203 réponses à ce sujet

[rabidhanar]

Beat DA2 twice, I think I have now seen everything in the game.

Storyline: does not flow well between transitions.
DAO and DAA there was a consistent reasoning for continuing the storyline. Save the world from the darkspawn, try to gain allies, investigate the remaining darkspawn.

DA 1.5 (sorry folks if u disagree with this statement, I just do not think that "DA2" deserves the sequel nameplate.) feels very random in comparison. Run away from Lothering, now try to get rich, now try to deal with the Qunari, oh wait the Templars know ur family has a Mage...time to deal with the schism between the chantry. The storyline cannot flow, there is no common theme then keeping the family thriving. I have no motivation for doing so. Even the end makes very little sense. (not posting a spoiler here).

Combat: DAO had a tactical combat feeling to me, quick pausing and reevaluating of the battlefield in order to deal with the threat. DA2 is far more twitch happy. Because of the extremely unrealistic (my warrior in heavy armor can leap around the battlefield, up to six feet away) and fast combat, I cannot issue tactics well as the situation fluctuates far too much (for example, waves on nightmare rushing from Behind my Mages! That is a tactical usage on the enemies part but makes no sense if I came from a linear one way in one way out hallway). To also mention the fact that I really cannot prepare for a fight, as I cannot see the enemies until the fight begins, unlike in DAO. Enemies in an ambush leave sounds or information (broken sticks, sounds of breathing may be audible, shifting positions), a giant 150 - 200 pound spider will leave some evidence of itself, hell A dragon will make noises!

I wil give the devs some credit: Side quests are far better in this game, except from the lost items quests. The story of the sidequests are very well done and make sense for the area.

Perhaps in the true sequel to one of these games they will take into consideration the thoughts of the forums here and dictate towards the complaints we have of both games. Neither games are perfect, I can assure you of that, but they both have areas that could be implemented extremely well in a future installment. Side quests in particular as in DA 1.5 are perfect in the sense of the game, make more sidequests

[Cody2Go]

Oh, and whoever put that Metacritic screenshot up, do you want to know what that actually means. It means that critics (people that review games for a living) can accept the fact that a company might want to try some new things and that the fanatical fans of DAO can't, and freak out when somebody tries to do anything different

[ENAKTSB]

17thknight wrote...

Warlokki wrote...

Old School RPGs time is over... at least for now. Maybe they'll be fashionable laterm but ATM, they're not. Get over it.

And yet DA:O was one of their best-selling games of all time and was specifically built around the concept of being an old-school RPG.

Um... but... If we talk about how big sales make a great game... then this will be just as good I guess. I think that many DAO players pre-ordered DA2 and the rest got it as soon as it was released just because... hey... it's Dragon Age. So if we look at "units sold" in a year or two - it should be roughly the same. What will you say then? "DA2 was one of the best-selling RPGs because it abandoned the archaic style of play and instead went for the more modern approach"?

[Fishy]

The dialogue system in Origins was not much different than Dragon Age 2.Sometime you had 2-3 different answer + 2,3 added for question.Even if you had 2-3 different answer it's would lead to the same conclusion.

It's was just done differently.I do miss the persuasion check that was entirely removed though . They should have kept it(Strengt for indimidation etc)

The gameplay in Origins was more of a chessgame if you played in nightmare difficulty(PC version).Normal difficulty was easy . The character were slow and awkward .Looking at my PC running awkwardly behind a moving darkspawn was funny.At least now the character actually attack moving enemy.Which i think add to the difficulty . Kiting the ogre in Ostagar was funny though lol .

They removed useless gift which forced a lot of gamer to metagame in the original.The sidequest were boring in both game but still more meaningfull in DA2.Still we had more unique location in DA:O.if only Kirkwall was not so much bland . The city felt small and never really cared much about the area i was.Triggering another quest in lowtown it's not really epic.

[ENAKTSB]

rabidhanar wrote...
Combat: DAO had a tactical combat feeling to me, quick pausing and reevaluating of the battlefield in order to deal with the threat. DA2 is far more twitch happy.

