Dragon Age 2 - Here be spoilers.

[Sjofn]

I occassionally slow or freeze up for a second or two but it doesn't happen very often. It is annoying though.

[tgr]

Sounds like texture thrashing or something similar?

[Mazakiel]

I haven't had that problem.  Everyone else is in Vista/ Win7 I assume?

Windows 7 here.  And while it usually will clear up after a minute or so if I let it sit there, I'm impatient, and once I figured out that alt tabbing would fix it much more quickly, have been doing that. 


Just to talk about what I like a bit to balance out the complaints about buggy programming, the writing has been top notch.  Even the characters I dislike are still pretty well done.  I know Fenris has surprised me a time or two.  I do wish we could haul around maybe one more person though.  Between Varric and Merrill being almost permanent members, I don't see much of the others.  I also like that things in Act 1 are more about trying to crawl out of Lowtown as opposed to sweeping epic events, which you don't start getting involved in yourself until you've started making a name for yourself. 

I may be alone here, but I also like the way NPC armor is handled.  I like that they keep individual looks throughout the game.  Also, mage hoods no longer look as silly as they did in DA:O.  Though I wish we got armor that didn't look like a bathrobe sooner. 

I do wonder if the DLC I'm sure is coming will focus more on filling in the time skips in the story, or on what happens after. 

[Sjofn]

I'm OK with the companions having their own look more in DA2 than in ME2, because they are not in space. I still wish I could make Isabella put on pants, though. I also hear you on the "I wish I had like ... one more slot in my party" thing. Of course, if I had one more slot, I'd probably still wish I had another one on top of that 

[Ingmar]

Yeah, I'm glad my rogues don't all end up clones in leather spartan skirts, the unique look thing I think is an improvement, although I wish they all upgraded as they went instead of just a couple of them doing so.

[Pezzle]

Then he saw the statues head and he knew he was on his own world.  He was in the future!

[Tarami]

Yeah, I'm glad my rogues don't all end up clones in leather spartan skirts, the unique look thing I think is an improvement, although I wish they all upgraded as they went instead of just a couple of them doing so.

Agreed, the companion outfits are nice because they are styled according to the character, not according to which clown suit gives the most +pwn.

However, I thought the upgrades you find would give small visual upgrades of the companion armour but, alas. Not really a fan of the wholesale change in appearance (atleast not for Merrill) as I thought it broke character for a Dalish to wear Stormtrooper armour.

I mean, why not make gifts out of the armour upgrades? So I could give Merrill some shoes with soles. 

[Xuri]

I haven't had that problem.  Everyone else is in Vista/ Win7 I assume?

Windows 7 here, yea. Of the 64-bit type.

[Merusk]

Must be something in that OS then, since I imagine you all have beefier vid cards than mine, too.  Wow, an advantage to Xp, whoda thunk?

What happens if you toggle Windows to run the game in Xp compatible mode?

[Ingmar]

If I had to guess the difference is probably between using the DX11 renderer and the DX9 one rather than a Windows version thing.

[Xuri]

I've tried with both DX9 and DX11 (or rather, DX10 since I don't have a DX11 card - but the options are still DX9 vs DX11), and had the same issue with both versions.

[FatuousTwat]

Merrill being buggy as shit makes me sad. After <act 3 personal quest shit>, she never talked about it, and I was all "wtf, don't you care?" Well, it turns out, if you're romancing her, the fall out thing WILL play after all ... before you do the thing that's supposed to trigger it, so you're all "what the hell are you even talking about?" when it happens.

By the way, make sure you click on Hawke while controlling a different party member a few times, especially if you are playing a Sarcastic Bitch Hawke. Some of what s/he says is funny. 

Ah, so her questline isn't broken, cool.

[Mazakiel]

Finally finished just now. 

[tmp]

I've tried with both DX9 and DX11 (or rather, DX10 since I don't have a DX11 card - but the options are still DX9 vs DX11), and had the same issue with both versions.

Could be the (beta) nvidia driver acting up. I'm running with older one (260.99) and don't get that.

