The characters definitely whine less as the game progresses. With time a bond forms between them in the same way it forms with Hawke.
My main complaint continues to be the lack of tension or the acknowledgment of the current situation in the game world. I won’t get spoilery but I find the words if the game npcs do not reflect the world you wander.
I imagine a lot of that is due to a lack of time in the release schedule. I think of random encounters in DA:O or even KOTOR. Specifically the crazy doomsday guy in Lothering or the humanocentric preacher on Taris.
Maybe its just me but I don’t feel the tension between mages/apostates and the city/chantry/templars at all. You would think having a demon possessed apostate boyfriend would have some repercussions.
They bought his silence! OMG, conspiracy!
There is no prevention that would halt the system if you use too many potions: due to the larger cooldown on potions this time around, we want to encourage players to use them more.
Um, if you want players to use more potions, wouldn’t you make the cooldown period SHORTER???
They probably offered him a nice vacation to someplace without wireless internet ;)
What it says to me is they balanced the game with people being able to quaff +HP ever X seconds. To keep that balance, they adjusted it so the player has a better chance of having that option always available.
Just finished the game, and wanted to wait to talk about it in case any opinions changed during the course of completing it.
Overall, I liked it, but not as much as DA1. I liked the storyline better - not so much a ‘save the world from a big bad’ as just a guy in the wrong place, really, at the wrong time, and the fact each act had it’s own basic storyline and motiviation. Not perfect, but a nice branch away from the typical CRPG storyline.
Gameplay - some things i liked, others not so much. I liked the skill trees much better than DA1. I disliked having to spam the ‘A’ button (playing on the 360) for the fights - especially during the bigger/longer sequences. I’m thinking of picking up the PC version just so the autoattack works. The reuse of areas - well, the city parts didn’t bother me that they didn’t change. I mean, things were built of stone ‘back then’, and didn’t change all that much, given the longer it took to build. I mean, you think Rome looked all that much different in 70 vs 60 AD? But reuse of caves, building, etc - it was more of a ‘roll my eyes’ annoyance than anything that really bugged me. The only thing I can’t stand about the game is the constant respawn of enemies during a fight. I don’t know whose brilliant idea that was, but they should be fired and banned from working for game companies ever again. SO not appropriate to an RPG. I mean, it makes sense if you have a blood mage that is raising the dead to give you something to fight other than him/her, but once s/he goes down, that should be it. And the number of waves is never consant - sometimes, there are no reinforcements. Other times, it seems like there’s 10 of them. Just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
Overall, I’d probably give it a 7. I don’t see a ton of replays of this by me as opposed to DA1, but will probably play through it once more, becasue I’m interested to see if being a two-handed spec fighter is easier or harder than shield/sword. And because I will probably end up buying it for PC, since apparantly the states from my Awakenings game save on the 360 isn’t quite what I’d want for a mission or two to be available in this game.
Razgon
2927
Nah - they just want you to experience running in circles until the cooldown is over - you know, the tactical combat.
Yea, still confused.
There were plenty of fights when I desperately wanted to quaff a potion, and wasn’t allowed to.
Also never really figured out what caused injuries. I mean, yea, ‘dying’ during a fight does, but sometimes they just appeared to randomly hit the players as well.
Yeah, this is what it essentially means for me, playing as a rogue. Lots of wheeling. I might mind less if that were an element of the gameplay - if you could Assassin’s Creed around the environment … But mostly it just means I’m going to run around the same pillar twenty times, until potions clock in or I get snagged on some awkward wheelbarrow geometry.
Bioware determined running circles and magically appearing waves are the combat of the future!
THIS…IS…STREAMLINED COMBAT!
Finished it, impressed. Another 6 months could have ironed out some glitches and NPCS-react-to-story issues, but ambitious+successful+fun = GG. The combat is as fun and engrossing as in any Bioware title, and I am frankly sick to death of DA:O/A’s combat, which I was playing-by-numbers a few weeks ago.
Case
2932
There’s an easier fix to the selection bug. It occurs when you select a character by clicking on the portrait rather than using the F1 - F4 keys. The fix is to select or mouse over the portrait when the bug occurs. You should then regain control.
I haven’t seen the hang personally yet.
Miramon
2933
I think this is mostly due to high level traps that your rogue can’t see yet. It’s definitely the case that some traps do injuries. But then, it’s hard to tell for sure if you can’t see the trap in the first place.
Just a couple more notes: I’m really starting to think Hawke’s sister is the best romantic prospect for him and this is troubling. Also, my three rogue squad (with my warrior main character as an improvised tank) is surprisingly effective. I put it together as a joke, just to see how they’d all get on together, and then everything in our path died quickly.
Miramon
2935
Yeah, they could at least eliminate some of the running in circles nonsense by providing a guard stance for everyone that might even increase regen rate. Obviously that would be a hack, but not quite so embarrassing as running around in circles.
But even so, dumb as this stupid random spawn wave stuff is, it still (barely) beats out cover-based combat using random chest-high objects magically scattered through all the rooms. At least once in a while in DA2 you think based on dungeon layout there might be a combat here, but it turns out there isn’t, or there’s an unexpected spawn in a boring old generic corridor. In comparison in ME2, you see a room with a chest-high barrier and that’s pretty much that: guess I better run into this room at a sprint to get to that barrier over there because as soon as I cross that line… Yep. Spawn time.
You might just mean the normal length of the cooldown here, but just in case - the right-hand quick-buttons for potions have some kind of availability problem, they are cooling down/greyed out when they shouldn’t be. You need to put actual healing/elfroot/sta/mana potions on your quickbar ala DA:O and use them from there.
No - I mean I couldn’t use a healing potion because I was still waiting for the cooldown timer to end.
My pet theory is that he is going to do something for the QT3 front page. Tom hinted in his sticky thread that he was thrilled with who volenteered, but I might just be setting myself up for dissapointment.
Tony_M
2939
disclaimer: I haven’t played DA 2 yet.
In any RPG that tries to give the companion characters personality, there are always people complaining that the characters are “Whiny”. And in any game where the main hero is anything other than a generic, personality free tough guy you will have players complaining that the main hero is “whiny”. (maybe thats why all Bioware main characters are genric tough guys).
I’m not sure what its about. Maybe people really do want every party to be a collection of rock hard badasses. Or maybe the word “whiny” is just a clumsy shorthand word for describing the feeling that the characters are 2 dimensional and don’t feel like real people.
I wonder if they’d describe Hamlet or Tony Soprano as “whiny”.
Tony
