Uh, I think you got your games mixed up.Ed130 said:
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Uncanny valley slasher smile creeps:
Poll: Dragon Age vs Dragon Age: The Battle Continues!
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Uncanny valley slasher smile creeps:
Origins because it was more immersive, had a proper thread with the main plot at all times, and gameplaywise it offered slightly more in terms of tactics.
HOWEVER...I really liked the IDEA of DA2.
The city FEELS like it should have more character than most of Ferelden in DA1, yet it doesn't deliver because most of the rooms and areas are recycled or simply poorly done. If they had gone through the effort (which they should have) to design every room and area more properly, add the little things that makes it come alive, then Kirkwall could have rivalled Ferelden in uniqueness even without adding the outside areas...yet this was not to be.
The plot IS more unique and interesting, the plot of how you rise to become the champion and the struggles you face. Yet the game drops the ball too often, with too many fetch-quests, too many gaps where you can't connect what you do to who you're supposed to become, and you kind of lose track of the plot, which is never a good thing.
Not to mention how you in this game are supposed to have a family...which is great...only they end up killing one (not really a spoiler, it happens too soon) and then
so they're out of the picture as well. That leaves you with a dog (if you got the dlc) a mother who...doesn't really do or say much, and an uncle who does even less. You have a family, but they don't FEEL like a family, they're not in the game you play even a tenth as much as your companions, so you never even get to know them all that well, watch them change and evolve, be part of their lives. Great idea, poor execution.
Even gameplaywise they had some things going for them, no longer was one class superior, there was more of a balance and all classes were fun to play and could merge together in combos that made the combat more interesting.
Yet then we have enemy reinforcement, and more reinforcement, and reinforcement dropping from the ceiling on top of your mages, and most mooks being so weak they're more of an annoyance than a foe, except for the fact that they're so many...and it not only kills the gameplay, but the immersion as you wonder how many people live in Kirkwall, when you slaughter so many...
So much potential, so many good ideas...so poorly executed.
HOWEVER...I really liked the IDEA of DA2.
The city FEELS like it should have more character than most of Ferelden in DA1, yet it doesn't deliver because most of the rooms and areas are recycled or simply poorly done. If they had gone through the effort (which they should have) to design every room and area more properly, add the little things that makes it come alive, then Kirkwall could have rivalled Ferelden in uniqueness even without adding the outside areas...yet this was not to be.
The plot IS more unique and interesting, the plot of how you rise to become the champion and the struggles you face. Yet the game drops the ball too often, with too many fetch-quests, too many gaps where you can't connect what you do to who you're supposed to become, and you kind of lose track of the plot, which is never a good thing.
Not to mention how you in this game are supposed to have a family...which is great...only they end up killing one (not really a spoiler, it happens too soon) and then
the other either dies or you lose them to the Circle/templars
Even gameplaywise they had some things going for them, no longer was one class superior, there was more of a balance and all classes were fun to play and could merge together in combos that made the combat more interesting.
Yet then we have enemy reinforcement, and more reinforcement, and reinforcement dropping from the ceiling on top of your mages, and most mooks being so weak they're more of an annoyance than a foe, except for the fact that they're so many...and it not only kills the gameplay, but the immersion as you wonder how many people live in Kirkwall, when you slaughter so many...
So much potential, so many good ideas...so poorly executed.
What are you talking about?
There's only one Dragon Age game: Dragon Age: Origins.
Unrelated; I wish they'd make a new Metroid game. We haven't had one since Prime 3. I heard there were talks of making one with Team Ninja, but they fell through.
On a serious note, I loved Origins. Dragon Age 2 felt like a complete mockery. The combat no longer felt strategic, the story was not particularly good, and I couldn't be a Dwarf.
I can get making the character voiced. I don't agree with it, but I get it. But why make said character human? Having the player character's race in a fantasy game be human is like having their race be accountant.
