DA:O had skills and talents, not just talents. You actually had to persuade through some conversations.
Leveling up a "skill" to create an Instant Win Button for conversations, especially when there was no trade-off, doesn't sound like a better system to me. Just sounds more cumbersome.
Disgustipated said:
It had a much deeper interaction system with your NPC's involving gifts, and persuade attempts.
Spamming minor gifts to raise a companion's approval independent of actually taking them on quests and doing things they liked - especially when those gifts dwarfed the impact of the conversations themselves - isn't really better either. Seems worse to me. Maybe I'm weird for not liking the fact that the only problem with getting a companion's approval in DA:O was wading through a giant fetid steaming mound of crap in your inventory. (Instead, they replaced it with a different fetid steaming mound of crap: the sheer volume of rings, belts, and amulets you get, along with the Junk. Wasn't happy about that. Still a relative upgrade, IMO.) You didn't have to do a single thing that a given companion (thinking Morrigan in particular here, although Shale also applies) approved of during the game so long as you did his or her companion quests and spammed him or her with gifts.
Disgustipated said:
It had more complex combat including more cross-class spells/effects (they are called something else in DA:O), I still haven't discovered all of them.
Semi-valid point; the problem in DA:O was that cross-class combos were more or less meaningless if you just spammed heals. Which you could do. On Nightmare. I would have liked there to have been a reason to use the combos other than novelty and opening Codex entries; efficiency was out of the question.
Disgustipated said:
Much more involved dialogue. I didn't realize how much so until playing last night. Even minor NPC's such as the nanny/cook in the human noble origin and the Ash Warrior leader (in Ostagar) had moderately long stories to tell (more than you'd get on a conversation wheel in DA2).
Also a fairly valid point. DA:O's dialogue system might not have been fully voiced, but the people who were voiced had a lot more to say. Of course, a lot of those people were repeating what other people had said, in different words, or reproducing Codex entries that you already had; in some cases, the dialogue was more poorly-written in DA:O as well, and infinitely hammier. Sarcastic Hawke, at least, didn't make me feel like an idiot and/or an .
Disgustipated said:
The graphics in DA:O are superior than DA2. I have never heard of a sequel having worse graphics until now. DA:O at max settings looks much better than DA2. The environments in DA:O are rich where the environments in DA2 look sparse and bare.
Eh. The high-res textures for DA2 look pretty good, honestly. And I suppose DA2 didn't have a lot of forested areas like DA:O did; forested areas are usually pretty spectacular. And the newspawn/derpspawn/whatever you wanna call them were annoying. I'm not sure which way to break on this.
Disgustipated said:
Environment sounds and music are better in DA:O than DA2. For example you can hear the noise your metal armor makes as you run.
Didn't notice. Maybe I have the sound turned down too low.
Disgustipated said:
The story is better in DA:O if you include the subplots. I admit the great evil story is generic. A person above asked about the story in DA:O compared to games like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. Sadly, the story in DA:O (or DA2) aren't as good as those older games. You can see things a mile away. It is the weak point of the games. But I still say DA:O is better than DA2 because it is more layered. You don't have that mage/templar thing hammered into your skull for 3 long chapters.
Don't buy it. The mage/templar thing was kinda like the Threat of the Blight (tm) in DA:O, honestly; fairly omnipresent, but only directly intruded into the story at certain defined moments. You don't even meet Meredith and Orsino until the end of Act II; while mages and templars are obviously having their disagreements all throughout the story, they're no more ubiquitous than the darkspawn. As for layers, well, DA:O strung together four unconnected individual stories with the storyline of the Blight; that's not layered, that's a grab-bag. DAII had that constant conceit in there: the rise of the Champion, going through the Deep Roads expedition, the qunari invasion, and the mage-templar struggle that had been brewing but finally burst out into violence. And each of those individual plotlines popped up, after a fashion, throughout the game, especially that lyrium idol and, to a lesser extent, the Tome of Koslun. It's not perfect; it might not even be all that good, but it's definitely got layers.
