Dragon Age did get at least one thing right though

[LeStryfe79]

I beat DA:O on Nightmare with a shitty sword and board main and no mages in my party for most of the game. Could be easily soloed with a rogue or mage as well.

 

[Roguey]

BG2 is pretty easy if you stick to the crit path.

Granted that crit path gets a little loose in chapter 2 but there's enough relatively-easy content for you to complete to make enough money to proceed to chapter 3.

 

[Dreaad]

Really? I died something like 20 times to first ogre in the tower on nightmare.... in the end I had to switch everyone to a ranged weapon and kite the fucker for 10 minutes because he one shot everyone. Potions and heal spells had cool downs, so unless you had at least two mages with multiple heal spells, it was almost impossible to keep everyone alive fight to fight. Maybe I just suck at positioning in that game or something.

As for pre knowledge for BG2. That's true, you would often stumble into a fight and get your ass handed to you, then you quick load, buff and annihilate everything. Late game, someone like Viconia has -20 AC and 50% resist and can literally buy you one or two minutes to consider your options even if you weren't prepared.

 

[Lhynn]

To me BGII was p. hard, even vanilla, hard enough that a lot of seemingly easy fights could eat up a lot of resources or outright kill me or my team. With metaknowlege the game becomes a lot easier, but the first run the game is p. nasty. finding yourself surrounded by invisible thieves, fighting beholders, fighting illithids, fighting dragons, fighting umber hulks and having bad luck on saving throws, and a ton etc. Before you know what you are facing and how to prepare game is p. unforgivable, once you know what comes and how to deal with it, congrats, you have mastered the encounter.

Game has the right kind of difficulty, the one that is overcome with knowlege and a bit of clever thinking. As for DA:O i never needed to implement more than one approach to every fight in the game, cannot believe you would classify that as "hard".

 

[pippin]

I don't see the point of comparing the games with mods. I know those are an important factor for many games, but it's just not how it was originally conceived. After 150 mods, any game can be the best game ever. Sometimes you just have to relax and enjoy games how they really were, and if you don't, then it simply means you don't like the game. I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but I say this as a person who enjoys playing vanilla Morrowind and New Vegas, among others.

 

[Great Deceiver]

IIRC they took this feature from Final Fantasy XII.

Spoiler

I kid you not.

They did, but the Gambit system in FFXII was incomparably better and more robust.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

Comparing BG2 and DA:O, difficulty-wise, from a powergaming perspective seems silly. Both games are far too similar to make any meaningful comparison from such a standpoint. Both games are single-player affairs with static gameworlds and non-adaptive AI. There are no significant random elements nor reflexive requirements. Neither game is a fangame/doujin outing and is tuned for a commercial release. The systems in each game are reasonably clear and well documented. Given the thousands (millions?) of player hours invested and the communicative technology of the internet, it's not hard to "break" or "solve" these games if one is so inclined.

So while getting into a pissing contest about which game is more difficult can be great fun (hey, sperging about game mechanics is often as, or more, amusing than playing games), reaching any sort of objective consensus is going to be damn near impossible. There's going to be a whole bunch of squabbling about minutiae, and placing games under drastically different levels of scrutiny. And this is without factoring in all the variability that comes in with difficulty in role-laying games; all the latitude the player is granted in assembling their party or playing their character(s) makes a uniform challenge experience across the playerbase virtually impossible. I don't find it inconceivable that one could struggle with DA:O and succeed easily in BG2 (or vice versa).

All that said, I don't exactly see the fun in powergaming DA:O, especially when compared to BG2.

Most of the powerful stuff is extremely straightforward in how it can be utilized; there's not a lot of goofy, fun plays to make like in BG2 that please my inner Johnny. Power plays in Dragon Ages: Origins are rather, to appropriate a term from Greenberg, predigested. Something like Mana Clash is extremely powerful in the most obvious way. Making a mage into a walking juggernaut is as simple as throwing up all the Arcane Warrior buffs, and maybe one from the Earth line. Crowd control and debuffs are extremely useful in almost all situations and easy to use; Force Field/Crushing Prison and the Hexes are all great spells, but extremely straightforward in how they're used.

