Dragon Age 2

[Zinegata]

I'm in Act 2 now. And yes, the little bugs here and there are annoying. As is reusing the same three or four dungeons but walling off some sections to make the layout seem different... except you can still see the walled off sections in the minimap. Ugh.

Two-handed sword fighting is so much fun though. And I like SnarkyFem!Hawke.

[Lagmonster]

Warning: The statue of limitations on spoilers has now expired. Read on at your own risk.

They made it very hard to sympathize with the mages, family connection or no. I said this before, but the startling and overwhelming majority of mages had the willpower of a banana. The minute things got tough, out came the blood magic. And every damn blood mage in that game - unless Bioware was hiding a few I didn't find - met horrible demon-related ends. They even made sure that you knew that the reason the Templars were assholes was because they were being led by a person who was under the influence of...wait for it...a demonic idol. Seriously; "magic makes you go crazy" was the theme du jour - Anders ended up slaved to a spontaneously-murdering ideologue that compelled him to obliterate hundreds of people, and Merrill was so narrow-minded that she basically would have got everyone in the universe killed by some supposedly powerful ancient demon if you weren't around. Even the cool-headed master of the circle decided to just toss away every potential argument he could ever have in support of free mages, so that he could transform into something less effective than a powerful and wise wizard, after which his first order of business was to try to murder all of his allies. And THESE are just the people we're supposed to be pals with, leaving aside the outright sociopaths and paper-willed idiots. Even the goddamned orphan-helping kindly old grandmother who was a friend to all poor and needy turned into a monster and tried to murder everyone.

You know what I wanted? An option to let the Qunari rule Kirkwall. They were hive-minded religious fanatics, but they were actually the least overall deranged people in the game if you look at how they patiently sat around for YEARS just minding their own business before getting pissed off at the corrupt government and murderous religious fanatics and deciding to slaughter the shit out of the place in a fit of built-up frustration.

On the other hand, I basically blame Isabella for everything. If she hadn't stolen the book, the Qunari wouldn't have hung around. If they hadn't hung around, the Viscount's son wouldn't have been off pissing on dad's political capital and the Viscount would have held power by not dying. If he had retained a strong hold on power, Meredith wouldn't have felt pressured to up her bid for control of the city in the power vaccum that followed. There are other outside variables that could have come into play, but the excesses by the Templars at large against the mages might have been kept in check by a stable Viscount, and a populace and church not terrorized by the threat of heretics or invasion.

All Isabella's fault. I have a secret hope that Bioware was conducting a social experiment to see the effect a huge pair of tits had on a person's ability to focus on moral and political issues.

[adam_grif]

And of course, the resource reuse is the laziest thing seen since ME1, but frankly I find that minor.

I would argue that DA2 was far worse than ME1, which at least had the decency to only reuse major assets for side quests. In ME1 if you stuck to the story arcs you would see a string of unique locations and only occasionally backtrack. Not so in DA2, which is also a longer game overall.

You know what I wanted? An option to let the Qunari rule Kirkwall. They were hive-minded religious fanatics, but they were actually the least overall deranged people in the game if you look at how they patiently sat around for YEARS just minding their own business before getting pissed off at the corrupt government and murderous religious fanatics and deciding to slaughter the shit out of the place in a fit of built-up frustration.

The Qunari were worse than the Templars for treatment of mages, see the Sareebas quest. They just need to put Hawke in charge as viscount, which happens if you side with the Templars instead of the Mages. Although I see no reason why you couldn't decide to take over after siding with the Mages anyway, given that you end up wiping Merideth and there's still a power vacuum either way.

I will say though that the Arishok was a bawse.

They even made sure that you knew that the reason the Templars were assholes was because they were being led by a person who was under the influence of...wait for it...a demonic idol.

Yes, this was very idiotic. I did not even remember the idol at that point in the game, and Merideth was a fully believable tyrant given the shit that was going down in Kirkwall with all the blood mages. It diminished from her character that she was just being corrupted by a magical artifact.

And yeah, Orsino turning into a giant stupid abomination has been complained about all over the 'net to death. If they just made it so you only had to kill one of the leaders, the opposite one to who you sided with, it would have been 10x better. But nooo.

[White Haven]

The last chapter of the game played host to some of the laziest, shoddiest writing I've seen in a long time, which was hellaciously jarring given the overall quality prior to that. I had to check the title to make sure I hadn't accidentally booted up KOTOR 2's endgame.

