I've been around these forums for a while since DA2 came out. I wanted to see what other people thought of it, and in doing so I've ended up sharing my side of it quite a few times. However, I've never put all of my thoughts in to one comprehensive post so that, hopefully, the employees at Bioware can get a good idea of how someone who's enjoyed nearly all their games feels about this newest one.
To give a little background on my history with Bioware games and RPGs, I've been a fan of Bioware since they made Baldur's Gate. I enjoyed KOTOR immensely as well. However, I also thoroughly enjoyed Mass Effect, as well as Mass Effect 2 (and most of the changes that went with it). I played the last three games on the console, and even played the PS2 Baldur's Gates (Dark Alliance) and enjoyed those as well. With Dragon Age: Origins, I bought it for PC because I thought it would be best played on the system that its spiritual predecessor was originally made for. I had played it on Xbox 360 prior to buying it for myself, and I enjoyed it on there. It wasn't until I bought it for PC that I realized how much I had been missing. I ended up giving it a solid 4 playthroughs, beginning to end with more than 95% of the side quests done each time. I pre-ordered Dragon Age 2 for the Signature Edition. When I did so, I knew it would be different, and I thought that, while I may or may not enjoy all the changes, I would enjoy the game as a whole. I enjoyed the demo for what it was; a demo. When I started playing Dragon Age 2, however, I realized that it wasn't quite what I thought it was.
There are a lot of good things about the game, for sure, but there are also many, many things that need to be improved on. For this review, I'll mention a topic, and go in to both what I thought was good about it and how it could be improved. Hopefully that makes it a relatively easy (if probably long) read. Let's get this started.
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The Story [possible spoilers]
As a warning, this'll be difficult to write without getting in to specifics about the storyline, so if you haven't played the game yet you might want to skip to the next section. Also, this will likely be a really long section (I'll be analyzing the game in depth), so feel free to skim. I'll throw in a summary at the bottom of it for anyone who decided that it was too long to read; this part is mostly meant for the Dev's anyway.
To start off with, I'd like to address the storyline. It was one of the best new ideas that the game had. I really liked the thought of bringing it closer and focusing on a single man's rise to power in one area. It was a bit of a jump away from the traditional epic, and cliche, RPG storylines, and that was a good thing. However, there were enough flaws in the development of the storyline that it ended up falling on its face. For starters, you missed a really good opportunity to introduce the player to the city when you skipped the year of either being a smuggler or a mercenary. If you had us play even a few missions throughout that time, we could have easily gotten to know our character better, as well as Hawke's companions and the city around him. Introduce us to the power structure of the city, and how things work. What's considered 'legal' and 'illegal', and where the line between the two is (or isn't). Show Hawke getting in to some shady dealings, and how he handles them when he doesn't have a choice whether he can do it or not. You should've given us more insight in to Hawke's first year, and in not doing so it felt like we not only missed out on a huge part of Hawke's life, but also like we were completely detached from the story, which isn't a good thing in a game like this. There are multiple references to Hawke having 'made a name for himself', but I have no idea what that 'name' is. Did I do good things? Was I a dick? What? It ended up being more alienating than not.
Once that's done, we get in to Act 1, which was essentially a giant fetch quest. For 50 gold coins, we can go on an expedition to earn us more money so we can regian our house. Good idea, but, again, bad execution. I felt like a pizza boy, running around doing smaller fetch quests just to get some additional money. I'll address the process of getting companions a bit later, but in short the story didn't particularly connect with many of them in the long run. It seemed very contrived that every time you helped out someone with something, they would magically join your team of adventurers. If you had tied in their separate lives with the main quest somehow, or made them feel more like close friends rather than acquaintances who, for some reason, ran around the city with you. Back to the storyline though, it would've been a lot better if you had made Act 1 feel like it had an actual purpose, some sort of overriding quest instead of just a bunch of fetch quest. Even a tournament where the prize was 50 gold would have made it feel a lot more connected, and less like I was trying to find Hawke a part time job.
