1012 réponses à ce sujet

[Creadous]

 HeyChris, overall I liked the game, good job but there is some elements of the game the need to be pointed.
(+) good
(-) bad
(*) what I thought it needed


*******End


(-)credit: one word....Boring! Should have keep it like DA:O with art work information boxes about how your chooses changed the kirkwall and what happened to 30 seconds to mars – this is war. Defiantly should have been the franchises theme song

(-) how it ended:need an extra Act because yes this is the story about the champion but it end before it really begin and it end like knights of the old republic 2. The story telling style should have ended and they find the champion...the one you create and the orlesian teams up with you for a climatic ending that wasnt expected.

(-)Isabella: she ditched my ass, but at the end she was the only one they mentioned sticking around....what?? The characters that stick around should be the ones the player uses in there party the most and fells the most attached with not the one that the game plays up

(-)after the Credits: the game locks up you can run around but only to and from your house and the black emporium....what the point of that.

(*)There should have been an after game dungeon with a extremely hard boss and been able to move free around the city.
 
(+)last battle: good idea with the knight commander and the living status keep me on my toes.

(+) Character: sister came back and character alliances where tested.

(+) Two chooses for how you want it to need

(*) if you going to fight the Orsino why turn him into a flesh golem? his staff a 3 headed dragon. The open screen shows the 3 headed dragon in the background. Turn him into a 3 headed dragon for a epic fight because this game need more dragons.

(*)Another Act


*********Environment

(-) repetitive cave and lack of outside scenery, why cant we go to an island kirkwall is on the coast

(+)you get a house, would have been nice to customize your house like in awakening with the keep.

(+)Like the day and night kirkwall idea, great idea.

(+)Liked the Deep roads caves a lot more prettier .

(*)more deep road exploration

(*) invest in parts of the city. Like in DA:A to influence the way the environment evolves



**********Combat


(-)where are my beheading.... I love the finishers in DA:O but I cant get them in this game...sure you get them as a cinematic but that doesn’t count

(-)I have all the good amour but only I can uses it what the hell...it nice that everyone got there own costume but you should be able to swap that for your amour set like in DA:O

(+)guys jumping down from building or appearing from behind keep me coming back to save my mages....great idea love it.

(+)Fast and easy to use

(+)fighting technique in rogues and mages are a lot more cooler



*******Characters:

(-)Merills mirror should have opened up a door way to the demons world or fade and you should have gone after her.... seen Morgan and save Merill. The entire game I was banking on that happening but it didn’t

(-)Anders was ruined. It was a joy to have around in DA:A but now all he does is complain and bullies the other character + he got pissed at me for rejecting to romance him and I made no action that I wanted to.

(+) family character ( you get the brother or the sister depending who you are) there need to be more character like that were you have a choice on who you get that why you can play the game 3 to 4 times and have a different team every time.

(+) Fenris was cool design for a character.

(+)great idea for including passed characters, I went nuts when I saw them.

(*)DLC character should have been an qunari or at lest a hidden character

(-)gift giving was dummy proof.


*****Story

(+) time line was a good idea, but the world really didn’t change that much visually

(+) some side quests evolved with the time line which I liked.

(+)tension rises between 2 side in both acts

(-)pointless side quests that didn’t do anything

(-)what happen to morigan?

(-)one time dialog.. I want to take to my characters more then just the one time

(+) dialog indication type

(*) The Hanged man should change every time you walk in. There should also be random events that would happen like bar fights or your NPC team having a good time at the bar.

*****Overall


(-) felt to much like mass effect 2

(-) ending wasn't really worth it

(+) better development on qunari, mages and elfs

(+) better combat.....need finisher tho

(-) good game but DA:O is better because in the end of DA:O I quite literally said holy **** this is a good game but at the end of DA 2 I was thats it?

(-)felt rushed

(*)make it more disks because this game scream I need to be alot bigger.


Final word for the developers


take the 3+ years, make an amazing DA 3 that involves character imports from both DA:O and DA 2 (with the ability to change the name on your characters; I named them both the same thing). You should be able to uses both characters. The other NPC party members should be the NPC that are alive/ liked your characters both games not the once that are died.  

Modifié par Creadous, 15 mars 2011 - 05:56 .

[Yootje]

Okay, let me start by saying that I missed quite some parts of the dialogue and cutscenes because my game suffers frequently from the 'sudden unexplained lag' that you have to alt+esc the game for. This did not exactly help my enjoyment of the game. This, together with some other bugs - the Merril bug, for instance, or the console no-auto-attack, or save games from DA:O not importing properly - really makes me think the game was pushed out the door too soon, without proper quality control. Also, music and animations reused from DA:O and the copy-paste dungeons makes me think the deadline on the project was too soon. This is really frustrating to me. It is hard for me to enjoy a product that looks like it's just not finished.

But anyway, content wise. + is a like, - is a dislike:
+ Combat. I liked this newer, faster combat. DAII is a game I think more people would like. This is a game my sister, who only plays Xbox games, would enjoy playing on Normal being all fast and badass while I can take my time and be tactical about everything on Hard. I think it works. Only complaint is that if you decide to kill Anders, you lose the only decent healer in the entire game right before the main boss battles. You don't want to be making a plot decision (or at least, that's not the point of a PLOT decision) based on whether you will survive your next encounter.
- Amount of enemies. I get it, combat is made more fun and faster and generally is really cool. However, I get tired of it really quickly when I have to fight wave after wave of low-level enemies for no apparent purpose. There was no need to make a choice at the end of Act 3, because Hawke had pretty much decimated the templar AND mage population before that point. Personally, I prefer fewer enemies per encounter and for each enemy to be stronger & smarter.
+ Overall story. I liked the story of a refugee making her way up in the world. I cared for Hawke and her companions. There were some moments where I was nearly screaming "Oh my God you didn't!!" to my screen (notably when Isabella legged it with the relic, when I had to wipe out the Dalish and when Anders blew up the Chantry). I loved Kirkwall and wanted to save it.
- Some story details:
1) Too many mages are evil blood mages. The number of mages who do not resort to blood magic can be counted on one hand. Orsino resorting to blood magic even when you side with the mages makes no sense. If you're trying to go for a game with a complicated moral decision at the end, you should present the story in a more balanced way. Basically, this game was a 20-hour showcase of why actually, as much as you may have supported mages at the start of this game, they're all evil bastards who deserve to be wiped out.
2) I felt the whole 'Isabella disappears with the relic that may yet salvage the situation' thing was SO artificial. You enter a building with your companions, the guy with the relic legs it, Isabella runs after him - and instead of immediately running after her, Hawke has to stop and kill off the Qunari and Tevinter mages who were perfectly satisfied killing off each other. That just felt like an incredibly cheap "solution".
3) I think the lyrium idol was a completely random plot device. You find it, it turns Bartrand crazy, later it turns out to have turned Meredith crazy. Uhm. Okay. Anything else? This is apparently THE main thing that destroyed Kirkwall - it should have been woven more tightly into the entire story line. Likewise, your mother's killer was completely arbitrary. Just one more example of crazy blood mages, destroying any semblance of balance between the two sides.
4) Oh, and all these blood mages happily slashing their wrists and twisting knives in their own chests? Bit much. Bit silly. People die quite quickly when they slit their wrists that dramatically and furthermore, can't use their hands properly which mages need.
+ and -: the art. The game actually looked a lot better and I liked it. I liked the new elves and Qunari, and the art when Varric tells his story. But the menus? That just destroyed the whole fantasy feeling. Very boring, very dark, no fun at all. It didn't fit in.
+ The voiced protagonist. I think people who complain that the dialogue wheel gives less choice seem to confuse 'more words written down' for 'more choice'. I liked it very much.
- Only being able to speak to your companions at set times. Just a standard conversation with some questions about their background or whatever for in between these times would do. I don't expect every time  I speak to a character to have a completely new dialogue, but only speaking to them as 'quests' kind of killed the fun for me. Characters were great, I wanted to speak to them more often!

All in all, although I enjoyed playing the game, it felt rushed. It felt like at several points in production, people did not have the time to sit down and properly look at what they were doing. That really is a shame.

Modifié par Yootje, 15 mars 2011 - 06:30 .

[Adamc619]

I've played through both a "diplomatic" and a "tough/world weary" play through, working through sarcastic/troll Hawke play through now. Played on Hard difficulty.

Pros:
Voice actors and characters: With the exception of Anders' voice actor changing, I thought the voice acting in the game was great. The emotional scenes were emotional, and the comedic scenes were hilarious especially the party banter. Sometimes though I felt that Hawke's responses were a bit too short or terse in some situations.

Writing and story: I thought the writing in the game was very good. The characters were believable and so were there motivations. Even though I sided with the Mages due to how I was playing my character, the Templars really did not feel like they were the bad guys and that if Merrideth had not been driven crazy by the idol she would have been a great leader in a time of crisis. You could tell she cared for the people of Kirkwall, and that made her a very sympathetic villain.  The story itself was very tragic, especially if you romanced Anders, and I think the tragicness made the game more epic and left me hoping for things to get better in DA3.  Edit: Also, I didn't mind the conversation wheel at all.

Combat: Huge upgrade from Origins, the healing cool downs made the combat a lot more tense and I had to use a lot of micro management on healing potion and heal spell use to survive later on while playing the difficulty on Hard.

Graphics: The graphics look gorgeous at times, only problem is some slowdown and stuttering that will hopefully be fixed in a ptch.

Cons:
Romances: I felt like the romances in DA:O were handled better over-all, these just did not seem as... special... I guess, with everyone being bi. I know saying something is unrealistic is bad in a fantasy game, but I dont think anyone would be "that lucky" to have half their party/friends they meet in one year be bi and ready to get it on. I think the old formula of having 2 straight and 2 bis is pretty good one to follow, and I hope that changes back in DA3.

Environments: Simply put the repeating dungeons got bland after a while, though I think Kirkwall itself is well designed and is pretty to look at. I think that having the reuse of bases and dungeons made things a little silly, if people knew the Champion had wiped out a group of  Blood Mages in the same cave three years earlier, I would not put my demon worshiping cult in the same cave.

DA:O Importing and Quests not appearing: I had a lot of glitches with my DA:O imports, I know in the read me it says that they are not working correctly but to me that is a pretty big feature that should have been ready at launch. I still have not been able to get the quest with Nathienel on two play throughs, so I feel like I am missing out on my Awakening experience.

