the origins stories were really good. I played the human noble first and most, and that is my absolute favorite. to have everything and see it taken away, then I finally get my revenge in the end and it feels so good for da2 I can only say I played a male rogue because I couldn't bare a second playthrough or the dlc
Aahh, that euphoria when you finally reach Loghain with the human noble...
It was really great that each origin had a piece of the main game that is kind of special to them. I liked the human noble Alistair talk and the landsmeet (already my favorite part besides the final battle), but every character has a special part and that was awesome. Howe's death is so personal for me compared to the dwarves and elves
I will wait the reviewers (especially player reviews), DA:O was a gem, it felt like playing BG2 again, everything felt very personal as people on this thread already said, but Bioware screwed the series with DA2, i mean, the writing is not bad but it lack the many options and it didnt felt that personal and i'll not even mention tecnical stuff like the maps and flashy combat which was very terrible. (And i'm a veeeery forgiving person, i really liked ME3 ending).
yeah i am quite forgiving too and just forgot about da2 rather than complain. yet mass effect was a life change for me and it changed me and truly i could not forgive them on that one. i actually had a dream recently going back to me3 but it was actually different, the way it should have been. maybe they should hire me because i know how to make the decisions matter, how to allow us to have a satisfying fight to destroy harbinger, and forget all about starkid and colorful death ray.
Dragon Age 2 was garbage; one of the worst games I've ever paid full price for, and the developers were completely and utterly unrepentant about the direction the game took. I don't expect DA3 to be anything but a marginal improvement. What I do expect, however, is that the game will be packed to the gunwales with EA's revenue-enchancing initiatives, such as Day 1 DLC.
I have zero interest in anything BioWare is going to put out in the future. They've shifted to making the sort of game I despise - a game that's little more than a movie with a few interactive fight scenes. Just play Mass Effect 3 and take note of how many lines of dialogue Shepard speaks without your input, or what proportion of time is spent watching cutscenes versus actually playing the game. They might has well have given you a pair of check boxes marked "Paragon" and "Renegade" and thenceforth just shown you cutscenes.
@500MetricTonnes Maybe they were "unrepentant" because there wasn't anything for which to be repentant? Your implication is that the game was objectively bad, and that the developers should have apologized to the players based on such. Neither of which is true. Some of us liked the game quite a bit, despite the minor flaws.
Day 1 DLC encourages pre-orders, but requires no extra money be paid by the consumer, are developed by different teams and finished after the game has gone gold (in which case would have been cut from the game entirely if it were not DLC to allow the game to meet its deadlines), and are entirely optional expansions. There's really nothing inherently wrong with the practice.
Shepard has spoken "without your input" since the first game, where all three dialogue choices would often lead to the same exact line.
fallout 3 also had a lot of expansion content that i went back to it with the expansions for the first time and i got a full games worth out of the extra content. had over 100 hours when i was done everything. still need to get around to finishing the first 2 as well as new vegas with expansions so I've been doing a lot of Fallout recently.
honestly I just saw a gameplay video of DA III and was appalled. I kinda looked like they used all the bad things from DA2 once again. I'm curious whether they decided to only change the few good points that the game did have.
there where some awesome visuals but they where pretty all much scripted.
It is a shame how lazy they were with 2 as they killed their fan base and because the style was great. I will never buy another of their games unless I see ING come out with a 10 and all my friends tell me its the best game ever. Cause you can't always trust ING like with Assassins Creed last one was the first one I played and it was top 5 worse games I have ever played you can't die and the game play is slow. The worse part is that the video reviewer brought up that it was shit then they gave it a 7.5lolz.
honestly I just saw a gameplay video of DA III and was appalled. I kinda looked like they used all the bad things from DA2 once again. I'm curious whether they decided to only change the few good points that the game did have.
there where some awesome visuals but they where pretty all much scripted.
I'm loving the gameplay footage I saw. My only real complaint with DA2 was two-handed animations being too fast and not weighty enough, but they fixed it! The game looks sexy as hell.
There were so many DLCs for Mass Effect 3 that they could be a game on their own. And that's where things go wrong.
I didn't buy a single ME3 DLC, and I got a complete game. So I don't see anything wrong. If I want more, I can pay for it. If I don't, I have the game I bought. That's choice, and as a customer, I like having choices.
There were so many DLCs for Mass Effect 3 that they could be a game on their own. And that's where things go wrong.
