Dragon Age 2 - Catch All

Gatta say I enjoyed the faster based combat. I like the way it feels and every attack has a nice feel of power to them. Abilities like shield bash and fireball has a nice umph to them. Even the archer felt like he had a lot of power and wasn't just shooting puny arrows.

I especially appreciate that regardless of the combat being faster, I can paused and manuver my party around and cue up spells.

However, I think the level up and action menu was a lot easier to understand in the first.

Can't say I will buy it right this moment at $60 because there are other games I want to buy but I will get it eventually.

One thing that strikes me about the DA2 combat (on the demo's one difficulty at least) is how vulnerable the enemy is, you're mowing through trash, which the combat speed doesn't help.

The thing I liked about DAO combat on normal was that it felt fair. Both you could take and receive a fair amount of damage, if you were good your party could tear down the enemy fast, and if you were using bad tactics you could be torn down too. It felt satisfying to beat a group of enemies as the stakes were there, I didn't feel satisfied playing the DA2 demo as I didn't really earn it. To be honest it was mostly right clicking on a random enemy and activating whatever abilities were off cooldown.

stevenmack wrote:

Hmm....DA2's out-of-place music of choice appears to be a remixed (pre-existing) track by whiny-voiced pixie, Florence and the Machine.

A step up from 30 seconds to mars i guess, but still....

Yeah, but the 30 Seconds to Mars piece first appeared as the second track that played during the credits. About as buried as it could get without breaking contract.

Vector wrote:

It's possible to buy Sebastien the Archer separately. If his DLC is anything like the Stone Prisoner (Shale) then it'll be worth the 7$.

That is the question, isn't it? The Shale DLC was fantastic. But then, a sarcastic, vain golem is intrinsically a little more interesting than... some archer. I'm going to wait and see what people are saying about Seb. Seems like I could always just hand the bow to Isabela (assuming she doesn't end up sending one of her nipples downrange).

Scratched wrote:

One thing that strikes me about the DA2 combat (on the demo's one difficulty at least) is how vulnerable the enemy is, you're mowing through trash, which the combat speed doesn't help.

The thing I liked about DAO combat on normal was that it felt fair. Both you could take and receive a fair amount of damage, if you were good your party could tear down the enemy fast, and if you were using bad tactics you could be torn down too. It felt satisfying to beat a group of enemies as the stakes were there, I didn't feel satisfied playing the DA2 demo as I didn't really earn it. To be honest it was mostly right clicking on a random enemy and activating whatever abilities were off cooldown.

I agree with you entirely, and you'll recall that this sort of emphasis on tactics was actually a selling point for Origins. No longer!

So... I didn't like it.

It feels like I'm playing WoW but it isn't as good. The auto-attack animations are ok but repetitive and battle consists of waiting for your cooldowns to end and spamming abilities.

Based on the demo I'm not picking this up until it is very cheap.

Just got the latest issue of PC gamer. They gave it a 94% and the reviewer was really satisfied with the combat.

PC Gamer Loves Big-Budget Title Released on PC. News at 11!

Sorry for being cynical. I basically don't trust any reviews that don't have "Wot I Think" in the subject.

Scratched wrote:

One thing that strikes me about the DA2 combat (on the demo's one difficulty at least) is how vulnerable the enemy is, you're mowing through trash, which the combat speed doesn't help.

The thing I liked about DAO combat on normal was that it felt fair. Both you could take and receive a fair amount of damage, if you were good your party could tear down the enemy fast, and if you were using bad tactics you could be torn down too. It felt satisfying to beat a group of enemies as the stakes were there, I didn't feel satisfied playing the DA2 demo as I didn't really earn it. To be honest it was mostly right clicking on a random enemy and activating whatever abilities were off cooldown.

Thanks for this. I felt the same, but couldn't quite put my finger on it in order to describe it. You're absolutely correct.

Another thing I noticed is that it is much harder to crowed control than it is in the first. The taunt range is pretty small. My party was always all over the place each dealing with 4 darkspawn.

EvilDead wrote:

Just got the latest issue of PC gamer. They gave it a 94% and the reviewer was really satisfied with the combat.

