Something I am curious about: Since they made runes be a lot cheaper, weaker and more disposable in this game, coupled with not being able to change companion's equipment, I've kind of just skipped enchanting all together.
For companions, why should I put a rune in now if it's there forever when better runes will inevitably come along? For me, why should I bother when I'm constantly changing what I'm using?
I just far preferred the way it was handled in DA:O.
Actually, now that I think about it, I've kind of stopped using crafting altogether. Which is funny, since I lived for herbalism in DA:O, but now that there's only one kind of potion, with a timer, I just don't feel the same need to supplement healing the way I did in DA:O.
As far as runes go, you can overwrite a rune with another rune; if one would be useful, there's really not much reason not to use one. Exceptions are a couple of unique runes that you get from Sandal; those ones I couldn't really justify using given the rate of item turnover.
I never used them much myself until the very end of the game (when I realized there was no reason not to), but I chalk that up more to the encounter design than anything; there are just too few types of encounters to warrant the level of customization that runes will give you.
Ultimately I wish they'd changed runes so you could enchant your own shit on the fly. It would have made runes useful (why would you ever use Cold Resistance runes if the only time you can ever use them is if you happen to correctly guess that you're going to run into an Ice-type Arcane Horror?); it would have acted as a proper gold sink (if you needed new enchantments for each difficult encounter and kept a variety of enchantments on-hand, the money would start to add up even if individual runes are cheap); and it would have made inventory management slightly less trivial (carrying around a full complement of runes would eat up a fair bit of space).
It would be pretty much a 100% improvement in terms of design and gameplay mechanics; unfortunately people would bitch that it detracted from their precious awful boring "lore" so I don't see it as likely to happen.
Still, the enchantment system in Origins was so fucking dire and awful that I didn't use it even once, so I can't really call it a step backward.
Same thing with crafting, really. It was so poorly designed in Origins that I never ever bothered using it once, until the last mission of the game where I decided I was just too bored to give a shit if I had god mode or not and just started making potions to chug. It wasn't particularly well done in DA2, but considering I used it and it felt useful without trivializing the game and it wasn't a pain in the ass totally out of proportion with what it actually added to the game, I'd have to call it an improvement.
Orsino, and almost every other mage you met, proved Meredith right in a bit of senseless irony, making a mockery of his own plight. Meredith wasn't a paranoid fanatic either, no, she was driven to extremes by the evil idol, not by her human failings. Meredith might have as well been RAWR!! evil Dragon!!!, for how paper thin her character is. And thanks to the idol, she kind of was! Not to mention that it gave her more hit points than the actual fucking dragon I fought not long before...
Damn, Act I was long. Finally got through it all. Took almost exactly 25 hours. Did all the quests. I'd say it was 80/20 played on Normal and Hard. I just wanted to do Normal, but at some random battle parts Normal is kind of a cake so I'd switch to Hard for those moments. Not bosses though, jeeze... Normal only.
I hope Acts II and III are more varied and shorter.
Not sure I could keep doing same ol' for another 30 hours or so. I already feel like I experienced all the game has.
Well, I finished it. I did like it, but with some criticisms. Re-used locations was stupid but obviously the result of a desire to get the game out quick. Some of the visuals were bland but I liked most of the vistas. And other parts such as the shadows of clouds rolling across the ground were nice. But a lack of visual variety hurt the game.
Combat was fine; speedy, visceral (though the explosions of body parts were poorly done - I liked the blood though), nice visual effects such as the ice attacks from mages staffs casting shadows. Decent animation too. It was simplified but that's a bonus to me.
Story? Well, pretty standard fare. Too many fetch quests and some of the companion quests left me puzzled and seemed rushed. The ending *shrug*. Whatever. But I did like the characters and the voice talent was pretty good.
All in all it was a pretty good 40 hour long romp. More than reasonable for the £25 I paid for the game.
Damn, Act I was long. Finally got through it all. Took almost exactly 25 hours. Did all the quests. I'd say it was 80/20 played on Normal and Hard. I just wanted to do Normal, but at some random battle parts Normal is kind of a cake so I'd switch to Hard for those moments. Not bosses though, jeeze... Normal only.
I hope Acts II and III are more varied and shorter.
Not sure I could keep doing same ol' for another 30 hours or so. I already feel like I experienced all the game has.
