How bad is Dragon Age 2?

Found Dragon Age 2 for 15€, is really so bad as some say, or has it become somewhat better with patches?

 

it was never as bad as they say. people were just (lol it blanks out ...rear-end-hurt) cause it wasnt origin.

long story short: as always, bioware makes great characters; the story is pretty good, but much shorter than origin; the world is much smaller (your pretty much limited to one city and neighboring areas); the combat is vastly improved; the inventory system is dumbed down.

despite the problems, it is still a great game, and its worth the 15 bucks as long as you realize its not origin.

 

The only thing I don't like about it is that the world is really small.

 

It depends on you´re own judgment, but i can say that it isent a bad game! It just wasent as good as origin (Which was VERY good, so it had high standards to live up too)...

 

It's 5/10 bad when compared to any other average game. It's a 3/10 when compared to an average BW game.

 

If you want a dungeon crawler/hack n slash with some rpg elements then it's a decent game. If you're looking for a striaght up RPG prepare to be highly disappointed.

The "killing things" in the game is fun, and the visuals aren't bad. Everything else is pretty fail.

 

The only thing I found that was REALLY worst about the game is the reuse of the surrounding Areas...

 

I thought it wasnt too bad, 7.5/10 in my books

 

Wasn't great.

Get Witcher 2 instead. Personally prefer Witcher 2 to DA:O also.

 

If you payed full price for Dragon Age 2 then i would say it was a bad deal.
I bought DA2 just to get a free PC copy of Mass Effect 2. xD

 

What i didn't like was that the world was smaller, environments were reused too often and the story wasn't as epic as DA:O.

If you play the game expecting a hack&slash, you'll enjoy it. I know i did. I felt the game was more adapted to a controller with third person view than a mouse/kb where you'd want to zoom out as far as possible though. After trying both the PS3 and PC demo, i went with the PS3 version unlike DA:O which was meant to be played on PC.

As long as you don't expect it to be like DA:O, you'll be fine. Bioware set some things right from the first game, but they also made a lot of what we could call bad decisions compared to DA:O. Like some said, it had a lot to live up to which one of the reasons why it received some hate. Fans of RPGs had a right to be disappointed.

 

Ugh. Same places over and over again. The DLC's help... but it's just so boring when you revisit the same places 10x each.

I loved how combat was done. I wish I could combine the two.

 

Zero chess match (strategy) and played like a Street Fighter game.

Horrible, and highly disappointing.

 

jab, jab, forward, short, fierce?

 

not worth playing.
instead try: The Witcher 2, Fallout 3, Fallout NV

 

Let's put it in terms of movies: Pixar is not the only studio that makes animations. Theirs are very good (or even excellent), yet Cars (Cars 2?) is their biggest flop. Does this means Cars is a bad overall animation? No, it just low in Pixar's standards.

No replace:
Pixar = Bioware
Cars = DA2
animation = game

Long story short: it is bad in comparison to other Bioware titles.

 

It was better than DA:0 in combat, worse than DA:0 in other areas. Despite that, I had fun and played it a few times. For that low price, get it and have some fun.

imo

 

Games only get better with patches if their problems are caused by bugs and not design.

It's not actually terrible, it's just not as good as people expected it to be. Dragon Age: Origins was a brilliant game with a some obvious problems (overused central premise, DLC authentication bugs, poor documentation, an overabundance of simple "fetch" and "kill" quests, etc.). Even with all of these, it was still much better than most games of that type in the half-decade before it (see, for example, the Metacritic page).

The galling thing was that all they had to do with Dragon Age 2 is fix those problems and it would have been a contender for one the best RPGs ever, finally eclipsing Baldur's Gate 2 as the greatest of the party-based, pause-and-play variety. How hard would have been to use something more original than "an ancient evil has arisen" as the premise, fix the bugs and add some complexity to most of the side-quests? But no, they had to turn it into a mediocre hack'n'slash with Mass Effect's dialogue system and Mass Effect's penchant for reusing the same area a couple of dozen times.

 

Some people in here think the combat is actually better in DA2? Does it get a lot better than in the demo? Because I only played the demo and I hated the "button mash", fast-paced feel of the combat so much that I still haven't played the full game to this day (I also hated the new art style). And DA:O was one of my favorite games of all time...

I'll probably give DA2 a shot once a game + dlc compilation is available for $20 or less.

 

Bad yes, but also really boring.
The witcher is much better especially with all the free dlc they put in the patches

 

I really hate the combat in DAO. You hit a couple buttons and then stand there autoattacking.

 

pretty bad compared to da1, but i played the whole thing anyways. combat is more fun and harder, i died many more times than i did in da1. but storyline/character development is very terrible.

combat is probably the only good thing about da2 lol

 

I agree. I played a mage in DA:O, and even by the end, and at high level, I ran out of mana very quickly and resorted to autoattacking most of the time. Eventually I said screw being a mage and spec'd for arcane warrior, so my autoattacks actually did some damage.

...But everything else about DA:O was awesome, and much better than DA2.

 

Yep, on consoles anyway. In my opinion, they murdered everything that made Origins wonderful and strategic - basically dumbing it down for the masses.

Hit X, X, X, A. X, X, B. X, X, A. Rinse, repeat.

 

maybe you guys shouldve played da2 on harder difficulty as it was much much harder than da

 

Just by playing the demo, decided it sucked and Biocrap was only trying to cash in on the first game !

 

Not even close. I've played DA:O many times and it's much more difficult than DA2 was. DA2 the auto-attack is insanely powerful and little to no strategy is needed. Mage freeze, warrior destroy, mage rock freeze, warrior destroy, risen and repeat. The cross class combinations in DA2 makes any situation stupidly easy.