I'm with Dysplastic on this one. Also remember that there are going to be people who absolutely adore the changes they've made to Dragon Age 2. It's not like Origins was so good they had to intentionally make Dragon Age 2 worse. They're trying to appeal to someone. 94% means they think it's a great game, not that they necessarily think it's anything like Origins or any other title out there.

94% on any Bioware game is a total joke. Every Bioware game that's been released thus far has had bugs and polish problems. The demo doesn't speak well of this tendency, and I have every expectation that DA2 will be just as buggy as every Bioware game before it. And the graphics! Ugh. Are they blind? Do they not see the terrible clipping and the floating weapons, and the dead eyes, and the bland style?

I know what Bioware is trying to go for, but the hardware and their artists aren't strong enough to support their vision, and they don't get points for trying. This is the real world.

All right. Okay. This in mind:

LarryC wrote:

94% on any Bioware game is a total joke.

What would you have given Mass Effect 2 in a review score? I seem to remember getting lectured by yourself (and others) every time I tried to say the game was good but not perfect.

LarryC wrote:

they don't get points for trying. This is the real world.

Many, many GOTY awards including this community's **two years running** , more than 4 million in sales (Dragon Age, I mean)...C'mon. They get points.

so... stop playing them?

Both MEs, DA:O, Jade Empire (blah), KOTOR and NWN were all bug free (my experience with them was, anyway) and for me, story outweighs graphics and art direction. If they aren't your cup of tea and you consistently have problems with them, don't purchase them.

I guess the 'problem' (with a small demo that might be a several months old build) is that while it looks like a good game, across a variety of game areas, you can see so many areas that it could be better. Meanwhile the marketing and advertising is insisting it's the best thing since hoop and stick.

Scratched wrote:

Meanwhile the marketing and advertising is insisting it's the best thing since hoop and stick.

I'm not by any stretch going to suggest the game is perfect, but you're a smart guy. Barbie Horse Adventures' marketing team insisted it was the best thing since hoop and stick as well, we know to ignore that kind of thing. Personally I rely on the opinions of the media members I trust and studio history. I'm a sucker for an intriguing and experimental concept, though. That's where my impulse buys come from.

Guys, you are so getting the wrong idea. I liked Mass Effect 2 a lot. For that matter, I also liked Dragon Age: Origins a lot. I like Bioware games in general a lot. That doesn't mean that I can't see the faults of those games. In general, a typical Bioware game suffers from a severe lack of polish - going right down to basic coding bugs and game design snafus. Blizzard games are the industry standard in terms of polish, and Bioware is nowhere near that level of shine. Every single one of their games is flawed on that basis. I would expect DA2 to be similar.

That doesn't mean that ME2 isn't really fun game, or that its combat is simplistic. I think, Blind_Evil, that you could benefit from coloring me a little less extreme. I'm neither a mindless ME2 fanatic, nor am I someone who can't find the game really, really fun. I do, and I still play the game, over 200 hours in. It's for that reason that I can point out every little misplaced tiling.

Blizzard games, eh?

They're still balancing Diablo 2 eleven years later man! Game design snafus!

We'll have to agree to disagree regarding the levels of polish. I find Blizzard's design philosophies bland and rate of output disheartening. I'd rather a great game from Bioware every year than a "perfect" (not to me, but for the sake of the point) one from Blizzard every six.

And I'm not making any effort to paint you as extreme, that's just how you come off in that post. You're talking about the game as if it's unworthy of any praise:

LarryC wrote:

94% on any Bioware game is a total joke. (snip) And the graphics! Ugh. Are they blind? Do they not see the terrible clipping and the floating weapons, and the dead eyes, and the bland style?

To be frank that sounds like something I'd see in the comments section of a Killzone 3 review from a huge Xbox fanboy. It's a review, that one guy's opinion. Probably he doesn't care about the same things you do. The sum can be greater than the parts. For the record, I didn't notice any clipping (the daggers not hitting the ogre doesn't count, does it?), dead eyes, and I like the art style just fine. It's not earth shattering, but it's striking, and that's more than I can say for Origins.

One thing that strikes me now that both Bioware and Blizzard are attached at the hip to major publishers, is that Blizzard is still definitely committed long term to the quality of their games, Bioware less so. Bioware seems a more 'ship it and move onto the next product we can sell, essential maintenance patches only' company, which isn't really fine for any game in an ideal world, but even less so for a big longer term game that RPGs lend themselves to.