Damn, Act I was long. Finally got through it all. Took almost exactly 25 hours. Did all the quests. I'd say it was 80/20 played on Normal and Hard. I just wanted to do Normal, but at some random battle parts Normal is kind of a cake so I'd switch to Hard for those moments. Not bosses though, jeeze... Normal only.
I hope Acts II and III are more varied and shorter.
Not sure I could keep doing same ol' for another 30 hours or so. I already feel like I experienced all the game has.
Only challenging boss in act 1 is the Rock Wraith simply because you have such shitty gear and talents at that point.
Also Hard is easy as shit, it's Nightmare that's tedious. But even Hard is pretty tedious.
Also you took a very long time for Act 1. Doing everything took me about 16 hours, and that's with me being slow and alt tabbing out or getting up to do a quick house chore.
So after about 30 hours I finally beat this stupid game. I did absolutely everything in Act 1, all but one collect quest in Act 2, and all the companion quests and very few other non-critical quests in Act 3.
This game is a piece of shit and I fucking hated it.
The wave based combat was terrible and reeked of filler. The boss fights were long and boring and seemed to exist only to add even more fucking filler to this game. For all the people complaining about this game being too short, holy shit, I don't think those guys know what pacing is. At the least, this game sure as fuck doesn't know when to quit. [END SPOILERS]
The boss battles during the end game, all like fucking eight of them, dragged on for so fucking long. Like, were they so proud of each individual boss fight they decided to just make you fight every single possible boss regardless of your decisions? And it's like, oh great I've now finished this game because this stupid fucking mage died. Oh, wait, there's another boss. And once I get her healthbar down? Well you get to fight another boss. And then another. And then it throws a bunch of little mini-bosses at you. And then you FINALLY fucking kill her - the lady who had more hitpoints than all the dragons in this game put together what the fuck
.
The dialogue options, the dialogue in and of itself - a mix of pretty terrible voice acting and script, and pretty much all the speech seemed completely fucked. It didn't help that everything was regressed into a stupid dialogue wheel, but I felt that so many times in this game when I was interacting with a character, none of the things I wanted to say would appear. In Dragon Age: Origins, I could always pick at least ONE of the several choices to fit my character. In Dragon Age 2, my character is perpetually clueless and out of mind, and can never work out super obvious plot points before they happen. I felt that absolutely every single dealing with any Qunari was made worse simply because I was given no proper choices to interact with them.
I did like most of the companions, even JRPG boy, so I'm glad there was at least something here to keep me going through the game. I felt that it kinda sucked that I saw every single one of them on my first playthrough (with the exception of the locked out DLC one), but knowing how tedious Dragon Age 2 is, I guess in the end I'm glad. By the end absolutely everyone was a friend with me, with the exception of Fenris, though [ALSO END SPOILERS]
by the end of the game I sided with him and the Templars, for reasons I'll get into next paragraph
. I felt that, with the exception of Fenris, every single companion could be made a friend simply by picking the top right dialogue option. That isn't any fucking fun, and in DA:O I at least felt like I had to know the character in order to manipulate them. In this game it seems all these assholes want is for me to be nice and peaceful and they'll love me.
[PRETTY MUCH SPOILER TOWN OUT THE ASS]
And one more thing I have to get off my back. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING MAGE IN THIS GAME IS A BLOOD MAGE WHO WANTS TO KILL ME EVEN THOUGH I SPENT THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME HELPING THEM. I realise this is probably intentional, but holy fucking shit, every single encounter with any fucking mage resulted in these stupid fucking abomination / shade fights and nobody seemed to ever accept that I didn't want to kill them. You know what? Fuck the mages. Fuck them. They're a whole group of one dimensional assholes that do nothing more than whine and complain about everything. In Dragon Age: Origins, I felt like I at least had some control over which factions became aggressive to me. In this, fucking everyone hates me. Making my entire character's journey pointless.
I hated this game. It was terrible. It was long and boring and tedious and nothing about it was fun. Even if they turned the entire game into a cutscene with a dialogue wheel, the dialogue is so completely fucking stupid I wouldn't even care then.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to games where I shoot people. Because if I'm going to have mindless waves of enemies and shitty dialogue, I might as well have some fun combat instead of clicking on a guy, going through my hotkeys with 20 second cooldowns, and watching a massive healthbar slowly trickle down.
quoting because i finished the game just now and this is pretty much how i felt. The choice in this game typically sucked, it was either " i agree with you completely" or " you have to die" , anything else typically spun around in circles going nowhere. Merril is an idiot. A complete idiot. Morrigan embraced her decisions/life and Merril was written as a five year old. The game felt like 3 expansion packs taped together. I typically felt like this game was just straight up trolling me and everything i wanted to do in it. It doesn't matter who i want to agree with or how i want to shape things, the same result just seems to happen.
