After 4 hours or so I have to say the game was streamlined, tactical combat is there but feels a little forced, but God damn this game is awesome anyway. Great visuals, great fights, great story... if you like Bioware games I can't imagine not liking this. If you hate Bioware games you will hate this even more probably, it's like Bioware essence in a DVD case.

Holy jesus! Just took a glance at Metacritic myself and good god the users are tearing this game apart. Wow, just wow. Some of what i read is actually very frightening. Is there really only ONE hub city?

The user ratings for the ps3 version are even worse with an average of 2.9. A lot less votes there though


edit-It's already gone up to 3.1 in a few minutes

I agree. I have been playing it for a bit today and I definitely enjoy it. It isn't the same as Origins, that is for sure, but if you paid any attention at all to the preview/release information you would have known that already and been prepared.

The only thing I don't like right now is how the menus are set up, and I think that is really just because I haven't gotten used to them yet. Other than that everything feels "correct". Not fitting for a different game, but fitting for the game that I am playing.

Holy crap, metacritic is so screwed up on this game. The user score? It can't be that bad, it looked pretty good to me. Not that I was interested enough to get it, but thats just crazy. They were complaining how theres only one city hub? Wasn't there only one in the first game?

I'm not quite ready to write off metacritic user reviews unless there's some evidence of an organized effort to push the score down as some kind of punishment. That's just how I view it. Of course, on either side, some user reviews give no detail beyond "it rocks/sucks!" and those are basically useless. While they still get calculated into the average score, you can read a lot of well written posts both pro and con. Now the con ones may all be BS, but some of the posts are well written.

Actually there were quite a few. From what i read its just the ONE city and a few areas on a mountain, not to mention a TON of copy/paste dungeons. I dunno, from what ive read overall from Metacritic to the Bioware Social Forums, DA2 is just seriously inferior to DA:O. When not comparing it to DA:O people seem to say its a good game, but when actually comparing it DA2 is simply a disaster. Call me paranoid but i would venture to guess the new direction DA2 went is most because of EA. Look at both ME1 and DA:O (which i know Bioware was under EA for) and then look at both ME2 and DA2. The first games in both series are completely different from their sequels, with story aside. Sad to say it but if the trend continues i will definitely be writing Bioware off as a lost cause. Guess i should have expected it after dealing with EA utterly destroying the Command and Conquer series over the last 15 years.

Either way, im going to wait for my copy to arrive and play the game for myself. I know for a fact i will not have the same enjoyable experience i had with DA:O but maybe if i look at the game as it is with DA:O taken completely out of the picture i could see it as a good game. Maybe my expectations were just too high after playing DA:O, DA2 just sounds like a complete slap in the face in terms of a sequel to a BG successor.

It's definitely different from DA:O. But despite that, I'm having fun with it. It's not the best game BioWare's ever put out, but it's certainly not a bad game. I think people were just expecting another DA:O, but that's really unrealistic given the sheer size of the original and the development time involved. I think your idea of putting aside DA:O and looking at DA2 as its own game is a wise idea.

I think it's kinda weird that all of the negative reviews have a high percentage of votes that said the review was helpful. I know that this could just mean the negative reviews went into greater detail, but there's still some that don't say anything useful at all. Like all caniplier says is "so bad so bad so bad" over and over again, but still 7 of 11 people voted it useful. How the hell do 7 people find that review useful? It doesn't say anything.

Then you go to a positive review that actually goes into some detail, and like 7 of 38 people found it useful.

I'm not gonna go back and look, but as a guess I'd say the positive reviews get a 15% approval rate and the bad ones get like 75% approval rating.

I also think it's weird that such a large number of negative reviews came when the game has barely even been out. This games is at least 20 hours long, isnt it? How long have they actually played it? Some of them might have just played the demo and are voting it down due to being unhappy with the changes. The score is low right now because people who are enjoying the game are still playing it, and hopefully most are aware that they shouldn't review a game without at least playing through most of it. I highly doubt the score is going to remain at 3.5 once more people start finishing the game and reviewing it

Denerim was the only important and big city in DA:O though, and even there you only went to a few small locations within the city. In DA2 it is basically one HUGE city with a ton of locations, but no other real cities. So far I have been to several places outside the city though... a place on the shore and a mountain elf village. Not sure how much else there is outside the city. I wouldn't say that, it has a lot of aspects that are much better than DA:O and some things that are worse. Mainly it's just different, but then not altogether different because it's fundamentally the same game (on PC anyway, the console versions play a lot differently).

Anyway, if you liked Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening and you're open-minded I can't imagine not liking DA2. You might find some annoyances but you will also find some improvements and overall it is very similar.

This early after the game is out (barely 24 hours), if they wanted to write a real and thought out opinion, they would still be playing the game instead of writing rants.

I have seen many verbose rants. They were long, but the writer was only using 20 words instead of 1 to tell a load of crap. There were a few thought arguments, but they were twisted.

And the supposed alienated fanbase, my best guess is that they never liked Bioware anyway. Saying "I loved Baldur's Gate but Bioware's been making crap these days" is a bit too easy to say. (For your information, I like Bioware games and they always managed to make quality titles, even with non-RPGs (like MDK2)).

I would wait at least a full week before trusting metacritics numbers. At least those who really HAVE played the game will have their opinion posted.

Yeah, Kirkwall feels like an expanded Denerim to me, which isn't a bad thing, at least not yet. I am still in the first "year jump thing" so I don't know how much things really change over time, but if the environments change somewhat and the people grow and such then I think it will work out.

It's always amusing to watch douchebags fight, no matter who wins the watcher wins.

Sorry for knowing this.

Both are parts of the famous 4chan, /v is "video games", /b is "random".