Having played DA II through to the end, I'm ready to offer my own thoughts on the game itself.

First off, the combat gameplay is inferior to the original; as others have said, a lot of the fighting has been dumbed down. One of my favorite things about Origins was that being stupid and using bad tactics could kill you even in routine battles. In DA II, it's very much charge-stab-stab-stab; about the most tactics you'll ever have to deal with is keeping your mages from dying.

The combat AI is probably the worst feature of the game; it is quite simply horrendous. If you want your party to have more tactical acumen than a headless chicken, you have to micromanage everything; otherwise your squishy mages will run up into melee range or cluster up in the middle of an ongoing area-of-effect attack. Don't even consider letting the AI manage spellcasters AoE attacks unless you're only letting them use one element, and your melee characters are all wearing gear with huge resistances against that element. The "good" news is that your opponents are just as stupid. The bad news is, the game tries to hide it by doing things like spawning waves of enemies in random locations during any significant battle. It's very annoying when a battle turns against you just because the game decided to randomly spawn half a dozen giant spiders right on top of your mage. Resorting to cheap tricks in order to hide crappy AI always bugs me.

I did like some of the changes to the levelling system; it really gave a lot more room for creating a unique character. One of the weaknesses of Origins was that Rogue and especially Warrior builds had little variation; max out 2-hand sword, 2-weapons, or Sword&Shield, pick specializations, and that's it. DA II gives a lot more room for uniqueness by separating most of the talents from your weapon of choice.

The party members are very good, but you sometimes don't get enough interaction with them for some of the more important scenes. It really hurts when things that ought to be long, proper conversations are instead reduced to two or three lines of dialogue. That said, when the the other members of the party get enough screentime, they really do manage to shine. It's almost disheartening how good the characters are when they're getting center stage, because it makes you realize how good this game could have been if the party was as well developed as it is in Origins. Being able

The storyline seems to have gotten less credit than it deserves, which is probably because it's a slow-starting story. Origins got the story started quite quickly; within the first few hours of the game you know what the main conflict was what the overall course of the game would be. DA II takes a long time to tie all its plot threads together, but once you go through the whole thing it does make a reasonably cohesive story. Things that seem like minor side-quests in the first act turn out to be major plot points that have a huge impact later on. The game does a very good job of making it seem like every decision your character makes matters. Of course, I'll have to play it again to see how true that really is, but at the very least the game delivers a strong impression that your choices matter.

My one real complaint about the story is that, for a sequel, it doesn't tie in very much to the original game. Aside from Anders, only a few party members from Origins or Awakening have brief cameo, which is disappointing; ME 2 at least left it clear what all the original cast was doing and gave them some degree of relevance.

Overall, I'd say that while it's not as good as Origins, it's still a reasonably good game, and quite a bit better than Awakening. If it had gotten a proper amount of development time instead of being a little rushed, it probably would have been a great game; the foundation of the game is solid, it's just lacking polish. Even the combat system wouldn't be as annoying if they would have taken the time to include an isometric view and coded better combat AI (and gotten rid of the cheap tricks they used to hide their bad combat AI).

As for all the Bioware/EA dickery surrounding the game; not much to say beyond lots and lots of rage. It seriously detracted from my ability to actually enjoy the game.

 

Now that sucks. I loved the DA: O score so much I even bought it on iTunes. Nobody should ever rush Inon Zur.

 

Very true; I forgot to mention it in my big review of the game, but the soundtrack for DA2 is utterly forgettable. Much like the occasionally weak companion interactions and crap-tastic combat AI, it's an obvious sign of a rushed game.

I will say that, to Bioware's credit, they didn't deal with having a game rushed out by making a mess of the ending like happened with Knights of the Old Republic 2. Of course, I still would have preferred waiting six more months and getting the perfectly polished game DA II should have been.

 

You'd need waaaaay more than six months. Hell, DA: O took what, three years?

 

Thought it was 4-5?

 

Five years. It was first announced '04.

And yeah, six months won't cut it. About half-way through and I can't be bothered to continue.

 

I would have been happy to wait for a Duke Nukem amount of time just to get a good sequel and find out what happens to Morrigan's fucking god baby. Honestly. The only people who WEREN'T happy to do that was EA.
I'm actually happier with Blizzard right now than EA: they took like ten years to get SC2 out, but it was a damn good game.

 

IIRC, the first Dragon Age's development time was delayed by quite a bit to adapt it for a console release. Plus they went through several revisions in mid-development. I'm not far into the game yet, but I've been having fun with it.

 

Just finished the game.

Don't think I've ever raged more.

It ends in a giant cliffhanger. It's essentially just one giant advertisement for DA3.

