MrBrown

Yes. I thought they were going to bring the rogue and warrior a bit up to par, but that just seems to mean the rogue archer is now also overpowered. Mages to me seem the same they were in DAO: high DPS, but very weak against attacks. Archery was extremely overpowered in DAO:Awakening, so it's more about bringing it down.

does it mean there's gonna be button-mashing on consoles?! this isn't fair Yeah, I want button-mashing for PC too. BTW, about the camera, some gameplay videos have shown different angles, so I guess the final version will have other views too?

the redesigned icons are actually very bad, because I can't understand what they stand for without looking it up in the skills window, it would help immensely if it said what the icon stands for when you held the cursor over it. It does for me?

That part was so short, that you can't really tell much. You can also see it on the latest developer video.

Oooh, just like the ring in DAO that gave you +1% XP, but only worked when you got a reward of at least 100 XP? Anyway, played the demo, was nice enough. Only bug for me was at the tactics screen, where clicking on stuff brought up wrong drop-down menus and whatnot. I liked that battles were a bit more fast-paced now, and especially that swinging a two-handed weapon doesn't take 5 seconds anymore. Some of the abilities seem a bit funny though. The warrior's rush or whatever is nice, but kinda stupid when an enemy is on a different elevation and you ram into the wall. Also, Shield Defense seems to limit attacks to only a basic thrusting attack, which makes long battles really stupid looking. Harder monsters in general seem to have so many hit points that it looks like you're whacking them the whole day... But this might just be my limited experience playing a Warrior.

Will the full game have combat tactics configuring like DAO?

There was a "whiter teeth" mod for DAO. I guess people want Hollywood-teeth.

Biowarians have already been making boggles of fanart for DA2. At least some of it is nice.

I'm sure that scene will turn out to be something a lot more boring than the stuff people come up with. 99.999% you won't be able to.

Sign me up for the charts, too. If the game doesn't tell them to me, I'll read about them online anyway. It's just annoying when I have to read the workings of the game somewhere else than the product itself. I remember when, during the development of Lionheart, this was requested, and the lead developers said "players actually want to know that stuff?". I'd be really surprised if some people at bioware wouldn't have figured it out by now after N games.

Or he just hit her a bit too hard. Now, let us contemplate what the blood on female Hawke's face is.

Elfophile?

On a somewhat related note, I always thought a good DLC for ME1 or 2 would have been to add another voice set for Shepard.

What Azure79 said. I guess the quest itself wasn't that bad, but changing something that was supposed to have happened in a previously unvisited area to 100% reused areas was really offending, IMO.

Definitely poorer. Leliana's Song and Witch Hunt are ridiculously bad. For Bioware's DLCs, I think the ME2 ones are generally a lot better than the DA:O ones.

Yes, the Ultimate Edition. And yeah, that's pretty much my policy as well.

Supposedly there's at least 2 companions of each class, + Hawke, so you can have 3 of any class I think. They might add more in DLCs of course, like they did with Sebastion.

I never had trouble. But I played it exclusively as a single player, so maybe my character's level was higher.

I never saw much reason to play NWN as anything other than high damage melee fighter. They can just whack their way through anything. The only problems are instances where you fail a will save, but that isn't a big problem. I don't remember the details of my build, but it was basically a Fighter/Weaponmaster. If you can really crunch the numbers, you can also throw in that Disciple of Tor prestige class, or whatever it was called.

On the bio boards, it took the first thread of this video about 10 post to note the boobs. Then it was all about that. The Bio people say her breasts aren't supposed to look big though, it just looks like that in the screencap for some reason. EDIT: Might be the new look of the elves.

I don't particularly care about dual-wielding as such, as long as there are other meaningful choices. Complaining about dual-wielding is like complaining about Torment not having swords; it might have become an industry standard to include it, but when you get down to it, it's just one choice you can have, and the important thing is that you have meaningful stuff to choose from, not what those choices are. That said, while DA:O had quite alot of talents for all styles, the problem was that many of those were bugged or badly designed. I wouldn't mind it if there were less talents, if they're more useful and fun to play with now.

On that note, has Bioware said how much stuff DA2 is going have about wardens or the darkspawn? I've seen no detailed info.

If DA2 turns out to be "Mass Effect with swords", I'd be very pleased.

The main difference was abilities (about 4 in DA:O iirc, more in Awakening) that directly influenced threat-ratings, thus making enemies choose specific characters over others as targets. The gameplay idea is that you can in this way direct enemies to attack characters that can more easily shake off the attacks (the tanks) rather than the weaker ones. The bigger issue is that, if you have no way to control which enemies attack what character, that means you are encouraged to make characters with similar ability to soak damage. And this takes away from the variance of characters design, as you encouraged to design characters the same way, at least in this aspect. I can think of 3 ways to solve this: 1) Make stupid AI, that attacks the first enemy it sees, so players can solve this with easy positioning. I think the IE games had a lot of stupid AI like this, but there was several exceptions as well, even within a specific game I think. 2) Make combatant positioning count so that enemies can't attack any characters they see freely. The attacks of opportunity used NWN is one example, though I don't think it worked at all (it works fine in PnP). 3) Give the player abilities to influence what enemies attack directly. I'm not sure if WoW was the first one to do this, but it's probably the most famous.

Just commenting on stuff mentioned in the last few pages. I think WoW-style aggro-management is Teh Future for RPGs with real-time combat. It just brings a wealth of tactical options games like the IE or NWN games didn't have. Certainly, it's not very realistic, but RPGs tend to be so abstracted anyway, I'm surprised people have a problem with this at all. Now, in turn-based combat, something like the positioning of combatants would work, but I doubt it'd work in games with real-time combat. Especially if the player is expected to control all the characters. As for DA:O, it was a mess. Half the abilities were bugged or didn't work the way the game said they would, and the most effective builds were often very counterintuitive. Awakening fixed some things, but also created more weird stuff. I kinda hope Bioware has cut the amount of abilities, since they seem to be unable to QA the amount DA:O had. I'd really prefer to learn to play the game by playing the game, not by reading about the actual workings online.