Which do you think is better?
DA was boring as fuck. I can hardly believe that I put in 30 hours before finally giving up on it.
Christ I can’t believe this thread is going to go anywhere good.
I’ve played through most of the origins in DA Origins. None of my characters really interested me enough to play further. I’ve finished Mass Effect 2 with four of the six classes start to finish.
I will never understand someone who favors Mass Effect 2’s repetitive streamlined cover-shooting galleries over Dragon Age’s party-based tactical “real-time with pause” combat ala Baldur’s Gate.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and good lord, I thought Dragon Age was just a really bad game. It had a lot of elements that should have been successful, but none of it worked for me, at all.
The combat was both too hard and too hotkey oriented. It felt very MMO-ish, and that’s a terrible, terrible thing in my book. The writing was boring and the world was bland bland bland.
And each combat section was like double the length it should have been! I got SO BORED and frustrated with the various dungeons. I didn’t feel like they were ramping up in any interesting ways; the game wasn’t teaching me new tactics or letting me feel a sense of mastery at all, which for me is the only reason to drag out combat encounters for that long.
It ended up being a crappy, frustrating game that I wish I liked more. Actually, that’s how I feel about ALL Bioware games. I thought Mass Effect was pretty boring and poorly done as well. They have lots of elements I like on paper, but they do NOT come together in satisfying ways.
They should take out 99% of the boring shooting in ME2 and maybe you would be left with a good game.
I’ve sunk probably 200 hours into both games and continue to play them both. The only complaint I have with combat is DAO’s balance is somewhat wonky. If you have two mages it’s an extremely easy game on Nightmare and even one mage makes combat significantly easier. Consequently I find myself putting together silly group compositions and investing lots of time exploiting traps, flasks and poisons to make things interesting. With ME2 none of that manufactured fun is necessary because various squad compositions can and do work, but none of them (that I’ve found anyway) break the game. I don’t find it any less tactical than Dragon Age on Insanity but maybe I’m just awful at shooting.
The combat system in DA:O is completely crap for balance, which is why I modded the skill system using the popular Combat Tactics add-on from Dragon Age Nexus. Suddenly archers aren’t gimps, shifters aren’t worthless spec choices, and a ton of annoyances are solved. (Arbitrary nerfs from Bioware to Arcane Warrior casting requiring sheathing weapon animations, and Blood Mage enhancement items not stacking.) Enemy archers become very nasty-- almost as bad as mages at lower difficulties.
I don’t think I would have finished DA with it in vanilla form.
Well, combat in Mass Effect, Jade Empire, KotOR and Neverwinter Nights was so incredibly dull and/or simple it boggled my mind. DA:O final broke the BioWare runt for me, balance be damned. The pre-battle D&D preparations were gone so that sped it up a notch. Archers sucked, Mages ruled. I rolled a Warrior wielding a two-hander and had a fairly challenging but rewarding experience.
Note that my answer is by the slimmest of margins.
I enjoyed fucking Miranda much more than Leilana, therefore Mass Effect 2 was better!
Ditto.
Also, the ‘sex scenes’ in both games were completely risible. Gimme the Witcher saucy postcard approach anyday.
I don’t care if this is a joke. This is the lamest thing I have ever read on QT3.
We already had this thread, but I suppose feelings might be different this time around. No question in my mind Dragon Age was a far better game. It has issues - it’s overlong, especially in certain places like the Deep Roads, and the balance is somewhat suspect - but there’s just so much more depth and variety to nearly every aspect of gameplay, not to mention the genius origins idea that helped firmly invest me in my character’s role in the world. And while neither game strays incredibly far from genre standbys, I feel like Dragon Age does a better job distinguishing them from the cliche.
This isn’t to say that ME2 doesn’t have its good points - some of the characters are awesome (Mordin, yay Mordin), there are some hints at interesting if probably ultimately sidestory things brewing, and the level of attention to importing individual choices from the first game is pretty amazing if inconsequential. And both games offer a lot of good writing and detailed worldbuilding.
ME2 because I felt the world was more interesting, the writing was sharper, the combat better balanced and the pacing much tighter.
If I’d have voted which I thought I would prefer, I’d have said DAO. That was a game I’d been waiting for for a long time, but the constant skill spamming was tedious and mages were hugely overpowered and I’ve found that I prefer balance in my single-player experience.
However, I am not of the school which rates the dialogue wheel above all else, I did like having the full response in front of me. Unfortunately, that means the protagonist is silent and again, I find I prefer a voiced hero now. So dialogue wheel it is I guess.
ME2 was the best game of 2010, whereas Dragon Age is the worst thing BioWare has ever made. So yeah, ME2.