Once we get in to the Deep Roads things end up getting better. I like the addition of the lyrium idol. It gave us hints at some sort of overriding plot that was going on, because up until that it felt like there was no real point to the game, other than 'increase Hawke's influence'. However, the lyrium idol disappeared far too quickly without any hints at what it meant, or what it was. Even just a small clue thrown at us would have made the whole game feel a lot more connected, but it ended up not tying things together very well, even at the end. To further that, the promising ideas behind the new enemies in the Deep Roads, as well as the Rock Wraith were never addressed much further than by the end. I found myself wondering if the it was all connected, or if the enemies were just thrown in there to add a bit of diversity. I wanted to know more behind it all, and, sadly, I never really found out. Not only that, but none of them made any other appearances in the game, and that was a little bit depressing.
Finally, one of my biggest issues in the game, we get back and (the way I played it) your sister gets taken to the Gallows. I had a lot of trouble believing this. Up until that point, and afterwards, we had been helping apostates out throughout the game. Anders practices his abilities openly, and whenever we're out in the street the mages are throwing fireballs around like nobody's business. And, afterwards, I ended up killing so many Templars that the few that were taking Bethany away wouldn't have been more than an afterthought. Not being able to do anything about it didn't fit in with the feel of the game at all, and that only further distanced me from the story.
Act 2 starts, and we're now considered to be Nobility. This is all well and good, but, again, I feel a bit of a disconnect with the jump. I want to go through maybe just a quick quest or two to see how Hawke changes in the time, what difficulties he has to go through, etc. When he comes back, does he just show the Viscount the new money he has and is immediately granted a manor and everything else? Or is there a big process for it? Does he have to prove himself somehow? And then the questions about the Qunari start to crop up, and I feel like I missed something big in my three years. How did everything leading up to that point happen without my knowing it? I end up starting the whole thing blind, without having learned too much about how the city works and my supposed place in it (whether I decide to stay in my place or not) over the three years I spent there. However, despite that, the actual quest line for this part is fairly well done; a surprise considering how I felt about Act 1. Whatever flaws there were, the only big one I remember is how Isabella acted throughout the act, and that's a good thing because, whether or not it makes complete sense, it remained believable enough. I enjoyed going and saving the city, killing the Arishok, and everything else. What made this section (and Act 3, for that matter) boring was the worthless sidequests, but I'll get in to those later.
Act 3, like Act 2, was better than I was expecting. Again, the sidequests threw the whole thing off for me, but the main quest was an interesting take on how the city began to fall apart. What, again, made me curious is the time jump. It makes a bit of sense, but, again, I would've liked to see a bit of what happened during those four years. In this case, it didn't feel like time jumped at all, but more like it was taking place a couple months after the end of Act 2. It threw me off again, and that didn't help much. Things either changed more slowly than I would have thought, or Hawke was actively ignoring everything up until the conflict with Meredith and the First Enchanter. Again, it left me feeling disconnected.
I don't have too much to say about the rest of the main quests in this act - whether you like it or not comes down to personal perference (I rather enjoyed it), but another thing that bugged me is the sudden re-emergence of the lyrium artifact. In my mind, Meredith seemed bat**** crazy from the beginning of the game. I felt like the artifact was thrown in there just to make it 'seem' like the ending was connected to the beginning, when, in reality, it wasn't. It would've felt a lot better if there was more evidence to Meredith's insanity, and a little bit more revealed about the lyrium artifact throughout the game.
Also, similarly, Anders' Big Boom didn't strike me as something that made sense. Throughout the game, as much as Anders seemed slightly insane, he didn't seem like he was as bat**** crazy as Meredith was. Really, he struck me as a nice guy at heart that was going through some tough times. It really struck me as disjointed and not completely making sense that he decided to blow the crap out of the Chantry. Now, it would've made significantly more sense if it was something else, or if it seemed he felt sorry for taking truly innocent lives, but he didn't. He just sat there and was like "Ya, I blew up a building and started a war, and in the process became the very thing I had been telling Merrill she was going to become the entire game. So what?"
