So... Dragon Age 2...

[Lagole Gon]

It tries to create human drama (lol), family tragedies (lololol) and deep characters(lolololol). All these cutscenes, voice acting, facial animations and the result is just a creepy prosperian puppet show.

While its true that it DA2 doesn't do create all this drama as well as say a book or tv series. It tries and comes far closer than anything at all in recent memory.

Even Bioware's Popamole Effect 2 is much better in this regard. It's easier to pull it off with an interactive movie.

You do hit an amusing point in that the cut-scenes, voice acting (its actually fine, considering some of the lines these people have to deliver in full seriousness... think about it) and facial animations detract from the story because they do. This game's story would be far easier to swallow as well written text rather than voiced dialog. The reason for this is that its far easier to cover up things you don't like with your own imagination when you don't have much to work with. It's also much easier to enjoy a romance when someone elses idea of a hot partner isn't shoved down your personal critical eyes.

But the writing alone is atrocious (most of it). Just think about the main plotline. What is it about? What did you achieve? Well, if I recall correctly it's something like this:
You are a motherfucking janitor in a motherfucking madhouse! Everybody in the city of Cockwall is bat shit insane! You just sit there and wait for a riot so you can beat the crap out of patients (oh, once in a while you also have to kill vermin in a basement. It's always the same fucking basement).

You have to remember that DA2 and in general all of Bioware's work attempts to appeal to anyone from 15-40 years old. That is not an easy thing to achieve, especially not in the serious drama department, someone who is 20 is going to have more or less a different opinion of what good drama is like, based on their life experiences and a whole bunch of completely un-plottable random personal whimsies. I am not saying it can't be done better, but they gave it a good shot with the time and pressure the team had (trying to cash in quickly on DA:O).

That's a lot of excuses bro.

 

[pan]

DA:O AI is designed to be as shitty as possible. It's intentional. If the enemies were programmed to target mages, archers and rogues, as well as to use stunning abilities like shield bash, the game would be impossible. Even if the enemies chose targets and abilities at random the game would be impossible. Fortunately for the player, the AI is designed to be as ineffectual as possible by targeting only warriors in heavy armour and to never use stunning abilities. This is so that the player can feel epic killing huge amounts of enemies without bothering with tactics or strategy beyond "spam epic abilities that cause huge explosions."

Also, the fabled battlefield terrain consisting of traps and archers behind barricades ends after the Tower of Ishaal and a few world map encounters. Everything else consists of enemies standing around in nondescript environments.

Conclusion: codex justifications for this game are delusional fabrications, excuses for shit taste.

 

[Roguey]

Fortunately for the player, the AI is designed to be as ineffectual as possible by targeting only warriors in heavy armour and to never use stunning abilities.

Enemies use stunning abilities all the time (particularly spiders with web and archers with scattershot) moreover, it is possible for a rogue or a mage's threat level to surpass a warrior's.

 

[DeepOcean]

While its true that it DA2 doesn't do create all this drama as well as say a book or tv series. It tries and comes far closer than anything at all in recent memory.

What you should had said is that Bioware is one of the few RPG developers trying to make RPGs with "mature" themes even if their idea of mature is laughfable but the "tries and comes far closer than anything at all in recent memory" is you just being a fanboy, inflating the qualities of DA 2. Bioware write schlock, if you want to see qualities on it, it says more about your tastes than Bioware writing quality.At least, it was schlock that had decent gameplay behind, nowdays is shit all the way through. Sometimes you can have fun watching schlock but don't to pretend that is something more than schlock. Any Bioware story from day one don't deserve any more praise than: "It could be way worse" and nowdays even that don't apply anymore.

You have to remember that DA2 and in general all of Bioware's work attempts to appeal to anyone from 15-40 years old. That is not an easy thing to achieve, especially not in the serious drama department, someone who is 20 is going to have more or less a different opinion of what good drama is like, based on their life experiences and a whole bunch of completely un-plottable random personal whimsies. I am not saying it can't be done better, but they gave it a good shot with the time and pressure the team had (trying to cash in quickly on DA:O).

