Funny thing is, once they made actions instant upon pressing the ability icon people called it a hack n' slash game
.
Dragon Age 2 has a ton of problems and is a shit game, but people who equate fast animations and input responsiveness with "hack n' slash" are an amusingly ignorant lot.
Not in its entirety. True, there are a lot of people who don't really know what hack n' slash is and use it as a shallow argument. But, then again, there are people who think that Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate were turn-based; and other whose critique is centered around and limited by the idea of Immershuns. I wouldn't care to read those posts anymore than I care to wander into the BSN.
However, the more interesting complainers focused on two fronts.
First, many claimed that the game was frantic and a bit too fast. The sort of clusterfuck that held many RTwP games back and, at least according to some developers, part of the reason why some features of the old game's combat were cut instead of integrated with the new features (talking mostly about spell combos and the CCC).
From an aesthetic point of view, DA2's frantic combat was a major portion of a larger whole: a change of pace that took over the entire game. Combat became a banal thing that is thrown at the player at regular and frequent intervals. The nature of combat itself is much more fantastical which makes it all even more anti-climatic. The player kills hordes of enemies in a late season
Shonen like fashion. This runs counter to BioWare's pretense at drama and was fundamental in VD's own review of the game.
But this is also an issue of gameplay: I think this is an interesting point to make because Neverwinter Nights 2 was often irritating precisely because of this. With such a clusterfuck for combat, then Dragon Age can't really pretend to be much more than a shallow RTwP or a mediocre Action games - otherwise it would be hard to keep track of rules. This is why I'm so happy that Sawyer's adding a slow down option to Eternity.
The other movement was that the frantic combat was accompanied by some action elements. Minor stuff like dodging from thrown rocks by moving characters instead of relying on character building for that. I don't really care about this argument because I'm more optimistic that BioWare delievers a solid Action game than a pure party based RPG. But I can sympathize.
