DA2 Pre-order

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The more I find out about Dragon Age 2, the more hessitant I get to even play it. It has been dumbed down so much its hardly an rpg at all.

1. Companions have static outfits. Isabela, for example wears a shirt, a scarf, boots and a thong. Thats it.

2. No friendly fire for any other mode than Nightmare. Enemies, however, have friendly fire constantly. Means you can just have your tank soak up enemies, and your mages can target him\her with everything you have og area spells. Makes fights very very easy.

3. Companions can`t change weapons. Hardly, anyway. Varic can use his crossbow (rogue character), and thats it. You can`t equip daggers or anything else on him. isabela can only use 2 daggers. Thats it.

4. Warriors can either use a two handed sword, or a sword and shield (main character can pick one of the two during character creation)

5. Rogues can only dual wield daggers, or use a bow.

6. You get a dog, wich you can summon at will. It just goes poof, and its there.

7. Huge "spotlights" on the map, telling you where to go. Even when you enter a small building, you can check the map of it, and see exactly wich room you need to get to.

8. Rogues backstab by tossing a smokebomb onto the ground, and teleporting behind their enemies. unlimited amount of smokebombs, of course. Looks kewl after all, so there is no reason to explain it.

9. Outfits can be upgraded by inserting runes. Meaning by...stuffing a rune down isabela`s thong, her clothes become just as good as armours. Makes me wonder why they have armours in this world at all.

10. All love interests are bisexual this time.

11. You get icons infront of the dialogue lines. Meaning you don`t need to read the lines you are supposed to say, just click on an icon, for the most part.

12. Game is alot shorter that the first one.

13. Even with a voiced main character, it only has 2 3rds of the spoken lines in DA:O

14. Can`t talk to companions unless they wish to speak to you first. Huge marker over their head if they do.

15. Have to play human male or female.

16. All non-combat skills have been removed. They are now tied to a stat instead. meaning if you wish to pick locks, you have to have a high cunning score. this also increases your persuasive skills, even if you don`t wish to play a persuasive character in the first place.

17. Isometric view has been removed. You get no good view of the battlefield anymore. Wich, actually, you won`t need since friendly fire is turned off anyway.

Looks pretty lame, and more than a little dumbed down. Kind of a mix between dragon age origins, and Tekken (with weapons).

 

Why, oh why?!!

And with all other things said all my hopes for a nice game are mostly gone now.

 

Sympathy for the Devil

I have a number of concerns as well, and I agree with some of those that you list (though not all of them). At any rate, I’d like to play devil’s advocate to your post:

Well, Planescape Torment is touted as one of the best CRPGs ever, and it shares this element. Nordom never used anything other than his default crossbows. Dak’kon only used his Karach blade. Annah only used punch daggers. Vhailor only used axes. Fall From Grace didn’t get to use a weapon at all. And so on. And armor and other equipment options were extremely limited.

If you’re concerned about roleplay, this technically enforces stronger roleplaying. Your companions are who they are. If they’ve fought using twin daggers for their entire career, you shouldn’t be able willy nilly force them to wield an axe and a longsword, or equip armors that don’t fit their combat style. I’m not bothered by this one at all. I think it actually makes characters a little more interesting and unique.

I admit that I’m not thrilled about this. That said, I managed to get through many, many hours of Diablo flailing frost spells, corpse explosions and all other manner of chaos around the battlefield without ever scratching an ally. I suppose I’ll manage to get used to it here also. My motivation to get to nightmare will be all the higher, though.

I suppose they did this to better differentiate warriors from rogues. I guess that I’ll just play a rogue when I want to dual wield, and a warrior when I want to a two handed sword. This isn’t necessarily something I’m excited about, but it doesn’t seem like the end of the world either.

That said, I really don’t play warriors as my main character. I was a rogue or mage exclusively in DA:O. For some I guess this could be a big disappointment.

So it was hiding off in the trees. This doesn’t bother me much.

Sounds like some serious catering to console monkeys. It won’t ruin the game for me, but it makes my cheeks hurt for Bioware nonetheless.

Again, I guess this is one of those things you can let really bother you if you want. I think I’ll just choose to roll with it. I honestly found the micro involved with backstabbing in DA:O to be a bit of a pain. This should help.

Runes are magical… why shouldn’t they have the ability to convert clothing into something more defensive? This doesn’t bother me, personally.

I will only allow the romances to go the way I want them to, so it doesn’t bother me that there will be other possibilities.