Excuses and more excuses. Buy my $ 60,00 dollars game, it is shitty and is a quick cash in but it was really hard to do? Do you really buys and accept really shitty products because the guy who made it whine to you how hard it was to make?

 

[pan]

Fortunately for the player, the AI is designed to be as ineffectual as possible by targeting only warriors in heavy armour and to never use stunning abilities.

Enemies use stunning abilities all the time (particularly spiders with web and archers with scattershot) moreover, it is possible for a rogue or a mage's threat level to surpass a warrior's.

No, there are times that enemies don't use stunning abilities, even archers and spiders with webs, moreover, it is possible for a rogue or mage's threat level to not surpass that of a warrior's.

 

[SCO]

BG2 was schlock. DA (and DA2) from what i can see from my distant horizon of sheer incredulity, seems to be a Frankenstein monster turned out by talentless writers that don't respect the audience (with reason) on a ridiculous deadline.

 

[Erebus]

Bioware is trying to make games with more developed stories than what we had in past CRPGs. I played through DA:O recently : compared to games like BG2, many more quests have different possible solutions, the companions are much more developed and your past actions (including your origin) were much more taken into account.

The problem, in my opinion, is that heavily developing your story is not necessarily a good thing. Some games have great stories, but most don't. Heavily developing a mediocre story, an unoriginal setting and annoying companions is a terrible idea, much worse than leaving them underdeveloped.

Enemies use stunning abilities all the time (particularly spiders with web and archers with scattershot)

Yeah, archers with scattershot could be a huge pain in the ass, especially when they were so far from you that you couldn't see them clearly.

moreover, it is possible for a rogue or a mage's threat level to surpass a warrior's.

Also yes. It often didn't take much for Leliana, Wynne or Morrigan to become higher-priority targets than my heavily-armored warrior PC.

 

[DeepOcean]

Bioware is trying to make games with more developed stories than what we had in past CRPGs. I played through DA:O recently : compared to games like BG2, many more quests have different possible solutions, the companions are much more developed and your past actions (including your origin) were much more taken into account.

The problem, in my opinion, is that heavily developing your story is not necessarily a good thing. Some games have great stories, but most don't. Heavily developing a mediocre story, an unoriginal setting and annoying companions is a terrible idea, much worse than leaving them underdeveloped.

From what I remember DA has the trademark Bioware illusion of choice, nothing much different from BG 2. I didn't compared each C&C situation in both games but I don't remember anything revolutionary. In relation to quests, they are for the most part linear and you have always a binary irrelevant choice at the end. Doesn't matter what you choose, you are going to be a Grey Warden as you would need to rescue Imoen. The problem is that the characters in DA and BG2 are both underdeveloped, the main difference is that the characters in BG 2 aren't gay psychopaths so they are less irritating. Number of of dialogue lines does not make a character more developed, the characters in DA 1 talk alot and say nothing of relevance, only lame attempts of humor and pretentious melodrama. It is worse in DA 2 because they become sex deviants, psychopaths and want to have an orgy at all times.

 

[pan]

Yeah, archers with scattershot could be a huge pain in the ass, especially when they were so far from you that you couldn't see them clearly.

moreover, it is possible for a rogue or a mage's threat level to surpass a warrior's.

Also yes. It often didn't take much for Leliana, Wynne or Morrigan to become higher-priority targets than my heavily-armored warrior PC.

That is not the case in my play-through. My wizards are only targeted if they spam a bunch of fireball spells at the start of battle, before anyone else has a chance to do anything. Oh, and also when they cast petrify -- cast petrify on a boss and he will chase the caster around for the entire battle.

I have yet to endure a single scattershot. Or, if I have, it was not noticable.

So, either you and Roguey are bad (highly plausible), or a patch changed the game since your last play-through. Note that I'm playing on Nightmare level, which I presume is abnormal for a codexer because I keep on seeing advice on this forum for tactics that only work on lower difficulty levels (using mana clash to one-shot kill wizard bosses, for instance -- that spell has yet to one shot a boss for me, in fact some bosses are completely immune to it)). So perhaps your warriors aren't drawing aggression because you are playing on easy mode where no enemy has magic resistance and all wizard spells do five bajillion damage.