Summary:
I have really, really enjoyed DA2. While it does have its flaws, they honestly do not hold the game back that much. I think its a far less glitchier experience than Awakening or Origins, besides the importing issue. I hope through patches and future DLC and an expansion pack that new environemnts will be introduced as well. Over-all I would give the game a 9/10 due to the sheer fun factor of the game triumphing over the bad parts of it. Playing as a Mage and Rogue are very, very fun!

Modifié par Adamc619, 15 mars 2011 - 06:28 .

[Esther]

Good game overall 

I liked: 
- Division of quests into main, companion, side and secondary quests
- Meeting old companions from DAO- Entertaining dialogues
- Improved graphics and combat animations
- It is just awesome to play the combats in real time
- Characters had a lot of depth and felt credible
- Brian Bloom and Gideon Emery as voice actors  

Disliked: 
- Lack of character interaction, not being able to talk to companions whenever I want to and not having a party camp. This was the biggest dislike for me. 
- Very repetitive environments
- Combat is not as tactical as in DAO
Still... Great job!!!   

Modifié par 1Magnolie, 15 mars 2011 - 08:53 .

[Paladin000]

Well, I like almost all aspects of this fantastic game... But I have only one simple question: BioWare promise, that Hawke's story will continue for 10 years. And it continues only for 7 years.

And now the question: WTF?! Why game is uncompleted? And how long we must wait for another DLC or addon? You dissapointed me, because the original game must be full! And only then DLC and others additional contend have to be released. It's my own point of view. And I think that fans will agree with me.

Sorry for my English, it's not my native language...

[KAAurious]

Let me preface this review by saying that I played through DA:O at least 15 times. To say that I was, at the very least, fanatical about it would be an understatement. Let me also say that I'm a relatively lazy person so this review will try to be as concise as possible.

The Good:

- The revamped feel of combat gives every encounter a really interesting appeal. Relentless adds aside, anyway. There's no more awkward "combat movement" from the first game which severely detracted from the intensity. Warriors now swing their weapons like they mean it, autoattacks look brilliant as they flail about in a dazzling display of skill. Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of this, are the mages, who in the last game were condemned to lazily pointing their staff at the enemy and sending a small bolt of energy at the opponents. Now? They twirl their staves all about sending bolts and waves of force at their foes, and if pressured in melee combat? They switch for the bladed end. Overall? A huge improvement.

- Graphically, the game is far more stunning than the first. The trade off, however, is immediately evident though as the same environments like to make repeat performances.

- Decisions. In DA:O our decisions were promised to make an impact... eventually. In DA2 we see those repercussions almost immediately. A quest which starts in the first arc will have repercussions for years to come.

- As a result of the decisions. I liked the general quests way more. In DA:O your goal was relatively simple. Go around to these people. Pander to them. Get them on your side and raise an army. There was no eternal wandering through the Deep Roads here. No "collect samples of X for an interested party". The quests here gave us a peek into how our allies responded. They were far more in depth.

The Bad:

- Our tactical options were greatly diminished. PC users lost the tactical view which was quite useful in large melees and getting a good idea on how to position our team. Trying to position people in DA2 is frustrating at times, when we have to try to force our entire group up to the top of a staircase and the view simply won't allow that.

- The environments are stunning. But they are very repetitive. This reminds me a lot of the first ME in which we explored similar looking planets and bases for the bulk of the game. It's an annoyance but it would have been nice to have some real variation.

- I truly enjoy the plot. I do. But some of the character changes and dialogue felt... cheap to me. Alistair for example making that insipid reference to "swooping" felt forced. I actually facepalmed, no joke. The other qualm I have is with Anders, who was my favorite from Awakening. When I first saw him, I was overjoyed to see him. Hoping for more rantings with his precious Ser Pounce-a-lot. But no. He had become fixated on the plight of the mages. He became too two dimensional.

The Ugly:

- This is my biggest gripe. The lack of interaction. We can no longer turn around to one of our trusted allies and talk to them. For that to be lacking in the sequel to DA:O, a game which was heavy in character development, is almost an unforgivable misstep. I was hoping that they avoided it in DA: Awakening due to a lack of time. But it's absence in DA2 makes me think that they drank too much of the ME juice. It was an enjoyable thing to get feedback from our allies whenever we damn well pleased in DA:O to lose that was a huge oversight by Bioware, I think.

Total Summary: It was a few steps forward and a few back. Overall, I liked DA2 but I felt that the choices in DA:O didn't have much bearing on this game. We get to see old faces return and that's all well and good. But The lack of true character interaction on demand and rampant adds in fights really hurt the game. I can see the angle on the adds in fights, to have the player think on their feet, which is a design choice which is totally out of the players hands.

In short. I really liked it. I hope DA3 takes the good and from both DA:O and DA2 to make a truly jaw dropping game.

[GreyLord]

Double Post

Modifié par GreyLord, 15 mars 2011 - 09:17 .

[GreyLord]

My thoughts on what Bioware could have done differently.  I loved ME2…I did not love DA2.  I thought ME2 was the best game Bioware ever made, after finishing  ~31 to 32 hours of gameplay  (that’s not including reloads for dying) and doing just about every side quest I could find along the way…DA2 fits the bill as being the worst game I’ve ever played by Bioware.

The graphics are well done, I don’t like the art direction they’ve taken with the Elves.  It makes them look alien, which may have been the idea…but also sort of anime as well.  You don’t know whether it’s a kids game with elves or an adult game when looking at the elves.

I’m not one that really enjoys shifting through tons of stuff in the inventory, but for some reason it really annoyed me in DA2.  It seemed that I was going to the vendor after every mission simply to empty out my inventory…and that most of it was useless to me.  Don’t pound me down with useless junk, just give me the money instead.  I didn’t like how some of the inventory was there…but the armor was like a completely different thing where only I could access it and use it to buff up my character.  I understand how this saved time for programmers since they have to do more programming for every model with new armor on…but it was still a little offsetting.  I personally would prefer something more like ME2’s system…or at least something where instead of junk we just get money, and keep it to the essential items that I CAN change around such as the weapons and stuff.

I really disliked the reusing of areas.  I was tired of it by the end of Act 1, and almost quite with despair when I realized I had to go through Act 2 with the same areas again…and then of course came Act 3.  Please…variety is the spice of life…I’d have preferred they push the game back to have more variety of areas rather then release it as quick as they did.  I also understand this may be EA’s fault and their push instead of Bioware’s, so out of BW’s control.

I had a couple of freezes…one right after I beat the game…twice now.  Right after I beat [Spoiler] The head of the other faction (not the mages…hopefully that keeps it somewhat non-spoiler) it freezes as they have problems with their weapon…etc.  That was annoying.

I also figured I spent about a third of the time simply watching screens load.  You wander back and forth so much on some quests, that half of the time you’re just watching the screen as it loads.  Worse still is that your companions are so scattered around the city, just to go get updates from them and talk means a LOT of load screens.  It’s simplified since now you are “notified” via quest that they want to talk…but still…why not have them all hang out together someplace…like around camp…or maybe a Tavern with a Hanging statue up front?
These are not my biggest problems with the game.

The writing was terrible.  This is probably my chief complaint. The characters were probably…or could have been deeper.  They had more interactions than some of the other BW games…but the writing was so infantile in some portions, it made it feel as if you weren’t interacting that much at all.  In addition, the writing had some amateurish items.
 
For starters, I understand that you want to appeal to the LGBT crowds…and I’m okay that you included Homosexual romances.  What I am bothered by is that there seems to be no way to opt out of it completely.  If you tell someone no (with the broken heart), there is NO reason why they should continue to give flirtations comments towards you, nor why I have to put up with flirtatious comments back at them.  I’m not turned on by that, and rather turned off.  Have a way to let the Homosexual crowd have their fun, and the heterosexual crowd have theirs…and let them OPT out of the others if they wish.  Perhaps even a button in the options to disallow or allow one or the other if we so choose…since apparently this system didn’t work all that great.

I also didn’t like the Middle School romance.  The romance where you have to go to find if a person is interested in a companion or not, and that companion acting like they are in middle school was annoying.  I graduated from Middle School years ago.  I would hope that I don’t have to put up with that stupidity from a game that a Middle Schooler shouldn’t be playing (according to the rating on the front of it).  Who wrote that, some 40 year old guy who’s living in his/her mother’s basement and never dated someone else in their life?  It was probably that quest that centered up for me the problem I had with some of the characters.  You have characters that have dialogue written as if you are in Middle School.  The Middle School Quest (as it should be heretofore known) was the climax of Middle School reminders).

You have the lady who has sexual innuendo in just about everything she says…with Emo boy who also has it every so often and replies in turn to her…or others.  Other than that he’s simply the stereotypical angry guy who wants all mages dead.  You have the stereotypical flirty Homosexual (who doesn’t have to be if you are female, he can be romanced in that way too) who hates all Templars.  Zevran was done well…Anders was not.  Anders was written as if he was a Middle School kid throwing a tantrum, especially at certain people in your party.  They made Merrill as naïve as one can be, which isn’t a problem except she remained that naïve for SIX YEARS.  You’d imagine she’d get SOME smarts about the world she’s living in after 6 years of being in the city.  The only smart remark she really made was towards Fenris with slamming his fingers in the door.  Varric was okay.  At least he didn’t remind me of Middle School antics.

Overall, I was unimpressed with Character interactions in DA2…that was a BIG disappointment.

The writing in DA:O had an overall arch, with many of the quests pointing to it.  ME2 was even more superb, with most quests being pointed towards an overall goal.  In fact ME2 was concise and to the point with the character working to do everything they could to assemble a team and get to the core of the problem.  DA2 might as well have been 4 different games with each separated into its different part (prologue, act1, act2, act3).  Each act had a culmination of quests, and to which many of the quests pointed to, but I didn’t think they really came together well at the end.  In fact, the end was more simply the end of another Act…that was in most ways separate from the others.  The writing didn’t seem to have an overall goal and you weren’t really working towards something poignant and meaningful the entire game.  This means that the game seems less fulfilling for some, and the end isn’t going to seem all that great for many.

