|
On May 24 2011 10:03 Fruscainte wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2011 06:34 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 06:33 Stratos_speAr wrote:On May 24 2011 06:27 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 03:40 greggy wrote:On March 29 2011 09:22 AntiGrav1ty wrote:
My conclusion
I feel like DA2 could have been an all-time great if they had just put in a little more time to develop. Nearly every flaw is based on lack of developing time. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game. The story, the characters, the combatsystem, the franchise, the artwork, the music and the presentation are all there and they are great (or could have been)
The bashing in fan-forums is definitely not deserverd. Unfortunately most fans had either way too high expectations or they were expecting something completely different from what Bioware has delivered. Doesn't mean it's a bad game just because they expected something different.
I mean with all the flaws DA2 had it still was a lot of fun to play. That means they must have done a lot of things right.
If you go into this completely unbiased you will have ur fun and be entertained for many hours.
I think this describes DA2 very well. They just didn't have the time to develop everything. And anyway, I thought it was a pretty decent game - engaging combat, brilliant voice-acting (love the fact that Hawke is voiced, such a change from the generic mute F3/TES characters), and overall it had a typically bioware-esque polished feeling. Now, the recycling of dungeons did get annoying by the end of act 2 but I didn't mind it too much. What pissed me off was the inability to respec my character without the DLC, because let's face it, melee rogue sucks fucking giant balls in pretty much every end-game fight (or I suck as rogue anyway) + Show Spoiler +well, mainly high dragon without fire resistance gems and meredith, but I also ended up killing anders and doing orsino + meredith with fenris, aveline, varric and myself as a rogue with a very limited amount of hp/sta pots so I had to switch to bow to save them lol I'd concur with the quoted poster though that if you've never played DA:O or play DA2 without comparisons/prejudices, you'll enjoy it. I did. Haha, I went ranged rogue, playing on hard, but had that annoying isabel bug going for me pretty hard near the end so my dps ended up terrible, but my alpha strikes were unreal. (as a result my strat in A LOT of fights was nuke the main casters/big guys and just clean up slowly) I think the dungeon recycling wasn't that bad. I think people forget that EVERY rpg ever made has done some of that... or was a brutally short game. I find it funny how much "free" hate this game has got, when it's really just some good unbiased fun. I mean when Bethasda takes the time to make a statement that it's huge world (Skyrim) isn't going to recycle dungeons "like DA 2" I find it pretty sad. It's become the whipping boy of the industry, yet deep down, most of us loved it. No...no. There are plenty of games that don't recycle environments. No 50+ hour RPG games that I know of. KOTOR 1 KOTOR 2 Fallout: New Vegas arguably, it is a DESERT so there is not much diversity available -- but they pull it off Baldurs Gate 2 Morrowind ----------- No game has copy pasted environments to the level of DA2. At all.
Whaaaat? I honestly can't think of a game where an internal little house or part of a dungeon wasn't replicated several times. Even the infallible Baldur's Gate 2 did it - they even cheated in places by using artwork from BG1. In the case of New Vegas, they use the same kind of tileset approach they used in Oblivion and Morrowind. Those dungeons are about as boring as they get, in my book. See an Alleid ruin, a cave and a dungeon and you've seen everything. At least the dungeons in DA2 had some neat artwork inside them to oogle at.
I won't argue against the last point, because its absolutely true. It really just depends on what your tolerance is to recycled environments. Don't pretend like all of those other games didn't just copy-paste, though.
|
The defense of DA2 don't make sense to me. Are our standards so low? The reuse of environments (when you only have like 8 in the whole game anyways) is only part of it. They shit all over the old RPG elements of true RPGs, the story is HORRIBLE and broken into seperate parts which don't interact at all, no matter what you do it doesn't matter since the ending is always the same, there is basically no world recognition of your accomplishments outside of a few changes like a new house and combat was beyond absurd: oh hey, another corner another 50 random assassins who jump out of nothing and keep coming for 5min! This is fun guys. Also, where are you getting 50+ hours? The game is so fucking short and shallow.
Is the game horrible? No. Is it better than most RPGs on the market? Yes. Is it on par with other Bioware games? No. Is it a "classic" rpg? Hell no.
Knowing that DA3 is like a year away is a sign that Bioware has sold out and DA will be the next Assassins Creed or CoD with a yearly release.
|
On May 24 2011 09:24 Bibdy wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2011 08:32 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 07:31 On_Slaught wrote:
The reuse of zones might be defensible if 90% of the game didn't take place within the same city, which rarely changed at all and which only had a hand full of zones. Over the course of 10 years the city basically didn't change until the very very end.
