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Dragon Age 2 anti-hype thread [PLEASE POST IN NEW THREAD]
Dashui
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Experience the epic sequel to the 2009 Game of the Year from the critically acclaimed makers of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. You are one of the few who escaped the destruction of your home. Now, forced to fight for survival in an ever-changing world, you must gather the deadliest of allies, amass fame and fortune, and seal your place in history. This is the story of how the world changed forever. The legend of your Rise to Power begins now.
Dragon Age 2 thrusts players into the role of Hawke, a penniless refugee who rises to power to become the single most important character in the world of Dragon Age. Known to be a survivor of the Blight and the Champion of Kirkwall, the legend around Hawke’s rise to power is shrouded in myth and rumor. Featuring an all-new story spanning 10 years, players will help tell that tale by making tough moral choices, gathering the deadliest of allies, amassing fame and fortune, and sealing their place in history. The way you play will write the story of how the world is changed forever.
Key Features:
* Embark upon an all-new adventure that takes place across an entire decade and shapes itself around every decision you make.
* Determine your rise to power from a destitute refugee to the revered champion of the land.
* Think like a general and fight like a Spartan with dynamic new combat mechanics that put you right in the heart of battle whether you are a mage, rogue, or warrior.
* Go deeper into the world of Dragon Age with an entirely new cinematic experience that grabs hold of you from the beginning and never lets go.
* Discover a whole realm rendered in stunning detail with updated graphics and a new visual style.
You are a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians. With the return of mankind's ancient foe and the kingdom engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen by fate to unite the shattered lands and slay the archdemon once and for all.
Key Features:
* Immerse yourself in a shattered world on the brink of annihiliation
* Experience complex moral decisions that have game-changing consequences
* Sculpt your hero in your own image or fantasy
* Engage in bone-crushing, visceral combat against massive and terrifying creatures
News
10/26/2010 - A new trailer, Rise to Power, has been released. You can view it here: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/rise-to-dragon-age-2/706695
10/14/2010 - The Dragon Age 2 Signature Edition has been announced. If you pre-order the game between now and January 11, 2011, your order will automatically be upgraded to the Signature Edition. It includes extra in-game weapons, a code for a new playable character, downloadable game soundtrack, and additional downloadable items. More information can be found at http://dragonage.bioware.com/da2/info/order/.
09/07/2010 - The final Dragon Age: Origins DLC, Witch Hunt, is now available for purchase. You can view more information at the following link: For more information, visit the following link: http://dragonage.bioware.com/dao/witch_hunt/.
08/17/2010 - The debut trailer for Dragon Age 2 has been released. You can view it at http://dragonage.bioware.com/.
07/08/2010 - Dragon Age 2 officially announced for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360! A debut trailer will be released on August 17th, 2010.
07/06/2010 - Dragon Age: Origins - Leliana's Song addon is now available for purchase!
"Assume the role of Leliana, a young bard involved in a criminal ring that deals in political secrets. Accompanying her mentor Marjolaine on a high-risk mission, Leliana soon finds herself entangled in a game of intrigue that she cannot escape with just her beauty, charm, or stealth. The only way out of this game is to kill or be killed."
05/18/2010 - The Dragon Age: Origins - Darkspawn Chronicles addon is now available for purchase!
"You now fight as the Darkspawn! The city of Denerim, jewel of Ferelden, girds itself for war. As a hurlock vanguard, you alone hold the power to make thralls of your fellow darkspawn and drive them into the heat of battle. Heed the archdemon's call--Denerim must burn!"
03/16/2010 - Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening expansion pack is now available for purchase!
01/29/2010 - Dragon Age: Origins - Return to Ostagar addon is now available for purchase!
"Your memories of the battle of Ostagar will haunt you for years to come. It laid waste to your order and claimed the lives of many great men and women, including the brash young King Cailan and your mentor, Duncan.
Now, there are rumors that a fellow survivor of the battle has escaped from captivity and is seeking the Grey Wardens' help. The time has come for the Grey Wardens to make their return to Ostagar and exact their revenge upon the darkspawn."