I wonder what their patching strategy is for TOR?

LarryC wrote:

Guys, you are so getting the wrong idea. I liked Mass Effect 2 a lot. For that matter, I also liked Dragon Age: Origins a lot. I like Bioware games in general a lot. That doesn't mean that I can't see the faults of those games. In general, a typical Bioware game suffers from a severe lack of polish - going right down to basic coding bugs and game design snafus. Blizzard games are the industry standard in terms of polish, and Bioware is nowhere near that level of shine. Every single one of their games is flawed on that basis. I would expect DA2 to be similar.

That doesn't mean that ME2 isn't really fun game, or that its combat is simplistic. I think, Blind_Evil, that you could benefit from coloring me a little less extreme. I'm neither a mindless ME2 fanatic, nor am I someone who can't find the game really, really fun. I do, and I still play the game, over 200 hours in. It's for that reason that I can point out every little misplaced tiling.

They did give it a 94%. So there's 6% to improve!

I don't get it. Just because I think it's intellectually dishonest to praise a game that highly when it's full of basic performance bugs and little design errors paints me as extreme? How does that even work? I'm the one dissing the extreme stance. Isn't that supposed to make me moderate, not the other end extreme?

I don't believe in the defense that a review is purely opinion. It has to be some part objective - an honest appraisal of the game find its faults and names them, even as it emphasizes the things that it does right. That way, if you totally agree with the reviewer's POV, the review is useful, but even if you don't, it's still informative. It is supposed to be journalistic writing, after all.

I specifically did not say that the game is unworthy of any praise! How do people read that into that sentence? It's bizarre.

Blind_Evil wrote:

Blizzard games, eh?

They're still balancing Diablo 2 eleven years later man! Game design snafus!

We'll have to agree to disagree regarding the levels of polish. I find Blizzard's design philosophies bland and rate of output disheartening. I'd rather a great game from Bioware every year than a "perfect" (not to me, but for the sake of the point) one from Blizzard every six.

Diablo 2 is a landmark game because it expanded on a game concept fully realized in Diablo 1. I happen not to agree that it's perfect, either, but it is quite polished from a UI and coding perspective.

Blizzard's game designs may be bland, but that's not a polish issue - it's an inspiration issue, and one which I broadly agree with. Blizzard isn't exactly the most imaginative of companies, to put it lightly. I did not say that they were perfect. I said that they released polished games. Seriously, where are all these words I didn't say coming from? It's like I spoke some code word I didn't understand and you're filling in the blanks from a stance and position I'm not even aware exists.

Just think how much grief could be avoided by reviewers not putting numbers on their reviews. Does anyone know a innumerate reviewer?

Scratched:

That may put paid to stupid "console wars," Scratched, but it doesn't solve the issue of blatantly biased reviewing. Mass Effect 1 for the 360 was riddled with all manner of problems. Some reviews were careful not to mention those problems (and some were, in fairness). Non-reporting of serious issues tends to happen more with big budget games, since game companies can lean on reviewers to omit certain details, which just undermines the credibility of the whole review process.

I mean, how many reviews for Brutal Legend named exactly how much RTS gaming there was in that title, and how many honestly gauged the quality of play against Starcraft, Company of Heroes, and Dawn of War 2?

It's unfortunate that most reviews about Dragon Age 2 are going to be functionally useless, which is exactly why I've preordered the game. I know I'm going to want to try it out, and that no reliable review will probably be forthcoming, either for or against it.

I've played through most of the demo now... what i could get to anyways, considering it crashed on me in three different places. Without the ability to save, I basically had to redo everything each time.

It's better than my first impressions, but not by much. Combat was more tactical than I first thought, but it feels so "Diabloized" to me that it really is a completely different game.

Scratched wrote:

Just think how much grief could be avoided by reviewers not putting numbers on their reviews. Does anyone know a innumerate reviewer?

There have been outlets that tried and the backlash was far too overwhelming to keep it up. Jeff Green talked about one of his old magazines doing it and that's how it ended.

