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[Cyrus Amell]

I bought this game for $5 and never regretted missing out on the Prince, Legacy or Assassin DLC because the Black Emporium was all I needed. The problem with this game is that it has so many cut corners that it would make the Circle blush. For instance, you may or may have not noticed that the city was already on fire when Hawke and company were running to stop Meredith and Orsino from arguing at the end of the game. Go ahead, replay it and see when Hawke and Aveline are running down the street while it is on fire already. Then of course the other nagging issues: Fenris squatting in a house filled with corpses he never gets rid of, Merril somehow walking into the city and getting a bigger and better house than our family has, and of course Orsino turning into a Harvester when it made no sense at all whatsoever.

 

And those are just the elvish problems. Let's look at the dwarves, for instance there are no dwarven women (they had to use an elf when the role called for one). In fact, we clearly see the entrance to what should be a dwarven style district where the rest of Varric's family and competitors should hang out. But Bioware couldn't be bothered to add anything else to the city because they were rushing like mad.

 

And then the most egregious flaw, in my opinion, is how they used the characters. Let's start with Flemeth - she was only in the story to make us think this was a Dragon Age game (period). Shaemus, Viscount Dumar's son, could have been an interesting character and if this had been Origins level production he would have served an excellent role in the story  (maybe a female political romance option like Queen Anora?). But no, they just killed him off early to invest us in a tiny plotlet of a story. Speaking of kill-off, the forcible removal of Leandra Amell was terrible - all for what? To show us mages can be bad? She was walking in Lowtown at night, we butcher people on the street regularly who would have attacked her or worse. The list goes on and on...

 

Lets review: bad attention to details, terrible use of assets, and all around little content even when needed.

 

That's Dragon Age 2 for you, take it as you will. A fun RPG for $5? Yes. A decent Dragon Age game? No.

[luism]

I bought this game for $5 and never regretted missing out on the Prince, Legacy or Assassin DLC because the Black Emporium was all I needed. The problem with this game is that it has so many cut corners that it would make the Circle blush. For instance, you may or may have not noticed that the city was already on fire when Hawke and company were running to stop Meredith and Orsino from arguing at the end of the game. Go ahead, replay it and see when Hawke and Aveline are running down the street while it is on fire already. Then of course the other nagging issues: Fenris squatting in a house filled with corpses he never gets rid of, Merril somehow walking into the city and getting a bigger and better house than our family has, and of course Orsino turning into a Harvester when it made no sense at all whatsoever.
 
And those are just the elvish problems. Let's look at the dwarves, for instance there are no dwarven women (they had to use an elf when the role called for one). In fact, we clearly see the entrance to what should be a dwarven style district where the rest of Varric's family and competitors should hang out. But Bioware couldn't be bothered to add anything else to the city because they were rushing like mad.
 
And then the most egregious flaw, in my opinion, is how they used the characters. Let's start with Flemeth - she was only in the story to make us think this was a Dragon Age game (period). Shaemus, Viscount Dumar's son, could have been an interesting character and if this had been Origins level production he would have served an excellent role in the story  (maybe a female political romance option like Queen Anora?). But no, they just killed him off early to invest us in a tiny plotlet of a story. Speaking of kill-off, the forcible removal of Leandra Amell was terrible - all for what? To show us mages can be bad? She was walking in Lowtown at night, we butcher people on the street regularly who would have attacked her or worse. The list goes on and on...
 
Lets review: bad attention to details, terrible use of assets, and all around little content even when needed.
 
That's Dragon Age 2 for you, take it as you will. A fun RPG for $5? Yes. A decent Dragon Age game? No.

Da2 owned in one post gg

[Obadiah]

"Hate" is a bit strong of a word for me. There is a fair amount of criticism to be heaped on DA2. I'm playing it for the 2nd time though, finally, and I am pleasantly surprised with how well its going so far. I guess its all about expectations.