1. Change the difficulty to Hard or Nightmare.
2. Zoom out a bit...
3. Press that little hand button in the lower left corner before rushing into combat...

...go twitch happy now.

The default combat style has been indeed dumbed down... but, the hard version is still there as far as I'm concerned.

Also - on the enemies not appearing there before combat. Um... It's called "an ambush".  Since it's a game - you can predict it will happen... but perhaps you should pretend that you don't know about the tons of dudes waiting for you with swords inside the warehouse.

[cljqnsnyc]

It's really funny how some people keep saying the time of old school rpgs is over...deal with it! Really? Why then create a DA2? Wasn't it the success of DAO...an old school rpg, that forced EA to rush Bioware into making a sequel? Well, it really isn't a sequel. I don't think Bethesda or CD Project Red would agree that it's a dying format, not in the least!

The gaming industry is SUPPOSED to have variety! There is a need...and an audience for old school rpgs. Bioware never had any trouble selling them in the past. If I'm not mistaken, "Fallout: New Vegas" sold rather well and there's this other little "niche" rpg coming later this year called "Skyrim," which I'm sure Bethesda won't have any trouble selling either. Not to mention "The Wither 2," which is receiving a very high amount of buzz.

Should every game be transformed into shooters and action games or be "effected?"  No. Books still sell and people still go to the movies. There is choice, variety. Bioware cultivated an audience that enjoys quality storytelling mixed with combat, exploration, and customization. If you lower the quality of the product that gave you your name and fans, you must expect there to be complaints. Gutting and streamlining isn't going to play to the majority of the fans that have been buying your games for years. Always keep your core audience satisfied. After all, they're the ones that made you. Smart business! Reaching higher is also smart, if not risky. But there are degrees to risktaking. How much is too much? Bioware will have to decide that for themselves.

I have no criticism towards the people that really love DA2. That's excellent! But those very same people are screaming bloody murder and making excuses because there are a large number of people who disagree with them. People have the right to disagree and demand higher standards if they are expected to reach into their pockets and purses to spend money. You cannot expect people who love rpgs to settle for a "streamlined" version of an rpg...which really isn't an rpg at all. Everyone doesn't have the same tastes. If you really wanted to target the COD/Halo/GOW crowd, why not just make an fps or an action game? Trying to do that with DA2 was bound to cause the reaction we're seeing now.

This all could have been avoided if DA2 was called anything other than DA2. How can you sell a sequel that isn't a sequel to the fans who loved the original? By calling it what it is: a story set in the DA universe that involves some elements of what we learned about Thedas from Origins. That way the game would be allowed to stand on it's own merits for better or worse. People wouldn't have gone in expecting a sequel. But hey, maybe this "beefier" dlc that has been talked about will fill in the blanks and cover up the holes. A toolset would also please the pc crowd.  Well see...

Modifié par cljqnsnyc, 15 mars 2011 - 01:01 .

[rabidhanar]

I'm not saying that I do not expect ambushes, I just find the fact that 20 soldiers can hide in wait out in the open to be odd while they are wearing metal armor that deflects the sunlight.

Combat, on nightmare it still isn't the same in my opinion. The CCCs of the game occur very rapidly, meaning I need twitch reflexes to fully exploit them. 5 seconds is really short when you are dealing with a lot of enemies, not to mention the entire immunities that certain foes have...why are qunari resistant to half of a spell tree? Primal becomes very useless on that situation.

[ENAKTSB]

Suprez30 wrote...
It's was just done differently.I do miss the persuasion check that was entirely removed though . They should have kept it(Strengt for indimidation etc)

A problem for me with that skill was... that I had to choose between upgrading my persuasion and picking actually useful skills. Which doesn't make any sense since it means that a person skilled in tactics or something else will not be able to appeal to others etc... The ability to be persuasive should not be a skill that you pick like that. The only thing worse then that was the Oblivion's approach of turning conversations into a stupid mini-game.

The best way this was solved for me atleast was the ability to have selective, special conversation options based on some stat. Like in Fallout for instance. If you have a high int score - then in some conversation you can spot a brilliant solution to a problem... a strong, burly looking person (high str + high stamina) can intimidate a bunch of bandits here and there. A dexterous guy can perform a swift disarm of some mage during a conversation, when otherwise it would end in a magical massacre... That sort of stuff. 

