Poll: Dragon Age vs Dragon Age: The Battle Continues!

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votemarvel

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Agayek said:
It got two things right: Varric Tethras and the combat mechanics
Here's what I don't get about the praise for the combat mechanic in Dragon Age 2...it's the same as in the first game.

Sure it is visually superior, no arguments from me there, but under the hood it is still the same dice-roll combat as in Origins.

I first played Dragon Age 2 on the PC, where auto-attack was the order of the day, and it was instantly familiar. The only differences that come to mind were a cool-down on potions and that when a character was knocked back, Hawke (or which ever character you were controlling), would lose them as a target. I suppose because the intention was that you'd get it instantly back because you were hammering a button (which of course you didn't do on the PC.)

So as I said I don't get the praise. Does hammering a button for basic attacks on the consoles really improve it that much?

Origins got everything right for me. Great, if hardly original, story. great characters and plenty of locations to explore.

In Dragon Age 2 it was only the characters that kept me playing, I wanted to know what happened to them. The main story though was a jumbled, unfocused, mess. It never felt personal for me because I felt a lot of important information about Hawke was taking place in the time jumps.

Combat for me suffered in Dragon Age 2 because they tried to force a more action based system but kept the dice-roll. If they wanted to go a hack and slash route then why not do it properly.

Plus I wasn't happy about the locking of the camera angle, so you could only pull back a very small amount. I can't understand why they removed the choice to switch to an isometric view-point for the PC version of the game.

What I did like though was how if you were a Mage in Origins, you were related to the Hawke family in DA2.

As others have said though. They need to start making Dragon Age more like Dragon Age and less like Mass Effect.
 
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Yeah, I think it's just a generally accepted fact that Origins is better than II. Sorta like evolution; there are always some dissenters with any statement, but their opinions are so unpopular that they'll never find any traction with anyone but the other nutbags.

The thing is, DA II is also a very good game, but it's such a strangely designed sequel to a such a popular game that many people are blinded to the game's qualities by a feeling of betrayal.

Some odd complaints I hear from time to time include:

-They completely changed the combat in DAII!
They did? It actually is designed exactly the same way as in origins, but sped up in an effort to infuse some spectacle in the plodding pace of combat in the first game. The only major difference is the way enemies pop out of thin air around you, which is certainly annoying after the billionth time it happens, but even Origins did this from time to time.

-The characters are all terrible in DAII!
Okay, this depends entirely on personal taste. Sure, there are a lot of popular companions in Origins, but II has its own intriguing cast, and just being different from the ones you like does not make them worse. I, for instance, love Morrigan and Sten from Origins, and Alistair and Wynne are well done and interesting as well, while I happened to find Leliana boring, Zevran one-note and way too smarmy, and Oghren was just a walking personification of drunkenness.

In DAII, Varric is a fantastic character, maybe my favorite in the series, and Merrill has a pretty interesting character arc, Aveline is a refreshing take on a strong woman archetype, one where they managed to avoid the dense minefield of "strong woman=either: total ***** OR secretly just wants a man to hold her." Fenris is rather dull but his deadpan viciousness is amusing, and Isabela and Carver/Bethany are pretty darn forgettable.

Overall, I'd say, personally, that the two games are about even in quality of party characters. You can certainly disagree, but it's a pointless argument based on opinion that no one should assert as proof or fact.

-The story in Origins is so much better!
Again, opinions are not facts, and besides, what was so special about the story in Origins? It's a pretty standard end-of-the-world scenario for a fantasy universe, with a mindless evil threatening the land and a band of heroes trying to unite the people to stop it. The civil war is more interesting, but too much of it seems like quick sidetracks from the whole darkspawn invasion thing.

In II, the story is indeed more like a few short episodes strung together with a central character (Hawke). But isn't this a more interesting way to approach a fantasy world, rather than retreading the same story we've seen everywhere since Tolkien, INCLUDING the previous game in the series? I think it was a great idea, just let down by some tricky problems with the pacing. Honestly, I'm more forgiving toward a brilliant failure than an uninspired success.

I do want to make it clear that I think Origins is a better game, and I enjoyed it more, but I feel like I have to champion DAII sometimes against the incredible and undeserved hatred it receives.
 

LetalisK

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So I decided I was going to play through Dragon Age: Origins again(never played DA2) after picking up the ultimate edition from steam. Going with a mage, I'm a few hours in, and I'm bored as shit. I forgot how fucking tedious this game is in between the passable combat.
 

