So I just tried Dragon Age 2...

[Senaro]

The only time the AI bugged me was when they refused to stand behind the pillars of a certain boss battle while he shot his big AoE of death. I tried manually moving them all out of the way, but the ones I wasn't controlling kept walking back into it.

Besides that the game is vastly superior to Origins in every way except a glaring absence of Alistair.

 

[Knight Templar]

The point of this thread was?

GodofCider seems to have hit a glitch.
One I (and as far as I can tell most people) have yet to encounter.

 

[Aesir23]

I actually really enjoyed the game. Heck, I'm on my third playthrough. (Xbox 360, thank you very much)

Sure some things annoyed me like the repeating dungeons and the "flickering" of characters in some of the cutscenes, but I had no other problems with the game. Not with the controls, AI, etc. I rather liked the graphics as well. Besides, all of your complaints could be applied to Origins as well.

Maybe you just haven't gotten the hang of the game yet? Sometimes it's better to assign tasks to your allies manually.

Also, a lot of games have you rotate the camera manually. It's not a new feature.

It may not be a perfect game but it's certainly not as bad as people seem to think it is. With the way some people are reacting you'd think their console or pc burst into flames just by placing the disk in the drive.

 

[McNinja]

As far as I can tell this game is nearly unplayable.

Aside from the terrible control interface, poor camera angles(you have to rotate it manually?), at least five year outdated graphics(which consume vast reserves of processing and ram power) all this while running on the highest settings. Aside from all that. The thing that makes this game nearly unplayable, is the ai.

I literally have not been able to progress past the first 'real' engagement as a warrior, terrible gameplay aside, because my ally ai which I need to rely upon, is so FREAKING BAD that they stand there looking at me like an idiot.

My dedicated mage-through both abilities and tactics, stares at me, refusing to heal me while I die; despite having a fully bar of mana, and cooldown for health casts.

And what is with most of the critic reviews? Baseline of an 8.0 it seems, with a user average of universally below 5.0?

Glad I borrowed the game, too bad too, as it actually looked pretty good...from a distance.

I mean... if you're playing it one nightmare you might have to constantly be rotating through party members in order to get them to be where you want them, and to do what you want them to. As for unplayable...

No.

The warrior is the easiest class to play, and if you cannot progress past the very first encounter (which is outside Lothering), you might need to just not play the game, and go find something that is far easier. God help you if you even attempt to play Demon's Souls...

 

[Tanfastic]

Step one: Buy an xbox or ps3 (If not owned)
Step two: Buy DA2 for said system
Step three: Enjoy it.

There are a TON of games that I would argue are "PC games" that don't work on consoles, DA2 is NOT one of them, in fact its the opposite. There are a select few games that are console games, due to controls, camera angles, and gameplay in general.

Also set some tactics and drink a health pot or two.

Nah. I'm not sure if you've played DA2 on a PC, but it works perfectly fine on one.

It may just be a matter of personal taste, but the controls, camera angles and gameplay in general are different on the PC. Specifically, they're different in a way I prefer.

I have tried it, didn't like it for PC. But for his problem the xbox camera and gameplay might fix his issues.

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

I had none of these issues with Dragon Age 2. The UI was great, AI did pretty much exactly what I programmed it to via tactics, and the graphics were very good on Very High with the hi-res texture pack.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well the AI doesn't always use the abilities you want unless you make sure they are set, I left everything on default with one or two additions so they would use potions.
Those preset tactics are also not always ideal, if you want something specific it's best to set the actual state.

If you find the comabt difficult just put it on casual and try again, I played on nightmare and it wasn't really hard only a huge grind fest with those randomly spawning enemies so the last couple of hours I put it down to easiest before I hate the game too much.

Well the camera is manual only, so it's bad in that sense, and sometimes it will go behind invisible walls and you won't be able to click anyone.

The graphics are decent, but level design is utter shit, looks like a weekend job, later on you will notice they only designed 1 mansion, 1 house, 1 cave and 1 underground hideout, obviously they weren't that bothered if you walk into the same scenery all the time.

 

[Anah'ya]

Dishonest?

I've literally been unable to progress past the first serious engagement because of the terrible gameplay and ai, how is that dishonest?

*snickers*

Oh this brings back memories... the dreaded Ogre in Origins, up in the b(e)acon tower. It's as though Dragon Age in general has decided to weed out the players who cannot play the game at the beginning, instead of leading them onto a quest that would fail eventually anyway.

Though of course its the game itself that is blamed, not the person sitting behind the keyboard.

DA2 is by far not perfect, there's no such thing as a perfect game (well except Thief, System Shock 2 and SC Chaos Theory, but I digress *coughs*, but if anything is to be criticised it's the copy/paste copy/paste copy/paste approach to environments. Then again it's a BioWare game, I'd rather they focus on dialogue than level design. Psssst, that was a personal opinion.

As far as game play and graphics are concerned... had no problems or reason to shout at my AI companions, saw no issues with the performance of the graphics (or their looks for that matter, they are fairly spiffy) and played through the whole game without a single glitch altogether. Certainly didn't crash, unlike Origins which I have been replaying the past couple of days.

So.

Yeah.

Unplayable?

Nope. Some folks just aren't suited for this style of combat.

 

[kasperbbs]

A lot of people complained about this game, including me, but your problems with it are weird. You clearly are doing something wrong, i finished it 2 times on medium/hard difficulty as a rogue and a mage and i had only few moments where AI failed me, i didn't even change the tactics, as for the healing, most of the time i did it manually because i was used to doing so in dao. Don`t know what the hell is your problem with the camera. It ran fine on my fairly old machine, i played on high setting because my video card doesn't support dx11, oddly enough it had shorter loading times than origins. Can`t argue about the graphics, i have no problem with it.

 

[TheEndlessSleep]

It's not the game... YOU must be doing something very wrong if you can't get through the first serious engagment.

What are you counting as the first serious engagement btw? For me, playing on normal, the frst thing I had to repeat because of failure was the deep roads dragon.

Mabye you weren't confirming the tactis after you set them?

 

[Vibhor]

Just a pointer to the people who liked the game, there exist people who love daikatana.
That said, I haven't played any bioware rpg except baldur's gate and Mass effect 1 (too linear for my choice) so I cannot comment whether DA2 is worthy successor or not.

 

[omegawyrm]

Funny, all of that are the criticisms I had from the first game that got fixed.

 

[Mouse One]

Seriously though, you'd think with all these DA2 threads that Bioware had just killed most of the Escapists' kittens.

Poor Ser-Pounce-a-Lot. I'll admit, I missed the old Anders.

 

[H20 Pirate]

I think it's rather likely this person is just fishing for a certain type of fire drenched response.

I mean it's a fine game, and while it may have it's flaws, it is nowhere near unplayable.

 

[SpaceCop]

Constantly having to jump between characters to babysit them throughout combat can take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it it shouldn't be game-breaking.