During my play-through I am noticing something. All I have to do to win any battle is have Alistair tank damage while my wizards heal him from behind and paralyse enemies around him. This works for every battle.

more quests have different possible solutions

The departures in quest solutions all happen at the end of quests, and are essentially just choices between which end boss you want to fight (if any). That's for the main quests. Side quests are sometimes more free form, I guess, but they are trivial to begin with.

I'm also not of the opinion that diverging quest paths are a good thing in hack and slashes. They seem pointless, like the huge amounts of banal dialogue in all Bioware games. Rather than add all of this extraneous shit to their hack and slashers, Bioware should spend development time on more worthy things... like non-shit combat, having more than a dozen enemy types, more than a dozen unique items, dungeons that aren't just corridors with loot and enemies every other screen length....

 

[Dreaad]

I don't really see how I am being a "fanboy" christ I only played the game one time, saw what the company did with the time they had and moved on. As for the overall plot, well I already said earlier I like the fact that it's disjointed more like episode's from a tv show than a movie. I did not sit down and play it for 8 hours straight completing it in 3 days, I played a couple of times a week for around 1-2 hours, who knows maybe that's why I didn't find the humor, repetitiveness to get that old....

Some of these comments are highly entertaining however do go on please. Especially the "talentless" writers part. Please extrapolate, what is talented writing to you in a video game?
Is it Morrowind? While essentially relatively interesting has no emotion whatsoever, makes in fact no attempt at emotion, pretty much like looking through some strangers holiday photos while reading about what they did on holiday from a long checklist.

In any case inform me oh mighty nay sayers of DA2, what constitutes a great story with great writing and great characters? If you are feeling brave, post your ideas.

 

[Erebus]

Number of of dialogue lines does not make a character more developed

I'm not saying that the companions in DA:O were well-developed. But they are more developed : they express themselves a lot more often than BG2 companions, their opinion of the PC isn't just a reaction to his reputation, they often have their own opinions about quests, they can sometimes decide to oppose you and, while I haven't tried any of the romances, I suspect you can pursue them without always having to choose the obvious "right answer" whenever a romance dialogue is triggered.

So, either you and Roguey are bad (highly plausible), or a patch changed the game since your last play-through.

I played the game only recently, unpatched (unless the patching somehow happened when I wasn't looking). And I have no intention of replaying it.

I'm not claiming I was very good at the game. For instance, I ignored the warrior abilities that allowed you to raise your "threat level", because they reminded me too much of fucking WoW.

I'm also not of the opinion that diverging quest paths are a good thing in hack and slashes. They seem pointless, like the huge amounts of banal dialogue in all Bioware games. Rather than add all of this extraneous shit to their hack and slashers, Bioware should spend development time on more worthy things... like non-shit combat, having more than a dozen enemy types, more than a dozen unique items, dungeons that aren't just corridors with loot and enemies every other screen length....

That's the point I was raising. Bioware puts a lot of effort into the story elements of its games and it's not paying off, because a mediocre story that's heavily developed is still mediocre, only much more obviously. The time and money that's devoted to things like romances and long uninteresting dialogues might be put to better use.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

2. You still end up as her errand boy. The fact she's an obvious villain is not helping.
3. Mages and templars are teaming up together to fight Meredith. Finally! ... You can't join them of course, they think you are BFF with crazy bitch (despite 1.). Furthermore they kidnapped your sibiling/LI.

I'm pretty sure it's Orsino who tells you to stop the rebellious templar/mages since he doesn't want the entire circle executed.

Avelline goes ape shit crazy about some elves who killed a rapist, but she doesn't mind Hawke murdering 100 people per day.

• Merrill: Why don't you arrest us, Aveline?
• Aveline: What?
• Merrill: We break the law. I'm pretty sure. There are laws for almost everything. You're not a bad guard, are you?
• Aveline: No!

(If on a friendship path with Merrill)

• Merrill: That's good. Is it because you're fond of Hawke? I kind of am.
• Aveline: How very nice for you. Keep it to yourself.
• Merrill: I'd rather keep it with her/him.

