The gameplay is mindless hack-n-slash, and in a bad way. Diablo 2 is mindless hack-n-slash but it offers you many, many ways of cutting through the endless... scratch that, D2 didn't have infinite respawning trash mobs. D2 actually posed a challenge and lots of fun. Dragon Age Turd combat is just as it has been said from the beginning - you press a button, one button ® and something happens, not necessarily awesome (far from that). You press R and your character automatically locks on the nearest foe and hack away until it drops dead. You also get to spam your special attacks all the time now which makes it all that much worse. Tactical combat? Think like a spartan? Only if that spartan is Ephialtes. The game is nothing short of spam spam spam spam HAWKESOEM!!! Also, don't say this game is like Mass Effect 2, that's just insulting. DA2 is a completely new level of ****ness.
Another thing to note is party inventory. You cannot change their armor, helmet, gloves or boots. Only rings, amulet, belt and weapons (for some characters) are customizable. Durrr.....
Graphics is another issue. The screenshots look like they're terrible probably because of the low poly count and, perhaps due of some higher entity of lulz shinning in BiowarEA's backyard, because all shots that have been shown are the worst possible ones. In game things are not that bad, in fact it looks similar to DA:O in many ways but not without its flaws. In Origins, everything appears to look better, screenshot wise and to some degree in motion, because the game is darker. Not in the sense of grimdarkmaturegritty but in the sense that most locations are shown in low light situations with lots of artificial light sources in the maps (torches, fireplaces, etc). Also because of this "darkness" in DA:O, it fitted the nature of the game much better. DA2 changed that and now everything is lit. Even caverns have enough cracks on the ceiling to make you ask yourself if that should be called a cavern or, perhaps, a canyon. Because of this excess lighting all the flaws of their outdated engine become apparent, specially the textures. You can see pixelation and blurryness in nearly every texture they have used. Yes, the Texture Package improves things considerably but not enough to justify the high system requirements. 1GB of vram for that? HELL! Every damned source engine game on very-high textures don't take more than 300 mega bytes of vram and they **** all over this game.
Art direction is good. I'm not judging whether it's retarded or not, I'm judging whether it's consistent throughout the game or not. BiowarEA this time made the game resemble their cutscenes and drawings from Origins. That probably explains why everything looks sharper and with prominent edges everywhere. It's like an attempt at cartoon-like graphics. There's not much more to say regarding art direction other than that though. Nothing commendable really, other than Kirkwall looks really good and well crafted. Much better than the "big cities" we are used to see in other games although it is sort of a letdown that Kirkwall is divided in multiple small zones with no connection between them and most areas are out of your reach due to invisible walls fences.
Audio is a mixed bag. Environment effects are plenty and don't give you the impression of walking into an sterile place. Spell sounds are quite good and so are attack sounds from the few weapon varieties available to you. Voice acting though... that hurts. The VAs for the main character (male/female Hawke) are terrible. Why couldn't they have used Jennifer Hale? Male Hawke managed to sound worse than male Shepard, if you could even consider that possible. Where's Jennifer Hale, BiowarEA?
In DA2 they have used a new compression method this time, "something called ogg" as Chris Priestley the Hutt said over the bioboards, which is probably the reason it is so poorly implemented. Ogg is a container for high quality audio. It allows for multiple audio channels (instead of only stereo) with high sampling rate while offering a reasonable file size. However it seems getting to know your tools is too much work for BiowarEA. Voice overs now sound like in low bitrate mono. It's terrible to listen to extended periods of time, even more so if you have anything better than onboard audio which makes the playback flaws even more prominent. There's a low hissing in character's voices as they speak, something that wasn't present even in NWN almost ten years ago. Thinking of it, I'm kinda glad now that BiowarEA didn't use Jennifer Hale on their game, it would've been a crime to **** her voice up like that.
Technically, surround effects are good, positional audio is good... everything one should expect from any game released in the past 5 years on this regard.
