Dear Mr. Gaider, Laidlow and Darrah; since you have taken the time to ask and read plus asking questions, I think as a dissapointed player of DA2 I´d like to cover some of your points and hopefully, in a constructive way, ask why DA:O clicked for me but DA2, not so much.
Here we go and if you can read all the incoming wall of text, I will thank you in advance.
-Mr. Gaider, I understand your angle in terms of not just importing, but also on the side of developing plots and narratives. Videogames are a work of both a poet and an engineer. I´m sure you and the rest of the writers come up with excelent plot devices, characters, situations and so on and then, the evil tech guy gets to you and comments on how implementing that would be a nightmare, would take a long time or would cost 1/4 of the budget for the whole game. I know so far there was a LOT of data to import from DA:O and I understand that it will be horrible to cever everything but please, avoid symple cameos in the future.
If something from past games actually makes it to new ones, make sure it´s meaningful. Yeah, I liked seing Zevran again, but his presence did not add much to the whole story. Anders on the other hand is a crucial element of the game and even with the changes, it was well handled.
BTW, I missed a lot of the "Gaidermancy" I have seen in other works in DA2. By Gaidermancy I mean characters that run deep and nice such as Viconia or Morrigan. Compare those two ladies to Meredith. Sorry to say but she felt like a very poor baddy. If I compare to Irenicus from BG2 or the Archedemon and the whole Darkspawn horde in DA:O I never got the feeling of archiving a victory. Meredith felt like a deranged junkie compared to above mentioned villains. And that is simply because I played against good odds in terms of gameplay, but I did not get the same feeling in terms of plot.
-Mr. Darrah, I never felt that Hawke really changed anything. He simply was in the middle of something big and world changing, but I never felt I did anything meaningful to alteer the events. I understand you and the whole team wanted a new narrative that went away from the classic "kill the super evil - save the world" story. And that is fine indeed! Games such as Planescape: Torment are about that and they are fantastic in doing so.
But the problem is the notion of interactivity. Bioware prides on delivering stories where us players make an impact. We saw that impact in DA:O, to the extent of changing the fate of several nations, the perception of entire races or setting big forces of the world in motion. Good, that´s what you promised and that´s what you delivered!
The main element about DA2 is about explaining the context of a massive-scale conflict, but it is not me who started it, not me who wanted it and even less me who could have changed anything on it. I felt like a soldier on the Marne trenches, not like the Kaiser sending the declaration of war. Is that a bad thing? Not really, but at least I wanted to be able to shape the events a bit, perhaps giving reasons to support one or the other side, perhaps helping victims in between and standing as the neutral partner to look for peace. When the game ended I felt like a natural dissaster surviviour, not the person who had a word on shaping anything big.
-Mr. Laidlow, I completely approve of your "show, don´t tell" policy. But the problem here is that what I see does not feel completely coherent. If there was something I loved in DA:O is the "blood, sweat, dirt" aesthetics. It´s not a matter of high fantasy, low fantasy or dark fantasy, it´s a matter of coherence. Combat was indeed more responsive, but elements such as the 101 Airborne enemies broke all sense of keeping the combat tactical and making sure that position is important at all times. On the other hand I liked the general Western Middle Ages attitude. DA2 felt too "manga". With charges that looked like Goku flying, weapons the size of Final Fantasy VII (two handed swords in particular) and people exploding as if hits were not from daggers, but anti-tank weapons...
DA:O´s combat was clunky at times, no question. But it also felt beliaveble, especially swordplay.
The interface was a big down too. The bars, icons and menus are supposed to help you create a whole atmosphere and they felt to asepthic. Returning for a second to the manga-style, cinematics that used animated drawings, well, they didn´t work too well. Again, this is a Western style Medieval RPG. Images felt cartoony and I think the approach you guys took in DA:O with the illuminated scroll-like drawings (the one about the myth of the fall of magister and the rise of darkspawn is a little jewel, to be honest) went great. And the narration itself for DA2 was no less good, but the problem is the "body" to present the information.
I will, on the other hand, give you credit for an element: dialogues. They went fluid and smooth, Limited at times, perhaps, but that´s not a terrible issue considering they can be expanded. Reading through walls of text may get terribly boring for many (not for me, though). In that sense, I think the voiced Hawke was a bet that went well. The problem I had with him is the lack of identification and alter ego effect when playing but that was not an issue of conversation mechanics, that can be blamed on other elements I described before.
-Mr. Darrah, I think your suggestions about control, environments and customization nailed it. That is exactly what I wanted and the elements I lost from DA:O. I expected DA2 to be a bigger in all those terms game than the previous, even if the mechanics were different but in the end, archived the same purpose.
-After all the complains, I will give you credit for something. The narration and plot behind everything was fantastic. It really was. Sure, I miss Alistair, Morrigan (Mr. Gaider, shame on you again for writting such a fantastic character! Now I´ll miss her mussings till I see her again!
) or the crude humor of Shale, but I get excelent characters too.
I loved the fact that even when things are baaaaaad and situations get desperate, we always get a smile, a little sentence to lighten the mood and a glimpse of hope, whether it may be the cynicism of Varric, the innocent view of Merrill or the flirtatious comments from Isabella. And yes, all of them get serious when they have to too.
Taking risks with the framed narration? You took it and it work most of the time as structure. However, you tried to make us protagonists of something big and world changing while at the same time, forcing us in a route that led to not being able to actually influence any big event.
All in all I saw a lot of talent in DA2, a lot of good writting and a beautifull story that due to playability issues in one hand and decission impact reduction did not work for me as other games you have created did.
The real problem here is that you have created diamonds such as Baldur´s Gate series, DA:O, Mass Effect or KOTOR. Compared to those, DA2 felt small. I know that you have the flame in there to surpass all those games and I hope you can find the means to make that flame a bonfire in future works.
PD. Excuse spelling and typos, it´s kind of hard to type and correct English in a computer that only understands Spanish. :-D
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