Some of the writing was very amateurish as it didn’t make sense.  I have a sister taken by the mages, or I am a Mage…why (except simply to see what happens if I do so) would I ever choose to destroy all the Mages, or opt to imprison those who are like me or my sister.  It doesn’t really work that way in the real world all that often.  Normally, you have a vested interest in not supporting those who are out to arrest, harm, torture, hurt, or Kill you and your family.  Why is it a surprise then to the Templars if I am against them?  On the otherhand, what if you want to choose a middle path.  Why is it that it is forced that everyone HAS to choose one side or the other.
Then there’s the entire, even if you choose one side, their leader is still going to change and try to kill you.  That’s a WTH moment, especially with the Mages.  Why if you are supporting them, do they decide they are going to kill you…what a sudden change of heart.

Everything about the writing just seemed disconnected.  It didn’t do so hot and if there’s a disappointment, it’s the writing of the game.  I am HOPING the same mistakes aren’t done with ME3…as I loved ME2. 
There isn’t much redeeming about the writing overall for me, and as I said, that’s the biggest disappointment for me in the game.  I think if many think about it, when wondering about romances, or why the climax didn’t seem as big to them, or about the cohesiveness of it all, they’ll stumble on the same reason…the writing just didn’t click.
I think it can be streamlined more, with better gameplay…but if anything needs to change, it’s to have Mature writing for an adult audience without resorting to kiddie titillation and gimmicks.

Modifié par GreyLord, 15 mars 2011 - 09:17 .

[LtAdams2247]

Since it's a sequel one can't help but compare to it's predecessor. Even though this had more in common with ME2. This must be the first Bioware RPG I have doubts about.

The bad stuff first.

- Repetetive locations. Why the constant reuse? That was a big complaint of gamers on ME1 and was fixed for the sequel. Why make the same mistake again? I don't mind playing the game in one city only (as opposed to an entire country), one can still make it feel large and diverse. But here everything looked the same, everything felt small. A small location gets in the way of a big story (again, I'm not talking about the story taking place in Kirkwall). That's my biggest complain.
- Limited companion interaction. I liked having long conversations with my crew in DA:O, just trigger a chat about this and that, these here fellas had nothing to say unless it was quest related. I had trouble bonding with most of them (Fenris I had almost no contact to). I felt deeply for the DA:O companions, the lot of them. This is what made a lot of the story that intense cause I cared for them, feared for them. Why? Because I knew them that well.
- Dumbed down gift system. I mean, set aside the fact that there's but a hand full of gifts in the entire game, it tells you without doubt who it's for. In Origins one had to read the codex entries to find out what a character likes, or maybe (OH NO!) listen to them in a conversation. Like in the real world one had to know a character to give them a propper gift. But since as previously mentioned we don't really get to know our companions I guess we had to be told who the gift is for.
- Reduced weight of romances. C'mon fellas, by the number of polls, threads and posts you must know by now that romances are amongst the most important features of a Bioware game. To rush through in a couple of scenes that don't last half a minute is not cool. Origins romances seemed to really have an impact on the story. This made one get even more involved.
- No finishing animations in combat. Alright, this was one of the coolest combat features of DA:O. Beheading an enemy or jumping ontop of an ogre in slow motion. Sorely missed in DA2.
- While we're talking about combat. I can't quite put my finger on it but how come the enemies are falling like flies? Even in casual mode I had to strategize, pause, select to win a fight in DA:O. The only time I had to think about what I was doing was when fighting the High Dragon. Everywhere else I just lit a cigarette and kept hitting the "attack next closest enemy" button. For instance, while the "hold position" feature was previously one of my most useful assetts, I think I used it twice in the entire game of DA2. Maybe it's better that way cause with the speed that combat was done, it was very hard to keep track of what was happening and controlling the fight anyway. It was confusing and boring at the same time.
- Merrils story seemed unresolved. She was hovering over that mirror for years, there should have been some sort of showdown. One that involved the damn thing going active and doing something terrible (more demons perhaps) or wonderful (Merrils goal fulfilled). Which one is up to the writers but somehting would have been nice.
- Short running time. I'm not really sure if this is a fair point. On my first playthough it took me around 35 hours. That is pretty decent when compared to other games (ME2 thakes me about 25 hours including all of it's DLCs). But when comparing to DA:O - and I must since it's the sequel - it is but half as long. 71 hours it took me to get through my first round of DA:O - and that's just the main game. I'm sure there will be game time added in the future though.

Now that I am done ranting (this you must be used to by now ;-) ), let me shower you with praise for a moment. The good stuff:

- LOVED the story. It actually outshines the one of Origins. That one we have all heard before, you are chosen to save the world, yada yada. In those types of stories it's only a question of what the primevil is that threatens to destroy flowers and kittens and so forth. In DA2 you guys managed to create a game that actually deals in grey for the most part, rather than black and white. You can never quite figure out who the villain is or if there even is one. Love. It.
- The decisions one has to make are actually HARD! Due to the ambiguity of the story I really had to sit down and hover my curser over dialog options, thinking about possible outcomes. In DA:O the way I had to go to get the outcome I wanted was pretty obvious at any given moment. Kill the boy/save the boy kind of things. In DA2 we have difficult moral decisions with commentary on current problems. Decisions that can go horribly, horribly wrong even if you didn't mean it like that. That's the stuff, guys, that's the stuff. VERY well done.
- Loved the whole Hawke family situation and how every one of them became swept up by the tsunami that was the game's story. Bethany is actually one of my favorite characters. Hated to see her go after the first act, rejoiced when she returned for the showdown. Woulda loved to get to know her better *hint hint*
- Anders worked very well within the story mainly because he needed less of a character developement than the others since we already know him. But merging him with Justice was a bloody stroke of genius. (sorry, I'll try to keep the cursing to a minimum but that happens when I really like something ;-) )
- I liked the new designs of the species to make them differ more from the humans. In DA:O they all looked pretty much the same, other than hight or pointy ears. Back then they looked like low budget Star Trek aliens - make the skin blue WOW new species ;-)
- LOVED the "let the companion step it" dialog options. Have the right companion with you on a quest and they will help out or resolve the situation better than you due to who they are - brillliant. They were not mere bystanders, they were actually in the room, reacting to what was happening. Also helped bonding with the companions which was very much needed cause casual chatting with them wasn't an option.
- Loved the way the story was told. When Varric and the Chantry warrior were talking about what happened before it happened in the game, it was always nice foreshadowing (e.g. "If she had known what was down there, she would never have brought her sister." before the deep roads expedition. I got the chills.)
- Also the cameos of DA:O characters were always good for a sentimental smile. Good to see Alistair hasn't changed much. And hotdamn! I wanna see Flemeth in DA3 ;-)
- I am very much in favor of a main character that speaks. Improvement over DA:O
- Finally, outstanding voice actors as always. Hats off to the lot of them.

Last I'm going into the grey stuff. Things I have seen criticised but didn't bother me at all.

- Save imports from DA:O don't have much impact on the game. I think that's perfectly understandable for we are far away from Ferelden. Ripples of what went down there reached the shore of Kirkwall in just the right amount, given it's distance. It's all good.
- I don't think the RPG elements are too far gone (like in ME2). Good enough.
- While I don't necessarily like the new look of the Darkspawn, I aprechiate their lack of presence given that the story is not about them and the universe of the game doesn't revolve around them.
- The ending is inconclusive. I agree with those voices but I'm guessing it's a cliffhanger. I am also guessing all the cliffhangers left from Whitch Hunt and Golems of howeveryouspellit will be resolved as well in the next installment. It's a leap of faith.

In conclusion I give the game the thumbs up. Even though I found unproportionally more points of criticism than in previous works of Bioware, the writers saved the day. Big time (you may notice the bulk of complaints is about gameplay and design while the bulk of compliments is about the story telling). You built and incredibly deep universe with DA:O and in DA2 you start tearing it all apart in the most tragic and dramatic way thinkable. Oh the darkness, the sweet, sweet darkness. And I got to be in the middle of all of it. If you manage to wrap it all up in later installments, I'll die a happy gamer ;-)

[BubbleDncr]

My first instinct when I started playing was that I hated it. The opening felt too directed to me, I felt like I wasn't really driving the conversations, and all the UI changes and differences to the leveling up (attributes and skills) bothered me. Even after playing the game for 45 hours, I still kept trying to get to my inventory through the radial menu.

I didn't like how what attributes did seemed to change. I decided early on I was gonna pick blood mage as my specialty, so my thought was to put points in constitution - but then I found out all the mage armor needed high willpower. It may have been helpful if when it gives descriptions of the what each attribute was, it said which ones were needed for armor for each class. I guess if it did say that somewhere, I missed it.

I was also disappointed by the loss of skills, like Coercion. Now, I realized as I was playing, that most of them were pretty much unnecessary, but I can't say I wasn't saddened when I realised I would never have the opportunity to persuade or intimidate someone. Maybe you can be able to have those just be based off cunning and strength?

All that said, after I got about 3 hours into the game, it started to feel more like Origins to me, and I started to love it. I remember my conversation with Fenris right after he showed up was the first conversation that felt like I was driving it, and it made me really happy.

Speaking of conversations, I went back and replayed some conversations last night, and realised something. Whenever I had a conversation that had a star for one of the choices, I thought if I didn't do that choice, I wouldn't get the chance to again (like for when you give someone gifts). I found out, that wasn't quite the case, and it made me a little sad, because I feel like there were a lot of conversations I missed out on because I always went straight for the star one.

The reuse of environments didn't bother me as much as they seemed to bother other people. And I really never got sick of Kirkwall.

Despite those complaints, I ended up loving the game more than Origins, I think. The ending had my jaw dropping, and I'm still reeling, days later. I didn't have a companion I didn't like - if anything, I was sad that I couldn't have all of them in my party all at once, and get to know them all equally.

The whole first Act, I just felt like I was doing a bunch of random stuff, and I didn't really care, or know what I was doing half the time. At the time, I thought it was maybe some poor design, but then as I got to Act 2 and started to see the results of some decisions, I thought maybe it was intentional - since in real life you also don't realise things are important decisions until after you make them. I honestly felt like I didn't make a single decision the whole first act, haha. I was pleasantly surprised.

The thing I loved the most about Origins, that set it apart from all other games for me, was the moment I found out that Alistair (my LI) or myself had to die - it was really emotional for me, and is what impacted me the most as a player. I guess I was lucky in that I chose to romance Anders this time, but I totally got the same feeling when he destroyed the chantry at the end, and that made the game for me, to the point that I feel bad for friends of mine who didn't romance Anders, because they won't get to feel it at the same magnitude as I did.

