Dragon Age 2

[The Summoner of Leviathan]

It'll be a looooong time before we get this game probably (I still don't have Brotherhood ) so I just have some questions:

1. Are mages as awesome as they were in the first Dragon Age?
It seemed so in the demo -- spells don't seem to have changed much. When I fought an Ogre and a mob of darkspawn the rest of the party fell and I was left to fight them on my own. Mage Hawke proved to be very squishy, but I was able to just run circles around the field, occasionally casting a spell before taking off running again. Once the goons were gone, the Ogre was very easy to avoid.

2. Does friendly fire still depend on difficulty? I like making GIANT FIRE TORNADOES but they just aren't as fun if my party gets boo boos

3. Importing! I read you could import a DAO save file. Is this true, and if so how much effect will this have?

1. I only tried Mage on the demo but it seemed pretty cool, maybe will try it on my second play through. The skill trees group a bit different though I like it. Just make sure you occasionally level up their constitution, just to make sure they have plenty of health!

2. Difficulty affects friendly-fire. In Easy, Normal and Hard friendly-fire does not occur. Anything higher, like Nightmare, it does occur.

3. It affects you in small ways, like you get the allusions that Flemeth make, or the occasional mentioning of the "Hero of Ferelden", plus some of the characters who make cameos and such.

Game feels too simplified on every department, plot is pretty weak ( big part of the game you collect money to travel to the Deeproads by weak motive), dungeons are identical copies of each other ( except the parts where paths are blocked by cement door) which makes the game feel pretty cheap.

That's just the first Act, plus if you concern yourself with getting your companion and doing other things than getting the sovereigns needed, then it actually goes by fast (SPOILER)plus there's a last minute quest where someone offers to compensate you if you lack the required amount of coin. Also, some minor sidequests in Act 1 evolve into major plot points in Act 2.

As for the dungeons being the same, I never did feel that way in DA:O but it was like that in ME1, all the mines and labs and spaceships had the same layout. Whereas it doesn't break it for me, it makes me a little bit sad every time I see that. The blocked doors and passages that appear of the map make my inner completionist sad as well.

[Aerith's Knight]

That's it? 10 minutes of credits and not even a bonus movie.

*grumbles*

The ending was good, but I don't want to sit through long credits like that for nothing! Halo franchise spoiled me.

Although it wasn't as bad as PoP

[Ouch!]

(SPOILER)First of all, they said the story takes place over ten years, and we've only seen seven at this point. I do not appreciate that it seems we're going to need to buy some DLC or something to get the conclusion that we had been hoping for.

At any rate, I enjoyed the first and second acts. For the first act, I felt enthusiastically overwhelmed by all the side quests I could do before I even entered the Deep Roads. The story of the second act was awesome to experience as well. The third act, by comparison, was a complete and utter let down. I kept hoping that something more interesting might happen, but it never did. Every step of the way, I expected Flemeth to come back and do something interesting. I expected Merill's attempts to rebuild the Eluvian so we can see a return of the Warden and Morrigan from the Witch Hunt DLC.

I expected more.

I'm not disappointed by the gameplay. The class trees were better done than in Dragon Age: Origins and unless you played on a lower difficulty, I didn't feel that the game turned into a blind hack-and-slash. You still had to think about what you were doing for most encounters on the challenging difficulties.

Given how much the developers said that they were trying to capitalize on the same kind of streamlining that made Mass Effect 2 so successful, I expected a better experience. They totally missed the boat in many regards. One of the things that made ME2 so much better than ME1 was to eliminate the recycled environments for all the side quests. The game is already divided into three distinct acts which very little back-tracking from act to act. Give the game a second disc if you have to; the reused caves was lazy and inexcusable.

The game was fun, but I feel cheated.