I didn't buy a single ME3 DLC, and I got a complete game. So I don't see anything wrong. If I want more, I can pay for it. If I don't, I have the game I bought. That's choice, and as a customer, I like having choices.
Actually, you are missing the ending in M3. So it wasn't complete.
honestly I just saw a gameplay video of DA III and was appalled. I kinda looked like they used all the bad things from DA2 once again. I'm curious whether they decided to only change the few good points that the game did have.
there where some awesome visuals but they where pretty all much scripted.
I'm loving the gameplay footage I saw. My only real complaint with DA2 was two-handed animations being too fast and not weighty enough, but they fixed it! The game looks sexy as hell.
'The game looks sexy as hell'. See, that's the problem. A game doesn't NEED to look sexy. All your comment basically says is that the graphics and animations look nice. Of course EAware is going to bet heavily on fancy graphics. But wait until you arrive at the dialogue part of the whole thing. Hope they abandoned the childish icons thing.
'The game looks sexy as hell'. See, that's the problem. A game doesn't NEED to look sexy. All your comment basically says is that the graphics and animations look nice. Of course EAware is going to bet heavily on fancy graphics. But wait until you arrive at the dialogue part of the whole thing. Hope they abandoned the childish icons thing.
You misunderstand. I meant the game in general looks like something I will enjoy. SWEET GRAFIX are not what impressed me, though they certainly did not subtract from the equation. As I said, the only real issue I had with DA2 is that its animations were poor compared to DAO, especially two-handed weaponry. Besides, for many, aesthetics are important. Not so much the graphics but the style and feel of the art design. For me, having my greatsword swing like it is heavy and crushingly powerful is extremely cathartic. Summoning a book full of Melf's Minute Meteors might actually tempt me to play a Mage at some point, too.
I enjoyed the dialogue in DA2 immensely. I felt they really fleshed out a lot of different attitudes Hawke could have, more so even than Mass Effect did for Shepard, and of course Varric and party banters in general were gold. Although, I didn't really like the Lucky Charms, either. Still, some of DA2's detractor's clearly needed them, as a common complaint I hear is 'I didn't want to say that!' Well, look at the damn symbols!
Hawke could only have three personalities: Blankfaced Negotiator, Inappropriately Timed Funny Guy, and Unreasonable Dickwad. Attempts to characterise your PC beyond those three was wrecked by DA2:s genius "we'll have dialogue options but we'll let the game choose for you" mechanics. Such as one of my attempts, playing a fairly simple character who allowed for some complexity but still was within the framework of options of your usual Bioware game (I thought): someone who was loving and caring towards friends and family but short and wroth towards others, and particularly ruthless when the family were threatened. I thought it would be fitting because the themes of family and such that seemed important to the plot (not that they were, as I'd find out upon progressing further into the game. Can't have any attmpts at emotional depth, let's just throw away these characters left and right and then never mention them again!). Of course, despite only acting nice and supportive towards my family, I soon gathered up enough Unreasonable Dickwad points from being rude to strangers that they outweighed my Negotiator points, and then the game went "Aha! This guy is playing a character who is a dick to people!" and had me act as a dick towards my family too whenever it was coded to have one of those "lets let the game choose your dialogue option for you" moments.
In short, unless your character fit into one of the above three personalities and acted exactly the same towards everyone, the game would eventually have you acting in different degrees of out of character just because it thought it knew your character better than you did.
That's what you get with fully voiced dialogue. Less RPG than action sim (limited archtypes opposed to the near infinite options you get in actual RPG's). It makes sense for ME (you're SHEPARD), but less so in DA:O. DA2 - you're Hawke, and I guess that is too limiting.
Say what you will, but there were several key aspects of Shepard's character where you had the agency to weigh in on during any given playthrough, and allowed you to differentiate multiple Shepards and keep the game fresh.
Hawke could only have three personalities: Blankfaced Negotiator, Inappropriately Timed Funny Guy, and Unreasonable Dickwad. Attempts to characterise your PC beyond those three was wrecked by DA2:s genius "we'll have dialogue options but we'll let the game choose for you" mechanics. Such as one of my attempts, playing a fairly simple character who allowed for some complexity but still was within the framework of options of your usual Bioware game (I thought): someone who was loving and caring towards friends and family but short and wroth towards others, and particularly ruthless when the family were threatened. I thought it would be fitting because the themes of family and such that seemed important to the plot (not that they were, as I'd find out upon progressing further into the game. Can't have any attmpts at emotional depth, let's just throw away these characters left and right and then never mention them again!). Of course, despite only acting nice and supportive towards my family, I soon gathered up enough Unreasonable Dickwad points from being rude to strangers that they outweighed my Negotiator points, and then the game went "Aha! This guy is playing a character who is a dick to people!" and had me act as a dick towards my family too whenever it was coded to have one of those "lets let the game choose your dialogue option for you" moments.
