[Fury]

Well, having now reached the beginning of Act 3, I suppose I should post a few more thoughts.

1.The annoying

--Repetitive environments (There's an achievement called "Spelunker". It's unlocked by visiting 10 caves. I still wonder why I have gotten it, since I only visited 2 caves. Over and over again.)
--Enemy waves. Which remind me of the worst FS2 missions with endlessly respawning waves. Now, it wouldn't be too bad if the game did a better job of hiding the spawning, but alas, these people seem to have developed a remarkable aptitude for hiding in plain ****ing sight and plopping into view when they see their mate getting slaughtered.

2. The Good

As the RPS article demonstrates, DA2 has a rather slow, disjointed start. It takes a while for you to get used to the main character, and the story doesn't provide much in terms of antagonists that could act as foils for Hawke.
However, once you leave Act 1 behind and get into Act 2, the story does pick up the pace rather nicely. Conflict seeds that were sown in Act 1 grow more noticeable, with the story constantly throwing choices your way that determine the way things are going to go.
So yeah. After a bad start, the game improves quite nicely.

Yeah, that description of a bug that users have encountered in the course of normal gameplay, breaking their game by rendering their characters invulnerable, is really exaggerated.

Oh my god. A game has a bug that can be exploited. Surely this has never happened before.

Oh, wait, yes it has. I really do not know what you are trying to say here. The bug itself is a rather minor affair (insofar as it hasn't affected me yet), and likely the result of the overall rather shoddy QA run EA seems to have done on this one. It's not a big gamebreaker. Seriously. How many big RPGs are there that have shipped without exploitable bugs?

Finally a sensible post. I agree with all those points. Good god they overuse environments like caves to the point of it becoming ridiculous. It doesn't help at all that you're stuck in Kirkwall and the surrounding areas for majority of the game, so environment repetition becomes unbearing.

The enemy waves? Christ. That's poor gameplay design if anything and really annoying. Particularly when you really don't know how strong those hostiles really are. Some can be brutally blasted to pits with as much as sneezing in their general direction, but some are really tough. For most parts fights have been easy though. Every time there's some kind of boss monster or whatever, there's also some kind of "environment exploit" to kill it without much hassle. Or so I thought, still stuck in this High Dragon encounter.

For all its bad points, I think the game's still mostly fun to play. For now anyway.

[Ransom]

I will say this, I really like the way your decisions about what Hawke says impact Hawke's personality in non-interactive dialogue. I love the idea of companions visiting each other, and I love the apparent reported amount of banter. Hope all that's in ME3.

Hawke in general is the one element of the game I enjoy unreservedly. The character's a welcome change from the flaccid roleplaying in Origins.

[TrashMan]

This just in - BioWare employees caught posting perfect reviews on Metacritic!

Bioware/EA asking fans to post good reviews and spam posts about ME3 on facebook and twitter.


Dear lord! How the mighty have fallen!

[newman]

Source?

[Flipside]

Based on this imagery:

http://i.imgur.com/BEZOe.png

At the moment, I consider it 'suspicious' but not 'damning' without a bit more testable evidence.

[TrashMan]

Aparently, he's not the only employee who did that. Now, it could be some trolling, but I doubt it.


Seems EA is desperately trying to do some damage control.

Not just that but think about this.  Bioware was getting absolutely DEMOLISHED from alll of the different scandals on both Facebook and Twitter.

So they come out with a ME2 DLC screen and say if you want to see more screens fans have to spam post about ME2 on Facebook and Twitter.  Which conveniently dilutes the amount of hate going on on both to people who dont know what to look for.

Funny how that works out.

[NGTM-1R]

ngtm-1r have i ever told you that you can be quite mysterious

I shall explain.

DA:O in its efforts to call back to BG and related titles managed to create an RPG system that was, essentially, unabashed insane '80s RPG silliness, pretending that the last generation and a half of tabletop games do not exist. (I believe I talked about this at the time.) Now don't get me wrong, when it comes to lethal number-heavy hard-to-play insanity I'm cool with it, I play Rifts. But DA:O somehow managed to keep everything that was wrong with AD&D 2 despite having mechanized the the system.

The game seriously needed to take a few pointers from more modern systems like Feng Shui or those by White Wolf. DA2 has apparently done so.

[mxlm]

Short initial impression: the combat system, while faster and more lethal than I'd like, is fine. The encounter design is not. After about two hours on hard I decided I didn't particularly feel like dealing with the developers shouting LOL ASSASSINS SPAWN ON YOUR MAGES LOL every fight and bumped the difficulty back down to roflstomp normal.

This is a good game that could and should have been a great one.