[Joviwan]

The ending works much better if you assume Hawke is performing genocide against the criminally and dangerously stupid. The end-game sequences where you run around murdering everything in the city make more sense that way.

It only falls apart when you can kill anders, but you can't kill isabela and merril.

[Lagmonster]

Well, Anders more or less blew up people himself and, due to being compelled by Justice was as unsaveable as any Abomination. With Merrill there was no malice intended, and she WAS being manipulated by the demon, who was pretending to be nice and helpful. Isabella you can turn over to the Qunari for their justice system to deal with; that seems far more like justice than just murdering her.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I reject the notion that Justice had much to do with it. Justice was the coolest Awakening character by far, for one. That and Anders was always a bit of a tool in Awakening, too.

[Lagmonster]

Anders effectively admitted that Justice and he had formed a third entity: Vengeance. We also saw that this compelled him to slaughter people, even people who didn't really deserve it, and at one point had to be held back from doing so.

[Vympel]

Oh, one thing I noticed - did anyone else notice to how fucked up the character models' hands were? They were just ghastly things. No relation to the rest of the person's body at all.

[Shinova]

Two-handed sword fighting is so much fun though.

Do you play a vanguard berserker as well?

It's like:

enter room, haste, barrage, cleave, WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM~

result: dead room.

[TC Pilot]

So I just finished Origins (I know, a bit late), and I'm wondering how different this game is. I've played the demo, so I know about the dialouge and combat speed, but I'm more concerned about avoiding what I perceived as the endless slog through dungeons; having to fight within an inch of my life every ten steps (and more often than not having to re-re-refight) got old rather fast. Is Dragon Age 2 like that at all?

[Highlord Laan]

So I just finished Origins (I know, a bit late), and I'm wondering how different this game is. I've played the demo, so I know about the dialouge and combat speed, but I'm more concerned about avoiding what I perceived as the endless slog through dungeons; having to fight within an inch of my life every ten steps (and more often than not having to re-re-refight) got old rather fast. Is Dragon Age 2 like that at all?

It's like that and worse. Rather then there being some rhyme or reason to the enemy's composition and numbers like in DA:O, they come in waves teleported into the fight. Corpses explode for the damdest reasons and the combat is horrendously Final Fantasy'd at mach three with moves that look like they belong in Dragonball Z.

Companion equipment is set with little customization, %99.99 of the gear found will be vendor trash, classes are pigeonholed, tactics are simpler to nonexistent beyond "mash the attack button", the writing is shit, the graphics out of date six years ago, and the game is about a third the size of Origins, yet priced higher.

In short, skip CODA2 and buy a game worth the money.

[Vympel]

So I just finished Origins (I know, a bit late), and I'm wondering how different this game is. I've played the demo, so I know about the dialouge and combat speed, but I'm more concerned about avoiding what I perceived as the endless slog through dungeons;

All areas are smaller, so there's no real slogging to be had, really. The major fights mostly take place in small caves, in houses, on the street, etc.

having to fight within an inch of my life every ten steps (and more often than not having to re-re-refight) got old rather fast. Is Dragon Age 2 like that at all?

I found the game much less difficult than DA:O, so no, it hasn't got DA:O's "fight within an inch of your life" every two seconds thing, IMO.

Teleporting enemies is annoying (they don't really teleport, they just drop in from behind you, most often from doors you couldn't open, or from the sides of the street (i.e. they're jumping down from rooftops) or if they're spiders - well - you know. It doesn't really bother me (I'm on my second playthrough) at all.

Companion equipment is set with little customization

Good. I can't think of anything more tedious than constantly stuffing around with my companion's clothes. That they decide what to wear makes sense. Besides, you still customize belt/amulet/rings and weapon.

%99.99 of the gear found will be vendor trash

True, since gear drops for Hawke that he can't use if he's not the right class. Luckily, you can mark it "junk" and sell it all at once at the vendor with one click.

classes are pigeonholed

Warriors losing dual wield was annoying.

tactics are simpler to nonexistent beyond "mash the attack button"

Disagree strongly. Protecting your mages by drawing aggro, taunts, setting up combos with the warrior / rogue / mage effects makes for more engaging combat, IMO, than DA:O.

the writing is shit

I enjoyed the plot. More original than "save the world" bumf, at least.

the graphics out of date six years ago

That's absurd. No similar game from 2005 looks anything like Dragon Age, let alone Dragon Age 2.

and the game is about a third the size of Origins, yet priced higher.

