For $8 it's worth it IMO. Story was good, characters are good, nice open worlds to explore.
Dragon Age 2 - Retrospective @Hihu
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For $8 it's worth it IMO. Story was good, characters are good, nice open worlds to explore.
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DA3:
- a few superb main masterpiece quests in which trashmobs don't respawn
- horrible filler areas full of grinding, perhaps even more than in random MMO rubbish
Basically, if you find a norespawn mod, buy. If no such mod, skippit.
- a few superb main masterpiece quests in which trashmobs don't respawn
- horrible filler areas full of grinding, perhaps even more than in random MMO rubbish
Basically, if you find a norespawn mod, buy. If no such mod, skippit.
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SSIGuy
An Islander Returned
I'd say definitely worth it for DA:I. There's enough things in there to keep most people interested for at least a while. Story is pretty decent and in spite of all the over-the-top graphics in combat, the core combat system was pretty good.
On the main thread, I played DA2 almost two years after I played DA:O and so it felt like I wasn't comparing it to DA:O at that point. I did have quite low expectations for it and I found it to be an ok game. I think I played about 20 hours before becoming tired of the repetitive nature of the combat and levels - but the story was ok. Shrug. I think I paid $1.99 for it, so no complaints.
Not more than "MMO rubbish". Except in the Hinterlands. Every other zones has a lot less enemies in it.
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It's worth a lot more than $8. I paid $30 for it and no complaints at all. It's a very good game. It requires a lot more horsepower than the first 2 games though if you want to play on max settings, it's a beautiful game.
Also, there's no reason to skip 2, it's one of the most underrated games ever. I don't even understand the amount of criticism it gets. DA was something special when it was released and in my opinion, the cult like following of that game is hard to follow. Sort of how like movie sequels rarely live up to the original. Still, it's a good game and for the price you can get it for now, I would highly recommend you give that a try also.
Oh, I just remembered, I think DA3 got a bad rap after release because the game was very buggy. By the time I had bought it, it had been patched up nicely and there were no bugs that I experienced. Also, like I said, you need a decent, at least mid level gaming PC to play it on high graphics settings. I couldn't run it on max settings with GTX 660 SLI, which is what I had when I first bought it, but on my 2 970s, no problem at all.
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lackblogger
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I dunno what's worse, the fact that you're advising people play DA2 without giving any reservations or that you genuinely don't understand why it has a bad rep. I'm mean, do you not notice any of it's shittiness? Do you honestly not know why people consider it one of the worst RPGs ever made by a prominent company?
Maybe if it was a first time effort by an indie that was mainly showing intent more than perfection and was priced to match ($20 or under), but a triple A release charging $60, I mean, do you not 'get it'? At all? How every single aspect of that game apart from its romance simulation has catastrophic problems?
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Holy shit, someone said that Dragon Age 2 is "one of the most underrated games ever". And was being serious?
Oh, wait, it's that same guy who said Planescape: Torment doesn't belong on a list of "Best RPGs of All Time", but Two Worlds 2 does :lol:
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1061373390#post1061373390
Oh, wait, it's that same guy who said Planescape: Torment doesn't belong on a list of "Best RPGs of All Time", but Two Worlds 2 does :lol:
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1061373390#post1061373390
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Welcome to The Watch. Where if you have different tastes than the general crowd, you get flamed for not being "indie" enough.
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Right, because that's really what's going on here. :lol:
No, really, if you think Two Worlds 2 is better than Planescape: Torment, your taste in RPGs is just terribly poor and there's not much reason to pay attention to what you think. That's why I remembered that post from a year ago. Stuff like that burns itself into your brain.
And I have no idea why you'd think RPGWatch isn't a "safe space" for AAA shills. Because it surely is. You may be thinking of the Codex.
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Hey look, it's the "we have different opinions, therefore your taste is poor so i'm going to shame you" argument.
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It's only shaming if it's true, otherwise I'm just spreading the gospel of his great taste! The reader is free to judge for himself.
