Shadowbanner wrote...
I believe BioWare chose to expand its existing fanbase and reach out for casual players (mainstream console). They decided that it was a worthwhile tradeoff to sacrifice a few old grumpy diehard hard-core RPG fans in exchange of appealing to a much larger, younger crowd and in the process make more money, BIG money.
The thing is, I'm an old school grumpy pen and paper RPG and RTS fan in my 30s, I generally find FPS games extremely boring and I have never in my entire life played any game on Xbox or PS3. The last console I owned was the NES about 20 years ago. And I liked DA2.
I found the combat in DA2 to be a huge improvement over DAO because it requires a lot more tactical thought and planning. Nightmare mode in DAO was a joke because you could simply spam cheap healing potions to get through anything. Nightmare in DA2 kicks my ass, repeatedly. I don't use tactics, rather I control every party member through pausing and I have to do a lot more thinking to survive tough battles. And I die frequently! Most tough battles I have to reload many times and often barely survive with only one or two party members left.
I love the "waves" and the massive HP for enemies, as well as characters spawning on top of me, etc., because it makes the game a lot more challenging. I realize many people hate these very same elements, but in my case I found them to be a huge improvement over DAO because DAO combat was not challenging enough.
I also found the character progression and party member selection to be a lot more balanced than DAO (although I will admit Isabella is a bit underpowered on Nightmare). Mages are still very powerful, but all of the classes and each companion has some benefits and drawbacks and the most powerful attacks are only possible by careful tactical coordination with a balanced party composition.
The result is that the design of the skill trees, as well as factors like cooldowns and armor requirements make each level up decision more difficult, which is an improvement to balance IMO. In DAO I recall for my mages I would put all my points into Magic and end up with 100+ magic nuke spell combo monsters who would spam cheap lyrium potions for mana. The "total damage dealt" stats for mages were always orders of magnitude higher than other classes in DAO. In DA2 I have to think a bit more carefully how to progress each party member at level up.
Loved the art direction, the new companions, the more personal story with stakes relating to family instead of "saving the world." The dialogue writing and voice performances were solid across the board and in particular Jo Wyatt (FemHawke), Victoria Kruger (Isabela) and Eve Myles (Merril) were especially engaging. Merril's Welsh accent was cute and when she was in the party it felt a bit like hanging out with Torchwood. I was blown away by the character design for the new Qunari and the default FemHawke was simply stunning.
With the high res texture pack installed, at Very High Quality on 1920x1080, DX11, SSAO, Diffusion DOF, High Quality Blur, 16 x AF, 2 x AA, the game looked fantastic and I was surprised that I got excellent frame rates playing on my laptop. The detail in some of the scenes with shiny golden statues, grey clouds moving in the background, even a few birds in the sky, was incredible, even when projected huge on the wall with my 1080p projector.
There are also a couple of things I intensely disliked about DA2. The poorly executed fetch quests gave me a lot of grief. (The ones where you find some item in a chest and then a random person on the street gives you gold.) I would only read my journal description of the quest after the fact to figure out why the hell the guy just gave me gold. If only these quests could have been given by the quest giver in a dialogue, or at a minimum posted on a Mage's board or Chanter's board, then they would feel like "real" quests.
I felt that the Arishok duel needed a better level design. Unless you have a carefully planned build like IN1's DW assassin build, the duel ends up being 45 minutes of kiting around the pillars.
I also dislike the choice to make all the loot generic. If I find or pick up a book, even if it is "junk" let me click on it and read it. I'd love to be able to discard items and see what they look like in-game. I don't have a problem with a "junk" inventory tab, but perhaps it is somthing psychological to do with the fact that all the icons for junk items looked so similar, it seemed that they were all not even worthy of having individual names or descriptions. I was really disappointed that Keeper Marathari gave me a book that turned out to be junk and not readable or clickable.
I didn't mind the recycled area maps.
The only bug that really bugged me was the fact that Disorienting Shot does not work. Hopefully that will be fixed in Patch 1.03.
I haven't made it to the end yet (110 hrs on my first playthrough at the beginning of Act 3 and 71 hrs on my Patch 1.02 playthrough at the middle of Act 2), and I have heard some complaints that your quest choices throughout the game don't have enough impact on the ending. If that is the case, I imagine I will be quite disappointed, but I can't comment on this yet.
Overall, taking into account the massive amount of negative hype for this game I find it to be extremely underrated. The time for each playthrough and the amount of time I've enjoyed playing so far, is much longer than any of my
DAO playthroughs. I'm glad that I pre-ordered and if it were not for the fetch quests, I would say that I liked the game more than DAO.
Modifié par naughty99, 17 avril 2011 - 04:44 .
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