Dragon Age II Leaves Kirkwall With Legacy DLC

[Gildan Bladeborn]

Decisions: Not one, not even bloody one decision had any consequences. Take away Merills knife to fix the mirror, guess what? She fixes it anyway!
Decide not to take your sibling with you to the Deep Roads? Doesn't matter they go away regardless
Pick Mages over Templar? Mages still attack you regardless of your choice, with any blood mages being evil, cackling morons. Not one of them had any humanity like Jowan did in Origins or other blood mages which could be reasonable.

Yeah, besides the really obvious issue with lazy map design (seriously, how hard would it have been to design a few different caves or outdoor areas? Did they think we wouldn't notice?), that's the aspect of Dragon Age 2 that most ruffles my feathers.

Mind you, for all the really quite glaring design flaws I'll happily expound upon at length whenever the subject is broached, I actually enjoyed my time with the game, but the sense that all roads lead to the same outcome is really quite pernicious. Going back and analyzing the various supposed decision points the game presents you with reveals a fairly stark truth: Players can only really impact the cosmetic surface details.

Well that's not entirely true - you can and probably will end up either end up driving certain party members away, selling them out, or killing them (there's a binary choice eventually between two of those options), and one might simply leave and never come back if a certain stat isn't high enough, but for the most part the things you can change are Hawke's personality and how your NPC companions react to Hawke.

And that's basically it - every other decision, as you pointed out, is either a meaningless choice between two or more options that end up being functionally identical if you go back and do things differently, or if the decision was a real one with some actual weight to it, the game writers snatch that decision away from you.

Spoiler: A certain quest in the second chapter really drives that home.

So at one point in chapter 2 a sympathetic Templar asks for your assistance with some escaped mages hiding in a cave. Once inside said cave, you are presented with 3 possible choices:

• 1) Turn the mages in.
  2) Help the mages escape by killing the Templar outside, even though he actually wants to help them and is a decent fellow.
  3) Be less bloodthirsty and bluff the newly arrived Templar search party, with assistance from the friendly Templar outside, into looking elsewhere for the escaped mages, who are then free to make their escape without further bloodshed.

Being the sort of player who inevitably does the nicest thing I can, I naturally picked option 3 - the mages' spokeswoman got to see the dangers of succumbing to the allure of blood magic, the friendly Templar lived to see another day and continue to aid mages, and everyone should live happily ever after to the best of their abilities.

...or not. No, see, during the chapter transition, the writers decided that those mages get caught and now that woman I "showed the light" to is vengeful and bitter and hates my guts, blaming her capture on me as if I had turned on her in the first place instead of helping her. Rather than take the lesson about the dangers of blood magic to heart when Hawke and company had to put down the cackling with unholy power previous spokesman of the escaped mages, she's (naturally!) turned to blood magic herself and is therefore unadulterated evil in a can just like every single other blood mage in the game, and that friendly Templar? Yeah, he continues his work assisting the mage underground but she ends up killing him (and picking an absurd fight with you) for basically no reason. Yay choices!

There's nothing inherently wrong with a plot on rails, but what Dragon Age 2 does is railroad the player onto the writers' vision of the "one true plot (because we didn't actually design any branching narrative so the only choices you can make that we won't just revert behind the scenes later can't impact anything important)", much like an annoying Dungeon Master forcing a D&D group into doing what it is that he wants them to by thwarting their attempts to do anything else. It's far more annoying when a linear plot is disguised under illusory choices than it would be if the game never pretended it was actually giving you options.

On topic: Yeah... I don't think I'll be picking this DLC up, not right away anyhow - if it gets glowing reviews and the content length matches the price I might consider it, but I remember what the Dragon Age: Origins DLC was like. Pattern recognition is after all one of my strengths!

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Snip

Alright, fine. Now that I'm calm, I'll try to give you an answer. My main beef with the writing team on Dragon Age 2 is with Cheryl Chee's childish comments on the bioware forums, and with Mary Kirby's utter derailment of Merrill.

Chee's comments are just grating, but that is more a personal opinion.

What Kirby did to Merrill just really rubbed me the wrong way. Merrill might have only been a bit character in Origins, but even there, she was given enough characterization to portray her as a responsible, if aspiring mage.

