It's great if you love D&D like I, but I will admit it's a bit more lengthy than it should be. Still a great game though.

Tactical depth...
All right, for a moment let me be the devil's advocate and ask you for an example...

True, but I would argue that it's just as possible to obtain tactical depth and options in a non-turn-based RPG simply by including a 'Pause' button. Doing so allows you to take a break in the action, assess the situation, and direct actions for your character/party members as appropriate. Tactical depth is obtained by the amount of options available to the player, not by the amount of time the player has to deliberate them in (and if that is an issue, again, a 'Pause' button solves that problem instantly).

Turn-based RPGs were the gold standard for RPGs for a loooong time (all the way back to the earliest RPGs on the NES and PC), and for the most part, they work rather well. ToEE's major flaw was it simply took too long for the enemy to complete their turns (it's the equivalent of playing a game like Civilisation and having to watch your opponent perform actions in every single city before it goes back to your turn). They could have overcome this easily by simply allowing the player to skip ahead to their next turn, or have a 'fast-forward' button.

I should point out that I really wanted to like ToEE (I'm a diehard D&D fan); it had a lot of promise, but Troika really dropped the ball due to a few terrible bugs and some poor design decisions.

hahah...

In Dragon Age 2 its is not possible at all to avoid pausing (turn based_cough cough..or rather Cool down timed game pauses) at higher difficulty, tell me a single soul who hasn't paused multiple times during battles to command hero(and companions) in higher difficulty.

As for Tactical depth: So you mean DA 2 has more options available to the player during fights than ToEE (cough_cough)..haha..HAHAHAHAHAHA....

Then between Civilization games and ToEE, I guess you have only played starting 10 minutes of Civilization games. I have a save file for one of my games which takes 5 long minutes for all the AI to make moves even with fast forward. (I got a pretty powerful system to RUN Witcher 2 at 1920x1080 all options MAX..except ubersampling, but with Vsync + Triple Buffering forces via 3rd party app for an 45-60 FPS during gameplay including combat)

Back to DA2 (ah darn I am addicted to making fun of DA2), tactical depth!..LOL..I can't even bloody change the armor on my companions in DA2. Ok ok..leave that aside, what depth does DA2 have!..hmm..click to attack, press a hotkey and select the target(AOE) marker.thats DEPTH!..DA2 is defined by either pauses (to stop the UBER game speed) or tap hotkeys are fast as possible on tactically* positioned enemies who teleport/blink/appear out of thin air during fights.

Example of DA2 fights's tactical depth at moderate and higher difficulty:
1. Cross a narrow doorway from a room (nothing present in the room)
2. Enter Room 2
3. FIGHT****
4. Pause the game (cough cough)
5. Holy frack..Tactically positioned godlike enemies just globally teleported from Boss area into the small room to ambush the party!.. not only from the small room, even next to me separated by a yard left of me which I didn't notice.
6. Fine; I kill them with during which one of my team mate falls down.
7. Pretty sure that the enemies were cleared, just when 2nd WAVE hit..from the same locations..for 2nd ambush.
8. Pause the game (my throat's parched) and spam the UBER hotkey spell, pure fun with exploding enemies as a result of a single backstab (which very well breaks the laws of a tactical backstab by actually TELEporting behind the enemy!..what th..).
9. All enemies are dead and then the team mate who fell down is now back at 100% was walking AGAIN..without any help!..lol bull crap tactical depth..
10. Not only that, all the party members are now healed to full HP and MP!..

Fin. (ignore my low quality in textual presentation, its just that Dragon Age 2 boils my blood)

I can't play turn-based RPGs. I've tried several, even from series I absolutely love, before that series went to real-time, but I can't play them. Within 5-15min I have to quit the game, because I can't stand playing it anymore.

Priceless... +1

No, because real-time lacks the natural pacing of turn-based combat. It is not only about having options, but also about having information to choose between these options and actually taking this information in.

I would define tactical depth as having many options, many possible ways to use these options and some ways to obtain information about which options are "good". A tactical challenge then occurs when there are not many ways to combine my options that will lead to a desirable outcome.

However, if I have many options, and there are only 3-5 possible ways to combine these options, I need all the information I can get. Then it is a huge convenience if I am presented this information in a periodic interval, preferably in a concise way with details available upon request.

An this means turn-based.

Many games have tried to combine possible tactical depth with real-time. However, almost all of them have ended up with a difficulty ridiculously low, essentially in turning into "Well, you coul do X, or Y, or Z, but everything works" (NWN2 as an example).



Withcer 2 is also to some extent one of these games. We do have many options (signs, bombs, sword), but in the end, usually all of them work (as long as you can dodge). It is fun for some time, however if I want some tactical depth, I fire up good old BG2 + Mods or play a game of Civ IV...

Well, as I said earlier, I haven't played DA2 yet, so I'm reserving judgment, but I'll say that I do have serious misgivings about the changes to DA2 combat from the way things worked in DAO. Who knows? Maybe I'll end up as miffed about them as you are. :P

Is that such a bad thing though? I tend to prefer games where you can adopt any number of tactics to get through an encounter, and all of them work as long as you're a decent player who doesn't do stupid things like go into combat naked or stand in a pool of lava while you fight the boss, or have a stupendous streak of bad luck. It lets everybody complete the game in a way that they enjoy, and not force you into using only an optimised set of min-max gear/tactics that massacre your opponents because they exploit flaws in enemy AI or badly imbalanced powers/spells/abilities that snuck through testing.

Tactics also include using the terrain/area you are in to your advantage this sadly is something I have yet to see nicely implemented into a cRPG. Im thinking 'bout Aard and the possibility to block ways up as a simple example in TW2...

Take NWN2 SoZ in that game/module the devs almost removed all chances to play tactical within the limits of the engine. This happens because the maps of random encounters were to small and thus the enemy always in sight when switching from world to area map. I had to begin from scratch when I noticed specializing in traps was pretty pointless because we can't place them on the worldmap nor during a random encounter... (Or did I miss something there?)

To me, there is just no challenge in that. I want to have to min-max (specialize) to some degree, and think a bit more than "do not stand in the red spot spouting flames".

It is possible to some degree to fix this through different difficulty levels. However, if the highest difficulty level is chosen such that you have to use almost all information the game gives you, real-time combat runs into difficulties because it does not present that information to the player in a structured way.

If you like Dragon Age Origins or any of Bioware's older games, I think you might be in for a very BIG surprise while playing DA2.

Suggest you try the Demo first, you might even actually miss playing a good game if you liked it ..But forewarned, *Spoiler begins* Darkspawns are not the enemy in the main game and you will never see Flemeth more than once after that in the game either *Spoiler ends*.

playing a rogue in DA2, indescribable. Backstabs, leaping like a frog, poking monsters for fun (attack animation) and kicking bombs like a circus freak is seriously not present in any other RPG game.

With Triss I couldn't agree more! I didn't even want to plough her after I died 3 times from friendly fire (I played on Insanity).

Roche is different. This is done so that bots don't steal kills from the player which can be very annoying (you haven't played Left 4 dead 2, have you?). When it comes to mellee the AI is not that bad. They can dodge, use group formation and are generally quite interesting.

But Range is something TW2 misses a lot both in terms of gameplay and AI. I hope we get a crossbow sometime in the future... With a scope!!! Oh that would be the day!

On a different note...

After the recent announcement in relation to their so called" global community" I have lost any respect I have had left for them...
This is not the company I grew up with, those are not games I am looking for...
Shame on you BioWare, shame on you EA.

And what was that announcement? Something else than their brand new shiny DLC?