Comparing it to quality RPGs that can give hundreds of hours of gameplay, like BG2, is bullshit. There is NO DEFENSE of the reuse of zones unless you think making the game as fast as possible for money is defensible. It's "defensible" because of the large production costs that were put elsewhere for immersion purposes like having a talking main character and mostly good sounding dialogue. I compare it to other good rpgs, because the complaint most people are formulating is INCREDIBLY shallow. On that note I might as well go back to my old school 16-bit rpgs and complain that they reused dungeon wall textures, or recolored monsters. Even then the backdrop in the quests/hubs might be similar, but what you end up doing varied quite a bit, arguably a lot more than other games. They had me going through different paths, different encounters, different events or involving some nuances with dialogue between npcs. I honestly believe that they might have tested the waters. They might have sat at a meeting and asked themselves what they could do to cut costs to keep it similar to DA:O and add a bunch of extra elements to it to make for a great story. I'm just wondering what they are thinking now... On the one hand, they have a sales success and tons of players who have actually finished and played their game fully, something they can't say about DA:O where 48% of people don't have the completion achievement and about 10% didn't even get past the intro levels. On the other hand, they have a ton of players, mostly players who finished the game anyways, who are waving their hands in the airs saying OMFG this dungeons has similarities with the last one!?!?!?! (Source on numbers: http://pc.ign.com/articles/116/1169580p1.html) I imagine they'll just keep continuing along the current path. If the main complaint continues to be the recycling of areas, then that's an easy fix. However, I think there's a lot of issues people have with the game that have absolutely nothing to do with the recycling of areas (mostly revolving around the detraction from old-school RPG tropes), yet that dead horse continues to get beaten.
No argument there, but I think the noise to proper discussion ratio when it comes to this game is ridiculous. Normally I wouldn't care all that much, I got more than my moneys worth in this title, it's just like I said, even Bethesda hopped on the bandwagon saying that Elders 5 isn't gonna have repeat environments "like DA2", which I find a little dumb comparing Elders to DA is pretty much apples and oranges.
|
Need help in Act3, I don't know if it is a bug !
+ Show Spoiler +I just finished Merrill's quest where you fight all the elves at the base of Sundermount after killing the Keeper (who held the demon inside herself). The questlog nows says to go talk to Merrill at her home in the elven alienage in Lowtown. When I go there and right-click the dumb elf, she just says generic stuff and no cut-scenes start or anything like that. Did this ever happen to anyone ?
|
On May 24 2011 12:43 Furycrab wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2011 09:24 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 08:32 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 07:31 On_Slaught wrote:
The reuse of zones might be defensible if 90% of the game didn't take place within the same city, which rarely changed at all and which only had a hand full of zones. Over the course of 10 years the city basically didn't change until the very very end.
Comparing it to quality RPGs that can give hundreds of hours of gameplay, like BG2, is bullshit. There is NO DEFENSE of the reuse of zones unless you think making the game as fast as possible for money is defensible. It's "defensible" because of the large production costs that were put elsewhere for immersion purposes like having a talking main character and mostly good sounding dialogue. I compare it to other good rpgs, because the complaint most people are formulating is INCREDIBLY shallow. On that note I might as well go back to my old school 16-bit rpgs and complain that they reused dungeon wall textures, or recolored monsters. Even then the backdrop in the quests/hubs might be similar, but what you end up doing varied quite a bit, arguably a lot more than other games. They had me going through different paths, different encounters, different events or involving some nuances with dialogue between npcs. I honestly believe that they might have tested the waters. They might have sat at a meeting and asked themselves what they could do to cut costs to keep it similar to DA:O and add a bunch of extra elements to it to make for a great story. I'm just wondering what they are thinking now... On the one hand, they have a sales success and tons of players who have actually finished and played their game fully, something they can't say about DA:O where 48% of people don't have the completion achievement and about 10% didn't even get past the intro levels. On the other hand, they have a ton of players, mostly players who finished the game anyways, who are waving their hands in the airs saying OMFG this dungeons has similarities with the last one!?!?!?! (Source on numbers: http://pc.ign.com/articles/116/1169580p1.html) I imagine they'll just keep continuing along the current path. If the main complaint continues to be the recycling of areas, then that's an easy fix. However, I think there's a lot of issues people have with the game that have absolutely nothing to do with the recycling of areas (mostly revolving around the detraction from old-school RPG tropes), yet that dead horse continues to get beaten. No argument there, but I think the noise to proper discussion ratio when it comes to this game is ridiculous. Normally I wouldn't care all that much, I got more than my moneys worth in this title, it's just like I said, even Bethesda hopped on the bandwagon saying that Elders 5 isn't gonna have repeat environments "like DA2", which I find a little dumb comparing Elders to DA is pretty much apples and oranges.
