Dragon Age 2

[Retroguy]

The only problem being that said jewel is hidden deep within a vault that's protected by magic and a private army, abd housed inside a fortress designed to be impregnable.

A vault that happens to look just like the interior of all the other buildings in Kirkwall, by any chance?

[Teeohbee]

With doorways and passages amateurishly cordoned off.

[JPR]

I wonder if Kasumi sticks around for the rest of the game or if she's just a companion in MotA.

[Space Renegade Ulala]

JPR calls it. Felicia Day's Stolen Memory, hopefully with the bad guy once again being a man with the most hilariously over the top Seth Affrikaan accent in the universe and Felicia opening a bar in stately Hawke Manor afterwards and commenting on how hot and fit Sandal is whenever you click on her.

Not that any of us are actually going to buy this shit to find out, right? RIGHT?

Fuck this game.

[Gambit]

I'll buy it because despite it's faults I actually liked Dragon Age 2.

Felica Day though. I have no idea how her creating the abysmal Guild is some sort of selling point.

[Monkeyboy]

JPR calls it. Felicia Day's Stolen Memory, hopefully with the bad guy once again being a man with the most hilariously over the top Seth Affrikaan accent in the universe and Felicia opening a bar in stately Hawke Manor afterwards and commenting on how hot and fit Sandal is whenever you click on her.

Not that any of us are actually going to buy this shit to find out, right? RIGHT?

Fuck this game.

Yep, I don't think I've ever cared less about DLC for a game than this one. I'm not buying any of it.

[Anubis]

Looks like I'm in the minority but I'll be getting Mark of the Assassin day 1 as Legacy was great.

[Gambit]

Wow. This really is just the Kasumi mission from ME2 again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0_41SWzCwk

[hebejebe]

Wow. This really is just the Kasumi mission from ME2 again.

Bloody hell, you weren't kidding.

[JPR]

Episode 1 of Redemption, adventures of the plastic ears and the Qunari Atkins diet.

Also the DLC is out today.

[Gambit]

Reminded me of the Uwe Boll movie, In the Name of the King. Only less amusing. And Felicia Day is an ATROCIOUS actress.

[Space Renegade Ulala]

I suspect watching my own grisly death at the fetid claws of some bastard mecha-Ramone-Strafe-Tripp Lovecraftian hybrid-megacunt gestalt would be more entertaining to me than that shite, of which I only managed 90 seconds before turning off in favour of Don't Tell The Bride.

[NecroMorrius]

I'm fairly insulted that Bioware think so little of their fans... wtf is this shit!?

And ugh, Felicia Day. We get it, she has two boobs and she plays games. Fuck's sake, she looks like Mads Mikkelsen in a wig. I can't stand the idea of dickheads tossing themselves off over 'gamer grrls'.

[deerokus]

A wee bit harsh on Mads Mikkelsen.

[NecroMorrius]

She can't even jump over a log properly.

[Scruff]

And ugh, Felicia Day. We get it, she has two boobs and she plays games. I can't stand the idea of dickheads tossing themselves off over 'gamer grrls'.

It is something that's been marketed to appeal to neckbeard gamers true, but she does genuinely like games and she's not unattractive. True she's no Jess Chobot but you still would, right?

[NecroMorrius]

Oh yeah of course, I'm no sharp-knees dude.

Edit: Although, looking at them...

[Unofficial Who]

She can't even jump over a log properly.

That's true to the game though isn't it?

[Gambit]

*sigh* So I went and bought the new DLC as I'm still a fan of Dragon Age 2, one of the few it seems.

It's not great, and could be my final time with the game. Story wise it's nothing special and whenever the combat kicks off the framerate is just appalling. I know it wasn't great in the main game, but it's a 100 times worse here thanks to the size of some enemies and how many there are. During the middle section it seems to want to be the Kasumi mission from ME2 a little too much. There's a party sequence where you're mingling, but compared to ME2 it's horrid because, let's face it, the game isn't exactly good looking. You're then thrust into one of the most abysmal stealth sections I've ever experienced.

Yeah, unless the next DLC is some epic think that leads into DA3, I won't be buying it.

[revlob]

So Dragon Age 2 got a mixed reception. While it had its fans, clearly not everyone looks back on it favourably. So how do Bioware go about addressing its flaws for the inevitable Dragon Age 3? What was missing? Clearly, what was missing from their epic character-driven singleplayer RPG was multiplayer:

http://kotaku.com/5863668/surprise-dragon-age-getting-multiplayer

That's right, Dragon Age is going multiplayer. The role-playing franchise is, according to an insider, going beyond singleplayer for the first time, and warriors won't simply face off against each other in combat.

But that's not all! The other thing that was clearly missing from their personal tale of Hawke's rise to power was being able to turn into a dragon:

Apparently, dragons will also be playable in Dragon Age multiplayer, giving players the chance to go head-to-head with foes in fire-breathing, swooping-through-the-air dragon form.

[Matt Defis]

I love Bioware but they seriously need to reign in Gaider.

[Nespresso]

BioWare participated in the Kids with cancer Beaded Journey Gala this year and offered a "BioWare Experience" as an auction item.

The "BioWare Experience" provided the kids the opportunity to come into the BioWare studio for a tour and a lesson on how video games are made. The kids got to see level art, tech art, concept art, animation, audio, programming, QA and then got to have some hands on time with space combat for SWTOR.