In Dragon Age 2, she's an ignorant, contradicting man-child who has no sense of responsibility or care for anyone else. Her arguments that Demons aren't bad gets hit when every single goddamn demon in the game is trying to kill you. She is an irritating character who never makes any right decisions, and all her justifications ring hollow when they are overwritten moments after she explains why. See: The Fade section.

As for Gaider, I don't care how much he made me like Alistair, the way he acts on the bioware forums is selfish and extremely arrogant.

 

[Alluos]

I'll pick it up... eventually >.>

 

[dishwasherwong]

No thanks Bioware, I'm not stupid enough to put my hand into the fire a second time. I'm hoping that DA2 is written off by the higher ups as being "that really awful one" and is retconned out of existence.

Preferably it will go something along the lines of the whole game being merely the Warden having a really bad dream about a woefully one dimensional character, in a one dimensional city, who's family and companions are cardboard cut outs, traipsing through the same flat, brown corridors, fighting stock enemies, in a paper thin plot that makes no sense only to get to the end and have it arbitrarily determined in one of two ways that is exactly the same regardless of the players actions or motivations thereby negating any replay value whatsoever.

Then the Warden wakes up, wonders how much Darkspawn blood he consumed that night and moves on content that it was all just a dream and no story in the Dragon Age universe could suck so hard.

 

[Paragon Fury]

Shit game will still be shit unless they plan on making major changes for the DLC.

 

[bob-2000]

Wow, two male warrior characters both have short hair. The nerve of Bioware.

Or, you know, two male characters with similar hairstyles, similar facial structure, similar weapon choice, similar clothes, similar build, and similar levels of angstiness. I'm not [http://forums.gametrailers.com/thread/does-fenris-from-da2-seem-a-li/1195060?page=3] the only [http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/dragon-age-2/show_msgs.php?pid=988966&topic_id=m-1-58400425] person who [http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/dragon-age-2/show_msgs.php?pid=988966&topic_id=m-1-58457809] thinks this [http://social.bioware.com/forum/Dragon-Age-II/Dragon-Age-II-General-Discussion-No-Spoilers-allowed/Fenris-and-Merrill-are-both-shots-at-JRPGs-6534506-1.html], btw.

(EDIT: It's not actually a huge sticking point for me. I just think it's hilarious when someone says "I hate JRPGs! That's why I like DA2!" Not that there's anything wrong with JRPGs.)

Soooo Bioware has a single character is a vaguely similar to another character from another game. I think that the point of the the first poster was that DA2 and other Bioware games are far superior to game such as Final Fantasy. I believe that this situation proves his point. Fenris has similar characteristics to others, yet his writing and characterization is far better.

For the record, I'm basing this on the arguments of other people who actually like Fenris. He reminds me too much of one of the aforementioned shitty FF characters. I believe that he is well-written, and I think that he certainly has some depth of character, but I like the other characters much, much better.

 

[Sartan0]

I enjoyed DA:O all the way to the end and through the DLC. I really didn't enjoy DA 2 very much at all. It seemed like an ok game at first, but rapidly got more and more boring. By the third act I totally lost interest in the game, now it sits unfinished in my hard drive and I am too busy playing a crapload of better, cheaper games from the Steam sale.

So to makea long story short, I won't be bothering with any of the DLC for it and I am a wondering if DA 3 will be something I enjoy or don't. Some folks may have enjoyed DA 2, but it wasn't a good game from my perspective.

That is basically my thoughts on the matter but I ended up not buying DA 2 after seeing someone play it the first week of release and getting a bad feeling about it playing it at PAX Prime last year. (That and the less then a year and a half development time made me nervous)

I was happy to pay for some of the DLC in DA:O because I loved that game. I have no plans to buy DA 2 at all at this point since I keep seeing and hearing terrible things about it. (At first I just thought I would wait till it was $20)

I will take a wait and see approach with DA 3. I am not going to write Bioware off all together yet unless they blow ME 3. That would tick me off.

 

[Knight Templar]

In Dragon Age 2, she's an ignorant, contradicting man-child who has no sense of responsibility or care for anyone else. Her arguments that Demons aren't bad gets hit when every single goddamn demon in the game is trying to kill you.

