Tale

Wait, this is that Salvatore/McFarlane/someoneelse game? I thought it was vaporware.

I refuse to believe any of that makes big difference in any given DA2 fight. everything said about DA2 until now contradicts it Yeah, I'd love to see the posts where people excelled at the game with crap attack values, using fire attacks against the Qunari on Hard or Nightmare, and no aggro management.

That's just ignorantly absurd. Attack value, damage type, and other miscellaneous bonuses weigh against that. It's better, but I can't pretend I care for it and call it a "nice thing." Most D&D games I played, it's hard to get attached to Short Sword + 1. Get lucky and get the Short Sword + 1 that does acid damage too, then you move on and the Short Sword + 2s come out and you just want to scream.

One thing is annoying me a bit in Dragon Age. I'm posting it here because it's a general concern with RPGs and not specific to it. I despise progressive loot. Not in concept, but in the implementation everyone uses. I run through a dungeon, pick up a bunch of crap, then when I hit home base, I start cycling through characters to see if I can give them minor +1s. Why does this system still exist? Spending even 5 minutes (though often up to 10 or 15) comparing everyone's equipment against stuff I just picked up is a waste of time. It's not fun, cinematic, narratively interesting, intelligent, exciting, awesome, or any other adjective you can come up with as an objective for roleplaying games. It's tedious crap. This isn't about loot in general, just about exchanging things like a +8 stamina/mana ring for a +10 stamina/mana ring. I understand the need for customization, having equipment that increases accuracy, other equipment that increases damage, defense, and a numerous other needs for characters to shore up weaknesses or specialize. But I'm at a loss to understand what the need for constantly replacing equipment for bonuses provides the player with when leveling systems still function. That's something I really appreciated in Mass Effect 2. Armor pieces provided customization, not progression. Weapons tended to fall short as newer weapons often outclassed older weapons. As I mentioned, I can kind of understand it when leveling systems stop function. Level caps or when levels are incredibly sparse, players still want to improve. But if you're getting a level on an average of every two hours, constant nonlevel progress doesn't strike me as necessary. I don't think it's sensible to be exchanging half your equipment even once per play session. At the absolute best, progressive loot should be major events. (You found the sword Excalibur!) Not minor ones. (Now to compare it against And

Might finish today, probably not. Got House and Stargate Universe to watch. But I'm close enough to the end that I'm fairly certain Flemeth isn't going to show up with an army of daughters, despite the trailer. Am I wrong? And I don't see Morrigan's portents at the end of Witch Hunt playing a role. Are they going to hold that back for DLC or is it going to be a plot that might get explored in two years, if it doesn't get forgotten?

That's the guy from Stargate Atlantis, FYI.

I'm not particularly a fan of IW, but I've played it through twice and it's not that bad really. No worse than Bioshock and probably better in some areas. Just don't compare IW too strongly to Deus Ex, and enjoy it for what it is. Where the hell were you guys when I first played IW? I just hit Act 3 in Dragon Age 2.

You mean play as a rebellious farmer or some mountain man?

Any encounter that requires you to have only a specific setup is a badly designed one. It's a jaw droppingly awful one. Like trying to describe an encounter in Mass Effect that requires three adepts. In either type of system it's simply a bad encounter. In one system, if everyone can use bows, then how is it balanced for the quantity of people who actually use a bow well? Is it balanced so that all three ranged users must be competent ranged users (wtf nerf plox)? Or is it balanced so that none of them are competent (lolololol, easymodo)? Flemeth fight in DAO was remarkably easy with three ranged characters, but you'd want to bring your competent ones (Mages+Lel). Not switch Sten over to a crossbow. In the other system, you're forcing people to run back and forth from home base just to adjust party makeup. Solution: don't have encounters like that.

ugh, no? didn't someone already say every character had his own weapon type and could never switch from, say, dual daggers to a bow? I didn't say weapon type. Weapons have various stats and some with special abilities.

