Since I've recently read that Bioware employees are definitely reading this thread, and the massive hatewave has ebbed somewhat, I decided to make my post here.
First of all: I loved DA:O. Played it a lot of times, got it the second EB opened on release day, just absolutely loved it.
Second of all: I loved DA2. Played it twice so far, got it the second EB opened on release day, just absolutely loved it.
On the whole, I slightly prefered DA2, but I am definitely not a DA:O hater and see a lot of good in that game. What I'll be focusing on in this review is stuff from DA:O that wasn't missed at all and the series is better off without, and stuff that I missed a lot and I think would be worth adding back in.
It's also worth saying that I played the game on PC, but don't consider myself a ~*PC GAMER*~, nor a console gamer, I just like the flexibility of a PC and being able to play it and check my email at the same time.
Okay.
GOOD STUFF DA2 DID THAT DA:O DIDN'T:
- Fast, fun combat that felt satisfying to watch and play. I especially loved the sound engineering in combat, the sound of swords swinging and bowstrings thrumming was intense, punchy, visceral and immensely satisfying. I loved how combat felt reactive and quick. It's hard to explain exactly what it is as opposed to DA:O that was so great here, but I think BW knows what I mean -- there was a closer connection to the action, a 1 to 1 correlation between the commands I was giving and what was happening onscreen. Everything felt immediate. That was awesome.
- Cinematic scenes. I loved the story and the voice acting in DA:O, but I got bored standing there, watching the NPC just make loving eye contact with my dude for upwards 10 minutes in some trees. While what was being said was interesting, watching it be said was boring. DA2 hit this out of the park. I thought that the characters felt alive from their motions -- Isabela's eye language and Fenris's facial expressions were both especially impressive. I loved the use of props, blocking, the conversation actually being set in a room. While the dialogue itself wasn't that much better, it felt it because the characters acted with their whole bodies instead of just their voices.
- Friendship and Rivalry. Holy moley, I loved having both options! This was the biggest ROLEPLAY change in DA2 that really worked for me. I loved having the viable option of playing my character disagreeing with everything Anders or Fenris said without bruising myself on the gameplay side. I realize that a lot of players didn't see Rivalry as a valid path and I hope that you can improve that somehow in the next installment, but I didn't feel like this game required as much politicking. You could have whatever opinions you wanted with no penalty, and it actually made relationships and roleplay more interesting. Rivalry romances were especially welcome. This sytem had one major flaw, though -- that being that gaining rivalry meant losing friendship, and vice versa. On some characters, this didn't hurt much, but on people like Fenris and Aveline, with very strong opinions in two different areas, it was easy to roleplay consistantly with them and manage to ride a flat old 0 all game. Very frustrating, and ended up requiring some politicking. Some have suggested making friendship/rivalry only apply to the character's most important issue (mage freedom for Anders, being a sweet bro for Varric, etc.) but I think this would be a removal of depth from the character. My best suggestion would be to make the neutrel path do something, OR, put rivalry and friendship on different scales and take whichever is higher. Inelegant, but I'm sure you can refine it.
- No gifts. Gah! I hated gifts! They were so arbitrary and stupid. You'd lose less approval for killing Oghren's wife than you'd gain for giving him some beer. And Morrigan was basically impossible to have any sort of relationship with unless you showered her with jewels. That said, I think a few MORE gifts would be welcome, and make them harder to earn. Maybe at the end of optional sidequests, or costing a whole damn lot of money in a store. They were too easy to find, and it just made them feel like one more stop in your route. Neither did they feel like an actual bonus to relationship scores, just something that the game was already balanced around. I think a few more gifts per character could improve the problems with friendship/rivalry, too -- more wiggle room for when you're straddling the neutrel line. And they should FEEL like extra points, bonuses, not neccessary to max out a relationship one way or the other. Overall, the change was very positive, but could definitely be improved.
- Music. I just thought the songs had more melody and less plodding, overwrought notes, YMMV.
- Storyline. I liked how DA2's story was a lot less cliche than what you come to expect from a fantasy game. There was no evil to fight, no war to win. It was a very personal story and it felt personal. I realize that lots of people complain about there not being "epicness" to it, but I liked that. A story doesn't always have to be epic. Sometimes it's better to be small. Personal preference, but LoTR heroic fantasy 101 was my biggest problem with DA:O. It was made tolerable by the darkness and the extremely loveable characters, but it was still a slave to its archdemons and usurpers and darkspawn. DA2 is a more human story. It isn't without its flaws, and I'll talk more about that later, but the tone and theme of the story is much more preferable.