[Ransom]

Exactly. I really don't know what they were thinking with the encounters - having a bunch of dudes ninja in every single fight really ****s up tactics. Placement and preparation mean next to nothing.

But the more I play this the less I think it deserves the controversy surrounding it.

I shall explain.

Ah. That's interesting, actually - I admit Origins' gameplay did nothing for me, but I'd just put that down to the excruciatingly long dungeons. For all I knew you were making a reference to The Witcher

[Grizzly]

The Witcher also has an fairly good combat system by the way. I never got why those oldies always shout about RPG systems that are dumbed down from Baldur's Gate. They, by example, take the levelling mechanics. And somehow, the Baldur's Gate's 'You just levelled up, enjoy your extra hitpoints and the slightly higher to hit chance' are somehow considered vastly more complex then ... say.. The Witcher or Mass Effect 2s. It's almost like saying the M16A1s superior to the FN SCAR because it jammed more often and you really had to work in order to get some results out of it or something, even though it is less flexible and completely inferior in every way (Except production costs, probably).

[phatosealpha]

Well, in this case it is undeniably reduced from the original.  Magic alone has 3 major reductions that spring immediately to mind.

1:  There are no spell combos.  They just aren't there anymore.   That's a pretty big loss as far as I'm concerned, as I used things like Grease Fire, Paralysis Explosion, Sleep/Horror, And force explosion constantly in DA1.
2:  You cannot cast spells at all outside of what the game considers combat.  Another big loss since you lose the ability to set down traps, runes and lures for a tactical advantage.
3:  There is no friendly fire.  Meaning you can just toss around spells willy-nilly with nary a thought about tactical positioning.


Pretty big losses.   And then the plot...oh dear lord, the epic "LOLWUT" of the poorly thought out plot.

[Scourge of Ages]

No friendly fire??!? That was like the biggest thing from DA:O that actually required you to think! (Also really neat when the hurlock emissary fireballs his own guys by accident)

[phatosealpha]

Not on normal difficulty, at the very least.

[Scotty]

That's unchanged from DA:O then.  Normal difficulty had no friendly fire then, either.  It's the difficulty I played on, specifically because it didn't have FF.

[phatosealpha]

Normal did have friendly fire by default in Dragon Age 1.  Damage was reduced by 50% though.  Easy Difficulty had no friendly fire - sort of.  Spell combos would still self affect though.

Wait, are you talking about the console version of DA1?  If so, that may be the case, as the console versions of DA1 were easier then the PC version.

[Suongadon]

Only nightmare difficulty has friendly fire in DA2. I don't know how badly the AI handles it though, since one bout with respawning ninjas in plate mail with their dual wielded instacrits was enough, and I dropped it to hard, and then normal some time after that - probably one time when all of my characters were running around with six giant spears stuck through each of them.

Still, the whole game wasn't as bad as I expected, apart from the waves and about 3/4ths of the first act. And the end. Good god the end. If there is one thing I like more than a tedious multistage boss fight, its two. Back to back. Made worse by dying right after the final bosses' 'Why is this taking so long?' line (which was around 5% health) and having to do it all over again.

[mxlm]

3:  There is no friendly fire.  Meaning you can just toss around spells willy-nilly with nary a thought about tactical positioning.

Given the speed with which enemies close to melee, the number of enemies, and the pervasive nature of AoE attacks, having friendly fire on would be...unpleasant. Though sure, they could and should have just made a damn toggle for the people who wanted it.

[phatosealpha]

Quite a number of changes from DA:O create that problem.  Enemies close faster, somewhat, but part of it is the distance at which contact is established.  Every battle in DA2 is a series of ambushes, first by placed enemies you can't engage until you're at a certain distance, then more ambushes from enemies who magically appear at point blank.  That's part of why point 2 was there - initiating combat at range meant a buffer zone to control the crowd. The enemy count is problematic because there aren't anywhere near as many effective crowd control abilities, and those that are run into the problem of recharge time versus respawn rate.

The whole affair reliably degenerates into a cluster****, in essentially every encounter.  More guttural and faster paced, perhaps, but it's still lacking most of the tactical depth of the first one.

[General Battuta]

That's unchanged from DA:O then.  Normal difficulty had no friendly fire then, either.  It's the difficulty I played on, specifically because it didn't have FF.

Normal only had no FF on console. On PC it had something like 50% FF and spell effects like freeze still worked on party members.

[Ransom]

And then the plot...oh dear lord, the epic "LOLWUT" of the poorly thought out plot.

So far the plot is better than Origins'.

Edit: Which, admittedly, is not saying much.