Yeah, you can always just wait to get it when its cheaper. Of course I got it from ozgameshop for $40AUD, so I bought it for waaaay less than I got DA:O.

[adam_grif]

Good. I can't think of anything more tedious than constantly stuffing around with my companion's clothes. That they decide what to wear makes sense. Besides, you still customize belt/amulet/rings and weapon.

I can think of many, many things more tedious than that. Shuffling around companion clothes was completely painless in DAO. This was a considered design decision, but don't act like it was hard work to go through your inventory to see if your dudes were wearing the best armor they could be once every four/five hours. Character customization is part of the traditional RPG experience, and "streamlining" all of it away doesn't always make it better.

Far more offensive than the removal of companion armor was, of course, the "each character can only use ONE type of weapon" thing. Varric is always the crossbow guy, even when being mobbed by 30 enemies in close combat. Aveline is always sword and shield, Fenris is always two hander, Isabella is always dual wield, etc. I don't think anybody complained that your characters in DAO were too versatile - you simply chose what you wanted them to use with talent tree investments and off you went. You'll probably say "oh Varric has to be the Crossbow guy that's part of his character", but there's no reason he can't also pull a knife at close range, yeah?

Disagree strongly. Protecting your mages by drawing aggro, taunts, setting up combos with the warrior / rogue / mage effects makes for more engaging combat, IMO, than DA:O.

Cross class combos are just about the only addition to the game that improves combat. Aggro, taunts etc were all 100% present in DA:O, and DA2 ruins most of your tactical play by spawning enemies wherever it pleases, in waves. The best part is when you've been carefully microing your mages out of harms way, then four dudes appear right behind them, making your tactical placement irrelevant.

This is a loony design choice, and the best you can say about it is that they made the game easier to compensate. Then again, if the game is too hard you just put the difficulty down anyway, so I'm struggling to see this as a positive.

True, since gear drops for Hawke that he can't use if he's not the right class. Luckily, you can mark it "junk" and sell it all at once at the vendor with one click.

"Junking" things is fine, but junk items should not exist, period. There are so many items that do literally nothing, and the game should either make the junk not take up inventory space, or completely abolish it and simply drop more gold coins since that's all you can do with it anyway. You want to talk about tedium, how about having to run back to a vendor every hour because you've got too much junk weighing you down, and the game removed the ability to expand your backpack size.

P.S. the game should not drop items you can never use, and if it must, it should auto-junk them.

I enjoyed the plot. More original than "save the world" bumf, at least.

I can't really say "you're wrong" here for obvious reasons, but I will say this is a minority opinion. Generally people are pleased by the absence of the generic save the world fantasy plot, but they are irritated in equal measure by the stupidity of what goes on in DA2. The game is weirdly paced (it seems like it's going to end with the Qunari arc, but then just keeps going), several characters in it are terrible or get derailed halfway through, and the ending was shocking.

There isn't any kind of overarching story at all really - you get the flashbacks indicating that you must have done something pretty bad, but you never feel like you're leading up to anything when you're playing the game. The first act in particular is strange - "We must gather coin for the deep roads expedition!" But why? If you could get that kind of coin easily you wouldn't need to go there anyway. There should have been an extra element of character motivation there. Then you get there and it's a pretty big anticlimax. You get these big overtures about something ominous going down with foreshadowing from narrator-varric, but you get there and nothing that bad happens tbh. Of course the idol was the reason Merideth went crazy, but that's another irritating point. She didn't need it, at all. You could totally remove the plot about the idol from the deep roads expedition, and the plot would function 100% the same, only now Merideth is a believable tyrant fighting for what she thinks is right. The Orsino blood magic turn too... ungh.

The high point was Act 2, but 1 and 3 were dull and uninteresting.

That's absurd. No similar game from 2005 looks anything like Dragon Age, let alone Dragon Age 2.

Dragon Age and DA2 are both basically turds that look several years out of date. One thing I've always found amusing is how the Assassin's Creed games could simultaneously have larger environments, far more NPCs, and still manage to look as good or better than DA/DA2. Bioware are not known for making great game engines.