... Not really. They are perfectly comparable. They are both medieval fantasy themed RPGs.
|
On June 15 2011 15:49 PizzaParty wrote:Need help in Act3, I don't know if it is a bug ! + Show Spoiler +I just finished Merrill's quest where you fight all the elves at the base of Sundermount after killing the Keeper (who held the demon inside herself). The questlog nows says to go talk to Merrill at her home in the elven alienage in Lowtown. When I go there and right-click the dumb elf, she just says generic stuff and no cut-scenes start or anything like that. Did this ever happen to anyone ?
Bug - I think one of the newer patches adresses it (I didnt play with patch, just read the notes).
|
The criticism for this game was way over the top IMO.
I think Bioware are just a victim of the standards they've set themselves. One great game after another, it was only a matter of time before they made one that was just 'good' as opposed to 'great' and got panned for it.
Jade Empire was another Bioware game that went a bit under the radar, but I played it and loved every second of it.
Dragon Age 2 has an enjoyable story, characters and the combat starts off very chaotic and hack n' slash but gets better as the game progresses.
All in all, not one of Biowares best games but still a really good game and better then most of whats out there. Maybe its a good thing it got so panned though, will prevent Bioware getting complacent and hopefully they'll put the extra effort into Star Wars: The Old Republic, Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 3.
|
On May 24 2011 10:14 Bibdy wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2011 10:03 Fruscainte wrote:On May 24 2011 06:34 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 06:33 Stratos_speAr wrote:On May 24 2011 06:27 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 03:40 greggy wrote:On March 29 2011 09:22 AntiGrav1ty wrote:
My conclusion
I feel like DA2 could have been an all-time great if they had just put in a little more time to develop. Nearly every flaw is based on lack of developing time. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game. The story, the characters, the combatsystem, the franchise, the artwork, the music and the presentation are all there and they are great (or could have been)
The bashing in fan-forums is definitely not deserverd. Unfortunately most fans had either way too high expectations or they were expecting something completely different from what Bioware has delivered. Doesn't mean it's a bad game just because they expected something different.
I mean with all the flaws DA2 had it still was a lot of fun to play. That means they must have done a lot of things right.
If you go into this completely unbiased you will have ur fun and be entertained for many hours.
I think this describes DA2 very well. They just didn't have the time to develop everything. And anyway, I thought it was a pretty decent game - engaging combat, brilliant voice-acting (love the fact that Hawke is voiced, such a change from the generic mute F3/TES characters), and overall it had a typically bioware-esque polished feeling. Now, the recycling of dungeons did get annoying by the end of act 2 but I didn't mind it too much. What pissed me off was the inability to respec my character without the DLC, because let's face it, melee rogue sucks fucking giant balls in pretty much every end-game fight (or I suck as rogue anyway) + Show Spoiler +well, mainly high dragon without fire resistance gems and meredith, but I also ended up killing anders and doing orsino + meredith with fenris, aveline, varric and myself as a rogue with a very limited amount of hp/sta pots so I had to switch to bow to save them lol I'd concur with the quoted poster though that if you've never played DA:O or play DA2 without comparisons/prejudices, you'll enjoy it. I did. Haha, I went ranged rogue, playing on hard, but had that annoying isabel bug going for me pretty hard near the end so my dps ended up terrible, but my alpha strikes were unreal. (as a result my strat in A LOT of fights was nuke the main casters/big guys and just clean up slowly) I think the dungeon recycling wasn't that bad. I think people forget that EVERY rpg ever made has done some of that... or was a brutally short game. I find it funny how much "free" hate this game has got, when it's really just some good unbiased fun. I mean when Bethasda takes the time to make a statement that it's huge world (Skyrim) isn't going to recycle dungeons "like DA 2" I find it pretty sad. It's become the whipping boy of the industry, yet deep down, most of us loved it. No...no. There are plenty of games that don't recycle environments. No 50+ hour RPG games that I know of. KOTOR 1 KOTOR 2 Fallout: New Vegas arguably, it is a DESERT so there is not much diversity available -- but they pull it off Baldurs Gate 2 Morrowind ----------- No game has copy pasted environments to the level of DA2. At all. Whaaaat? I honestly can't think of a game where an internal little house or part of a dungeon wasn't replicated several times. Even the infallible Baldur's Gate 2 did it - they even cheated in places by using artwork from BG1. In the case of New Vegas, they use the same kind of tileset approach they used in Oblivion and Morrowind. Those dungeons are about as boring as they get, in my book. See an Alleid ruin, a cave and a dungeon and you've seen everything. At least the dungeons in DA2 had some neat artwork inside them to oogle at. I won't argue against the last point, because its absolutely true. It really just depends on what your tolerance is to recycled environments. Don't pretend like all of those other games didn't just copy-paste, though.
