Lostconfused said:
Significantly increasing the cool down on all abilities and introducing a cool down on potions. Adding enemy waves. Adding enemies that have a health bar several times size of others. Addition of cross class combos.
They are all significant changes that make DA2 a different game from DA:O.
Of course it's a different game than DAO. It's just got far, far,
far more in common with the first game than there are differences between the two. There's less difference between the two games than there is between Halo and Call of Duty. It's enough difference that they're different; it's enough difference that it's easy to see how one can like one and dislike the other; it's
not enough difference to justify the hyperbolic position that
nearly everything has been changed or whatever it was.
Your specific points are really strange, though, since almost all of those things were in DAO in the first place.
- They didn't significantly increase the cooldown on anything even
close to "all abilities". Winter's Grasp and Heal are the only obvious offenders; everything else is pretty comparable to DAO. That's not to say that they
should have done that (well, they should have done it for Heal), and honestly they really should have
lowered cooldowns to be congruous with the pacing of the rest of the combat system - I complained about that the first time I played the demo, even - but it's not a huge change, let alone a fundamental one. Go back to DAO and mod it so that Winter's Grasp takes 20 seconds to recharge and Heal takes 40. You're not suddenly playing a different or even unfamiliar game.
- There was always a cooldown on potions. They made it
longer, and they made the cooldown global amongst every
kind of Health potion, every kind of stamina potion, etc, but it's a rebalancing issue, not a fundamental change (and I don't think you can rightly even argue that it was anything other than a completely positive change, considering how potion-chugging made DAO trivial on every single difficulty).
- Enemy waves are overused in DA2. They weren't absent from DAO. Redcliffe starts with a big multi-wave fight. The Brood Mother spawns in waves of Darkspawn throughout the fight (along with tentacles that literally pop up out of nowhere like DA2 enemies). It's a tool in the franchise's toolbox - it happened to be used sparingly in the first game, and overused heavily in the second, but it's in both.
- There were always enemies with more health than others. Hurlock Alphas had more HP than Hurlocks, Ogres had more than any sort of 'lock, etc. It's not a fundamental change - it's not even a
change, except that a larger health bar gives the player a slightly more detailed version of the information they already have.
- Cross-class combos A) were already in DAO, particularly the Frozen -> Shatter combination, and B) aren't really a whole lot different from any of the other spell combos that were available in the first game. They're standardized now, and they make classes besides Mages useful for something other than being the target of a Force Field, but they're not fundamentally different - just much, much better balanced.