- classes felt more distinct and fun, talents were the same. I found a joy in choosing my talents that I'd never felt on any of my DA:O characters. The trees improved the experience a lot. I felt they were a little too limited on forcing X many points in the tree, sometimes -- some limitation is good, too much is not, maybe just limit by level/statistic? -- but on the whole, talents were fun as hell and each class felt singular and unique. My personal favourite to play was the archer rogue, a lovely change from DA:O where archery was pretty boring and didn't have a lot of talent support, especially with a rogue.
- Voiced PC. Now, this one comes with a huge caveat, and I'll talk more about it below, but on the whole, my Hawke felt like more of an actual person in an actual world with an actual presence than my Wardens ever did. I think half of this was the blocked scenes, and half of this was the character voice. However, I feel like I really need to highlight the most IMPORTANT part of the character voice succeeding, and that is dominant personality. It's not a flawless system, but it's by far the best use of a pre-voiced, player-defined character in RPGs yet, in my opinion, and I'm really looking forward to seeing Bioware expand on it. I think the choices of personality were a bit limiting, and there are some problems I have with the voiced character and the changes that brought to DA all around, but on the whole, I think it was definitely an improvement.
- The companions speaking up during quests. This is one of the biggest improvements. DA:O's companions felt like an army of wooden soldiers unless you personally asked them for their opinions. I just loved how DA2's cast will speak up whenever they have something to say, and they do it really often. I think it made them feel very alive, and made ME feel a lot less alone.
- UI. Seen a lot of complaints about it, but I thought it was slick and professional and austere and gorgeous, where DA:O's was more rinkydink and visually cluttered. I liked the use of spare cleanness to highlight Kirkwall's visual look, and how nothing ever looked overwrought. Very tidy.
- Speaking of visuals, DA2 was a really nice looking game, especially the areas. Thank you for adding hair physics, everybody looks less fake. Like the slightly stylized but mostly realistic faces. LOVE the elves redesign, **** the haters on that one. There definitely could have been more visual VARIETY, but what was there looking absolutely lovely.
- Also mages were less stupidly broken and I appreciate that.
GOOD STUFF DA:O DID THAT DA2 DIDN'T:
This is the stuff that I really missed and think it was a huge miscalculation to ship the game without. I know there's probably a lot of reasons for it to be the way it was, but I'd appreciate your consideration thinking about these features.
- Waves of enemies absolutely ****ing suck. Does ANYBODY like this? Look, BW, I love you guys and the combat system you designed for DA2 rocks tons of faces, but waves of enemies are just horrible. Nobody likes this poop. It's just impossible to play the game strategically. Strategy is identifying the most harmful target in a group and blowing it down as fast as possible. It's recognizing the dangers of every enemy on the field, categorizing them, and positioning/planning accordingly. When a bunch more dudes zone in halfway through the fight, it makes those choices not matter. It makes kill order become a crapshoot. You stop caring about where to position your people because god knows a rage demon is going to just spawn and stunlock Anders whatever you do. You stop caring about which enemy is most dangerous because another one could appear at any second and you'll still have everyone else to contend with. Waves are just not fun. I beg you to please reconsider including them in DA3. I'm not complaining about my immersion or how illogical it is, I really don't care about any of that, but I know that I enjoy my experience a lot less when I can't plan ahead. RPGs can be anything you want, sure, but planning is the most important part of them.
I have no problem with enemies joining the fight halfway through, but make it rare, it make it less of them. Make it something you feel you can react to, not just a big reset button that drags the fight out and frustrates the player.
- Healing is really not a factor in this game and it makes me sad. Some people like healing, and like playing the healer. I really, really missed this option. It's considerably easier, actually, to play this game with Merrill as your mage than Anders while on Hard, in my experience. I get that reducing the need for a healer was a design choice, but it was one I didn't like. I missed healing being useful, and I missed the game being balanced around it. More viable healer role for DA3, please.
- Relationship transparency. It's actually remarkably difficult to tell what a character thinks of you. Do they like you? Is that bar bluer or redder? Are we friends? Are we dating? What's my score, exactly? Do I have to keep track of this, myself? In DA:O, you could just hover over the bar and see what the character thought of you, whether you were in a romantic relationship or not, and what your exact score was. I really, really missed this.
For romances, especially. Yeah, here comes a girl talking about romances, man the clownbowns things are gonna get hilarious!! But here's the thing -- I absolutely loved the DA2 romances, but they have zero transparency. It's impossible to tell what's going on, there. In DA:O, things were pretty easily laid out. You triggered a romance, the character's status changed to "interested." You pursued the romance until they brought it to you to make it get serious. If you were getting serious with multiple characters at once, there were flagged moments where you'd be forced to choose which romance to pursue. You could break up whenever you wanted, and pursue another character after that break-up if you chose to and hadn't previously broken their hearts. It was all very upfront and intuitive.