11/03/2009 - Dragon Age: Origins is now available for purchase!
10/22/2009 - Dragon Age: Journeys is now available to play.
It's a 2D flash game, free to play in your browser, and set in the Dragon Age: Origins world. Playing the game will allow you to earn exclusives items for use in Dragon Age: Origins. http://www.dragonagejourneys.com/
10/13/2009 - BioWare's Social Network website is now live! http://social.bioware.com/
From here you'll be able to access friends, groups, uploaded character information, and more, as well as being able to download the Character Creator. You can make a character, save it for use with the full game, and even upload your character to the Social Network website.
You can also download the Character Editor directly from the following link: http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_en.exe
Dragon Age: Origins - PC Mods
Many of the following links and descriptions are courtesy of Ranadiel!
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Dragon Age 2 - Articles & Reviews
PC Gamer Preview
1up Preview
Five Facts About Hawke In Dragon Age 2
Comic Con impressions from another forum; read it you silly geese!
Dialog System:
-IGN got a whole lot of things wrong about this. While the dialog system is now in a wheel, the intention of the wheel is to retain Dragon Age's dialog system while adding voice acting. Firstly, there are up to five response slots and five investigate slots on each wheel, and none of the response types in this wheel are static. There are a lot more response types than the three IGN listed, and the idea behind the symbols is to show the intent, not the result of your actions. Since there are only five response slots and more than five symbols, the types of responses you can make in each situation change as well. To give an example of how this works, you might be talking to a bandit who stopped you on the road and have the response types of friendly, aggressive, sarcastic, and flirty. Instead of defusing the situation, choosing the friendly option might result in you getting robbed since the bandit isn't scared of you, while choosing the aggressive option might scare them away. Since there is no morality meter, there is no arbitrary penalty for choosing one option over the other. However, if you're say, talking to a ten year old boy, some of the options like flirty might disappear while others are added in.
-The other thing they wanted to do was make your personality very mutable despite having voice acting. BioWare views Shepard as having a very pre-defined personality, where he is a stoic marine no matter what type of dialog you choose. With Hawke, they implemented the intent icons so you know what your character will do when choosing a dialog option. One of the issues with Mass Effect is that choosing the paragon option might result in you punching someone in the face, which could be the exact opposite of what you intended to happen, even though it would ultimately be the paragon choice. With Dragon Age 2, only the aggressive option would result in you punching someone in the face, but the morality of that decision won't be indicated. However, since you always [know] Hawke's intent, you can choose to make your character have the same generally friendly demeanor to both the kid picking flowers and the serial murderer if you really want to.
Combat System:
-I'm not entirely clear on what they changed for the console version of the game, so I can't really shed any light there.
-For the PC game, it largely plays the same, but so far they have announced three notable changes.
* The first change is that they wanted to remove what they viewed as the "Dragon Age Shuffle". When playing the game near release, they started to notice several issues with their combat system, and they gave three examples of the types of issues they wanted to solve. The first is that, after shield bashing someone, it would take so long for your character to get into place to attack again that the person you shield based would already be getting up, causing you to only get one hit in before they got back up. The second is that you could get into situations where your warrior would try to attack an enemy, but that enemy would be going for you mage, and your warrior was so slow at attacking that the enemy would be able to just run on past them. Once your mage started fleeing the oncoming attacker, you would end up with a situation where the mage, the enemy, and the warrior would run around in a train chasing each other, with none of them being able to attack or use abilities fast enough to change the situation. The third they listed was that after telling your rogue to shoot someone with a critical strike arrow, your rogue with start to pull an arrow out of the quiver, but in that time, the enemy may have moved out of range, causing your rogue to move back into range and then start pulling an arrow out of the quiver again. By the time your rogue was finally ready to fire an arrow, the target might already be dead. Their solution to this was to make all the abilities much more immediate and rework the engagement system so that you don't walk around until you're facing one of the exact angles the game expects you to be in to actually attack. If you want to fire a critical arrow, your arrow will actually fire instead of having a 1+ second warm up time, and instead of spending shuffling into position, your warriors will just leap into battle and start attacking.
* Another thing they changed was that they felt that almost all the interest of the battle system revolved around controlling your mage, so in order to try and make the other classes more interesting to use, they added combination attacks to the other classes as well. For example, sundering armor now increases the damage of backstab. Combined with the previously mentioned change, they feel that the other classes will be more interesting to play now.
* The final change they listed was that they felt there were a lot of mage spells that were either clones of other spells, pretty much useless, or so situationally useful that they were pretty much irrelevant. So for Dragon Age 2, they lowered the total number of spells with the goal of making a larger number of useful spells, and they also added a customization system to each of the spells allowing you to make fairly large changes to the way they work over the course of the game.
Companions:
-BioWare felt that in Dragon Age 1, when talking with your companions, the game penalized you for choosing any dialog options except the one that would make their reputation go up, causing players to always choose the dialog option their companions preferred, even if it disagreed with how their character acted during the rest of the game. In order to address this, BioWare changed the dialog system so that you could have an antagonistic relationship with your companions while still unlocking bonuses and not having them abandon you solely based on their reputation. However, having an antagonistic relationship with a companion character will change their combat behavior in ways they haven't revealed yet.
Dragon Age: Origins - Articles & Reviews
Witch Hunt the Penny Arcade Dragon Age comic
5/5 - Giant Bomb review - "However, as the sort of guy that has lovingly played an Infinity Engine game at least once every year for the past decade, I can think of no higher praise for this throwback than to say that Dragon Age: Origins leaves me feeling fairly confident I won't need to dig out the classics for this ritual next year."
9.5/10 - GameSpot video review - "If you're hungry for a fantastical original fantasy setting, an awesome story filled with memorable characters, and fun multi-layered questing, Dragon Age will fill you up. This is the RPG you've been waiting for, the one that's going to keep you up at night and invade your dreams."
94/100 - PC Gamer UK - "Roleplaying games now have a great deal to live up to."
9.2/10 - UK IGN PC - "Bioware’s achievements in all this are incredible. It cannot be stressed enough at the depth of the universe they have conjured. Every corner you look, there is a sense of age, of something old. Entire mythologies for multiple cultures have been brewed up, entire religions mapped out in their own belief systems, history that stretches back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Cities look lived in, worn – majestic and squalid places that spill with times gone by and a sense of place. The castles look like they have been there for centuries, and truly, there is an uncertain sense that they have been. That Ferelden and its inhabitants were waiting patiently in the wings for all this time, waiting for their chance to shine. Well, like the Grey Wardens, their time has come. Let us unite then, and in the words of an old friend: We shall show those cursed Darkspawn our hearts – and then show them theirs."
92/100 - Absolute Games review - "It has everything that is sought by the most jaded fans of the genre..."
9.1/10 - Gametrailers video review
90/100 - Game Informer review - "Even more than Mass Effect, the nation of Ferelden feels like a fully realized setting with its own history, conflicts, and power groups."
8/10 - Eurogamer PC review - "In its desperation to infuse this setting with 'maturity' - be it of the sober, political kind, or the game's painfully clumsy gore and sex - BioWare has forgotten the key ingredient of any fantasy: the fantastical. Without it, you're still left with a competent, often compelling, impressively detailed and immense RPG, but it's one that casts no spell."
The People of Dragon Age: Origins – An Interview with Sten, Wynne and the Tower Guard
Dragon Age 2 - Screenshots
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Dragon Age: Origins - Screenshots
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Dragon Age: Origins - PC System Requirements
Spoiler:
Dashui on
Xbox Live & PSN: Vacorsis
Posts
Is this what we are reduced to complaining about?
If I am going Sword + Board Warrior as my main for a hard play through, what should I respec Alistar to? If I keep him a tank, I may go the two-handed tank route the DA wiki has in it. Supposed to be good DPS and a great "off-tank".
S&B warrior has a nice 300 vibe, plus if you pump strength, you can do a nice chunk of damage and still be pretty impossible to kill, as long as you got a healer and massive plate, you don't need more than the 26 dex for the shield talents. Champion/Templar is best, but champion/Reaver works well too. All the stuns and knockdowns are pretty nice. I like to RP as a nice Reaver.
I also use precise striking and wear a lot of plus crit and crit damage gear, you can pump out some 250 crits often if you use the Blightblood from the darkspawn DLC. Vigilance in Awakenings and Sentinal armor can get you crits above 500. Spirit Warrior is awesome too.
You don't have to be all defensive when going S&B. To me, it's more fun to dps tank. Only hard fight is Harvester, but most people skip him anyhow. I usually respec Alistair to 2h sword and Leliana to either DW or a better bow, depends on how I'm feeling.
Edit: I'm talking about nightmare difficulty btw.
Let's Play Mass Effect - Set 6 Updated 9/8/2012
Specific to DA2, or do I get to rant about how all the DLC I want coming 7th of September is part of plot of some kind?
I just saw the new trailer for Dragon Age II. That was pretty sweet. And I don't usually get excited about fantasy stuff.
I have plenty of (ps3) games already, and now I find a new one. I have read that the first game is really, really good, no matter the version.
Personally I think if you're using two Warriors one going S&B Tank and the other going 2H DPS is the best idea. That way there's zero weapon conflict, plus 2H Warriors are really easy to gear fast (just go get Ageless right after Lothering and he's set for basically the whole game unless you want to make him the 2H Starfang or something).
If you're using multiple melee characters I highly suggest employing Haste from some number of Mages. My first full playthrough (after getting my legs on Normal) was on Nightmare with an Arcane Warrior Warden, Alistair, Wynne, and Morrigan with both the Warden and Wynne having Haste. With double Haste active the Warden had ~130 damage with S&B (using the Cailan's Arms set for the +mana regen) and Alistair had ~115 damage with the one-handed Starfang. With Tactics set up properly I basically just point and clicked on enemies one at a time for every fight that didn't have a red-level boss, sometimes micro a stun or AOE. I got Haste because I find the normal attack speed WAY too slow, and it's also so much nicer in general just running around thanks to the massive movespeed boost.
You might want to check the DAWiki about the Haste attack speed bugs (2x Haste doesn't break it) and keep in mind that it consumes mana to keep up so you need some kind of regen gear to offset it.
http://beta.humugus.com/index.php/auth/register/inv/1966
I think the point was it is blood magic. He hurt himself to do it. He probably didn't want to do it.
Yeah. I would say it's obvious that Hawke is Morrigan's spawn baby, but I don't think the timelines work out? IE, he would already be a man when that whole thing happened.
So it kinda makes you wonder what his story is...
Also I agree about the length for the new DLC. If it's not 3x as long as Golems at least, I'm not getting it.
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
Let's Play Mass Effect - Set 6 Updated 9/8/2012
"Save successfully imported!
LOL GAME OVER"
Your sister is stacked.
Thats you're sister? You knows people are gonna wants the inces...
...nevermind :rotate:
And they generally aren't staring off into space anymore. Which is obvious in movement, but I guess less so in still screenshots?
new look. The hair horns? Really? Only Maleficent can pull that off!
Although I guess we shouldn't really focus too much on what Hawke does in the trailer since Vsove said that the trailer is basically there to make Hawke look badass, not to give us any kind of gameplay info.
well, she's not your IRL sister, right, so it's ok
Self harm is weird and creepy.
wait for it...
....
...
you know ..
..its coming...
the dream collaboration.......
DRAGON AGE.......
+
Also, of course you're not Morrigan's time-traveling paradox god-baby. You must be Flemeth's demon-dragon-baby. The final boss will be Morrigan's baby (a 10 year old, canceling Little Lamplight from Fallout 3 out), who will then be assimilated into a Harvester and thus will the set-up for Dragon Age 3 be complete.
The god baby will not be a part of Dragon Age 2.
EDIT: Hey Vsove, what are you responsible for on DA2?