Dragon Age 2 Done

(Meant to post this several months ago)

Having completed Dragon Age 2, I wanted to jot down likes/dislikes.

Ok, I understand they wanted to reduce the budget as compared to DA1 and that they wanted to make it more console friendly. I won't gripe too much. I'm going to just live with these two items as a consequence of cheaper and console friendly:

1. Area reuse: obviously a cost control measure where every area gets used for 10+ quests
2. RPG Lite: Eased porting to console and making it more controller friendly. Perhaps this also widened their player base.

Things I liked:
Varric
Merrill
Isabela


Things that bugged me about DA2:
Minor Annoyances
No Autorun key
Show item/people names isn't a toggle
Golden mask: Best helm I found. Completely dominates the look of your character... ruins some cutscenes, IMO.
Locked chests in the middle of the street.

Medium Annoyances
Shallow mana/stamina pools: It feels like you only get 1 or 2 abilities until you're down to basics. Makes combats either a grind or a potion fest.
Weak item differentiation: I feel like their item randomizer is a d6 table that 90% of the items use:
1- +xx Attack/defense
2- +xx mana/stamina
3- +xx% magic, physical, crit damage
4- +xx% damage resistance
5- +xx% attack speed
6- roll on special table (immunity to stun, crits, knockback + maybe 4-5 others)

No real healing character (assume hawke isn't mage):
Anders- Recast timer on the heal is like 30-60 seconds and his panacena doesn't make a dent
Merrill- No heal
Bethany- Not around
Potions- Yep, there is your healer


Major Annoyances
"Funny" Item Names: Near the end nearly every magic has a name that tries to be cute:
Belt- Seven Deadly Cinch
Ring- Three Wolf Boon
Shield- Lord Bearing's Shield
... and many more.
This is a bit of a staple now a days where every MMORPG has a quest called "Pulp Friction" or "Unusual Suspects."

Blood magic, blood magic, blood magic: In DA1 blood magic was referenced sparingly and was spooky powerful stuff. In DA2, it seems all mages are blood mages.

Demons, demons, demons: Again, in DA1 fighting a single rage demon was scary stuff, they were tough fights. Now there are fights with several rage demons, abominations, etc all working together. I guess the Champion of Kirkwall is way tougher than the Champion of Fereldan?


Only characters I could keep up were tanks. My mages and rogues always died nearly every decently hard fight. A new, better taunt mechanic would be nice for tanks.

Spoiler-free Dragon Age 2 demo

The new PC demo for Dragon Age 2 unlocks some items for the main game. The problem is that the demo seems to have a sampling of scenes from the real game. SPOILERS!

Want to get those items and mostly have a spoiler-free experience?

One thing to keep in mind is that you can skip all cut scenes and blow through most conversation trees by spamming your mouse. So, hit ESC every chance you can.

BTW, it looks like they did to Dragon Age 2 what they did with Mass Effect 2. Dumbed down the RPG aspects a bit and made it more action oriented.

Hat design inspired by last D&D game

Make custom t-shirts at CustomInk.com

Tactial RPGS

Trying to muddle my way through some tactical RPGs I think my number one thing is that they be responsive and fast... very quick resolution of standard actions and skippable animations for the fancy attacks. I wonder if I should try Disgaea 3 again?

August Video Game Update

Moving interrupted all of my game activities... sitting in a Motel for 10 days while you moved all of your stuff in to storage, found a new place to live, filled out rental agreements, rented trucks, and moved everything in did in fact break me down enough that I bought a DS XL. Sigh. Like I need another gaming platform.

I played a bit of Dragon Quest on the DS and was hoping that the co-op would be really fun. Unfortunately for the co-op you have to get 5 hours in to the game, which ended up making it so I never tried it. I also picked up Final Fantasy IV, haven't opened it. Add it to the ever growing backlog. Also picked up Tactics A2, got 1/3rd through it (my guess.)

Then I got Internet and real computers setup again. DS XL gathering dust now for the last 2 weeks.

