I haven´t completed the game yet, but even i have seen quite a few flaws (and i haven´t even hit the deep road yet) 1 reused areas.
At first when you deliver the amulet to the elves you are instructed to go and atop the mountains through a cave.
Fair enough i´ll do that saw a few restrictions like a door that was clearly marked yet couldn´t be opened and so forth okay a bit annoying, but not that game breaking.
Later i was given the task of clearing out a cave of Qunari...okay Sten was a qunari so why doesn´t these Qunari´s look nothing like him at all? Also that cave look really familiar it pixel for pixel the dungeon i went through at the beginning of the game, okay its relatively close to the first cave so maybe they are a part of the the same cave.
Even later i was given the task of clearing out a cave of dragons which was nowhere close to the original cave and...WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK IT LOOKS LIKE THE FIRST TWO CAVES!!!!
And not just the caves MANY environments are reused over and over again and from the reviews i´ve seen it doesn´t change, what is this Mass Effect 1? Both Dragon Age Origins and awekening had multiple environments and didn´t reused one except maybe for the few scenes inside a building or such, but those wheren´t that multiple and didn´t stick nearly as much out as it does here.
Characters so far there hasn´t been any really interesting characters in the game, not compared to the first either where you had Morigan Sten Oghren and many more each quite interesting and well told.
Combat? Sure its okay but i miss the overhead view i had in the first game it game a more strategic overview which was a god sent in the more cluster fuck moments of battles.
another complaints and maybe its because i´ve played to much JRPGS, but Anders my healer in DA2 is basically useless his healing spells are charging FAR too slowly for the intense combat in hard mode.
Some might argue but you have potions don´t you? Yes the problem is they are useless TOO in the first game you had several which meant in a hard pinch you could chuck several of them down and keep your party alive or at least keep the one in the thick of combat alive to keep them away from your weaker characters.
In this game you chuck down one potion and you have to wait for some time before you can use it again, and by that time its far TOO late because the enemy will have killed you twice over.
This isn´t good gameplay, if you want to limit the potions use fine do that, but you have to update it so that the healer of the party can fill the void left by the diminishing usefulness of potions, give him a wide array of buff and healing spells that can be used to keep your players alive.
A good example of this would be Wynne from DA:O by the time you got her she already had a wide array of buff and healing spells that were more then capable of keeping your party alive.
And then we have your companions i don´t know who thought it would be a great idea of NOT being able to upgrade any other but your main characters armor.
But it leaves a lot of the stores useless, like the one in hightown who sell robes well my character is a bloody warrior he can´t use robes nor leather armor for rouges, so basically all they do is take up space.
Sure you couldn´t upgrade your companions armor in ME2, but neither did you have to because the only thing you got while on missions was ammo and maybe a few weapons plus the occasional medigel here and there all of which your different companions could use with no problems.
And then we have the weapons in ME2 and more or less DAO they where shown almost clearly strapped to your back or hip.
In DA2 especially with the pirate chick they are just floating in the air behind you...what?
There are possibly several more flaws but since i haven´t completed the game yet i can´t point them out.
Since the guys in Bioware wanted their city to look like something out of a water painting i´ll use a painting metafore to illustrate my opinion of the game.
In a good paint you start with a sketch roughly sketching out what you want then you add the base colors and then work in the shadows and highlights till you at least have the complete painting.
This game/painting fells like they had the sketching down and got most of it covered with the base colors, BUT it lacks that last bit of base colors and it doesn´t have neither shadow nor highlight in it.
It really feels like it could have used another year or two and that it was rushed into release and thus wasn´t given the amount of time that makes a good game.
Ohh and by the way a question for everybody in here Am i the only one remembering the statement given by EA sometime last year about how they would scaledown the release of new game in favor of making better games, it sounded like a great policy what happened?