Speaking of romances, I've heard from my guy friends that are playing, that if you're a guy, Anders is gay. I understand wanting to appease everyone, but I kind of don't like how all the characters are open to be romancing both characters. It feels like it changes who they are, a bit, making them less defined. But I can see why it was done.

[Exodusith]

Well, just finished my playthrough (about 38 hours) and here are my thoughts. I write this as a Bioware veteran having played just about every release since the original Baldurs Gate. Unfortunately, Dragon Age 2 is the first game to disappoint me in this long heritage.

I'll start with the positives. I switched from PS3 for DA1 to Xbox 360 for this game, and found the graphics engine to be much smoother and stable. Characters look far more detailed. Combat is faster, and better animated. No more of the dreaded delay dancing that happened in the first game as AI tried to juggle around mobs to attack them.

I played as Female Hawke (Mage), and tried my best to make a decent toon of my own with the creator, but the default look for her is just too good. For the record, Jo Wyatt really made the character for me. Her voice acting was above and beyond anyone else in the game imo.

So, where does it all go wrong? Where to start...

Immediately the first thing I noticed was horrendous drops in FPS on cutscenes. Just about all of them. This really took away from the immersion when the lip syncing was miles out and some of the animations juddered through.

Whilst the combat was fast, it quickly became evident that this was time for button bashing. The lack of auto attack, and some ridiculously long cooldowns on mage abilities left me spamming staff attacks constantly. As others have compared, its like playing Dynasty Warriors or some other mindless beat em up. Hell, I even looked away from the screen to talk to my partner while hammering the one button. It became somewhat worse when Carver left, as I had built my team around him tanking. I switched to a team with Anders, myself, Varric and Sebastian. So, four ranged and two mages with healing auras. I found killing things to be much faster, and with damage spread around the party I didn't actually use a tank for the rest of the game. This was quite distressing.

The tactics didn't seem to make much difference anyway, even with "Target Of Party Member" set the allies seemed to attack whatever they wanted. Often times they would bug and just stand still and not attack at all. Even if I was trying to be tactical about it, the constant waves of random mobs meant that four ranged spamming aoe attacks took down just about everything we faced. Sure, I could have turned the difficulty up but the combat became so tedious after a few hours that I just wanted the fights over as fast as possible.

Unfortunately, I suffered a full game freeze halfway through the game. Sadly DA2 is the only game to have ever done this on my Xbox. And even more sadly, the orginal was the only game to ever crash my PS3 in three years of gaming. This instability in such a uniform platform is a sad thing to behold. But I started saving with a paranoid frequency to get around this.

Soundwise, the effects were fine. But some of the explosion sounds seemed very loud even on my modest setup, and even turning them down to halfway on the audio settings they tended to drown out alot of other sounds. The music? My god what happened. The first game had such signature tunes. But this one was a mess of generic battle tunes that cut off abruptly, with large parts of the game unscored completely. Most of the time I did not even notice it at all, which really isn't a good sign.

Voice acting wise, as I said really liked Jo Wyatt. But I'm sorry to say the rest of the characters fell flat for me. Some also sounded so similar to each other. Early in the game, I had some of the allies talking among themselves and I couldn't tell who was talking to who - it was that bad. Certainly not like the original, where you had each ally with pretty much a different accent. You certainly didn't mistake Leliana for Morrigan.

This dislike of the main characters unfortunately spread to the story. I really just couldn't get into the main plot, or give a damn about any of the companions. I really wasn't interested in venturing into the Deep Roads having done so in the first game way too often. Side quests mostly composed of delivery quests, (Is this your hat? Try not to lose it.) which I really could muster no taste for. The whole thing felt very disjointed, the much vaunted framed narrative barely used at all. Jumping between time periods really didn't feel like the 6 - 7 years it was supposed to be - especially as everyone looked the same throughout.

Ah yes, equipping characters. Where on earth did this go? Upgrading allies was one of the main highlights of the first game for me. To lose that completely was very jarring. But it wasn't just the allies who stayed the same. The constant re-use of the same areas was shameful. I mean, I must have gone to the Wounded Coast 15 times for random quests. What happened to the variety of locations and exploration of the first game? That sense of wonder was completely lost as I wandered the same streets of Kirkwall over and over again.

Towards the end of the game, I was ashamedly willing it to be over. I was just finding it so tedious to carry on through the predictable story and dialogue, and bored myself to death hammering the same attack button for near 40 hours. But alas, I did not even have a good ending to make it all worthwhile. I just thought to myself... "ok, so what was it that Hawke was supposed to be doing?". The whole journey felt awkward and not very fulfilling at all. Hell, my girlfriend played on her PC at the same time and despite us playing completely differently (her a goodie two shoes templar lover, and my Hawke an evil pro-mage) we both ended up with the exact same ending scenes. Our decisions fundamentally meant nothing. This is sad contrast to the Mass Effect series or even the first DA, where you could literally play out each scene with two very stark conclusions. There was none of this here. The whole dialogue wheel just felt like an illusion - made worse by many conversation choices not actually panning out as I had actually selected.

And so here I sit, reading comments from Bioware stating that they were intending to cater for the Call Of Duty crowd, and that we are adverse to change. Erm... no. First of all the FPS crowd for the most part has zero interest in decent storylines, they just want to shoot each other - mostly in multiplayer. And second, I'm all for change. But only if it is for the best. Unfortunately what has been changed here is everything I liked about the original. A decent story, customisation of companions, a decent score, and meaningful decisions with real weight and consequence.

I pre-ordered Dragon Age 2 on the strength of the first game, and because frankly I have always preordered Bioware games due to the strong pedigree of storytelling and fulfilling gameplay. Unfortunately this will no longer be the case for me. I will certainly be paying more attention to user reviews for all future releases, and not the paid off reviews that currently splash all over the official site. (Yes, because the official Xbox and Playstation mags would never sell out for an exclusive review. Ahem).

The corner cutting going on in this game is shameful. If this is an indication of where Bioware is going, it is a dispiriting one. As a loyal fan for many years, I implore you to take on board the numerous critcisms laid at this game and return to the track record that put you where you are. Sadly I have little interest in any DLC for this game, and will probably give DA3 a miss if it continues in this vain. I will probably not even bother to replay through DA2 - which is a first for me and Bioware games. If this truly is EA's responsibility for pushing this out so quickly, then they have ultimately lost out on further DLC revenues from Bioware loyalists like myself and those posting in these threads, who suddenly feel left behind in the glories of the past.

Sad times in Thedas.

Modifié par Exodusith, 15 mars 2011 - 10:22 .

[QwibQwib]

 Likes:

Graphics : I loved the new graphics, textures, lighting, art.

UI: Better than Origins

Combat:  You guys did so much improvement with combat, it makes me so happy playing mage, back in origins I
couldn’t even touch the mage class, it felt boring, but now, it's so awesome. My favorite class is mage and rogue, although warrior is awesome too! Whoever is in charge of the combat mechanic, deserves a bigger paycheck.

Animation:  LOVED the way female walk and run, I know people don’t like how female run, but it is way better than
Origins, we now look feminine, also the facial expressions, take Aveline for example, in the second act, when we had to invite her love interest to the bar and the expression of Hawke when Aveline decided to bail on us. Priceless.

Companion interactions:  I really  like the fact that, we can go to their house and talk, but honestly it wasn't
enough interaction like in Origins there wasn’t anything character cohesiveness, or development.

 
Dislikes:

Gameplay Value: Compared to origins it is not enough, too short, not enough quest, poor interactions.
Overall not worth $60.

Map Recycling:  If you guys decided to do it in one place, don't use the same maps, compensate the lack of adventure you guys cut off by adding variety, or enlarging Kirkwall.

Lack of Adventure:  One of the things that I loved about Origins, is the fact you could play it over and over and
over again, and you won’t feel burnt out. You could pick variety of choices but in DA2, I was already on a routine of, “been there, done that, what’s new?”

Consequences: I as the player didn’t felt any impact on the decisions my character was making whatsoever. Even if I picked one or the other, it wasn’t as if it’s going to change anything. No, Hospital VS Orphanage situation.

Ending:

Spoiler

"She’s gone, just like the Warden." (credits)

, that's it? What happened
to the choices I made? How did it impact Kirkwall? Who’s the new ruler of Kirkwall? Did everyone die? Wheres the companions? Why did I disappeared? Was the cake a lie?

Conclusion:   Honestly, I love you bioware, you probably had a cut in your budget, I’d rather wait 3 years for
this game to come out than having this kind of product outcome. You guys tried too hard on consoles and neglected your pc fanbase.

 

7/10 for the game

 

10/10 cuz you guys are awesome and deserve a chance, but please save this.

Modifié par QwibQwib, 15 mars 2011 - 11:43 .

[Punahedan]

Oh boy.

I loved this game, for all its flaws. DAO felt too forced. Sorry, but for me, DAO was trying too hard. DA2 felt like BW was finally settling into its setting shoes. It's a story for big kids now. Bad things happened.

So:

Time felt like it was passing. Even if Hawke didn't technically age, nor did the people around him/her, the situation changed appropriately.

Although it was entirely in Kirkwall, I liked the city a lot in terms of its geographic position and political situation. It was very pretty, too.

I loved the art direction and design. It was original and cute, and at the same time, believable. People usually go for flowy in-setting art. The narration through the pictures was angular and, as I said, believable. CC, clothing, and all-around aesthetics were great. Each Hawke looks different, but still looks like a Hawke.

But I do wish there were more map variations. Every cave was the same, every sewer, every house I explored. I could go through new caves with my eyes all but closed because I had been through the same map so many times. The city itself did not change, either. It always remained pretty. Fenris' mansion never changed. People complain about the docks, but I didn't see anything particularly crummy about it.

The only party member I didn't think was compelling was Sebastian. His introductory scene was awesome, and then he just preaches at everyone and dithers. Everyone else was interesting and excellent to talk to. Not everyone was there to look pretty - Aveline was awesome. She was sensible and had man-hands. It's not that she is a warrior and a female, but that she has a seriousness and competency few other knight-like characters have. She neither has a stick rammed up her arse, and nor is she stuck up.

Merrill was cute, but dumb in the best way possible. She was like a little sister I had no  control over. Bethany and Carver are two separate people (unlike Ashley and Kaidan...) and very distinct. I've never had more fun with a family member in a game. Anders, despite his... final decision... was a believable character. Even if I do want to smack his face into the wall a few times. The characters were all good quality, even if they made bad choices. The mark of true craftsmanship.

