Continuity said:
These games have every right to exist exactly as they are, but the sad fact is that they being made instead of traditional RPGs. Bioware could of been making something of the calibre of Kotor, or baldurs gate... but rather than have that, instead we get served up this. Its like your favourite brand of whiskey suddenly becoming an alcopop.
DA:O was considerably more complicated than either of those games mechanics-wise. Are you simply complaining because it didn't use an existing D20 system (or variant thereof?) Neverwinter Nights would be a better example because it's built on the more complicated 3.5 rules, but even there DA:O definitely kept pace with it.
Speaking as someone who really loved DA:O though, I'm not getting the hate for DA2 at all.
Firstly, it doesn't play like an action game at all. Sure, there's that bit in the beginning of the demo where you're slaughtering darkspawn in one hit, but that's a deliberately easy tutorial section. For most of the demo I found the action considerably slower than Origins, characters seem to be slightly more resilient all around and the tactical use of abilities hasn't really changed. It was a bit easier, sure, but DA:O on normal mode was hard enough to put a lot of people off so you can see where they're going there. I'm sure the harder difficulty modes will still be hard.
Secondly, they've cut down abilities, but seriously, how many of the abilities in DA:O were you using? It's one thing to boast a vast an expansive character creation system but if some of those options are useless compared to others you may as well not include them. In DA2 it feels like everything is much more useful and has a major effect without being an automatic game winner, which could actually make character building more interesting.
Thirdly, a bigger focus on visuals. Seriously RPG fans, what the hell happened to you? You think those people playing the first text based RPGs and Roguelikes wouldn't have killed for even a visual representation of what was going on, let alone one as stylish and cinematic as Dragon Age 2?
The things which actually worried me are things you can't include in the demo. Origins, for example, was huge because it used a fairly limited range of models and graphical environments. With more visual complexity comes more disk space requirements which means our poor chuggy old consoles are going to need to sacrifice something, and I fear that something will be length and scale. This was the big problem with ME2, not that it had been 'dumbed down' (the original was so easily broken it was laughable and claim it was somehow more mentally demanding is ridiculous) but that it lost the sense of epic scope and scale and became a series of beautiful but relatively restrictive shooting galleries.
But we won't really know until the full game is released, so having a hissy fit about that seems counter-productive.