There's a difference between copying obviously similar landscapes here and there and just copy pasting the same 1 dungeon the entire game.
|
Ya know, if you play the game through, it isn't that bad. It definitely wasn't Origins, but it was at least worth finishing. Crysis 2 I still haven't actually played more than 2 hours.
|
On June 15 2011 21:57 Fruscainte wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2011 10:14 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 10:03 Fruscainte wrote:On May 24 2011 06:34 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 06:33 Stratos_speAr wrote:On May 24 2011 06:27 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 03:40 greggy wrote:On March 29 2011 09:22 AntiGrav1ty wrote:
My conclusion
I feel like DA2 could have been an all-time great if they had just put in a little more time to develop. Nearly every flaw is based on lack of developing time. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game. The story, the characters, the combatsystem, the franchise, the artwork, the music and the presentation are all there and they are great (or could have been)
The bashing in fan-forums is definitely not deserverd. Unfortunately most fans had either way too high expectations or they were expecting something completely different from what Bioware has delivered. Doesn't mean it's a bad game just because they expected something different.
I mean with all the flaws DA2 had it still was a lot of fun to play. That means they must have done a lot of things right.
If you go into this completely unbiased you will have ur fun and be entertained for many hours.
I think this describes DA2 very well. They just didn't have the time to develop everything. And anyway, I thought it was a pretty decent game - engaging combat, brilliant voice-acting (love the fact that Hawke is voiced, such a change from the generic mute F3/TES characters), and overall it had a typically bioware-esque polished feeling. Now, the recycling of dungeons did get annoying by the end of act 2 but I didn't mind it too much. What pissed me off was the inability to respec my character without the DLC, because let's face it, melee rogue sucks fucking giant balls in pretty much every end-game fight (or I suck as rogue anyway) + Show Spoiler +well, mainly high dragon without fire resistance gems and meredith, but I also ended up killing anders and doing orsino + meredith with fenris, aveline, varric and myself as a rogue with a very limited amount of hp/sta pots so I had to switch to bow to save them lol I'd concur with the quoted poster though that if you've never played DA:O or play DA2 without comparisons/prejudices, you'll enjoy it. I did. Haha, I went ranged rogue, playing on hard, but had that annoying isabel bug going for me pretty hard near the end so my dps ended up terrible, but my alpha strikes were unreal. (as a result my strat in A LOT of fights was nuke the main casters/big guys and just clean up slowly) I think the dungeon recycling wasn't that bad. I think people forget that EVERY rpg ever made has done some of that... or was a brutally short game. I find it funny how much "free" hate this game has got, when it's really just some good unbiased fun. I mean when Bethasda takes the time to make a statement that it's huge world (Skyrim) isn't going to recycle dungeons "like DA 2" I find it pretty sad. It's become the whipping boy of the industry, yet deep down, most of us loved it. No...no. There are plenty of games that don't recycle environments. No 50+ hour RPG games that I know of. KOTOR 1 KOTOR 2 Fallout: New Vegas arguably, it is a DESERT so there is not much diversity available -- but they pull it off Baldurs Gate 2 Morrowind ----------- No game has copy pasted environments to the level of DA2. At all. Whaaaat? I honestly can't think of a game where an internal little house or part of a dungeon wasn't replicated several times. Even the infallible Baldur's Gate 2 did it - they even cheated in places by using artwork from BG1. In the case of New Vegas, they use the same kind of tileset approach they used in Oblivion and Morrowind. Those dungeons are about as boring as they get, in my book. See an Alleid ruin, a cave and a dungeon and you've seen everything. At least the dungeons in DA2 had some neat artwork inside them to oogle at. I won't argue against the last point, because its absolutely true. It really just depends on what your tolerance is to recycled environments. Don't pretend like all of those other games didn't just copy-paste, though. There's a difference between copying obviously similar landscapes here and there and just copy pasting the same 1 dungeon the entire game.
But even then, no two dungeons was exactly the same, encounters varied, NPCs varied, even the path you took thru the dungeon was rarely ever the same. No doubt they took a gamble figuring we would prefer more content over spending time making things look different. Which is pretty much what every other great RPG has done. To me this complaint about the game is very shallow when you consider that previous generations we pretty much relied on our imaginations and didn't care if they reused the same wall textures everywhere.