Finally, the ending left me feeling like I'm missing out on something huge, which isn't particularly a good thing for a game like this. If it were an awesome game, then yes, I'd be ready to buy the next one to find out what I missed. However, it wasn't quite good enough to make me look forward to it, so the cliffhanger ending only made things more disconnected for me.
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To sum it up (AKA TL;DR)
I felt a lot of huge disconnects from the main story throughout the game. The time jumps didn't quite do it for me, because it felt like I was missing big, significant parts of my character's life. Act 1 as a whole just felt like a giant fetch quest, and was used more like filler than set-up for the more epic parts. The final two acts were good, but there were a few flaws in them that, coupled with the other flaws, made them seem iffy at best. A few plot holes and such and it felt like the game was a hastily thrown together series of short stories, not a comprehensive plot that spanned ten years of one character's life.
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Sidequests
Like any good, lengthy RPG, sidequests were a big part of Dragon Age 2. And they came off as done extremely poorly. More than anything else, I felt such a complete disconnect from so many of these quests that they ended up forcing me to take a two day hiatus from finishing the game, and even after that I had to force myself to finish. Multiple times I was extremely tempted to just say "screw it" and finish the main quests, but I stuck with it, completing all but a couple (not including the bugged one). I'll compare these with DA:O's sidequests, but they can actively be interchanged with just about any RPG.
In DA:O, whenever I did a sidequest I felt like I was learning more about the world around me. I learned lore from them, or how the nations worked, or even just more about the Warden and my character as a person. They added to the depth of the game, because they fit in with the main storyline so well that they were almost seamless. Only a couple of times did I feel like I had to go completely out of my way to finish something that didn't feel important to me. Even the fetch quests were so well integrated that I barely even noticed I was doing them, I'd just go turn one in once I was done with an area, having picked up everything I needed during the course of a normal runthrough.
Now, compare those to DA2's quests. In this game, it made me feel like doing everything was a chore. I had to go out of my way to finish quests that I didn't particularly care about in the first place. I felt more like an errand boy than anything. The only quest I felt even a mild attraction to was the series of murders (with the boquet of white flowers), and only because of what happened at the end of them (and even then only barely). I had to physically force myself to continue to do them, and at the end all I got was some cash and no more real knowledge of the world around me. I didn't learn anything, and they didn't add to the depth of the game, they only added an artificial fifteen hours to the game. The recycled dungeons only served to compound this feeling tenfold, making me essentially close my eyes and click to the next point. I spent most of my time watching Hulu as I did these quests, because they completely failed to hold my attention (and normally I have an excellent attention span). If there was anything important that I could have learned during them, I missed it completely because they weren't well built or executed.
This, in my opinion, was a real game-killer and a big part of the reason the game has performed so poorly among the fans.
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Characters and Companions
In Dragon Age: Origins, I felt a real connection to my companions. They joined me because they saw a purpose to what I was doing, and because they felt they could help the world. They stayed with me because I did things right; I helped them, and, although they might not have agreed with me all the time, and they certainly didn't agree with each other, but they ended up trusting me and staying together. Over the course of the few months I spent with them, I got to know almost every one's entire history. I even got to know more about Sten than I ever thought I would have, despite not truly knowing his real name. I led my companions, but they also taught me, and we worked together to form the best, most coherent fighting team that Ferelden had ever seen.
Fast forward to DA2, and the companions have taken a turn for the shallower. By the end of the game, I felt as if I knew Sten better than I knew any one of them. Even my sister, who I had supposedly known my entire life, felt almost like a stranger to me. I didn't know what she liked, I didn't know if she enjoyed stone carvings. I didn't know if Merrill had lost a mirror as a child, or if Isabella had a strange attraction to leather. All I knew was that my sister was an Apostate, Merrill was a blood mage obsessed with a certain mirror (which had more to do with the Origins plot than this one), and Isabella was a pirate who liked my butt. And I spent ten years with these people. It felt like they were just acquaintances who I hung out with every once in a while, with the sole exception of Aveline, who I felt a genuine connection to. If you want to know which characters you did a good job with, it was Varric and Aveline. The rest of them were about as shallow as a puddle of water over the lid of a manhole. Enough to get the hem of your pants damp, but no more.
