Scoobes said:
It also means you don't ever plan your battles in terms of character positioning because every battle will just descend wave after wave of enemies comming from all directions. You position your archer and mage on higher terain? No point doing that as a bunch of rogues will just jump from fall from the sky and land behind them. The waves further ruin the pacing of your abilities as it's near impossible to judge if a stronger opponent(s) will appear at random. Can you afford to use up your best abilities on that lieutenant or are two more going to appear randomly with further backup leaving you to hold on for the abilities to cooldown? Heal now and risk the cooldown if a bunch of enemies will suddenly appear? Other factors include stuff like a lack of traps (stealth a rogue and set traps at choke points), inability to detect stealthed enemies, and a lack of friendly fire on all but the highest difficulty (which basically means every battle descends into your tank gathering melee units whilst your mage spams large area spells). I personally don't enjoy playing on the higher difficulty level because the waves mean I can't plan my battles as I did in Origins and the fact that nearly every battle is identical is plain lazy (actually that's a bit harsh, I think they probably had a very tight deadline and had to cut corners to meet it). |
I guess we just like different things. I liked that the combat in DA2 wasn't simple and predictable. I very much liked that you had to actually check on your ranged characters, and have them use their escape skills. I liked that it wasn't just "set-up, kill, move to the next grouping". Personally, I thought that got really old with DA:O. It just seemed incredibly static to me. I actually remember the exact moment in DA:O when I sighed and thought, "this combat has become boring," and truthfully, it was after I pulled some guards into a trapped corridor. Stealthed Rogues setting traps, that was insanely overpowered in DA:O, especially when you could just pull enemies into a trapped AoE kill-zone. DA:O was actually only difficult because the AI were so terrible.
I loved DA:O, but it had a host of problems and annoyances. Although, I will agree with you that DA2 should have had a difficulty level under Nightmare that offered friendy fire gameplay. That would have been great. The Ice Cone spell was way too powerful in both games.
