@Orm, awinarock, Chengar:
All valid points, though I honestly didn't see any plot-holes. Point some out for me?

@Anarchy:
I plan on playing Origins as soon as possible, but right now I just don't have a machine that can run it. Played DA2 on my bro's.

 

I played both on the Xbox and enjoyed both on the xbox equally. Both games had their flaws for me.

DAO had slugglishly boring as hell combat that made me want to smash my face on the wall with how slow anything but a mage played. The graphics were basically as much brown/dark green/grey they could jam into the game. The look of the game was fairly dull and boring. The plot was decent enough but it was the basic "gather army, go kill big bad" plot-type.

DA2 had reused dungeon environments and only one nasty bug I encountered (the Merrill Plot 3 arc bug that Cheddar mentioned). Combat relied too much on waves and giant health bars. They definitely fixed the boring as fucking warrior/rogue gameplay from the firstgame and made them fun to play here. I think they went too far with the combat speed and the balance of the game needed to focus more on tactical stuff. I loved that you could pause and issue 4 orders instead of just one, but it often wasn't needed. DA2 needs to nerf the classes, do away or do better with the wave system and turn on friendly fire for all difficulty levels. Loot had a lot of either "junk" items or items simply named "boots" or "ring" DAO had a lot of this too, but atleast they had a unique small icons and said things like "Chainmail Boots" or "Iron Ring".

I found both DAO and DA2 very fun to play. I loved both stories, the side quests, the codexes, the little easter eggs. I loved the setting of both games, the characters I found and the quests I did. DAO was loads of fun as a mage, though it got stupidly easy even on nightmare save for a few boss fights. We needed those kind of boss fights in DA2. DA2 was loads of fun on my rogue. But it also got too easy even on nightmare.

I did enjoy the graphical look of DA2 way more than DAO, but again, reused environments have to go.

All in all, they simply needed more time with DA2. BioWare claimed at Pax East to be doing away with the reused environments, being able to customize companions with armor again and expanding the world to beyond just Kirkwall. Their plan was to be even bigger than Ferelden. They have said on the forums that they wish to bring back more tactical gameplay in DA3. I just hope they get that time for DA3

 

DA2 was decent, IMO. God knows I got sick of the generic loot, reused locations, everyone coming to you with their issues. two or three waves of enemies in every fight and the railroaded plot at the end leading to a Mage's revolt and Hawk ultimately fleeing Kirkwall, but it was an enjoyable game. The characters were interesting and engaging for the most part (except Anders, fuck him), a lot of the quests and writing focusing on Hawke really fleshed him out for me as an individual character, and the combat system was quite nice.

Was it as good as DA:O? Nope. Was it as good as it could have been? Nope. But it wasn't the piece of shit people make it out to be.

 

I think I've found your problem.

 

I was going to write a long ass post about the fucking moronic "war" between consoles and PC but then I got bored. Then I realized that we're both gamers and being an elitist prick about either side is pointless. Point of games is to have fun. I have fun with my Xbox 360. I also have fun with my PC and my Nintendo DS.

Why should it matter what medium I play the game on as long as I have fun playing the game?

 

Because the control system for the console version is terrible and the one on PC works pretty well.

It has nothing to do with 'console war' bullshit, I'm talking about the fact that the console versions of DAO just did not play anywhere near as well as the PC one, which fits directly into your complaints of terrible and slow combat. It wasn't terrible on PC, at least in my opinion.

 

Somehow, I doubt having the isometric camera, a wider view, more hotkeys and a better pausing to issue order system would've made playing a Rogue or Warrior more fun on DAO for me. Maybe the mage, perhaps, but I still had loads of fun as the mage on DAO for the Xbox anyways.

Edit: I found combat in DAO to be tactical (which was awesome) that involved a lot of strategy. What I found terrible was how boring it was to actually watch a warrior or a rogue swing a sword, shuffle to get to enemy or fire a bow. I found their swings slow and me wishing the combat would finish faster but still require strategy. DA2 tried to fix this for me and for a large part they did. Warriors and rogues were fun, but I felt they gutted a bit too much tactical play. Combine the two and I will be very happy.

 

It was a party based game. What class your main was didn't really matter, and the control system was significantly better for controlling a party quickly and easily.