BG2's a little more complex by comparison. None of the lines of play are as complex as breaking through tough chess openers or piloting Doomsday Fetchland Tendrils or what-have-you, but that's to be expected. This is just a single-player cRPG, after all. But at least there's a bit more "play" in the powergaming. Getting the equivalent of Mana Clash to disable mages unconditionally involves burning a Protection From Magic scroll, of which there are only 3 in the game, on any given mage, fully disabling their spellcasting abilities. Turning oneself into a juggernaut can be achieved by many different means including, but not limited to:

-The good, old Fighter/Mage stacks. Stoneskin, PfMW, Mirror Image, Tenser's Transformation, Mislead, etc. There's lots of ways to negate all sorts of attacks.
-Ranger(/Clerics). Grab the Defender of Easthaven and Roranach's Horn, then stack with Hardiness and Armor of Faith.
-Barbarians operate similarly to Rangers, except they rely on natural damage resistance rather than AoF.
-(Fighter/)Cleric/Mages who can put a couple of Regeneration spells into a Chain Contingency with an (Improved) Haste and restore HP at a ludicrous rate.
-Having Viconia or Thief Bhaalspawn with Use Any Item hitting 100% Magic Resistance given the correct items (Human Flesh, Amulet of the Seldarine, Carsomyr).

Like I said, none of this requires some astronomical IQ or insight. Plays like this merely require a little bit of creativity and preparation, enough to make them feel a bit more rewarding.

What really sinks DA:O's powergaming fun, though, is the game structure. So much content is wrapped up in linear questlines, making routing replays a lot less interesting than BG2, in which less content is tied at the waist to other pieces. Once you hit Chapter 2 there are so many different permutations of quest order which DA:O can't really boast of.

And speaking of routing....

I can accumulate 300,000 gold in BG2 within 1 hour, legally and without tedious exploits.

I'm curious as to how you do this without some sort of "engine" (e.g. stack underflow, abusing fences). There are a lot of surplus valuable items, particularly gems/consumables/+1equips, laying about Athkatla, but it would probably take a lot more than an hour to gather up enough to sell for 300,000.

I can see routes to acquire lots of gold straight from the Chapter 2 intro cutscene, such as:

~30,000 from selling everything from the Copper Coronet and Slaver Stockade quests
~50,000 from liquidating everything associated with the Mae'Var questline (including Renal's payout)
~15,000 from triggering "random" encounters (Arbane's Short Sword encounter, mostly)
~30,000 from a fire sale of the Slave Lords compound
Optional: Trade a Rogue Stone from Mae'Var's guild to fight the Twisted Rune for ~7.5K (net 5K)

But this will take a bit more than an hour, assuming near-perfect play, and is far short of 300K.

 

[Perkel]

OP is faggot.

DA:O is fucking decline on all fronts.

From skiltrees that were fucking boring, to spells, abilities. Fucking armors and weapons were shit to for most of the time.
Also game was made with third person camera in mind not with isometric and even when you fucking run isometric it works like shit.

Then there is story and as BG2 storywise wasn't really good but it contained fuckton of good sidequests and stuff to do where in DA:O case is one big "meh" and shit ton of trash mobs everywhere.

But you can fuck people so i guess your whore avatar answers why game is better for you.
On other hand if you compare it to post BG2 RPGs they made it is incline thought. (no i don't care that NWN was good mp tool, fuck you)

Lore was interesting especially about mages and fade but they fucking wasted it for one of the most boring quests and presentations.

And now for fatality let's compare actual dungeons.
You know what let's not because DA:O dungeons are joke compared to bg2 ones.


Then there is music, voice actin and even graphic which in DA:O looks like shit and sounds like shit where in BG2 case all of them work in tandem to deliver one of best presentations ever. There are ton of areas that are simply good looking where i can't remember and good looking area in DA:O because most of the time they looked like shit.

 

[Sykar]

Really? I died something like 20 times to first ogre in the tower on nightmare.... in the end I had to switch everyone to a ranged weapon and kite the fucker for 10 minutes because he one shot everyone. Potions and heal spells had cool downs, so unless you had at least two mages with multiple heal spells, it was almost impossible to keep everyone alive fight to fight. Maybe I just suck at positioning in that game or something.

