First of all, Jakub, it's good to see you post your thoughts and I hope you become more active here or find another place to express your views. FS used to be one of my regular website visits until you stopped posting. There is hardly a place to get an opinion of a true gamer who's seen it all and was even competitive at some point. IMO you've been pretty much dead on with all your reviews over the years, save for that steaming pos Rome:TW that deserved much lower.
DA is exactly as you've described it - unbalanced, ridiculous random encounters, cheap tactics and often brain-dead AI. I had to drop down from 'hard' at level 8 because there was literally nothing else I could do, nowhere I could go to win. One of my friends went through the exact same thing, and I've been playing hardcore since, oh, early 90's.
With a little more experimentation I found out that our problem was that we were both using a warrior build without a mage in our parties. As soon as I tried inserting Morrigan back into the party with Cone of Cold spell, the game went from nigh-impossible to cheat mode easy. With a warrior you have to micro long cooldown knockdowns on single targets, and with a mage you can keep half a dozen npcs frozen indefinitely, while frying them with insane electric damage. Forget about rushing enemy archers with your melee warriors - there will be a trap waiting for you in the conveniently tiny patch on the way to their positions. Just get a mage and annihilate them all with no challenge.
Basically everyone I've seen on forums talk down to people who complain about the challenge of the game rely on mages to win the encounters for them possibly without realizing it. Some have as many as three (main,morrigan,wynne), and it would indeed take a blind one armed chimp to lose with that configuration. Flag this | Edit this post |
