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| 5. |
Re: On Sale |
May 19, 2011, 09:19 |
Verno |
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DA2 is still a moderately entertaining RPG story in its own right
Warning, long post ahead, my thoughts on Dragon Age 2.
I don't know, I was bored by the end of Act 1 but I slogged through anyways. The game isn't even really much of an RPG, all roads tend to lead to the same place and the character development isn't much to speak of. Most of your choices end up being small differences in dialogue. There were a handful of choices related to whether you lose a character or not but they weren't handled very well, in fact one was quite jarring and poorly foreshadowed.
Dragon Age 2 is pretty much a piece of crap to be honest. The graphical improvements in the engine are wasted on poor texture design which in turn was produced by their hyper development window. At least half of the score is reused from the first game and what was added doesn't really resonate. Spending almost the entire game in a single city was not a great choice for anything other than their bottom line. By the end of the game you actively resent Kirkwall for limiting you so much and forcing so much repetition on the player. It also thematically breaks the game in many ways and immersion suffers as a result. Why are people dropping from the sky? Why does this area always have thugs? Who cleans up the 10000 bodies I've piled up in this place? Why does the player visit the same caves and mansion designs dozens of times? Who thought that would be ok with people?
Voiced Hawke isn't very interesting, I found myself tuning out and actually hoping for the silent protagonist again. The dialogue wheel is implemented in a way that leads me to think the developers believe us all to be apes and still suffers from the "my choice isn't what I wanted to say" problem.
The supporting characters are somewhat interesting, Varric is really the game's only redeeming feature. The writing itself feels like equal parts fanfic and pandering to their sycophantic forum base. You can feel them trying to reach at some points, the Qunari plot even threatens to become interesting at one point but then they ruin it by railroading the player. The Mage/Templar plots are expanded enough in the first game and fail to make a meaningful impact in this installment. You can't take the player from saving the world and then back to things like "we need monies for our house!" and "mages are terrorists grr!". Mass Effect 2 suffered from the same problem in trying to scale back it's goals but having the story suffer as a result. Thankfully ME2 had a very solid gameplay base to fall back on but Dragon Age 2 does not.
Finally all of this could be redeemed if the combat was interesting but even on higher difficulties it is just annoying as the AI has its own set of rules to play with. The first game had hand picked encounters designed with care and some thought to balance. This game has generated spawn waves. The poor pacing leads to some hilarious difficulty ramp ups too. You can literally cruise through the entire game on auto-pilot up until a few bosses that can stonewall a novice player. I watched my friend try for about 20 minutes on a certain boss until he was getting frustrated then I pointed out the WoW boss mechanics they had stolen and he worked through it.
tl;dr - I write this ridiculously long, 10 minute post to warn others that Dragon Age 2 sucks. You can spend your money and more importantly your time better elsewhere. It is difficult to think of a situation where you would actually want to put money down on this game considering there are dozens of better offerings, some old, some new. |
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Playing: Animal Crossing, Sleeping Dogs, Tales of Graces F
Watching: Survivorman, Justified, Silent Running |
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| 4. |
Re: On Sale |
May 19, 2011, 04:21 |
Domgrief |
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I ignored most of the negative feedback for DA2 (people do tend to complain) and bought the game with anticipation, but probably shouldn't have.
DA2 is still a moderately entertaining RPG story in its own right, but DA:O feels like the big, epic, open sequel to DA2 rather than the other way around. |
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| 3. |
Re: On Sale |
May 18, 2011, 23:49 |
Pete |
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| A very poorly done sequel to a great game. |
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| 2. |
Re: On Sale |
May 18, 2011, 23:00 |
Dades |
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| $30 is still too much, it will be $20 and lower easily this year so that people can experience the colossal letdown for a reasonable price. I wouldn't pay more than $15 for it. Tedious is the best word I can use to describe it. Wait, unrewarding. That's a good one too. Take any money you were going to put towards DA2 and just put it towards a real game like The Witcher 2. |
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| 1. |
Re: On Sale |
May 18, 2011, 22:52 |
Dirwulf |
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Obviously I was really wrong. DAII already on sale...
I liked both games. I guess not too many liked the second (gee really?) or are waiting for...a SALE  |
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