BarbaricGoose

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Now those are the kinda poll numbers I like to see. Loved everything about Origins. I like DA2, as it made me laugh. Revisiting/clearing out that old warehouse for the 11th time had me rolling.

The criminals really should stop moving into that one fucking building.

"Well, guys, that hero man just cleared out the ol' evil-doing warehouse, so I guess we're up. I'm sure we'll fare better than the other 10 gangs/monstrosities/animals that lived here once. Go ahead and stock all the jewels and treasure in these now-empty barrels while you're getting rid of the corpses. I'll go ahead and set up downstairs where I'm guessing all the other gang leaders met their end. I'm sure I'll be fine."
 

Mycroft Holmes

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evilthecat said:
Better than a case study in overcompensation.
Overcompensation implies weakness. I fully believe I am correct, so there is no overcompensation.

evilthecat said:
When your entire argument hinges on "you simply lack the ability to think" then maybe you need to go away and think about why you needed to resort to that, or indeed why people have no desire to waste any time on conversation with you. Because if that's the argument you're going to make, then it is truly time wasted.
Well then I suppose it's good that I have never made that argument? What I said is most people simply don't think. There's plenty of reasons for this but none of them are because they are incapable of intelligent thought. For one thing a lot of people work long hours and so they want something mindless to do in their downtime. Then there's also the fact that most games don't encourage thought; at least in the way that older games did any how. As I believe I mentioned before things like cornering yourself by making bad choices aren't a thing. Even at the hardest levels, people are expected to complete the game with at worst a few too many quickloads. My point being that it is possible for the most part to blunder your way through a game without paying much attention.

As an example a person is legitimately one of the smartest people I have ever known with strong logical abilities tempered by creativity(and I know a lot of really smart people.) But she was having difficulties with a smart phone game that I couldn't name because I don't own a smart phone. Essentially it was a time based puzzle game and she jumped into it without really thinking, trying to solve the puzzle as quickly as possible. She mentioned to me that she couldn't really get the hang of it so I talked about warcraft 3 with her.

Sorry to 'brag' which you apparently hate but it isn't intended to be bragging, only an accurate representation of reality. But for about two years I was top 100 in wc3 and ranked like 23 on the 2v2 ladder for west coast; so I was quite good at the game. But I am a pretty lazy individual over all, by which I mean that I prefer to find the best way to do something. My opponents almost always had substantially higher APMs but I would still come out victorious the bulk of the time. They would jump in the game and immediately try the hardest they could by clicking as fast as possible, because that is what the game had conditioned them for. Any pro blizzard game they always talk about APM and how fast a player is; it's supposed to be the mark of a great player. But I would take the time to think things out before attacking. I wasn't the greatest microer but I would follow basic strategies depending on my opponents build that would mitigate that effect. Like striking multiple bases at the same time and running away immediately. I wasn't better than them or even necessarily smarter than them, I just played the game in a different way that allowed me to take things easier while still winning.

And that is exactly what I told her. And now she is a pro at her iphone game. Because rather than rushing in, she took a step back and looked at the game from a strategy perspective. When people are stupid, yeah they aren't going to think about the game they are playing. But when people are smart they often have a try as hard as possible mindset. So they get wraped up in playing fast that they forget to take that step back and look at what they are doing. They take the more obvious route but not necessarily the smarter route. Which is playing harder and not smarter. It's an easy trap to fall into and I've probably only avoided it by account of my being more inclined to not try hard.


evilthecat said:
Moreover, when your only evidence or reasoning for anything you're saying is "oh, but I soloed nightmare and it was piss easy" (despite my somehow being concerned about friendly fire) or "oh, but I found the game so easy it doesn't matter" and leave no analysis or point of comparison to support your belief, then I'm sorry but my subjective experience is completely different, and it says a lot to me that you believe this simply indicates that I wasn't playing the game as intelligently as you.
Well you weren't if you found other spells and classes to be not strong enough. But I feel as though I've provided plenty of evidence. I'm not about to go and dig up a bunch of data about damage levels because I prefer to go off instinct and despise spread sheets. If you bought excellent equipment for your melee characters then they are pretty powerful. If you use spells properly then you will find that most of them are quite useful. Yes there is one that is absolutely retarded and can kill any mage spell, but by and large I found that there are a superfluous number of equally viable options when building a character. When I played I found that utilizing cone spells and other basic spells was equally if not more effective than using giant field spells. If you want to call me a liar and my experiences false then go ahead. But from my experience and my perspective of playing the game an embarrassing number of times there wasn't really much of a balancing problem for the game.