Disgustipated said:
Better and more indepth codex. For those people that like to read up on things in detail.
Basically all of the Codex entries that were relevant to the DA2 plot from DA:O were included in DA2; DA2 got a ridiculous number of weapon and character Codex entries, too. Plus, they dispensed with the pointless manual-style Codex entries. Eh.
Disgustipated said:
DA:O have bards (yes Varric is a bard, but he can't teach you like Lelianna can) and rangers, and you can use traps. Admittedly I don't use traps, but many people like to roleplay that way.
Huh? What's this about? Specialization? Specializations exist; there are fewer, but they're slightly better balanced, with no more obviously good ones like Blood Mage and Spirit Warrior were in the original game. I'm not sure streamlining something that needed to be streamlined is really an instance of removing something good from the game.
Disgustipated said:
Less restrictions on armor and equipment. Want a warrior archer? No problem. Want a duel wielding warrior? No problem. You can wear heavy armor as a warrior, but you will pay a stamina price. There are no stamina penalties in DA2.
Stamina was irrelevant; in the early game, it was a minor pain, but the opportunity cost of investing in Willpower for anybody who'd actually use the armor was too high to justify it, and in the late game, cooldowns were a bigger issue anyway. You could have (and should have) circumvented the issue by employing a Spirit Warrior mage; as a mage, you'd be getting Willpower anyway, and once you picked up the specialization, you could use Magic as Strength and tank tank tank away. When clearly suboptimal choices exist, they are not choices.
Disgustipated said:
DA:O had less restrictive exploration. Outdoor areas weren't narrow passages (which makes no sense in an outdoor environment. Yes the Kokori wilds is a little linear, but large enough to give the impression it is not. You can go any way you want to activate the markers, you aren't forced down a narrow passage. Environments are not reused over and over like in DA2 to the point I was sick of them. And they look so much more beautiful than the bland DA2 environments.
I agree, environment reuse was a serious problem in DA2, and I have to wonder if they didn't organize the game's storyline (hanging out in Kirkwall and the vicinity) around the time constraints that would limit their ability to create new areas. The amount of hue and cry that's been raised about this might get things changed for DA3. One can only hope, anyway.
Disgustipated said:
More conversation options. The only bad thing about this is it means you can't have a fully voiced PC. But it's worth it to have more options, and more race options.
I couldn't disagree more, honestly, but this is an issue of personal preference. Whatever.
Disgustipated said:
edit: I forgot the heroic accomplishments tab in the character screen. I like to see my max damage and how much party damage I'm contributing.
Valid point. Be nice to get some more statistics, although I have a feeling that the numbers would be utterly outrageous given the damage dealt-to-damage taken ratio in the game.
Disgustipated said:
You can't do as many evil things in DA2.
Sure, you can. They're just not cartoonishly evil. Although honestly, in DA:O, they usually weren't cartoonishly evil, either; they did a fairly good job of making sure that your decisions usually made sense regardless, instead of picking obviously idiotic things to do just for the evulz (
Mass Effect [1] was particularly egregious of these, down to the climactic choice of whether or not to save the Council).
I'm using her for her quest line, and I went into the cave (chapter 2) with the big spider boss. I barely got through that battle, and now I died in a battle on the way out of the cave (big annoyance that mobs appear in a cave I already cleared). I should have brought Anders and went with two mages. I had a feeling I'd have rivalry points with him if I brought him on this particular quest (as Merrill is a blood mage), so I brought Varric. Merrill has no healing, so she's about useless. I went with lightning spells for something different, but tempest sucks ass compared to spells like firestorm. Chain lightning doesn't seem to do much either. And her blood magic spells don't work against undead I don't think. Worthless character, annoying too. 
For me one of the best RPGs I ever played. And I started my carreer with Bard's Tale on the C64 many years ago. Almost no other RPG tied to to my PC like this one.
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