[Xuri]

Alas, I wish it was so. I upgraded my nvidia-drivers TO the beta-version in an attempt to fix the problem - without luck.

[Samprimary]

I'm really disappointed in the direction DAII took for the level development assets. Repeating the same maps over and over and over again is a dark road that we don't want to let them set precedent for, so please bitch about it a lot. I don't want to see any more otherwise top-notch games sullied with terrain copypasta just to get them out the door faster.

[Job601]

I'm really disappointed in the direction DAII took for the level development assets. Repeating the same maps over and over and over again is a dark road that we don't want to let them set precedent for, so please bitch about it a lot. I don't want to see any more otherwise top-notch games sullied with terrain copypasta just to get them out the door faster.

Out of all the complaints about DAII, this is the one that rings truest for me.  So much of what happens in a game like this has to do with 1.  exploration and 2.  tactical fight setups, and using the same levels over and over again ruins them both.  What's more, those levels you're running over and over again look ok, but don't play especially well.  There are way too many straight line corridors.

Why I generally like the combat and think it's faster and more fun than DAO, I am surprised at how good kiting and dodging are, and given the size of enemy health bars I'm not sure they lead to fun gameplay.  Playing on hard, I have had way too many fights end with Varric running back and forth taking potshots at the last guy standing. 

Plaudits:  Resource management is fun without being frustrating.  On hard, at least, the game does a good job of dropping  just about as many health potions as you need to keep going without having to "go back to town" to buy more. 

The pacing is excellent, especially compared to Origins.  I've never felt like there's too much fighting or too much talking.

I've just finished Act I, and I like the story so far; DAII feels like it's about something without being cliched.

[Merusk]

Latter act2 and most of act3 was off on the combat pacing. 3 or even 4 waves of enemies spawning from nowhere just to tax your resources.  They could have taxed me just as much with fewer waves of stronger enemies.  I'm not sure if their goal was wanting to make me feel powerful by slaughtering 40 men at a time or they really were just trying to drag things out as I've seen postulated.

Either way it was less fun than the start where it was only one or maybe two waves of enemies that were about as strong as I was.  You'd kill off the last guy and think, "Ok I can move on now" only to notice Hawke wasn't out of combat mode yet and red circles were springing up everywhere once more.

[tmp]

Alas, I wish it was so. I upgraded my nvidia-drivers TO the beta-version in an attempt to fix the problem - without luck.

No, i meant the opposite -- the newer (and beta) drivers could be what's causing it, since i don't experience it with older drivers. But if you had that with the older ones, then dunno.

Latter act2 and most of act3 was off on the combat pacing. 3 or even 4 waves of enemies spawning from nowhere just to tax your resources.

I got rather tired of getting jumped by waves of 20-30 people while i was cruising around town with just my Hawke brother, so found easy way to break most of these cheap carefuly crafted encounters -- rather than charging in when the battle would start, i'd move back ~screen worth of distance, to either nearest chokepoint or open space depending if there was a boss or not. It'd either funnel reinforcements into nice and easy to manage line, or in some cases they wouldn't come at all and it was just matter of moving back to intended battle point and moping them up afterwards.

I'm really disappointed in the direction DAII took for the level development assets. Repeating the same maps over and over and over again is a dark road that we don't want to let them set precedent for, so please bitch about it a lot. I don't want to see any more otherwise top-notch games sullied with terrain copypasta just to get them out the door faster.

People already bitched a storm when they had done it before with 4 dungeons in ME; it's not like they weren't aware that's going to be the reaction.

[Xuri]

Latter act2 and most of act3 was off on the combat pacing. 3 or even 4 waves of enemies spawning from nowhere just to tax your resources.  They could have taxed me just as much with fewer waves of stronger enemies.  I'm not sure if their goal was wanting to make me feel powerful by slaughtering 40 men at a time or they really were just trying to drag things out as I've seen postulated.