I also had so few people in my party that i have to now go back and figure out who i missed or what dialog option i didn't choose to get them to join me because the decision wheel was such a joke that my guesses on what i said would result in didn't match up with what i actually wanted to do. Yep i missed both side quest companions and i did a ton of side quests, just must have missed them.....that irks me, i kept waiting and waiting for one of these side quests i was doing to result in a new party member to play with and kept getting letdown.
And i can't imagine replaying this game again like i usually would to play a different class and use different party members ( in this game, actually get the two extra ones ). It's just too boring, too repetitious, and the choices just weren't that fun.
So I slept with Isabella early in Act 2 (who wouldn't?) and I thought it was rather tastefully done. She's not the one I want to "end up" with though, I want Merrill. Does this now close her off? I recall Morrigan being a bitch to get with after I was with Lelianna. Would be a shame of Merrill is closed off to me now.
Only challenging boss in act 1 is the Rock Wraith simply because you have such shitty gear and talents at that point.
Also Hard is easy as shit, it's Nightmare that's tedious. But even Hard is pretty tedious.
Also you took a very long time for Act 1. Doing everything took me about 16 hours, and that's with me being slow and alt tabbing out or getting up to do a quick house chore.
Just finished the game, took me about 34 hours. I quite enjoyed it, don't see what people were bitching about with the story, I liked it, and will probably start a new game tomorrow.
So I slept with Isabella early in Act 2 (who wouldn't?) and I thought it was rather tastefully done. She's not the one I want to "end up" with though, I want Merrill. Does this now close her off? I recall Morrigan being a bitch to get with after I was with Lelianna. Would be a shame of Merrill is closed off to me now.
So I slept with Isabella early in Act 2 (who wouldn't?) and I thought it was rather tastefully done. She's not the one I want to "end up" with though, I want Merrill. Does this now close her off? I recall Morrigan being a bitch to get with after I was with Lelianna. Would be a shame of Merrill is closed off to me now.
at the end I could only "choose" Merrill(Isabella didn't give me the option) at the end but I appearantly had a high enough romance with Isabella that the ending says that she stayed with me not Merrill.(A bug or Merrill found out about the affair :lol )
Agreed! I can sit and listen to the Codex in ME easily but no way I am going to read it by myself. Lol. I'm way too impatient to read any of those text entries in this game because of this.
So I slept with Isabella early in Act 2 (who wouldn't?) and I thought it was rather tastefully done. She's not the one I want to "end up" with though, I want Merrill. Does this now close her off? I recall Morrigan being a bitch to get with after I was with Lelianna. Would be a shame of Merrill is closed off to me now.
The epilogue is bugged if you sleep with Isabella and then go with Merrill, but you can still romance Merill.
bloodforge said:
I romanced them both. Though
at the end I could only "choose" Merrill(Isabella didn't give me the option) at the end but I appearantly had a high enough romance with Isabella that the ending says that she stayed with me not Merrill.(A bug or Merrill found out about the affair :lol )
Just finished the game, took me about 34 hours. I quite enjoyed it, don't see what people were bitching about with the story, I liked it, and will probably start a new game tomorrow.
for further illustrations. The first article is largely about the disconnect between story and gameplay as a mage, the second impressions of the first 8 hours of the game from someone who loved Origins.
I reallly can't get over how badly i hate what Bioware did with the mage/templar part, it's trying to tie my hatred for Fable 3's end game "decisions". Bioware didn't betray my character through other characters, Bioware just betrayed me as a gamer who enjoys a good game because that was easier and they wanted to wrap the game up quickly.
for further illustrations. The first article is largely about the disconnect between story and gameplay as a mage, the second impressions of the first 8 hours of the game from someone who loved Origins.
So, overall verdict on the game from you guys? Still deliberating on whether to buy or not. Also, have the Nvidia card performance issues been solved yet?
So, overall verdict on the game from you guys? Still deliberating on whether to buy or not. Also, have the Nvidia card performance issues been solved yet?