Meanwhile I found DA2 to have a rather extremely balancing problem for nightmare. In that mages and rogues to some extend could absolutely not even take a single hit on nightmare mode without the game being completely ruined and having to reload. In my opinion the hallmark of a good combat system is being able to adapt to a situation rather than going on I guess an archer shot my mage so I might as well reload at this point.

evilthecat said:
Does any of this really matter?
For the sake of truth? Yes it does.

evilthecat said:
However, as you yourself said, if one result comes out at 11 and another comes out at 10, does it matter if you only need a 5? It doesn't matter if you can find a situational use for any of the vast number of dross talents in Origins, because if you're still building your character primarily with the purpose of getting to a small core of generally useful abilities then it's just not as fun as having every level feel like you're getting something useful.
1) holy crap you love the word Dross.

2) it's not about a small core of generally useful abilities. I filled up my entire bottom bar stretched all the way across on a 1080p monitor and i used 85% of them in every encounter. The point is that your abilities a great. They get the job done. But with a little bit of effort and situational awareness I can do the job better because everything said, there are a lot of good abilities and spells and the game is balanced pretty well.
 

Jacques Joseph

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In all honesty, what surprises me the most is how some people, not only here but generally, can have so radical opinions on both games. To me personally - and that is only my opinion and I don´t want to be starting some arguing here - DAO wasn´t all that great, just as DA2 wasn´t all that bad. Out of it all, at least for me, DA2 comes out ahead. Maybe just because I went in not expecting that much after the overhyped DAO turned out to be just sort of OK...

EDIT: plus most of what evilthecat said about the games, though I never got involved so much to know or care about the numbers behind the mechanics, so I am just one of those noobs who never understood why some things work and some don´t. Maybe it got better with DA2, maybe not, I don´t care either, just lowered the difficulty to normal so as not to get frustrated over the respawning waves of enemies...
 

votemarvel

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Jacques Joseph said:
EDIT: plus most of what evilthecat said about the games, though I never got involved so much to know or care about the numbers behind the mechanics, so I am just one of those noobs who never understood why some things work and some don´t. Maybe it got better with DA2, maybe not, I don´t care either, just lowered the difficulty to normal so as not to get frustrated over the respawning waves of enemies...
I'm one of those people who love the numbers in role playing games. I can, and indeed have many times, spend ages pouring over the equipment and weapons, trying to decide if the agility boost is worth the health loss or is the damage increase worth the loss of range.

Slightly off track but that is why I prefer Mass Effect 1's combat to its sequels, I liked how the stats were just as important as your ability to place a cross-hair.

Back on track. So that's another reason I didn't like Dragon Age II. There was no real choice to make about weapons and armour because some were simply better than others.

The continuing popularity of Origins should show EA and Bioware that there is still a market out there for those types of games but they just keep seeing simplifying to appeal to the mass market as the best way to go. Yet as Dragon Age II goes to show, you do that and you please neither side.
 

Terminal Blue

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Mycroft Holmes said:
Overcompensation implies weakness. I fully believe I am correct, so there is no overcompensation.
Anyone who is overcompensating fully believes they are correct. In fact it is impossible for that person to even acknowledge the possibility that they might be wrong, that is part of the problem.

Don't take it too personally though, I was exaggerating for effect.

Mycroft Holmes said:
I wasn't better than them or even necessarily smarter than them, I just played the game in a different way that allowed me to take things easier while still winning.
I hate to say it, but I think maybe you're putting yourself down.

Even I know that raw APM is a terrible measure of skill, because it's easy to artificially inflate it by spamming or making actions which are not very useful. Of course there's a difference between just being fast and being effective, heck that's something which has been drilled into me too.

I've never been a big Blizzard gamer (other than a period playing World of Warcraft which we do not speak of) but I used to be quite good at chess. I wasn't the best in my area or anything, but I could play in tournaments and get a decent ranking. I don't know if you know much about that, but in tournament chess you're timed, and some players in junior tournaments do get very into times as evidence of skill. The thing is, the really good players in the adult game tend to be those who have no problem spending 10 minutes on a single move (1/3rd of the total time you're allowed), I learned very early on that time is a false economy and that patience is the way forward.