The gift giving system in Origins may have been flawed, sure, but it at least gave us an insight in to who your companions were. If there were something I would suggest, I'd say let us talk to our friends more, get to know more about them. I'd assume Hawke would know where Isabella was from, or whether Sebastian had any friends in Starkhaven. As the player, however, I had no idea about either. Like the storyline, it made me feel severely disconnected from the characters and the game in general.
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Areas and Environment
For a big city-state, Kirkwall sure as hell felt small. It was a good, and I thought pretty cool, idea to focus on one city, but when you do that, you need to make things more appealing to us. Lowtown felt like I was playing Minecraft in a world that was entirely made out of sand. It got dull after the first Act, much less the next two. It would have improved the area considerably if you had added some variance from one half of Lowtown to another, but the most interesting thing in that area of the city (and the docks, which really only felt like an expansion of Lowtown) was the Alienage's tree. And that felt like it was just thrown in there to give an illusion of 'difference'. I would've thought that the elves would have made their area look a little more unique, no?
In all reality, Hightown was done fairly well, but it hardly made up for the rest of it. Everything else felt like more of the same. Even Darktown felt like it was just Lowtown with a ceiling above it. You should've made the city feel more expansive, add some variance to the areas. What would have made it ridiculously better is if the city had actually changed over the course of ten years. I expected it to, especially since nothing ever stays exactly the same over ten years time, but, lo and behold, Lowtown looked exactly the same when Hawke became Champion as it did when he first arrived in the city. You missed a golden opportunity to show exactly what Hawke did for the city by illustrating how things changed and were either improved or fell apart based on what you chose. It would've added a ton of more depth to the game. As it is, four years after the Qunari were defeated and left, the compound is still walled off and looking exactly the same as it did.
I'm just going to briefly mention the recycled environments here, because, honestly, I think you knew that was a mistake when you decided to do it. Whether it was a result of rushing to meet the deadline or a design oversight, I have no idea, but I don't think I need to rub any more salt in that wound.
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Leveling/Game Mechanics
You did a good job in the mechanics area of the game. Everything felt like it fit smoothly, and, as much as people will complain about how it was different than DA:O, I thought you did a good job here. The skill trees were creative, and they made you think about what you were going to do next instead of just following a straight line to get to an 'uber spell'. One way I feel like you could've improved this is to give us an option of either taking one path or another to get to something big, not always making us take both paths in order to let us get it. It would just add a little more variance to the system that would make it feel a bit more realistic and 'tactical'.
On the note of tactical, however, I felt like the removal of the isometric camera for PC was a bit of a slap in the face. Again, it might've been because you were trying to meet a deadline, and I can understand that, but it was a big reason DA:O felt as good as it did on PC, and to us who like the PC it was a big reason that it felt like you were telling us to go screw ourselves in favor of consoles. Now, before you go about dismissing me because of that, allow me to clarify. I realize completely that you probably didn't think about it that way, but that's how it felt to us. If you remember, and this has been said so many times it hurts me to repeat it, DA:O was supposed to hearken back to the days of Baldur's Gate, and be a way for Bioware to tell PC gamers that you were still looking out for us. I thought it did that extremely successfully, while still drawing in quite the console crowd (remember, I played this game on the console first and really liked it). However, by removing the thing that reminded many of us most of the Baldur's Gate series, it seemed like you were telling PC gamers that you had changed your mind and were focusing on Console again. We all know you didn't mean it that way, but sometimes things don't come across how you mean them to, and this is one of those times. Not only that, but in my playthough being unable to zoom out and give my characters commands from the godly view of an iso-cam caused a significant number of problems. Not being able to move my characters around walls was one of them, and occasionally it got to the point where I couldn't move them to the other side of a plant because it was in the way. Likewise, being unable to gauge where my characters were based on the combat arena and the other characters caused me a few issues throughout the game.So, it's not just about 'feeling'; removing the tactical cam actually did remove a surprising amount of tactical gameplay.