As many people pointed out, I think the real crux is that this game, while being fairly entertaining and good, is about 10-20 steps away from what you would consider the old school for the genre, something that DA:O was attempting to revive, with varying levels of success, some good, some very average.
|
On June 15 2011 22:37 Furycrab wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2011 21:57 Fruscainte wrote:On May 24 2011 10:14 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 10:03 Fruscainte wrote:On May 24 2011 06:34 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 06:33 Stratos_speAr wrote:On May 24 2011 06:27 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 03:40 greggy wrote:On March 29 2011 09:22 AntiGrav1ty wrote:
My conclusion
I feel like DA2 could have been an all-time great if they had just put in a little more time to develop. Nearly every flaw is based on lack of developing time. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game. The story, the characters, the combatsystem, the franchise, the artwork, the music and the presentation are all there and they are great (or could have been)
The bashing in fan-forums is definitely not deserverd. Unfortunately most fans had either way too high expectations or they were expecting something completely different from what Bioware has delivered. Doesn't mean it's a bad game just because they expected something different.
I mean with all the flaws DA2 had it still was a lot of fun to play. That means they must have done a lot of things right.
If you go into this completely unbiased you will have ur fun and be entertained for many hours.
I think this describes DA2 very well. They just didn't have the time to develop everything. And anyway, I thought it was a pretty decent game - engaging combat, brilliant voice-acting (love the fact that Hawke is voiced, such a change from the generic mute F3/TES characters), and overall it had a typically bioware-esque polished feeling. Now, the recycling of dungeons did get annoying by the end of act 2 but I didn't mind it too much. What pissed me off was the inability to respec my character without the DLC, because let's face it, melee rogue sucks fucking giant balls in pretty much every end-game fight (or I suck as rogue anyway) + Show Spoiler +well, mainly high dragon without fire resistance gems and meredith, but I also ended up killing anders and doing orsino + meredith with fenris, aveline, varric and myself as a rogue with a very limited amount of hp/sta pots so I had to switch to bow to save them lol I'd concur with the quoted poster though that if you've never played DA:O or play DA2 without comparisons/prejudices, you'll enjoy it. I did. Haha, I went ranged rogue, playing on hard, but had that annoying isabel bug going for me pretty hard near the end so my dps ended up terrible, but my alpha strikes were unreal. (as a result my strat in A LOT of fights was nuke the main casters/big guys and just clean up slowly) I think the dungeon recycling wasn't that bad. I think people forget that EVERY rpg ever made has done some of that... or was a brutally short game. I find it funny how much "free" hate this game has got, when it's really just some good unbiased fun. I mean when Bethasda takes the time to make a statement that it's huge world (Skyrim) isn't going to recycle dungeons "like DA 2" I find it pretty sad. It's become the whipping boy of the industry, yet deep down, most of us loved it. No...no. There are plenty of games that don't recycle environments. No 50+ hour RPG games that I know of. KOTOR 1 KOTOR 2 Fallout: New Vegas arguably, it is a DESERT so there is not much diversity available -- but they pull it off Baldurs Gate 2 Morrowind ----------- No game has copy pasted environments to the level of DA2. At all. Whaaaat? I honestly can't think of a game where an internal little house or part of a dungeon wasn't replicated several times. Even the infallible Baldur's Gate 2 did it - they even cheated in places by using artwork from BG1. In the case of New Vegas, they use the same kind of tileset approach they used in Oblivion and Morrowind. Those dungeons are about as boring as they get, in my book. See an Alleid ruin, a cave and a dungeon and you've seen everything. At least the dungeons in DA2 had some neat artwork inside them to oogle at. I won't argue against the last point, because its absolutely true. It really just depends on what your tolerance is to recycled environments. Don't pretend like all of those other games didn't just copy-paste, though. There's a difference between copying obviously similar landscapes here and there and just copy pasting the same 1 dungeon the entire game. But even then, no two dungeons was exactly the same, encounters varied, NPCs varied, even the path you took thru the dungeon was rarely ever the same.
...Did you play the game?
The encounters were always the same. A few mobs, and then NEW WAVE INCOMING as more mobs jumped down from rooftops. There were no separate types of NPC's. Every NPC was just a grunt, essentially. In DA:O, there were multiple times of enemies with varying levels of difficulty and skills that made you strategise. In DA2, I literally was just fighting random soldier/monster/etc. #42043094 the entire time. They may have had new skins, but they were all essentially the same enemy.
And yes, dungeons were exactly the same.