So, overall verdict on the game from you guys? Still deliberating on whether to buy or not. Also, have the Nvidia card performance issues been solved yet?
Dragon Age 2 is mediocre. The only area I would say it's a step up from Origins is in the character interactions with your companions and the general banter. Some of the companion quests can be a bit interesting as well in their story, though it's a shame you complete nearly all through combat. In pretty much every other regard, the game is a step back from the first, with often puzzling design decisions.
The best thing I could call the game is half-baked and incomplete. Needed much more time in the oven, and needed to go in a different direction entirely than it did in several critical areas.
Dragon Age 2 is mediocre. The only area I would say it's a step up from Origins is in the character interactions with your companions and the general banter. Some of the companion quests can be a bit interesting as well in their story, though it's a shame you complete nearly all through combat. In pretty much every other regard, the game is a step back from the first, with often puzzling design decisions.
The best thing I could call the game is half-baked and incomplete. Needed much more time in the oven, and needed to go in a different direction entirely than it did in several critical areas.
Well, that certainly doesn't inspire me to pick it up. Any more opinions? Thinking of skipping this now. Crysis 2, Shift 2 and Motorstorm Apocalypse to fill the void.
Witcher 2 out soon as well right? Game looks fantastic!
Well, that certainly doesn't inspire me to pick it up. Any more opinions? Thinking of skipping this now. Crysis 2, Shift 2 and Motorstorm Apocalypse to fill the void.
Witcher 2 out soon as well right? Game looks fantastic!
Surprised Bioware messed up so bad. Always had them down as a AAA dev. Mis-placed credit perhaps. But I did really enjoy ME 1/2. Though the first was a bit f a technical mess, at least on consoles. Hear it didn't run too well on PC early n either.
I have a GTS 250, which is dated. The game runs putridly on DirectX 11 -- 10 in my card's case. However, it runs well on DirectX 9 with Medium quality textures, as anything higher is blocked; graphically, characters look better than Origins' (imo). I play it at 1920x1080 and it ranges from 40-60 FPS.
I thought Flemeth sucked. She stayed up on her little hill and I stood just to the left of a fence or piece of wood (cant remember) and just shot her with arrows until she died. All her attacks hit the fence. The one on the way to Andastre was awesome.
So I kept with DA2 a bit more tonight and I got to the end of chapter 2. Ended up skipping a ton of quests, but I did enjoy how the chapter ended. I also thought Aveline's Companion quest was pretty darned funny. Will finish it off this week and mail it back to Amazon. Their trade-in price jumped from 33 to 38 today. Whoot.
Do two-handed swords attack more often than single-handed swords? Just wondering why the 1H swords are outpacing 2H in listed damage stats.
Actually, seems like the entire game difficulty just swerved massively upwards starting with the
Arishok battle. Fighting him one on one (and surviving) seems impossible; chip away for a half hour and then he just uses supermoves to restore health and hit you from anywhere.
Do two-handed swords attack more often than single-handed swords? Just wondering why the 1H swords are outpacing 2H in listed damage stats.
Actually, seems like the entire game difficulty just swerved massively upwards starting with the
Arishok battle. Fighting him one on one (and surviving) seems impossible; chip away for a half hour and then he just uses supermoves to restore health and hit you from anywhere.
With a 52 attack Axe it took about 25+mins and 10 heals just to get him down to range, and then he healed back to 90%, and started doing some special attack that nailed half of my health bar.
I've poured several hours into the game as a snarky, sarcastic male mage Hawke. However, I seriously reconsider restarting over due to the SERIOUS disconnect between the narrative and the gameplay. In Kirkwall, a city famously known to put very strict reins over mages, it's a serious atmosphere-breaking to have my Hawke prancing around with a staff and apostate robe all over place casting fireballs and such without no one practically gives a shit :\
However, when I have decided to make a badass two-handed sword wielding female warrior Hawke, the goddamn overly girly running animation turn me off immediately. I am sorry, but I really just can't associate 'badass' with that kind of running animation :\ Female Shephard did not suffer from this issue
Guess it's rogue male or warrior male then.........
HadesGigas said:
It was truly EPIC. If there was an option to
leave Hawke dead
there and continue on the game somehow I would have taken it.
Yes, they mention some details about it. Would have been way better if the game started there (or elsewhere if you play mage since I guess mage Hawke's backstory is slightly different). Would have definitely helped you feel more of a connection with Carver (or Bethany for mage Hawke).