As for pre knowledge for BG2. That's true, you would often stumble into a fight and get your ass handed to you, then you quick load, buff and annihilate everything. Late game, someone like Viconia has -20 AC and 50% resist and can literally buy you one or two minutes to consider your options even if you weren't prepared.

I needed like 5 reloads for the entire game on my first run on hard. Flemeth and the one dragon needed 1 each, can't remember the others. The Ogre was a joke, just keep running with the character he is chasing.
BG 2 I needed 2 dozen reloads easily. Shit Kangax without Anti Magic Scroll was bonkers. Unseeing Eye used PW:Kill on my sub 60 HP mage the second it appeared. Lich in the Underdark wiped my party. Twisted Rune was a hardcore figh with a Beholder, Vampire, Lich, high level fighter and a cleric. Tolgierias and Lavok could one shot any party going into Planar Sphere rather early and you cannot avoid the fights once the Sphere takes off, which happens fairly early. I could list tons more fights which were memorable so in comparison I can just say there was nothing in DA:O even remotely as challenging.

Difficulty is also a joke with the HP bloat. BG 2 was cheap as well by increasing enemy damage to 200%, but at least you could still kill them just as fast.

 

[Roguey]

Difficulty is also a joke with the HP bloat. BG 2 was cheap as well by increasing enemy damage to 200%, but at least you could still kill them just as fast.

Difficulty settings don't touch HP at all. At the most, nightmare adds 5% to enemy resistances, which is negligible.

 

[Sykar]

Difficulty is also a joke with the HP bloat. BG 2 was cheap as well by increasing enemy damage to 200%, but at least you could still kill them just as fast.

Difficulty settings don't touch HP at all. At the most, nightmare adds 5% to enemy resistances, which is negligible.

So the terrible HP bloat persists throughout the entirety of the game. Doesn't make it better even one bit.

 

[Roguey]

So the terrible HP bloat persists throughout the entirety of the game. Doesn't make it better even one bit.

Enemies take longer to kill in DA:O than the IE games on average but I wouldn't call them bloated. Because of various other systematic decisions, it's necessary they be able to survive sustained damage from four different sources at once.

 

[Bubbles]

To get any challenge from DA:O, even in Nightmare mode, you need to either a) go into the game completely blind and know as little as possible about game mechanics and RPGs in general, or b) do a non-rogue solo run.

 

[J1M]

Love it or hate it, there is no denying that Dragon Age was much less unweildy than BG (that game that origins was a spiritual successor of) when it came to controlling the actions of each individual group member than Baldurs Gate. BGII was ****ing micromanagement hell, especially once you hit around epic levels and had to take on armies of giants, demons and Dragons in the BGII expansion. I kid you not when I say that I actually spent more than HALF of my gameplay time in BGII: ToB just moving characters around, casting spells and squinting through all of the speciall effects. All so I could make slight adjustments to my formations before letting the fighting proceed for fractions of a second. That type of compexity in gameplay has no place in a real time with pause game at all, and sadly a lot of that aggavation had nothing at all to do with the gameplay, but poorly designed interfaces and no obvious ways of modifying AI scripts.

See how each companion in DAO has the status bar running parallel with the skill buttons? See how an ability bubble pops up above the head of the characters whenever one is used? See how you could script characters to automatically handle basic tasks such as drinking some health whenever it drops too low? These type of design decisions are fairly obvious nowadays, but it sadly didn't occur to the BG team. And I think that PE eternity could improve the feedback even further by dividing the short term status effects from the long term. I must have been a much more patient person than I was 10 years ago, because I just can't replay BGII anymore without getting bored or frustrated at how unweildy the interface design is and how I control even the most basic actions of my group all of the time because they're dumb.

Basically, please be more like Origins and less like BGII.

I wouldn't count on Bioware ever making another game like that. Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition have really shitty, pointless, combat.

 

[Roguey]

To get any challenge from DA:O, even in Nightmare mode, you need to either a) go into the game completely blind and know as little as possible about game mechanics and RPGs in general, or b) do a non-rogue solo run.

I was challenged in DA:O on my second playthrough as a mage because of self-imposed restrictions. ^_^

 

[pippin]

b) do a non-rogue solo run.

I had a little laugh at this detail, especially if you go on to Awakening and your rogue(s) end up being better fighters than any warrior. What would Josh say?