Mem
Lifer
- Apr 23, 2000
- 21,476
- 13
- 81
Btw don't forget you can get the high res texture mod from here http://social.bioware.com/page/da2-patches .
TheSlamma
Diamond Member
- Sep 6, 2005
- 7,625
- 5
- 81
I went to 5 different stores today and alas, no xbox 360 signature editions to be found anywhere... but every single one had a stack of PS3 SE's. ><
(and Best Buy had an entire palate full of WoW: Cat collector's editions. lol)
(and Best Buy had an entire palate full of WoW: Cat collector's editions. lol)
What are the chances that some of the complaints about the PC version can be fixed by mods? Could you mod in the ability to choose your companions armor?
zerocool84
Lifer
- Nov 11, 2004
- 36,041
- 472
- 126
Red Storm
Lifer
- Oct 2, 2005
- 14,233
- 234
- 106
Nope. I thought it was weird at first when every piece of armor I found in the game had "Restriction: Hawke" under it, and then I discovered the new "feature".
Less Mass Effect (a great game in its own right!) in my Dragon Age please.
I see a lot of complaints on the forums about this and some complaints are valid but I think a lot of others are off the mark.
I've played for about 15 hours so far and here's what I've seen:
* Difficulty is ok, you might not play on the same as last time (Hard for DA2, Normal for DAO) but it still works.
* Companions not having armor is a boon and a curse. On one hand they look the same the whole game, but on the other hand, it really does reduce inventory clutter and focus the experience on Hawke. I'm no longer comparing 3 choices for each of the 5 pieces of armor for something like 8 people which is nice. Saves on inventory space and lets me concentrate on my main character development. Overall I do sort of like not having to worry about companion armor, esp for companions I don't use a lot (I'm a rouge so Avaline [tank] and Anders [mage/healer] always travel with me so my other companions arent always going to have the right armor for their level otherwise (see: DA1 when you suddenly take a lesser used char like leiliana and she has gear way too crappy for her level)
* Gameplay is alright. Feels sort of WoWish with hotkeys and cooldowns. I have my control scheme set up like WoW which I played a lot years ago so not too bad. One thing to remember, set attack closest enemy to a convinent keyboard hotkey.
Clicking on enemies gets incredibly annoying since unlike in DA:O, the clicking area seems really weird. Trying to tell a char to attack an Arcane Horror? Too bad you're now walking to where it used to be since the click box is nowhere where his body is onscreen (tip: moving Shades cannot be attacked by clicking on their body AFAIK, you have to click on their feet where the circle is, incredibly annoying since it very hard to attack them when they move). I pause A LOT to click on targets so now I remap attack closest to "E" and it makes it better. Not a big fan of the controls though, mainly the clicking to attack.
*Missing skills are sort of cool, traps, poisons and all that BS were stupid skills anyways. Now you have to collect recipes and ingredients as well as gold to make things which streamlines it.
This is awesome. DA:O's talent system did not work because it made characters suboptimal fighters because you really needed to craft in harder difficulties. Te flip side is that in harder difficulties you also needed optimal fighters which meant that you had party members that were weaker than others because they had to invest in non combat talents, a liability in harder difficulties. In Planescape: Torment, it was no big deal to put 18 points in Charisma because you only had to fight once in the entire game, in DA:O, it doesn't work that way.
Now crafting depends on your exploration of the game world, disarming and unlocking uses the same skill points that a rouge would invest in anyways and conversation choices are no longer locked because of talents. This makes for a more focused game and more flexible characters. Before I wouldn't bring Leliana because she was weaker than Zevran. Now I can experience the missions with any character I want which helps story telling and choice.