Either way it was less fun than the start where it was only one or maybe two waves of enemies that were about as strong as I was.  You'd kill off the last guy and think, "Ok I can move on now" only to notice Hawke wasn't out of combat mode yet and red circles were springing up everywhere once more.

This. If they want me to feel that my character has become powerful, make him slaughter those 40 people all at once - not have him kill groups of three people over and over and over (and over) again.

[Comstar]

Well the Rock Paper Shotgun blog of the 1st 8 hours convinced me not to buy the game (though their full review is still to come).

I hope Mass Effect III doesn't have the same problems :(

[Bunk]

I find it odd that you guys really felt the combat was a timesink. I'm taking my sweet ass time with this game (20 hours to get past the Deeproads), but I'm finding combat to be the highest paced part of the thing. I managed to use up that time by doing every sidequest, not fast forwarding conversations (amazingly, I really had no urge to), agonizing over leveling decisions, and constantly checking shops for new goods.

Since so many people seem to still be undecided, I'll regurgitate what everyone else has said, with my spin:

Good:
- complex story with some intersting wtfs? A quick conversation with a friend about a decision just before the Deeproads that we each did differently revealed two very diverging story options for example.
- graphics - much better than DAO as a whole, I like the customer crafted companions and the lack of man shoulders on the women
- high paced combat - you can still play the pause and tactic game, but it's not to the point of having to plan every characters' step and pin point placement of every AOE like you did in DAO
- interface - love the map interface, inventory is easier to sort and manage, prefer the new talent tree approach
- love the voiced over main character, and I think they actually improved on the ME2 version of the dialog wheel
- really glad they made the dog an additional summon instead of using up a character slot
- actually seems to be more and varied loot than DAO
- well written and complex NPCs - as expected from Bioware.
- the story feels more connected, you are becoming part of the city, where as DAO felt very disjointed at times for me

Bad:
- the resue of the same terrain gets a little annoying at times - many of the sets look really cool, but the impact gets lost when they keep getting reused
- too much loot that just can't be used, because of the no armor on companions
- the darkspawn should look scarier and less like Skeletor in tights

[Merusk]

Oh, Bioware.

[Simond]

I don't know what's funnier - EA employees being caught red-handed in shilling their own game, or the fact that the player metacritic score is still 4/10 even after that. 

[tmp]

I find it odd that you guys really felt the combat was a timesink.

I suspect if nothing else the mini-human-reaper thing can put anyone in this camp.

"let's make a fight with different phases, like in MMO. Then it'll be awesome."
"No, got a better idea. Let's make it go repeatedly through these phases for 20 minutes straight, then it will be A-A-Awesome"
"Brilliant."

[Paelos]

I don't know what's funnier - EA employees being caught red-handed in shilling their own game, or the fact that the player metacritic score is still 4/10 even after that. 

I'm picking three I liked that gave it a zero:

Geeze, can they possibly dumb down these games any more. Blatant copy-paste areas and revisiting the same locations over and over, very lazy design. So many waves of mobs that its almost border-lining on hack and slash game. that wouldn't even matter so much if the combat was good but it's not, like everything else totally dumbed down. I just can't stand to play this game any more, its just bad in just about every area, way to linear and tedious and an incredible disappointment, a huge step backwards in my opinion. Total proof that publishers are paying these top reviewers to give good reviews.

Don't play this on the PC or atleast get an xbox controller, this graphics/gameplay is only good for consoles. Also, Play dragon age 2 first before playing DAO so your standard bar is not set to high before playing DA2.

In DA:O it was tactical, you had to use your brains, rushing straight-forward was a no-no. In this game, you basically spam one or two abilities on group of enemies and wait them to die. Maybe get a heal spell from a mage or gluck down a health potion. The combat is seriously boring and repetitive, it actually makes you wish you'd just get over with and move on with the plot without beating dozens of same looking monsters in same looking environments. Now about the areas, the recycling is hell of a bad thing. Having to run the same looking mine cavern really isn't what I define as immersive. Couldn't Bioware put any more work on the areas instead of recycling every type of area (there's one cavern, one beach etc.) for the duration of the game?? Really now. The dialogue and conversations.. well they aren't bad, the voice acting is nice but.. does it really matter what you choose? It always ends up in the same situation as with every other choice.

