Origins was a great game, very indepth, great character development, good gameplay.

Dragon Age 2 was a great game but not as good. While aspects were improved for me, certain removals I did not like. Repetitive scenes were annoying. The fact I couldn't customise my teammates armour (half the armour you pick up is not for your class so useless).

And the dialog wheel. I really didn't like it. In Origins you had text and you had to read the text to really find out what to do or the right words to say to do the right action or to screw people (both kinds). A wheel telling you what words do what was stupid and ruined the fun out of either being a dick or the nice guy when you can plainly see the smily face is good guy.

This one I don't understand.  I read people saying that DA2 had no strategic game-play and it honestly puzzles me.  I know that I played DA2 the same way that I played DA:O.  I switched characters constantly, more often than DA:O, actually, because of the improved pace of the combat, I set my moves up in advance, and I used stategic positioning at all times.   The only real difference I can think of is that in DA2 you had to be more mobile and not over-extend yourself, because reinforcements might show up behind you.  I loved the waves of enemies idea, it was so much more dynamic.  You couldn't just pull enemies and pick them off at your leasure, heal up, then pull again.

Is this perhaps a console thing?  I played both DA:O and DA2 on PC, and the style in which I played was nearly identical.  That's the only explaination I can think of.   I suppose the auto-programming in DA2 was so much improved that you could switch characters less if you WANTED, but, honestly, I like using all my characters, and setting most of their moves myself.  I can't see allowing different playstyles as a negative.  Of course, normal mode ends up being a lot easier if you control everyone, but that's rectified easily by simply increasing the difficulty.

I also played both on PC. I don't know what to tell you. I tried playing DAII the same way I played Origins and I just couldn't get on with it. The limited viewing distance/mode annoyed me greatly as did the constant waves of enemies. I don't mind a few reinforcements here and there but the games over-reliance meant every battle just became a high speed melee. If you have a few battles with reinforcements then it keeps you on your toes but not all the time.

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).

well that is the first problem right there... 3 days of play =/= good game. a good game should be fun for over 60 hours of gameplay, assuming you ate, and slept and you did all the quest it will last you about 35 hours if you are lucky. DA2 is short.

the reason dragon age 2 is a failure is because it was worse then origins in EVERY way except combat.

the game was shorter, had less dialog, the map was still ungodly linear.

the game took place in the same area every time, eniviorments were reused lots of times.

the story wasn't as good as origins either, no party camp system to easily talk to all your friends.

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on its own DA2 isn't a terrible game, its just too short to be honest, you always compare one game to it's predicessor and DA2 fell short in pretty much every way possible.

I think the biggest problem with the combat in DA2 is that on the lower difficulty levels, the game is a bit too easy.  On Nightmare in DA2, for example, you'll feel overwhelmed if you do not utitlize cross-class combinations (to take down high priority targets like rogues and mages who can kill party members in seconds), capitlize on elemental resistances (e.g., switching to ice-based weapons and attacks on rage demons), crowd control (to deal with high-priority targets or new waves of enemies), and so on.

On hard or lower, there is no friendly fire, being aware of elemental resistances is not really necessary, and you could probably get by without using cross class combinations.  I'm guessing the majority of players play on normal or lower, and understandably find the combat easy enough to not learn the combat system.

If I recall correctly, there was friendly fire (50%) on Normal for DA:O (at least for PC, as I think consoles had 50% friendly fire on Hard), so most players had to be careful with AoE spells in DA:O, as opposed to DA2 where you only had to worry about positioning on Nightmare.

With that said, the combat in DA:O had several problems.  First, enemies didn't really scale as your characters leveled.  For example, by the time that you get to the battle of Denerim, each darkspawn could die with a single hit (I hated playing as a rogue, and slowly walking up to an enemy, only to have it killed by Leliana).  Second, several abilities were just too unbalanced.  Blood Wound, for instance, could crowd control AND damage enemies (to the point of death), enabling you to clear out an entire room of enemies with a single ability.  Mana Clash trivialized any encounter with a mage, with the only reason not to use it was because it sometimes crashed the game.  Third, potions had a very small cooldown, so you could craft hundreds of potions, and just swig away and never fear death.

Having played both DA:O and DA2 on Nightmare, I'll say this:

On Nightmare, DA2 is far more challenging than DA:O.

On Hard or lower, DA:O is more difficult than DA2.

Unfortunately and understandably, most people play on the lower difficulties, so many don't see how strategic DA2 can be.  Obviously the best way is to try Nightmare, but going forward, I do hope that Bioware makes the easier difficulties a bit more challenging (at least challenging enough to require players to learn the basics of CC's, tactics, resistances, etc.).

I didn't like the combat. With an unknown number of waves spawning out of thin air each battle it was impossible to manage your resources during combat. Instead of carefully planning and picking off enemies using stealth tactics it turned into spawn enemies, run away and pick them off while they come around the corner. If a simple hack 'n slash fest didn't already do the job.
The same few areas were overused. They didn't even bother to rearrange parts like in Skyrim, instead just different doors and passage ways were closed off.
My favorite part of DA:O Exploring the deep roads was reduced to a simple small corridor.
There were way too many loading pauses within quests going back and forth between buildings in different parts of the city.

The story and characters were the best part and I even bothered to play through it several times to see how the branches worked out. That was a bit disappointing. Non-logical steps were forced in one or the other branches to get everything on the same track again over and over. The branching was much better handled in DA:O

Still not a terrible game but a huge step back from the first one.
I give DA:O a 9.5, DA2 a 7.5. In comparison I gave ME1 an 8.5, ME2 a 7.5 and haven't bothered with ME3 yet.
They better get back to what made DA:O great or DA3 is a no buy.

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.

Without reading the replies in this thread I am going to throw my few cents in here;

I loved DAII the first two playthroughs I did, but after that I saw the flaws that just shouldn't have been there to begin with. The fact that ALL SHIT seemed to go down in the SAME basements just pissed the living hell out of me. Now, I loved origins as well(Actually needs to do a playthrough of that, as I lost my save so will have to replay it for Awakenings now). The lack of depth for MOST characters, really other than the dwarf there was no one to love, and I am not gay unfortunately, so romancing him was not really an option for me(Not sure if you can even do that). The ending was shockingly thrown together and some of the story seemed a bit off. Lack of variety in quests pissed me off, and the fact that there weren't that many to begin with is what threw me off completely. Suffice to say I didn't stick around for the third playthrough, and I got bored, really quick. Other than the Qunari sequence nothing can really make me come back to it. It's a decent game, but I can see why so many fans of the DA series would absolutely loathe it.

Yes I loved it. It has the potential to become a medival Mass Effect. The first game was ok but second was what blew me away. Maybe it is because I expected a bad game. I played it on PC

Well I finished DA: Origins in a bit more then 30 hours so I think DA 2 could have lasted for at least 60 hours but I wanted to see how the proceeds.