*Speaking of storytelling, it is better now because you can pick any conversation choice instead of being locked out by an arbitrary paragon/renegade bar or missing talents. The previous ways made your character more one dimensional. Now I can play a character that is compassionate to mages while being a massive dick to the Quinari which helps the whole role playing part of RPG. How many people do you know practice the same amount of compassion or dickishness to every single person equally? Furthermore, why was the coercion talent even it DA:O? A blight killing warrior with magical top tier armor that has accomplished epic feats in combat can't frighten someone but once I put points in coercion to learn to speak in a slightly meaner voice and give a more refined evil eye people now listen? How does that even make sense? The new way is much improved.
*As for the storyline itself, eh, I haven't finished it yet so I cant say but it's not gripping me as well as Mass Effect 1 or DA:O since there doesn't seem to be as epic an enemy. It's more of a coming of age story or biography as far as I can tell.
*The new ability system is good, it's no longer linear so now you can pick up skills that you want without going down through a 4 column ability line and getting them all, allowing your character and playstyle to be more adapted to how you want to play. More branches and less synergies would be even nicer so you don't have to pick up some placeholder skills to get to the end of the ladder. (Like Rock and electricity mage skills both have to be picked up to get the skill that allows you to increase rock spell effectiveness? Why?)
*Performance is not very good. My PC can run Crysis 1 at 1920x1080 medium settings pretty well (With some things like textures on high). Dragon Age 2 runs about as quickly FPS wise as Crysis 1 does at 1920x1080 at medium without looking nearly as good. Also there should be some settings besides just Low/Medium/High. Why can't I adjust particle effects, shaders, shadows, textures and everything else without going neck deep in an ini file?
*Overall it's a good game that tries a more streamlined combat system that lets you focus on the combat while still allowing you to pursue crafting if you want to. It also improves in giving you the freedom to roleplay your character to really reflect what you want them to really say without arbitrary limitations. It's basically more focused while being more flexible, a pretty good design in my opinion.
It's not a hardcore RPG like Balder's Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape Torment but it is still good. Just because the ideas are new don't mean they're bad, just different. DA:2 evaluated objectively as a game and not as some hardcore RPG is pretty good, I'd say 8.5-9/10 with points taken off for performance, lack of video settings, the controls and not having as interesting a storyline nor characters (Where's the Morrigan, Mordin, Legion, Wrex, analogue, the really interesting, unexpected truly awesome character?) so far.
I've played for about 15 hours so far and here's what I've seen:
* Difficulty is ok, you might not play on the same as last time (Hard for DA2, Normal for DAO) but it still works.
* Companions not having armor is a boon and a curse. On one hand they look the same the whole game, but on the other hand, it really does reduce inventory clutter and focus the experience on Hawke. I'm no longer comparing 3 choices for each of the 5 pieces of armor for something like 8 people which is nice. Saves on inventory space and lets me concentrate on my main character development. Overall I do sort of like not having to worry about companion armor, esp for companions I don't use a lot (I'm a rouge so Avaline [tank] and Anders [mage/healer] always travel with me so my other companions arent always going to have the right armor for their level otherwise (see: DA1 when you suddenly take a lesser used char like leiliana and she has gear way too crappy for her level)
* Gameplay is alright. Feels sort of WoWish with hotkeys and cooldowns. I have my control scheme set up like WoW which I played a lot years ago so not too bad. One thing to remember, set attack closest enemy to a convinent keyboard hotkey.
Clicking on enemies gets incredibly annoying since unlike in DA:O, the clicking area seems really weird. Trying to tell a char to attack an Arcane Horror? Too bad you're now walking to where it used to be since the click box is nowhere where his body is onscreen (tip: moving Shades cannot be attacked by clicking on their body AFAIK, you have to click on their feet where the circle is, incredibly annoying since it very hard to attack them when they move). I pause A LOT to click on targets so now I remap attack closest to "E" and it makes it better. Not a big fan of the controls though, mainly the clicking to attack.
*Missing skills are sort of cool, traps, poisons and all that BS were stupid skills anyways. Now you have to collect recipes and ingredients as well as gold to make things which streamlines it.
