Just knock the difficulty down for this one encounter. No shame in that. I’m not telling anyone. Then you can get back on with the good stuff. Several times I’ve certainly picked the wrong party for a mission (“Uh, I thought this was going to be more dialogue and less with the supernatural bitey things…”). I haven’t felt stuck yet, I’ve managed to make it work, but if it didn’t I’d tone things down in a heartbeat to keep the story moving.
On the PC I find the “ctrl-a” select-all to be fundamental to the interface.
A bit of ctrl-A + shift clicks judo gets around 90% of “can’t see the target/movement objective from character’s point of view” issues.
As important, so long as you have characters selected they (almost always?) suspend their tactical initiative and do what you’ve ordered them to so long so long as their designated target still exists. Generally I pause, give orders, select all, and unpause. If you’re using most characters for focus-firing autoattacks but not all, you just shift-click those people in and out as needed, remembering to select-all again before unpausing.
Select-all also ensures that “Hold” works as expected. There seems to be some sort of glitchy conflict between “Hold” and tactics - holding characters will sometimes have a move/attack order flashing on and off many times per second - but they’ll stay put if they’re all selected. (I think there may be a range limit beyond a few hundred meters, but it only came up once.)
Is a party viable without a dedicated warrior-tank?
I know this was answered above, but to reinforce the idea that yes, you can play without a dedicated warrior-tank, I completed the game while using either warrior NPC for their particular companion quests only and not for 95% of the main plot and side quests.
My normal party was me (melee rogue), Isabella, Anders, and Verric/Merrill. I had Isabella and Verric spec into lots of stun abilities, so packs of enemies became much less of a threat. Boss fights were a bit challenging but doable. I don’t know how much easier a dedicated tank in the party would have made them.
Note that I was playing on Normal, so this may or may not be viable on higher difficulties.
Sadly, I don’t have the source of my numbers, so take it for what it worths. And to be fair, from the links you posted, it shows that ME2 shipped 2mm at launch while DA:O shipped 3.2mm in the first year. So that is rather hard to compare.
Anyway, the bottomline is EA/BioWare was not satisfied with DA:O’s result, as that would be the only logical explanation to the shaft of direction in the sequel.
ShivaX
2845
Only thats not true. DA2 was in production before DA:O even shipped. They had decided before any numbers were in what direction the game was going. DA:O was a huge success by all accounts and they rushed out DA2 early to try to ride its wave.
I do not have any real numbers, only posts like these that as of July suggest that DA:O was the best selling Bioware game to date.
Whether it was there best selling game or not, it was still wildly successful for them…
It seems, for reasons unknown (I have some suspicions), they just decided to make the second one DA2: We Do Not Have a Lot of Time, So Cut, er Streamline, Most of the Systems and Artwork.
Kind of a long name for a game really…
It’s a bad year for BioWare to release what is arguably a mediocre game. There is a lot of stiff competition coming out this year in the RPG category (Skyrim, Deus Ex: HR, The Witcher 2).
I’m hoping they do better with ME3.
Aren’t the controls in pc a bit… weird? janky? clumsy? orthopedic?
They aren’t direct controls like in an action game, but they also aren’t tactical controls with a good isometric camera, full use of mouse to select, move and give orders to characters (and the gameplay itself in combat isn’t really designed for that style, with spawning reinforcements of enemies).
You move more or less clumsily with wasd and then with a “free” mouse cursor you go right clicking the enemies and activated the abilities with 1-2-3-4, it’s a weird mix of direct and indirect controls.
It’s a bit in the middle of the two types of control, a “middle of the road” solution, but without being as good as one or the other. I don’t like them, being honest. And without liking something so basic as the controls, it’s hard to be positive about the rest of the game.
Am i missing something? I seached in the options to see i could activate another control system or improve them, but without any luck.
They’re basically the same as they were in Origins, without the isometric camera. I make full use of the mouse to select, move and give orders to characters, and use WASD if I want to take direct movement control of a character.
In DA1 i used the direct controls to navigate the enviroments in the areas without combat, switching to isometric mode to do combat.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Dragon Age: Origins sold more than Mass Effect 2 considering that the latter sold even less than Fallout: New Vegas in 2010 when it had a 9 month lead (I don’t have link rights but a 2010 year end Google should yield the results). The Mass Effect franchise just isn’t as big of a blockbuster as perceived.
That 2mm at launch for ME2 also didn’t delineate PC vs. overall. Pretty much, it seems like we’re all still guessing.
Aveline is a fantastic character, definitely one of my favorites from any Bioware game I’ve ever played.
A ha. I didn’t do that, so I’m not getting the disconnect you are. I hardly used the isometric camera in Origins, so I’m not missing it as much as some people.
I think that’s the one Kieron was referring to. Note the bit that says:
"Dragon Age was an extremely successful title for us – last November it was the single most globally successful title we’ve put out to date,” he confirmed at EA’s recent European showcase [July 2010]
November 2009 would be a couple of months before Mass Effect 2 actually released. There’s nothing in the article to actually support their headline.
Miramon
2856
Yeah, she is really one of the better characters in the game, not only in her own right, but also in comparison to the others, since she’s neither annoying nor over-the-top with a single quality (of course she is a law-and-order type, but she doesn’t spend the whole game whining about her beliefs, like most of the other characters). They spent a lot of time and effort on Varric, and he’s not bad, too, but most of the others are one-dimensional caricatures – which is of course standard in most games.
I might give it one more shot and then shift down, but I already did that for the first lock-in boss and was hoping to maintain some consistency through the game. Not sure why.
Yeah, I like Varric. And I like Fenris quite a bit too, though I suspect that flirting with him ever would ruin that for me. But Aveline’s taking top honors as my favorite from DA2, even if she is worthless as a tank.
I have roughly the same feeling playing the console version. That I’m fighting through butter and issuing orders with a mouthful of marbles.
Against all the trash mobs, it’s usually not an issue - but when I get to a boss that actually requires some planning it gets a bit frustrating.
Though it’s not as bad as it felt like in the demo, once you get some good moves, I’m essentially playing for the plot direction and characters.
I think this genre arrangement could work, by the way - but it doesn’t feel optimized enough here for what it actually intends to be. It feels constantly like the half-baked horror of two disparate concepts.
She really is worthless, isn’t she? Such a shame, because she’s easily my favorite non-Flemeth character in Ferelden right now.
I can’t understand why even with 30 strength she does single-digit damage per swing, and why the only way to get enough threat on her to make enemies stick is by stacking sustained modes and giving her absolutely no stamina to work with. Fenris is an infinitely better tank even without any special tanking skills, since I rarely have to use taunt and his special glowing thingy is more than enough to make him survivable.
DA2’s combat just isn’t balanced well at all, and the some of the companions just aren’t good enough to do what they need to do. Isabella is spec’d exactly the same as my Hawke Rogue, but for some reason she does maybe a third of the damage, even with similar weaponry. Aveline is a miserable tank, as noted.
