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sirell wrote:
Such is life.
Indeed so, most indeededly.
On topic; personally I cannot say anything useful about the series yet as I've only played a few hours of DAO just recently. So far I can say that it's definitely an enjoyable game, but the combat is disjointed, the camera system is awful, and the animations are either strange or absent. Also, I hate all silent protagonists not named Link.
The latter is obviously a joke, because I think LoZ would be a much better game if the protagonist would utter actual words.
OTGBionicArm wrote:
Yea that's my biggest gripe with DAO, they bothered to give you a grunting/command dialogue voice actor, but not actually voice your character.
That was the biggest bait in game development history.
Focusing on the changes from Dragon Age Origins to DA2, I think people's should stop bashing everything blindly: yes, DA2 has various big obvious flaws (limited dialogue with baits between what it shows and the real intention behind the sentence, always the same locations which makes chapter 3 a bit tiresome, dialogue decisions seem less impactful in terms of changing how pieces of narrative are affected and, of course, limited main character personalization), but it improved on many things it should have improved on the original:
- Combat feels A LOT less clunky, and you don't feel ******ed as a mage when your abilities are on cooldown;
- Characterization improved, and this considering DAO already had really interesting and relatable characters. Also, each character's relevance to the story increased;
- A really strong climax - the way the story is built up and peaks is a lot more impactful than on DAO where the Archdemon fight has 0 impact (specially because he isn't even the real story antagonist, everyone knows you are up against Logain and the only interesting that follows that situation is the pre-archdemon dialogues and the story's conclusion);
I loved both games and they got me hyped for this third one. I can also say that I think Origins is superior, but people do love to overstate how they ruined the series with DA2
- Combat feels A LOT less clunky, and you don't feel ******ed as a mage when your abilities are on cooldown;
- Characterization improved, and this considering DAO already had really interesting and relatable characters. Also, each character's relevance to the story increased;
- A really strong climax - the way the story is built up and peaks is a lot more impactful than on DAO where the Archdemon fight has 0 impact (specially because he isn't even the real story antagonist, everyone knows you are up against Logain and the only interesting that follows that situation is the pre-archdemon dialogues and the story's conclusion);
I loved both games and they got me hyped for this third one. I can also say that I think Origins is superior, but people do love to overstate how they ruined the series with DA2
Thank you Tsuki for the sig!
I dunno man, I thought the characters and storyline in DA2 were pretty terrible. Each act had its own storyline that was basically unrelated to the other two, there was no real overarching goal or villain and almost every single character is intolerable either because they have an annoying lazily-written cliché personality or because they make absolutely moronic decisions that screw everybody over cough anders cough merrill. How you could possibly consider them an improvement on the DA:O characters kind of boggles my mind to be honest.
As for the climax
As for the climax
The big thing I myself liked about DA2 was the gameplay, not the story. I agree that the story went way downhill with DA2, but the satisfaction of combat, interface, ability build options, dialogue system, rewards for exploration and story telling were all amazing in DA2 compared to DA:O.
The abilities in DA:O were take it or leave it. You cannot focus around a certain ability, instead you went broad. This forced me to pick boring abilities a lot of times because I already had everything I wanted. Besides that the ability system of DA:O also forced you to waste 3 ability points if you really want a 4th one in a row. In DA2 most great abilities were either accessable directly or after some other amazing abilities first. Not only the abilites though, the rest of the interface really confusing in DA:O. Some stats I couldn't really find proper information on in the game, going from menu to menu in DA:O was a pain whereas DA2 gave clear stat description and values on how these stats affect your gameplay. Besides that, it was really easy to go through the menus in DA2 whereas after playing DA:O multiple times, I still flow as easily throught the menu's as I did after playing DA2 once.
The good interface also helped with side quests. You knew what areas would have which quests. This made me more appealed to go to these areas. These areas would have treasure such as ingredients which don't just give one piece of that ingredient, but instead a whole site. In DA:O it wasn't rewarding to get ingredients at all as you could just buy 99x stacks of ingredient at a store for a cheap price. In DA2 ingredients would stay forever and can be used multiple times for crafting. Not only that, the fact that it gave XP made it also feel extra rewarding to get some ingredients.
Then there is the dialogue wheel. This is one of my favorite changes about dragon age. In DA:O it happened so many times that I picked a dialogue option that I thought meant something while the game actually meant something else with it. This caused me to break up relationships many times by making people hate me unintentionally ;_;. The dialogue wheel, however, made very clear what your options are and what they mean. This reduced the amount of breakups by a lot. I also loved the narrative Varric used in Dragon Age. In DA:O you pretty much had to figure out most of the lore yourself by doing questlines or reading codex. Reading codexes.... is not that much fun imo. The fact that Varric just told the story for you and gave some good visuals during the process made the story far more interesting to me, even though the story itself was worse than it was in DA:O.
