I've played now for several hours as a rogue. It's a bit slow starting out as you are doing a bunch of tasks around the city to make money. But the amount of negativity directed towards this game is profoundly silly.
Yes it's simplified, and it's better to turn the difficulty up to Hard (who cares?). But it's a fun game that looks really nice and is very, very well done. Voice acting and directing isn't quite as good as Mass Effect 2 (which I think has the best voice acting of any game I've ever experienced), but it's still extremely well done.
You're missing out on a good game if you pass it up, but that's your choice of course.
I totally disagree, and unless a player is used to monotonous (enemies appearing from the edges of the screen) combat and not-free-to-play gameworld, I'd say its a major disapointment. Try a rogue and you will see what I mean when you approach a group of enemies in stealth. Shame.
here is a quote from the source known for its disrespect, and I totally agree with it
RPG ReviewsDragon Age: Origins was one of the best games ever created with full-scale castles, awesome tactical combat, excellent dialog and some of the best writing seen in any video games. Beyond that it had memorable characters and was pretty much the best RPG ever created since Baldurs Gate II ( and was the actual spiritual successor). Bioware, instead of continuing this tradition decided to take A BIG FUCKING SHIT on everyone who enjoyed the original and instead created the game based upon the retard-infested Call of Duty market and alienated everyone who liked the original. In turn, you get a watered down, poorly written, uninteresting stinking shit fest which tests not only your patience but your ability not stomp on small animals until they are dead. Dragon Age 2 is not just a let-down because of its predecessor but it is an all around terrible fucking game even on it's own right.
So everyone enjoyed the first game and it had incredible reviews with a metacritic score of 91 and incredibly high user score. The exact fucking opposite in this case with a score of 84 and a 3.0/10 for user reviews. You know some reviewer bullshit going on in the sense of PC Gamer being a fucking paid-off review site which will suck any game developers dick when they get enough money.
Dragon Age 2 had a lot to live up to when it came to the first game, however, if it kept most of the formula the same, improved some of the problems and graphics, and wrote a great continuation, there would have been no problem with the game being at minimum equal to the first. However, the real story is "STREAMLINED" it which basically means they took out everything EVERYONE liked and left the game as a hollow shell of what its predecessor and basically took a shit on all of its fans who supported them by purchasing. Here is a straight forward list of why this game is a piece of shit
Shit Graphics: The graphics in this game are a fucking step back considering that they are incredibly bland and uninteresting. The art design took a style to become more cartoony and JRPG looking and is a mash between western and and JRPG styles which comes off looking like shit on the overall scale. Different armors in this game simply look like a blend of stupid generic pieces of sharp metal rather the VASTLY unique different looking armors we were offered in Dragon Age Origins. Beyond this, the textures (even with the High-Res Texture pack which you have to download separately) are absolute ass and when tessellation is enabled the game runs like shit and yet still manages to look worse than the first game. It is like they outsourced the development of the assets to some shit Chinese company who is better suited at putting poison in shitty toys to kill small children.
Woefully Retarded OTT Animations: Dragon Age Origins had excellent combat animations with the standard fighting moves being fancy enough to look actually real and vicious while still keeping a gritty tone to them. THIS GAME FUCKS THAT IN THE ASS. Now you get mages shooting fireballs from between their legs while doing blackflips and Hawke is doing whirlwinds left and right and hitting thousands of enemies at once in ridiculous flashy and stupid looking animations. Yeah, way to keep the serious fucking tone of the game when my rogue is jumping around the game like a fucking monkey stabbing people all around the map. Way to go dipshits
"Streamlined" Combat: Basically, all that Streamlined combat means is they made it fucking easy for dipshits who don't actually know how to play a game, i.e. Console players with stupid controllers. I was playing on Nightmare and the game requires absolutely no tactical thought or pausing at all. The spiritual successor combat of Baldurs Gate had a big shit rammed down its throat and we basically got a fucking BUTTON MASHER. You just press your stupid moves to kill darkspawn and/or various humans and the flashy graphics just play and somehow everything ends up dead. The stupidest part of the combat is you attack groups at a time, so enemies with fucking RESPAWN in front of you while in the middle of battle. That's right, to attempt to add some sort of stupid challenge, Bioware decided to make it so random enemies willl just POP OUT OF THE AIR and attack you in another group. If you play with the combat for more than 30 minutes you will become absolutely bored because even the flashly graphics don't help the game when it is a fucking BUTTON MASHER.
