I hated DA: 2. As you said, so much potential to be a good game, I was really excited about it. What really killed it for me though, was the waves of enemies. Thing is, you could play it as a tactical style rpg like origins, I was even excited about the possibility to put it on a low difficulty and button mash for that new level of experience. The problem was, the enemies spawning in waves made tactical play impossible. You never knew how many waves were coming, or where from, or what level enemies would be involved. This basically meant that instead of being able to put your warriors in front and use your mages to tactically control the field, you had to use as little mana as possible in case the last wave had a large number of elite enemies. Even worse, you couldn't just find a corner and put your warriors in front, because 9/10 times enemies would appear out of nowhere in that corner. The only way to play was to keep your characters as close together as possible so when, not if but when, enemies appeared 2 inches from your mages, you could maybe manage to stun or pull agro before the mages were dead. Also, because you couldn't really deploy your mages tactically, you almost had to relegate them to a healbot. On the harder difficulties, if you played it any other way, you were going to lose your entire party in seconds and basically have to solo the entire fight.
Plain and simple, DA:2 failed because it was lazy as fuck. Instead of designing challenging encounters, they just spawned waves of enemies in a way that intentionally destroyed any tactical advantage you might have. Instead of having a diverse group of 24 abilities available based on class, you had about half that. And only half of them were any good. On the surface, every single player had their own set of abilities, but they were usually the same ability, with a new name and the numbers tweaked a little. Character A's short cone has more range and less damage than Character B's. Character C's has shorter range and a wider arc. Pathetic. They couldn't even design enough levels for the entire game, or even close to it. Instead, they had the same areas reused half a dozen times each. Even the weapon and armor availability tanked. Maybe 1/5 as many available items. Lazy ass design in every way. Even the story, you basically couldn't get a more predictable fantasy story. If any of you have played dnd for a few years, you probably have a character whose story is hawk's story. Loss of a father, destruction of a town, gathering of a party, and then save the city from invaders and stop or assist a rebellion. Hell, if I DMed a dnd campaign that predictable and boring, my friends would have my hide.
A lot of people like to say it would have been fine as a stand alone game. I call bullshit. Yeah, trying to pass that turd off as a sequel to such an amazing game certainly made it worse, but even on it's own that game would never be more than a 5/10, even to fans of the action/anime combat style and limited RPG elements. There was just too much lazy design for it to be any better, even with a generous bias.
Plain and simple, DA:2 failed because it was lazy as fuck. Instead of designing challenging encounters, they just spawned waves of enemies in a way that intentionally destroyed any tactical advantage you might have. Instead of having a diverse group of 24 abilities available based on class, you had about half that. And only half of them were any good. On the surface, every single player had their own set of abilities, but they were usually the same ability, with a new name and the numbers tweaked a little. Character A's short cone has more range and less damage than Character B's. Character C's has shorter range and a wider arc. Pathetic. They couldn't even design enough levels for the entire game, or even close to it. Instead, they had the same areas reused half a dozen times each. Even the weapon and armor availability tanked. Maybe 1/5 as many available items. Lazy ass design in every way. Even the story, you basically couldn't get a more predictable fantasy story. If any of you have played dnd for a few years, you probably have a character whose story is hawk's story. Loss of a father, destruction of a town, gathering of a party, and then save the city from invaders and stop or assist a rebellion. Hell, if I DMed a dnd campaign that predictable and boring, my friends would have my hide.
A lot of people like to say it would have been fine as a stand alone game. I call bullshit. Yeah, trying to pass that turd off as a sequel to such an amazing game certainly made it worse, but even on it's own that game would never be more than a 5/10, even to fans of the action/anime combat style and limited RPG elements. There was just too much lazy design for it to be any better, even with a generous bias.
