Well, I said okay, not great, right? ;)
But the female was really, really bad.
Alec Newman really should do main roles, not extras...

board = bored right?
I agree about femHawke she was too upperty, Male hawke like male shepard- bland . Morigan, leliana and Fenris were standouts for me.
Yes, Im really pleased laidlaw played the game, There are so many things that Bioware need to learn from the Witcher. However I do think that the DAO had a better UI

Yeah, female Hawke was nothing to write home about either.

You're right about Alec, i pretty much hated Sebastian with a passion right from the get go but his VA worked pretty well. I don't necessarily think the guy that did Hawke is bad or anything like that, it's more like it was a poor choice of casting for that specific role.
Yeah, boring, flat, empty, soulless.

I for one hope nothing from Bioware makes it into a Witcher game.

1.) I don't like the party based combat that Bioware implements. To me it never feels like it is working right, especially Mass Effect games, as it makes you feel like a military commander instead of a fighter. And the Witcher games are meant to put you in the shoes of a Witcher, who does most of the actual fighting, not tell his allies how to do their jobs from the back. I feel like I am actually fighting in TW2 and not choosing stragic options from a menu and then seeing how things play out.

2.) Mass Effect shows that Bioware has this deep love of half-baked morality systems that I don't want that in a Witcher game. CDP has found a way to give players' choices meaningful impact on the world without tracking if you are a good or bad guy and shoving it in your face with a blue and orange "morality meter".

3.) After playing Mass Effect 2 and seeing how the choices you made in the first game didn't affect anything of importance in the second game, I don't want something like that to happen to future Witcher games. I know that that is how TW2 ended up; the plot and major points are the same regardless of how you plaed the first one. But CDP is pretty small stuido that is new to the big budget game scene, whereas Bioware has been at it for a long time and, therefore, has less of an excuse. I am hopeful that CDP is getting bigger and will hopefully have more resources that TW3 will finally offer a very drastic difference depending on how you played TW2.

link1264: Bioware games do have their issues (I wont even comment on DA2, few take that game seriously) HOWEVER - look at how choices from ME transferred into ME2 and compare that with the Witcher series. I mean if you are trying to tell me that this particular element is even comparable...well good luck with that. I personally think that CDP should have dropped this endeavor altogether because it certainly feels nobody spent too much time with it.

With ME2, I was amazed how well and thoroughly it was implemented.

Oh yeah, that "niche" of story-driven but combat-heavy third-person single-protagonist CRPGs instead of the completely different market of story-driven but combat-heavy third-person single-protagonist CRPGs with supplementary companions!
Completely different. No threat to at all. No, not at all. LALALA! They could not hear the angry gamers with pitchforks and torches, and now neither the party over at CDPR.

Good luck Bioware. Have fun developing Games that you think will *sell* well.

Geralt did have a party once consisting of a vampire,a she-elf and a knight if I remember correctly. It'd be cool to have companions at some parts if it makes sense but they should really improve the AI Triss keeps hitting you with her fireballs and Roche finishes off one guy after you kill 20.

One quick comment about voice acting:

While who the voice actors matters to an extent, what makes it or breaks it is the editing. Usually, there is more than one "version" of the line (as in how the line is read), and the sound editor has final say as to which "version" makes it into the game.

I pointed out that the choices from TW1 didn't make a real difference in TW2. But I also pointed out that CDP is a much smaller developer and TW1 was their first big budget game. Bioware has been in the big budget projects for years so they have less of an excuse.

There were no big changes in the layout of the ME2 plot based on your choices in the first game.

-The plot points of ME2 are exactly the same no matter what choices you made in ME1.

-Whether or not the council lives didn't make life any better for humanity from what you see when playing the game. Whoever you elect as the first human member of the council never gets the other members of the council to accept their ideas or their belief that the Reaper threat is not gone.

-You don't lose the ability to recruit certain party members in ME2 based on choices you made in ME1.

And then there's the fact that even WITHIN ME1 there are big choices you make that don't alter the ultimate outcome. Specifically, whether or not you choose to save the council. The set it up to look like risking your ship to save the council might weaken the fleet to the point that Sovereign could win or at least get away. But regardless of which choice you make, Sovereign is always defeated.

At least in TW1 there where choices you made in game that had pretty sizable consequences on events later in the game. Such as if you let the Squirrels take their supplies, Coen gets killed later on. This eliminates an information source for you to narrow down your suspects in Chapter 2 and possibly (I haven't tested this thoroughly) could make it impossible to prove Vincent's innocents, thus allowing you to get access to the cemetary and notice the real Raymond's body and realize that you have been tricked before the incident at the tower.

Right. As someone pointed out before, in Bioware games you change your character, your moral standing - but in Witcher games, your decisions change the world. I am very curious how they will tie all the possible outcomes of TW2 together in TW3. Even if you only count four different states of the world, it's still gonna be interesting. Expectations will run high, that's for sure.
Whereas I can't quite fathom, how Bioware might save their badly injured Dragon Age series...

Well, quite an easy goal to achieve, considering how DA2 was awful and Temple of Elemental Evil has probably the best turn based combat ever seen in a RPG.

laidlaw doesn't get it. what separated w2 from everyone else wasn't the lone wold stuff, it was the story that worked and art that was incredible and made sense.

dragon age will always be a comic book looking disaster

I haven't played DA2 yet, but I actually found ToEE's combat to be SO tedious I couldn't make it past the first level of the Temple. "Ahh crap, TEN zombies?? This battle is going to take forever!"

For those who haven't played ToEE, imagine a combat where every single participant in the combat takes a turn, and everybody else freezes in place while said participant is taking their action. (And no, there's no option to skip seeing the enemies' turn either.) Now, zombies are ridiculously slow and can take up to 10 seconds just to slooooowly shuffle from one spot to another. Now multiply that by 10, before your party gets to take their turn again.

And no, Turning the zombies didn't help, because my level was still low enough that the zombies are merely turned instead of destroyed, so I still got to see the wonderful animations of the zombies running slooooowly away from my party.

Fixed that for you...

BioWare is the name on the product and BioWare have had creative freedom... so assign blame where it belongs.
Let’s face it, BioWare deserves positive feedback for their successes and negative feedback for their failures.