I don’t know what the budget was, or what the break even point was on Dragon Age 2. I would be willing to bet money their aim was not to sell just a bit less than DA:O.
I ranted a bit about why I would not being buying DA2 when it dropped. I think you can look to two very important factors in contributing to DA2 being not quite there as a game.
One, their unexplainable (though maybe listening to console gamers that did not like your game in the first place is a reason…) design change. For some reason, they took some very…hard to explain paths in fixing up their systems in DA2. Loot, combat, story interaction, world exploration, etc. They were all streamlined/dumbed down. I don’t know who they thought would jump on the new systems, but however it came about, they had better go back to the drawing board for DA2.
Two, development time. If I remember correctly, DA:O took years and years to finally get to market, no? DA2 took less than a year from start to finish. That’s just hubris and EA at work is my best guess. Hopefully being burned on this time around, they will give the dev team a bit more time. Maybe if they had more time, when they started using these new systems and finding the game was less fun to play (someone had to see this, right?), they would have had time to change things…maybe.
I do eagerly await DA3. Just because two was not my cup of tea doesn’t mean three can’t be awesome…it just means it is less likely.
Also, doesn’t/didn’t DA:O have much more DLC, which in turn translates to more money?
Sarkus
3123
The only DA2 DLC stuff released so far has been item packs, so its too early to say. But Bioware has said they’ve delayed announcing/releasing their first planned story DLC to try and address issues brought up after DA2s release, whatever that means. They also just announced a new novel, so they haven’t abandoned the franchise or anything.
Christ, I mean, isn’t it a first principle of game design that what the players say they want isn’t necessarily either what they really want or what would be good for them?
How could BioWare fall for game design by focus group?
Oh well, all good things must come to an end. BioWare had a great run making some of the finest CRPGs ever made. RIP.
Nesrie
3125
Well some players seemed to know what they wanted, in that they didn’t want DA2. I mean EA listened to one group of players over another. That doesn’t mean the “players” don’t know what they want. It just means they listened to one group and alienated another.
Pretty much. They listened to the players who “might buy da2 if it is more Xtreme(!) than da1” over the players who liked da1 for what it was and the result… is the result.
Burning bridges with your current fan base in order to woo a new fan base is rarely a grand idea. Maybe that is why you don’t see blizzard telling diablo fans to go screw themselves and making diablo 3 in to a first person shooter.
I can’t believe no one figured this out yet.
Dragon Age 2 is Jade Empire 2. They built the new engine in 2007, flushed out the classes and mechanics, and scrapped it for some reason. Dragon Age hits big, they need a sequel fast, bingo, just take our Jade Empire 2 work, throw Dragon Age mythos on top, 1 year later, DA2.
Go play Jade Empire. Then play Dragon Age 2. When your warrior flies across the map in a cacophony of action gibs, you’ll have an epiphany where you realize Bioware just repainted the corpse of Jade Empire 2 and threw it out the door.
I liked jade empire personally. the combat was fun and the story was pretty good as well. Certainly a better experience than da2. In fact, give me jade empire 2 instead of the current da2 please.
Seriously. I would much rather have that.
Nesrie
3130
I enjoyed Jade Empire even though I didn’t care for the controls… although I got used to them after awhile. I wouldn’t complain if they came out with a Jade Empire 2 even. DA2 didn’t even tempt me. Maybe mechanically they’re similar somehow but… there is a disconnect.
Alternatively, I made that connection 4 months ago:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2590011&postcount=2189
Another person who loved Jade Empire but found DA2 to be a slog.
I agree, Jade Empire was actually a great game (for me personally it’s on a par with ME, i.e. just below KOTOR and the other classics). It was certainly more console-oriented than any of BioWare’s previous attempts, but it was nowhere near as over-simplified as ME2, say (haven’t played DA2 yet, and I must admit to an overwhelming sense of ennui whenever I contemplate playing it) - JE just squeaked through as recognisably “classic BioWare”.
Joe_M
3134
A brief pause in the incessant griping: I just stumbled upon Diversified Followers Armor which adds equip slots and numerous armor sets for your companions. It’s not a perfect solution (blood dragon armor doesn’t quite work) for those that like fiddling with loot but it’s something and as far as I can tell the custom character chest armors don’t suffer the same problem.
Didn’t really like any of the non-story elements of JE at all (although putting in a shmup made me laugh) and did like ME1/2 and DA1/2.
I hate to restart the ancient manichean struggle over DA2 but the JE combat comparison strikes me as ludicrous. Intercept-charges or rogue leaps don’t make a DA-type RPG combat into an ARPG; there isn’t a speed limit.
If anything the leap-attacks reminded me of KOTOR’s leap attack for jedi guardians. And replaying KOTOR I’m reminded how hard one had to fight with the interface - constantly erasing and replacing all of the AI’s targeting/casting/attack scripts and replacing them with my own, on three characters? Microing DA2 was more labour intensive than DA:O, but less than KOTOR. (Needless to say, JE didn’t have combat micro, what with the no party.)
This is why I gave up playing DA2.
Eventually settles for an all ranged party, and having my tank running around in circle strafing everyone. Course, one issue with this was that enemy ranged had auto-aim so running didn’t work until you also used terrain to LOS them. First fight in the game probably took 10 minutes of running in circles to avoid the troll (or whatever it was) and then hit it when it charged.
Was this on Normal or Hard? As I said many pages back, there weren’t any fights were I needed to resort to kiting with my tank on normal, and that was with my incompetent character builds and near total ignorance of cross-class combo damage.
To my mind the moment you have to tank kite, you’re on too high a difficulty level, the game has a game design problem, or both.
(Which is why the “duel” option at the end of Act 2 confuses me, and makes me think you’re not “supposed” to be able to win it. Making a player kite is like making a player edit his savegames to give himself gold; something is wrong at that point.)
I played on Hard. still have not conceded and gone down to Normal just so I can finish the damn thing. Biggest problem so far are the POPUP Spawns that appear in a ‘sector’ I control during some of the fights, and enemy casters that drop some AOE spell that kill everyone. Mostly game resolves around pausing, telling my people to run away, unpausing and using a few abilities with my main guy while my AI do whatever, and then pausing again to reposition them. Its tedious.
Edit: Is it time for games to remove hard/easy/normal and just have the game be played. Should be easier to balance as well. If they wanted to, I suppose there is always the “auto adjusting difficulty” feature they talked about for Sin, although I never played that.
Well, normal was really well balanced for me, but that was without intelligent use of cross-class combos, which actually can account for a massive amount of DPS. I think basically Hard is impossible to play without them, without kiting.
And I think honestly playing on Hard and kiting is a much bigger “concession” than playing on Normal without kiting; it’s sort of cheating imo, in any game that doesn’t rig movement speeds to make it counterproductive.
The trick with respawns is to keep your party within a 10-15 foot circle or so unless you have a really good reason (ie, boss fight) to disperse them any further. This means you can always use a “leap attack” with one of your melees to protect one of your squishies pretty much instantly. Characters only do leap attacks if you switch to their camera perspective, order the attack and stay there for unpause-and-attack, IIRC.
Another kind of undocumented interface thing is if you’re microing everybody’s orders - and I always do - you’ll probably want to have have all characters ‘selected’ (ie ctrl-A) when you unpause. This seems to keep them from retargeting new enemies when their previously designated targets are still alive. If you don’t do that, the party turns into more of a cat herding exercise.
Oh nice find. Will most definitively try using that next time I launch the game.
I agree on Kiting could be considered exploiting the game mechanics. I might as well make a game-trainer if I wanted to continue along that path I suppose. But I heard there is an achievement for completing the game on Hard ;)
