Re: the fade / orzammar
The Fade is annoying because if you don't know what to do, you will be backtracking a lot. Also because of the fonts that give a permanent +1 to an attribute, it's kind of important to go through the entire area and 100% it to get all of those, it makes it really suck when replaying the game. You have to pull up the wiki and figure out an optimized route to make it less dull.
Another thing that sucks about the fade is that there really isn't any way to do it differently or change the outcome. I remember when I first played DAO as a kid and had so much trouble there I restarted the game as a Dwarf just to see if it would skip the fade, because Dwarves aren't meant to dream or whatever.
The Deep Roads are just extremely long. The whole Orzammar section is going through long, fairly challenging dungeons. And all the enemies are higher levels compared to most of the other quests, so it usually should be left to the last quest unless you want to have a hard time (same applies to Denerim). Although, you can do it much faster if you skip all the additional sidequests and loot, especially at Caridin's Cross.
I actually like Orzammar a lot, probably my favorite area in the game aesthetically. The only thing is how small the City seems. Like nigga, shit's barely the size of the Denerim, what good are they gonna do against the blight. Are there meant to be more lesser-thaigs that they still control?
Re: characters / da2
When I played Awakening for the first time a few years ago I was shocked at the difference between Anders compared to DA2. He just randomly becomes a fag after awakening and changes his entire personality. Why'd they even bring him back? They could've easily just made a new character, seeing as they pretty much wrote one from scratch. They did basically the same with Merril, for no reason.
Isabella is the only one who is mostly the same as she was in DAO.
I haven't played DA2 in years, but from memory it was mostly fine. Combat wasn't that bad and it was quite difficult. Although I think some enemies were a bit bullet-spongey.
I didn't like how half the encounters were like ambushes where you'd see a few guys initially, then 60000000000000 more would jump from the rooftops or appear out of the bushes, really just made savescumming even more important than it usually is.
I don't mind the story, or the setting. I don't mind going back to the bone pit or running around kirkwall in the different acts. However, the bit that I really hate is how they reuse the same layouts for different dungeons constantly. Ok, DAO does this too in some ways, but nowhere near the level of DA2. They don't even bother to change the minimap between them so there are rooms shown that are just inaccessible and just blocked off.
I get very sick of fighting in the same bloody mineshaft all the time.
Re: DAI
Fucking shite game. theres some fun to be had, and the open world areas are quite beautiful and can be fun to explore and go through. I really like the place with the dam and the flooded town. Hate hinterlands after doing it once. But it did expand the lore a bit and give access to areas that only existed as codex entries until then. And apart from nigging-up Orlais they didn't go
too overboard with woke retcons.
The lack of the non-combat skills that were in DAO or NWN (like survival) is sad too because you now have huge sections of just walking and exploring, it would have been nice to have skills that could be used in those areas and had to build characters differrently to get access to different places.
Combat is absolutely atrocious, easily the worst in the series. The party AI is on the same level as Neverwinter Nights 2, enemies take ages to kill on higher difficulties until you have a good build and good gear, you can't even change your attributes, the talent trees are simplified and boring, the encounters are even less memorable than DAO or DA2 because most of them are just randomly spawning niggers or lame bosses.
One of my main gripes is how unbalanced crafting is. All the crafted gear looks like shit, it's boring, and its so trivial to make. The fact that even the first thing you can craft in the tutorial completely statmoggs any unique piece of equipment you can find is ridiculous. Obviously you can just not craft, but it's still dumb as hell.
It also takes way too long. Takes too long to level up, to grind the retarded power points just to get on with the game, the level scaling in areas is really arbitrary and annoying (suddenly level 12 enemies in a corner of the map??) so you have to come back later. They don't give a recommended level for the generic areas, only the main quest locations. Which is stupid. Waste 10 power to accidentally go somewhere with exclusively level 18 monsters. The specializations being locked behind quests is also bad, especially because some are so much easier than others and you can only get one anyway. They're all just glorified fetch-quests too, waste of time.
And IDK why they made Corypheus such a joke after the start. They could have done something interesting like the Architect, but they just made him a generic evil faggot. Missed opportunity.
(So is all the stuff in Awakening that was just forgotten for no reason
)
. It wasn't bad but virtually every talk on the game is how the start is really cool and how the other 60% of the game is shit and the last 20% is railroaded.