So, let's see where I'm at:

Playing:
Deciding...

Finished:
- (new) Alien Swarm: Awesome co-op alien game free on Steam. Only one campaign, but top notch co-op experience from the team behind L4D.
- (new) Lara Croft Guardian of Light: This was an awesome co-op experience. It's a $15 game on Xbox. Two player co-op same screen, the best part is how well balanced it was. There were a couple of frustrating parts, but not bad enough we quit. Highly recommend.
- (new) Starcraft 2 (SPC): Was cool. Good balance of difficulty on normal. May do a comp-stomp or two, but no way I'm doing competitive.

Played some and on hold:
- (new)Trinity Universe (PS3): Meh, kind of interesting GUST/Atlus kind of JRPG
- Monster Hunter Tri (Wii)
- Sakura Wars (Wii)
- Record of Agarest War (360/PS3): Played a bit, was annoyed by the load times, bought the PS3 version... played some more. Put on hold.
- (new) FEAR (PC): Played through the first FEAR game, got maybe 2/3rds way through so far. Kind of repetitive but there are some nice creepy parts in it.
- (new) Transformers: War for Cybertron (PC): Up to three people co-op action shooter kind of game. Pretty fun, not a super strong co-op experience, but still pretty to look at it and it's great imitating Megatron.
- (new) Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (DS): Cute. Wish it was on a real platform though

Unlikely to finish:
- Kane and Lynch 2 via OnLive: Love OnLive, but K&L2 wasn't my kind of game. Free game coupon though made it totally worth it!
- (new) Two Worlds: Read on http://www.co-optimus.com/ that it might be worth $20 for co-op. It's barely worth it.
- Vandal Hearts: FoJ
- Shiren the Wanderer


Not going to finish:
- Star Ocean: Last Hope
- (new) Murky Horizons: Like 80 pts on xbox arcade, interesting but only for about 30 minutes.
- Resonance of Fate
- FFXIII
- Red Steel 2

Queue:
- (new) Mafia 2 (OnLive): This is supposed to be pretty killer
- Dawn of War II: Chaos expansion
- Penny Arcade: Rain Slick blah blah
- Modern Warfare
- Modern Warfare 2
- Mana Khemia
- Prince of Persia: Sands of time
- Supreme Commander 2
- Final Fantasy IV(DS)

Haven't bought yet, but probably will and add to queue:
- Dragon Age: Awakenings
- Ogre Battle 64

John Rogers!

So I'm reading this new DnD book "Player's Strategy Guide" which WOTC cunningly marketed in some fashion as to make me buy it. I start reading a sidebar about helping to create a background for your character (I've probably read 100s of similar ones.) It's a pretty cool take on it, but it's not a pragmatic approach... the author is describing something that obviously takes some writing talent. So I get to the end of the article and it says "John Rogers is a film and television writer. He created the show Leverage, the story of a party of 10th-level rogues who take on corporate bad guys."

That is so awesome! I love Leverage and it's always struck me as a series I liked only because it felt like an RPG, not like a real model of the world.

Then I look a little farther in to John Rogers (who apparently all the famous geeks like Wheaton hang out with) and it turns out he he also did writing for Jackie Chan Adventures, another one of my favorite RPG-style shows!

John Rogers is the man!

Games Played Update

I gotta stop buying games... I'm so deep in the gameplay hole.

Playing:
- Monster Hunter Tri

Played some and on hold:
- Sakura Wars
- Vandal Hearts: FoJ
- Shiren the Wanderer

Unlikely to finish:
- Star Ocean: Last Hope

Not going to finish:
- Resonance of Fate
- FFXIII
- Red Steel 2

Queue:
- Dawn of War II: Chaos expansion
- Penny Arcade: Rain Slick blah blah
- Modern Warfare
- Modern Warfare 2
- Mana Khemia

Haven't bought yet, but probably will and add to queue:
- Dragon Age: Awakenings
- Ogre Battle 64
- Record of Agarest War