Most of your team isn't likable ranging from absolutely awful like Merril (She's like Tali, who was already kind of annoying, but really dumb) and Fenris (Androgynous emo with a giant sword? You're supposed to distance yourself from that fanbase, not court them!) to not so good like Isabella (She has one character trait. That's that she is a slut. Nothing beyond that) and Anders. (He would have been fine as an character, but they ruined one of my favorite characters to make him. He's nothing like the Anders from Awakening.) The two good characters (Varric and Avaline) are the only ones you can't put the moves on. (I suspect that Bioware secretly hates Dwarves, that's why they've never let us put the moves on them, even though some of their better squadmates have been Dwarves (I miss you so Sigrun!))
There's only one Dragon Age game: Dragon Age: Origins.
Unrelated; I wish they'd make a new Metroid game. We haven't had one since Prime 3. I heard there were talks of making one with Team Ninja, but they fell through.
On a serious note, I loved Origins. Dragon Age 2 felt like a complete mockery. The combat no longer felt strategic, the story was not particularly good, and I couldn't be a Dwarf.
I can get making the character voiced. I don't agree with it, but I get it. But why make said character human? Having the player character's race in a fantasy game be human is like having their race be accountant.
Most of your team isn't likable ranging from absolutely awful like Merril (She's like Tali, who was already kind of annoying, but really dumb) and Fenris (Androgynous emo with a giant sword? You're supposed to distance yourself from that fanbase, not court them!) to not so good like Isabella (She has one character trait. That's that she is a slut. Nothing beyond that) and Anders. (He would have been fine as an character, but they ruined one of my favorite characters to make him. He's nothing like the Anders from Awakening.) The two good characters (Varric and Avaline) are the only ones you can't put the moves on. (I suspect that Bioware secretly hates Dwarves, that's why they've never let us put the moves on them, even though some of their better squadmates have been Dwarves (I miss you so Sigrun!))
Sorry, no such thing..Desert Punk said:
No, not even Superman 64.
No, not even ET: The Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600.
Certainly, certainly not Dragon Age 2.
Opinions are not objective, just like rain on your wedding day is not ironic.
That said, it's kind of funny how many people's subjective definition of a "bad game" has moved from "a game which simply does not work" to "a game which was slightly disappointing", because frankly that's all it is here. There's nothing wrong with Dragon Age 2. It works, in fact mechanically it works better than Origins, it's just flawed and visibly rushed through development.
Really, if you've not played nightmare before then I suspect nightmare will still be a reasonable challenge. While certain overpowered builds can make nightmare easier, provided you're just building characters normally it should never be dull. For one, I imagine friendly fire will be lethal.LetalisK said:Though I might as well since I'm going to crank the difficulty and then cheat to where I can have every member of my party travelling with me at the same time. Or at least the ones that don't bother me.
I've never played on the higher difficulties (mostly because I refuse to play it more than once), so I can say nothing on that part.Mycroft Holmes said:
The skill trees, the way abilities worked, the more active participation of the player, and the status combo thing they had were all pretty damn good and made the combat quite a bit better than in Origins. There were definitely problems with it, but on the whole, the combat in DA2 was superior to Origins.
Or rather, it would have been if the encounter design was better than "wave after wave after wave after another fucking wave of dipshits spawn and rush you so that the only viable tactic is to stand in a clump and AOE everything" for every single fight.
Origins and Dragon Age 2 both had bad visuals. Dragon Age 2 in particular copped a lot of flack for featuring some exceptionally poor quality models and textures in the finished release, which again is simply down to the game being rushed. Origins did not have that graphical inconsistency, but it was overall graphically inferior.Desert Punk said:
Both games also had a crappy story. When people talk about how Origins had a good story, they are generally talking about certain atomized elements of the story which were well-handled. The overarching story itself is wallpaper paste. A robot with access to a copy of Lord of the Rings could come up with that story. Dragon Age 2 tried to tell this new kind of bildungsroman story which, unfortunately, wound up being incredibly poorly tied together with no real overarching plot. However, some of the Storytelling in Dragon Age 2 was much, much better than anything in Origins. So again, give and take.