A high "speech" skill means, that everybody will simply max it out and use all the "persuade" options in the game, eliminating replayability...

[Maverick827]

cljqnsnyc wrote...

It's really funny how some people keep saying the time of old school rpgs is over...deal with it! Really? Why then create a DA2? Wasn't it the success of DAO...an old school rpg, that forced EA to rush Bioware into making a sequel? Well, it really isn't a sequel. I don't think Bethesda or CD Project Red would agree that it's a dying format, not in the least!

The gaming industry is SUPPOSED to have variety! There is a need...and an audience for old school rpgs. Bioware never had any trouble selling them in the past. If I'm not mistaken, "Fallout: New Vegas" sold rather well and there's this other little "niche" rpg coming later this year called "Skyrim," which I'm sure Bethesda won't have any trouble selling either. Not to mention "The Wither 2," which is receiving a very high amount of buzz.

Firstly, BioWare's statistics show that a very large majority of people who bought Origins never finished the game. While it was a popular and well-recieved game, this fact does not bode well for a sequel. Just because Origins sold well as an "old-school" RPG does not mean that a sequel would have done so. I highly doubt the "old school" crowd were the majority of Origins' purchases.

BioWare made a choice: they could have copied and pasted Origins (and, in that instance, copying and pasting would have been okay, right?) and, according to their research, turn away those who simply did not like Origins gameplay. Just as many of you say you won't buy DA3 after playing DA2, the silent majority spoke up and said "we're not going to buy DA2 after playing DAO."

Whether or not this was successful will have to be determined after a few months of sales data comes in. It could be that the players lost from being turned away from DAO never looked back, and "changing" the game was for naught. My friend, who loves fantasy and RPGs, simply could not stand Origins, and I doubt I could get him to buy DA2 no matter how hard I tried. It could be that "changing" the game resulted in a greater net profit than would otherwise have been earned by a flopping "Dragon Age: Origins 2." It could be that not changing anything would have been a more successful game.

I guess the point is that EA and BioWare employ people with college degrees to gather this data and make these decisions, and I really don't think any naysayers on these forums have the clout to make better judgment calls from their couches.

Secondly, The Wticher is farther away from an "old school" RPG than Dragon Age will ever be. There's novels about your character already written for christ's sake; it's barely more of an RPG than a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings game.

[ENAKTSB]

rabidhanar wrote...
The CCCs of the game occur very rapidly, meaning I need twitch reflexes to fully exploit them.

I didn't try nightmare combat... hard was enough for me... but... isn't there a pause function that allows you to order your party to exploit a debuff to achieve a CCC? An enemy gets brittle, press space... pick a char that can exploit it... shoot, stab, whatever... there - CCC. Also, the AI actually does that automatically, so if you're lazy like me - you don't have to do a thing... just go to tactics, enable the right one and that's it - auto-CCCs. The only twitch reflex required was pressing the space bar to pause the game.

[cljqnsnyc]

Art can never be created using flow charts and statistics. You can poll as many focus groups as you want. They don't always tell the whole story. If that is the new way of making games at Bioware then people who have been buying their games long before there was a "Mass Effect 2," will exercise their right to pass...and they'll see if the grand experiment to cultivate a new fanbase really worked. Your opinion of "the Witcher" is just that, your opinion.  I disagree. As with other mediums, games can take stories previously written and transform them into high quality games, which in my opinion is what "the Witcher" was.

Modifié par cljqnsnyc, 15 mars 2011 - 01:31 .

[Ignus Burns]

Stalky24 wrote...

 Ive been wondering. Its great game, it really is. 
I am enjoying it a lot and I dont regret purchasing it.
So why do people hate this game so much?

Free will? Different opinions? You are not the center of the universe?

[Rockpopple]

Your premise is flawed: only some people hate Dragon Age 2.

[cephasjames]

Bhav wrote...

keyip wrote...

DarkAngel1979 wrote...