(Maxed settings on PC)

[Vympel]

I can think of many, many things more tedious than that. Shuffling around companion clothes was completely painless in DAO. This was a considered design decision, but don't act like it was hard work to go through your inventory to see if your dudes were wearing the best armor they could be once every four/five hours. Character customization is part of the traditional RPG experience, and "streamlining" all of it away doesn't always make it better.

Far more offensive than the removal of companion armor was, of course, the "each character can only use ONE type of weapon" thing. Varric is always the crossbow guy, even when being mobbed by 30 enemies in close combat. Aveline is always sword and shield, Fenris is always two hander, Isabella is always dual wield, etc. I don't think anybody complained that your characters in DAO were too versatile - you simply chose what you wanted them to use with talent tree investments and off you went. You'll probably say "oh Varric has to be the Crossbow guy that's part of his character", but there's no reason he can't also pull a knife at close range, yeah?

You can always just use Maker's Sigh to respec characters weapons though. But why would you want to? What's the point?

Cross class combos are just about the only addition to the game that improves combat. Aggro, taunts etc were all 100% present in DA:O, and DA2 ruins most of your tactical play by spawning enemies wherever it pleases, in waves. The best part is when you've been carefully microing your mages out of harms way, then four dudes appear right behind them, making your tactical placement irrelevant.

This is a loony design choice, and the best you can say about it is that they made the game easier to compensate. Then again, if the game is too hard you just put the difficulty down anyway, so I'm struggling to see this as a positive.

I found shit descended into melee in DA:O (I thought the inclusion of friendly fire at every difficulty level except easy, given the combat zones, was ridiculous - I found AoE spells totally useless for that reason and simply unfun to try and use) often enough that I didn't really notice much difference. As it is, you can always reposition your mages during combat if someone attacks them and draw aggro off them. I could've done without the "teleporting", but it doesn't bother me very much.

"Junking" things is fine, but junk items should not exist, period. There are so many items that do literally nothing, and the game should either make the junk not take up inventory space, or completely abolish it and simply drop more gold coins since that's all you can do with it anyway. You want to talk about tedium, how about having to run back to a vendor every hour because you've got too much junk weighing you down, and the game removed the ability to expand your backpack size.

What? You can buy backpack expansions throughout the game, from multiple vendors. But true, if you're going to streamline, get rid of default 'junk' items. Just have them drop as gold.

The rest that follows is of course subjective opinion, but:-

There isn't any kind of overarching story at all really - you get the flashbacks indicating that you must have done something pretty bad, but you never feel like you're leading up to anything when you're playing the game. The first act in particular is strange - "We must gather coin for the deep roads expedition!" But why? If you could get that kind of coin easily you wouldn't need to go there anyway.

50-100 gold is certainly not enough to buy back your estate. That's what the riches you found in the thaig bought you, and the main motivation for going after finding out what Gamlen did.

Dragon Age and DA2 are both basically turds that look several years out of date. One thing I've always found amusing is how the Assassin's Creed games could simultaneously have larger environments, far more NPCs, and still manage to look as good or better than DA/DA2. Bioware are not known for making great game engines.

They're serviceable IMO. I've never played either and thought "these graphics are shit". However, I'm surprised that Mass Effect - in terms of character models, looks so much better. Compare default Shephard to Hawke (aka the Sheriff of Nottingham from Men In Tights) - its no contest.

[HMS Sophia]

I thought there was a level cap at 20. It appears my wife just hit level 22

As for the companion customization?
I personally found it really irritating. I love changing peoples armour and making them look different. And I really wanted to put more clothes on Isabella ... Not being able too do so, is a ridiculous piece of streamlining. Also, does getting their customization things actually change their armour at all?

Oh, and Varricks crossbow? It has a bayonet he doesn't need any knives

[adam_grif]

I found shit descended into melee in DA:O (I thought the inclusion of friendly fire at every difficulty level except easy, given the combat zones, was ridiculous - I found AoE spells totally useless for that reason and simply unfun to try and use) often enough that I didn't really notice much difference. As it is, you can always reposition your mages during combat if someone attacks them and draw aggro off them. I could've done without the "teleporting", but it doesn't bother me very much.

Managing friendly fire is part of the experience

In DA:O Cone of Cold was brokenly powerful, and things like Earthquake, Blizzard and Tempest were fantastic if you used them in the appropriate situations. Naturally they weren't always useful - different circumstances call for different tactics and so forth.