Dragon Age 2 reused environments. Dragon Age: Origins reused art assets. Honestly, I'm getting kind of sick of this criticism because Dragon Age Origins effectively had three environments. Brown Cave, Grey Castle, Green Forest. Even the Fade levels, which you'd think would be an excuse to let imaginations run riot, copped a lot of highly justified flak for ultimately just being variations on Brown Cave and Grey Castle. I would say Origins made the most of this limited graphics pool better than Dragon Age 2, but if you managed to sit through the incredibly tedious and repetitive Deep Roads levels in Origins, I really don't buy that the reused environments in 2 was a deal breaker.
The only justifiable criticism I can see here is wave combat, which was clearly thrown in to give fights more of an action-oriented focus. However, I don't buy that wave combat alone makes a bad game, particularly since many combats in Origins also used it.
I'm just going to leave this here.Desert Punk said:
..we're not talking stupid QA testing there, we're talking no QA testing whatsoever, because I refuse to believe any human being would have played through the game and not noticed that issue.
And in fact, the whole game is like that. It's very, very obvious once you understand how everything works under the hood. There is no consistency, there is no balance, nothing works as it is supposed to and nothing is remotely intuitive or easy for the player to grasp. I suspect this is why so many people regard the game as hard. It isn't, it's just incomprehensible in its mechanics.
Another example. Look at this "sequence".
0 2
1 3
2 0
3 1
4 6
5 7
6 4
7 5
8 10
This is actually how Origins calculates the effects of one particular talent. The two columns numbers are two "linked" variables. I say "linked", and yet as you can probably see the numbers are almost entirely random. That's not good design. It will never be good design.
Skill trees aren't combat gameplay. That's character design systems.Agayek said:
"The way abilities worked" is about the vaguest statement I have ever heard. So I have no idea what to even say about that.
I'm replaying DA2 now and I participate a lot less than I did in DAO. In DAO I had to jump around between characters constantly to line up attacks and ensure the most damage possible with the least amount of friendly fire. In DA2 I don't play on nightmare because of the poor knockback scaling and the fact that I don't want to play a force mage or a warrior. Instead all I do is push the r button and then win because the combat is boring as balls. I don't even have to set up intelligent tactics AI for my characters.
ign said:
Cross-class status combos already existed in DAO. You just didn't notice and then DA2 lied to you, said it was something new, and you believed them because they really empathized it this time. In fact a big part of my strategy in DAO relied on using cold spells so that Leliana could cross class crit insta kill enemies.
In fact they actually nerfed the combo system entirely. In DA2 it was reduced to just three simple status effects, mages cause brittle, rogues cause disorient, warriors cause stagger. "Disorient/Confuse (-50% to enemy defense), Brittle (+50% critical damage), and Stagger (-25% to enemy attack and defense)." It's not particularly advanced or interesting. In DAO you could make paralysis fields and then repulsion to cause a wave of paralysis to ripple out. You could create tar and then light it on fire to create a field of fire. Now its just huzzah you used an ability now the enemy has -50% defense because there's a little status symbol over their head? yawn.
DA2 had a fair number of improvements. But combat mechanics sure as hell wasn't one of them.
Did you ever use the latter, because believe me, I actually tried in one game..Mycroft Holmes said:
But no, there are three combos worth getting.
Death Curse.
Paralysis Explosion.
Storm of the Century.
..and that's because each of those is overpowered. Not just slightly overpowered. Monumentally overpowered to the point where, applied correctly, they can make the difference between having difficulty on normal and soloing nightmare.
I feel I have to bring this up in every Dragon Age thread, but false choice is not choice. A choice with a clear win/lose binary is not a choice. An ability tree, however large and impressive, in which where a small number of options are immensely overpowered and the rest are puffs of wet fart smell is not providing choice, unless you count the choice to nerf yourself for challenge as a choice.
