. It sort of comes together in the end, but I didn't feel all that excited about it because the lead-up was not as captivating as it should be.
I would have liked even more companion interactions. I was interested in my companions (especially the hot ones), but didn't get to learn all that much about them.
The last battle was a little ridiculous.
Recycling things over and over is only good for bottles and cans. Not so good for game worlds.
Most of the problems with the game are story related. The word "contrived" comes to mind. All and all, I still really enjoyed the game; good characters and good combat made that possible.
I liked the fact the story isn't 'bad stuff is coming and YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE that can do something!'
The story is about Kirkwall. You are just in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the right place at the right time).
Bioware actually did something that they don't normally do which is the moral choices are grey and those choices turns up later in a totally believable way (but not in a predictable way).
Mechanically the combat system was vastly superior than DA:O and it has more interesting characters so for me it is totally worth the $60. ^_^
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.