I'm certainly aware you can just run your mages away from enemies and use aggro stuff (I never would have been able to finish the game otherwise), but it is never-the-less pretty terrible design. It means you can't get situations anymore where you shuffle your party into a great spot to take advantage of terrain or room layout or traps, because now the enemies will just spawn next to you in a few moments anyway. Actually, the AoE spells were great for this in DA:O - you funnel your dudes into a room, have your tank blocking the door and cast Blizzard, Tempest, Earthquake all simultaneously into the other room to wipe the enemies out (3 Mage party ftw).

What? You can buy backpack expansions throughout the game, from multiple vendors.

I must have been the unluckiest bastard in the game to never stumble across any of them, then.

50-100 gold is certainly not enough to buy back your estate. That's what the riches you found in the thaig bought you, and the main motivation for going after finding out what Gamlen did.

50 Sovereigns isn't chump change either. It's just really weird to go from complete poverty to suddenly agreeing to go on a risky expedition that you yourself have to fork out 20,000 dollars to fund, which you don't have. I understand that you become rich off it etc, but it still seems quite unusual a plot point. Also, weren't you going to get your estate back anyway, because you discovered the will that left it to your mother? After the deep roads Varric just says "he purchased an estate in high town" or what have you.

They're serviceable IMO. I've never played either and thought "these graphics are shit". However, I'm surprised that Mass Effect - in terms of character models, looks so much better. Compare default Shephard to Hawke (aka the Sheriff of Nottingham from Men In Tights) - its no contest.

They look fine if you stay in the isometric view (except you can't in 2, lol), but the game insists on cutting to close up shots of everything during cut-scenes that look terrible. When you zoom right in it becomes apparent that there is absolutely nothing technically impressive going on here, a meager number of NPCs, special effects that aren't all that, textures that aren't anything to write home about, some stilted animations, etc. Everything about it is sub-par except maybe closeups of the main character's faces. The worst part is it runs like a dog - Dragon Age 1 had the worst memory leak problems until about 5 patches in, and DA2 ran like a slideshow on max on my Nvidia card until the recent Nvidia drivers were released because Bioware decided that the most common video cards on the market weren't worth their time to cater to.

I would complain about the art style being awfully bland in both games (except the Qunari in 2, who I think are quite awesome), but that's just taste.

[Vendetta]

I found shit descended into melee in DA:O (I thought the inclusion of friendly fire at every difficulty level except easy, given the combat zones, was ridiculous - I found AoE spells totally useless for that reason and simply unfun to try and use) often enough that I didn't really notice much difference. As it is, you can always reposition your mages during combat if someone attacks them and draw aggro off them. I could've done without the "teleporting", but it doesn't bother me very much.

The big AoE's were pointless in DA:O, their damage was puny and since as you noted everything would turn into a scrum fairly quickly you'd just be doing friendly fire damage anyway.

The teardrop template ones, however, were massively useful. Because you were usually outnumbered you'd get 2-4 enemies all nicely lined up around your tanks and you could run your mage to the end of the line and send Cone of Cold, Shock, and Flame Blast down to deal respectable amounts of damage to 3-4 enemies at once.

Even fireball was only really a counter to archers and enemy mages, and more useful for knocking them on their ass than the damage.

I replayed DA:O recently and those were my main weapons as a mage, could use those and a couple of single target spells on a cooldown loop that decimated everything.

It is notable that probably the strongest spell in the game, Hand of Winter (added in Awakening), has no friendly fire despite being an AoE (probably because it's AoE around self, and the code didn't support it not damaging you if it could do AoE, and when it averages 250 damage + freeze for a well specced mage you don't want that)

[Vympel]

Managing friendly fire is part of the experience

In DA:O Cone of Cold was brokenly powerful, and things like Earthquake, Blizzard and Tempest were fantastic if you used them in the appropriate situations. Naturally they weren't always useful - different circumstances call for different tactics and so forth.

I'm certainly aware you can just run your mages away from enemies and use aggro stuff (I never would have been able to finish the game otherwise), but it is never-the-less pretty terrible design. It means you can't get situations anymore where you shuffle your party into a great spot to take advantage of terrain or room layout or traps, because now the enemies will just spawn next to you in a few moments anyway. Actually, the AoE spells were great for this in DA:O - you funnel your dudes into a room, have your tank blocking the door and cast Blizzard, Tempest, Earthquake all simultaneously into the other room to wipe the enemies out (3 Mage party ftw).