There weren't enough conversations. DAO's advantage in this department was that I could talk to all the NPCs whenever I wanted, firstly, and secondly, there was a lot more to talk about. I could talk to Alistair about cheese and stuff. I could talk to Leliana about Orlais and shoes. Sten could tell you about cookies and you could argue about a female's ability to fight. The characters in DA2 felt robust, but I didn't see the robustness in action. Though I do enjoy the fact that I have to wait until later in the game to get to certain parts of their sidequests. It is all too easy to do things very early in DAO and then run out of new dialogue with the party members, xD. Still, there should be more meat.

That said, their animations are great. They have their own little ticks and habits - Fenris' slouch comes to mind. Their conversations were great to listen to. Isabela and Varric were a hoot.

I don't think people tease your LI nearly as much as they should. Some characters don't take rejection well. I don't have the option to let them down easy, and I should, even if my mage is snarky.

I liked having the little symbol in the dialogue wheel to indicate my choices. That said, sometimes what it said on the dialogue wheel is not what actually comes out. If I'm making a decision, I'm not always sure which side I'm going with based on the short text. 

I got used to the voice-overs, but I will forever be in support of a silent PC and the entire text written out. It's too frustrating otherwise. I enjoyed the NPC voice-acting. Anders' VA was especially excellent. Even knowing what I know now, he's still so very convincing when he talks about not wanting to be made Tranquil. It's just excellent voice-acting. It's for all the party members, thankfully. And Hawke can be funny! I was so pleasantly surprised. And she was actually funny. And when she was being intimidating, she wasn't just muscling her way in, she was blunt and aggressive. I keep thinking back to the jerk you needed to be to follow the Closed Fist path in JE, and this is such a major improvement.

The game was very buggy. Sequence didn't always match up .There was one conversation with Sebastian where I chose something that sounded right and I got rivalry points. When I went back and chose the other option - the one that seems to go against what he wants - I get friendship points. Merrill teased Fenris AFTER he and Hawke had gotten back together. The bandit quest in Act 3 doesn't spawn properly. Merrill romanced me for some reason in Act 3 and I've never used flirt lines with her. I thought it was sisterly and then they were on the bed and MAKER, WHAT HAS BEEN SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN. The scene sometimes faded out before the line was completely finished. There were a few audio bugs and sometimes the recordings were a little muffled or fainter than the rest. 

DA2 is top-heavy. She's got bright, pretty Act 1 eyes, she's a busty Act 2, but she's got no rear. Act 3 was painfully empty. Granted, I was itching to stop the tension, but if you have to resort to a sword-fetching qunari quest, there's a problem.

Mechanically speaking... yes, the system was simple. That's not a bad thing, but I did feel so much more limited. I'm not going to demean myself. I play console games, too. JE, I have for Xbox. But if you've got the option to make things more interesting, mechanics-wise... take it. 

I has a brane, wud liek 2 yuuz my thots 2 plan fite. plz maek fitez hardur. In other words, I didn't feel challenged. It was spell spell spell stab heal spell.

I'm kinda sad the spell combos weren't as prominent as they were in DAO. I miss my wind+acid.

Isometric view, where are you. D: It was really annoying to play without it because I can't see what's going on. 

Playing a mage is still the most fun. I love that class. Force Mage specialization was probably the best thing that could've happened. I LOVE THAT THING, though it could do with at least one spell that doesn't have an AoE.

The music was pretty, for the most part, and less oppressively HERO HERO HERO HERO DRAMA than DAO... It feels like you wanted to go a little less western, but didn't quite make it. PUSH! My favorite soundtracks are JE, Planescape, ME2, and the Witcher. They were decidedly not your typical western sounds. Eastern Europe, Asia...

Cullen makes me happy this time around. The Grand Cleric was great. And then someone ruined it. <_<

The prophetic cues were neat - Flemeth's hair is like the qunari horns and her headpiece is like Meredith's.

Act 1 is clever. Much like BG2, you need money to keep the main quest going. You need to do side quests to get the money. That gets me into the habit (that I already have anyway) of doing side-quests. All of them. I'm a completionist and this only encouraged that. <3

The serious side quests were usually not simple, with a few exceptions. They may start simple, but there's a catch. Things come back later to bite you in the rear. The game follows up - I offered to teach Fenris to read and clicking on the shelf later gives me a line saying how much he's improved. Blood mages that survive return later.

You always have the fear of Templars, either if you're a mage or if Bethany is with you. Another clever plot point.

I feel more immersed in the setting and situation. DAO kept dragging me out for some reason.

The story is great for me. I feel like all that time spent arguing on the old boards was good preparation for this in-setting debate about the danger of mages (even if no one actually listens to the middle ground. They barely touch the middle ground, actually). It's serious, it's societal, and it can't be stabbed away (unless you're in Meredith's philosophical camp). Anders' actions are interesting, and plausible, even if I dsagree with them.

That said, Meredith falling prey to the idol was an interesting way to link the first and third acts, but ultimately less compelling than her actually believing Mages are dangerous and ought to be contained, even killed. In fact,it was kind of a cop-out, as well as Orsino turning to Blood Magic. How the hell can I feel like I'm even half justified (even if it's just far enough to stand in the middle) when everyone we know turns to blood magic. It's a cheap excuse. KnightofPhoenix put it well in another thread. Act 3 just didn't live up to Act 2 in the least. I chalk this up to MOAR QUNARI PLZ.

The final battle was bizarre. All her leaping around was annoying and just didn't seem to fit, if that makes sense. The activation of statues was weird. And then she occasionally pulls out of her madness in a weird, forced way... if you wanted her to question herself, it could have been worked in differently. The monologues while she spammed Time Stop (... Valsharess ...) was kind of silly.

There were times where I did a quest and some things felt underexplained... the quest with Katojan comes to mind.

I liked that party members didn't need to
agree with you to stick with you. And that whether they agreed with you
or not was less about your Diplomacy and more about your actual stance. I
can romance Fenris and still be a rival. I wish you could plant the
seeds of doubt or sway them from time to time, but this was far better
than them clinging to my every word.

There were a few conversations and debates that felt unfinished. BW is too shy about engaging in a long dialogue. I remember Obsidian did not have that qualm. If I'm going to debate Mages with Fenris or with Anders, I want to debate it. Not be dismissed halfway through an interesting conversation. Also, the comforting scene after Momma Hawke kicks the bucket? Too short.

There were a variety of choices within the story that actually felt like they were making a difference. And, as I said before, it follows through.

Where things start to get muddy for me is the choices, though.

I'm not sure how I feel about the lengths BioWare is going to to make things accessible. Accessibility is great, but I'm not sure where it stops being accessible and starts abandoning the core of BW games. The thing is, gaming is a new industry, this is a new setting, and I support the changes made to the setting - the qunari horns, for example, or the changes to the elves - in order to better fit what BW wants to say. I know the envelope needs to be pushed to find new things and new ways of telling the story and letting the player tell the story. I know BW is experimenting right now.

But what I don't know is if this is moving towards more player choice or less. Because, yes, there were a lot of complex story routes in DA2, and I'm so proud of BW for being able to make it so multitudinous a way to the end. But Hawke's character was, in many ways, a Shepard. I am still roleplaying, but I was stepping into the shoes of someone else's character. I made Hawke my own in many ways, but she was still not my character. She was BW's character, and they lent her to me for the game. I feel like the direction RPG developers should be going towards is more player preference being involved. It can never be the same as a tabletop RP, but that should be the highest ideal, the Republic to our Plato.

So, I guess what I mean is, keep experimenting and mixing things, because there's no way to move forward without doing that. But please settle at some point.

The thing I can't get over no matter how hard I try is how weak the connection between the advertisements and the actual game is. Hawke's eyes glowed in the ads. He had this weird majical mumjo jumbo that probably would've been cool... but it never comes up. I'm not going to lie, I'm not pleased with the marketing. I'm lucky enough to know there's more to the game than what marketing shows, but it's upsetting that this is what needs to happen to attract more attention.

Also... there are many advantages to how cinematic things are now, but I'm really not sure why a game developer wants to make their game more like a movie and less like a game. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd... go and watch a movie. Mixing genres is great, but... I want an RPG. Not a cinematic presentation.

Very rarely do the negatives WHOLLY outclass the good things... I still have a lot of fun and the setitng has not suffered in the least. It's gained. But there are some points where I just facepalm. At the very least, the bugs need to be ironed out. I know the plot system is pretty complex, but I was expecting something more polished.

M-****' inventory tetris. Give it freakin' back. I want my grid, dangit!

I probably had more, but I've already written so much, I'll just leave it be. [/Wall of Text]

ETA: Expansion should be a la Hordes of the Underdark, not Awakening and can I please take Fenris with me.

Modifié par Hawkeyed Cai Li, 15 mars 2011 - 11:15 .

[DON JEZZ]

I loved the game. I would really have liked it more had I been able to free roam after beating it. If BW would do a game just like this but with an open world like the elder scrolls series it would be my all time favorite game. I like to play games after I beat the main storyline, it makes it feel like you are getting more for your money. The game was very fun and I liked the way that the combat works, I didn't feel like there was as much connectivity with your party members as there was in DA:O. I also didn't feel like I was the character as much as I did in DA:O. I think in most ways this was a step forward but in a couple ways it was a step back. All together I give the game 8/10.

[PureGold_Au]

Well overall i found it to be a great game. The dialouge was great and i liked the new fight mechanics to a surprising amount. Also really dug the inovative way to tell the story because amongst other things it allowed for really intressting things that might not otherwise have been possible

The characters where great though i found it really hard to try and fortell what they responded to and what type of characters they where in the start to the point of me completly giving up on fenris followed by some satisfaction in killing him

For the the negative part I disliked the UI, it felt like it was ripped from ME and just shoved in there even though it just didn't fit. Most rings, belts and amulets weren't clearly marked making for a confusing time and They didn't all carry some description alá DA:O making them less special and endering and those who did just unlocked a codex entry wich quickly got buried amongst everything else.

Also, the game contained alot of bugs everything from character models in cutscenes flickering about to fire falling through braziers to the game crashing from trying to access The exiled princes inventory. All and all making the game seem somewhat rushed

Now it may seem like i have alot more negative points than positive but thats just because i find them to be more constructive than my positive.