Not to mention, on a side note, this game looks like utter balls on Dx11.
|
Well as far as combat I found DAO's bad as well with way too much of the same ones. Definitely not the way BG games did it. In that they failed a lot if they wanted to be a spiritual successor to BG (DA2 even more).
Story in DA2 is OK but not great. When you play Witcher 2 afterwards you can clearly see how better a story can be made if the devs give it a real try.
|
On June 15 2011 22:46 Fruscainte wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2011 22:37 Furycrab wrote:On June 15 2011 21:57 Fruscainte wrote:On May 24 2011 10:14 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 10:03 Fruscainte wrote:On May 24 2011 06:34 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 06:33 Stratos_speAr wrote:On May 24 2011 06:27 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 03:40 greggy wrote:On March 29 2011 09:22 AntiGrav1ty wrote:
My conclusion
I feel like DA2 could have been an all-time great if they had just put in a little more time to develop. Nearly every flaw is based on lack of developing time. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game. The story, the characters, the combatsystem, the franchise, the artwork, the music and the presentation are all there and they are great (or could have been)
The bashing in fan-forums is definitely not deserverd. Unfortunately most fans had either way too high expectations or they were expecting something completely different from what Bioware has delivered. Doesn't mean it's a bad game just because they expected something different.
I mean with all the flaws DA2 had it still was a lot of fun to play. That means they must have done a lot of things right.
If you go into this completely unbiased you will have ur fun and be entertained for many hours.
I think this describes DA2 very well. They just didn't have the time to develop everything. And anyway, I thought it was a pretty decent game - engaging combat, brilliant voice-acting (love the fact that Hawke is voiced, such a change from the generic mute F3/TES characters), and overall it had a typically bioware-esque polished feeling. Now, the recycling of dungeons did get annoying by the end of act 2 but I didn't mind it too much. What pissed me off was the inability to respec my character without the DLC, because let's face it, melee rogue sucks fucking giant balls in pretty much every end-game fight (or I suck as rogue anyway) + Show Spoiler +well, mainly high dragon without fire resistance gems and meredith, but I also ended up killing anders and doing orsino + meredith with fenris, aveline, varric and myself as a rogue with a very limited amount of hp/sta pots so I had to switch to bow to save them lol I'd concur with the quoted poster though that if you've never played DA:O or play DA2 without comparisons/prejudices, you'll enjoy it. I did. Haha, I went ranged rogue, playing on hard, but had that annoying isabel bug going for me pretty hard near the end so my dps ended up terrible, but my alpha strikes were unreal. (as a result my strat in A LOT of fights was nuke the main casters/big guys and just clean up slowly) I think the dungeon recycling wasn't that bad. I think people forget that EVERY rpg ever made has done some of that... or was a brutally short game. I find it funny how much "free" hate this game has got, when it's really just some good unbiased fun. I mean when Bethasda takes the time to make a statement that it's huge world (Skyrim) isn't going to recycle dungeons "like DA 2" I find it pretty sad. It's become the whipping boy of the industry, yet deep down, most of us loved it. No...no. There are plenty of games that don't recycle environments. No 50+ hour RPG games that I know of. KOTOR 1 KOTOR 2 Fallout: New Vegas arguably, it is a DESERT so there is not much diversity available -- but they pull it off Baldurs Gate 2 Morrowind ----------- No game has copy pasted environments to the level of DA2. At all. Whaaaat? I honestly can't think of a game where an internal little house or part of a dungeon wasn't replicated several times. Even the infallible Baldur's Gate 2 did it - they even cheated in places by using artwork from BG1. In the case of New Vegas, they use the same kind of tileset approach they used in Oblivion and Morrowind. Those dungeons are about as boring as they get, in my book. See an Alleid ruin, a cave and a dungeon and you've seen everything. At least the dungeons in DA2 had some neat artwork inside them to oogle at. I won't argue against the last point, because its absolutely true. It really just depends on what your tolerance is to recycled environments. Don't pretend like all of those other games didn't just copy-paste, though. There's a difference between copying obviously similar landscapes here and there and just copy pasting the same 1 dungeon the entire game. But even then, no two dungeons was exactly the same, encounters varied, NPCs varied, even the path you took thru the dungeon was rarely ever the same. ...Did you play the game? The encounters were always the same. A few mobs, and then NEW WAVE INCOMING as more mobs jumped down from rooftops. There were no separate types of NPC's. Every NPC was just a grunt, essentially. In DA:O, there were multiple times of enemies with varying levels of difficulty and skills that made you strategise. In DA2, I literally was just fighting random soldier/monster/etc. #42043094 the entire time. They may have had new skins, but they were all essentially the same enemy. And yes, dungeons were exactly the same. Not to mention, on a side note, this game looks like utter balls on Dx11.