[Khaldun]

That's a fun bit of tracking down.

I keep being surprised at how companies think it's easy to shill and how transparent they are about doing it. On Yelp, you'll occasionally see a restaurant or business that has a shitton of reviews that are filtered out. You go and look at them and they are all from people with a single review, and are nearly copy-pasted in their unreal enthusiasm for the business.

[Ingmar]

This looks more like one random dude getting pissed at the low ratings and trying to do something about it rather than an organized effort by the company itself. If they were actually trying to shill as a business initiative I'm sure the ratings would be much higher.

[eldaec]

- the darkspawn should look scarier and less like Skeletor in tights

I've always worked under the assumption Skeletor actually wore tights? I mean, Skeletor in tights would just be 'Skeletor'. 'In tights' is redundant.

This is important.



If this is tightless then the whole show suddenly becomes  . Also he is clearly going to catch pneumonia.

[Merusk]

This looks more like one random dude getting pissed at the low ratings and trying to do something about it rather than an organized effort by the company itself. If they were actually trying to shill as a business initiative I'm sure the ratings would be much higher.

I'll see you that and raise you:

You guys are also ignoring that a bunch of other suspect accounts which apparently linked back to BioWare employees were registered on the same day... and all gave DA2 a 10 and wrote PR-like reviews as their only ratings.

When users got pissed off at DA2 and wrote 0s in protest, BioWare's PR then talked up about how Metacritic user reviews didn't matter, and while they don't matter, it's hilarious that you can say that while your own employees apparently care a lot.


There was also something (I don't know all the details), but somebody posting on a Russian BioWare site who allegedly had a connection to BW, exhorting fans to give high reviews to DA2... before the game was even out in Russia.

and

Originally Posted by EmCeeGramr:
There was also something (I don't know all the details), but somebody posting on a Russian BioWare site who allegedly had a connection to BW, exhorting fans to give high reviews to DA2... before the game was even out in Russia.

Yea.. on Bioware.ru there is a news item asking people to vote on Metacritic to combat the low review scores lol

Page in Russian: http://www.bioware.ru/2011/03/10/dra...etacritic.html

Page translated to English: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bioware.ru%2F2011%2F03%2F10%2Fdragon_age_2_vote_on_metacritic.html&act=url

[Ingmar]

Ah, if there's more of them, sure, I thought this was the only one.

[Paelos]

The Zeros on the Metacritic page are just mindboggling. There are a lot of people that really really hate this game.

It can't possibly be THAT bad, right? This is just about beating up on the shills?

[Merusk]

It's neckbeards angry that this game isn't the next Baldur's Gate, Elder Scrolls or any other game that traces its lineage back to the gold box days.   It's a different beast, very much a console RPG at its heart (which isn't a bad thing!) but still enjoyable and fun.

[Ingmar]

The Zeros on the Metacritic page are just mindboggling. There are a lot of people that really really hate this game.

It can't possibly be THAT bad, right? This is just about beating up on the shills?

The initial zeros were probably 'protest' ratings from people angry about SecureROM or perhaps vague notions of 'dumbing down' and 'consolization'. That kind of thing is what essentially makes Metacritic ratings useless and why the Bioware Angry Lunch Cabal or whatever should have just left it alone instead of doing a half-assed shill job on it, because I'm sure by doing so they've just caused dozens more zero ratings from people.

A 10 is too much of a stretch given it is clearly not flawless, but a 0 is way beyond ridiculous.

[Paelos]

It's neckbeards angry that this game isn't the next Baldur's Gate, Elder Scrolls or any other game that traces its lineage back to the gold box days.   It's a different beast, very much a console RPG at its heart (which isn't a bad thing!) but still enjoyable and fun.

I don't mind a console RPG as long as it isn't painfully obvious I should be playing it with a gamepad. That isn't the case is it?