True, I did do that multiple times. On balance DA:O was better that way. But I do like the greater speed in DA2.

I must have been the unluckiest bastard in the game to never stumble across any of them, then.

There's IIRC two for sale in each Act and capacity goes up to ... 100? The Robes guy in Hightown sells one, as does (I think) one of the vendors in Lowtown. You probably never found them check because naturally "what the hell do I need to buy from robes guy?"

I'm a bit OCD so I checked every Vendor multiple times.

50 Sovereigns isn't chump change either. It's just really weird to go from complete poverty to suddenly agreeing to go on a risky expedition that you yourself have to fork out 20,000 dollars to fund, which you don't have. I understand that you become rich off it etc, but it still seems quite unusual a plot point. Also, weren't you going to get your estate back anyway, because you discovered the will that left it to your mother? After the deep roads Varric just says "he purchased an estate in high town" or what have you.

I think you had a preferential right to the estate (or maybe it was a purely sentimental point), but on any understanding of property rights killing the previous owners wouldn't have reverted the estate back to you automatically. It probably would've reverted to the city, and then you pay for the privelege to have it back.

They look fine if you stay in the isometric view (except you can't in 2, lol), but the game insists on cutting to close up shots of everything during cut-scenes that look terrible. When you zoom right in it becomes apparent that there is absolutely nothing technically impressive going on here, a meager number of NPCs, special effects that aren't all that, textures that aren't anything to write home about, some stilted animations, etc. Everything about it is sub-par except maybe closeups of the main character's faces. The worst part is it runs like a dog - Dragon Age 1 had the worst memory leak problems until about 5 patches in, and DA2 ran like a slideshow on max on my Nvidia card until the recent Nvidia drivers were released because Bioware decided that the most common video cards on the market weren't worth their time to cater to.

Yeah my new PC has an Nvidia card and the game ran like unplayable ass and was filled with graphical glitches. However I'm not sure who's fault it was. It was nvidia after all who released new drivers that resulted in a 516% (lol!) performance increase, not Bioware who released a patch.

Of course, its still bugged in a way that is definitely Bioware's fault - on my new PC with DX11 my game is guaranteed to crash if I rotate the camera too fast - becaues apparently DA2 has been coded such that certain powerful new nvidia video cards they are too fast to work properly. A guy made a post about it on the bioware forums - by underclocking his video card, he was able to eliminate the constant DX11 crashes, at a cost of 1 or 2 FPS. Which he noted, naturally, that he shouldn't have to fucking do.

Me, I refuse to do such a thing, so I simply set it to DX9. Sucks, but oh well. I couldn't play without saving constantly otherwise, it was a massive annoyance.

EDIT: to their credit, the official Bioware 1.03 patch thread (i.e. the next patch which they've started working on) notes "DirectX11!!!!!" as a problem. Here's hoping.

[adam_grif]

Yeah my new PC has an Nvidia card and the game ran like unplayable ass and was filled with graphical glitches. However I'm not sure who's fault it was. It was nvidia after all who released new drivers that resulted in a 516% (lol!) performance increase, not Bioware who released a patch.

The way I heard it told was that AMD sent people to help with the development of the game, and so they basically coded it with ATi cards in mind. The Nvidia drivers included specific tweaks just for DA2 because of how shockingly bad it ran on the cards due to lack of optimization for Nvidia firmware. It's not Nvidia's fault that they coded it the way they did, it's Biowares. Every other DX11 game runs comparably on both vendor's cards.

I don't think I've ever seen a game have this much difference between performance between cards just because of their brand.

[TC Pilot]

All areas are smaller, so there's no real slogging to be had, really. The major fights mostly take place in small caves, in houses, on the street, etc.

Good. There were times in DA:O (particularly in Orzhammar and Andraste's Temple) that the length of the dungeons reached ridiculous proportions. I'm pretty sure there were more dwarven bandits in the dwarf slums than darkspawn in the final dungeon.

I found the game much less difficult than DA:O, so no, it hasn't got DA:O's "fight within an inch of your life" every two seconds thing, IMO.