I finished the game, twice on hard and I'm working on Nightmare (Might not finish, but that's a TON of playtime). In terms of NPC reusing it was rather light, but they went for a style of combat that involved high action high numbers of mobs you need to try and control.
No I didn't think in terms of NPCs that is was worst than any other game, if anything some of the boss fights were actually quite unique and pretty cool (I only wish there was more than 7-8 of em). When I play for instance Fallout NV (which I still loved) they have fewer types of encounters and most npcs just have a different outfit/size or color to differentiate them (OMG IT'S A GOLDEN gecko and it just has more HP and damage)
The "levels" they re-used the same backdrop a lot of times, no argument there, but they had you pathing in it in different ways almost every time. Moving the encounters, entrances, exits, blocking different paths, putting traps/treasure/bosses in different places. Different types of encounters: from heavy melee, ranged with traps, to tossing in varying kinds of casters. Or tossing a different kind of voiced *showdown*. It's not perfect, but it's enjoyable. They took a gamble where they decided that making an engine that just randomly generates generic but different looking caves was less important than making sure the player doesn't have too much deja vu.
Like many people have said every other RPG is guilty of reusing assets for the sake of giving us more hours of gameplay, complaining about it is shallow. What I think is a legit complaint is how it's a little bit a testament to the death of the old school RPG. However it's not saying the game was bad, it's just saying the game wasn't what DA:O initially set on trying to revive.
|
On June 15 2011 15:57 Zocat wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2011 15:49 PizzaParty wrote:Need help in Act3, I don't know if it is a bug ! + Show Spoiler +I just finished Merrill's quest where you fight all the elves at the base of Sundermount after killing the Keeper (who held the demon inside herself). The questlog nows says to go talk to Merrill at her home in the elven alienage in Lowtown. When I go there and right-click the dumb elf, she just says generic stuff and no cut-scenes start or anything like that. Did this ever happen to anyone ? Bug - I think one of the newer patches adresses it (I didnt play with patch, just read the notes).
I don't remember what at what patch I was when I started to play ( which was 2 weeks ago), but I know that before starting act 3 I was at patch 1.03, which the latest patch there is. 
|
On June 16 2011 00:49 PizzaParty wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2011 15:57 Zocat wrote:On June 15 2011 15:49 PizzaParty wrote:Need help in Act3, I don't know if it is a bug ! + Show Spoiler +I just finished Merrill's quest where you fight all the elves at the base of Sundermount after killing the Keeper (who held the demon inside herself). The questlog nows says to go talk to Merrill at her home in the elven alienage in Lowtown. When I go there and right-click the dumb elf, she just says generic stuff and no cut-scenes start or anything like that. Did this ever happen to anyone ? Bug - I think one of the newer patches adresses it (I didnt play with patch, just read the notes). I don't remember what at what patch I was when I started to play ( which was 2 weeks ago), but I know that before starting act 3 I was at patch 1.03, which the latest patch there is.
Sadly, these fixes only work for new savegames. You would have to start an entirely new game to get around this.
|
On June 16 2011 01:06 Fiend13 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 16 2011 00:49 PizzaParty wrote:On June 15 2011 15:57 Zocat wrote:On June 15 2011 15:49 PizzaParty wrote:Need help in Act3, I don't know if it is a bug ! + Show Spoiler +I just finished Merrill's quest where you fight all the elves at the base of Sundermount after killing the Keeper (who held the demon inside herself). The questlog nows says to go talk to Merrill at her home in the elven alienage in Lowtown. When I go there and right-click the dumb elf, she just says generic stuff and no cut-scenes start or anything like that. Did this ever happen to anyone ? Bug - I think one of the newer patches adresses it (I didnt play with patch, just read the notes). I don't remember what at what patch I was when I started to play ( which was 2 weeks ago), but I know that before starting act 3 I was at patch 1.03, which the latest patch there is. Sadly, these fixes only work for new savegames. You would have to start an entirely new game to get around this.
I always hated Merrill, now I have one more reason to hate her even more.
|
On June 15 2011 23:37 -Archangel- wrote:
Story in DA2 is OK but not great. When you play Witcher 2 afterwards you can clearly see how better a story can be made if the devs give it a real try.
Are you kidding me, man? The story in both Witcher games falls apart the more you progress, though it wasn't nearly as bad as DA2.
The trouble on the DA2 side of things was Bioware attempting a real story as opposed to the same fantasy bullshit, but executing it really badly by trying to mix in two entirely different storylines while leaving several others hanging about. I was honestly intrigued when Varric was being all ominous about what they found in the Deep Roads, but it turns out that particular bit of the tale vanishes almost entirely from the game until the (pathetic) reveal just before the final boss. Flemeth was only in it to foreshadow (read: advertise) DA3, and provide some trite dramatic lines for the trailer.