Okay, there are only three combinable effects in Dragon Age 2. Frankly, there are only three combinable effects in Origins which are worth the tiniest damn. Moreover, there is only one effect which is actually cross class, and even that doesn't actually need to be cross class anyway as the easiest way to trigger it can be employed by the same class which set it up. What it is is incredibly irritating for players who took choices thinking they sounded interesting and suddenly find themselves bathed in the smell of wet farts.
Again, this is simple QA testing stuff. Mana clash should not exist. It makes black lotus [http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=600] look like a neat design choice. Meanwhile grease fire should do more than slightly warm your enemies' feet. It's all very well to brag about how extensive and deep your mechanics are, but it's useless if they aren't properly balanced, and Origins, for all its many virtues, is incredibly poorly balanced.
I preferred origins without question. While I feel that Dragon Age 2 had some good ideas especially as it pertained to playing the game on a console (I played DA:O on PC for the record), a series of relatively small problems dramatically undermined my enjoyment of the game. The two most egregious were the way the game spawns enemies and the second was environmental reuse. The former was a significant mechanical problem since a great many characters rely on careful positioning for one reason or another and the fact that enemies just appear on the battlefield made it almost impossible to play smart - you were always forced to simply react to problems rather than executing a careful plan to eliminate them. The latter was simply an issue that undermines any verisimilitude the game may have otherwise built - a cardinal sin when setting is built to be of extreme importance.
All that said, after a mastery of a handful of ideas, combat in Origins was trivial at any difficulty setting. I rarely ever bothered with combined spell casting and even on Nightmare mages lay absolute waste. That's probably another problem with the game - everyone else in the party basically serves to simply keep your offensive mage alive, even when it's indirect. It dramatically undermined any reason to use any other class given that a properly specc'd mage could do anything the other classes could do (and they could probably do it better).
This was a problem as far back as the days of baldur's gate though. There were lots of spells that were never reasonably going to be useful and others that were of paramount importance even if you wouldn't necessary recognize why for hours.
I can certainly agree that the game balance had dire problems. When the game launched (and for weeks if not months after) Archers did not receive a damage bonus from the dexterity score meaning that as you progressed through the game, archery became increasingly useless against tougher foes.evilthecat said:
All that said, after a mastery of a handful of ideas, combat in Origins was trivial at any difficulty setting. I rarely ever bothered with combined spell casting and even on Nightmare mages lay absolute waste. That's probably another problem with the game - everyone else in the party basically serves to simply keep your offensive mage alive, even when it's indirect. It dramatically undermined any reason to use any other class given that a properly specc'd mage could do anything the other classes could do (and they could probably do it better).
This was a problem as far back as the days of baldur's gate though. There were lots of spells that were never reasonably going to be useful and others that were of paramount importance even if you wouldn't necessary recognize why for hours.
Origins was definitely the better game, but I didn't like the combat system. I love isometric strategy combat like Baldur's Gate, but i just have problems with Dragon Age I didn't have with BG. It mostly involved trying to move people around and having them bump into random things and each-other. Major annoyances like them getting stuck behind a crate or something. In a strategy game were ever second counts is sucks losing attacks because you character is stuck on a piece of the environment, or because you party is failing over themselves trying to get through a door or narrow passageway.
If people didn't have this need for "visceral real time action" we could just do the thing in turn based. That would give you the maximum amount of strategy without worrying about pathing or engine issues at all.
If people didn't have this need for "visceral real time action" we could just do the thing in turn based. That would give you the maximum amount of strategy without worrying about pathing or engine issues at all.