To be honest, this probably carries over. I still overall tend to prefer turn based games to real times ones for this reason, and I tend to pause a lot in real time games which allow it. Heck, my favourite game of DA:O was one where I played a rogue and honestly tried to make traps work. I suspect I'm one of the very few people who always uses rogues to scout encounters in RPGs where that is possible (it wasn't in DA2, and I found that really annoying). So there you go. Your criticism is fair enough, but I don't think it applies to me or to the particular strategies I use because if anything I play over-tactically and over-cautiously.

Mycroft Holmes said:
Well you weren't if you found other spells and classes to be not strong enough.
No. No.

There's a whole list of spells which are useful, and actually the classes are not too bad (although I do think warrior probably needed to be made more exciting to play). The problem emerges in the fact that there cornerstone abilities in every class (particularly mage and rogue) which can have a huge effect on the game when compared to other abilities. This doesn't mean those "weaker" abilities are useless, because the game is set up so that any ability is better than none, but they are often highly situational or simply do not give a particularly useful benefit. For the few times in the game you're going to benefit from feign death, something like momentum or lethality will help you out in every single fight.

This isn't true in every single tree or ability, but it's true in many.

You've probably worked out that I used to play Magic the Gathering as well, so I know the difference between something being "imbalanced" in the sense of being strictly better (i.e. simply doing everything something else does more effectively or cheaper with no additional stipulations or negatives) and imbalance in the sense of something being more generally useful than something else, and yeah, there's not very much of the former in Origins, but I'd still contend there is quite a lot of the latter.

I think I've been overfocusing on the spell combos, but some little examples.

Cone of Cold - Its cooldown is so low that you can keep a pretty large group out of the fight indefinitely, and it works as both damage and crowd control. There are plenty of abilities which are signficiantly harder to get which are far less useful than cone of cold.

Blood Wound - It's a bit like crushing prison (already a very good spell) only it works on groups with no friendly fire. Okay, it's not strictly better than crushing prison, but it's far far better than any other blood mage spell, including the level 4 one, and actually much better than most of the other specialization spells in general.

Arrow of Slaying - Okay, so you know archery is not very good. Well, this and scattershot are the only reason to play an archer in the vanilla game. The big issue is that it has absolutely no logic in how it works (the table of random numbers I posted a while back is the damage multiplier for arrow of slaying, with the first number being the level difference between you and your target) so unless you have the ability to see enemy levels and have written down the table it's often difficult to know how to use it, but when it works it's insanely powerful. Not only does it kind of carry the archery tree all by itself, it's potentially one of the highest single target burst-damage abilities in the game (discounting mana clash).

Song of Courage - This is a good example of something which looks cool on paper but is kind of silly when applied. It works fine at normal levels of cunning. However, if you're pumping the vast majority of your points into cunning, which you can do with this talent, you'll end up getting more attack and damage than you would from the duelist tree, and bonus critical chance to boot, but for the entire party instead of one person.

While, I have to say, it was really fun working this out, this kind of excessive synergy is something which should be quite easy to pick up on.

Momentum - Momentum was clearly designed with two-weapon warriors in mind. It makes them a bit more effective but not overpowering. The armor mechanics (which are better in Origins, another thing I'll say) make really fast attack speeds less overwhelming than you might think.. until you're playing a rogue.

Rogues will end up with very high armor penetration and the ability to deal automatic critical damage. They also tend to use weapons with a high speed modifier. Anything which increases a rogue's attack speed has a massive effect on damage output, far more so than with any other class. This means that an ability which is decent enough on warriors can easily become the entire focus of the two weapon tree for rogues.

There are quite a few of these, I could probably go on for a while.

Mycroft Holmes said:
Yes there is one that is absolutely retarded and can kill any mage spell, but by and large I found that there are a superfluous number of equally viable options when building a character.
Oh yeah, I agree there are often multiple options, particularly once you've picked up your cornerstone abilities. What I actually don't agree with is that there are anything like as many as in DA2.

Mycroft Holmes said:
Meanwhile I found DA2 to have a rather extremely balancing problem for nightmare. In that mages and rogues to some extend could absolutely not even take a single hit on nightmare mode without the game being completely ruined and having to reload.
Yeah, they should have scaled the force mechanics better.

Force overall was a good idea, but it did get kind of silly on higher difficulties.

Mycroft Holmes said:
2) it's not about a small core of generally useful abilities. I filled up my entire bottom bar stretched all the way across on a 1080p monitor and i used 85% of them in every encounter.
Of course you did. There's no point not to.

