Ostriig on 16/3/2011 at 21:05
Yup. Just can't stand the wave dynamic altogether, I think that raising the difficulty would only make it more tedious for me, not challenging in an engaging way.
Judith on 18/3/2011 at 10:19
They had a good idea with shifting from "as a hero you MUST save the world" to "let's have a detailed story on how one CAN become a hero" — at least that's the illusion I have for now. But all the rest is meh at best. I've spent 15 hours in one bloody city and a few "outside instances". And I have a feeling the bodycount per minute exceeds games like call of duty. On one hand you get characters who cast spells as fast as you fire the laser blaster in star wars... On the other, Bioware tried to balance that somehow, throwing hordes of enemies at the player, no matter the location, context, anything. The game just cheats. Groups of enemies just spawn behind you during the fight. Sometimes they do it in front of you, regardless of enemy type. Actually I've been thinking about lowering the difficulty level, so it gets less tedious. For sure it's not challenging and gets old quickly. I'd rather focus on that slowly developing story which is easy to forget when you have to fight countless waves of exploding blood balloons :erg:
Jason Moyer on 27/8/2011 at 23:46
Bumping old thread since the thread where this is most relevant is closed now.
Just finished this, with all the DLC installed. Some random thoughts:
The combat is basically NWN. You can play it by manually controlling your party (although even with no tactics set, they constantly wander off on their own), but really the way to go is just to set up the tactics (which aren't bad preset-wise, aside from no one using potions by default) and control Hawke most of the time. There were maybe 4 fights in the entire game where I felt the need to use more direct control of the party.
The re-use of environments is annoying. I don't mind so much that they re-used areas, but they could have at least given each area a unique minimap. A bigger annoyance for me was having to explore the same areas repeatedly, both day and night, each time a new Act started even though nothing changed in the maps other than new item drops spawning. I don't mind the Bioware-y "explore every goddamn nook and cranny in the map, usually in the opposite direction of where I need to go" thing, but having to do it repeatedly in the same areas is fucking stupid.
The characters were ok. After doing all of the DAO campaigns in chronological order in order to get a full save to import, I totally forgot who the fuck Isabella was. For that matter, while I had Anders in my party all the way through Awakenings and DA2, I didn't see any reason to include him or Isabella other than fan service. Anyway, Merrill was awesome, particularly early on when she kept acting nervous and insecure. Aveline/Ferris/Sebastien were just bland, and I enjoyed the constant joking around with Varric (his over-exaggerated story during the confrontation with his brother was also fucking hilarious).
The fan service bullshit with Leliana/Alistair can fuck off. SWOOPING IS BAD LOLOLOLOL. THE HERO OF FERELDEN HAS A NAME YOU KNOW LULZ. Also: ENCHANTMENT!!!111 ENCHANTMENT!!!! I realize Bioware has this thing now where the player's sanctuary has to have some sort of portable merchant in it, but jesus fuck, come up with some new goddamn characters.
The total lack of choices/consequences in the main story arc can also fuck off. Act I didn't seem hurt by the fairly railroaded story, but the way the game totally ignores all of the choices that are made to seem important while things build to multiple climaxes in Acts II and III is fucking bullshit. The last 2 acts could have felt nearly as epic as the end of DA:O and they totally dropped the ball by making the player's actions completely meaningless. In DA:O there was a large amount of variety in terms of how the player impacted the ending of the story (and the setup for Awakenings and DA2). In DA2 it boils down to one choice at the very end deciding which of two 5 second cutscenes you see immediately after the final battle.
Anyway, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but I don't see any reason to replay it. I'm surprised that the combo-based combat system was probably the highlight of the game for me, aside from some of the more interesting sidequests (Merrill's mirror and, uh, probably some other one somewhere). Cross-class combos were nice, and I liked how the combo-meter for special moves meant that I was running around slashing the weakest guys until I could finish with a giant final hit on the boss. On the downside that meant it felt more like NWN than DA:O or the Infinity games, but fuck it, when I hit buttons cool shit happened.
CCCToad on 28/8/2011 at 20:22
Quote:
The fan service bullshit with Leliana/Alistair can fuck off. SWOOPING IS BAD LOLOLOLOL. THE HERO OF FERELDEN HAS A NAME YOU KNOW LULZ. Also: ENCHANTMENT!!!111 ENCHANTMENT!!!! I realize Bioware has this thing now where the player's sanctuary has to have some sort of portable merchant in it, but jesus fuck, come up with some new goddamn characters.
Thats something Bioware has a bad tendency towards. The "fan service bullshit" was so extreme in Mass Effect 2 as to be obnoxious. It seemed that every ten steps Shepard would run into a character who would loudly and obnoxiously remind the player that you made a paragon/renegade decision in some sidequest(fortunately, more of them were dead if you imported a Renegade game). That he would have that many "chance" encounters in a universe that is presumably full of trillions of sentient beings stretches suspension of disbelief. It would have been far more interesting if, like in the Witcher games, your choices resulted not in cameos but in unforeseen consequences that impact other quests.