You’ve never technically needed to read dialogue in most games. I will read the dialogue lines, so I guess this isn’t an issue for me.

I’ve heard that DA2 is a nice long game. I can’t really form an opinion based on such an open ended statement. I’ll have to play it myself to find out if the experience feels overly short.

Even with a voiced character? Don’t you mean “because” of a voiced character? When a character is voiced, it becomes more costly to have a lot of dialogue… not the other way around.

Again, I can’t really formulate an educated opinion when given information like “less” or “shorter.” It may work perfectly well in the context of the game, so it seems premature to get worked up until we know how it affects the overall game experience.

In DA:O NPCs had exclamation points over their heads when they had a quest to give you. I guess this is a similar concept. Still, a bit of a bummer if you can’t initiate dialogue any time you want.

We’ve known this for a while. It is what it is. In PS:T you could only play a human male, as that’s what the story called for. I guess don’t buy the game if you have to play an Elf or a Dwarf to be fulfilled.

It seems like every game does it differently. I will have to try this for myself before I can form much of an opinion. The skill system in DA:O wasn’t exactly my favorite, so I’m totally fine with a revamp. And by the way, even in Dungeons and Dragons, if you had a very high charisma your character would become more persuasive, even if you didn’t want your character to be persuasive.

I’ve known about this for a while, and I’m not overly happy about it. That said, I rarely used the isometric view in DA:O. It was more satisfying to be in the thick of the action.

I assume your observations are based on the demo. I understand that some things have changed from the demo to the final game, so let’s see how the final game ends up. I’ve seen some extensive gameplay demos, and it sure does look like a lot of fun to play.

It clearly won’t be my “ideal” game in a lot of ways, but then again, what game is? I still believe that those who approach this game with an open mind will find plenty to enjoy.

 

This will be my main concern. Anyone tried planning battle tactics in first person/close up third person view? It's real annoying and difficult.

 

Yes. It is the only way to play on the console and it wasn't all that bad.

This is also the last day to pre-order to receive the extra goodies.

 

I played DA:O and Awakening almost entirely in third person, actually. I can probably count on 1 hand (with maybe a couple of fingers borrowed from the other) the amount of times that I switched to an isometric view in a DA:O runthrough. But for those times that I used it, I was very glad it was there.

It was most useful when you wanted position AOE spells, and ensure that all of your teammates were out of the line of fire. I guess that's going to be less of a concern in DA2 though....

 

When I played the DAII demo the view was actually higher for me as a console gamer than in DAO. This actually provided me a better view to place my fireballs in better positions. I'm not sure how it looks or act on a PC, but on the console demo it definite made me feel better about using AoE spells.

 

In DA:O, PC players could zoom out into a full isometric view, ala Baldur's Gate. Characters became small little things with blue or green circles around them and you looked down from a helicopter view over their heads.

It didn't look amazing from an aesthetic perpsective, but the wide view of the area made tactical maneuvers much easier to plan and carry out.

Dragon Age - Origins was touted as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. That concept clearly seems to have been thrown out the door with DA2. It doesn't mean it won't be a great game in its own right, but certainly something a discerning buyer should be aware of before they purchase the game.

 

I'm in more of agreement with Marcerors advocation . The length of the game is one of my only concerns, as I'm sure 50% of the gameplay issues listed in the negative post can be adjusted in options.

AoE's not being FF is nice, especially considering they're severely weaker in DA2 than they were in DA:O, but infinitely more useful. I might actually considering picking up and USING a mages AOE. (Why not criticize DA:O's AOE abilities for melee/ranged non-caster classes? If you want FF you should complain/mod/find a way to make whirlwind hit your friends. And Dual-sweep. Maybe scattershot should stun your party as well as the enemies?).

THANK GOD I won't be accidentally clicking party members in the middle of something and initiating dialogue... or guessing as to when their next dialogue option is! Party banter is nice, but IWD/2 were plenty fun without it.

I think the appearance issue is the only one that'll bother me, because I would honestly love to dress up my DA2 characters like barbies. (I say that in all honestly with as much manliness as is possible to maintain with such a comment).

 

@omnigodly
You may be TRYING to exude manliness with your statement, but there's simply no disguising a statement like "I would honestly love to dress up my DA2 characters like barbies."

Even with James Earl Jones saying it… it’s about as unmanly a statement as I can imagine!

 

Couple of days to go for New Zealand release! Excite!

 

My copy will arrive on Saturday.