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BoboTheMighty
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Well TW II wasn't a bad game, a bit underrated definitely. Good world/environment/armor design, innovative spell casting system, decent side quests, OST.
Dragon Age II is more "overhated" than anything else. It had a few gems here and there: https://youtu.be/txa-FbepiJ4?t=641
Dragon Age II is more "overhated" than anything else. It had a few gems here and there: https://youtu.be/txa-FbepiJ4?t=641
My god...that combat. I'll never understand how or why Bioware suddenly decided to pull a JRPG out of their ass.
lackblogger
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I got out my analysing head and set to work...
Watching that 17 minute video I decided to simply write down exactly what I saw. In that 17 minutes I saw a total of 8 different things happening, they were:
Running, loading screens, cut-scene conversations, combat, looting, world map, Quest puzzling, reading their journal.
And each time one of these features changed to another feature I called it an instance, so, for example, watching hawke run, then engage in combat, then loot, then run, then loot, then engage in conversation would be a run of 6 instances. In total, during that 17 minute video hawke ploughed through 57 instances, the single longest instance being a 90 second cut-scene conversation and the shortest instance being a 1 second corpse loot. I will now list the 8 types of instance in order of their frequency:
1. Running - 22 instances
2. Loading Screen - 11 instances
3. Cut-scene conversations - 10 instances
4. Combat - 5 instances
5. Looting - 4 instances
6. World Map - 3 instances
7. Quest puzzling - 1 instance
8. Reading journals - 1 instance
I'll now relist those instances by the amount of time they took:
1. Cut-scene conversations - 7 minutes 40 seconds
2. Combat - 3 minutes 26 seconds
3. Running - 3 minutes 3 seconds
4. Quest puzzling - 1 minute
5. Looting - 45 seconds
6. loading screen - 40 seconds
7. World map - 11 seconds
8. Reading journals - 10 seconds
I also tried to take note of some other aspects while noting all these statistical bits and pieces:
I thought the lip-syncing looked quite good at first, but some characters later on looked like automatons, so I scribbled that out. There seemed to be a nice musical piece playing during the quest completion pop-up, but, again, I didn't hear it later in the vid and might have been random, so I scribbled that out.
Everything you can interact with has a yellow arrow above it, not just subtle highlighting but a big bright yellow title plus arrow. Wherever people are, no matter the environment, everyone talks with this echo that makes them sound like they're inside a massive cave or ginormous cathedral, it's really off-putting once you notice it. Some of the voice acting fits the look of the character but some are really quite bad. I still don't know why Hawke has a bib on his armour that looks absurd, particularly as a mage, while others dance around in virtual loin cloths. The blood after battle look is just silly, especially when some are covered while others are not and then it just vanishes anyway.
Combat is never considered, it is either straight-in from a cut scene or Hawke just runs into a room and it gets going. Some interesting combat stats:
Hawke's party defeated 59 (?) enemies and Hawke performed 241 (?) individual actions when adding up all the combat encounters. That's an average of 12 enemies per encounter and Hawke averages 4 actions per enemy killed, meaning that because it was a party of 4 that each enemy likely takes 16 individual actions to kill.
I'm not overly confident about the combat stats however as for most of the battles I honestly have no idea the exact number of enemies slain nor exact number of Hawke's actions. Feel free to look at the second and fifth battles in the video (6:48 & 11:26) and please, be my guest, tell me exactly how many enemies were defeated and how many times Hawke performed an action, I do not believe it's possible to know, even slowing it down, in fact it's probably harder counting them when its in slow motion!
While looting gets a mention, its barely looting. in this case its just running up to an arrow pointer and moving on, whether its on a box, chest, corpse or dead enemies. The only time the player actually looked at their loot for the entire 17 minutes was when a dead enemy had a codex on them, so it pop-up up automatically. Many of the enemy encounters didn't even drop loot when they died resulting in the player literally killing all enemies then immediately running off to do the next lot without even so much as a swivelled camera.
At no point did Hawke behave in any way tactically. He would usually run head-first into battle and then, once in battle, just stand still and either bash or blast, perhaps turning around if an enemy was behind him, perhaps not even that.