Two things.
A) Everything she does with that mirror is for others., so clearly cares for somebody other than herself.
B) She doesn't say that demons are not bad, she points out she makes no distinction between good and bad spirits because to her they are all dangerous. She is foolish, but because she thinks she can deal with spirits and come out the better, not because she doesn't realise they are dangerous.


So aside from you not understanding the character, you not liking them means the person who wrote them should be fired?
That is extremely childish.

 

[AsurasFinest]

In Dragon Age 2, she's an ignorant, contradicting man-child who has no sense of responsibility or care for anyone else. Her arguments that Demons aren't bad gets hit when every single goddamn demon in the game is trying to kill you.

Two things.
A) Everything she does with that mirror is for others., so clearly cares for somebody other than herself.
B) She doesn't say that demons are not bad, she points out she makes no distinction between good and bad spirits because to her they are all dangerous. She is foolish, but because she thinks she can deal with spirits and come out the better, not because she doesn't realise they are dangerous.


So aside from you not understanding the character, you not liking them means the person who wrote them should be fired?
That is extremely childish.

A) No, she does it to gain history, despite others telling her not to. She never for one moment thinks someone might know better than her. She consistently makes stupid choices based on nothing but what she thinks and disregards advice from people who CLEARLY have more knowledge than she does and taught her all she knows

B)Yes if someone writes something badly( if that link he put up was true, it all makes sense as to why the writing was so bad in this game, it reads like bad fanfiction)then they should be fired. For a team that puts emphasis on writing anyone who can write crap like that should be kept as far aay from the writing team as possible. But then its not solely on those writers, the whole team dropped the fucking ball, from combat to graphics and character design, to music and story.

There is not one aspect of this game which is good at all and I spit on EA for slowly killing this once great company

 

[Knight Templar]

In Dragon Age 2, she's an ignorant, contradicting man-child who has no sense of responsibility or care for anyone else. Her arguments that Demons aren't bad gets hit when every single goddamn demon in the game is trying to kill you.

Two things.
A) Everything she does with that mirror is for others., so clearly cares for somebody other than herself.
B) She doesn't say that demons are not bad, she points out she makes no distinction between good and bad spirits because to her they are all dangerous. She is foolish, but because she thinks she can deal with spirits and come out the better, not because she doesn't realise they are dangerous.


So aside from you not understanding the character, you not liking them means the person who wrote them should be fired?
That is extremely childish.

A) No, she does it to gain history, despite others telling her not to. She never for one moment thinks someone might know better than her. She consistently makes stupid choices based on nothing but what she thinks and disregards advice from people who CLEARLY have more knowledge than she does and taught her all she knows

B)Yes if someone writes something badly( if that link he put up was true, it all makes sense as to why the writing was so bad in this game, it reads like bad fanfiction)then they should be fired. For a team that puts emphasis on writing anyone who can write crap like that should be kept as far aay from the writing team as possible. But then its not solely on those writers, the whole team dropped the fucking ball, from combat to graphics and character design, to music and story.

There is not one aspect of this game which is good at all and I spit on EA for slowly killing this once great company

A) Her making mistakes and cocking things up isn't related to my or his point. She isn't working on the mirror for history's sake alone, she thinks it can help her people to once again have control of such powerful magical artifacts. 

B) You are not responding to my point B. To respond to what you said, a character you dislike and one that is poorly written are not the same thing. He wants them fired because he dislikes the character, you confuse good writing and characters you like in addition to not understanding what I said.

In your haste to attack the game you seem to have not properly read my post.

 

[SyphonX]

So, they're cutting to the chase by 'leaving Kirkwall', which is a long-forgotten, dilapidated "city" with overbearing prison and slave overtones, to go to a long-forgotten dilapidated actual prison. I bet the entrance will be in a newly designed hidden cave mine, with spiders.

That sounds invigorating, original, and exciting.

 

[Kahunaburger]

To respond to what you said, a character you dislike and one that is poorly written are not the same thing.

What if Merrill is a character I dislike and a character that is poorly [http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6046067] written [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlQIAsfA1Fk&feature=related]?

Spoiler: Seriously, f*ck Merrill.