This is awesome. DA:O's talent system did not work because it made characters suboptimal fighters because you really needed to craft in harder difficulties. Te flip side is that in harder difficulties you also needed optimal fighters which meant that you had party members that were weaker than others because they had to invest in non combat talents, a liability in harder difficulties. In Planescape: Torment, it was no big deal to put 18 points in Charisma because you only had to fight once in the entire game, in DA:O, it doesn't work that way.
Now crafting depends on your exploration of the game world, disarming and unlocking uses the same skill points that a rouge would invest in anyways and conversation choices are no longer locked because of talents. This makes for a more focused game and more flexible characters. Before I wouldn't bring Leliana because she was weaker than Zevran. Now I can experience the missions with any character I want which helps story telling and choice.
*Speaking of storytelling, it is better now because you can pick any conversation choice instead of being locked out by an arbitrary paragon/renegade bar or missing talents. The previous ways made your character more one dimensional. Now I can play a character that is compassionate to mages while being a massive dick to the Quinari which helps the whole role playing part of RPG. How many people do you know practice the same amount of compassion or dickishness to every single person equally? Furthermore, why was the coercion talent even it DA:O? A blight killing warrior with magical top tier armor that has accomplished epic feats in combat can't frighten someone but once I put points in coercion to learn to speak in a slightly meaner voice and give a more refined evil eye people now listen? How does that even make sense? The new way is much improved.
*As for the storyline itself, eh, I haven't finished it yet so I cant say but it's not gripping me as well as Mass Effect 1 or DA:O since there doesn't seem to be as epic an enemy. It's more of a coming of age story or biography as far as I can tell.
*The new ability system is good, it's no longer linear so now you can pick up skills that you want without going down through a 4 column ability line and getting them all, allowing your character and playstyle to be more adapted to how you want to play. More branches and less synergies would be even nicer so you don't have to pick up some placeholder skills to get to the end of the ladder. (Like Rock and electricity mage skills both have to be picked up to get the skill that allows you to increase rock spell effectiveness? Why?)
*Performance is not very good. My PC can run Crysis 1 at 1920x1080 medium settings pretty well (With some things like textures on high). Dragon Age 2 runs about as quickly FPS wise as Crysis 1 does at 1920x1080 at medium without looking nearly as good. Also there should be some settings besides just Low/Medium/High. Why can't I adjust particle effects, shaders, shadows, textures and everything else without going neck deep in an ini file?
*Overall it's a good game that tries a more streamlined combat system that lets you focus on the combat while still allowing you to pursue crafting if you want to. It also improves in giving you the freedom to roleplay your character to really reflect what you want them to really say without arbitrary limitations. It's basically more focused while being more flexible, a pretty good design in my opinion.
It's not a hardcore RPG like Balder's Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape Torment but it is still good. Just because the ideas are new don't mean they're bad, just different. DA:2 evaluated objectively as a game and not as some hardcore RPG is pretty good, I'd say 8.5-9/10 with points taken off for performance, lack of video settings, the controls and not having as interesting a storyline nor characters (Where's the Morrigan, Mordin, Legion, Wrex, analogue, the really interesting, unexpected truly awesome character?) so far.
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I've played a few hours now, and what seems to be the biggest thing is that the storytelling and general dialogue has become awful compared to the first game.
So far, my party is composed of about the most generic fantasy characters you can imagine. There is no one like Morrigan, Shale, or Sten. Most are variations of someone who is trying to be really edgy and dark and failing at it.
Let's not even get started on the dialogue. What worked sort of well in Mass Effect just totally collapses in this game. The 8 or 9 options of Dragon Age Origins are gone, and replaced with your character being able to say the same thing in three different ways. You can say the overly nice "paragon" option, the generic emotionless "neutral", or the trying-to-be-edgy "renegade". Are you kidding me Bioware? It seems like Bioware decided to fire all their best writers and put a bunch of fanfiction writers to the task.