I can play Dragon Age II on a console. Therefore it works better mechanically than Origins, because in order to play that, I had to use a PC that was clearly not equipped to handle anything more dramatic than a surprise affair.Desert Punk said:A bad game is one that has shitty visuals, worse than even the game that came before it, a bad game is one that has a crappy story, a bad game is one that reuses environments with barely any changes from one area to the next, a bad game is one that has enemies literally spawn out of thin air.evilthecat said:Sorry, no such thing..Desert Punk said:
No, not even Superman 64.
No, not even ET: The Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600.
Certainly, certainly not Dragon Age 2.
Opinions are not objective, just like rain on your wedding day is not ironic.
That said, it's kind of funny how many people's subjective definition of a "bad game" has moved from "a game which simply does not work" to "a game which was slightly disappointing", because frankly that's all it is here. There's nothing wrong with Dragon Age 2. It works, in fact mechanically it works better than Origins, it's just flawed and visibly rushed through development.
Dragon Age 2 has all of these. There is very little that redeams it, thus making it a bad game.
Its kind of funny how many people think a game has to not work to be a bad game. And the fact that you think it works better mechanically than Origins is just...I have no words for it.
Dragon Age origins: i just bought the complete edition on steam sale to get all the dlc and looking forward to replaying it in a few weeks time once i set some time for it.
Dragon Age 2: the game that single handedly destroyed my fanboyism for bioware and was the first time in a long time i actually really regretted my preorder. Even when i preordered aliens colonial marines i cheered myself up by saying "well at least it wasnt dragon age 2", and indeed playing with 3 friends i actually got some fun from it.
So yeh definitly a fan of da1 over da2. Am ambivalent about da3 in that my expectations are lowered but i still have hope the series ain't dead yet, the ball is in biowares court.
Dragon Age 2: the game that single handedly destroyed my fanboyism for bioware and was the first time in a long time i actually really regretted my preorder. Even when i preordered aliens colonial marines i cheered myself up by saying "well at least it wasnt dragon age 2", and indeed playing with 3 friends i actually got some fun from it.
So yeh definitly a fan of da1 over da2. Am ambivalent about da3 in that my expectations are lowered but i still have hope the series ain't dead yet, the ball is in biowares court.
Judging from the poll results, my opinion has probably been expressed already, but here I go anyway. I loved Dragon Age:Origins one of my favorite games this generation. While, I thought Dragon Age 2 was train-wreck. I didn't couldn't even bring my self to finish it. The disjointed story, the poorly written dialogue, the terrible terrible combat, I did not enjoy a single element of it.
No, I'm pretty sure I picked correctly.Drago-Morph said:Uh, I think you got your games mixed up.Ed130 said:
Generic zombie mooks:
Uncanny valley slasher smile creeps:
Besides I couldn't take the DA2 darkspawn seriously after seeing them waddle into battle 'like my baby brother with a full nappy'.
Not very scary.
While I did prefer Dragon Age: Origins, I think Dragon Age 2 improved on several things, mostly the animation, general art style, and I felt that the skill trees were a lot mother in this one then in Origins. But I still prefer Origins because they actually finished it in their own time, while with 2 it felt like someone moved the release date like 6 month ahead of schedule and they had to scramble to get it done.
They're both pretty good, but they both have aspects that didn't gel well.
DA:O - Replaying missions such as "The Fade" and "The Deep Roads" can be a real drag, end boss is easily killed by just using the harpoon guns instead of actually stabbing him, the side quests felt like chores and were mostly avoided, and it's difficulty on the console version is a little spikey. Not major issues, but issues.
DA2 - Nearly everyone wanted to bone Hawke, game was a little short, weapons/apparel were somewhat scarce/useless, (While I didn't mind) the re use of rooms.
But, if I were to choose I think I would pick DA2. Side quests were easy to obtain and were mostly fun, I enjoyed the combat (I hate clicking one button and then having the whole Runescape auto attack), even though it was awkward when some of the companions hit on me most of them were well fleshed out, and the story was a good build up, I liked that they ditched the dialogue box for a fully voiced dialogue wheel. Simply put, I liked DA2 because it did what I wanted more than the original.
