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Dragon Age II - Final Thoughts
By: Shaun McInnis, GameSpot - Posted on Mar 24, 2011
Dragon Age II - Final Thoughts
The release of Dragon Age II sparked a controversy among the role-playing game community. Some enjoyed the changes BioWare had made in its follow-up RPG. Others decried BioWare for purportedly neglecting its most ardent fans with simplified mechanics. We spoke to Mike Laidlaw, lead designer on Dragon Age II, to get his thoughts on the debate, the reasoning behind some of the changes, and what he thinks of the finished product.
GameSpot: How do you think the reception for Dragon Age II would have been different if this had been the first game in the series?
Mike Laidlaw: I think it would have been different--exactly how is probably hard to tell, at this point. When you think about Dragon Age, one of the things that comes to mind is the legacy, going back to the Baldur's Gate games and that kind of thing. Actually, [that comparison] was drawn during Origins. It was an explicit, spiritual successor kind of connection. Certainly, I think Origins did a very good job of following in that vein. What Dragon Age II does, or what I perceive it as doing, is take a lot of those gameplay elements--working together as a team, functioning as a combat unit, having a story that unfolds with choices (all of those core things that I see as principal to both Baldur's Gate and, more importantly, to Dragon Age)--and tries to bring some newer ideas to the table (elements of responsiveness, elements of interactivity in the way those fights are coordinated) into what I think is a more modern setting and expectation. For most players, the idea of the solo combat is surprising.
I do think Dragon Age II is running up against some elements of Origins, and it's not something we went into completely blind. We certainly knew there would be some friction between what Origins players have come to expect and what Dragon Age II delivers. But I don't see the two in opposition to each other. I've talked to Origins players who said, "As soon as I moved it to hard, I totally see where Origins is again." That's fair, and I think that's something over time we'll continue to tune and capitalize on that fusion between the Origins experience and Dragon Age II.
"We certainly knew there would be some friction between what Origins players have come to expect and what Dragon Age II delivers."
GS: In terms of the story in Dragon Age II, it feels like Hawke's rise in Kirkwall comes at the expense of the gameworld as a whole. In contrast, the player saw and learned a lot about the world in Origins. Is the idea that Dragon Age II has a narrower focus and lacks the broader context a fair assessment of the story?
ML: The goal that we were going for is twofold. First, we did want to focus in on a more personal experience--the experience of one person and not the avatar of an organization. To be quite frank, that's a story we told before, and while there's nothing wrong with it, we really wanted to challenge ourselves to not have you end up in the Jedi Order or a Child of Baal, what have you. The story is tighter, and what I think it does is it moves through time in a way that we move through space in Origins.
In Origins, we very much had a mandate to bring a new fantasy world to life--one country, specifically, of a new fantasy world to life. And we moved around through that. But really, what I want to see Dragon Age II set up is a world that's evolving over time just in the same way that Ferelden, as the Blight advanced, evolved through space. When I look where Dragon Age II leaves us, it leaves us with a phase that's inherently more interesting--one where we see strife and things falling apart. This is in stark contrast to the ending of Origins, where we saw things resolved. Oh good, the Blight's over. That's great. We can all go back to minor politicking, which as comfortable as that would be makes for a far less compelling world to be in.
So, in that respect, I think the narrow focus of Dragon Age II really does what we originally hoped to do, which is to say, "This is an event. We want to change the world." As our lead writer said, we want to kick over the sand castle we just built to change something and to show that this is a dynamic space. But we don't want to do it in a way that's just a heavy-handed, "And then a war started!" What we wanted to do is show in a uniquely Dragon Age way this is something that people and real passions and motivations got involved in. It wasn't just an event that happened because it seemed convenient for the narrative.
I'm just going to say this once.
.....the ending is entirely convenient for the narrative. Every mage is a blood mage and the Meredith was driven crazy by a plot point not because of any kind of character flaw.
If the purpose was for human and human emotions to be the cause for the world to change then it should be humans and their emotions that changed the world. Not demons and plot items.
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My own being that archers and 2h warriors were fairly bad in comparison. Its not so much a issue of balancing the classes and more a issue of making all them viable and fun. The only other worthy goal i can speak to that was mentioned often was useless abilities like most of the creation line etc. 