Navigating DA2's romances is a nightmare. You can pursue two romances at once without being forced to choose either, and either have DA2 decide for you, or completely break the game. Characters will end or deny romances with you for reasons it's impossible to figure out, when in world you could just logically ASK THEM why they're not interested. Also, with Fenris's (*groans erupt*) in-romance breakup, because there's no way to check if you're in a relationship, it's impossible to tell if you've wrecked the romance or not. I've heard of people reloading their game five and six times to try and get Fenris not to leave them, certain that they've broken the romance somehow. I loved Fenris leaving. It was IC and heartbreaking and lovely. I would have loved it a lot more if I weren't meta-panicking that I messed it up. If the system were more transparent, we really wouldn't have this problem. DA2's romances felt a bit more ORGANIC than DA:O's, it's true, and I liked the actual romance arcs better for the most part, but I think DA:O's SYSTEM was a whole lot better. Transparency. Intuitiveness. I missed that stuff a lot. Trying to successfully woo a DA2 character is like navigating a minefield, and even that could have been solved with any in character feedback. Speaking of which ...
- In character feedback. DA2's characters were great, better and more real than DA:O's imho, and I loved interacting with them. But it always felt as if it was on their terms.
Now, I liked this, I did ... to a certain extent. I think DA:O's system was very flawed. I DON'T want to talk to my dudes just anywhere. Having Leliana tell me a story about a French Knight while standing beside Hespith eating corpses was just ludicrous. When I try and talk to a character there, they should say "not now, stupid, we're about to get owned."
But there should be SOME feedback between player and companion when I just want to have a conversation. I think cutting out about a quarter of the dialogue budget used for other things, and giving it to DA:O style dialogue trees, would be great. Frontload a bit early on to let us get to know our characters -- you know, "so, pirate wench we just met, tell me a bit more about yourself." And then add some that lets us ask characters how they feel about recent story events, like how you could ask DA:O characters if something was wrong after a fight. I would have liked the option to be able to talk to Varric after [tragic event] happened in Act 2 -- it didn't need to be a fully blocked scene, just a quick little exchange that I personally sought out, to make me feel less isolated. I really do think that some dialogue needs to be player guided and player initiated, and the game should let me ask my companions whatever questions my character would ask, within reason. No, I shouldn't be able to ask Varric at a whim what he thinks of rampaging clowns, but I should be able to ask Fenris why he left me and if there's any chance for us, even if his only reaction is emotionally shutting down and not wanting to talk about it. I need to feel like I have agency.
- Speaking of agency! Man, these keep seaguing into one another. Okay, so, Hawke had few choices, and I liked that. Destiny, fate, and what it's like to not HAVE many choices, those were the themes of the story and the game. And that was tight as hell. It's something that games rarely explore, because games tend to be about having us make choices. I liked that you did something different.
But that's the thing ... games are about having us make choices, and when we don't get to make any, it's unsatisfying. This isn't something you notice as much on your first playthrough, but it's really bad on a second. DA:O was great about offering choices. Sometimes it offered too MANY (cough, Connor, thank you so much for not including a Connor disaster in DA2), but it was always offering them. And what this let you do was really feel as if your story was your own. There were branching paths for every major questline. Few of them were very well done, and almost all were the option between being a douchebag or being a hero, but in THEORY, you could personalize your story, and it let you feel as if YOUR Warden was different from any other Warden.
There really aren't many of these in DA2. Most choices are very small, and don't actually affect anything. I'm not asking to let me kill Orsino at the end of act 2, or join the Qunari, exactly. I'm just asking for ways to make my story feel unique. Whether you let that one apostate go or not, she still gets captured and still hates you enough to kidnap your sibling/lover/friend in Act 3. Whether you side with the mages or the templars, the mages still conspire against you, thinking you're with Meredith. I realize that there's a lot of whining along this front, and I'm not asking to be able to avert [the tragedy] or not kill [the character everyone doesn't understand is a twisted **** at the end of the game] or even to stop [that one character] from doing [that one truly heinous thing that sends matters beyond your control.] I'm asking for choices like the ones DA:O offered, like getting to put your choice of ruler on the throne, of seizing or destroying the Anvil, of deciding the succession in Orzammar. A lot of those choices were awful, black and white, poorly outlined ... but they were choices, and I think you could make BETTER ones and include them in the game, instead of cutting them down entirely. The big moments have to stay the same so as not to compromise the themes, but most quests have a preset ending, in the game, and whatever choice you make doesn't seem to matter. Maybe in DA:O, it only had the illusion of mattering, but that
was better than nothing at all.