Every time I see 'old school', my mind automatically translates it to 'obsolete'. Which is what it is. People need to stop wanting to replay the same game over and over with just a cosmetic change on the companions and locations.

True, old school rpgs needed a great investment in time. The older I get the more I appreciate games you can just pick up and play. 4 years ago I never thought I'd say such a thing, but there you go.

Bethesda do that best. Complete the main plot in around 30 hours, or spend hundreds of hours exploring the world and doing all the side quests.

Whats wrong with having more content? I would rather have a top quality RPG with 300 hours worth of content even if I only play 50 hours of it, rather than have a linear hack and slash game that only lasts 30 hours with nothing more left to do after that. 

Theres also nothing old school about all the recent deep and massive MMORPGs with huge worlds to explore and plenty to do. Just how well do you think DA2 would do if it was a 30 hour long MMORPG? 

Bethesda doesn't tell stories. Bethesda does a series of quests that are supposed to fake people into believing they tells stories. BioWare and Bethesda do totally different styles of games. Stories have linearity by their very nature. Open worlds with quest givers do not. Each has their own merit.

[2Hard2C]

Again, things change. Origins was a harkening back to a time gone by. I appreciate BioWare for trying something different, but I would at least want them to execute their product. But really the game is good in spite of it's faults, there are just a lot of people uselessly mad about it.

They also did not call it Dragon Age: Origins 2 for a reason.

[Gargarensis]

I think the honest to god reason why dragon age 2 is not meeting with so much approval is simple. The name. If theyd called it "hack and slash dungeon crawl in DA universe" i wouldnt be unhappy with it. But by calling it DA2 they set themselves up to be compared to DAO - and whether you like DAO or DA2 or not you simply cannot say that they are similar games.

My point being is that by calling it DA2 they can cash in on the franchize but without having to put in the sweat blood and love that went into DAO. THAT is why I and i suspect many others found it disapointing - it was billed as The Who and ended up as the Spice Girls

[cljqnsnyc]

I hate to tell you this but there are more than just a few people complaining about DA2. Look around the internet, check the Amazon.com bestsellers list, even this very site seems to show more than just a few negative opinions. I don't believe the game isn't without some merit, if you look at it as an ordinary game with many flaws. But Bioware doesn't make ordinary games with many flaws. That and the fact that it's being marketed as a sequel when it is not. As I stated before, it should have been called anything other than DA2. Trying to pass it off as the changing face of rpgs is a very poor excuse. After all, who exactly was going to buy DA2 but the people who played DAO? Isn't that the very purpose of a sequel? Go to a movie to watch a sequel to a film you loved, but when the lights go down and the camera roles, its........something else. Would you be okay with that? Possibly, but fans who saw and loved that first film would be livid!

Modifié par cljqnsnyc, 15 mars 2011 - 01:45 .

[aox_general]

I don't like DA2 mostly because I had such high expectations after DAO. I assumed the next product would be an improvement of the first, not a ...I don't know what to call DA2. If DAO never existed then DA2 would be awesome and impressive. But I expect Bioware to continuously raise the bar with each new game, and not to occasionally lower it. That may not sound fair but ..well, that's the burden of being a leading game studio. I'm pretty sure Bioware loves carrying that weight on their shoulders so I got no need to try and spare their feelings.

But I'm not angry at Bioware or anything, I appreciate the effort. And I'm looking forward to their next effort. But I can't get obsessed with DA2 like I did with BG2, NWN2 or DAO.

[2Hard2C]

Cody2Go wrote...

Oh, and whoever put that Metacritic screenshot up, do you want to know what that actually means. It means that critics (people that review games for a living) can accept the fact that a company might want to try some new things and that the fanatical fans of DAO can't, and freak out when somebody tries to do anything different

I liked Origins as much as the next guy.... it had awesome dialouge, an awesome story, and literally every companion was memorable in some way. However, the game was fugly, the combat was un-fun for the consoles(it sold more on the consoles by the way), there where far more quest ending glitches(particulary in Awakening, where if you didn't do something in a certain order or recruit somebody before a quest could be started, you where screwed), and I didn't like that my Warden felt like a piece of wood staring at people.