If I had to give it a score i would give it an 8/10. Which i find really awesome for a game made in what? A year and a half?

[ownz0rz]

Here are my thoughts after my playthrough of Dragon Age 2.

Let's start with Flemeth since she appeared in the demo. When I first loaded up the demo and found Flemeth speaking in her mysterious tones, I felt excited to continue the story from origins. It grabbed my interest with a character that seemed important, relevant in the world of dragon age. 45 minutes later I handed in the amulet and am told I possibly saved Flemeths life, and I never saw her again the entire game. It felt a bit weak, as if maybe she was only placed in the game to make the demo seem interesting, and the follow up quest only necessary to explain why she's in the demo to those people (myself included) who killed her in origins.

Somewhere among doing these first few intro quests I noticed I couldn't equip any of my team with armor. Weapons sure, but armor no, and this struck me as a huge problem. I simply had one word. Why? I mean I'm a rogue, and some Str/Con armor was in my inventory. What was the purpose of this gear I wondered, did it simply exist for me to npc? It seems so, as I never found any other reason for it dropping. This was a continuous problem for me as I was a huge fan of swapping gear on and off all my team in the first one, and every single time some armor dropped that had any stats other than dex/cunning I felt as if the whole inventory system was incomplete.

I was still having fun though, as the flashiness of the combat was very appealing and quite fun to play, and I had the prospect of the deep roads expedition looming over me. After about a solid 8 hours of doing nothing but errands, I finally had that 50 gold to begin the MAIN STORY! I was excited, I prepared myself to finally leave the setting of kirkwall. I got a bag of chips, put my headphones on and started the quest. 40 minutes later I was back in kirkwall.

For me, this is where the game started unravelling. Soon I was some 14-15 hours into the game, and still in...kirkwall. I thought surely I'll be leaving after this Qunari conflict is over. Nevermind that the entire conflict is based on the stupidity and selfishness of one of your own teammates. But the city was burning, things were in disarray, and even though I'd put them right (sort of) I felt now I surely would be leaving kirkwall. Wrong.
I should make a note right now that upon completion I was informed bioware said the entire game would be in kirkwall before it came out, but since not everyone who bought it (like me) checks up on every video/detail announced it isn't information that I was armed with heading in, and what I found saddened me.

The rest of the game was something I felt I endured rather than played. I had to know, would Flemeth be returning? Would morrigan show up? Would I ever do something other than run errands for people? This is what kept me playing, but I found eventually that the answer to all of that would be a resounding "No". It seemed everything that I had invested all of this time in was 100% unrelated to dragon age 1. I had assumed there was some larger, overlaying problem and the blight was just a portion of it, that more would be coming in dragon age 2 revealing things about the previous conflicts, what set them into motion, and what happened to our hero from the first game. None of this ever happened.

Could you argue that you were an errand boy in the first game as well? Maybe, but every errand you ran had an overall purpose, you knew what you were trying to accomplish. You had to unite seperate regions of the world, and did so with immersive encounters with insane cultists worshipping a false dragon god, deciding the fate of an ancient dwarven paragon trapped in the stone body of a golem who begged you to listen to his reasons. You did it by lifting a curse that turned innocent people into vicious, murderous werewolves and like it or not, by going into the fade where you play through perhaps the most frustrating, but most unique part of the game, where your given temporary transformations to reclaim your team that had been captured by an otherworldly demon. But again, all with the final goal in mind. You knew what that last fight would be, you knew you were gonna kill that son-of-a-**** archdemon. What you didn't know is you'd be (perhaps) impregnating your apostate companion who would then channel the archdemons menacing soul upon its death into her womb, giving your demonchild astounding abilities and massive power. At least you assume, because  the sequel never addresses it, and can pretty much be summed up as an individual city collapsing on top of itself in self conflict while you become rich killing things. You never go on a quest with sizable scope, you never explore across the world, you just run errands in one town for 34 hours. At least thats how long the game took me, just over half the time of my origins playthrough.

Honestly, I didn't even know the final fight of the game was the final fight, I beat it expecting to take a boat back to ferelden or something (since the blight ended years ago apparently), but instead the credits just rolled.

My final thought is that there's been a lot of back and forth, a lot of people saying this game is horrible and a lot of people and critics defending it and giving it high reviews. It's not so much that the game is a terrible game, it
isn't. It's that it's a terrible sequel. You don't take a game that had its appeal founded in the hardcore niche and then streamline it into oblivion while removing almost every aspect that made the original what it was in the hopes
of appealing to a larger audience. If you want to do that, make a new game, don't ruin what had begun as a fantastic franchise by doing a complete 180 on everything that made it what it was.

PS: A bioware dev recently posted a review on metacritic. Here is a quote from the article talking about his post, this is what the bioware dev said.

"Anything negative you'll see about this game is an overreaction of personal preference," before going on to claim that "it is flawlessly executed and endlessly entertaining".

Look. If it's "personal preference", how can you declare that they're ALL overractions?  If you want to post a 10.0 review on your own game, go for it, there's nothing wrong with that. Don't be immature and discredit the opinions of all of your customers who found that your product lacked the polish that was found in all of your other recent releases. Read the criticism and embrace it. Try to find where it might be correct, and self improve. Neither kirkwall nor 34 hours are endless.

Modifié par ownz0rz, 15 mars 2011 - 11:51 .

[JamieCOTC]

I've been playing BioWare games since Baulder's Gate and have played nearly every game thy have put out. For me, DA2 is a very frustrating game. For every positive element there is at least one negative, sometimes more.

Pros:

Lady Hawke: To steal a line from a friend, "she makes the game for me." Finally, BW has created a female character that looks like a woman and is feminine, yet a total bad*ss in a most unique way. She runs like she needs to go to the bathroom really bad, but other than that, I love her.

Story: Over all, I liked the story. It's not BW's best and I barely noticed the narrative structure, but I did enjoy the political struggles of Kirkwall and how Hawke fit into place. There were some pitfalls and some down right immersion breaking points w/ mage Hawke but over all I liked it. My favorite aspect of the story was how Hawke was the focus, but the main theme of the story was regulated to subtext.

Companions: I liked most of the companions, though I didn't really *love* any of them. I think this is due in part to the damnedable Awakening style dialogue system Mr. Gaider keeps championing. In essence Hawke can't instigate a conversation unless the game tells him/her to and that really limits the time spent w/ companions. Still, what little time spent w/ the companions is well done. There needed to be more of *gasp* let Hawke initiate a conversation once in a while.

Dialogue Wheel: I may be in the minority, but I liked the dialogue wheel in DA2. I've played enough Mass Effect to know what you see isn't what you get in a dialogue wheel, so I can sort of game the system and choose lines very carefully. By doing that, I was able to create a very rich character who was diplomatic when she wanted to be and a total b*tch when she needed to be or should be.

Graphics: This barely makes it into the pro side as there is a lot of attention to detail in what little we see in the game.


Cons:

Combat: I'll just skip over the fact that it is too easy and jump into the boring parts of combat. It's tedious. Sure, something awesome happens when you push a button again and again and again and again and again and ... You get the picture. There's very little variety in enemies and there is a sameness to the combat. Screw tactics, I didn't need them as 90% of the time I pretty much knew which formation the enemy was going to take. Combat became tedious rather than fun.

Camera Angle (PC): For about 80% of the game, the camera angle did not bother me, but in that 20% it was a royal pain. Please bring back the isometric view. The last ting I want in boring combat is to add insult to injury by making it frustrating to boot.

Maps: Jesus, Mary and Joseph jumping on a pogo stick, this was ridiculous. The reuse of area maps in DA2 was a sin. There are a few bad aspects of DA2 I could overlook or simply add to "a new path" in the game, but the cut and paste maps screams cheapness or worse that the game was rushed and to be honest, I don't doubt that latter bit at all. To paraphrase Mike Laidlaw defended the reuse of area maps as a "risk, but they wanted to have more content than less." My question is why was the risk needed? Did they just not have the money or (as many suspect) was the game just too rushed?

Inventory: I hated the inventory system, but ultimately learned to live w/ it and chalked it up to "streamlining is cool," "we don't have enough money for this." or "we gotta get this game out NOW!"

Companion Armor (or lack thereof): So many times I would come across some armor in the game and say to myself, "Hey, this would look good on -- f*ck!' BW should have and could have let us put armor on our companions. It actually could have added to the plot more than it would have taken away. I chalk it up to bad decision or "We need to get this game out NOW!"

Companion Dialogue and Romance: I actually liked the cinematic feel of the dialogue system, but there needed to be more. I was hoping for a combination of DA:O and Awakening style dialogue w/ companions, but that was not to be. I suspect a personal vendetta against Awaking haters was at play, but I could be wrong. The romances seemed shallow and incomplete compared to the ones in DA:O. For what little was there, they were well done, but the game just didn't give me what I wanted. The romances also felt shoehorned into the game, almost out of place, although I did enjoy the fact that they seemed to be reflected in some of the quests.

Mage Hawke: I loved mage Hawke and when Mage Hawke is noted as a mage in the game, it's great. When s/he isn't and should have been, it is nearly game breaking, especially w/ a certain Templar from Fereldon. I think BW wrote themselves into a corner w/ Mage Hawke and instead of confronting the problem, simply ignored it and hoped it would go away. Akuze anyone? Dear BW, in the future if you are going to create characters that have a direct link to aspects of the story, no matter how small, please address them or don't make the damned characters.

0 - 10 score meter.
Story: 7
Graphics: 6
Combat/RPG: 3
Companions: 8
Dialogue system (including wheel and companions): 7
Character Development: 10
(bonus points for Lady Hawke) 10

Final score: 7 out of 10.

[broncos1123]

Overall, I liked the game, and I spent well over 40 hours the first time through. There were things I did not like though.

Dislikes:

- The quest glitches: For half the game Isabela was standing in my house with an exclamation point over her head and there was nothing I could do to change that. I had a quest to rescue the daughter of a nobleman on the wounded coast. Nothing I could do would trigger the quest. At the end of the game, in the epilogue, it mentioned I romanced Isabela. I did not, I romanced Merrill. Those are just a few.

- The recycling of areas. At one point I did four quests in a row.... in the same cave. "Oh look, someone went through and put money back in the pockets of all the corpses." "Oh look, someone put valuable armor and treasure back in all the chests for the third time... that was nice of them." Lame.