(If on a rivalry path with Merrill)

• Merrill: That's good. You look uncomfortable. Did I say something wrong again?
• Aveline: No, Merrill, that's fine.
• Merrill: Ah, maybe it's your shoes.

Merrill cheerfully talks about cute stuff and rainbows 30 seconds after freezing/burning her whole clan alive. (srsly).

Since she's Aerie in a new skin, how appropriate for her to be just as bipolar.

Hawke. A guy who kills 30 bandits when he's trying to cross a street is unable to stop one templar from taking away Bethany.

Can't be everywhere at once.

I wanted to cry, just reading that. My face got that weird hot feeling like tears were about to come, but they just didn't. The writing in DA2 is so abominable, you can't even cry in despair at it, nothing will come.

 

[Roguey]

Trying too hard.

That is not the case in my play-through. My wizards are only targeted if they spam a bunch of fireball spells at the start of battle, before anyone else has a chance to do anything. Oh, and also when they cast petrify -- cast petrify on a boss and he will chase the caster around for the entire battle.

http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Threat

I have yet to endure a single scattershot. Or, if I have, it was not noticable.

It happens most often late-game.

So, either you and Roguey are bad (highly plausible), or a patch changed the game since your last play-through.

I recently completed it on hard, using the 1.02 patch (avoiding 1.03+ and all the instability it brings). I'm also a better-than-average player, since the average seems to be pretty damn low.

Note that I'm playing on Nightmare level, which I presume is abnormal for a codexer because I keep on seeing advice on this forum for tactics that only work on lower difficulty levels (using mana clash to one-shot kill wizard bosses, for instance -- that spell has yet to one shot a boss for me, in fact some bosses are completely immune to it)).

Normal and lieutenant mages go down with any one mana clash. For a boss mage, you'd need to use your PC and only put points into magic and maximize your spellpower through gear/spells.

So perhaps your warriors aren't drawing aggression because you are playing on easy mode where no enemy has magic resistance and all wizard spells do five bajillion damage.

Um what now
http://web.archive.org/web/20101115173807/http://dragonage.gulbsoft.org/doku.php/difficulty
5% isn't significant, it likely means one more hit for them to die, maybe three more than easy.

Hmm you know since you're playing on nightmare, your warrior's armor should have nothing to do with the threat it's drawing.

During my play-through I am noticing something. All I have to do to win any battle is have Alistair tank damage while my wizards heal him from behind and paralyse enemies around him. This works for every battle.

I hate winning battles through heal spams so I never play that way.

 

[DeepOcean]

Is it Morrowind? While essentially relatively interesting has no emotion whatsoever, makes in fact no attempt at emotion, pretty much like looking through some strangers holiday photos while reading about what they did on holiday from a long checklist.

In any case inform me oh mighty nay sayers of DA2, what constitutes a great story with great writing and great characters? If you are feeling brave, post your ideas.

I don't remember Bethesda at that time claiming to want to make emotional engaging dialogue, different games have different objectives at writing. Morrowind was a walking simulator that had interesting lore and well crafted world and it's writing accomplished the job for it's purposes, Bioware games appeal for emotion and character interaction and fail every time. Bioware shitty writing features: Emo villains, melodrama, pretentious dialogue that only manage to be funny for the wrong reasons, reused archetypes, one dimentional characters, lore contradiction, plot contradition, failure at logic, lack of understanding how the dialogue between two human beings works, labeling characters with titles like mother/sister/brother/friend thinking that the player would care because they say they should, killing unkown characters at the beginning thinking that their death would cause emotional reaction, lack of use of dialogue skills on dialogue, binary simplistic moral systems, complete disconect between story and gameplay, making the player the only rational agent on the game that solves everybody problems(ME 3) or completely robbing player agency and making him an errand boy (DA 2), failure to attribute believable motivations to characters actions, reused big evil is comming theme. There are alot of games that make those mistakes but they many times have solid gameplay behind, something you can't say about DA 2.