[Jouni S]

I didn't hate DA2, but it was so grindy that I grew bored with it sooner than with DA:O. The plot was interesting and reminded me of the Witcher series. You're just a single guy caught up in events much bigger than yourself. You can make some choices that affect the outcomes, but ultimately there are much more powerful forces at play. Combat, on the other hand, was the weak point of the game. I would probably have enjoyed DA2 more without any of it.

 

Combat was superficially faster than in DA:O but slower in practice. Everyone just beat each other with styrofoam swords until one side died of boredom. On the other hand, there were a lot of enemies with instakill spells and many rogues with invisibility spells dealing heavy backstab damage, so I often had to pause the game once in a few seconds even in routine encounters.

 

The loot was absolutely underwhelming, and approximately 99.9% of it should have been classified as junk. With a few exceptions, equipment upgrades rarely had any visible effect on combat, unless I had leveled up several times without any upgrades.

 

Boss fights were among the worst I've seen in any game. Many of them were essentially slow-paced 30-minute puzzle sequences, where you had to know in advance what happens next, and react accordingly.

[MagneticDawn]

I loveeeeed the combat. and the emotional impact.

cus you know with anders and the kaboom. I HELPED THAT BEEP PICK UP POOP TO BLOW UP MY HUBBY'S SURROGATE MOTHER.

made me cry. oh yes, it made me cry.

 

I love the graphics upgrade, and I would honestly prefer da: I to be in that graphic style if I had my way. the frostbite engine makes things TOO shinny, no I'm being completely series, its like if every thing was glazed in glass.

 

I like they updated it, but yeah, GLAZED IN GLASS.

 

But yeah, I REALLY wished they took they're time with DA2, if they did then no one would be beeeeep ing.

[Riven326]

I had a very hard time just getting through Act 1. It really feels and looks like a budget RPG.

[scruffylad]

Just finished my second playthrough of DA2. (Went girl mage this time, first time was dude with big sword.)

It's not a "bad" game. It's actually a pretty decent game. But it doesn't live up to DAO, imho.

 

So, having just finished DA2 again, my jumbled thoughts on this issue:

 

The good things about DA2

- Varric is awesome. A fun character who's got some real personality to him. Not romanceable, so none of those pitfalls. Quite possibly my favorite part of DA2. (Aveline isn't bad. She seems refreshingly "normal.")

- It ties into the larger DA world without being a carbon copy of Ferelden. There are points of commonality (chantry, templars, mages, etc.) but everything is a bit different, because you're in another part of the world. It's just different enough.

- The backstory of Kirkwall was interesting. Its past as a Tevinter slave port tied in with the art, architecture, etc. It's clearly a very messed up city, and there were hints that its dysfunction almost made sense.

- Nifty art design, particularly the loadscreens. (The one with Merideth has a nice bit of foreshadowing, when you think about it.) I liked DAO's look, but it was very "classic RPG"-looking. When I first saw the DA2 interface I wasn't a fan ("where are the bits that are supposed to be here?"), but I changed my mind.

- Bringing back a few DAO characters (Cullen, Zevran) with larger or smaller NPC roles.

- My character talks. :)

 

The things in DA2 that are a wash

- The graphics are generally better, but I have weird texture issues in DA2 that drive me crazy. Textures are constantly going missing, not working right, or turning rainbow. It's annoying. (Apparently this is nvidia's fault, but still, it bugs me to no end.)

- Combat is a bit faster, but the mobs seem mobbier. ("Oh look, yet another wave of enemies.") Thankfully, our merry band of apostates has area of effect spells that they will use if you tell them to (but rarely otherwise it seems; praise the Maker for pause).

- The imported DAO save was good in theory, but in practice, often got certain details wrong. ("Wait, what do you mean Loghain is still alive? Alistair, you chopped his head off!")

 

The reasons DA2 isn't as good as DAO, imho

- Party banter isn't quite as good. (Seriously, I almost always had Morrigan and Alistair in my party, just to hear them go at each other.) DA2 has party banter, but I liked DAO's better.