Teleporting enemies is annoying (they don't really teleport, they just drop in from behind you, most often from doors you couldn't open, or from the sides of the street (i.e. they're jumping down from rooftops) or if they're spiders - well - you know. It doesn't really bother me (I'm on my second playthrough) at all.

Maybe it has something to do with the way I played (offensive mage-turned-healer), but I expected that by the end I'd be powerful enough to basically coast through the standard "mook-swarm" fights, which turned out not to be the case (particularly the boss-fight in the alienage, which I had to replay 6 times), though it seems I just hit that threshold a little later, it Awakening is anything to go by).

Spiders and cloaked mooks were about the only justifiable teleports I can think of. Again, a particularly egregious example was the fight in the alienage, in which a damn ogre simply appears out of thin air. Naturally, I had pushed forward past its spawn point, so it just walked up behind me and roflstomped me.

Disagree strongly. Protecting your mages by drawing aggro, taunts, setting up combos with the warrior / rogue / mage effects makes for more engaging combat, IMO, than DA:O.

Either way, I wouldn't care. My tactics don't go much beyond "spam every offensive spell I possibly can, cast heal when health goes down."

(I thought the inclusion of friendly fire at every difficulty level except easy, given the combat zones, was ridiculous - I found AoE spells totally useless for that reason and simply unfun to try and use)

The only AOE spell that's any good (not counting things like sleep that don't have friendly fire) in DA:O is fireball. Even at close ranges, you can fire it so that the edges of the explosion hit enemies around your party but not your team itself. The huge AOE spells like blizzard or tempest are only good in the cheap sort of "send one guy forward, cast the spell from around a corner, and hope it lures a few guys away" sort of way. Going back to that alienage fight, it was also helpful in mass-killing the 30 or so one-hit kill darkspawn standing behind the gate.

Oh yeah, and cone of cold. That just goes without saying. Saved my ass fighting Arl Howe 1 on 1 with just Morrigan, waiting for that damn Revival spell to cool down.

I can think of many, many things more tedious than that. Shuffling around companion clothes was completely painless in DAO. This was a considered design decision, but don't act like it was hard work to go through your inventory to see if your dudes were wearing the best armor they could be once every four/five hours. Character customization is part of the traditional RPG experience, and "streamlining" all of it away doesn't always make it better.

The only thing I found particularly tedious was the fact that the comparison window that pops up when you hover your mouse over an item only shows the main character's equipment, which is particularly infuriating when dealing with merchants. Quite a few times I remember going "holy shit this weapon is like 20 times better than the one I ha... oh wait, it's comparing my mage's staff to a greatsword..."

Far more offensive than the removal of companion armor was, of course, the "each character can only use ONE type of weapon" thing. Varric is always the crossbow guy, even when being mobbed by 30 enemies in close combat. Aveline is always sword and shield, Fenris is always two hander, Isabella is always dual wield, etc. I don't think anybody complained that your characters in DAO were too versatile - you simply chose what you wanted them to use with talent tree investments and off you went. You'll probably say "oh Varric has to be the Crossbow guy that's part of his character", but there's no reason he can't also pull a knife at close range, yeah?

That actually appeals to me. The only reason I gave people a second weapon was to clear room in my inventory. It's so annoying to select another partymember, only to come back to my character and find him pulling out a sword because an enemy coasted into his general vicinity.

[Lagmonster]

As for the companion customization?

I personally found it really irritating. I love changing peoples armour and making them look different. And I really wanted to put more clothes on Isabella ... Not being able too do so, is a ridiculous piece of streamlining.

On the other hand, I now find the idea that you can treat your party members like kid's dolls somewhat bizarre. It gets wierder when you see the sheer number of mods out there to let you give your people new hair, skin tones, fashions, tits, whatever. A whole gaggle of young men staring at artificial people and messing around with their hair and fashion before they send them off to slaughter things in epic ways. I think, "Why does the hulking man-warrior need me to pick out his outfits for him? Does he have unresolved mommy issues I'm supposed to care about? Why can't they root through my magical box of things and dress themselves with whatever is the most appropriate to their skills?"

Mass Effect 2 is, without exception, my favourite game in the entire universe for the management and dissemination of inventory items. I mean, I understand the giddy appeal of outfitting yourself in the morbid scraps torn from the corpses of your enemies, but if I've mashed your skull with a giant magical steel hammer, I do not want your helmet.

