Dragon Age II

[liquidmetal]

Need to finish of Origins asap! Though a bit gutted that I won't be continuing on my warden like Mass Effect style. Will probably fade once I start DA2 though

[Flying Dagger]

In the process of DLing the demo.

I am rather disappointed at the various DLCs they introduced in DA:O. For the most part they have relatively little plot development (ie: go bury the king, get a suit of powerful armor) for the amount that EA charges. I felt like the various DLCs should have been patched into the game for more re-playability. The items which you obtain through DLC are pretty overpowered which makes the very easy game even easier. The only DLC where I felt is really worth the money would be the Shale one - whose story is somewhat integrated into various moments of the plot (but instead of overpowered items you get an extremely overpowered tank).

Talking about replayability: DA:O was extremely easy in my eyes (except for maybe the first few dungeons). Certain builds (ie: arcane warriors) can easily solo the entire game (unless they knock you down - the guard dogs gave me a lot of horrible memories). After clearing the mage tower for the 3rd time I really do not feel like doing that dreaded place again. The Awakening expansion is worse: my 2 hander warrior completely slaughter groups of enemies in just a single attack (and don't get me started on how powerful archers became).

Stamina is an issue while playing various melee characters. Since stamina regeneration is constant, the amount of active abilities you can use in combat is really limited (after a fair amount of your stamina is reserved by passives). Autoattacking as a dual wield warrior gets really boring after a little while.

While this is not a multiplayer game I hope EA spend a lot more effort in balancing the game than to roll out DLC.

Edit 1: I almost missed that they are releasing a day 1 DLC. Like... immediately after I just buy the game EA tries to sell me "new" content... why not just include the DLC into the game?

[Chaos2Frozen]

I personally find it hard to replay Dragon Age because it was such an epic story to go through, majority of the fun comes from not knowing what's goin to happen and the eagerness to find out...

Doing it the second time through... It's not the same feeling when you know what's going to happen... I had to drag myself to even complete the first segment.

[Keroko]

*growls* Demo where?

Originally Posted by Flying Dagger

While this is not a multiplayer game I hope EA spend a lot more effort in balancing the game than to roll out DLC.

Heh. Bioware is notorious for their broken builds.

Originally Posted by Flying Dagger

Edit 1: I almost missed that they are releasing a day 1 DLC. Like... immediately after I just buy the game EA tries to sell me "new" content... why not just include the DLC into the game?

It's the new marketing. Due to piracy, second hand games (the later of which is, to a publisher and developer, no different from piracy) and the increasing cost of making games, publishers are looking for new ways to make money. Day one DLC is one of the new ways they are experimenting with.

I myself won't buy the DLC. The character doesn't look nearly interesting enough, and while I agree with the concept of bundling DLC codes with games for the people who don't buy second hand games, forcing people who honestly bought the game and supported the creators to cough up extra money is sad and reeks of EA money-grabbing.

[MikeyGrey]

Originally Posted by Keroko

*growls* Demo where?

For PC – February 22 at 9am PST
http://dragonage.bioware.com/da2/demo
For Xbox 360 – February 22 between midnight and 2am PST
XBL
For Playstation 3 users in North America – February 22 between 4pm and 8pm PST
PSN
For Playstation 3 users outside North America - February 23 between 4pm and 8pm GMT
idk but im guessing PSN

[Keroko]

Originally Posted by Who

and it being 'too fast-paced' for hardcore RPG-ers... what.

And the main complaint about Origins was its slow pace.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Originally Posted by MikeyGrey

For Playstation 3 users outside North America - February 23 between 4pm and 8pm GMT
idk but im guessing PSN

Thanks. Bloody timezone differences, should have known better but still got all excited for nothing.

... Still, a full day in between? We getting the short stick again? Blagh, at least it's only one day.

[liquidmetal]

Going to start downloading the demo. I heard its more of a prologue to DA2 so its actually worthwhile to play it. Is that true?

[Flying Dagger]

The pace in Origins varies a lot.
I believe it is find in the opening and closing chapter. While all the various "gather allies" quests are very dull and boring. Actually, almost all quests are dull and boring as they always involve "go here", "kill this" with a small handful of exceptions.

Killing hordes and hordes of brainless darkspawns which die in a few hits in deep roads is extremely boring. I wish more tactics would be involved. The toughest fight in the entire game would be the ogre up in the tower - which requires kiting while your archers and casters slowly chip away its hp.

[Who]

Personally, I don't mind killing waves upon waves of cannon fodder as long as the bosses remain challenging to an extent. Gaxkang (without use of Mana Clash) and the Harvester are good examples of this.

Originally Posted by liquidmetal

Going to start downloading the demo. I heard its more of a prologue to DA2 so its actually worthwhile to play it. Is that true?

