"Not Enchantment" :rofl:

What the [censored] is with Bethany's hands? They looked like a grandmothers but only if she was also undead.

I have come to the conclusion that in DA2 it goes from most to least powerful:

Rogue (either ranged or duel wield)
Mage
Two handed warrior
Sword and shield warrior

AoE for both Mage and rogue are way over powered and a sword and shield is pathetic.

In DA:O was it the same? I don't remember, I know I didn't get too far playing a Mage because dwarfs couldn't be mages.

Done with t he first playthrough of DA2. Was nice. 55 hours. First few hours were meh, but it picked up in Act 1 when you had your companions, and in Act 2 it really got the ball rolling.
Yes, you don't need epic journeys or epic huge villains. Politics and religion also suffice. The dialogue system is great in giving intention rather than alignment (which is what even Origins did, and I'm glad Bioware is getting rid of that old part of theirs), and if they can get more precise thoughts on the wheel, I'll start to prefer it to old branching text, at least in modern games.
Characters went through the same development the story did. My main party of Merrill, Varric and Isabela was just hilarious to follow.

Bad parts: Stupid delivery quests, many unpolished cutscenes, balancing between the difficulty levels, and the occasional recycled area - though those were not as bad as many make them out to be. All in all, most faults are really with the short dev cycle.

Absolutely don't care about the waves enemies. They just need better surroundings for this, that is all.

A solid B, could be B+ with more polish, and had it had more development time I'm sure it could have been in the A area.

Yes, her hands seem to have contracted the same case of always-low-def-osis that Garrus' face was struck with in ME.

Yes, dual-wielders and mages were wiping the floor with the enemies in Origins, too.

Has anyone played that crap DA Legends?

I remember that. I laughed my ass off.

DAO sword and shield were better than 2h warrior, 2h was so [censored] slow.

The key to playing 2h warrior in Origins was to have a large stamina pool and spam abilities as fast as possible.

You mean that enemies were so far past you by the time the swing completed that you had no hope in heck of actually hitting them? Made the defense of the gates really, really, really, annoyingly awful.

Speeding up the two handed weapon combat was the only thing that I agree with wholeheartedly.

It didn't matter in Origins, though. If the the swing was going to hit, it did damage regardless of the position of enemy. This too was changed in 2, correctly timed running away and firing arrows allows you to kill anything without taking hits. And i much prefer Origins' 2h fighting, slower but more powerful, in DA2 you might as well be whacking enemies with a giant feather.

That wasn't my experience while playing Oghren or Sten at the gates. The darkspawn are streaming through the gate; no matter where I positioned my character, until/unless the darkspawn paused, or were stopped by other npcs attacking them, I never got a hit in. If they stopped moving, yes, the two handed weapons did a lot of damage. Other than that though, not many of the swings registered as a hit. Like I said, I appreciate the two handed weapons being sped up, but, imo, they probably took it too far. None of the changes seemed to be aimed at hitting a balance; faster doesn't automatically mean uber-super-hyperkinetic frantic extreme.

Wow, this game is plagued by some serious bugs and glitches. One Oblivion players should be very familiar with: Doing something before being told to do so (like looting a corpse) hoses a number of quests.

The second is a game-breaker: the slowdown bug caused by Isabella's or Sebastian's friendship buffs. If you load a save made without either in the party, the game improperly applies a 5% speed penalty to Hawke. This penalty stacks on every load, so eventually Hawke is slowed to a crawl in combat, making him/her unplayable. There are a number of threads addressing this in Bioware's tech forums.

And I'll let the YouTube Video explain the third: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_txX0-BAy4.



I agree that combat was badly balanced. Just about every battle consists of waves, which the mage class in particular is poorly equipped to deal with, thanks to the reduction in activatable abilities and long cooldowns. Since Bioware decided to overuse the wave mechanic, they should have shortened the cooldowns while toning down abilities. If you have ever gotten into raiding in mmo's, boss battles are laughably simplistic in DA2.

Damn.

Also another guy on the BW forums is banned, one time error my ass.