- The spawning of enemies. Really takes away from being able to be tactical in battles. Not a good thing.

- Not being able to equip my companions with armor. That made it hard to be submersed in the game and connect with my companions. It was especially tough with Varric because at least with the other companions I could change their weapons.

- The lack of choice and consequence. I imported a save that did not work. I killed the Architect, but when I imported my save it said I saved the Architect. The game itself had a lack of choice and consequence. Having the frame narrative over ten years, I expected to see a lot more consequence for my choices.

- The dialogue wheel. I had to reload a couple saves because what I picked did not match up with what I thought it would be or say.

- The pointless loot. All it did was take up space. You changed the way crafting worked so we wouldn't have 99 elfroots taking up space. Now I have 99 pieces of frayed rope. So what was the point again?

- The lack of a real world feeling. I'm told I can't enter Kirkwall because it is busting at the seams with refugees. So I walk into Kirkwall and there are like four people standing around. Really? Lame. Also, as I'm attacked by twenty random people, the four people just stand there like nothing happens as I'm killing people right in front of them. Really? Lame.

- Armor looking the same. I played as a sword and shield warrior. At the beginning of the game I had a shield that was shaped like a rectangle. Later in the game, I got this sweet shield that was three or four times better than this shield shaped like a rectangle. So I was excited to equip the shield and see how sweet it looked. Imagine my disappointment when I equipped the shield and it was the exact same shape and color as the rectangle shield. Nothing different about it. Lame. So the first shield I had in the game, was the exact same as the shield I ended up finishing the game with 45 hours later... not fun.

- The star system for inventory. I had items that had the exact same stats and look. For example, an Amulet or a belt that had the exact same stats and bonuses. But one would be four stars and the other would be two stars. How does that make sense? There was a lot of that. Made the star system for inventory kind of pointless.

- Lack of meaningful quests. In the first act there were a TON of quests. Then by act 3, it seemed like there weren't that many. It was a big decline, it was like the game was being rushed to be finished. The other problem is that the quests did not have a big enough impact on the main story.

- Not enough interaction with our companions. There should be more opportunity for having our companions contributing to conversations. We should be able to ask them their opinions on issues more often. I would have loved the opportunity to talk with them more often and do more companion specific missions.

- The ending... didn't really feel like there was an ending. After 45 hours of playing the game... I found out nothing that happened. After waiting two years for this game, now I have to wait another two years to find out the consequences of my choices? Very, very lame.

Overall - 8 out of 10, but a feeling of disappointment to go along with it.

[hawat333]

Adding to what I've listed here ( http://social.biowar...index/6568680/1 ), let's see:
Tiny Kirkwall was mentioned already but we cannot emphasise it enough - Kirkwall can be an interesting, intriguing place, but we only see a few bits of it. Which is completely good for a usual fantasy game, but we have the wast majority of the story taking place there.
Also, seasonal changes or something like that could/would fresh it up, so it's not "Oh, it's the randomcitizen157 again standing in the same spot of sunlight, how are you?".
But most importantly, I was expecting to see the city growing, changing, shaping based on my actions, so I was a bit disappointed in that.



Companion armors -or the lack of them- was disappointing, I've expected at least as much differences between the episodes as we saw with Aveline.

There we are with the story.
Which is well written, more or less well executed, but I have to mention that the ending part could've used some work. It was simply too rushed. We felt the threat towering in Act III, no problems with that, but then we suddenly had the war breaking out, out of the sudden and in 40 mins, it's over already (Well, not the war, but the battle for certain). I know that's how wars break out, but still I wouldn't mind some preparation first.
I, for one, would have cut the story to more pieces, (even with the same overall length) and covered this seven years in at least five acts. That means more opportunities to create a puzzle for the main plot, more chances to present changes in the city and with the people, etc. Just for future reference

Compared to DA:O, we barely get to know our companions, it's a definite step down from the first game.

Oh, and the sex scenes. Have only seen one of them, but the Isabela romance scene was the right direction. No awkard medieval undies sex, nor pornographic scenes for the wicked.

And give us more Cassandra!
No, really, she was one of the most intriguing characters for me, and yet we only saw her for a few minutes. I wouldn't mind if she played a role in the next game.

[Merlin326]

Right, let's start with the basics:
Graphics: 7.5/10
an overall improvement to DAO, though not without its flaws. I'm not into graphics as much as most, so I'll leave it at that.

Music: 8/10
The music and sound, like that last game, was quite good.

Combat: N/A /10
Personally, I enjoyed the changes made to the combat system, it allowed for both the tactical planning of DAO but also allowed for a more fast-paced, actiony type of combat.

Companions:
Characters: 9/10
Dialogue: 7/10

I enjoyed all the companions, as well as the idea of having multipe quests associated with them. They each had their own unique personalities, and I found myself growing to love (or hate, but in a good way) each of them.

The dialogue with them... not as much. It wasn't the dialogue itself I didn't like, but the fact that any dialgoue with them was tied to their quests. Like others here, I think dialogue in the style of DAO was the best. However, I did like the idea of each companion having their own base of opperation.

Story:
Act 1: 6/10
This was probably the weakest part of the story. Whereas Acts 2 and 3 both had a sense of urgency and purpose, Act 1 did not. It was simply too long and lacked purpose other than earn money. The deep roads sequence and meeting our companions was interesting, but the rest just seemed drawn out.

Act 2: 8/10
The story starts to pick up here. I found the tensions with the Qunari to be particularly interesting.

Act 3: 9/10
My personal favorite part of the story. the quarell between the desperate mages and the insane Knight-Commander I found quite interesting. I also found the ending quite interesting, and I was honestly hyped for both the inevitable sequel and any DLC that will come.

Overall: 8/10
This game is not without its flaws, some of them quite significant, but overall I found this game quite enjoyable.

One last note: the storytelling method used in this game (not Varrics narration, but the 3 act system) needs some changes. I didn't care for it in Mass Effect 2, and I think it negatively impacted the story in this game (particularly act 1). I can understand trying new things; just saying it still needs a bit of work.

[CyberNinjaSensei]

 Likes: Battle System!  I absolutely LOVE just sitting their tapping A to my heart's content. So much better than auto-attacking.

Conversation wheel!  While alike to ME2's convo wheel, it has it's own personality. And, I actually prefer the symbols to colored text.

Characters!  I enjoyed the characters infinitely more in DA2 than DA:O. I think the biggest reason is they just feel more developed. Nothing against the Warden's party, but Hawke had the better developed crew around him/her.

WTF moment!  Now, I have never actually raised my voice and busted a WTF?!?!?!?! in the course of a video game. But when I saw the Chantry asplode, I actually did. And, for some reason, still spared Anders. Which speaks to the writing of the characters.

Pop Culture References  "I like big boats and I cannot lie." That was excellent beyond comprehension. "Cheers" references. Underpants Gnomes-esque 3 Step Plan. And I thoroughly enjoyed the continuation of the Ethiopian Prince scam. Words now escape me.


Dislikes: Cutting  I experienced a bit of cutting during my play through. Though it didn't take away from my experience, it was kind of annoying.

Dungeon/Cave Repetition  I understand that there's only so much a developer can create in a time frame when it comes to dungeons/caves, but since they seemingly play a significant role in both main and side quest lines, it became annoying.

Fenris/Carver  I know that there has to be an array of personality archetypes. I get it. But good Lord, I couldn't stand their whining. Fenris' general Emo disposition is more understandable, but, in the words of one Dr. Denis Leary "Life sucks get a ****** helmet."


Push: Companion Armor  I neither like nor dislike the inability to change your companion's armor. It was nice not having to micromanage armor constantly. However, being an old school RPG'er, I don't like the exclusion of customization. So, I'm still tore. But, I DO like that there's at least armor upgrades. If the upgrades were missing, this would be a Dislike.

Story  Seeing as how this is a middle point style story (assumption), I forgive things like being, for all intents and purposes, in a static city. Now, I am already hyping myself for the next installment, due to the ending. A possibility of there being some unknown connection between Hawke and the Hero of Fereldan? SOLD. Hawke's mother becoming a twisted Frankenstein-ish being. EFFED UP. Though there's the stand-out twists, there's a balance with the not-so stand-out stuff.

All in all, I enjoyed the hell out of this game. There's enough balance with the changes, that I actually enjoyed DA2 more than DA:O. I also enjoyed ME2 more than ME. I really hate trying to do the whole star rating or out of 10 rating. But, it is my opinion, DA2 is more REPLAYABLE than DA:O and ME, but not as much as ME2.

Thank you for such an excellent game. I'm glad that I'm gonna be spending a chunk of change on Bioware games in the next year. And you guys and gals always give me games that's well worth the money.

EDIT: I forgot one important thing: Bodahn and Sandal. Awesome. And Sandal once again being surrounded by dead bodies before the epic finale. Though I really didn't like Zevrhan's appearance, I liked the usage of Alistair and Leiliana within the story. 

Modifié par CyberNinjaSensei, 16 mars 2011 - 01:53 .

[Taleroth]

This is with regards to the ending. Overall, I liked the game, but I want to get out this particular feedback while I recall it.

Finished today. I... have a hard time caring about Orisino or Meredith. Orisino for his "I could be a respectable character, but I'm just going to randomly become a super-evil boss battle with only the barest of foreshadowing." And Meredith for her "I'm totally frickin nuts, RAWR!" I fear that my second playthrough, when I see the characters I'll only be able to think "Oh look, it's dumb and dumber." As exemplars of the final conflict of the game and the one upon which future titles will be expected to continue, and the characters on the title screen, this strikes me as a failure.

It was simply senseless. A complete waste. You've got two characters, who could have been given relateable or at least understandable motivations, driven into conflict, but instead they are both simply batty. Why? It's like Bioware, in an attempt to create realistic motivations in grey and grey morality setting, over and undershot the mark by instead focusing only on base emotions that turned it into black and black.

You can do better, Bioware. I know I've been a decrier of your plots, but I believe you can do better.

[kww75]

Starting with the bad before the good, criticisms will have comments explaining my thoughts, positives will be generally short as there’s little I can add that would improve future projects

GRUMBLE NUMERO 1

Very slow pacing of inital story. What do I mean by this? Well after about 16 hours of game play did story really start to take shape well into ACT 2 of the game. Most recent Bioware games the story is establish quite early with a very decent hook. Take for example the first Mass Effect game, in this the initial story is to find out why Sauron betrayed a fellow Specture. In DA:Origns it is established quite early the story centers around massing an army to fight the blight.