[Stofsk]

The only AOE spell that's any good (not counting things like sleep that don't have friendly fire) in DA:O is fireball. Even at close ranges, you can fire it so that the edges of the explosion hit enemies around your party but not your team itself. The huge AOE spells like blizzard or tempest are only good in the cheap sort of "send one guy forward, cast the spell from around a corner, and hope it lures a few guys away" sort of way. Going back to that alienage fight, it was also helpful in mass-killing the 30 or so one-hit kill darkspawn standing behind the gate.

This isn't really true. Tempest and Blizzard are massively useful, especially combined with spell might. It's basically an 'I Win' button for any fight in the game.

My two-hand warrior was for the most part owning the game until I hit the last part of Arl Howe's estate, where I bumped into Ser Cauthrian. I was like 'this will be a piece of cake'. About a dozen reloads later... (I should mention I played the game on nightmare)

The only thing that really gave me an edge was the fact I had Morrigan in my party, and she had the above two AOE spells plus spell might. That took care of almost all of Ser Cauthrian's troops, which were a huge problem because all those archers were high level and had scattershot, which if it goes off leaves most of your party and probably you stunned and then it's a total party death after that. After the nuke went off it left more or less just her to deal with. And she can very nearly kill off your entire party single-handed at that difficulty level (especially if you have a mage unleash that magic equivalent of a tactical nuke in close quarters, she'll realise the mage is the most damaging threat and focus on her - if you lose your mage, you lose cone of cold, force field, and crushing prison, spells with utility which cannot be overstated in a fight like that)

Even without that spell combo, blizzard can be super-useful for things like getting a swarm of archers who are on high ground and a far rush distance away knocked down and frozen for a long time. Meanwhile your party has quaffed potions of greater cold resistance and suddenly that blizzard fills like a walk on a beach. When I first played DA:O the friendly fire on the AOE spells bothered me too, but then I realised it's all about positioning as well as buffs, and if you have the resistance maxed out then a fireball is only going to singe you if that. Hell if you really want to game the system you can get enough unique gear to give you 100% spell resistance. But that sounds cheesy to me.

[Vendetta]

My two-hand warrior was for the most part owning the game until I hit the last part of Arl Howe's estate, where I bumped into Ser Cauthrian. I was like 'this will be a piece of cake'. About a dozen reloads later... (I should mention I played the game on nightmare)

Ser Cauthrien has more HP than the Archdemon, and the fight with her is probably second only to The Harvester.

You're actually supposed to lose that fight, that's why it's set up with massive one sided archer spam. Three spells which are useful solely to win a fight you don't even need to win anyway is not good planning.

And if there's archers on high ground shooting at you fireball will knock them on their ass long enough for you to get to melee with them (especially if you brought Dog, unlike everyone else his move rate goes up in combat, making him excellent for cleaning up archers and mages who like to stand off and fire), comes off instantly, and does more damage up front meaning you'll probably have ended them faster.

[TC Pilot]

This isn't really true. Tempest and Blizzard are massively useful, especially combined with spell might. It's basically an 'I Win' button for any fight in the game.

The only way I could see that being very good is if you have a second mage-healer along with to heal your party. If not, then you just hurt your own party as much as your enemies, unless you deploy it against archers, in which case fireball is probably better, given the combination of casting time, recharge time, and knocking out your enemies for a moment (at least compared to tempest).

My two-hand warrior was for the most part owning the game until I hit the last part of Arl Howe's estate, where I bumped into Ser Cauthrian. I was like 'this will be a piece of cake'. About a dozen reloads later... (I should mention I played the game on nightmare)

As Vendetta says, that fight's set up for you to lose. Which is pretty silly, since it's the only one like that in the entire game.

Even without that spell combo, blizzard can be super-useful for things like getting a swarm of archers who are on high ground and a far rush distance away knocked down and frozen for a long time.

I've only ever used tempest. After it proved such a colossal dissapointment, I decided not to waste resources on getting the fire or ice equivalents. Fireball is really all that's neccesary for archers.

Meanwhile your party has quaffed potions of greater cold resistance

See, I don't ever do that. The only potions I ever used were health and mana, and the only times I even bothered to loot element resistance potions were when I had a ton of inventory space (very rare) and would immediately sell them to the nearest merchant.

Sure, it was a waste to have 100 gold at the end of the game, but it's sure helped with Awakening