 

i could point out all the flaws in your post but that would be pretty pointless, just go play da2 on hard and see whats up.

anybody who played both games on hard knows which one is harder.

 

The problem with DA:O's difficulty was that it was so inconsistent. You'd be grinding against relatively unchallenging enemies for 90 minutes, and without warning, you'd face a brutally hard battle.

I haven't played DA2 (except for the demo, which left me a little underwhelmed) so I can't comment on that.

 

I've played it on nightmare, it's not hard at all, it's pathetic. Are you a shill for BioWare?

 

I only played both on normal, but I constantly found myself repeating the same boss in DA:O dozens of times, and I was always low on potions.

On the other hand, in DA:2 I don't think I tried any boss fight more than twice (except the first boss because I neglected to bring a tank or healer) and the trash mobs were a joke for the entire game.

 

Not that bad, but it gets...uh... boring.
How boring? I was thinking of my NBA 2K11 Season (PS3) while I was playing.
Graphics is nice though.

 

ok enough talking with liars. gl hf in your life

and yep im so working for bioware.

 

I thought the ending felt pretty rushed, but the only huge problem I had with it was the lack of inspiration with level design. Rerunning the same maps gets incredibly old fast.

 

DA:O had a leveling problem where the game would become almost impossible after the story divided into different branches. Some routes were easier than others. The game would go back to normal later when it became linear again (near the end).

I think it was fixed with updates and in DA Awakening. I also think the issue wasn't present in consoles; If I remember correctly, QA for the PC version skipped the issue for some reason.

 

You sure behave that way as you are the ONLY person I've ever heard who has said anything about DA2 being difficult. DA2 is an absolute joke. Not hard at all.

 

I think BioWare has a lot better things to do with its money than pay people to argue on internet forums that DA2 was harder than DA:O.

 

That's not a QA issue, it's a feature. When the game opened up, they rather clearly steered the player towards a certain order of doing things. The easy way to do it is to follow their advice, but if you're good enough, you could go to the "hard" areas first and win. The expectation is that if an area is too hard, the player would try something else. The same was true in the Baldur's Gate series and most other old-school games (Fallout, Might and Magic, Betrayal at Krondor, etc.).

Unfortunately, it seems that this is no longer a valid assumption. I'm not sure whether it is because people now expect every part of a game to be doable by a player of every skill level at the moment when it is revealed to them or simply because the average intelligence of the audience (as observed in the Bioware forums) has decreased by more than an order of magnitude, but there are a lot of people who will just keep knocking their heads against the wall.

 

Except they seal you inside the tower of the magi. Did you get there, get through a floor or two, and then wish you had done the Castle of Redcliffe first? Too bad; they sealed the door behind you. Also, the Dalish elves tell you they're under assault, creating a sense of urgency; it's not exactly obvious that you can just change your mind and take off and come back a good amount of time later and nothing will have changed.

 

Uh no they don't. They spent time to trash other games on MetaCritic. It's a weird company.

 

I looked it up; hadn't heard of it before. That's HILARIOUS. I'll file it under "when good companies do things," along with Bethesda's lawsuit over the word "scrolls."

 

Fixed for you

Also, I totally agree that making a sequel by changing it into ME was definitely a bad decision, probably rooted in the premise of getting some fast cash.

 

But it is not bad at all. The price you trade for having to go through whole tower is to get the earliest access to THE healer, a key character for the whole game.

 

Correct. And they do more or less the same thing in Redcliff (if you leave without going through the battle, the village is overrun). However, Redcliff and the Circle Tower are the two easiest quests of the mid-game main storyline. Redcliff is probably a bit easier, but, barring a rather unfortunate build, a player should be able to do either of them.

Most RPG quests have some element of urgency. The general rule is that you will be clearly warned if time really matters (as you are when you try to leave Redcliff without saving the village).

 

DA:O wasn't nearly as linear as DA2. DA2 didn't give you choices. It was do this, and that, in this order. The only real choices you had were in whether you do the side quest or not. The major decisions you had to make in DA2 either had no impact at all, or resulted with the exact same consequence (ending).

DA:O has a massive main quest line. And as others have said, the game did gives you clear indications of what your next move might be, sort of like an inherent internal adviser. But you didn't have to follow that advice and do whatever you wanted to do. Sure you really needed to do all the main quests, but at least the decisions you made during those main quests had some influence on your gaming experience. It made me feel there was some character development and that I did make some decisions that are having some influence in this fantasy world.

For me DA2, whenever I made a decision, I felt deflated. It was, well, hmm... That was pointless, that that was a waste of time. *Disappointment* is then what I felt.

Side Quests:
- DA:O I felt the side quests enhanced the game and you got some real benefits that helped you complete the main quest.
- DA2 I was an errand boy and I resented it.

 

Honestly, DA in general was a huge disappointment coming off of ME, BG, KotoR, etc. It's probably one of Biowares less attractive franchises, either way - if you played and beat the first one you might as well play the second one to see how the plots turn out because knowing Bioware, we're going to be in for one heck of a finale.

 

There was a "healer" in that tower? I just purged everyone.

 

Yes and she had what I would call super healer mode.

 

What do you mean? She joins you just after the door is closed.

 

DA 2 on Nightmare wasn't as much hard as it was ANNOYING. All it did was basically give an HP bonus to everything in the game, and it would take forever to do some of the tankier bosses. DAO on Nightmare was harder and less annoying. Played the expansion on Nightmare and finished it with a solo dw assassin.