This game will forever more be called "Dragon Effect 2", as it perfectly follows the Mass Effect 2 formula of simplification and sidequest-into-mainquest issues. It even ends on a remarkably similar cliffhanger.

 

I completely agree with what you said. Looking back, the plot did get better as it went along and it does set up an interesting scenario for DA3, especially if we tie in the events of Kirkwall back into what may happen in Ferelden. Though, that does bring up the interesting question of who would be the main hero in DA3, the Champion or the Hero of Ferelden?

The Combat AI did pretty much suck and AoE was completely useless unless you lowered the difficulty, considering how much the AI sucked at using it. Mages still got their ass kicked, mostly because the fringe enemies weren't drawn in by the tank's threat, making keeping them alive a challenge though lifebane potions and the grenade that revived all characters that fell helped in that regard. I still found archery rogues to kick a lot more ass than any other character besides a well controlled mage, simply because 100% crit was possible and easily abused to natural 1K+ elemental damage with no talent use.

I do agree with your point about the cameos and I wish there was more of a tie in with DA:O, especially if that's their plan heading into DA3. There have been hints to that, especially when you consider that Hawke, the champion, is related to the Mage Origins Warden. Overall however, I really wish Bioware spent more time on DA2 though admittedly the product wasn't as terrible as I expected for only 6 months work. As it is though, they fell far too much in the ME2 trap and assumed all the DA:O fans would buy DA2 anyway and attempted to broaden the fan base at the expense of all the DA:O fans, for profit reasons. For that, fuck you EA and hopefully, DA3 will do a better job.

 

I actually really liked this game. I liked the faster paced action of battle to be honest. I hated stunning/knocking back an opponent only to waste my time getting into postion before I could attack. I still felt the effects of having to slog my way through battles, when a little bit more team tactics/cohesiveness would've been better. But I could stand to play through the combat. I also liked the way the story worked it's way up. A little bit more by way of character interactions would have been nice, but I'm sure there's some DLC coming out that will do just that. EA's gotta milk that teet for all it's worth.

Oh yeah, when I saw this bastard, I was like Awww Yeah Golem's of Amgaraak time bitches.

 

I really enjoyed this game. Im on my third playthrough.

 

I enjoyed it immensely. I played as a Sword and Shield Warrior. My favorite characters and the ones I enjoyed using were Varric and Aveline. My other group member was Anders. I don't like Anders but his character was pretty well written.

I don't like using all the characters and exploring the depth of all of them all at once but instead prefer using them in a second playthrough for a bit of freshness. It will be hard not to use Varric as his damage output is amazing.

I'm probably going to play a mage sometime down the line, perhaps a few weeks from now.

 

After experimenting around with rewards.gda via a gff editor and the console, I've found two runes that I don't think are possible to get ingame but are still coded into the game. Torpor's barrier rune and celestial rune, which increase magic resistance and remove attribute requirements respectively. They are NOT mod runes to clarify. If anyone has found them ingame, detail where. I can post a screenshot if someone wants me to as well.

Edit: In case you're not aware yet, there's a very nasty bug out there regarding Sebastian and Isabela's friendship bonuses. If you're playing on PC, get the fix via a mod and fix existing saves via a gffeditor. For consoles, you're just kinda screwed for existing saves.

 

^What bug?

 

A far worse bug is the scene with Merrill and the mirror playing before it's supposed to play.

 

Wouldn't some of those be fixed with the 1.01 patch?

EDIT: @Sion Revan: WISE MANS FEAR!!?!?! I have to cover my eyes! Spoilers!

 

That bug. It will literally slow your character down to a crawl unless you mod it, make Isabela/Sebastian a rival, or don't use those two companions.

Edit: link to a video documenting the cumulative effects of the bug: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJjCO0ISALI

The 1.01 patch that's out there right now only solves the DRM issues caused by SecureROM for saving. We'll probably eventually see the bug fixed via a patch but who knows when that'll be out?

 

Played until the start of Act II, where I immediately received huge numbers of quests - read: errands - from people I had no emotional connection to due to me knowing nothing of the last three years beyond a token 'got rich' paragraph. While the combat was better - as was the leveling system, I thought, disregarding the dual stat req. gear - the enemies dropping randomly from the sky was bad enough to cancel out any benefit there. The voiced character and ME wheel were nice for the most part though being limited to essentially three options rankled at times.

It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't what I was hoping for. I may play through again as a different class (played mage) and see if I can get through it, but for the moment I can't bring myself to do so.

 

Uh... not really. Except for maybe that Elodin has a class. There's absolutely nothing substantially important to the events of the book in that quote.