I'll go into this saying that I have played every game Bioware has ever made (yes, even MDK2) and I have enjoyed everything they have created. Some moreso than others obviously, but I have never had a bad time playing a Bioware game. That said, DA2 is the worst standalone game that Bioware has made. This is not as harsh a criticism as it sounds considering what it is up against, and I actually really enjoyed it on its own merits, but I couldn't help but feel disappointed by some things while being very happy about others.
The watchword when designing every aspect of DA2 seems to have been "Streamline". Everything from combat, to companion interactions, side-quests, original content, and level design have been streamlined as much as possible. This makes a certain degree of sense given the fairly short development time for a full RPG, but while it did lead to some aspects of gameplay being improved, it also added a veneer of what I can only describe as apparent laziness to the game in certain areas.
This starts with the most obvious things -- sidequests literally appearing out of nowhere and vanishing with a click of an NPC, a total of perhaps five or six unique dungeon layouts repeatedly reused without even the effort spent to make an accurate mini-map, swarms of enemies allowing for nothing but essentially identical battles outside of bosses. I don't really care that much about those things though -- at worst they make side-quests feel a bit repetitive, but not to the degree where I wanted to stop playing. Happily the writing and characters were, for the most part, more than good enough to keep my attention. Where the intense focus on streamlining everything begins to go wrong for me is in the lack of original content or real world building.
I am interested in The Dragon Age Setting (TheDAS hur hur hur). I enjoy reading the Codex entries and listening to every line of dialogue that is uttered. I want to learn more about the world and see it grow through sequels. This is the main place where DA2 really disappointed me. I cannot speak to why, but very little significant new lore -- outside of a few tidbits about the Qunari that weren't entirely clear from talking to Sten in DA:O -- was revealed. I thought the new enemy that was introduced was pretty interesting. However, note that that was "Enemy", singular. By my count, the Rock Wraiths were the *only* entirely new enemy introduced in DA2. For a sequel to a game that already has a pretty thin Bestiary, that strikes me as borderline unacceptable.
Of course, it's not all bad. In some ways, I think the new design philosophy really worked. To be frank, I thought the companion interactions were a lot better and more focused than in DA:O. Granted, I wished that there had been a lot more of them, but what was there was for the most part excellent and felt much more natural. The redesign and simplification of combat worked in some ways and failed in others, but in the end I feel it came out a net positive. DA2 was pretty clearly a console port where combat design was concerned and that was frustrating at times, but the controls were significantly more responsive than in DA:O, and the abilities were a lot more interesting.
As a (mostly) unrelated aside, I want to compliment whoever wrote Isabela (Mary Kirby?). She underwent some real, honest-to-goodness character development over the ten year timeline, and was -- in my not so humble opinion -- the best romanceable NPC in a Bioware game to date. Kudos.
So, in summation, while it was quite a bit better than one might expect from witnessting the massive outpouring of hate and vitriol towards this game on these forums and elsewhere, DA2 was clearly limited by its shortened development time. I did not feel like the game was rushed, exactly. It is certainly not particularly bug-ridden (though it does contain a few) and the story does not feel curtailed at all, nor do the majority of the real side-quests. However, I do feel that it was made a bit too quickly. I hope DA3, or the next expansion or whatever is given a sufficiently long development cycle to allow the folks at Bioware to do what I know they are capable of.
Some other miscellaneous observations not entirely related to game design: as people have said, the framed narrative worked to introduce Acts, but not when it broke up the action. The 10 year timeline was also used very well to develop characters and inter-NPC relationships. The exception was the romance plot, where it just makes no sense that there was no change over a 3 year period, however reticent one or the other may be feeling at the time. I suppose it is an issue of player agency vs. a realistic narrative. I loved the "Dominant Personality" idea that led to varying canned responses when you didn't get a choice in dialogue. It made that particular change more palatable.
Just noting that this is inaccurate -- the health potion cooldown is per-character, not global. IE one character can use a health potion immediately after another has, but the same character cannot chug two in a row. If this were taken out, it would be essentially impossible to lose an already easy game.zyxe wrote...
GLOBAL HEAL POTION COOLDOWN
i really dislike the cooldown of ALL healing potions at the same time. while it hasn't ruined the game on normal, it just seems kind of silly. at the very least if the global cooldown has to stay, it would be great if they knocked a few seconds off the cooldown, even 5 seconds would make it nicer.
Modifié par taine, 20 mars 2011 - 08:57 .
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). Although this little thing has made me laugh a lot from reading Gamefaqs forums and CAD comics. Perhaps Anders comes onto a boy a bit too strongly in comparison to a girl? Considering he keeps going on and on about "I don't wanna hurt you" for a girl and for a boy HE initiates the flirting O_O. 
. Metroid and Castlevania just do a better job at reusing assets or backtracking (part 2 of Symphony of the Night was just part 1 with the dungeon mirrored up and down, but no one said that it was cheap or ugly... it was also justified by the setting). I think it would have helped if part of the different-but-same dungeons were actually the physically same dungeon each one branching to a new area with the non-active parts closed off for some reason, and the common parts better integrated in the city, the wilderness or common areas... All those caves with the same exit on the coast... couldn't they have been different exits on the same map that we could acknowledge the next time we went there?
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