That doesn't mean they actually had much of an effect though.
 

Mycroft Holmes

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evilthecat said:
Anyone who is overcompensating fully believes they are correct. In fact it is impossible for that person to even acknowledge the possibility that they might be wrong, that is part of the problem.
Yeah everyone believes they are correct. No one is ever like "here is my opinion but it's wrong so whatever."

evilthecat said:
Even I know that raw APM is a terrible measure of skill, because it's easy to artificially inflate it by spamming or making actions which are not very useful.
My point is that they played harder though. They tried harder in every way and I cruised through because I took a step back and thought to myself hell I'll just run around in circles with my raiders and play who can kill the base faster. And I've found that people either are just bad or they are good but they jump into the game and charge straight forward putting in the most effort they possibly can. And that often blinds them to the little intricacies of games.

evilthecat said:
So there you go. Your criticism is fair enough, but I don't think it applies to me or to the particular strategies I use because if anything I play over-tactically and over-cautiously.
Well I haven't say behind you and watched you play so I can only guess. But it seems like you found one optimal way to play and you stuck to it rather than experimenting with other strategies. Even if it is a fantastic strategy that does not negate the many other, perhaps better, ones. It might be a curse or a gift but I have a difficult time doing the same thing repeatedly for too long a period of time, so I am always tinkering with other methods and strategies. So even when I find something that works great, I am inclined to continue messing with things(to the both the disappointment and enjoyment of my aforementioned wc3 2v2 partner depending on how crazy/effective my new method was.)

evilthecat said:
although I do think warrior probably needed to be made more exciting to play.
Probably, but although I did find shield bashes to be the most hilarious things ever; I never really stuck to any one character for more than a few seconds anyways so it's hard to get a feel for that kind of thing.

evilthecat said:
The problem emerges in the fact that there cornerstone abilities in every class (particularly mage and rogue) which can have a huge effect on the game when compared to other abilities. This doesn't mean those "weaker" abilities are useless, because the game is set up so that any ability is better than none, but they are often highly situational or simply do not give a particularly useful benefit. For the few times in the game you're going to benefit from feign death, something like momentum or lethality will help you out in every single fight.
Sure but I think there's far more use than you've admitted and they are far closer to being balanced. If I had origins installed still I would record some fights and show you how effective things can be, but I moved and have like 300 kbs internet so I really don't want to spend like 30 hours downloading it again.

As a caveat I do think that Dragon Age Awakening did become pointless for most spells/abilities. I mean you could just get all the no friendly fire, sustained forever, aoe, massive damage abilities on a mage then stack them on top of each other and just run around in circles to win. Well except for the fucking nightmare mode Harvester in Golems of Amgarak. Fuck that thing.

But you're far underestimating most spells. I got tons of mileage out of things you apparently didn't use practically at all. I mean I'm assuming your previous example of blood wound vs flying swarm was saying blood wound was so much better than flying swarm, because most people for some reason think that blood wound is great(it is but so are lots of things) and that shapeshifting is a waste of time. But I probably used flying swarm far far more than blood wound. Not only can I zip through towns and levels quickly because it's way faster than running but it's also a really baller combat ability so long as the enemy using using fire at all. You become practically invincible, do a good size aoe with no friendly fire, and regain your health I would use it to wreck large groups of weaker enemies or even just to troll Loghain because he has such a hard time hitting me.

And there's so many more examples of stuff like that. Where people say a spell in DAO is worthless and yet I absolutely wreck face on nightmare mode with it. So what conclusions would you have me draw from that? Either somehow everyone is a gibbering idiot who can't even figure out how to press buttons or they rush into things without thinking, do them wrong, and then just assume it's the games fault and move on without analyzing what went wrong.




Anyways I was going to on and point all all the uses and stuff so I saved this post for like a day on my desktop so I could complete it later; before realizing I'm never going to because I can't be arsed and I don't like repeating the same argument over and over with slight different phrasing(although it is a great vocab builder.) Anyways you're wrong, my embarrassingly long, like 200 hours of dragon age origins, experimenting with the utility of tons of spells and abilities can lead me only to that conclusion. And my complete and utter disappointment at feeling that nothing really matters much in the combat in DA2. Everything seems to be bland palate swaps of other abilities with slightly new animations. And nightmare mode is absolutely terrible in a way that DAO doesn't even approach. So that's my conclusion take it or leave it.