- That bloody cave that you go in twenty times, but it's a "different" cave each time, because a different set of doors have been blocked off with stone slabs, or a different set of passages has been blocked with rubble or carts. (Repeat this point for the times you go into the same mansion, same dock, same underground area, etc.) I know that DAO reused areas a little, but not like this. (It's a minor point in terms of plot, but it's one of those things that kind of pulls you out of the story, because there's no way that one cave has that much going on in it, so it must be different yet nearly-identical-looking caves, which makes even less sense.)

- The plot just doesn't scream "Dragon Age" to me, and that's probably because DAO was the first and therefore set the tone for what a DA game is about. DAO may have been your standard "a hero must rise to save the land" bit, but it certainly felt epic. I (my warden) was saving Ferelden and the lands beyond from a monster horde: high stakes awesomeness. In DA2, I generally didn't feel like I was even saving Kirkwall. I was trying to get money, or trying (and failing) to get stupid NPCs to stop being idiots to each other. The one time I got that "I've saved the city!" satisfaction is when I chopped off the Arishok's head. I get the "let's follow this one person's life" thing they were trying to do, but it just didn't feel like "Dragon Age" to me. DA2's plot would have been fine for an expansion to DAO, but as a standalone sequel, it falls short. (And were it an expansion, we could cut out most of those "same cave, different name" quests.)

- Choices mattered more in DAO. Although there are some things at the beginning that you just can't change (Loghain's betrayal), a lot of the little parts on the way let you make real choices. Example: at Redcliffe, do you kill Connor to free him from the possession? Or do you let his mom sacrifice herself to power the blood magic ritual? Or do you go to the mage circle for another way into the fade? Three different ways to resolve it. Heck, you can chop Loghain's head off, you can let Alistair do it, or you can recruit that scumbag into the party! (I always let Alistair do the choppy-choppy, btw.) In DA2, no matter what you do, mom dies. No matter what you do, Anders goes mad bomber on you. The Viscount and his kid die, no matter what. You could do everything right for the mages, but still Orsino is going to go all Voltron-abomination and need to be put down. The Warden makes choices that matter; things happen to Hawke. Maybe DA2 is more realistic in some ways -- in real life, you can't control what other people do. But it makes Hawke's actions less important, and that means the player's choices matter less.

- DAO had more emotional impact, at least for me. The first time I played, at Ostagar, when we lit the beacon and Loghain turned away and left us all to die, I was genuinely outraged at that treacherous bastard. ("We're your fellow humans! How dare you abandon us to the darkspawn, you scumbag!") I never had a moment like that in DA2. Sure, I was confused when Anders blew up the chantry ("Anders, why did you assassinate the one sane person in this stupid town?"), but it didn't hit me hard, because the game just hadn't sucked me in enough. That carries through the rest of the game. Emotional impact is a matter of personal taste. For me, I cared more about what happened to the fictional people who inhabited Ferelden in DAO.

- Finally, Anders. I really liked Anders in Awakening--my favorite character in the expansion. (He was hilarious, for one thing, but he also had weird little quirks that made him a fun character (Ser Pounce-a-lot, etc.)) When I heard he was brought back for DA2, I was pretty excited. (And I had kind of liked Justice too, in Awakening. He was a bit awkward (being a sentient idea stuck in a corpse) but he seemed like a basically decent, noble sort of guy who might see the world in very black and white terms, but generally had a good instinct about right and wrong.) But Anders+Justice just didn't cut it. A lot of Anders' humor was gone, and Justice got twisted into something pretty messed up. I can see Anders changing a little as the world wears on him, but the change just seemed like it was too much; too little of the original Anders remained. The transition from wisecracking-apostate-on-the-run to Mr. I-will-start-a-huge-war-by-assassinating-the-reasonable-person was too big a gap. It didn't feel right. My first DA2 playthrough, I kept interacting with him, trying to get the old Anders to come out. Nope. Second time, I fell for that a few times, but in the end I stabbed him anyway, because hey, it's not like it's the real Anders -- it's just some impostor with a similar face.