Except it's only armor. The flexibility in weapon/rings/amulets is still there. Am I fighting X type of enemy? Change out the staff for a different damage type. Is it a longer fight, use more regen equipment. Are my characters not hitting enough, use +attack equipment. Armor itself was never flexible enough to constitute a different approach to an encounter compared to character talents and stats.

I couldn't help but troll those games. Mass Effect 1 got some forgiveness from me recently, but I'll never recover from Neverwinter Nights. The only drastic departure of Dragon Age 2 over everything else they've done after Baldur's Gate is companion armor. That's hardly alienating RPG fans. I know it's a hangup for some people, but it is not some great offense or "dumbing down." And it's still more complex than Mass Effect 2. Which is itself a great game.

I thought the general opinion was that the "die hards" who've been buying Bioware games for 10 years are just the people looking for dating sims. It's not like this game is Neverwinter Nights. Which is a terrible game that only appeals to Diablo fans and custom content. Or Mass Effect, which is a corridor shooter for Xbox kiddies. There simply is no consistency to make the claim that this is a radical divergence anymore than half the games Bioware has made this century. Most of their games are different. Bioware even got this awkward reputation as a great PCRPG developer when prior to DAO they'd been focusing on Xbox games for the past 3 titles.

You recall correctly. I haven't seen Shrieks (Elves), either. I wanted to know how they'd look in the new art direction. Oddly enough, I have the collector's edition guide, and a lot of the page art is old Hurlocks. Though maybe Disciples (who also don't seem to appear).

I don't remember the difference between hur- and gen- but I did see a screeny of an Emissary, who looked a bit different, could've been a Genlock Genlocks were basically Goblins. The Emissaries I've seen are definitely not Genlocks. I'm thinking this might be the consequence of higher detail and consoles. They can't have that much model variety, so it's just Hurlocks. I'm probably wrong, demon/undead infested areas get plenty of variety.

That's the one.

Do you guys really like Risen 1 so much? The demo was terrible. But that is the way things are sometimes.

I want Victorian London. And I hope they keep modern era as just the framing sequence. I don't even think modern era would work with the systems they have in place for a full title.

So... anyone seen any Genlocks?

I do too. I forgot about that.

I have a hard time accepting "best of Oblivion." I think some of what they're doing with Skyrim is wonderful, but what exactly is it they are trying to bring from Oblivion? I don't recall anything I fancied about it. Perhaps the more storied and interesting major group quests? I'm hopeful for their new magic system.

I noticed something really really neat last night that I forgot to mention. If you hit someone hard enough with spirit damage, they start to freak out. Anders hit a guy with his staff and the guy just started screaming. Right before he exploded. I guess Anders got a crit. I'm really digging the elemental effects.

Whoah whoah, 500+ missing and 200-300 bodies washed up that aren't what's included? I was considering 100+ dead to be an immense tragedy. I... am at a loss. My sympathies.

I have to agree with Volo here. Dragon Age 2 is far more of a traditional sequel to DAO than people give it credit for.

My experiences are very much the same. I haven't had my attempts backfire, but every time something comes up, I'm afraid they might. Last night I did a quest to catch a killer. I get there, he claims to be innocent. And for the first time in a Bioware game, I'm... not sure. Could this little tit be lying to me? Or did the guy who sent me lie? Is there a third option? Edit: And another situation I'd like the stress. This was the first game, ever, that I killed a character begging for their life. But they made it more personal than anything I'd seen before. The character was truly a threat. And I felt I had to. I don't play characters that do what they "had to." But oh god... The whole Chantry/Mage thing is what I wished DAO was. Dragon Age is supposed to be oppressive to the Mages, but paint that as a necessary evil. DAO didn't really do that, it didn't come across as oppressive, and barely came across as necessary either. DA2 does. You have seemingly good people being threatened with death from Templars. And you have other seemingly good people turning into monsters. It's a recurring theme and not just some little boy who went nuts. Well, it kind of does. Apparently the Templars have Nazis. "The Tranquil solution to the Mage problem." I am not making that up. I like that there's no central villain (so far). People love to talk about seeing a political plot and that seems to be what the game is so far.