I loved it, as did a great many others. The combat is pretty old school pause-and-play, slow-paced combat similar to what you find in the Baldur's Gate series, so definitely unlike TW2 (which is more of an action-RPG).

As for the storytelling, I find it was brilliantly done and reached wonderful levels of depth and complexity, and had a good time reversing many of the standard fantasy tropes. The setting has a lot of depth to it, and even the Codex entries only scratch the surface.

All in all, DAO is an excellent game, and in my opinion one of the best CRPGs ever made (sure, I'm nostalgic for Ultima IV and BG2 and others, but I try to look past that bias as there ARE many improvements in newer games *grin*).

Is TW2 better than DAO? It depends. TW2's story shorter and more personnal, more ambiguous and greyer for sure (heck, regardless of the ending, your achievements are mostly at a personnal level, and the greater picture remains the same). TW2's combat is definitely action-RPG, defense and offense driven almost entirely by player skill.

So in a way the two are difficult to compare. Different style of combat and storytelling and gameplay. They're both RPGs, yes, but for the most part it is apples and oranges.

Let's just say I am very happy to have both DAO and TW2 on my Hard Drive. And ME1. And ME2, and Morrowind and Oblivion and all the Fallouts and Eschalon for that matter, even DA2 (though I think it should have been given another year of polishing)... and Planescape Torment, and TW1, and BG1-BG2. And so on. :)

There are a lot of good ways to do RPGs, and this is not a zero-sum genre, where TW2 being a great game somehow prevents others from being great. My computer feels more complete for having all those RPGs on it. :)

Itkovian

Call me crazy but TW1 is still my favorite of the series although I do like this game a lot.

Other RPG's add flavor in different areas so TW2 hasn't ruined other RPG's for me (except in graphics!)

LOL...are you serious or you are driven by emotions?...with some RPG elements...still laughing...if you don't like DA:O don't be unrealistic;)

I dont know if I get older, but but...

looking back at DA: it is so lame. You win the elves' support by yourself and 3 other mates. The whole elf clan fucked up.

I think, whatever game world it is, making it liver by putting human social life in there is a good way to create a compelling story.

When I heard that they were making a 'spiritual successor' to Baldur's Gate, I kinda took it as a modern AD&D game so I went into DA:O expecting something totally different which is probably why I had trouble playing it and keeping interested. I'm still holding out for another slew of AD&D CRPGs that don't try to go all realistic with 3D graphics. I still think the early Black Isle games with the Infinity Engine look better than some modern RPGs.

You didn't find mods like Elves of Lineage or Beautiful people good for faces? I'm asking out of curiosity... obviously it is a matter of personal preference

For me, TW2 is a really good game, but it doesn't reach the small elitist group of games that really made me go 'Waow' in front of my PC when I first played them.

Just for reference this small clique would be composed of the following games :
Ultima VII, Baldur's Gate 1, Fallout 1, Planescape Torment, Morrowind and The Witcher 1.

I played all these games on release which is important because they all marked a turning point in the way I appreciated future titles. Which is probably why TW2 is not featured among them. As much as I like the game, all the elements that I love the most in it were already present in the first opus.

Oh, but I never said so.
I myself finished BG1&2,IWD1&2,PT, NWN, ME1&2, Gothic1&2 among many others. It's just that I've played through a few of the DA:O prologues and they're all so. extremely. bland. that I can't bring myself to play any further. It's one fantasy cliché on the top of another, a world build on re-naming the stock races, guilds, and evils and calling it a new universe. I will give it a try in the future to see if it gets better later. As for now, absolutely not my cup of tea.
I'm allowed to have my opinion, yes? :)

No. Ugh. it's a good thing I was staring at my character's backside for most of those hundreds of hours or I don't think I'd have ever managed. Oblivion was in that awkward phase between the age where graphics weren't good enough that you had to use your imagination to fill in the blanks, and graphics became good enough that you didn't. Which was awkward and resulted in some horrible monstrosities where faces are concerned. Not totally their fault really.

Isn't it a running joke that the first screens of Skyrim showed people's faces so we knew we wouldn't all gag this time around? :p

Why do people keep saying that? It's never been remotely true. I assure you, my gaming PC in 2006 put the console version of Oblivion to shame. There has never been a time when a PC could not be a much more powerful gaming platform than a console.


[edit] And I had a *decent* gaming rig, but not some uber high end water cooled monster by any stretch.