Plot is a mess. During these six hours of gameplay, there has been no plot whatsoever. Zero, nada, neinte. You flee from Lothering with your family and head towards Kirkwall. Once you get there you find out your rich uncle is in fact broken because he gambled the family fortune and lost it all and now lives in a dirty slum and owes favors and money for half the street gangs on the place. To gain entrance into the city, your uncle offers your services (which you cannot say no, by the way) to one of two gangs which you can chose. You will have to work for them for one year to pay your debts. What happens after that? Short movie, a year passes and you're inside the city. There's no mention of what you did during that year only that people now know your name and that's it.
A year later and you're now working for a greedy dwarf (how original!) and the main quest requires getting yourself 50 pieces of gold so that you can join this dwarf's expedition into the Derp Roads. You then gain a ****LOAD of sidequests that consist of nothing but fetching useless **** from one side of the town to another or killing thugs at the city streets so that you can make that sum of money and continue the plot. And that's what I have done during these six hours of gameplay so far - side quests that don't need any sort of brain activity so that teh plowaaht may continue. There's no Blight, no threat, no nothing to motivate yourself to get that fat ass of yours moving and do something. Mindless MMO-quality quests.
Camera and UI. How could I not talk about these? Camera is better than in Origins but still not good enough. There's no top-down view anymore which makes playing as a mage an extremely annoying endeavor. For casting area spells, you must do so from a third person perspective without much visibility of where you're actually casting it. We need top-down view for that to work right. At least in third person view you don't get into odd angles anymore while fighting and you can actually see what happens on screen.
User interface, as far it goes in-game, is good and usable. Quickslot bar, a minimap and that's it. The character menus though are ****ed up. You must now navigate through a series of menu trees to get your needed information and it's spread out in an odd layout. Character status are not displayed into the character screen but instead at the inventory menu. There's a separate menu for your resistances that could have been easily integrated into the character screen because of all that unused screen space. The skill trees are painful to read. You have skill branches that you zoom into to see its subskills instead of everything in one place where you can easily compare what is available to you and make your best choice. Now you must navigate through these branches and compare all those spell icons (that you must mouse over to get any sort of description) and memorize what each one said to compare them. This bothers me and I bet it bothers other people that played games for longer than two years as well. Perhaps this design decision fits better for the desired target audience though where you just keep on leveling up your Two Handed skill branch or your Elemental skill branch all the way and don't ever look at everything else, making all character specialized into a single form of combat. This also scores against playing as a mage since it's ****ing tiresome to see every single spell description from the multitude of available ones. It's almost as bad as Oblivion's character menus.
Level design. Linear, small and uninteresting. All areas consist of a single path that you must follow in order to progress. There are not alternative pathways nor exploration. You pick a quest, go to where the quest compass tells you to go and slash your way to completion. Nothing else really. Also, all caves/mines are exactly the same. I'm not saying they look the same, I'm saying they are the same. I have entered the same looking cave about four times already in distinct locations on the world map to complete my fedex deliveries/retrievals and the same map is used for all of them. Only a few restrictions of where I can walk thanks to invisible walls fallen debris. Copy-pasta at its best.
Conclusion. I can't picture myself playing this game any longer. It's uninteresting and plain boring. People that claim this game is to DA:O what ME2 was to ME1 are completely ****ing wrong. ME2 is leaps and bounds ahead of DA2 in every regard. ME2 can be a fun popamole third person shooter if you disregard most of its cliché ridden and weak plot. DA2 is not even fun as a hack-n-slasher as it offers no challenge. ME2 on higher difficulty levels only require you to manage your team and use their abilities properly to take down your foes before they quickly shoot you dead. In DA2 higher difficulty means longer hacking and derping and that's it. Oh yes you also need to actually use potions on anything higher than normal because otherwise you never die or run out of mana/stamina. ME2 is more "tactical" than this game as it actually requires some small cognitive capabilities on the highest difficulty level to survive. Not that I'm saying ME2's difficulty is anything to be proud of, quite the contrary, but compared to DA2 it actually is.
I guess I must be in denial loop , according to mister Gaider's chart right now. *shrugs*
Graphics -- 5.5/10
Gameplay -- 4.0/10
Sound -- 6.0/10
Story -- 2.0/10
Replay Value -- 4.5/10
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Total Score -- 9.8/10
Modifié par BiowarEA, 11 mars 2011 - 10:23 .
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