In short, unless your character fit into one of the above three personalities and acted exactly the same towards everyone, the game would eventually have you acting in different degrees of out of character just because it thought it knew your character better than you did.
This.
If DAIII uses the same conversation system as DA2 (and I don't doubt that it will), then that alone is reason enough to avoid purchasing it. I'm not paying for a game so "streamlined" that it has dialogue options colour-coded with icons just so people don't have to read five or six words. That's just insulting, and really indicates that BioWare is targeting a completely different audience.
Torment, Project Eternity, and Wasteland 2 are going to rip this game to shreds. Even The Witcher 3, a series I am not at all fond of (to put it mildly), will probably be vastly more enjoyable. The only way DA3 will surpass these games is in graphics and the amount of money blown on voice acting...and in the amount of price-gouging Day 1 DLC.
And, keep in mind, folks, that games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 are pretty much on the ground floor of this level of interactive narrative. Bioware did not have multitudes of games with several novels' worth of voiced dialogue combined with greater player agency in dialogue from which to draw and learn. There was ME1, ME2, Dragon Age II, Alpha Protocol, and most recently ME3 and The Old Republic. That's it, as far as I know, which makes the count five games from Bioware and one from Obsidian. These games are essentially the first drafts, so they were bound to be a bit shaky.
Comments
...Yeah, no melodramatic disparaging of EA or DA2 here. I know, you're all very disturbed by the revelation that people like things. It'll be okay.
Dragon Age 2 was garbage; one of the worst games I've ever paid full price for, and the developers were completely and utterly unrepentant about the direction the game took. I don't expect DA3 to be anything but a marginal improvement. What I do expect, however, is that the game will be packed to the gunwales with EA's revenue-enchancing initiatives, such as Day 1 DLC.
I have zero interest in anything BioWare is going to put out in the future. They've shifted to making the sort of game I despise - a game that's little more than a movie with a few interactive fight scenes. Just play Mass Effect 3 and take note of how many lines of dialogue Shepard speaks without your input, or what proportion of time is spent watching cutscenes versus actually playing the game. They might has well have given you a pair of check boxes marked "Paragon" and "Renegade" and thenceforth just shown you cutscenes.
Maybe they were "unrepentant" because there wasn't anything for which to be repentant? Your implication is that the game was objectively bad, and that the developers should have apologized to the players based on such. Neither of which is true. Some of us liked the game quite a bit, despite the minor flaws.
Day 1 DLC encourages pre-orders, but requires no extra money be paid by the consumer, are developed by different teams and finished after the game has gone gold (in which case would have been cut from the game entirely if it were not DLC to allow the game to meet its deadlines), and are entirely optional expansions. There's really nothing inherently wrong with the practice.
Shepard has spoken "without your input" since the first game, where all three dialogue choices would often lead to the same exact line.
there where some awesome visuals but they where pretty all much scripted.
I enjoyed the dialogue in DA2 immensely. I felt they really fleshed out a lot of different attitudes Hawke could have, more so even than Mass Effect did for Shepard, and of course Varric and party banters in general were gold. Although, I didn't really like the Lucky Charms, either. Still, some of DA2's detractor's clearly needed them, as a common complaint I hear is 'I didn't want to say that!' Well, look at the damn symbols!
In short, unless your character fit into one of the above three personalities and acted exactly the same towards everyone, the game would eventually have you acting in different degrees of out of character just because it thought it knew your character better than you did.
If DAIII uses the same conversation system as DA2 (and I don't doubt that it will), then that alone is reason enough to avoid purchasing it. I'm not paying for a game so "streamlined" that it has dialogue options colour-coded with icons just so people don't have to read five or six words. That's just insulting, and really indicates that BioWare is targeting a completely different audience.
Torment, Project Eternity, and Wasteland 2 are going to rip this game to shreds. Even The Witcher 3, a series I am not at all fond of (to put it mildly), will probably be vastly more enjoyable. The only way DA3 will surpass these games is in graphics and the amount of money blown on voice acting...and in the amount of price-gouging Day 1 DLC.