Overall, the game mechanics weren't bad. They ended up being one of the points that many people disliked due to changes, but the changes themselves weren't anything that actively detracted from the game (although I really would have liked to spec a character as a true battle mage via Arcane Warrior).
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Combat
The combat in this game really was a double edged sword for you all. Making it look better, and seem faster was most certainly a plus. DA:O's combat, while I found it entertaining, was slow compared to this. It was cool seeing my character perform acrobatics while moving in to position. Unfortunatelly, this also led to more than a few issues. The first one is the gore-plosions that plagued the game. Somehow, with a pair of foot long knives, I was able to make a guy literally disintegrate right before my eyes. There's a border between realism and ridiculousness, and occasionally it's a good thing to cross it. In this case, you crossed it and then just kept running. Dial it back a little bit, make things a bit more realistic (I can see a Mage making someone explode with a fire staff, but not a Rogue with a pair of knives), and you'll have fixed a lot of things. Personally, I also thought it was ridiculous that my Rogue would tuck and roll half a foot to get within striking range; it made so much more sense just to step six inches to his right.
As for the actual combat, as has been stated before, the waves was a bad idea. Seeing enemies materialize out of nowhere all around us never made any sense to me, and, while it would be interesting to see reinforcements arrive in a few fights here and there, it was a bit of a stretch to see every common band of theives have an entire legion of men at their disposal, especially since most of them were based out of what was little more than a hovel. It would also be nice to see the reinforcements come out of places that I didn't just painstakingly clear of absolutely everything; were they hiding in the broom closets, or under the beds? Where did they come from? Overall, what it ended up doing was adding 'artificial' difficulty to the game, padding the length, and making it so that I seriously contemplated turning it down to casual while I was roaming the streets at night, just so I wouldn't have to spend half an hour trying to defeat a gang of bandits (especially after I just annihilated the entire Qunari army).
On the tactical side, largely beacuse of the waves of enemies, every fight ended up being a brawl. There was no way to "leave my mages and arches in the back" (as the game told me) because whatever 'back' there was ended up becoming a spawn point for any number of enemies. I ended up just clumping everyone in a group and telling them to "attack this guy", then having them use special powers on said one guy until he was dead, then rinse and repeating to the next guy, and the next, and the next... That's not 'tactical'. That's rushing in to a battle and hoping you survive. You couldn't plan for anything, except for more and more enemies to come. Honestly, as much as some will say that it actually was tactical, spamming health potions and heals and memorizing spawn points while your characters stay clumped in a group isn't 'tactics'. Neither is spamming AOE spells. Tactics involves setting up trapps, luring your enemy in to ambushes, coordinating between mages and tanks so that the tank will keep enemies from flanking the mages while they pound away from a distance. All of which were, quite honestly, prohibitively difficult to even try, much less accomplish with any sort of success, in this game. It was easier, and more effective, to clump attack.
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Overall
Overall, the game had a good premise going for it. The ideas for pretty much everything were solid, but the execution of said ideas was extremely flawed. The story, which should have brought us in, distanced us and made us feel like we weren't a part of the story at all. The combat, while starting off solid, ended up being more repetitive and boring (and significantly less tactical) than DA:O's. The characters were shallow and poorly defined, really only there on the surface so it can feel like you formed a team. The environments were bland and boring, with a few exceptions. Out of ten, I would rate the game at 6, or a D. It wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't good, and it could be improved upon immensely. Plus it wasn't at all what I was expecting out of a Bioware game.
I sincerely hope that this review helps in the creation of the next game, even if it's just in a small way. I'm rooting for you Bioware; you've been one of my favorite game companies for a long time, and I hope this is just a bump in the road on the way to continued greatness. I look forward to both ME3 and DA3, but I'm going to be more careful about pre-ordering after this.
Cheers,
Apollo45
Modifié par Apollo Taren, 17 mars 2011 - 11:11 .
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