People have putting Origins on a freaking pedestal since it was released, but the game had serious issues. So shame on BioWare for trying something new. What fun would it be if we played Dragon Age 7 and it had changed little since Origins?

But if people have serious gripes about the actual game and it's flaws, because DA2 had some, then that I can understand and accept, but simply bringing the score down because it was something different is wrong and merittless.

[cephasjames]

cljqnsnyc wrote...

Art can never be created using flow charts and statistics. You can poll as many focus groups as you want. They don't always tell the whole story. If that is the new way of making games at Bioware then people who have been buying their games long before there was a "Mass Effect 2," will exercise their right to pass...and they'll see if the grand experiment to cultivate a new fanbase really worked. Your opinion of "the Witcher" is just that, your opinion.  I disagree. As with other mediums, games can take stories previously written and transform them into high quality games, which in my opinion is what "the Witcher" was.

Art can never be created using flow charts and statistics... unless the artist wants to sell to a bigger audience.  If someone wants to be "true to themselves" and make the art they want to make regardless of how much they sell, that's great. But if someone wants to make art that they like and have it sell well then they need to understand what their potential audience wants (common business sense). And that is also great. Both choices will alienate people from buying that art. BioWare (or any artist) has to chose which alienation they think fits them best. Sometimes they chose "poorly" (a subjective word) or go too far (again, subjective) in one direction. It happens. But artists, at least the ones that actually want to sell their art, usual learn from what happens and then adapt.

[Aesieru]

Evolution is not the same as de-evolution, or regression.

Opinions are like flowers, they're everywhere.

[cephasjames]

cljqnsnyc wrote...

After all, who exactly was going to buy DA2 but the people who played DAO?

Hmm. People who didn't play DAO. Which would hopefully bring in more people into the "rpg" fold. Just sayin'.

[cljqnsnyc]

Then they should have called it something different, not DA2. Yes DAO had flaws but it stands head and shoulders of above this "sequel." I cared! That's the problem. The story was engaging as were the characters. There are some positives about DA2, but the name is killing it! Bringing people into the fold as you put it is the goal of any smart business. The problem is excecution.  You might go see a sequel to a film you never saw the original too, but you can bet your money that the majority of the people in that theater saw the first film. That's just an undeniable fact!

Modifié par cljqnsnyc, 15 mars 2011 - 01:54 .

[Cadaveth]

Stalky24 wrote...
Conclusion
Bioware has created great, but modern, RPG with modern combat, modern storyline, modern converastion system, modern character and its developement, all adjusted for style of todays games, leaving old school behind
for good. And thats what pisses off so many people.

It doesn't have anything to do with the gameplay/being old school etc. itself. I like action RPGs too and DA2 is just an average game in that category.

[cephasjames]

morgueanna wrote...

I posted this in another thread. My perspective:

What's really ironic is that a lot of people (including myself) have been under the impression that they 'dumbed the game down for the masses' when in fact, they dumbed it down for the minority. Let me explain.

Again and again, Bioware reps have stated they did extensive research into the first game and discovered that some people bought the game and only got a few hours in. They've overwhelmingly used this as an excuse for the changes they've made. But those people are obviously the minority, considering the strength of DLC/expansion sales and usage. Let's look at it this way:

10 people play the game, and two don't get very far. Instead of Bioware talking to the 8 that loved the game, they pull the two over to the side and ask them what happened. While the remaining 8 are loving the game, paying for DLC content and supporting future releases through that, Bioware is making the sequel for the two idiots who just never caught on to the game.

Bioware, and EA, are under some weird assumption that if they can please the minority of people that didn't like the first one, that this will somehow translate into appealing to the masses. What they don't understand is...the masses don't enjoy niche games unless they're a niche gamer anyway.

No matter how dumbed down and slick the combat is, no matter how simplified the RPG elements are, this is still not a first person shooter. So they didn't appeal to the masses. And those two people who didn't finish the game remember they didn't like the first one...so they didn't buy the sequel. All they managed to do was anger those 8 fans who stood by them and financially supported the sequel to begin with.

Does that make sense?

Do you have the same data that BioWare does? If so, please share it with the rest of us.