As for the graphics, someone at Bioware decided to lump all these effects that DX9 has had for years (Parallax Occlusion Mapping, SSAO, Dynamic Lighting) into DX11 to give the impression that they are actually putting time into making the renderer look good. The only feature that is actually used in DX11 is tessellation and even that only shows up at a few points.
Bioware's winning streak of games had to end sooner or later. Looks like they've released their first crap game.
So far, my party is composed of about the most generic fantasy characters you can imagine. There is no one like Morrigan, Shale, or Sten. Most are variations of someone who is trying to be really edgy and dark and failing at it.
Let's not even get started on the dialogue. What worked sort of well in Mass Effect just totally collapses in this game. The 8 or 9 options of Dragon Age Origins are gone, and replaced with your character being able to say the same thing in three different ways. You can say the overly nice "paragon" option, the generic emotionless "neutral", or the trying-to-be-edgy "renegade". Are you kidding me Bioware? It seems like Bioware decided to fire all their best writers and put a bunch of fanfiction writers to the task.
As for the graphics, someone at Bioware decided to lump all these effects that DX9 has had for years (Parallax Occlusion Mapping, SSAO, Dynamic Lighting) into DX11 to give the impression that they are actually putting time into making the renderer look good. The only feature that is actually used in DX11 is tessellation and even that only shows up at a few points.
Bioware's winning streak of games had to end sooner or later. Looks like they've released their first crap game.
zinfamous
No Lifer
- Jul 12, 2006
- 111,987
- 31,540
- 146
if you honestly do CARE about where they are heading, and you believe it is in the wrong direction with something like DAO2, then you would logically feel that you have wasted your money.
rather--you would care enough not to support the notion that these "bad RPGs" continue to be profitable.
blah blah blah, they should listen to gamers! Look, if listening to the gamers increases their profits, I'm sure they would. If remaining stoic about it and continuing along the path of their design maintains profits, or increases them--then they have no reason to care.
with all the complaints about "omg consolization" has anyone actually played the game on the 360/PS3?
the complaints have actually made me look forward to the game; historically, I've liked console RPG's a lot more than PC RPG's. I'd take FF9 over Diablo 2 any day.
the complaints have actually made me look forward to the game; historically, I've liked console RPG's a lot more than PC RPG's. I'd take FF9 over Diablo 2 any day.
Bateluer
Lifer
- Jun 23, 2001
- 27,730
- 8
- 0
Must we have this discussion again? The Diablo franchise are NOT RPGs.
They are action games.
zerocool84
Lifer
- Nov 11, 2004
- 36,041
- 472
- 126
Must we have this discussion again? The Diablo franchise are NOT RPGs.
Of course they're RPG's, they are Action-RPG games.
I'd pick FF9 over BG2 stillMust we have this discussion again? The Diablo franchise are NOT RPGs.
I think that was probably the other most prominent PC-RPG released in 2000
NoSoup4You
Golden Member
- Feb 12, 2007
- 1,253
- 6
- 81
The game is arguably more fun on consoles because the control scheme - you have to hit 'X' for every swing, there's no auto-attack...etc. It's very "action-y" but that's a good thing in this case, the controls just "work" which is important on a console...etc. I got it for PC because during the demo I realized -
I mentioned this earlier and someone else did as well, but it's worth repeating since for me it's practically mandatory to re-map "attack closest target" to an more easily accessible key - in this case "E" was available - because targeting with the mouse is extremely problematic and will cause you problems. Sounds crazy but I don't think I would enjoy this game if I didn't have that key mapped there or wasn't using the key at all.
I mentioned this earlier and someone else did as well, but it's worth repeating since for me it's practically mandatory to re-map "attack closest target" to an more easily accessible key - in this case "E" was available - because targeting with the mouse is extremely problematic and will cause you problems. Sounds crazy but I don't think I would enjoy this game if I didn't have that key mapped there or wasn't using the key at all.
as annoyed as I am about my inability to buy a signature edition, I'm glad I didn't preorder DA2... I would have preordered it for the PC and my desktop hard drive died this morning. lol.
bought DA2 on my xbox and am enjoying it while waiting for a new ssd to ship from newegg.
bought DA2 on my xbox and am enjoying it while waiting for a new ssd to ship from newegg.
