Another question for my fellow Hawkes:
What is up with the waves? The constant, spawning waves of enemies.
Not just in some battles but in EVERY BATTLE. It makes the strategy of when/how often/where to use abilities such a pain.
Wait, I’m about to kill the blood mage… ok, now where was I? Oh wait 5 more blood mages just materialized, let me just take care of these fools. This will teach me to post while playing. Ok, now that their dead---- OH wait, archers just choppered in from the sky…
I didn’t mind that at all, honestly. And you just have to make sure that you have a high stamina/mana regen so you can keep using abilities. Or, just carry a bunch of potions. I never really ran out of mana while playing on normal at least.
I disagree. There were elements of the story that carried through, but there was no one unified arc. It was pretty much:
[spoiler]
Act 1: Raise enough money to go to the Deep Roads, just cuz, ya know? Oh, you found a lyrium artifact things, and it’s bad. Later you’ll deal with the crazy dwarf that took and it and it’s the deus ex to make the head templar go crazy. Other than that, you can pretty much forget about it.
Act 2: the horn-heads are misbehaving. People also don’t like them. Fight fight fight! Yeah, that turns out not to matter much after all.
Act 3: Templar vs Mage, fight! Choose a side, do some annoying side quests while bouncing around and then fight in a little mini civil-war and… the game just ends. That’s it. Over.
No Blight ended. No overarching political conspiracy dealt with (but it is, to be fair, hinted at). Hell, Flemeth, put forth as the ultimate Big Bad in Morrigan’s expansion pack for DA:O has a cameo or two and then… nothing. At all.
All in all the game seemed like a bit of filler designed to string people along under the next DA game comes out. A game which will, hopefully, tie everything together. [/spoiler]
I can see where you’re coming from, and I agree that there’s not a single story arc. However, I think the theme of the story is consistent and carries throughout the game.
[spoiler] While I liked the story of DA:O, it’s been done many many times before. It’s done very well, to be sure, but still it’s a familiar tale. With DA2 I agree the way the story was told could have been handled better, but the story itself seems refreshing. I can’t think of any other games where I felt like a bad guy when I was trying to do the right thing.
While the endings of the first 2 chapters were about the Deep Roads expedition and the Qunari attack, the main point was to get you to see Kirkwall as a living city, which I thought was handled pretty well. You are introduced to the various factions operating in the background, you see some of the things that are happening, the tensions that are building up. You get a build up and a temporary reprieve with the end of chapter 2, but things keep going downhill until the tension becomes unmanageable. And when Anders sparks his revolution, the whole thing goes off. I would have liked an epilogue that shows more about what happens to you, but I was satisfied with the ending as it is.
[/spoiler]
Agreed, I just think it could’ve been handled much better on the plot side. The theme was definitely “penniless refugee’s rags to riches tale in the city of Kirkwald.” And that’s cool. But it would’ve been nice to see a unified plot arc through the game rather than, essentially, unrelated events and loosely connected plot points somehow come to a head in the third act.
I was actually quite surprised that the game ended where it did. I though that there would, at least, be a section where you have to take the war-torn city and rally it to defend itself. Heck, that was hinted at when
[spoiler]I refused to kill Justice Boy and the prince guy was all like “Okay fucker, I’m going to go raise an army and come back and ruin your shit!” And the crazy rogue from DA:O with all her hinting about The Divine coming in to wreck shit.
Instead, all I got was a dead head mage, a dead head templar and a lame “to be continued” ending leading to what they’re hopefully going to do in DA3.[/spoiler]
These sort of games got to stop having duels, when the whole point of combat is group vs group. There’s hardly anything more boring than two guys in plate spamming all their abilities and drinking potions for minutes. Of course, you can just switch to Casual for that one fight which is what I did, but it felt ridiculous I had to do that. The other option would’ve been a 15-20 minute fight with me drinking all my 15 health potions, and at the rate I was depleting my enemy’s health bar it would’ve been touch and go if that would have worked. DA:O had this too, but at least I played a mage there and just Glyph of Repulsioned my way to victory every time.