Terrible User Interface: Gone is the beautiful wood looking interface that you got in DA:O that was functional and extremely usable and was instead replaced with WHITE ON BLACK. The inventory which used to be a detailed Tome that you would open is not replaced by WHITE TEXT ON BLACK BACKGROUND. It looks like a fucking iPad reject interface that Steve Jobs would have pissed out if he was a retarded down syndrome infested child. They clearly did NO user testing and instead with their 12 month development cycle, just farted out the first thing that came to mind and everyone suffers for it.
Boring Characters and Dialog: The first five minutes of the game you are stuck playing as a Human considering that ALL the origin stories are now gone which added replay and differences to the game and you are stuck with shitty human companions. One of them is your sister who DIES thankfully because her writing was terrible. You get a stupid dwarf who looks like some fat mobster from the 80s wearing a sweat suit with his chest hair flaring out. Yeah, that is great character design. These characters have absolutely NOTHING interesting to offer the game, nothing they say is even remotely interesting, their backgrounds are bland, and beyond that the love story in this game is LAUGHABLE. Beyond that, they replaced the standard text with a dialog wheel FOR RETARDS. Seriously the whole fucking game the only replies you can make are HAPPY, FUNNY, BAD. Oh wow, how INTERESTED, yeah it really sucks me into the game when my stupid replies are the same stupid set of three options everytime. Whoever did the writing for this game needs to have his fucking eyes swatted by a cat because no matter which characters speaks it is just so uninteresting that it makes my testicles hurt.
Kirkwall is fucking dead: The whole game takes place instead the city of Kirkwall which is about as interactive as a dead gold fish. The city is just a repeatable sea of brown that you run through THE WHOLE FUCKING GAME. There is literally NO ONE in the city that you can talk to and interact with. You just run around a CORRIDOR city. Seriously the game feels like you are running down a fucking corridor the whole time instead of actually exploring big city areas. You end up going to the same fucking areas multiple times just to do the same boring 50 quests over and over. That is pretty much all the game consists of is you going, I NEED MONEY, and doing 50 shitty side quests that appear in the same pre-fabricated area. Yeah, that is about as interesting as counting blades of grass. There is NO interactivity in this game whatsoever.
The Story is Atrocious : Seriously, this game has absolutely nothing to fucking do with the previous two games which were released (Origins/Awakening). It is just you running around as Hawke going I NEED MONEY TO DO STUFF until some bullshit happens that you don't care about. The narrative isn't interesting, it isn't gripping. Hell, I've taken a dump that was my gripping in this game as I thought I might die, in this game, you are expecting a story to be like a million dollar fireworks show but instead you get fucking snakes and sparklers.
That pretty much covers everything as they fucking gutted the original game to release a turd in disguise to swindle people out of their fucking money. This is MORE than obvious when there is a shit ton of fucking DLC which comes out on DAY ONE instead of being included with the game. This was just a bullshit money grubbing scheme to help fund their stupid MMO. Bioware FUCKED DRAGON AGE and ruined the whole fucking series. They literally have one option which is to pretend this sequel never fucking existed and release a NEW and BETTER Dragon Age 2 instead of this shit.
0/10
Now as a quick side note, it is obvious by looking at Metacritic that the reviews were paid off. With sites like PC GAMER AGAIN stating that this is better than the original in every single way. FUCK YOU PC GAMER, you cock sucking low fucking assholes. You are the bane of real reviews and help to fuck people out of money by causing them to buy shit instead of providing real reviews to people. You are the lowest, greedy, cum swapping dick sucking assholes and you deserve to have your fucking shitty headquarters burned down where you print your bullshit greedy lies on paper.
Seriously, look at Metacritic, the game is scoring 7 and 8s with only shitty review sites like XBOX Magazine giving it 9s and 10s. The Escapist is another shitbag as well who praised the game with LIES. You can smell the fucking money just changing hands. Bioware must have spent all their fucking money paying off reviewers instead of actually putting it into the game. If you look at the users reviews they are almost UNANIMOUSLY negative against the game on PC, PS3 and 360 because real users are NOT PAID OFF like those fuckers writing this shit. All review websites should be on your fucking shit list. Fuck you guys. Dragon Age 2 was fucked by Bioware and we the consumers got a big fucking dick up the ass. This game is a fucking abomination.
Update 3/11/2011: We know have OFFICIAL confirmation from the composer for the music score that the game was a turd. He says, ""Unlike other titles from Bioware, this was kind of a rush job", he tells IGN. "EA really wanted to capitalize on the success of Origins, so the game was really being pushed hard to be released now." There you fucking have it...they caved into shitty EA pressure and the game is now a rush job turd fest which basically means they stole our money. Beyond that, they also banned a guy for insulting EA for being a piece of shit and he can no longer use his game. Bioware has OFFICIALLY gone the way of Westwood.
