Poll: Dragon Age II

[Shoggoth2588]

Consider this; At this point you can probably grab DA2 for between $20 and $30 depending on where you get your games. For that, I would say its definitely worth it. In terms of play style though, it's like Mass Effect which may sound great to you but I found it to be really annoying personally. If you don't like it you can probably download the Dragon Age spin-offs (like Awakening and, Liliana's Song I think) to give you more of the classic Dragon Age experience. So yeah, it's worth it for $20 but I regret buying it for $60 months ago...

 

[babinro]

Totally worth it!

The story and characters are worse than DA:O but better than DA:A. Although there are still good characters and the Act 2 conclusion is fantastic.

The combat is far superior to all prior renditions.

I'd personally compare this in terms of experience to KOTOR 1 vs KOTOR 2. KOTOR 2 wasn't a great game compared to the first, but it was still a fun experience and worth the money.

 

[darkcalling]

I say buy it.

I actually liked it better than the original. Where the first did a VERY good job of setting up the world and pulled off an above average "save the world from the giant dragon" plot, the second is more about one man (or woman) finding his place in this world and how he deals with the disasters that crop up around him. In my opinion it does this extremely well and was one of the more original video game plots I've seen.

The combat was also a lot more fun and responsive. Nothing takes me out of a game faster than pressing auto-attack and just clicking (or in my case pressing, I was on 360) hotkeys to activate special abilities.

I will agree that the dungeon design was more than a little lazy though. It really could have benefited from a few more months in development.

 

[mental_looney]

I got it quite cheap and enjoyed it the combat is pretty fun and the story while not saving the world is not bad over all. The voice acting is good and there is lots of banter between the characters that is fun.

Enviroments are reused and that's a really big problem and kind of off putting.

Shrug if it's cheap you can always try it it's too hard to tell if you will like it or not seeing as ther eare such varying opinions on it.

 

[darkcalling]

I honestly can't understand people who call DA:O a deep tactical reincarnation of Baldur's Gate and DAII a stupid hack-and-slash

You do realise that on DA2's release there was no auto attack on consoles, despite Bioware promising it was in the game right up until 6 hours before release. I like to play rouges so you can imagine how mental it was having to spam the A button three times a second whenever in combat. Needless to say, couple this with other well reported problems like the reusing of assets and it's not hard to imagine how much of a steaming pile of excrement this was on release... and why myself and many others stopped playing. If I recall correctly it took Bioware almost two months to fix the lack of auto-attack, by which time I'd lost the disc and to this day I've yet to play it again.

Even if the game is on sale, I'd learn towards not purchasing anyway to send a clear message to Bioware/EA especially as you're a fan of the original. Without it DA3 could be even worse.

You do realize that there are some people who wanted to turn auto-attack OFF in DA:O right? Different people like different options. And that option should have been in from the start IMO.

 

[Forst1999]

I honestly can't understand people who call DA:O a deep tactical reincarnation of Baldur's Gate and DAII a stupid hack-and-slash

You do realise that on DA2's release there was no auto attack on consoles, despite Bioware promising it was in the game right up until 6 hours before release. I like to play rouges so you can imagine how mental it was having to spam the A button three times a second whenever in combat. Needless to say, couple this with other well reported problems like the reusing of assets and it's not hard to imagine how much of a steaming pile of excrement this was on release... and why myself and many others stopped playing. If I recall correctly it took Bioware almost two months to fix the lack of auto-attack, by which time I'd lost the disc and to this day I've yet to play it again.

Even if the game is on sale, I'd learn towards not purchasing anyway to send a clear message to Bioware/EA especially as you're a fan of the original. Without it DA3 could be even worse.

That was a little bit unpleasant. But i didn't think it was a big deal. Even after auto-attack was patched back in, i caught myself still pressing A to attack all the time. For some people it might be annoying, but this doesn't actually hurt the tactical aspect of the game. It just requires the player to do a bit more instead of just watching battles unfold.
And i'm willing to forgive the promises that it was in the game, as this bug came about in a uncommon way (lost code during conversion or something, wasn't it?). Irritating, but i understand why they thought it was in the game.
And if we want to talk about flaws that ACTUALLY hurt the tactical approach, then how about the missing "move to position" command for DA:O on the Xbox? That is catastrophic. Your archers and mages follow you in a row in the mouth of a dragon. You can only get them into position by manually moving them.
So why does a bug that doesn't do much more than tire your thumb a little make the game "a steaming pile of excrement", while a bug that complicates essential tactical features like positioning your party isn't a big deal?