As I and many others have noted, Dragon Age 2 felt like it was missing a lot of the RP in RPG. Upon completion of my first playthrough, I wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly where I felt this deficiency. only that I did feel it. Nearing the end of the second playthrough, I finally realized: the game played like a to-do list rather than an actual RPG.
In Dragon Age: Origins, after escaping Ostagar, Alistair proceeds to lay down the series of options available to your party. Naturally there are dozens of sidequests, character recruitment quests and loyalty quests available at your discretion, but the most symbolic moment is when Alistair turns to you and asks “What is your plan?” While the four major “zones” were the main story line, they could be completed in any order, or some of them could be skipped entirely. The decisions within decisions gave a real sense of shaping the world and story; you really were choosing your adventure. Each subsequent playthrough was entirely different for me because I could choose where I first wanted to go and what I wanted to do.
In DA2, by comparison, the main plot is quite linear. While there are still side quests, recruitments and loyalty quests that can be done in a relatively open fashion, the overarching story must be completed in a fairly set series of steps. You must complete all of the main story within Act 1 before venturing to the Deep Roads. On a whim, I tried to skip ahead to the Deep Roads without completing a couple of quests, and either my character or a party member flat-out explained “Gee, perhaps we should do this quest before we venture onwards.” But what if I’d rather do that quest later, or skip it entirely? For example, with the Qunari mage quest, you are given the option to refuse to help (indeed, this gives you a +15 bonus with Varric), but then two minutes later, as I tried to venture into the deep roads, Bethany reminded me I needed to finish that quest. Because of this, there was a very clear beginning, middle and end. I would feel quite comfortable arguing that DA:O did not have such set stages, and felt more open as a result.
However, it should be noted that this rail-shooter role-playing feels like a symptom of the overwhelming condition which, to me, wreaks of laziness. There are tiny details within the initial moments of the game that set my Spidey senses tingling, starting with the recruitment of Merrill. After DA:O spent the majority of the game reminding you that blood magic is evil, and the only good blood mage is a dead blood mage, they then present you with a blood mage in your party. You know, for a person who courts demons, she’s awfully chipper. To be fair, depending on your decisions within Redcliffe in DA:O, your character could learn the blood magic tree, and I’ll be honest in saying that was a detail I never liked.
Another tiny, telling detail was the retrieval of your family estate (or, at least, the will showing it should belong to you) by murder. Wait, what? You want me to break into a house that doesn’t belong to me to steal property that is now rightfully theirs, and kill anyone in my way? Ohhhh, slavers bought it! Well, naturally it’s okay then for me to go hog wild. Thank God it wasn’t the Huxtables who bought the family home…
More laziness? The itemization. Yes, I did say in my review that itemization is improved and that is true. In all of my playthroughs of DA:O I changed my equipment maybe two or three times in 25+ levels. I’m sorry but that felt pathetic to me. In fact, that was another of my major bones with DA:O. So yes, I believe DA2 improved upon the itemization, but that’s not saying a lot. First off, how many rings do you pick up? I have a ring, a ring, a ring, and an ornate ring. Ring 1 is two stars and gives me +3 physical damage, Ring 2 is four stars and gives me +3 physical damage. That’s not a typo. Considering one of the only things you can change on your party are trinkets, you’d think they would have put a little more effort into naming and making trinkets at the very least unique. Additionally, why am I picking up junk at all? At one point I had a backpack full of junk, I sold it all and made 20s. One of the items was a gold bar. Apparently the people of Kirkwall think a gold brick is only useful as a weapon.
But on that note, I’ve decided that the reason your party’s armor merely upgrades rather than allowing you change it out was solely so they didn’t have to reanimate or program the cutscenes to recognize new armor. I’m sorry but the cut scenes felt fairly cheap. Not only were the flames within braziers often floating beneath the brazier, but as far as I can figure, Anders must be 6’1″, and Justice must be a mere 5’11″, because his eyes are constantly appearing 2″ beneath Anders’. Again, this just felt lazy to me.
As I mentioned within my review, there are only a handful of dungeon layouts. This may seem a minor gripe, but considering the majority of the game is spent within Kirkwall (as opposed to the entirety of Ferelden last game), this tiny detail would have done wonders at killing what quickly feels like repetition. Also … wait, why is there vegetation in every cave? How are these plants growing? Where is all of this natural light coming from? Have I taken a knock to the head, I feel like we’ve been here before! Why do I get the feeling someone went to painstaking detail to design the first cave dungeon and they liked it so much, they copy/pasted it so that all could revel in its glory?
On a final note, the romances were a major let down. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, feel free to insert fanfic jokes here, it’s okay, I’m comfortable with it) In DA:O you had to work, a little, towards romancing a character. In this game, if you so much as say one nice thing to Anders, he starts calling caterers and picking out curtains. And Fenris is so full of wounded-dark-boy angst, I was surprised he didn’t sparkle in the sunlight (nice corpses, by the way! Good to see you wouldn’t want to, you know, clean those up in three years). Merrill’s lovable quirk is “I worship the devil,” Isabela was the obvious tramp, and the only person out of the entire party I wanted to be friends with, let alone romance was Varric. Yeah, I said it, I’m down with that. Also, I miss the general discussion that helped you not only learn about your party members, but also what type of gifts to give them. The gift system provided a nice mini-game, like a little detective novel as you figured out who liked what. What few gifts exist in this game are immediately labeled as being for a specific person.
Now it’s important to bear in mind that I write this article after my second playthrough. So obviously I really enjoyed the game. But I guess what I’m saying is that while an entirely solid, decent game, there were so many details that prevented it from being great. I loved Dragon Age: Origins, because it felt like a classic RPG — I like Dragon Age 2. At the end of the day, due to a lack of variety and true choice, the replayability just suffers.
Source: videogamewriters.com/addressing-the-dragon-age-2-discontent-4936
Retour en haut
Nice drawing of Flemeth.