I can't criticize a game for coding issues, because I have no idea what they entail and if they are there they don't effect my gameplay experience in any significant way (not usually, anyway).

I suppose one example would be in Origins, when the cutscene between the old mage in Warden's Keep and the demon possessing Sophia Dryden repeated. Played twice before the fight. I said "hey, that's weird." Then I finished the fight and moved on. I'm sure in the world of programming that is a disaster. To me it was 25 seconds lost. Not exactly something earth shattering.

Anyway, Larry, it's clear we're coming at this game, or gaming in general, from very different directions. I don't think trying to bridge the gap will produce any results.

Phew, kinda glad i'm waiting on this one. Definitely preferred the PC version of DA:O, but it sounds like console is the way to go on this title.

It's difficult to talk about the reliability of the review of DA2 specifically as it's not out for the great unwashed yet, for all I know it could be spot on. To a certain extent you could come back to whether the demo, which is all the public have at the moment, is meant to be a good representation or just a marketing expense to get people to part with their money.

On a more general note, I think there is cause to be a bit concerned and suspicious of reviews of big budget games. Part of that big budget is marketing, which can meet or exceed the development budget, and as has been anecdotally reported many times, reviewers or the companies reviewers work for do get pressured by representatives of the companies selling the games. Not to say that all reviews are useless, but it poisons the well.

Blind_Evil:

Examples of coding issues would be the bug that caused detroit20 to lose over 20 hours of gameplay on his PS3 version of ME2, rendering the copy virtually unplayable. Another example would be the common graphics driver bug that rendered ME1 completely unplayable for many of its users, and the coding bug that prevents me from reinstalling ME1 on my new hard drive, even though I still have all the codes and the disk and everything. My own copy of DA:O erased several of my save files for no apparent reason, and crashed several times, losing me hours in gameplay.

I think you're fortunate in that you have never experienced these items, but I don't think it's too much to ask to mention these bugs when you're an official reviewer. The bug rendering the PS3 ME2 unplayable was particularly nasty.

Just Downloaded the Demo on PS3. Looks good so far.

I think it's question of where you draw the line with that. As a games reviewer what aspects should you be reviewing? If a game has bugs (what game doesn't, I'm sure the internal bug list for most shipped games is long), at what threshold does it become worth mentioning?

You have to decide whether you think every company is out to screw you over, or whether they're acting on good faith if they say they didn't know a major bug existed, as Bioware did with the PS3 save bug. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. The best you can do is get to learn a company's reputation and change your buying decision based on it. If a company gets burned with falling sales then it would be nice to think they need to pick up their game to recover those sales, but it doesn't always happen that way in the games industry.

But the flawless Blizzard released Starcraft with a memory leak that caused the game to crash, for many users, after a couple hours of play. Maybe the reviewers / critics should just make 90 the new 100 (so nothing can score higher) and everyone will be happy.

The fact that they didn't even know the bug existed is exactly why it's such a bad bug. If they knew it existed when it shipped, they could have warned the public and started working on the solution immediately. It's not like there's a gazillion PS3 configurations out there. It's a pretty closed system.

A bug that renders the game completely or virtually unplayable is the worst kind of bug and it exceeds any reasonable threshold of mention. Brad meant well with Elemental, but it was still a virtually unplayable mess when it released, and he doesn't get points for meaning well. If it's any standard, Action Girlz Racing for the Wii was a pretty bad game, but it was still completely playable all the time.

DA2's demo has a bunch of bugs and graphical corner-cutting that is getting a pass. I'm fairly sure that no review site is going to mention the clipping models, bad cinematic blocking, and the bad close-up textures. At the point where they're all obfuscating obvious facts, what's the point of reading them? I already know I'm going to like the combat from the demo. I don't need them to say that. It's not like reviewers routinely give accurate combat details anyway.

jonnypolite wrote:

Phew, kinda glad i'm waiting on this one. Definitely preferred the PC version of DA:O, but it sounds like console is the way to go on this title.

Nah, you still want the PC version. Sure, the PC UI isn't the best ever and definitely shows signs of being a console port (as was the case with the ME2 PC UI), but I still found the PC version vastly preferable in many ways, just as I did with DA:O. Definitely download and try both demos if you are unsure, but I'm pretty confident you'll agree once you do.