DA2 had two great themes at its disposal and it did next to nothing with them: family and the passage of time. Then there is the remarkably complex issue of the mages and the chantry, which isn't really given any treatment at all, despite all the dialogue whirling around it, because in the end you accomplish nothing about it, but are forced to choose one side over the other rather than seek a solution. This precludes and invalidates any sort of discussion, and it cheats the player because it offers a false choice. It's our way, or the highway.
Wouldn't it have been better it if the game had focused on you juggling between the Viscount, the Mages, and the Chantry, while the Arishok and his warriors grew gradually more disgruntled? What if Hawke's trip into the Deep Roads has a more direct and tragic consequence? When chaos ensues, and the factions clash as they must, Hawke discovers it was his ambition and greed that brought ruin on the city. He is hailed as a champion, and no one but him and his companions knows the truth. What do you do, stay in Kirkwall and seek redemption, or go into exile?
That's just off the top of my head. Imagine what Bioware's professional writers could achieve if they put their heads together.
But I could handle the bad story (I still admire Bioware for at least having the guts to put family as a theme in one of their games), the real killer is the wave system. It completely killed the game for me. It is a boring, wretched grindfest in which you have the same fight over and over again through the entire game.
|
On June 15 2011 15:52 Voltaire wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2011 12:43 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 09:24 Bibdy wrote:On May 24 2011 08:32 Furycrab wrote:On May 24 2011 07:31 On_Slaught wrote:
The reuse of zones might be defensible if 90% of the game didn't take place within the same city, which rarely changed at all and which only had a hand full of zones. Over the course of 10 years the city basically didn't change until the very very end.
Comparing it to quality RPGs that can give hundreds of hours of gameplay, like BG2, is bullshit. There is NO DEFENSE of the reuse of zones unless you think making the game as fast as possible for money is defensible. It's "defensible" because of the large production costs that were put elsewhere for immersion purposes like having a talking main character and mostly good sounding dialogue. I compare it to other good rpgs, because the complaint most people are formulating is INCREDIBLY shallow. On that note I might as well go back to my old school 16-bit rpgs and complain that they reused dungeon wall textures, or recolored monsters. Even then the backdrop in the quests/hubs might be similar, but what you end up doing varied quite a bit, arguably a lot more than other games. They had me going through different paths, different encounters, different events or involving some nuances with dialogue between npcs. I honestly believe that they might have tested the waters. They might have sat at a meeting and asked themselves what they could do to cut costs to keep it similar to DA:O and add a bunch of extra elements to it to make for a great story. I'm just wondering what they are thinking now... On the one hand, they have a sales success and tons of players who have actually finished and played their game fully, something they can't say about DA:O where 48% of people don't have the completion achievement and about 10% didn't even get past the intro levels. On the other hand, they have a ton of players, mostly players who finished the game anyways, who are waving their hands in the airs saying OMFG this dungeons has similarities with the last one!?!?!?! (Source on numbers: http://pc.ign.com/articles/116/1169580p1.html) I imagine they'll just keep continuing along the current path. If the main complaint continues to be the recycling of areas, then that's an easy fix. However, I think there's a lot of issues people have with the game that have absolutely nothing to do with the recycling of areas (mostly revolving around the detraction from old-school RPG tropes), yet that dead horse continues to get beaten. No argument there, but I think the noise to proper discussion ratio when it comes to this game is ridiculous. Normally I wouldn't care all that much, I got more than my moneys worth in this title, it's just like I said, even Bethesda hopped on the bandwagon saying that Elders 5 isn't gonna have repeat environments "like DA2", which I find a little dumb comparing Elders to DA is pretty much apples and oranges. ... Not really. They are perfectly comparable. They are both medieval fantasy themed RPGs.
Don't think of them genre wise, but gameplay wise. They are quite different.
|
Wave system, reused environments, pointless and empty side quests, being stuck to a city and same surroundings for 10 years, story composed of three acts that don't connect to each other in a way, bad itemization, completely unstimulating and consolized UI, inability to change what your party members wear, reduced interaction between you and your party members, and game ending being a joke. I wouldn't rate DA2 anything above 7.5/10, it deserves 7/10 in my book. It is a playable game but definitely not a classic, and definitely not a Bioware game.
|
I love DA2, don't know why people are shitting on it ^_^ The combat's just so much more fluid, though I'll admit the storyline isn't quite as good as DAO.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