The duel (unless there is more than one) shouldn’t be done as a toe-to-toe fight. You are supposed to run around him and hit him in the back while he sits there and thinks about his next move. If you have a tar bomb it really gets silly watching him stare at the wall for about 10 seconds while you whittle his health down.
At least that’s how it worked with my rogue. Every time I went toe-to-toe he’d one shot 2/3rds of my health but I quickly learned if I ran around a column he’d start to swing at the air and I could just run up and slice him.
Sometimes I would get stuck to where I was still in combat mode, but some cluster of archers hadn’t spawned yet. It makes me flash to an image of a couple of guys off having a smoke break and suddenly realizing the battle’s started, stomping out their cherries and jumping down from the balcony just in time to get fireballed.
I’ve only barely gotten into chapter 2 so far. I haven’t bought any of these upgrades for companions you mention, though apparently I didn’t need them, except that I did have to crank down the difficulty for the rock wraith, because I just didn’t care to keep dicking with that. I’ll look for it from now on, though. I wondered about there apparently not being anything worth spending money on except the potions to re-jigger your ability points. Turns out that this shadow/stealth business takes a hell of a lot of points to be able to put into action, whereas whatever you put into more crits helps with what is pretty much what you’re going to end up doing between your sneaking attempts anyway. The rogue seems suspiciously like just a fighter who can pick locks.
Works for dps guys I guess, but my tank hardly does any damage, back or front. That’s just the thing about duels, they might be trivial for one guy and utterly silly to another. Even with me constantly hitting him and only using damage abilities it took several minutes to get him to 80% health, if I had spend time running around his heals would’ve outpaced my damage completely. I suppose using poison (which I didn’t have) and de-activating my tank toggle thing (-25% damage - as it is always on I didn’t even think of it) would’ve helped, but that doesn’t change the fact the fight felt completely ridiculous for my character.
Might be more of a failure of Hard difficulty, when I think of it more. Usually the difficulty of the fights comes from the complexity and that’s something you can use skill to counter, but when it is 1vs1 that’s gone and all that’s left is one guy with a few thousand hp who does stupendous damage against another guy with 300 hp and pitiful damage. I really like the ability to change difficulty mid-game in cases like this.
This pisses me off too, also because it’s so predictable – I think it’s happened in, like, 98% of all the combat situations in the entire game. It also pisses me off because it’s hard to keep track of where all the enemies were on the map, so after the fight I don’t know where to look for dropped loot.
The lack of loot also pissed me off until I realized you find loot (and good loot too) all over the damn place, so it’s not like you’re hurting.
Except when I killed this huge dragon and got 24 silver pieces for it, and that’s all. A few minutes later I killed an ogre and got 27 silver. That dragon fight took at least 10 minutes and all I got was 24 silver?!
I switched on all the options to see the damage numbers and was quite pleased when my rogue would do 8000-9000 damage with assassinate. Stack Mark of Death, Brittle and whatever you can from Entropy and you can take out 1/2 of any boss’s lifebar. He would also pretty much one-shot any trash mob with that jump critical they do when they first close the distance. The whole game was pretty trivial on normal I kept thinking I’d switch to Hard or nightmare but…bleh I don’t want to make the fights LONGER (this from someone that only plays on Nightmare on the first game because I enjoy the pace of the fights on that setting). Hell by the end I was wanting anything to be able to stop fighting 50 mobs every third step.
On that note beat it today. I’m not sure how to feel. When it’s good it’s pretty good but it just feels…rushed? Unfinished? Badly paced? Unfocused? Definitely could have used 6 months more development time.
Heh, the Loghain duel in DA:O wasn’t so bad even with a tank. You just had to send in a 2H guy, with the ability that makes him immune to stuns and single target knockdowns. Then Loghain spends most of the fight either on his arse, or spamming useless low damage abilities while Sten just wails on him.
The funniest thing was that the fight ended with the decapitation death move. Loghain seemed fine afterwards though 
OTOH, the various solo Provings were a bitch and a half as an archer. The worst was the one against one shield warrior and one rogue. Stunlock city.
