Also I believe you have to click more info to unlock all the other content... Hopefully everything goes smoothy for everyone.

You guys seem to like it better then people on metacritic do. 3/10. Ouch.

Apparently so.  I'm thinking somewhere between 85 and 95...it doesn't do anything terribly new but is fun to play and seems far more solidly executed than DA1.  Maybe just cause you don't have so much backstory to slog through.

I'm not really sure where the story is going, but I'm enjoying going there.

Fixed protagonist race, no equippable armor for companions (!), party based potions cooldown, lots of reused areas... Is this a joke or what?   Am I reading reviews right?

Seems like professional reviewers are too timid to demolish this game as it would deserve. They demolished (and rightly so) Elemental, but now they don't have the stomach to criticize the giant Bioware.

I hope DA2 will tank. No, I hope it will tank HARD.  Sad days for PC gamers, indeed.

This whole debacle does place Stardock in a better light. At least they have their hearts in the right place.

Don't really care whether or not people dislike the game but this isn't the entirety of it.  Most conversations its the emotion, not whether its good or bad.  From what I can tell its peaceful, sadistic, humorous, greedy, pushy/throwing your strength around, and sometimes trying to give people more options.

I'm sure that isn't the entirety of it either, but thats how it seems to me.  I will agree that I liked knowing what I was to say, but it makes more sense to have lots of options this way...and lets you match more to what in the first game was just a choice of how your guy will sound.

The upper-echolon review scene (for lack of a better word) is either suffering from an enormous disconnect from the actual market, or is quite simply corrupt. We've seen this pattern of "Criticize everything that can't fight back" and then "Praise large publishers or they'll cut their ties with us" over and over again now.

Reviews from big sites and magazines are an utter and complete croc with no meaning anymore. It's almost hilarious to see bug-filled abominations or rehash #52 consistently garner 90+ scores for.. for what, exactly?

Having had about 5-6 hours with the game, here's my take on it.

It is "pretty", in the technical sense. The models are detailed, the textures are nice and sharp, and the combat animations are improved over the original. But, the environments are crappy. There's just no flavor. Even setting aside the fact that most of the time you're in the city with a similar color palette, the environments outside just aren't interesting to look at. 

The dialog system is definitely a step back. It's basically a clone of Mass Effect, and it suffers from the same crappy problems. The "short hand" text it gives you to pick from sometimes gives a totally different impression of what your character would say than what they actually say. The addition of voice for your character seems to me a very poor reason to pedal backwards on the depth of dialogue.

The combat is, I think, a bit misunderstood by people.. or maybe they don't play on the harder difficulties. I started the game on Nightmare, and so far I've had to pause every battle constantly because there's no way I would be able to do it as it flows. Positioning matters a lot, and who you target matters a lot. There are a few things that bother me about it, namely the fact that every hit seems to interrupt/knock back, which basically means you or your party members can be permanently prohibited from doing anything if they're attacked by fast foes (or more than one).. they just get chain knocked down and can't even escape. The other is that the formula for most battles seems the same, and goes something like: Spawn 'lieutenant' mob + helpers > when 'lieutenant' is getting low on hp, or all helpers are dead spawn more helpers out of nowhere > have 'lieutenant' drink a potion > die. There are a few exceptions, but so far most of the fights resemble that. I'm also not a fan of the new up-close camera. But overall, this combat system is not devoid of tactics, and to anyone that's finding it boring I highly recommend starting the game on Nightmare. I still favor DA:O's system, but this one is not a complete failure.

Not being able to equip armor on your companions sucks. Scrolling through the achievement list, it looks like their armor can be "upgraded".. at least I hope that this brings stat upgrades as well, not just visual appearance like in ME2.

To correct one thing..

Is false. The party shares the same pool of potions, but each party member has their own potion cooldown. Multiple characters can drink a health potion at the same time.

Overall, so far my prediction is coming true.. I don't think DA2 is a bad game, it's enjoyable enough because the more difficult combat is somewhat of a redeeming quality. But DA:O is all around a better, true, PC RPG. Too many sacrifices were made in DA2 to please the console crowd, resulting in a game that's not bad, but not nearly what it could've been if it was developed for PC as the primary platform.

I think scores of 8-8.5 are appropriate for the game. 

Because if you take it as a game on its own, I think it earns that 8-8.5. If you take it as a sequel, which it really isn't - more of a "reboot" - then it is lacking in too many things that DA:O had. And I guess it also depends on whether or not you're judging it as a purely PC game, that can dock some points, too  

It just plays like more of a straightforward action RPG (though you can wander around and your quest log gets a fair amount of quests/side quests), than one of the old-school D&D RPGs where sometimes you could wander around for quite a bit without seeing combat.

Also, again, I am playing on Nightmare which has friendly fire and some rather difficult fights - as far as I could see, none of the reviewers actually played on Nightmare and I believe without friendly fire the combat really loses a lot of flavor as you can just spam powerful mage AoEs with reckless abandon. Given that DA2 heavily shifted focus to combat over story/exploration, you really need that combat to be fun, and atm for me it is, despite all the changes to it.

Are you sure, though?  I've met a lot of people on many sides of the RPG scene (some prefer complexity, some don't but enjoy depth in the world design, some love Diablo clones, etc) and the general sense I've gotten is that action oriented games are generally well received, unless they're genuinely boring/bad.  I've no reason to believe any real disconnect on the part of the reviewers.

Hell I'm still affiliated with the Ultima Dragons and I think most of the Ultimas sucked.  Hah.

After checking out some of the reviews I think I'll be passing completely on DA2. DA:O was originally inspired by games like Baldur's Gate - Tactical RPG's that had lots of choices and an epic feel. Certainly DA2 looks like it deserves the 8-9/10 ratings it's recieving, but it looks like they "fixed" things that weren't broken and by "fix" they dumbed things down. Sure, it's nice to have the main character voice acted, but I'd have rather had more choices, not less. I'd have thought this would be a game where Bioware could go crazy with the choices, especially since it was advertised as being a shorter game. Everything looks to take place in/around one city with many locations, which is fine if they make everything seam together like it would in reality.

Of course, I'm taking the Cooper Lawrence approach. Well, I'm not, because I've actually watched videos and several reviews, but I've still not actually played it.

I'll stick with the original DA:O for the moment. Also, just beat ME2 with my new graphic card. It looked so much better this time around. The first time around it was like watching claymation on youtube using dial-up.

Edit: Also, on the ratings discussions - I believe the ratings are likely accurate - Or at least the reviews are. IGN and Gamespot both mentioned lack of choices, somewhat flat characters, lack of locations, washed out textures, and reused locations at one point or another. But they also stated that the gameplay was solid, and while the story started out with not being able to piece things together so well, the missions themselves were decent. So giving a game an 8 on those points, with none of the issues actually affecting gameplay, seems decent to me. Now if they did a rating where they were basing their points on whether or not it lives up to the original, I'm sure it'd get a 5-6 because of the gameplay changes and watering down of some of the things that made DA:O so great in the first place. It looks like DA2 just got away from the Baldur's Gate roots and took a step towards being more console friendly.

Played the original DAO, for DA 2 only watched demo playthrough by TotalHalibut on youtube. Based on that decided to wait until the price comes down to something more reasonable. Then too, patches, mods, and expansions will improve what appears at the moment to be a fairly dismal gaming experience.

Metacritic, current metascore pro reviews 84/100. Current user rating 3.0 based on 257 users.

My latest grump:

No manual.

$25 Prima guide.  (Not that I'd buy it when the information is available online, but still....)

Methinks the two are linked...