LMAo, your so clueless, the fastest graphics cards back then were the 7800GTX and 1900XT, basically the same as whats in either console, and the console can be optimized much more, The console versions and PC versions then were almost identical, with only a slight edge the the very high end PC which was less then 1% of gamers at the time.

PC were only slightly more powerful, but you also have to consider console have a hige advantage early in the life cycle, as they have no bloated OS and other processes running, and devs can maximize games on them as all configs are the same.

I love PC gaming, but saying PC's back then were way more powerful is total BS..
Also, bethesda makes ZERo effort to use PC hardware, they basically port the console graphics over, the PC version even had the terrible blurry distance textures, that were fixed in 1 day with mods, as bethesda did basically nothing to the PC version except direct port. Thats another problem, skyrim will be the same. Todd howard in an interview said PC, ps3 and 360 will all look the same, except PC has options for higher resolutions Wowee.
Their still dog ugly by a wide margin.

Its obvious nastalgia blurs your judgement, there is nothing in TW1 that isnt better in TW2, combat in tw1 at the time was terrible, dialog a joke (all the dwark cock stuff? Come on), they had about 5 faces the entire game, atrocious load times, etc... The story, writing, game mechanics are better in every way in TW2. ts obvious your one of those "Older is always better" because nostalgia clouds your judgement, Nostalgia is a powerfull emotion.

Consoles are constrained by many other factors than GPU. And I didn't say they were way more powerful, I said at any given time a PC *can* be a more powerful graphics platform, nothing of which you just said makes that statement false. And the fact remains, that even before community modding which drastically improved quality, the oblivion I was running looked better, and performed *better* by a wide margin on my PC, than the copy on my brother's console did. It was no small difference.

And larger textures and higher resolutions make a big difference all by themselves. One of the biggest complaint about console ports onto the PC are the muddy detail and pixelated texture.


Id be careful calling people clueless, when you're the guy who said TW2 has "old school deep rpg mechanics", which means you've either never played a real "old school" rpg, dont know what the term "mechanics" refers to , or dont know the meaning of the word deep. Take your pick. TW2 is a wonderful rpg, but mechanically is much more of an exciting new-fangled action game, than an "old school" stat driven turn based rpg that models many different aspects of the game world and character, mechanically speaking.

fwiw, i'm able to play at ultra minus ubersampling on a 4800 series card (admittedly 4890 but still). i haven't updated to the very latest drivers.

Except Oblivion shipped with identical textures as the console versions. They looked identical, hell the console versions had AA, the PC versions at the time with the G7800 series could not even doAA and HDR at the same time.

Upping the resolution doesnt make much of a difference, textures are still textures.

You have no clue, being a DEEP game doesnt mean lots of stats numbers LMAO, this game has tonnes of layers and one of the deepest moral, story implementations for many, many years.

I can post MANY oblivion comparisons at the time, there was almost no difference, do a quick google search. I owned a gaming PC at the time and a 360, there was almost no difference. The 360 version was actually cleaner due to AA, my 7800GTX could not do A and HDR.
Here is an exerpt from one artticle:

Charles: After seeing Oblivion running on a PC and an Xbox 360, I'm still not sure which version is the one to buy. Quite frankly, I was surprised at how similar both titles looked. I'd still give the performance edge to the PC though; its framerate looked smoother and textures sharper. Still, loading times with both titles seemed almost identical. I'd have to say I'm leaning toward the Xbox 360 version because I just don't know if my PC can run it. I've seen the specs, but I think the computers at that preview had some ludicrously high-end hardware.

Difference was small and it took a beast of a machine in 06.

Again, bethesda said all versions will look identical, they dont care about PC version, they let modders do the work.


Another article:

But like you said, when it comes to performance, what we saw of both versions was strikingly similar. Load times were very quick (on PC to the point that I barely even noticed them and probably wouldn't have if it wasn't for the draw distance pop in) and frame rate was absolutely decent. Visually it's only a smidgeon better on PC if you look really hard like you said in the preview. Yeah, the PC has sliders for graphics capabilities, but that's not going to matter to high end users to which the 360 is most comparable. The only thing that'll make a difference to hardcore PC fans is that resolutions can be raised up to a level the Xbox 360 can't display.



AND ANOTHER:


CVG: Will there be different features or limitations in the Xbox 360 version?
Carter: We are working to make the two versions as close to identical as possible. The Xbox 360 version should be visually identical to a PC running with all the visual options turned to maximum. PC users will have more options to turn down certain visuals to better accommodate older hardware setups. The only thing the Xbox 360 version will lack is the Elder Scrolls Construction Set for modding. It simply isn't possible to offer on a console.