steo on 12/3/2011 at 18:24

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You really don't need to spend £1500 to have a high-end system that'll play almost any game on high settings. My last upgrade cost around £600, which includes everything that can't be reused from the old system - motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU and graphics card, think I got a new HDD as well - and now, over two and a half years later, I'm just starting to find that I need to turn the settings down from maximum in some of the new games I play.

june gloom on 12/3/2011 at 21:04

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What the fuck is this?

gunsmoke on 12/3/2011 at 22:29

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I think you answered your own question. Fucking hilarious.

Sulphur on 12/3/2011 at 23:06

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ThiefGen's dropped the spaz act in that thread for now, but there's still the occasional post going OMG THIRD PERSON AND BRIGHT LIGHTS NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!11 http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/9338/flailsh8.gif

I wish they'd borrow a page from ShockGen and incorporate a little cynicism in their worldview, because Looking Glass is gone, and the lower their expectations are, the less mental gouging they're likely to inflict upon themselves.


As far as DA2 is concerned, I'm only 45 minutes into the city of Kirkwall, and I'm already feeling constrained by it. 45 hours of running around the same city no matter how well-architected it might be, along with copy-paste dungeons/caves, means that the plot and quests had better be fucking worth it, because the combat's been pretty meh so far. There's a term I've come across in forums (Ars Technica amongst others) that designates low-level hordes as 'trash mobs', and it's an apt appellation. Waves just spawn on top of you as soon as the last one's gone down, and it's annoying.

DA2's also only worth playing on Hard difficulty, because at least then you'll need to approach boss fights and large mobs with a small amount of planning. Normal makes the combat seem to play by itself because it's so easy, almost like an insta-gib version of baby's first RPG.

Ostriig on 13/3/2011 at 03:08

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I call it the "But Wait! There's more!" approach, and it had me groaning in the first game too. Except now there's, no pun intended, more of it. In Origins they did it for bosses or some other important encounters, it was like clockwork - for each third or quarter of a boss's lifebar you got a new wave of dingbats. But now it feels like more than half of the mobs you encounter had their mates step out for a shit in the bushes just before you walked in. I don't know who made the final call on this, but the dude shouldn't even be allowed to work on facebook games.

And see, this is part of the reason I took the exact opposite approach to you with Dragon Age 2. The combat gameplay was better, at least to my eyes, in the first one, but I still regarded it as the having to eat my veggies before I could have dessert. I turned the difficulty all the way down to Casual this time around, I figured that if it's gonna suck anyway I might as well get it out of the way quicker.

But here's where Dragon Age 2 really makes me wanna shit on it - they took out my dessert! I'm seven hours in and I can't think of having made a single choice of importance. I loved Origins for its writing, for the multitude of plot and sublot options, for the sense of genuine agency it gave the player in the unfolding events. And I haven't seen any of that, it all boils down to meaningless conversation choices (Lovely & Resonable / Unfunny Hollywood Wit / Moderately Rude) that may or may not slightly influence your companions' attitudes, and at best minor, surface level choices with near-instant outcomes. I remember one of the designers talking in an interview about how the whole crux of the plot is about building up to this one major choice that Hawke has to make, and I'm starting to think that it may be the only choice Hawke has to make.

Heh, there was this one point where I actually they were gonna give me a branching development similar to what Obsidian did back in the day with NWN2, when you joined the Guard or the Thieves Guild in Neverwinter. And then HURR fast forward, danger averted! Welcome to a year later, people around town know you and you get the impression that you've been doing some stuff worthy of noticing. Kinda puts a bit of disconnect between you and your character, doesn't it? But scratch that last remark, it's the least of my concerns.

And that's cause it gets even better in this sort of writing-related department, as I'm sure you've noticed. I tried to talk to Bethany or Carver during the opening sequence, where you flee Lothering and all, no go. I figure this is just the prologue and it's all supposed to be very intense, whatever. I get to Kirkwall and I try again, lo and behold I once again get generic one-liner dismissals. Damn, I think to myself, they must've really turned it into Mass Effect, you can only talk to people at your home base. Bzzt! Wrong! But thanks for playing.

I could go on and start listing plenty of other changes that really suck, but the thing is that I expected quite a lot of downgrades and I was willing to put up with all just for the sake of getting more of the stuff that I liked about the first game. And so far it's not there, next to no agency in plot development, practically no interaction with your party... I'll keep going, I'm hoping the plot picks up a bit and maybe I can at least get some value out of that. But I am disappointed to find that all that whinging on the official forums seems to be appropriate, I was hoping parts of it would turn out to be overreactions.