Review rating out of 10 not 5

[Bob]

It's no Mass Effect though is it?

[Dan Howdle]

I think that depends on which way you lean. I know some people prefer fantasy, some sci-fi, some both. I certainly think ME2 is a better game, but not by much. Not by much at all. Unless it's merely graphics you're looking at in which case ME2 is streets ahead. In terms of fundamental structure and story, the two are on a par for me. It just so happens I prefer sci-fi, so ME wins.

Just.

[Johnny Shoulder]

Unfortunately Oblivion killed the fantasy genre in video games for me. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing it overall but by the end of the game I was sick of it and never wanted to see it again. I'm not saying I'm never gonna play Dragons Age, but the Oblivion experience has put me off fantasy games. Unless by fantasy I mean erotic, but thats a different matter all together...

[j2000_nr]

Yay! Win!

That's awesome, I'm really glad so many other people love DA as much as me. Literally cannot wait for DA2.

Dude, I've already got it on pre - order. It's going to be epic.

[Optikal.]

So long as DA2 has a realtime combat system and not that nonsesense in the first they tried to pass of as combat.

And Oblivion was shit.

[The_Deleted]

I really shoulfd get back to DA. It's one of those games I have every intention of spending some serious time with, proper gaming marathon, but just don't have the time or mental energy. Same with RDR.

[j2000_nr]

So long as DA2 has a realtime combat system and not that nonsesense in the first they tried to pass of as combat.

And Oblivion was shit.

I see what your saying about the combat in DA:O, it wasn't that bad though, it certainly felt solid enough for me

Oblivion was the first 'real' RPG I played on the 360. IMO it's still one of the best

Why do you dislike it mate?

[Havantgottaclue]

The combat in Dragon Age is excellent, it's just not what some expect. There's no pretence that it's action based, it simply plays the movements out in time according to the players' stats, which it has to do because it's an RPG first and an action game, erm, well ... not even second actually. It's an RPG through and through with no action elements at all IMHO, which moves it away from Mass Effect, which it resembles in its presentation and narrative. It took me a while to get used to because around the time of Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale I was playing Colonization and not a lot else, and wasn't interested in RPGs. I had a boxed set of Baldur's Gate II, Shadows of Amn but never really played it - shame on me!

But this kind of half-real time half strategic combat isn't that unusual and although it was never going to work perfectly on the 360, it's pretty good actually. I have only played the 360 game on normal and I bet it's really difficult to keep party members out of the way of bombs and AoE spells on hard, which you have to do on higher difficulties because they do damage to your own NPCs.

What you have is a game where you need to balance the abilities of all the members of the party and get them to complement each other. Every time I've played it I've always tried to select a team with balanced abilities but you always go around thinking 'if only I had Morrigan/Sten/Leliana because I could do with [insert skill here]'. You always have to make do with what you've got, which makes the perfect battle something you're always trying to achieve.

I love the way the combat makes you think tactically but still puts time pressure on you. In my first game I played very badly - didn't really know how to build a decent character (he was sort of a warrior but I gave him dual-wield skills because they looked cool so he ended up being not a bad damager but too vulnerable), didn't max up the party's approval ratings as I did in subsequent plays, and had to make a few shortcuts (like caving in to Kolgrim first time around and only handing him his arse later on outside the temple). I was well short of where I needed to be for the last match in the Provings in Orzammar and spent literally minutes at points with my finger on the left trigger scanning the enemies and deciding who needed to use a special skill, who needed a potion, and so on. What you don't want to see in those situations is a team member that's still alive but is going to be brown bread soon after you start the action again because they're stunned and can't take a potion. Especially if it's Wynne who's usually your bail-out specialist.

TBH for Bioware to have got anything like as close to the level of popularity with DA:O as they did with ME is something of an achievement in its own right. After all, they risked massively falling between two stools with this. It is quite clearly a pared down version of Baldur's Gate and could have been criticized for offering a 'watered down' RPG experience. It probably is in some quarters, and even I wish they'd included skills such as Runecrafting in the original rather than just the expansion pack - or at least allowed you to install the enhancements into the original game once you bought the expansion. But I think there are more than enough types of talents and spells to keep you interested and there's little in the way of duplication or redundancy. I mean, how many different types of damage over time spell (for example) do you need?!?

[Johnny Shoulder]

HGC, hows does the PC version differ to the 360? Is there much difference between the two combat systems?

[Havantgottaclue]

The way the combat works is exactly the same on PC as it does on 360 - it's just that on PC you have some control and viewing differences that can give you a bit of an advantage.

You can view combat from above - if you scroll out with the mousewheel the roof disappears (if there is one!) and you see the party from above. Obviously there are advantages tactically in being able to view it that way.

The advantage I found most useful was being able to pause the game and use the mouse to instruct every character as to where to move. You can of course pause on the 360 and use the D-pad to choose the enemy to attack, but it's fiddly. It's much easier on PC - you just select the character with LMB and click RMB on the enemy you want them to attack. Even more importantly though, you can select each character and direct them to where to move by selecting the spot on the floor. This makes a whole load of things much easier, in particular getting characters out of the way when you want to use bombs or spells like Cone of Cold. I always enjoyed using Cone of Cold on 360 but you'd have to move Morrigan (or whichever character you've assigned that skill to) around the front line in real time and hope that the line was still there by the time you got there. On the PC you can instruct Morrigan to move whilst instructing other characters to move slightly to line the enemies up for her (tanks in particular will pull enemies around with them). Maneuvering assassin rogues around the back of enemies is a lot easier this way too, especially if you're operating in tandem with a tank.

You can also assign skills, potions and other items to quick slots accessed via the number keys, but as you have the pause facility I find it just easier to select it from the bar at the bottom of the screen than use the keys.

To be fair the 360 version holds up well as it still basically includes all the skills and talents that the PC version does. The pause/radial menu combination preserves quite a lot of the tactical play but it can't quite make up for the lack of overhead view and individual movement.

[Keep 117]

Just watched a few trailers for DAO2, looks like a beautiful game!
Expected release March 11, 2011 – EU

Anyone snagged by the combat system,i never found a problem with it, it just seems to get a few so I doubt Bioware will do any major overhaul on it!

[Venomous Albino]

Just watched a few trailers for DAO2, looks like a beautiful game!
Expected release March 11, 2011 – EU

Yeah, exactly the same bloody day as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. If 2K and Gearbox announce that Duke Nukem Forever is coming out on the same day, I swear it'll be WHITE FURY!!! time.

[Johnny Shoulder]

Yeah, exactly the same bloody day as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. If 2K and Gearbox announce that Duke Nukem Forever is coming out on the same day, I swear it'll be WHITE FURY!!! time.

Duke Nukem US Release Date

[Venomous Albino]

Yeah I read about that a while back, but tend not to trust dates that retailers put on their sites unless I've heard it from the horse's mouth first.

There's still potentially reason for WHITE FURY!!!

[j2000_nr]

Yeah I read about that a while back, but tend not to trust dates that retailers put on their sites unless I've heard it from the horse's mouth first.

There's still potentially reason for WHITE FURY!!!

Does white fury involve Chuck Norris? If not it probably should