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Dragon Age 2 Announced
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.
I sunk 70+ hours into my first game (female Dwarf Noble) did as many side missions as I could find) and put about 40+ hours into my second game (female City Elf). Dragon Age's world really felt alive, and I felt like I was having a direct impact ont he way things were going.
I don't usually like to gush on about a game, but even with its flaws (slightly wonky camera, some textures looked like they were from the N64 era while other textures looked very realistic, etc) Dragon Age deserves every bit of attention and praise it gets. Truly great storytelling, and truly engaging gameplay.
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Bow-ties are cool.
Given how much the BioWare games are turning into Japanese "dating" sims. If you dont know who Illusion Games is, think of a gaming company focused 100% on realistic breast manipulation.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Can we bone Morrigan in this one?
I'm not a huge RPG kind of gamer but every now and then I get the itch to battle dragons and cast magic so I got Dragon Age. It's really a pretty good game. Long, not terribly repetitive, plot twists to keep it interesting, interesting characters, etc.
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....
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
This is exciting. I played Dragon Age for about 3 hours and loved everything but gave up because I got frustrated by the camera, not being able to tilt it from 0 to 90 Degrees and zoom out far enough to see enough of the battlefield. Anyone know if they're going to unlock the camera for us in Dragon Age 2? I would rather have a more flexible camera even if it means setting the graphics to a lower quality setting.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed DA, but what happened to the ability to do whatever the hell you want (i.e. kill guards, rob houses, etc.) from BG? And what about the awesome multi-player support from NWN? It was the perfect multi-player RPG experience -- you could play with friends, but you didn't have to deal with a bunch of MMO douchebags.
Still hoping for a true successor to NWN.
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.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
This time I'll plan on the PC version over the console. The XBox 360 interface on the first DA was horribly hobbled and made the game very frustrating if you're a "I want to control every character's every move" player like me.
Also, if they bring back the battle scripting, just give me unlimited scripting slots (or some high number I'll never reach). Don't make me expend hard earned development points on opening script slots. Give me scriptable characters or not.
I do hope the sequel will support 64-bit platforms. Like most people here, despite some shortcomings I thought the original game was great - all the way until the point where it stopped working on my machine. My PC surpasses the minimum requirements easily, but apparently 64-bit Win7 isn't technically supported. I was able to play up until the point in the game when you enter the town of Redcliffe. At that point, my machine would consistently lock up. Despite all patches being applied and ensuring no background processes were running that would seem likely to interfere, no luck. I contacted Bioware support, who told me to f*ck off as 64-bit OSes were not only not supported, but also that they were not likely to issue a patch in the future to stabilize the title on such systems.
Did anyone here experience regular lock-ups on Win7 64, and if so, were you able to and how did you solve the issue?
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
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.