I believe the demo takes place at the beginning of DA2/shortly after the Warden left Lothering to start enlisting his/her allies and prior to Hawke's arrival at Kirkwall. So basically as Hawke's family is fleeing.

More gameplay videos tonight through Mike Laidlaw; they said that Fenris fans will be pretty happy with this one.

[Hooves]

Originally Posted by Who

Personally, I don't mind killing waves upon waves of cannon fodder as long as the bosses remain challenging to an extent. Gaxkang (without use of Mana Clash) and the Harvester are good examples of this.

If the cannon fodder can last for 10 seconds of being attacked, then I don't see anything wrong with that just as long as the boss is not all just auto-attack without any special moves in mind since they decided to throw in constant armies of mobs.

More gameplay videos tonight through Mike Laidlaw; they said that Fenris fans will be pretty happy with this one.

Goody more gameplays to watch.

[Kyral]

Ok finished my first playthrough with a warrior.

I'm actually pretty relieved, after reading so much posts in other boards from old RPG-fans (which actually is also something I belong to, as I too played Baldur's Gate and enjoyed it... oh my god...
I was 14 back then Oo ) who love to bash the game since the very first screenshots and videos, I halfway expected something terrible. But it was actually very enteraining.

First of all, the whole "cannon fodder" feeling is only in the very begining, when Verric totaly overstates how Hawke slaughters everything in his path. Later in the "real" story the Hurlocks need a lot more time to go down, the Oger too was challanging and I mostly had to switch to Aveline to run away from the thing bevor her HP dropped to 0 and drink something, sadly I didn't needed much tactics, only a little vigilance.

The Grafics are alright. All characters look actually pretty good (except the Hurlocks, who are just... I don't know... I liked them more when they looked more skeletal... they have noses now.. NOSES!) and while the first part is actually a brown dirty pipe, the panorama view made somehow up to it. Later in Kirkwall everything looks a a lot better. To bad we are not able to explore it, as there were a lot more ways to go on the map, but we have to follow Isabella here.

Of course as it was in Mass Effect 2, the presentation was just fun. The dialogue wheel is a good addition and like in ME2 I really enjoy it to talk with people (To bad we don't have much of it in the demo.).

So... it is better then I feared, and as I am intrigued what the story will be, so I will buy it.

Oh and I could not contribute to the "call to arms" as it refused to log in. Server being busy all the time, so I try again tomorow.

[Keroko]

I'm pretty much like Kyral about this game. The battles do feel a lot faster than they did in Origins, even after the exaggerated prologue. An increase in AoE abilities certainly helped with this, but there's also a higher damage too.

Graphics were never my main concern. Photo-realism always failed to really paint themselves as important to me, and since I played tons of games that lacked photo-realism and were still enjoyable I'm more looking to whether I like the art style. DA2 hit the spot for me in that department.

I like the storytelling mechanic they use. Having it all be history, all be part of a story that's being told to us... it blends itself with the gameplay really well.

And finally, Flemeth. Just... Flemeth.

[FlareKnight]

Will say I enjoyed the demo. The exaggerated part in the beginning was fun just for the laughs at how much devastation you were unleashing there. Though good to get to the more reasonable combat. It was definitely faster than before and enjoyed the explosions you could get from the mage.

Thought the game looked fine and the dialogue wheel worked alright. Will probably go back to hear the different options that I avoided.

Overall think it's going to turn out pretty well.

[Edge Meltdown]

Hot diggity damn I just finished the demo and it was so much fun. Also, I gotta say, I'm starting to regret killing flemeth in DA:O knowing now that she's one helluva hot cougar in the sequel

[LoweGear]

Dragon Age 2 Prologue Video in German

[Flying Dagger]

Finished demo. The graphics looks good enough and I am glad to see that the artists spent more time in armor design (at least I hope the armor models I saw in demo are not all there is to the game, all Massive armor in DA:O are essentially the same). A lot of blood as expected.

Isabella got a breast implant! -.- (Flemmeth's grew too!)

A lot of options (DX11, inventory) are disabled in the demo.

Health bar toggle is missing, making combat a little annoying. I would also like to zoom out a little further to not tunnel vision onto one part of the battlefield.

Heal now has a good 60s cooldown, though I have never came even close to needing it in the current difficulty level (no more dedicated healer!). I believe potions will also have a significant cooldown.

There is a limited amount of stam/mana consuming talents (and in place now we upgrade existing talents). This allows active skills to be used more often (and the premade characters have enough stam to last through a battle). There are also various stam/mana regen talents scattered around so I believe combat *should* be a little more interesting than auto-attack.