Kinda figured Dragon Age 2 wouldn’t be as full as Dragon Age 1. They probably got money hungry and already had a good name so they didn’t put as much heart into the second game. I think Dragon Age 1 should go down in history as one of the top games of all time. I haven’t even finished it yet but after reading the reviews of Dragon Age 2 and although they aren’t bad, I will take my time playing Dragon Age 1 and make it last.
Other people seem to be having a problem similar to mine. This is the most fun I’ve had playing a game that I have nothing but complaints about. Many of these complaints, of course, have to do with it being much less game than Dragon Age: Origins. Dumbed-down gameplay, a much smaller world to bustle in, etc. If this were a new franchise from an up-and-coming producer, I’d be impressed. Coming from Bioware as a follow up to a game that really did rival Baldur’s Gate II in the ranks of the all-time classics, it seems disappointing.
So, let me say a few nice things. The voice acting is exemplary so far. Even Bioware has been known to slack on this – consider Nathan Filion’s phone-in-while-on-the-toilet rendering of Gao the Lesser in Jade Empire. The lack of epicness is actually great for telling the more tense story they’ve got here, with no place to go. It’s like a Dragon Age one-off, like those TV movies they made for Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica.
Of course, I wouldn’t expect to pay as much for a one-off episode as for a full epic season of television, but here I am back to complaining. Someone mentioned previously that it may have been EA’s influence that leads to this business. Long ago there was a thread about the deleterious effect they’ve had on sports games franchises – year after year of re-packaging un-updated materials while quashing competing franchises with exclusivity deals. Well, Dragon Age: Kirkwall does play into the complaint that EA is trying to see how little we’re willing to pay for.
Actually, Dragon Age:Origins didn’t make that much money relative to the time it took to create and the amount of marketing around it. Despite all their drumming up of THE NEW SHIT, it still remained mostly a neckbeard hit and the console, Halo of War frat house crowd they were trying to hook in mostly didn’t bite in spite of Morrigan’s tits. Mass Effect was way more successful there, which is probably why DA2 took so many pages from its book (waves of enemies, re-used cells, dialogue wheels, reduced inventory, etc…)
Sorry but this is wrong. Not the development vs costs thing but the neckbeard thing. DA outsold ME by quite a margin it was in fact Bioware’s biggest seller to date. If it was only a niche game then all their other games were worse including ME.
I can believe they were trying to go for a different market while retaining their old but that just shows they don’t understand either market very well.
I didn’t say it sold badly, I said it sold to neckbeards. BG2 nostalgics, RPG fans new and old, in other words people who would have bought the game no matter what direction Bioware took.
It’s not a niche in the sense of say hex wargames are, in fact it’s a sizeable portion of the market; but again it’s a group that would have bought the game no matter what, especially considering the dearth of good RPGs these days. The new crowd they were angling for on top of that didn’t really bite.
So, finally finished it. Did the last half a dozen fights on Casual since I just couldn’t bother micromanaging my way to Hard victories - keeping 4 idiot characters out of AEs and guzzling down countless potions to stay alive through the unavoidable attacks just holds zero appeal to me - I had no healer which made all the boss fights in the game especially tedious.
Bleh. Didn’t really like the end much, and while I don’t agree with the many rabid “betrayed” Bioware fans out there that the game was total crap, it was still a disappointment all in all. Hopefully Star Wars: The Old Republic and ME3 are better. 
I finished it a couple of days ago, and concur. I was most pissed when Orsino, with whom I’d been siding all along and defending as a good guy, decides at the last minute to use blood magic…and you have to fight him. WTF was that for? What was the point of siding with him, then? Not to mention how utterly ridiculous it was within the story context for him to make that choice. So stupid.
I felt the exact same way, gallows fodder. It was a big part of the why the ending felt empty and pointless for me I think.
Hey, can you maybe, y’know, not call me a Neckbeard? :rolleyes:
For someone who probably named himself after a silly RPG character from In Nomine known for his cunning humor, you’re awfully lacking. RPG fans come from all ages and types, and Dragon Age sold far and away to too many people for a ridiculous characterization like that. You got it wrong and just let it go ratehr than dig in deeper.