Finally, the combat. It felt so much more alive in DA2. In DA:O it often felt like a puzzle than a combat game. How should I fill in tactics? What item do I put on which character? Why the hell do I need to spend 6 points of cunning on Wynne so she can upgrade her skills? The puzzle in itself is fine (except the cunning part, that was pretty dumb), but the combat didn't feel anything more than that. In DA2 the visuals, abilities, health bars, etc. etc. felt so much more satisfying. Having the health bars flash white when you crit, seeing magical bolts flying through the air and when you are a mage, EXPLOSIONS EVERHWERE. There are the issues though that the tactical view was removed from DA2 (NOOOOOOOOOO) and that you had less freedom in building any character that isn't you yourself. These last facts, the fact that the story was less amazing in DA2 and the fact that the story had less freedom in DA2 made DA:O way more replayable than DA2 was. Today my inquisition will finish downloading, hopefully it will have the userfriendliness of DA2 and the depth of DA:O. #hope
tldr; DA2's amazing interface, dialogue wheel, rewardsystem and visuals made the game way more userfriendly. This made it a very enjoyable game to me. However, since DA:O had waaay more depth than DA2 had, it was still enjoyable even after you played the game multiple times.
The abilities in DA:O were take it or leave it. You cannot focus around a certain ability, instead you went broad. This forced me to pick boring abilities a lot of times because I already had everything I wanted. Besides that the ability system of DA:O also forced you to waste 3 ability points if you really want a 4th one in a row. In DA2 most great abilities were either accessable directly or after some other amazing abilities first. Not only the abilites though, the rest of the interface really confusing in DA:O. Some stats I couldn't really find proper information on in the game, going from menu to menu in DA:O was a pain whereas DA2 gave clear stat description and values on how these stats affect your gameplay. Besides that, it was really easy to go through the menus in DA2 whereas after playing DA:O multiple times, I still flow as easily throught the menu's as I did after playing DA2 once.
The good interface also helped with side quests. You knew what areas would have which quests. This made me more appealed to go to these areas. These areas would have treasure such as ingredients which don't just give one piece of that ingredient, but instead a whole site. In DA:O it wasn't rewarding to get ingredients at all as you could just buy 99x stacks of ingredient at a store for a cheap price. In DA2 ingredients would stay forever and can be used multiple times for crafting. Not only that, the fact that it gave XP made it also feel extra rewarding to get some ingredients.
Then there is the dialogue wheel. This is one of my favorite changes about dragon age. In DA:O it happened so many times that I picked a dialogue option that I thought meant something while the game actually meant something else with it. This caused me to break up relationships many times by making people hate me unintentionally ;_;. The dialogue wheel, however, made very clear what your options are and what they mean. This reduced the amount of breakups by a lot. I also loved the narrative Varric used in Dragon Age. In DA:O you pretty much had to figure out most of the lore yourself by doing questlines or reading codex. Reading codexes.... is not that much fun imo. The fact that Varric just told the story for you and gave some good visuals during the process made the story far more interesting to me, even though the story itself was worse than it was in DA:O.
Finally, the combat. It felt so much more alive in DA2. In DA:O it often felt like a puzzle than a combat game. How should I fill in tactics? What item do I put on which character? Why the hell do I need to spend 6 points of cunning on Wynne so she can upgrade her skills? The puzzle in itself is fine (except the cunning part, that was pretty dumb), but the combat didn't feel anything more than that. In DA2 the visuals, abilities, health bars, etc. etc. felt so much more satisfying. Having the health bars flash white when you crit, seeing magical bolts flying through the air and when you are a mage, EXPLOSIONS EVERHWERE. There are the issues though that the tactical view was removed from DA2 (NOOOOOOOOOO) and that you had less freedom in building any character that isn't you yourself. These last facts, the fact that the story was less amazing in DA2 and the fact that the story had less freedom in DA2 made DA:O way more replayable than DA2 was. Today my inquisition will finish downloading, hopefully it will have the userfriendliness of DA2 and the depth of DA:O. #hope
tldr; DA2's amazing interface, dialogue wheel, rewardsystem and visuals made the game way more userfriendly. This made it a very enjoyable game to me. However, since DA:O had waaay more depth than DA2 had, it was still enjoyable even after you played the game multiple times.
Change is gooooood
Picture by: Thalia Kael
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