Some of these comments are highly entertaining however do go on please. Especially the "talentless" writers part. Please extrapolate, what is talented writing to you in a video game?

Talent is an animal that flees in terror every time it sees David Gaider and Hambuguer Helpler.

 

[pan]

I hate winning battles through heal spams so I never play that way.

Bullshit. The 'harder' fights in this game are battles of attrition against enemies with thousands of HP. Without heal spam or potion spam you can't win them.

 

[Roguey]

Bullshit. The 'harder' fights in this game are battles of attrition against enemies with thousands of HP. Without heal spam or potion spam you can't win them.

Yet I beat them without doing so and so have others. If only Bioware forced players to master their game instead of letting them low-effort it with such a boring crutch.

 

[pan]

Bullshit. The 'harder' fights in this game are battles of attrition against enemies with thousands of HP. Without heal spam or potion spam you can't win them.

Yet I beat them without doing so and so have others. If only Bioware forced players to master their game instead of letting them low-effort it with such a boring crutch.

No you didn't, you little cock gobbler, you couldn't have beaten Flemeth, for instance, without gargling potions or heals or doing something else equally as lame. Dragon Age Orifice's combat system doesn't exactly lend itself to dynamic and fair combat tactics. You are either exploiting something or you are playing it in the orthodox manner of spamming heals on a tank while everyone else does DPS from afar. In the simplistic world of WoW combat one does not defeat Flemeth any other way.

 

[Dreaad]

Missdirection hex

 

[Hepler's Vagina]

Bullshit. The 'harder' fights in this game are battles of attrition against enemies with thousands of HP. Without heal spam or potion spam you can't win them.

Yet I beat them without doing so and so have others. If only Bioware forced players to master their game instead of letting them low-effort it with such a boring crutch.

Yes, I hear that really often - the game is unplayable without a healer. Tactics are just kiting and cone of cold. There is no enemy variety besides their HP. All that shows is the person is either playing on a console or on a difficulty lower than Hard and they've made zero effort to learn about the class skills. They are living proof that Laidlaw was absolutely fucking right to nerf the difficulties after Knowles left, because it seems even on the codex some people have trouble reading and trying out builds and tactics. For the 'we are teh hardcore RPG taliban, oh noes modern gaems are for mouthbreathing retards' that gets spouted around, I bet a whopping three people looked at the DA:O toolset to see the numbers behind the icons.

I never use a healer or poultices (except for the dragons) and I always play on hard or nightmare. Only on hard+ do the enemies start using special attacks at you and you actually have to do more than spam abilities as they come off cooldown. And I get stunlocked every other fight, even from Mabari howls on the lowest levels. I never kite. I do not use the tactics slots because the encounters are too varied to fit any type of boilerplate auto-actions on the top difficulties. You will die if you try to autopilot anything.

That said, the tactics are buggy and the builds are shittily balanced. If I just wanted god-mode on nightmare on PC I'd just take 2 mages (no healer), post-patch Shale and Alistair.

 

[pan]

Bullshit. The 'harder' fights in this game are battles of attrition against enemies with thousands of HP. Without heal spam or potion spam you can't win them.

Yet I beat them without doing so and so have others. If only Bioware forced players to master their game instead of letting them low-effort it with such a boring crutch.

Yes, I hear that really often - the game is unplayable without a healer. Tactics are just kiting and cone of cold. There is no enemy variety besides their HP. All that shows is the person is either playing on a console or on a difficulty lower than Hard and they've made zero effort to learn about the class skills. They are living proof that Laidlaw was absolutely fucking right to nerf the difficulties after Knowles left, because it seems even on the codex some people have trouble reading and trying out builds and tactics. For the 'we are teh hardcore RPG taliban, oh noes modern gaems are for mouthbreathing retards' that gets spouted around, I bet a whopping three people looked at the DA:O toolset to see the numbers behind the icons.

I never use a healer or poultices (except for the dragons) and I always play on hard or nightmare. Only on hard+ do the enemies start using special attacks at you and you actually have to do more than spam abilities as they come off cooldown. And I get stunlocked every other fight, even from Mabari howls on the lowest levels. I never kite. I do not use the tactics slots because the encounters are too varied to fit any type of boilerplate auto-actions on the top difficulties. You will die if you try to autopilot anything.