DA:O - Replaying missions such as "The Fade" and "The Deep Roads" can be a real drag, end boss is easily killed by just using the harpoon guns instead of actually stabbing him, the side quests felt like chores and were mostly avoided, and it's difficulty on the console version is a little spikey. Not major issues, but issues.
DA2 - Nearly everyone wanted to bone Hawke, game was a little short, weapons/apparel were somewhat scarce/useless, (While I didn't mind) the re use of rooms.
But, if I were to choose I think I would pick DA2. Side quests were easy to obtain and were mostly fun, I enjoyed the combat (I hate clicking one button and then having the whole Runescape auto attack), even though it was awkward when some of the companions hit on me most of them were well fleshed out, and the story was a good build up, I liked that they ditched the dialogue box for a fully voiced dialogue wheel. Simply put, I liked DA2 because it did what I wanted more than the original.
What does this have to do with the fact that combos were much more expansive in DAO than in DA2 so your argument doesn't really hold water?evilthecat said:
well firstly storm of the century blows donkey dicks. way too big of an AoE it's a lot faster and less boring to simply clear areas by hand. I played through nightmare mode w/ no pausing and I never really bothered with storm of the century.evilthecat said:
And secondly I have no idea wtf death curse is. Theres a spell called death hex... but that's not a combo. So pretty sure you aren't remembering things properly.
Thirdly and lastly, there's tons of good combos. Nightmare, shattering, the shockwave combo is a great follow up after you have used force field to tank a bunch of damage.
Again one of those doesn't exist. The mass paralysis really isn't better than just sleeping everything and then waking nightmare. And storm of the century is either a waste of time or downright counterproductive.evilthecat said:
Not sure what you're talking about. I always get the feeling that most people don't really understand how to play dragon age origins. Pretty much everything is overpowered if you do it correctly... the only exception that I can think of is that archery was bad until they added the quick target bows. There's very few spells or abilities that weren't powerful. When I did my no pausing nightmare full completion runthrough I had my entire lower bar chocked full of spells and I used pretty much all of them in every single fight. The only ones I would really hold back with would be like throwing down big aoe spells like blizzard. And I used shapeshifter which for some reason people also thing is awful despite being one of the most useful utility ability sets in the entire game.evilthecat said:
Not even remotely true. Shatter lets Leliana and mages wreck mid level opponents very quickly as well as take down single targets. waking nightmare+sleep massively debuffs and makes some enemies tank damage for you. sleep+horror does extremely high single target damage useful for dueling sections like the proving and the duel with loghain. Shockwave lets you pull out a character who is badly wounded that you saved with force field or provide a good extra stun at the end of tanking with force field. Improved drain is good for keeping mage health up in tough fights.evilthecat said:
I beg to differ for one Leliana with high cunning and lethality will expend no mana and shatter nonstop. Also it's an actual cross class combo. DA2 is basically less a combo and more just a basic debuff with a tiny visual indicator icon. It's boring and not very effective. People just latched onto the idea because their marketing department made it sound a lot cooler than it was.evilthecat said:
Then maybe they should learn how to use the abilities they got instead of just assuming the game is broken? I know it requires thinking, but isn't it supposed to be in part a combat strategy game?evilthecat said:
Cool because that's the only spell combination in the game?evilthecat said:
No it isn't. It's a game that requires the player to understand that a hammer is not a wrench. They do different things and that doesn't make one of the tools worthless. A warrior is not a mage is not a rogue. They all are effective if used correctly and thoughtfully applied to their proper tasks. Shield warrior isn't going to be ultimate badass DPS superstar. The mage can't do super high single target damage. The rogue can't heal other characters. But when Alistair is properly healed, Leliana is flanking with a pair of high priced daggers, and Morrigan is laying down cones of cold on the enemy; you will succeed handily. DA2 on the other hand tried to amalgamate all the classes together to the point where most everything is practically a texture swap.evilthecat said: