Boo!!!

Agreed, I couldn't tolerate DA2; I found it to be lame and repetitive.

Skyrim, the SWTOR beta and my guild's 6 year anniversary this weekend, gonna be great!

I absolutely adore TES, but I strongly disagree. As I'm sure you're aware, it all depends what you prefer in a game. DA:O provoked the strongest emotional reaction I've had from a game yet, that alone makes it my favorite. But there are so many more reasons.

Two words:
Reused Dungeons

Seriously that was just lazy game developing, they didn't even listen to what the fans were saying I was on the forums before it came out, the devs basically lied to all of us. Glitchy game, reused dungeons, waaaaay shorter than DA:O.

there were some good points, the writing, story, and characters were pretty good, graphics were a step up from DA:O too.
Overall, i wouldn't waste my time on it.

This.

Not. Oblivion svcked.

Get DA:O instead, or better yet...

Skyrim.

Dragon Age 2 is one of the worst games I've ever played IMO; which is why you should play it OP. It will give you a greater appreciation for Skyrim, and like the others said; you'll probably be able to finish it quickly anyway.

It was the worst TES game.

OB can't have been that crap, i put over 300 hours into it, over 2 playthroughs. Slightly more with the DLC's.... and i'm on console so no, mods wasn't included in that play-time...

People have WAY too much free time on their hands.

I tried to sit idly by as the rampant hate for DA2, that (in my opinion) was unwarranted, perpetuated this thread.

You broke that attempt.

Alright, first of all, to the person I quoted: I completely disagree. Oblivion has allowed me to spend hundreds of hours in the game, which no other game in existence besides MAYBE Minecraft, other TES/Fallout games, and WoW, can say. It's one of the greatest video game masterpieces of all time. It had a grand, open world, and a very good atmosphere. For it's time, the graphics were great, and the combat was awesome. I don't have to explain my case any further, because Oblivion is one of the greatest games that ever blessed the market.

Now, onto DA2. If it were not for the fact that it was the successor to DA:O, it would be a very good game. Bioware attempted to fix the problem with the XBOX's version of DA:O's evident sluggishness in combat. I commend them for that, as most developers rarely change anything about their games. Not to mention the fact that EA was clearly rushing the hell out of them. They barely took a year to develop the game, and the had to ship out a sloppy game. For all the odds against them, DA2 was a good game.

The characters in the group were fairly deep, and I genuinely liked many of them. Aveline, Varric, and Isabela were some of the best characters I've seen in games. Mainly because they LOOKED like a flat, two dimensional character, unless you dug deep and took every ounce of their personality out. Others weren't as good, and had several design flaws, and weren't as deep. On the outside, looking at the group made you think that some teenager slapped it together. But, digging down, they all had good design and stories. Fenris, in particular, knocked me on my ass when I finally got around to bringing him along. Here I thought he was some JRPG, white-haired emo elf, and he turned out to be a loyal and brutal, and actually changed throughout the story, depending on what you did.

I truly liked DA2. I'm not saying that to be a hipster. When I finished it, and went on to various forums and saw all the hate, I had to double take and ask if we played the same game.

Edit: Regardless of any of that, I still got about three playthroughs from the game. To me, that was more than 60 hours, not to mention the playthroughs I started. Most games can't boast that much.

Really, I saw DA2 as childish cartoon graphics..........Darkspawn now look like comic book villians instead of hellish soldiers. Horrible Mortal Combat hack and slash gameplay. Lastly, Bad story and quests. A very cheaply made game if you ask me. They rushed it because they were too busy still making Mass Effect 3.

If you thought Oblivion had samey dungeons you'd be in for a nasty surprise finding out that all of the dungeons in DA2 aren't simply samey, they're the exact same two or three dungeons reused over and over and over again.

Honestly the game was simply awful; the combat was dumbed down and uninteresting, fighting wave after wave after wave of enemies only to move six feet and repeat the same process. Have you ever played Left for Dead and seen the AI spawn 40 zombies behind a single cardboard box? DA2 was like that only not actually hilarious because it happened all of the time and it was so obviously and painfully scripted. All of the areas and quests were rinse and repeat and it got very old very fast.

The only redeeming features that the game had were its above average writing and characters, but even then it paled in comparison to Dragon Age: Origins, to which the game rightfully should be compared. It was perhaps one of the single biggest let-downs I have ever experienced, and I say that with plenty of love for Bioware and the original game.

i say play it, cause youre gonna forget about it the moment you start playing skyrim. sure, its a complete failure of a new direction for bioware and probably their worst game yet, but compared to most other bad games out there, DA2 is the king of the trash!

The characters might get on your nerves sometimes... okay, A LOT, but the 2nd act is fairly decent and most of those characters you can completely screw over... or really, they all pretty much screw themselves over, but its still mildly satisfying and might make up for the wholly unsatisfying ending.

Yeah play it now.
Once you play Skyrim you'll want to take your Dragon Age 2 disc, [censored] on it, set it on fire, and smash what's left with a hammer.
Such a horrible game, and it's a shame because DA 1 was pretty good.

As someone who played Dragon Age Origins 19 times without skipping quests (mods) and then playing DA2 4 times, I can say that you'll find more enjoyment in Skyrim than DA2. I did like some of the companions but I do think the game was poorly written and poorly executed with average DLC.

Loved Origins, was horribly disappointed by DA2. That said, after replaying 2 a few times, it's grown on me, and I can honestly say that it has a number of aspects that I like better than Origins. It's major flaw in my opinion was the reuse of areas - its set up from the beginning to have you revisiting the same environments, with the game taking place over three episodes each revisiting the same city, whereas Origins had you visiting a number of very different settings throughout the story. Then they took it one ludicrous step further and only produced one each of their generic cave/sewer/ruin/etc settings, blocking off sections to change your path so that they could palm it off as a new area. Second problem would be the loot, you can't customize your companions beyond rings and weapons, and even with their cash grab DLC item packs the gear for your main character is frustratingly linear - there always seems to be one single "best option" for your character at any given level.

As stated in this thread the story is good, and the characters are interesting and well written. I found the graphics to be a bit too cartoonish compared to Origins, but they are more striking at times and higher quality. Where it shines though, in my opinion, is the combat. People that complain about it being dumbed down are probably playing on a lower difficulty setting. You can't get through everything on nightmare unless you pay attention to some of the subtler aspects - basic dps alone won't cut it. You have to pay attention to cross class combos, balance critical chance/critical damage, picking the right passive abilities, party composition (especially tanking damage). Those pain in the @$% assassins add some real tension to combat and present you with a challenge that Origins really lacked (I can practically let that game play itself now if I set my companion tactics up right). On higher difficulties though the boss fights can drag on or seem impossible, unless you've set your party up right, bringing the right people and setting them up with the right resistances and elemental damages, etc.

If you have time to kill between now and Skyrim, I'd say try it out. If you hate it you can drop it for Skyrim, if not, you're enjoying yourself so what does it matter if you start playing Skyrim a little later?

No its not, they took an astonishing successful game and completely changed it. Its like taking a FPS like call of duty or battlefield, and turning it into a puzzle game. Its a big "**** you" to all of the fans of the original. Instead of the slower tactical, and more realistic type of combat, we got stuck with a dynasty warrior type system, with ridiculously over the top combat moves. They changed almost all of the lore (Hello, dark spawn are not medieval man at arms, Qunari don't look like that, The characters are absolutely unforgettable, with next to no depth in any of them. Combined with terrible visuals, and a story that ends just as soon as anything gets interesting without anything really being resolved. Then the dialogue itself was downright annoying, the game beats you over the head with an "us vs them" mentality, lazy moduls (they rescued so many of the same textures from DA:O!) and a constant return to the same 12 or so locations, over and over again. ODST drop type RESPAWNS- Dragon age does not have respawning enemies, that defeats the whole point of combat pacing!


The only redeeming thing about the game, apart from the 10 or so minutes at the end of each story arch that is mildly interesting, are the improved interface, and the fact the main character has a voice. Everything else was a complete disaster.


It wasn't even half the original time ffs, i thought "Oh finally, a new location and i'm out of this bleeding' city" only for the game to END after 20 hours. I bought the game based on name alone, Bioware name, dragon age name, and the development team. This game was a rushed, rebooted, disaster.

If it was DA:Origins, i`d say yeah, it`s a good game and you will enjoy it most probably.
DA2? I wouldn`t recommend it to anyone, on fear of being locked in stocks and pelted with soggy cabbages.

Dragon Age 2 < Skyrim

IMO

DA2? RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! Seriously. It's as if BioWare and EA spitted in the face of DA1 >_<

Chuck that filth in the bin. It's an abomination, it's a dirty smear on the face of gaming.

That's the problem right there... it was a bad successor to DA:O, but it would've been an acceptable hack&slash title if it stood on its own feet. They did some interesting things with the game mechanics, not only the sluggish combat. Funny though, when DA:O came out, everybody was complaining about starting combat, fetching a cup of coffee, drinking it while watching your guy swing his sword and so on. Then they make it faster and suddenly it's no longer okay to have fast paced combat. The ingredient gathering mechanic was interesting too, rewarding exploration as opposed to node farming (find sources instead of camping one known spawn). But it all got drowned out by the massive fanbase of DA:O that was expecting something different.

By giving you Dragon Age 2, your brother has proven that he hates you and wants you to be miserable. You should disown him immediately and convince your parents to leave him out of the will.