Dragon Age 2 - News Round Up # 2

I'm not in a huge hurry to play DA2, so waiting another day is no big deal.

I don't think I'm interested in trying to fumble my way through the menus in German anyways. :)

I think I can safely say that it's no big loss to wait another day for that demo :)

Still - I'm not sure how it compares to the full product.

It certainly seems like a much less challenging and much faster Dragon Age - with more edgy/gritty story-content.

Beyond that, though, it really does seem like a very similar experience - so it will likely depend on how important the above changes are to the individual player.

My initial verdict is: slightly worse than I expected - but not entirely without hope.
 
It's also a question of for which target audiences the demo was made ...
 
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It certainly seems like a much less challenging and much faster Dragon Age - with more edgy/gritty story-content.

Well I guess enough of the mainstream market complained about the difficulty of DA:O for Bioware to make it easier. No surprise there. I'm just going to assume that the 'hard' setting in DA2 will probably be close to what 'normal' was in DA:O.
 
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Edit: There is one way I would buy this game when it was released and that is if a few people here started to sing its praises after they have played it. I'm already expecting the 10/10 nonsense from the major gaming websites. They've been bought and paid for from EA, but if a few people here actually like it then I might try it out. Who knows? Maybe all this fury is aimed at their PR campaign, but I doubt it. I really don't like the fact they are "streamlining" a lot of what made DA great. Especially the damn races. I really don't like playing humans if I don't have to.

I have preordered. Will report back.
 
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Well I guess enough of the mainstream market complained about the difficulty of DA:O for Bioware to make it easier. No surprise there. I'm just going to assume that the 'hard' setting in DA2 will probably be close to what 'normal' was in DA:O.

Shit, they even made Origins a lot easier through patches.

Just play on hard though, problem solved :)
 
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DA:O on hard was (actually: is) a good level of challenge for me. One where I felt certain supplies were actually scarce (Lyrium potions, and cure injury potions, e.g.) Of course I tend to not think too much about my character progression, and I stumbled into some sections with probably less-than-ideal character combinations in my party, so I probably run a supar party, all things considered. There were one or two fights where I had to dial down the difficulty to progress (the spider queen comes to mind).
However, I already found DA:O's fights rather hectical, and the party AI system still allowed a lot of goofy things to happen. So making the fights even faster does not sound great at all to me.
 
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Not really imo, because friendly fire is only on nightmare in DA2.

I'm sure you can play it on nightmare. If normal is intended for no pausing and no character switching then nightmare is surely fully playable for people used to old-school games.

I played Mass Effect 2 on "insane" and it was easier than Doom 2 on normal. I think I died like twice in 30 hours.
 
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- poor level design with one-to-one copy-pasting of whole quest areas (do they mean, some areas are a carbon copy of each other???)*

That's exactly what they mean. As an example they mentioned an area called Wilmods Camp which looks exactly like an area called Fortified Caves (very free translation of the last). And there are five or six other maps with this same design.
 
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I'm sure you can play it on nightmare.
Yeah, what I meant is that playing on nightmare seems like the only way to go if you want some tactical challenge. But then you´ll most likely have to live with inflated enemy stats as well, which may be bothersome if the game contains a lot of trash mobs.
I´m sure some people would prefer to have the friendly fire feature on other difficulties than nightmare.
DA:O had friendly fire even on normal, at least on PC iirc.
 
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Yeah, what I meant is that playing on nightmare seems like the only way to go if you want some tactical challenge. But then you´ll most likely have to live with inflated enemy stats as well, which may be bothersome if the game contains a lot of trash mobs.
I´m sure some people would prefer to have the friendly fire feature on other difficulties than nightmare.
DA:O had friendly fire even on normal, at least on PC iirc.

There's always a chance that there will be a way to edit an ini file to enable FF on the normal hard mode (or whatever difficulty).

I do get your point about enemy health and making it more of a slog than a challenge. I never upped the difficulty on Bethesda games for that reason, all it changed was how many hits I had to get on the enemy. Bioware games are generally better than that though, I had a great time playing their recent games on hard modes.
 
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On the Bioware boards, they've said that the a German magazine (pc gamer, I think?) did sent out the demo on a dvd with the magazine. It should be PC Gamer # 4, I think...

Also, Maria13 said in the thread I linked to in the newsbit about London that some of her worries were laid to rest after playing the demo. Also, some people are wondering why they in the demo, and in the game, are going south to get north? I wondered the same thing, actually...
 
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How is that even possible? They're the same exact game.

Awakenings adds more overpowered gear and abilities + epic level nonsense that makes the game's combat trivially easy. The story was uninteresting and the characters felt fairly flat (though arguably, this part is exactly the same as DA:O). Either way, being an expansion pack, DA:A was short and didn't feel like it had the same sort of choice breadth to allow you to express a character's personality even in the shallow C&C sense of DA:O.

In short, the engine may have been the same but DA:A threw out pretty much everything that made DA:O playable and interesting. The gameplay that I've seen for DA2 makes me think that Bioware has gone further this way (easy combat, overpowered abilities, etc.) rather than coming back from what I believe to be a mistake.
 
I spent 40+ hours playing Awakenings. And the story was interesting, appealing and had a nice twist in the end. Playing on casual I did not find the combat to be easy at all. Hurlocks and other darkspawn swarmed down on me - many times.
As for the characters, I did not find them to be flat at all - Bioware, to me, at least, know how to write very intriguing characters.
 
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@aries100: Can you please change me gender in the news, i'm a he. I knew i should not have named myself Estel, should have went with Elessar. ;)
 
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On the Bioware boards, they've said that the a German magazine (pc gamer, I think?) did sent out the demo on a dvd with the magazine. It should be PC Gamer # 4, I think…

Hasn't arrived here, yet … The web sites of both major gaming magazines don't hint towards the demo … But they claim to have tests of the game within the pages of the printed magazine …

Here is an FAQ there :

http://www.pcgames.de/Dragon-Age-2-...tlicht-FAQ-zur-kommenden-Probeversion-812815/

http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/dragon-age-2/news/dragon_age_2,45873,2321159.html

Interesting is that the term "Probeversion" is used, not "Demo".
The term "Probierversion" was once the unique wording of the "Computer Bild Spiele" …
 
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Awakenings adds more overpowered gear and abilities + epic level nonsense that makes the game's combat trivially easy. The story was uninteresting and the characters felt fairly flat (though arguably, this part is exactly the same as DA:O). Either way, being an expansion pack, DA:A was short and didn't feel like it had the same sort of choice breadth to allow you to express a character's personality even in the shallow C&C sense of DA:O.

In short, the engine may have been the same but DA:A threw out pretty much everything that made DA:O playable and interesting. The gameplay that I've seen for DA2 makes me think that Bioware has gone further this way (easy combat, overpowered abilities, etc.) rather than coming back from what I believe to be a mistake.

I guess I am not the same kind of player you are because I don't consider combat nuances like that to take a game from "I loved it" to "I hated it." Maybe that's me.

Also I am pretty sure as an expansion that takes you to higher levels half the point was to give you awesomely powerful new high-level stuff. :biggrin:
 
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There's always a chance that there will be a way to edit an ini file to enable FF on the normal hard mode (or whatever difficulty).

I certainly hope so, because it's a significant issue to me. Being able to wade headfirst into an AoE spell without taking any damage pretty much kills a lot of the immersion for me. I still don't understand why Bioware couldn't just make it an option to be toggled on/off.

If it can't be enabled through the config, hopefully someone will create a mod/hack to enable it for the other modes.
 
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