EddySpeddy wrote...
I don't mean give them heavy armour, I mean light armour like a Rogue, I mean the Rogue is just as OP as a mage damage wise and gets cooler armour. I just really dislike the Robes on mages. Maybe have some cooler clothing, there is nothing that says a mage has to wear a dress, I mean Robe 
The thing about mages in armor is that it can certainly happen. You just have to put enough points into strength and constitution for them to equip the armor (or dex/cun if you want rogue armor), which happen to be useless stats for spellcasting, but hey, that's the tradeoff you make.
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Just completed the game and now for my contribution to this thread, didn't want to start criticizing the game before I'd gotten all the way through with it, after all. I won't be saying much about the game's positives (of which I did feel that it had many) here as this is the constructive
criticism thread, which implies to me that Bioware is looking for input on specifically what went wrong, not what went right. Minor DA:O spoilers ahead, if anyone cares.
StoryMy biggest criticism of the story is the pacing during Act I. For starters, there's the game's beginning/prologue, Hawke's "origin story" if you will. You are thrust immediately into action, conflict, and battle as Lothering is overrun; contrast this to the origin stories from DA:O which did not start off with immediate action and conflict. Instead, DA:O's origin stories had some character interaction and plot development take place
before tossing you into the fire.
For example, during Origins's City Elf origin, you start off in your family's home, woken up by your sister, after which you speak to your father, conversations which help to establish who your character is and what's going on in his life, and are then given a chance to go out into the alienage, explore it, and interact with its residents--all dialogue and exposition, no combat (yet). It's only after the stage has been properly set that conflict is introduced and you are given a task to complete and enemies to fight. This sequence of events allows you to get a sense of connection with the characters before you go off fighting for them. In DA2's beginning the first part of this process is skipped entirely. You're fighting to help your family survive right off the bat, without getting a chance to actually interact with any of them or get to know who they are (or who Hawke is, for that matter).
Next up is what happens after the prologue is done. You escape and get into Kirkwall, and this is where the main story should be introduced, but instead it's put on hold. You're given a glut of sidequests to do without there being much focus on a primary conflict or a sense of what you're doing these things for. Once again, this can be contrasted with DA:O's (imo much better) progression of events. After your origin story, you're dropped in Ostagar, followed by Lothering, both of which serve to introduce the game's primary conflict and place you right at the epicenter of it--and only
after that are you given free rein to choose how you proceed next and what, if any, sidequests you want to do.
DA2 does give you a main purpose as well, but it's very underdeveloped compared to DA:O's approach. Just consider the amount of time the Ostagar/Lothering quests take in DA:O vs how long the cutscenes between the prologue and Act I take in DA2. Hawke's goal for Act 1 is introduced in a brief, bare-bones manner and then cast aside for the rest of the first third of the game. In DA2, it feels like you get straight down to the sidequests after entering Kirkwall without having any substantial development of the main character's goals and the setting's conflicts, and almost as if to add insult to injury, you can't just skip this part and get on with the main story, you're actually required to do a ton of sidequests in order to proceed to the next chunk of the main story. I felt like the story didn't give me enough time or material to form a connection with Hawke before it switched to focusing on the stories of the characters in the various self-contained sub-plots of the game's myriad sidequests.
Combat/GameplayCombat was very well done compared to DA:O, huge improvement overall, but of course it's still not perfect. The waves of enemies I feel weren't an entirely bad thing; the problem was that
every encounter was designed like this, instead of only some. While it can add some diversity to the encounters to have reinforcements in some of them, it doesn't really add variety to switch over to every single encounter being designed this way.
Another problem with the reinforcements is that they add cheap difficulty to the game--this is supposed to be "tactical" combat, but tactical combat requires you to make informed decisions about what's happening, and you obviously can't make an informed decision about the reinforcements in DA2 because you have absolutely no clue where they're going to come from. They jump down from buildings or walls, rise up out of the ground, or sometimes just appear out of thin air. Reinforcements would be fine if you could predict where they came from and thus prepare for them appropriately, but instead they can come from nearly anywhere and often do spawn all around you. Having to reload because you didn't know that 2 guys were about to spawn on top of your mage adds the wrong kind of challenge to the game, it's annoying as it requires trial-and-error, rather than actual decision-making or strategy, to overcome.
Next thing is the exploding bodies. I know this game is supposed to be more stylized and visually appealing, but there's a line past which something goes from being stylized to ridiculous, and imo the exploding bodies with gallons of blood bursting out crossed said line. It's completely unrealistic and I actually found it kind of comical. Which would be cool if DA didn't take itself seriously as a whole, but the thing is, it does; the whole "gritty, realistic" atmosphere is an angle that the DA series goes for, as exemplified by features like characters retaining blood splashes on their faces and clothes after combat. The exploding bodies in DA2 directly contradict that tone.
MiscellaneousThese are some random details that bugged me for one reason or another, mostly stuff that I found to be immersion-breaking, made me pause and go "wait, really?"
Re-used environments (duh).
There was a certain side quest in Act 2 that had demons and abominations spawning in the viscount’s keep and/or in the Chantry. Now that’s all well and good so far, but my willing suspension of disbelief was shattered when none of the NPCs in those places even batted an eye at the battle with—I repeat—demons and abominations going on on the balcony above them or in the next room over. No templars or guards running in, no civilians screaming and fleeing, no acknowledgment of any kind.
The random gangs attacking you at night also struck me as somewhat of a wall-banger. The numbers that they attack Hawke in and the manner in which they do it are just absurd. Large groups of organized criminals is one thing, but those groups being willing to throw 20+ guys at a group of 4 armed travelers right in the middle of the street, without introduction and for no particular reason, strikes me as pretty ridiculous. Maybe it wouldn't have given me pause in Darktown, but Lowtown and Hightown were the same deal. In the latter two places, a smaller group of thugs accosting you if you wandered into a backalley would've been much more reasonable. There's also the fact that if there are any NPCs standing by when this happens, they don't react at all to the massacre taking place in front of them.
These are just random bits that pulled me out of the game and reminded me that it was just that, a game, rather than keeping me immersed in the story. They didn't detract much from the overall experience, just annoyances that I felt were worth noting.
Now to my last and by far my biggest complaint, the bugs. Oh man, the bugs. Please Bioware. Patch them ASAP and try your hardest not to have such prominent bugs in the next DA release, that's all I can say. This is killing me much more than any of your actual design decisions. Things like Anders's eyes being messed up during cutscenes involving Justice really make me wonder if this game was playtested at all, bugs that happen rarely or that you don't really notice unless you're looking for them are understandable, but this bug is the kind of thing that jumps out of the screen at you, is impossible to miss, and detracts from the experience.
Modifié par WJC3688, 20 mars 2011 - 06:46 .
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