Also I love how they seperated general discussion.

And I saw an interesting post by David Gaider, I liked the story in DA2, but I didnt like his response to dead people coming back, his response was pretty much "because we want to". Why even have a [censored] import if you ignore what you want ?

Me too, the open general discussion was unbearable.

I got my hands on a used copy for 360 (they're available here even quicker than I anticipated) - so I've seen a lot of what people are talking about. The story is all over the place. It's garbage in the prologue, disjointed in the first act, finally picks up in the second act, then falls apart toward the end of the third. Kudos to Bioware for NOT making mages vs templars a black & white issue, except toward the end where the story-telling slips. This game is clearly rushed - Bioware NEEDED more time to tighten up the story and properly balance the combat, not to mention some of those gltiches and bugs should have NEVER made it through QA.

Another damage control effort by EA/Bioware. They don't want the dedicated fans to be influenced by independent thought.

:lol: The only ones who made it unbearable were the drones (and the giraffe dog guy) any criticism was valid, all biodrones would say is "hurrr troll, BW dont make bad games troll" they even defend all the [censored]edup things BW has done, banning that guy, the drm (I havent read up much, but appparently they slipped alot of stuff in people didnt know about or like) and the BW employee reviewing his own product.

BW social still is terrible,now it just requires you to register to post in more places, and regerstering is bad, enjoy the banhammer for products you legally purchase becuase BW dosent agree with your post.

Hell one guy got in trouble for using the word "homosixual" he was refering to himself, stupid forums.


I will get it used eventually, still to expensive for me, also waiting on the ultimate edition, I saw the ending, I am not going to have to pay for dlc just to get the conclusion becuase they made half a story.
Allthough I agree the riting is good becuase its not soo black and white, just curious do they explain the lyrium ?

in case you haven't read it:

http://www.1up.com/features/dragon-age-2-afterthoughts from 1up

There's some major spoilers in there, but it says when they're comin.

I just thought I'd post an excerpt regarding the recycled dungeons.


1UP: So while we're talking about development resources and decisions, I have to ask: Can you also explain the process of why the dungeon assets seem to get re-used a lot? That is one of the more prominent and universal sticking points from both reviewers and consumers.

ML: Absolutely, and I think it's a fair critique, and it's not one that I'm going to leave unaddressed, frankly. What we ran into was the situation where we had the ability to have more plots, more content, some side stuff that we knew would be optional, but we didn't have the assets to create entirely new levels for. So we took a long look at that, and said, "Is it important to have more content in the game, or is it important that the content be 100-percent unique?" So we tried to strike a balance, and tried to evaluate a good way to use this. I think the one thing that caught us a little bit off-side was, with the caves having much more interesting features than just "generic cave with left bend," -- you know, having things like collapsed or old masonry and so on -- is that end up probably creating a larger sense of repetition than we thought would originally occur. And the end result is something I look at and go, "Okay, I think that is a shame, and that is a fair critique, and something we can easily address in the future."

Deepening ?
After playing lelianas song it wasnt deepening her story, it was changing. Everything was changed from the main game, thats not depth mr laidlaw its stupid and breaks her character when you have 2 completely different versions of events important to that character.

So I broke down and bought the all-inclusive DA:O. I hope 7 dlcs are worth it.

I havent got around to golems yet, but each is about an hour, (except awakening) most arent linked (only witch hunt and golems) to your warden either.

There's still criticism in the registered GD, much of which i agree with. But when you have threads titled "You should just pack ritalin with your games now" i'm more inclined to faceplam myself away from the forums rather than read it.

The criticism threads in the registered GD are more mature, from both sides.

The Isabella bug was the last straw for me, not to mention Merill's Quest Bug, Sword And Shield Glitch where the Armor Rating keeps going up everytime you equip a Shield, etc. I liked DA 2 but it pales compared to it's predecssor. The Infinite Exp Glitch isn't that big a deal because the Enemies level scale with you. I did the Bone Mission Quest in Act one after I did the Level Glitch with my Duel Wield Rogue and that Dragon destroyed me at Level 30.