It seems to be ADHD The Game. Hawke is always running, inside houses, inside caves, on the streets, run run run run run, because that's what you do in action RPGs, right. Well, ok, but how many action RPGs have non-stop cut-scene conversation breaks? I know for certain that Diablo doesn't. This game was supposed to be all about the city aesthetic, how immersion breaking it is too barge around the streets and even in people's homes and then engage them in polite innocence, it's just bizzare. And how the game jolts you from instance to instance, a few seconds doing this then a few seconds doing that over and over and over again, never letting you ever feel like you're at ease, always making you feel on edge, like an RPG made my amphetamine addicts for amphetamine addicts.
Oh, and that quest puzzling? That was just 1 minute of running around an area touching boxes until you'd touched them all, not really a puzzle, not really anything really, except more running, of course, which could effect my running totals if you really wanted to be fully efficient.
Oh, an no-one should have to see 11 loading screens in 17 minutes of playtime...
And, yes, I can hear the detractors, but if you distil any RPG into compartments then it wont look like much, to which I would reply, yes, indeed, what DA2 does, and what adherents of this style of RPG do, is over complicate the fluff while forgetting about meat, that of quest, combat, loot, sell, likely with many combat, loots in between there. The great irony being that even a good, stacked dungeon level in Balder's Gate wont see you killing 59+ enemies in 17 minutes, and even Diablo wont require you to make 241 actions in 17 minutes of playtime, and it would be a heck of a lot more than 5 combat instances if it did, and even Diablo would likely require more thought during battle. And did it really need 10 instances of conversation cut-scene? It couldn't be one at the beginning, one at the destination and one upon return? 10? Really? And, couldn't the quest box thing have actually been some kind of puzzle? Even if it was laughably easy, just... something... something other than running around and touching boxes? Not even a lever to pull or trap to disarm/avoid!
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Thaurin
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Reading the comments from both the detractors and supporters, I'm convinced the truth is somewhere in the middle. I have DA:O and DA:I, but never got DA2; I'm sure that I will buy it and enjoy it when I eventually buy it. I'm not sold by the overabundance of hate for this game.
lackblogger
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I guess this begs the question, what do you need to hear in order to understand the 'disappointment' (the actual word used by EA bosses about its reception, which propagandists then convert to the word 'hate' to make it sound like a horde of irrational trolls are on the loose)?
You have DA:O and DA:I but don't say if you played them. Why did you not buy DA2?
Such a small post and so many questions…
But one thing's for sure, you certainly bought into the 'hate' narrative easily enough
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This is very interesting, thanks for your effort!
However I think that with 17 minutes the sample size is too small to get meaningful results. Has something like this been done for DA2 or other games on a larger scale? This is information I'd like to see from "professional" game reviewers. It could even be a good tool to classify games.
lackblogger
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The sample size isn't really too small, I did play DA2 and the sample accurately reflects my memory of the whole game, something I noticed particularly because I tried to rush the final chapter and got infuriated by all the stopping, whether it be cut-scenes, loading screens, utterly pointless combat, all made worse by the imagination that Hawke was supposedly running everywhere, as if he too was in some kind of hurry but was constantly held-up by mind-numbing traffic jams. Going back to Diablo, the king of action RPGs, if you wanted to run past stuff, you did.
If someone did this for the entire game then they'd likely spend 300 hours per 100 hours played taking notes, so not entirely likely...?
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I forgot to mention that. I've played DA2 as well and my memory is quite different. First thing that comes to my mind are respawning thrashmobs and thus endless battles.
I don't remember cut-scnenes (and dialogues) being that much.
Of course time perception is highly subjective. I didn't like the combat (did anyone?) and so it's no surprise that for me they seemed to last very long.
That's another thing. Playstyle alters the results dramatically. Still I think it would make sense to collect this data.
Well, don't underestimate nerds.
But honestly if done right it wouldn't take much time. You would just need to have a little software running on a seperate PC where you press a key (or a button) as soon as you enter an instance of a different type. This wouldn't increase overall playtime by more than a few percent.