Taking a look at DA2, the first 16 hours you are wondering around quite aimlessly running here and yonder without any real sense of purpose. Though the goal is simple enough make loads of money to get out of the gutter as it were. But there’s no real sense of desperation here in this part of the story. It’s only until you get to ACT 2 does the story begin to grab your attention and explain how your character becomes the Champion and starts to details the decision you become faced with that changes the city. Finally ACT 3 is where it puts finale of ACT 1 into perspective. Herein lies the problem, given the aimless nature of the first ACT and how long it takes to get to ACT 2, I suspect most players would have given up following the story long before it got interesting.


GRUMBLE NUMERO 2

The game is exceptionally short; Thus poor value for money. Don’t go down the road of multiple play-throughs as a sign of value for money. A story is only good the first time as you don’t know what to expect. Once you know what happens you lose a lot of entertainment value the second time you play it. Origins took a good 60+ hours to complete the vast majority of the game, for some people it took a bit longer, not surprising to hear people spending 80 to 100 hours playing the game. On one single play-through I complete the game in 36 hours judging by the forums having done most of the stuff in the game.

For the retail price I have seen DA2 retail for, I would have expected at the very least 50+ hours of guaranteed entertainment on one play-through. Especially given the success of DA:Origins

 GRUMBLE NUMERO 3

Reuse of maps; again this leads to poor value for money. There’s nothing that says more about being sold out when you see the same map assets used over and over and over again. All this has shown is some lazy work or the fact this game was rushed out with little pride given to the work of everyone involved in this game. You look at DA: Origins and pretty much the whole game and its areas are all unique to one and another

GRUMBLE NUMERO 4

Party Balance; now this one is odd. Because if you wanted to go a particular path with the story to keep companions happy you had to use specific ones otherwise you just upset them most of the time. And this is most evident with Anders. Unless the player character him/herself is a mage, basically you have to keep your healer happy by siding with the mages. Or you don’t take him at all. If like me towards the end you kill Anders using a warrior player character, you are left without a healer for a period of time which on normal difficulty caused a number of problems as unless you had a nice stock of healing potions I found myself reloading several encounters numerous times. This was more frustrating than fun

On this note, is if you want companions with strongly polorised views, you need to give people alternatives to using that character abet with slightly weaker abilities to what the stubborn headcase has. Otherwise the player feels restricted to making decisions he probably doesn’t want to make

 GRUMBLE NUMERO 5

Zerg-fest encounters. I think someone has been watching far too many Chinese Kung Fu or Hollywood action movies or something. Barrage upon barrage of weak npcs to kill is just not really fun and more in line with a beat them up type game than a role playing game. An encounter can be made harder not just by number of opponents but by making encounters much more tactical, take a look at some of the big MMORPG games for ideas. A very good example may be found in Star Wars Galaxies Operational Droid Factory Encounter on Mustafar. I can list others

Fights like the high dragon used a zerg-fest of dragonlings which got boring to see, otherwise the fight would have just been great with just the dragon minions (maybe one or two more) and NO dragonlings. Certainly doesn’t give the illusion that dragons are extinct. The idea behind that fight was good but it got over used in far too many encounters. Fight one boss and eleventy-billion of its minions ain’t really fun.

GRUMBLE NUMERO 6

Loss of customization of your companion’s armor to the point I didn’t understand why there is so much
armor in game.


THE POSITIVES

1. The bottom line is the game was overall entertaining but bear in mind my earlier criticisms as this could have been a whole lot better.

2. Technically the game is a huge improvement on DA:Origins, cross class combos, streamlined skill trees with no overlap. Combat is much smoother.

3. Banter between companions was classic, especially lines which utilized Isabella. There were a few companions which were just boring in this respect namely Aveline.

4. Graphically the game looks amazing, the world, the characters all look fabulous.

5. Some seriously tough decisions to make in game and their effects on the game later on

Modifié par kww75, 16 mars 2011 - 03:22 .

[Barachiel]

Alright, tuns out my review is going to be a lot different than I thought it would. I've defended this game, enjoying Act 1 & 2, but finally as I near the end, I have to surrender.

I haven't beaten the game yet. As it stands, I'm not sure when I will because I've just gotten tired. Of the same areas, of the endless waves of "drop-in" mobs, of knowing where every single spawn point is (because of it being the same areas).

You said you revamped combat to be fun? Well, congratulations, mechanics-wise, you did. But then you made combat so forced, prolonged, and banal (note i'm not saying a word about difficulty), that I don't want to go through another single fight. I dont' want to complete another companion's quest, because I know I'll just be right back in the same sewer or alley or cave, and I will want to tear my own head off in frustration.

I'm nearly done with the game, but I am so *sick* of the same, rote combat at this point, that I'm honestly not sure I'll be finishing at any point in the near future. Maybe in a couple weeks, after the bad taste has left my mouth. I haven't had a game make me feel like this since the OC of Neverwinter Nights.

Also, on a related note, has anyone else caught on that there is *no* way to avoid all the combat in this game? Remember how Coercion would occassionaly let you talk your way out of things? NOPE not any more! If there's the chance of a fight, then by Zeus' sphincter, there'll BE a fight!   The only time I've seen dialogue choices affect a fight is for deciding *which* set of sprites you're going to spend the next 5 minutes butchering.

Guys, do yourself a favor, put a little more lead time into DA3. I can sum up what this franchise needs in one word: VARIETY.  I've played all your games at least 3 times a piece, a few even more.  At this moment in time, assuming I can summon up the will, I can pretty much promise I will *NEVER* Play this game again.  If i really want to see the other endings, I'll go look them up on Youtube.

Modifié par Barachiel, 16 mars 2011 - 03:48 .

[sgreco1970]

Well, I've just finished the game and there were things I truly loved...and truly hated. I'm a bit taken aback by the things I disliked, because I haven't ever run into these issues in previous BW titles. I'm not terribly sure what's going on over at BW, maybe EA is invading the dev rooms too much and ruling with an uncreative iron gauntlet. Maybe the proper devs are at work on TOR. I just don't know. But here's my overall assessment of the game; good, bad and ugly.

THE GOOD

I truly appreciated the glossy. high def graphics.  I remember playing DAO and thinking something was wrong with my graphics card.

I enjoyed the storyline taking me from hovel-dwelling refugee pauper to mansion dwelling, smoking jacket wearing nobleman.

I felt the combat was definitely better and so very grateful that two-handed weapon went from zero in DAO to hero here in DA2. Its time had come. I also didn't have to be terrified that a party member behind me would be decimated because I hadn't hovered over their every move. It felt right.

I enjoyed all of the DAO cameos, particularly Alistair.Its a pity the game didn't take place in his city so we could report to him from time to time. He's a gem with loads of personality and, for those of who spent an entire game getting him to wear the crown, it would've been nice to have him as our liege.

Overall, the storyline started innocently enough and slowly transformed into an unexpectedly epic tale.

THE BAD

The crafting system at first seemed better. No need to gather much, just gather the representative quantities and, so long as you have enough money, you can print out as many potions, runes etc as you liked. But, much like the generic sillhouette icons for everything except armor and weapons, in the end it helped rob the game of immersiveness and complexity. I couldn't say that I ever felt RPGs with gathering, resources and loot icons were ever a burden so why this was needed is beyond me.

I was grateful for more freedom with romances, not being limited by sexuality. However, they were very poorly managed, with cues for a romance option usually coming up at totally inappropriate times. Someone says,  "My whole family was just slain right before my eyes."  and you can say,  "Yes, but nothing slays me like your eyes." The romance arcs were littered with moments like these. The kiss-only always clothed sex scenes were extremely boring and made me wonder if you'd changed your target audience to 11 year olds.

Any quest except for a main plot quest was overly short, usually consisting of go-here-then-go-there-then-come-back-here with a fight or 3 that greeted you almost at the door. Gone were the intricate dungeon crawls of DAO that felt like a true side adventure. In making them so short, it helped the game feel choppy and frenetic and poorly paced. Things could have been far more carefully planned to evolve and grow much more fluidly and could have easily had much more in depth side adventures with real meat to them.

The city did not change over the 10 years. Part of the allure of the game was supposed to be the epic tale stretching over a decade, yet nothing really changed. oh sure, this person or that was now installed as capt of the guard or whatever, but not one tiny bit of architecture changed, those damnable slavery reliefs never got torn down, and I found several NPCs still standing in the same spot, saying thesame things. In the final chapter, I walked past mr "How long do i have to wait" outside the Viscount's office and chuckled to myself, "you've been waiting here ten years..."  I spotted one nameless NPC on his knees in the docks picking at a pebble on the ground....for ten years. Must've been a very heavy pebble he just couldnt manage to lift.

The game was too short. Frankly, I was expecting to become the Viscount and have another chapter ruling the city, especially after the Viscount's head rolled down the stairs. The option came up many times for me to rule but it never happened, with me always being told that first Meredith must be dealt with. Once she was dealt with it was like, "GAME OVER INSERT QUARTER." Perhaps things work out differently if you arent in love with anders, spare him and take him with you, and side with the mages at the end, but I dare say I don't expect it gave a large, quest-filled last chapter.

THE UGLY

The repetition of the same unchanged cityscapes and, worse yet, the used and reused and reused some more interiors of caves and dungeons was not only apalling, it was actually insulting. Between the choppy. short quests and the reuse of dungeons, I felt severely shortchanged and that those in charge of development just didn't care about quality.

There is only an illusion of choice and, choices which can deeply alter the outcome of the stories, are frankly what your audience really wants. I admire your storytelling and appreciate your desire to carefully tell one story as well as understand the intricacies involved in what we seek, but that's what your audience really wants and its best always to play to your audience.

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Overall, I had loads of fun with DA2 and will replay it. I will reccomend it to friends who were fans of DAO. However, that recommendation will come along with the above caveats and a warning that it isn't as good as DAO. Its a shame, too, it should have blown away DAO and exceeded our expectations. I enjoyed it, yes, but it will not stand as a classic alongside DAO, KOTOR, JE, and ME 1 and 2. I have never had these feelings about a Bioware game before, and am defnitely surprised. I do hope this is not the way of things to come for future BW titles. I haven't yet had a bad experience with a BW game, I did like this one, but it was not nearly the good experience it could or should have been.