That said, the tactics are buggy and the builds are shittily balanced. If I just wanted god-mode on nightmare on PC I'd just take 2 mages (no healer), post-patch Shale and Alistair.

Yeah I can tell you're an idiot because you imply that you replay this game often.

 

[Hepler's Vagina]

No. I will however concede to possibly being an idiot for re-reading Gaider comics.

 

[DraQ]

I don't remember Bethesda at that time claiming to want to make emotional engaging dialogue, different games have different objectives at writing. Morrowind was a walking simulator that had interesting lore and well crafted world and it's writing accomplished the job for it's purposes, Bioware games appeal for emotion and character interaction and fail every time. Bioware shitty writing features: Emo villains, melodrama, pretentious dialogue that only manage to be funny for the wrong reasons, reused archetypes, one dimentional characters, lore contradiction, plot contradition, failure at logic, lack of understanding how the dialogue between two human beings works, labeling characters with titles like mother/sister/brother/friend thinking that the player would care because they say they should, killing unkown characters at the beginning thinking that their death would cause emotional reaction, lack of use of dialogue skills on dialogue, binary simplistic moral systems, complete disconect between story and gameplay, making the player the only rational agent on the game that solves everybody problems(ME 3) or completely robbing player agency and making him an errand boy (DA 2), failure to attribute believable motivations to characters actions, reused big evil is comming theme. There are alot of games that make those mistakes but they many times have solid gameplay behind, something you can't say about DA 2.

This. In Morrowind you're a tabula rasa for player to fill in and run around rich world doing adventurer stuff, with extra steps taken to ensure you're fucking ignorant of the gameworld and have no ties to anyone in it.

 

[Roguey]

No you didn't, you little cock gobbler, you couldn't have beaten Flemeth, for instance, without gargling potions or heals or doing something else equally as lame. Dragon Age Orifice's combat system doesn't exactly lend itself to dynamic and fair combat tactics. You are either exploiting something or you are playing it in the orthodox manner of spamming heals on a tank while everyone else does DPS from afar. In the simplistic world of WoW combat one does not defeat Flemeth any other way.

For Flemeth I had an indomitable'd, berserker'd, powerful swing'd, and threaten'd Sten in the 75% fire-resist high dragon armor with the +10 damage to dragons sword with two +10 runes and quiet death poison adding another +10 and swift salve, Leliana pelting him off to the side, Wynne buffing (but not healing) Sten with heroic offense/defense and glyph of warding, and my character debuffing Flemeth with weakness, stacking vulnerability and affliction hex, misdirection and death hex, and paralyze. I think I had to use force field to interrupt her once when she picked up Sten.

I do not use the tactics slots because the encounters are too varied to fit any type of boilerplate auto-actions on the top difficulties. You will die if you try to autopilot anything.

This is the only thing I disagree with. I had tactics on almost all the time and didn't have to think about most fights.

 

[Jestai]

Same than you with one less character, you popamoler!
I RULE THIS SHIT. I'M THE TRUE MASTERMIND OF DA:O. I'M THE REAL BEST TACTICIAN OF THE WORST TACTIC (NO HEAL).

zzz

 

[Hepler's Vagina]

Same than you with one less character, you popamoler!
I RULE THIS SHIT. I'M THE TRUE MASTERMIND OF DA:O. I'M THE REAL BEST TACTICIAN OF THE WORST TACTIC (NO HEAL).

zzz

But healing is a bad tactic in this game. In DA:O you rarely need to even lose a HP, (except for the dragons) because the abilities you have are so insanely OP even after Laidlaw's spell nerf patch. Eg sleep + waking nightmare, mass paralysis, crushing prison, force field = battlefield owned. I don't use Cone of Cold or Storm of the Century because I consider those spells to be cheating. Not to mention that health poultices actually cost a ton of cash (even with crafting) that could better be spent on say, magic items, making the next battles easier still.