Dragon Age 2 Announced 183
Today BioWare announced a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins, titled Dragon Age 2. They've opened an official site for the game, which shares some vague details and concept art, and promises a trailer in mid-August. The story will apparently span an entire decade and involve a new hero, but it will be located in the same world as the original game. The site says there will be "dynamic new combat mechanics," though the same three basic classes will be available. More information should be forthcoming in this month's issue of Game Informer.
Start by patching Dragon Age 1 ... (Score:1, Insightful)
If only they would finally release the 1.4 patch fixing the bug introduced in the 1.3 patch ...
My thief want to do thief things.
Re:I can't freakin' wait, man. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Still waiting on the BioWare / Illusion merger. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given how much the BioWare games are turning into Japanese "dating" sims.
I call bullshit. The relationship aspect of BioWare games is an entirely option part of the experience, and involves no more strategy than picking the "nice" sounding conversational lines.
Hardly the same thing as a dating sim.
interview even more people! (Score:5, Insightful)
But one thing that really gets to me about these RPGs is all the damned talking. Talk to the bartender, ask him 20 questions, 15 of which are getting at the same thing only worded slightly differently. Interview the bar patron, ask 20 questions, 15 of which rehash what the bartender said. Interview the barmaid, ask 20 questions.... interview the angry drunkard.... move to the next building and interview 5 more people....
maybe more sandbox this time? multiplayer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:interview even more people! (Score:4, Insightful)
There are ways around this...Dragon Age (and BioWare games in general) are designed so that if you want to power through them, you can...but if you want to know every little detail about the world, you can do that too.
The first Mass Effect is a good example. Literally doing everything and talking to everyone I could find took me right around 30 hours.
My fiancee only extracted the minimum information she needed from each NPC and moved on, and did maybe a handful of side quests. Her total playtime? About 13 hours.
She enjoyed it just as much as I did, with the only difference being that she knew enough about the Mass Effect world to understand the storyline, while I decided to learn about it on an esoteric level. It all depends on your level of commitment. If you don't want to hear everything an NPC has to say...just don't ask them about it:-)
Re:will they fix the camera? (Score:4, Insightful)
...I take it you didn't play it on the PC? Because you could do the very things you described with the camera in the PC version...
Gamer's take on DA2 (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Steam's playtime count, I clocked up 106 hours on Dragon Age. Upon hearing the mixed reviews for its expansion (Awakening) I refrained from getting it. As it was informally billed as a successor to the classic Baldur's Gate series I was pretty enthusiastic like a lot of folks who had experience with Shadows of Amn.
The fact remains that it has only been 9 months since DA released, and the expansion was out 5 months; having not played it I can only echo the commenest gripes of other players which was the relatively short length compared to Dragon Age vanilla (circa 10-15 hours), coupled with a somewhat stilted villain and overall plotline. The characters, most of which are new, haven't endeared themselves as much as the original set featured in DA. My experience with DA was good...but I never saw a villain with the depth or intensity of Irenicus, instead having a faceless entity of orc-like creatures named Darkspawn, with a corrupted Dragon at the helm. The motives of the evil horde were not touched upon much at all in DA...and whilst the characters were a varied bunch I never felt all that engaged thanks to the cropping up of cliches.
It was a surprise to me when I came across a much less promoted and much more obscure title in the Steam summer sales just a week or so ago. The Witcher expanded edition pulled me in much faster than Dragon Age, with its unusual story steeped in Polish myths - it sure beat DA's rather Lord of the Rings feel that has been done to death not just on the silver screen but to a great extent in gaming too. Despite being inferior in graphics terms to Dragon Age, I found the protagonist pretty refreshing in the same way I liked Clint Eastwood in his most iconic westerns; the medieval world is darker and so suspends disbelief better than the gleaming spires of fantasy I saw in DA. It was less than $10 in the sale too, and offers a very large amount of gameplay. It's even further from Baldur's Gate than DA was, but for what it was it felt much more impressive.
So after Bioware's content-light expansion, the announcement of a sequel so soon makes me more skeptical than excited. DA was good, but not ground-breaking as most of the perenially bribed gaming press were saying.
Like any other gamer geek I hope it turns out brilliant, but just like every experienced gamer I've been let down by hyped franchise so many times. With smaller development houses bringing out quality, I start to wonder if there's much point paying all that much attention to the bigger ones with massive capital behind them.
Re:Still waiting on the BioWare / Illusion merger. (Score:3, Insightful)
Given how much the BioWare games are turning into Japanese "dating" sims.
I call bullshit. The relationship aspect of BioWare games is an entirely option part of the experience, and involves no more strategy than picking the "nice" sounding conversational lines.
Hardly the same thing as a dating sim.
Actually, you just summarized an average dating sim. Picking "nice sounding conversational lines" is generally the only gameplay element in those games.
not trying to troll here (Score:3, Insightful)
I found the game completely unimmersive. I've played a handful of RPG's that I've really, really liked but have not been able to find any in a long time that feel really engaging. I thought that Oblivion was a tremendously varied mixed bag. The engine was beyond amazing, just completely brilliant. I spent hours just wandering around the damn environment gawking at everything. Top notch! But the storytelling was limp and uninspired. And don't even get me started on the mess with leveling. Good game design should be intuitive and the leveling system was anything but. You had to read up and study on how to do it correctly. You run into the same problem with the quests where you might put your game in an unwinnable state by doing something the designers did not anticipate.
As far as my playthrough of Dragon Age went, the controls were awful, the maps poorly designed, and the storyline was completely unengaging.
I'm the same way with fighting games. It's not that I dislike the genre -- I love the Dreamcast Soul Caliber -- but so few measure up to that. There's usually just a lot of extraneous fluff and BS and the gameplay itself isn't enjoyable or demands memorizing an endless series of button combos.
The whole Dragon Age phenomenon I find rather puzzling. Tons of people like it and it's not a Larry the Cable Guy situation where you can explain it as lowest common denominators with no taste. No, people like it for what it is. I like RPG's and it falls flat. It's weird how subjective tastes can be. Here's someone who loves a given genre, let's show him something that's seen as a classic of that genre, let's be puzzled when he dislikes it. Loves scifi but hates Firefly. Loves Thai food but hates curry. Strange.
Bioware is over for me. (Score:4, Insightful)
I was a huge Bioware fan. I don't buy a lot of games, but my shelf is dominated by Bioware. BG,BG2,NWN, KOTOR, KOTOR2.
But Dragon Age was a disappointment for me. It looked pretty but the RPG engine seems light weight and limited. It felt very dumbed down compared to the D&D based system in NWN. Plus the move to selling in game items was a big turn off.
I won't be looking into DA2.
I will just keep playing NWN from that better, pre EA era of Bioware.
Re:Still waiting on the BioWare / Illusion merger. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a pretty poor simulation then. In real life, girls go for the jerks.
Re:Bioware is over for me. (Score:1, Insightful)
Ugh, please no. (Score:2, Insightful)
One thing that would have made it infinitely better was a multiplayer option, even just locally.
Maybe I'm just a misanthrope, but enough with the goddamn multiplayer. That's what D&D is for.