I never got bored playing a Rogue or Warrior, because I wasn't playing either, I was playing a party with those classes in them, and on PC I could quickly easily switch to and change the strategy with my Rogues or Warriors (or even just activate a specific skill to help them out) and then switch back to whatever character(primarily mage) I was focusing on as an active skill user, all within a few seconds.

 

And that is where you and I differ in how I approached the game. I primarily controlled my character, and paused the game to either issue an order to an npc that wasn't doing what I needed him/her to already, to move them as needed and to focus their fire as needed.

I set up vast tactic systems overtime so that I wasn't always needed on the other characters. I didn't micro manage every single action my party did because it wasn't needed on nightmare and it would've made the combat even slower.

And since I primarily sat on the Warden character, who was my character, then I needed to have fun doing so. As a Warrior or Rogue, it was not fun. As a Mage, however, it was loads of fun. Thats why when I DID play a Warrior or Rogue Warden, I ended up controlling Morrigan for most of the game. Heh.

 

This is the key point I think. It didn't for me, not on PC. Things happening in combat and the issuing of orders happened pretty quickly (at least past the early sections of the game), which made things fun.

Also, I'm really not seeing what your argument is on how boring playing Rogues and Warriors were when apparently the reason this was a problem is because you chose to sit on and control a Rogue or Warrior for entire battles rather than using a mage, or switching as needed, just because you didn't choose a mage at startup. Were you unable to customize the progression of your companions in the 360 version or something?

 

Nah, just I didn't view Morrigan or Wynne as my characters. If I take the time to design what a character looks like, I damn well wanna spend my time controlling him/her.

If I spend 30 minutes or so making a Warrior or Rogue character look cool and then only really control them until I get Morrigan, then there's something wrong with the "funness" of that class. They were both very useful classes and I always had one of each in my party, its just that the character I make in party based games is the one I want to control the most. Thats all.

 

I liked DA2. The combat was fun. The story and dungeons on the other hand...

Eh...

They could have done better work with the dungeons or at least done better at hiding the reusing of the same map. Hell the MINIMAP WAS THE SAME. It only turns out there's a closed door where there previously wasnt. Thanks guys.

The story is okay. I mean you're basically confined to Kirkwall and somehow events always have to happen so that you stay in Kirkwall. That and its really a story of one man(or woman) and his friends and family.

DA:O on the other hand is about the Warden and his quest to stop the Blight. Thats a bit higher on the drama scale then "Me and my friends going around and fixing problems."

 

Anyone who played both on the console is going to have differnet impressions than someone who played both on PC because DA: O was great fro PC and shit for console while DA2 was a shitty console port for the PC.

 

Dragon Age 2 had some of the most entertaining characters I'd seen in a modern RPG. I loved Varric to death, and Isabelle was just fun. Some characters were easy to hate, but then, that's how they were supposed to be.

DA2 suffered from having no story, no plot, and effectively no real linear progression of events. If you had told me it was possible for a story to have no plot whatsoever before I played that game, any story, in any form, I would have told you that it was impossible. Plot must exist in some capacity.

Having played DA2, I'm now not so sure. You can argue about the validity of the characters all day if you like, but I don't think anyone would dispute that the story of DA2 varied from Total Crap to Why The Hell Are We Doing This Again.

That being said. Do I think DA3 is going to be good?

"We're trying to make the characters more engaging and fun."

No. No I don't. They clearly have absolutely no idea why the first one was terrible, and thus, are obviously going to make the same mistakes all over again. We will get a character-centric story with no plot or story to speak of just like the first time, only this time the characters won't be a saving grace, because they're going to overwrite them to death.

And EA is a tyrant with release schedules and budgets, so all the environments will be copypasted again and the entire world will be Samefaced because decent character generators require money, time, and effort to make.

Whatever tiny, emaciated spark of orphaned optimism I had left died when the Extended Cut DLC for Mass Effect 3 was "Nothing new is changed, your choices still don't matter, all of the bad consequences of the previously vague ending were fixed in a week in-universe, and if you shoot the Star Child, rocks fall and everyone dies."

I'm going to need at least five trusted friends telling me the game is not an overpriced frisbee to consider buying it.

And even then, I might just save my money on the principle of not giving more of it to EA.