I pre ordered ME2 collectors edition thinking it would be awesome and more of the same of ME1, and felt just like you guys are feeling now. I had a feeling this would happen, and glad I didn't preorder. Plus with the whole ultimate edition thing, I figured they are going to do the same here, so why bother. I got a back log of about 15 games to play anyway.
so, I got in an hour of playtime on my 360 tonight and really dug it.
my only complaint is the camera zoom. I don't know if it was any different on DA:O, but the inability to zoom out makes it annoying when I've got darkspawn attacking me from behind and I don't realize that they're there. I never used the tactical view, but I did zoom it out a bit on the PC.
my only complaint is the camera zoom. I don't know if it was any different on DA:O, but the inability to zoom out makes it annoying when I've got darkspawn attacking me from behind and I don't realize that they're there. I never used the tactical view, but I did zoom it out a bit on the PC.
GoodRevrnd
Diamond Member
- Dec 27, 2001
- 6,801
- 581
- 126
Can anyone tell me what the different dialogue symbols mean exactly? From what I can gather...
Green Head: Logical
Blue Wings/Halo: Pious/Good
Red Crossed Swords: Agressive
Green Olive Branch: Peaceful
Red Gavel: Forceful??
Purple Mask: Snarky
Purple Gem: ???
I might be missing some, I haven't played much yet.
Also, whose bright idea was it to assign attack and camera rotation to the same mouse button??? What could you possibly need to click drag select in this game that mouse 1 couldn't be used for rotation?
Green Head: Logical
Blue Wings/Halo: Pious/Good
Red Crossed Swords: Agressive
Green Olive Branch: Peaceful
Red Gavel: Forceful??
Purple Mask: Snarky
Purple Gem: ???
I might be missing some, I haven't played much yet.
Also, whose bright idea was it to assign attack and camera rotation to the same mouse button??? What could you possibly need to click drag select in this game that mouse 1 couldn't be used for rotation?
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Pretty sure the manual explains them. That's what one of the review's said anyway.
zinfamous
No Lifer
- Jul 12, 2006
- 111,987
- 31,540
- 146
They are RPG-Action Click & Slash games.
...with heavy emphasis on the click & slash
GoodRevrnd
Diamond Member
- Dec 27, 2001
- 6,801
- 581
- 126
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/features/hotspot/index.php?id=2106&tag=topslot;thumb;4
This podcast should sum it up. They are pretty much shitting all over it for being to streamlined and not improving on DA:O in any meaningful way. I believe their summary was "Fable crossed with Dynasty Warrior." They also address the missing auto attack on consoles and Bioware's explanation for it. Conclusion? Bioware is either incompetent, lying, or they shouldn't have made the game in 18 months. They say the story and gameplay was done by Bioware's B team. Sounds like whoever did the review was picked so it would get a good score.
This podcast should sum it up. They are pretty much shitting all over it for being to streamlined and not improving on DA:O in any meaningful way. I believe their summary was "Fable crossed with Dynasty Warrior." They also address the missing auto attack on consoles and Bioware's explanation for it. Conclusion? Bioware is either incompetent, lying, or they shouldn't have made the game in 18 months. They say the story and gameplay was done by Bioware's B team. Sounds like whoever did the review was picked so it would get a good score.
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Sums up one extreme end of the review spectrum, I suppose.
Every review I've read references auto-attack being an option on consoles. Is that not the case?
holy this game stinks.
No story, gives you 3 companions right off the bat without any character development, not exploration friendly, repetitive quest (kinda annoying), etc.
It feels like you are in middle of this huge town without any real object, and run errands all day.
No story, gives you 3 companions right off the bat without any character development, not exploration friendly, repetitive quest (kinda annoying), etc.
It feels like you are in middle of this huge town without any real object, and run errands all day.
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