Combat is an important part of the game but it doesn't make or break the game. Not in my opinion. It's the "other" stuff which made DA2 such a forgettable game for me. Tiny game world, gross re-use of resources, boring and repeatable quests and "decisions" being constantly forced upon you. I have keep playing this game hoping that it will get better but in never did. And the ending… what a fucking downer!!!

Being put to sleep or similar thing in BG was tedious design for me I never enjoyed it and always end wear asap helm protecting agaisnt mental spells or some similar resistances.

Also I don't like at all the D&D spell system requiring learn few spells not knowing the context where you'll use them. The result is this spell diversity is fake, in practice you don't have memorize that much different spells.

But I do agree mage enemies in DA2 could use more diversifed spells, myself I feel good they don't use a wide range of spells making hard to predict their moves, but there could be more different mages.

Yeah, the majority of spells in BG 1&2 I never touched, and in my opinion the system was more complicated than it needed to be. Once you knew what dispelling or piercing spells you needed for X or Y you were set (etc.), and having to know specific spells ahead of time just made for meta-gaming… Strategic saving and reloading.

But it would be nice to have more variety in DA games.

Hehe, yeah, good old D&D. There were tons of cool 3rd level spells - all ignored. Fireball for the big areas, lightning bolt for a slightly finer touch. Especially at high levels when you're pouring out a bucket of dice for your damage. Magic missles and maybe a knock spell for first level. Cone of Cold for fourth. Second level, before Melf's Acid Arrow came around, was a complete wasteland.

BG inherited that spells system and had the same problem. Tons of spells they had to support even though most folks are only using a few kinds. Also lots of camping in dungeons, which seemed more than a little silly. ("Hey Joe, wasn't Bob the Troll supposed to come over to our room dinner last night?" "Yeah, he never showed! But I heard a bunch of adventurers singing and snooring just down the hall. I couldn't attack them in their sleep, though because…umm… because they need to have a fighting chance. Yeah. Just wouldn't be sporting.")

Still having fun in DA2 but I'm still in the 'companion gathering' phase. I've pretty much given up on the high resolution package - why did they even release that thing? Hard difficulty is still kicking me around from time to time. I'm not leaving the fighter lying dead quite as often as I did in DA:O but hey, Sten deserved it. I haven't even looked into runes, crafting, or even the tactics window yet. Gotta do that last one soon.

Holy anhkheg meat, this game got hard all of the sudden! Dragons at level 10!?

Edit: Dragon defeated! Took an awful lot of running around but it worked. Now I'm getting beat on again a bit further in.

I found it pretty inconsistent difficulty-wise. At least the dragons are optional. Some of the other difficulty spikes are in the main story, and no way around them as far as I know.

I couldnt believe how crazy those "saarebas" casters are, talk about a sudden spike - one zap and most of my crew is at about 10 hP!

Woke me up real quick

I got fed up near the end and went to Casual. I've never been a big fan of "epic" end battles in CRPGs anyway.

Well, I've learned one very important lesson in this game - don't do more than a couple of quests in parallel. In the first chapter I just grabbed every quest I could. As I went from area to area, I advanced every quest in the area. Terrible. I couldn't keep the stories straight at all. (Names stick to me like a greased pig, which didn't help.) Huh? What's that little boy doing here? I guess I'm supposed to be rescuing him?

Get a couple of quests and do them. When they are done, go hunting a couple more. It's been working MUCH better for me going through chapter 2.

I've been able to stick with hard difficulty for all my battles except for the last one in chapter 1. Like others have noted before, there's a wide gap between normal and hard. I went from "I'll never get this thing to half health" to "didn't even need a potion". Thank goodness we can change difficulty on the fly but they really could use a 'challenging' difficulty between normal and hard.

I just came across exactly the same room (+interior objects) in separate dungeons. I did a wooden version first (e.g., wooden doors), and not 5 min laters in another dungeon there was a stone version (e.g., stone doors). Absolutely crazy, they didn't even bother changing small stuff. Now I know what was meant with extensive reuse of environments.

Yep; it gets worse - the game has some real pluses but the maps are not one of them.

Yep that's something you notice as you play but it's due to the short development cycle of the game. At least it excelled at story telling. I wish more RPGs followed family's.

I'm playing it for the story indeed. I can 'forgive' many things like the decision to make combat faster. It just did not turn out so well. However, this reuse of environments really shadows the positives. It just feels like a 5 dollar bin game from your local discounter.

I have to admit I was a bit biased when I jumped in, reading all the critique on it for years. This made me want to speedrun it possible missing some good stuff. I lowered the difficulty to casual, hopefully I'll get through.

Yea the reuse of maps was just lazy. THey could have spent very minimal $$ to have someone develop more interesting maps while the rest of the game progressed. In fact they could have almost done a xcom style of picking a random map each time you reenter an area. Very very lame and inexcusable. Having said that I enjoyed everything else about the game.