 

 

(Whew. So that got a lot longer than I was planning. But I've been thinking about this while on my DA2 playthrough the last couple weeks. DA2 is a decent game. So why am I vaguely disappointed? Because DAO created certain expectations of what a Dragon Age game would be like, and DA2 really didn't hit a lot of them. It did some things well, and it made some interesting choices, but in the end, it just didn't stack up.)

[Riven326]

- The graphics are generally better, but I have weird texture issues in DA2 that drive me crazy. Textures are constantly going missing, not working right, or turning rainbow.

Have you tried updating your drivers?

[Shadow of Ashes]

I'm probably repeating somebody, but hey. Personally, what I think people disliked (in general) the most was the more direct storyline. Because of it, we could only play as human and no one could stop the Chantry blowing up. I heard someone call it a "transition game" between DAO and DAI.

 

And I get that. I get that people don't like that they couldn't have as many options, but I personally didn't mind it so much. I still enjoyed the bantering, I liked the complicated nature of many of the situations your character got pulled in/the relationships they had, and I even liked the story. I thought it was written well, for the most part.

 

I also don't get why people have to hate on it so much, but I understand some of where they're coming from.

[scruffylad]

Have you tried updating your drivers?

 

From what I've read in the support forum, it's the opposite problem, actually. DA2 had issues with the drivers way back when. They were fixed in later versions of the drivers. But the very newest ones have the problems all over again. Apparently I need to de-update back several versions to get things right. :/

 

(Update: rolling back my driver back to 340.52 seems to have worked.)

Modifié par scruffylad, 15 novembre 2014 - 08:20 .

[Xamufam]

I agrre, but, however the only thing belive it or not that made me angry about this game was that we couldnt be an Elf dwarf etc.  It felt like bioware was taking elves and dwarven players as second class, and that humans is the only thing important, yeah sure, Bioware made a great game in my opinnion sarcastic hawke but I  have never felt as much connection to hawke as I felt to my warden, other than that, everyone blames EA only, for it being rushed, but hey! Bioware can fight? speak? etc? I am sure they've spoken to them... or not? Yeah sure this game is getting unfair hate, but some fair hate too, eventually its a cool game cool story etc.. And, sometimes I even wanna play it more than DA:O cuz I could much more easliy run away from an ogre, and the most thing I have loved about this game is that the companions meet with each other and hang out in Kirkwall, not just sitting in a camp and shutting up, and this will return to DA:I anyway, it is a good game that have gotten some unfair and some fair hate, like.../spoiler....

 

 

If you side with the mages or the templars the end will be preety much the same, Anders will blow the chantry anyway, and orsino and meredith will both be against you.

I did read that 85% of the playerbase played human in origin

[dekarserverbot]

I did read that 85% of the playerbase played human in origin

 

that's no excuse for forcing me to play the race i hate most

[KaiserShep]

that's no excuse for forcing me to play the race i hate most

 

This would probably have been more meaningful if the race you hated most wasn't the only one that existed in real life XD

[dekarserverbot]

This would probably have been more meaningful if the race you hated most wasn't the only one that existed in real life XD

 

people like you is why i hate humans

[Riven326]

I played the two DLC's recently and I thought they were much better than the vanilla game.

[scruffylad]

I played the two DLC's recently and I thought they were much better than the vanilla game.

 

Which ones did you play?

I didn't get any for DA2, so I'm curious if any of them are really worth it. I liked a number of the DAO ones.

[Riven326]

Which ones did you play?

I didn't get any for DA2, so I'm curious if any of them are really worth it. I liked a number of the DAO ones.

Mark of the Assassin and Legacy.

[Tremere]

And yet Mass Effect 3 is infinitely more engaging than the borefest of Mass Effect... Interestingly enough environments in Dragon Age 2 were also way more detailed than in Origins. The fact there was "more" in Origins doesn't make it automatically better - the Brecillian forest, Redcliffe, Deeproads and Denerim all had a ton of re-used and low-detail assets which people like to conveniently forget whenever comparisons are brought up. 

 

I for one doesn't think DA2 deserves less hate, but I absolutely believe Origins gets way more praise than it deserves. 

*THIS!* I'm especially glad you brought up the reused areas in DAO.