After lunch, the kids got to pick a character, and a name for that character from the Dragon Age universe. They were assigned scripts to do their voice over work.

The kids then got to paint textures for a 3D character using pencil crayons and paper which was later scanned in and assigned as a texture to the animated character.

At the end of the day, the kids were given a backpack full of SWAG and then a DVD showing their hard work.

The BioWare Experience was auctioned for $15,500 and all proceeds went to the Kids with Cancer Society of Edmonton

Simply brilliant.

[Unofficial Who]

There's a great piece over at RPS looking into one of the sub-quests in Dragon Age 2 which reminded me how great some of the writing in it was.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/15/s-exe-dragon-age-2-long-road/#more-227695

This little strand of companion quests is very touching: there’s a little teenage angst there that’s quite rare to see in games. Everyone involved behaves like a human being: awkward twitching masses of attraction, misunderstandings, frustrations. There’s little feeling that this is taking place in a fantasy realm apart from the fact that you have to go down a quest halfway through to beat up some weird creatures. Aveline’s past with her late husband, which the player had some part in, looms large over all her emotional foibles and hovers gently over all your conversations with her. You want her to succeed, but she’s making it very hard. Isabela’s sex-positive outlook wins out in the end – her outburst “Take a hint and bend her over a basin” is a necessary burst of honesty that finally has Donnic understand what is happening around him.

For me the problems with Dragon Age 2 were the title (it wasn't reallly a sequel, more of a side story and that 2 set expectations too high) and the cookie cutter dungeons. So many people ranted about how shit the writing was, rather unfairly I thought.

[Bacon Horsemeat]

the writing was the best part, as you said the identkit dungeon with random closed slab doors was the most pathetic bit of lazy game design I've seen in modern times.

[Wiper]

The problem with 'the writing' isn't the minute-by-minute stuff - the dialogue is excellent, the side-stories well-crafted - but in the crafting of the major plot itself, which is a turd of the highest order; the impossible amount of suspension of disbelief you're expected to carry out to accept the "magic is strictly controlled by the templars" logic as your teammates (and quite possibly you) romp through the city and surrounds casting spells at the drop of the hat; the presentation of the templars' behaviour as being this awful, totalitarian thing being completely undermined by the fact that it seems that every bloody mage you come across really is everything that they fear; the ridiculous Saturday morning cartoon series-level main villain and final bosses.

Basically, every little piece of writing fell somewhere between fine and great, but the overarching storyline was pants, and a complete waste of a genuinely fascinating setup; Planescape: Torment has shown just how much you can do with a narrative RPG set in a single city, and combining that with the passing of time was a great idea. Just a shame they squandered it on a severely flawed main story (and then, based on DA3, seemed to blame most of the criticism on the fact that it limited you to a single area, made you not all-powerful and gave you a bit of a downbeat ending, none of which were flaws).

It's like they took a really solid foundation, bought up the fanciest, nicest bricks they could find, then proceeded to build a structure without actually bothering to have a plan in place for what exactly it was they wanted to do.

(the combat was bobbins too, with the spawning enemies and repeated areas, but I can generally look past that in an RPG - see Alpha Protocol for a game that I love despite its combat/stealth mechanics and level design, so for me it was that main storyline that really spoiled things in DA2)

[Retroguy]

Totally agree with you with the writing of the overall plot. It just made no sense in the larger scale, which is a shame when the dialogue and characters were largely very good.

The reason the spawning made the combat so terrible for me is because the whole system is based on abilities with cooldown times. That would be fine, but the more powerful abilities had much longer resets- the game literally gave you no idea how many waves of enemies you'd be facing, or how hard those waves would be, so it would be a total gamble. Sometimes I'd use it in a hard second round, only to find I had two more tough rounds to go afterwards where it would have been much more useful. Other times, I'd keep it back, expecting a longer engagement, with possibly tougher enemies, and would end up not using it at all. You never really want a game where you end up not using fun abilities like that. It was just god awful game design, the laziest way possible they could avoid the issue of people setting up choke points in doorways from the first game, without thinking about the impact it had on their existing systems.

[Guest]

Those slab doors were outrageous.

[davejm]

Started this up yesterday, as I want to play through the story in preparation for Inquisition.

Oh my. That intro combat sequence. Selected a Mage (as people have said that it at least makes the combat slightly interesting), but it was horrible. Too fast, too frantic, lots of enemies rushing you from multiple angles. I'm guessing there's no tactical play at all? Is it just spamming the attack button in combination with different numeric keys for your spells?

I might select a rogue or warrior instead. Does it get better?

*sigh* I was hoping it wasn't as bad as people have mentioned.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

I've had this on the shelf since 2011. I loved Dragon Age, and the sequel just got panned by everyone I knew so I didn't bother in the end. I was craving an RPG though after a bit of an fps overload recently and fuck me sideways if this isn't a bit good. Everyone is all like it repeats caves wah wah, but as far as I recall the original repeated loads of locations too. This is addictive as hell. Bring on the next one.

[Gabe]

I really liked it, too. I liked the fact that because quests were generally quite short it meant you could make progress in little chunks (something I also appreciated in Mass Effect 2) and level-ups were quite frequent, to feed that compulsion to spend points on things. The spawning enemies didn't really bother me much (though it wasn't the best design choice) and I wasn't fussed about reusing locations, either.

If I had more time I'd go through it again with different choices (and perhaps get the DLC). But instead I'll just await the next instalment.