- Roleplaying in general. As I said, I think that voiced Hawke was a step in the right direction ... but I find my Hawkes harder to roleplay than my Wardens ever were. Some of this is the voice. Some of this is the lack of choices. But I think a lot of things is the lack of transparency in the dialogue wheel.
Like, one of my Hawkes was a cold, serious, confrontational woman. I played with a mixture of the diplomatic and aggressive roleplay options. Those options are limited, by the way, and I'd really like to see them expanded in a future game, even just to allow different reactions and actions as opposed to just different tones, but they'er a good start. Anyways. Sometimes, I'd pick an aggressive option, expecting from the summary that it would sound like a tough, straight-talking person you don't want to mess with, only to have my character transform into a cloud of angry bees and angrily attack the speaker. It's RIDICULOUS, some of the disparency between the summary and the actual statement, sometimes. There are times when I'd nearly miss out on the best option for my Hawke because the summary seemed wrong for her/him. And there are times when I'd pick what looked perfect only to have them make a joke about their dead father. What.
I've heard talk of an option where you could hover over the summary for a few seconds and then see what the character will say at the top of the screen. I think that would HELP this, but not fix it. Make no mistake -- I'm not asking for the removal of the dialogue wheel. I'm not quite sure what I'm asking for. But I found it hard to make my character do what I know my character would do, to say what I know my character would say, disturbingly often. I'd appreciate if BW could think about this and how to improve it, even if you don't come up with anything.
- Origins. Sorry, but I missed them. And being able to choose different races, too. I get it, all about cost efficiency, and my blocked scenes require a character of the same dimensions unless you make them six times, but if there's any way, please reinclude these things. At least Origin stories, even if they're all human. It's that same problem -- my Hawke feels less MINE without an Origin story. She feels less unique, less interesting, and less singular. I get less ideas for characters because they all come from the same place, shouldn't they all logically be the same person? I think Origins were a great idea and I think it would suck for the series to just drop them altogether. It's something unique to DA. Don't abandon it. I missed them.
- Replayability. More FUN to replay, but less reason to.
- Of course, the areas. I don't care so much about this as some people do, and I think it was at least half a stylistic choice, but it WAS lazy and I DO wish that there had been more aesthetic variation, so I'm going to add my voice to the chorus. However, this is last priority for where I want you guys to put your time and money into improving next time.
- And, finally, the ending. I'm not going to complain about it being a cliffhanger, because it's not, and I'm not going to complain about it leaving things unfinished, because I liked that, and I'm not going to complain about how it prepares the world for DA3, because I liked that, too. As far as the overarching story goes, and as far as that last scene between Cassandra and [spoiler character] goes, I am totally satisfied and totally pumped for DA3. Bring it on, that was sweet.
I'm talking about Hawke. My Hawke, in particular. My Hawke and her deep friendship with Isabela, her bromance with Varric, her love for Fenris. My Hawke, and all of her companions, didn't have an conclusion. They just faded away. I didn't get to find out what any of the characters did after DA2, I didn't get to say goodbyes to them after the dust settled. I didn't miss ending slides, those were tedious as all get out, but I did miss walking around the throne room and seeing everyone. That was the farewell, instead of everyone just vanishing. The fact is, most, or at least "a lot of" people play BW games for the companions, and the relationships you can build with them, romantic or not. Not getting to see where everyone went and what they planned to do ... that sucked. I don't care if it gets contridicted later, so long as it's explained IC in a satisfying way, but I want to know.
I think there should have been one last scene, a different one for either outcome, where you talk to all your surviving friends around a campfire on the run, or talk to them all in the Kirkwall throne room. Nothing big, just enough to have the sendoff. And then roll Varric's final monologue.
I don't think it's really the lack of dramatic conclusion people complain about with the ending, so much as the lack of personal closure. Maybe this'll be fixed in DLC, but that's crappy design. A game should conclude itself, without needing microtransactions for emotional satisfaction. I liked the scenes before the Gallows, but they weren't what I needed, and I don't think they were what anyone else needed, either.
So there you have it, TL;DR as hell, my concrit of DA2. I loved the game, I REALLY did. This is all after I've let it sit for a month, let it REALLY sit and think about everything I loved and didn't love so much about it. I hope it's helpful and I hope you take it into consideration. I'm happy with everything DA2 did, even though I had some issues, and I'll be buying DA3 on release day regardless of what you do.
Well, unless you include waves of enemies in combat again. Then I'm out.
J/K. Maybe. Seriously, guys, nobody likes that crap ;_;
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