"Tanking" with sword and board is still somewhat ineffective due to the high reliance on taunt for threat (did I miss a +threat talent somewhere?). Your tank would have less "dps" talents compared to other damage dealers and would have less strength. Fighting through a battle with various crowd controls seem to be the way to go (every class can employ several CCs and some of them are even AoE CCs). Warriors still lack range capabilities to tank all those ranged mobs - I suppose mages with their high magic resistance are more suitable in tanking magic anyway.

Mages seem less broken at the moment compared to DA:O although they still seem to be the primary damage dealer with their various AoE. I suppose in higher difficulties where AoE affect allies as well they will have to be used sparingly.

Raising Cunning on tank woman boosted her avoidance from next to nothing to the low 70s on the last scenario - while stat deflation can limit the powers of a character, the stat curve seem a little broken.

The demo exceeded my expectations but is still short from a "perfect game". I will give it a 8.25/10.

[synaesthetic]

Just wrapped up the demo as a female rogue Hawke.

Gotta say, DA2 definitely makes rogues way more fun to play. I seriously had trouble playing anything but mages in DAO, but man, that was some sweet shit! I love the new backstab mechanic--making it an activated ability, rather than constantly having to micromanage my character behind monsters... blurgh.

The demo definitely shows that the game wasn't finished and is quite buggy when it was put together (which, I assume, was some time ago).

Changing tactics was a frustrating experience--it's almost impossible to highlight the buttons! If you don't wave around the cursor until you find the tiny "sweet spot" that highlights the button, you click through it. Not cool at all. If that isn't fixed in the full retail version, I'm going to raise hell.

Lots of "Loading..." especially between action scenes and cutscenes. ME2 didn't have this problem, so I'm assuming it's demo issues again.

The combat animations are very fast and jerky. I don't know, but I actually did not like that. It made the whole thing look like fantasy!Matrix. It seems very jarring, but it's only a minor sticking point.

Looking forward to release. Hopefully the demo's bugs are fixed in retail.

[Tokkan]

Originally Posted by Flying Dagger

A lot of options (DX11, inventory) are disabled in the demo.

Actually, DX11 features can be enabled in the demo, though it's not recommended as the DX11 implementation in the demo is rather unstable. According to BioWare, it's been fixed for the retail version.

[Irkalla]

I played the demo over with all classes and specializations, but must say that I still liked mages the most. The aoe spells are much more useful and flashier this time around, so I stand by my blood mage first playthrough. Rogues got really better tho, they are not just weak warriors but a class by themselves. They are friskier, and more importantly, you don't have to manoeuvre around enemies to backstab anymore, that was so annoying in origins that I didn't even bother with it to begin with. Archers are actually useful as well, but I think I'll just leave that to Varric or Seb the first few playthroughs. 2 Handed warriors are like, super hulks, especially when you circle slice some torsos off Ss on the other hand are true tanks, especially Aveline, she could take on that Ogre all by herself, definitely an asset.

The demo had a lot of shortcomings gui wise, it was frustrating. Like Syn has already mentioned, it's like you clicked through icons, and consequentially, it would throw you back to the game, soooooo annoying. Sometimes I had to click a dozen of times and go through a lot of click the selected character icon-in the menu-click another character in the menu-throws you back to the game, grrrrrr. I reaaaally hope this is fixed in the retail version. Maybe it's just a German demo thing, I didn't bother dling the English version, although I doubt it's much different.

[Who]

Originally Posted by Flying Dagger

"Tanking" with sword and board is still somewhat ineffective due to the high reliance on taunt for threat (did I miss a +threat talent somewhere?). Your tank would have less "dps" talents compared to other damage dealers and would have less strength. Fighting through a battle with various crowd controls seem to be the way to go (every class can employ several CCs and some of them are even AoE CCs). Warriors still lack range capabilities to tank all those ranged mobs - I suppose mages with their high magic resistance are more suitable in tanking magic anyway.

Warriors still have Taunt and now it's upgrade, Bellow. It's put under the Warmonger talent tree. If you choose not to get it, you can still have a Rogue use Goad and Corral to transfer all existing threat towards your warrior. There's also Bravery's upgrade, Bravado, which increases threat generation by +50% per enemy, as well as Fearless Synergy.
Range isn't too much of an issue either, in my opinion, due to the nature of closing/zoning attacks, although it could be problematic if they spread out a lot.

Oh, and to me, archery seems to be the overpowered one now. Staggering chance for every single shot, slowing AoE attack in Hail of Arrows, elemental AoE that also boosts evasion in Bursting Arrow, and an instant kill for normal rank enemies that also does as much damage as Arrow of Slaying in Archer's Lance? Count me in.

Edit:
Screw everyone else. Actually, screw my character and his/her classes as well. The only character I need is Varric. +50% attack speed and damage boosters?