Amitar wrote...
The problem is that they clearly wanted to drop the players into the action, whereas personal stories need time to setup:
We needed to see Hawke in Lothering as the recruiters came to drag people off to Ostagar.
We needed to spend time with the Sibling that died (Mage Hawke with Bethany dodging the recruiters, Warrior/Rogue Hawke with Carver at Ostagar).
We needed to see what Hawke lost as Lothering was Destroyed and their connection with their family.
We needed to see Hawkes first year in Kirkwall working for the smugglers/mercenaries and their reaction the the newness of the environs.
Instead we got a naff outdoor dungeon with a pointless death sequence and a cutscene to the Deeproads Expedition prelude.
I think EA wanted an RPG it could treat like the the CoD/Madden/Fifa series and put no effort into market research about the majority of RPG gamers.
I'm one of the few people who really like DA2, but so much this as well.
I wrote a very long review in German and don't feel like translating it into English.
So I'll just add a few lines:
I LOVE the mages against templars story and I consider it infinitely more interesting than fighting some evil monsters. But yeah, the first 20 hours of the game (it's not a short at all, people!) up until the second act were painfully devoid of a real plot. It's basically: you're a poor refugee who needs to get money from somewhere to join a mysterious expedition in order to become rich or something. Uhm, ok.
It took me slightly frustrating 15 hours to relealize that the endless list of sidequests *are* the game. Once I accepted this I actually started to enjoy these sidequest *g*
Anyway, dropping the player into the action doesn't work well for RPGs. It might work for short stories but it sure as hell doesn't work for video games that are supposed to offer an emotional connection to the characters.
You *need* to get familiar with a setting and the characters. You *need* the guy/girl-venturing-out-into-the-big-bad-world-introduction. Kill a few rats as training and so forth.
I don't mind all that much that I had to play a human, that I couldn't choose an origin. But it would have been nice to at least be given ONE origin for this one character.
This game would have had much more impact if it had started in Lothering. I agree.
Your sibling dying after 5 minutes was not a smart move. I felt nothing.
Creating a storyline that stretches over a period of 7 years is a cool idea. And I'm fine with having to fill in some of the gaps. But the time leaps left me confused mostly. Or disappointed.
Take the arrival in Kirkwall: You are told that you'll have to work for a year before you can enter the city. I expected this year to be part of the game. But what happens? Once I choose who to work for the prologue simply ends and BAM the year has passed. Okay.....
A minor time leap gripe was the romances: I've only done the Fernis romance so far. Anyway, I was expecting a romance that develops in accordance with a long time frame. It didn't! You can hit on Fenris right away but then nothing much happens and I don't even know why. Years pass and we're still flirting but not getting anywhere. Then the relationship does finally progress and you spend a night with him but he freaks and runs. But there's no follow-up. I was assuming the relationship continued somehow. I didn't consider this scene to be a relationship breaker. Only in act three did I realize that the relationship had ended YEARS ago because a companion asked me about it! Maybe that was just me not getting it but the romances shouldn't be so vague and cut up, should they?! Maybe that's just the Fenris romance....?
The time leap between act two and three wasn't so bad. But they could have shown better how the conflict is on the brink of escalating now by maybe inserting a few cutscenes, not just a few lines by Varric.
Ok, that was more than just a few lines *g*
It might not sound like it, but I had tons of fun with DA2 despite the prologue and act one failure. It's not a bad game at all. But I'd prefer the DAO style story telling. Don't mind experiments, but DA2 didn't quite work out. The 7 year storyline is a nice idea but could have been executed better. Definitely.
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