Lieju said:
I wouldn't say none of them are visually interesting, I liked quite a bit of environments, although they suffer very much from the recycling. However, I can overlook that a lot as long as the lore and world-building is interesting and makes sense. And it did, the history, political situations, and so on, and I liked the whole ethical dilemma of there being people who can do magic but are suspectible to posession; how different cultures respond to this, what kinds of explanations they have for them etc.
Well, that's the problem. While the environments might have been average or passable, you traverse through them several times. I am a completionist; I have to do every single side quest to feel like I played the game. There were a lot of side quests in DA2... but they were largely very samey, and take place in the same locations. There were only a couple interesting sidequests (see: qunari mage), but they were rare and made the others feel like even more of a slog than they already were.
Having to see the same coast, the same cave, the same cellar over and over again was just not acceptable to me. It made everything feel so "gamey".
About mages... The scenario is very interesting in of itself. You have templars who try to protect everyone but cross moral boundaries while doing so, and you have mages who want their freedom but might threaten others. My problem was the way they handled this: In the universe of Dragon Age, blood magic isn't something common everyone can just whip out. But in DA2, every mage seems to resort to it and use it. Behind every corner, there is a blood mage. They game attempts to be morally gray, but when nigh every mage turns into a bloodmage and nigh every templar is unreasonable, it just starts being ridiculous.
Regarding mages and templars... playing through the game as a mage is absolutely ridiculous. Casting blood magic in front of a templar doesn't have any repercussions. Nobody even notices it. Not even your companions have any kind of remark on Hawke turning to forbidden blood magic. There's just such a huge disconnect between the gameplay and the story which further ruins the immersion.
Lieju said:
Not just that, but they quite often materialize from nowhere. I just ignore that. It would be great if that was better, but it's not a deal-breaker in this case for me. Is the fact that enemies drop loot, for example, something that diestroys the immersion to you?
It's subjective.
For me it would have been far more immersion-breaking if you just slayed the baddie and saved the city.
Yes, the fact that enemies drop unsuitable loot can be somewhat distracting. I don't want to pick up chainmails from the spider I just slayed. I can't just something that doesn't fit in the world.
But it's not about "slaying the baddie and saving the day". I don't want that either. But I do expect coherence; something that DA2 lacked. it largely just jumps around.
"Oh so you told the qunari to leave? Oh well, time skip time! So yeah, the qunari left, and that part of the story now has absolutely nothing to do with this story."
Many of the plot threads feel disjointed.
Lieju said:
I totally disagree with you on the story, but this is subjective. I loved the narrative.
It wasn't a story about a hero fighting a 'big bad', it was a story about a city slowly building towards civil war. The red lyrium idol, as well as Hawke, Meredith and Anders were sparks that ignited the barrel.
The red lyrium idol simply made meredith more paranoid, but she had her reasons. A situation where you have a group of people that have powers others don't and can be unwittingly dangerous, is difficult.
i also liked Anders's character, and I don't think it came from no-where. He had been talking about that kind of stuff the whole game, and over the course of it, his attitude becomes more and more extreme.
And one of his abilities is 'martyr'.
The civil war angle was nothing new. It was in Origins as well. But in Origins, you had Loghain on the one side who had believable motivations, and was truly gray. He believed he was doing the right thing.
Now contrast this to DA2: first of all, the lyrium idol was completely uncalled for. Bioware has shown that they can handle this scenario better; why mix supernatural powers into this?
While Meredith may have believed he was doing the right thing, she was just absolutely stonking nuts over the top about it. *add "KILL ALL THE MAGES" -meme here*
And like I said above, I believe they handled the templar mage situation poorly.
And about Anders... I hated that he was forced to be in the party as the sole healer suitable due to his unique skills. At hard difficulty i needed to have him with me or I would get my ass beaten.
His attitude becomes nutcase-y. To me it came from nowhere since I thought he had been depicted to be at least reasonable before that point in the game. But suddenly he, what, is taken over by his spirits which cause him to conveniently do something drastic which allows the plot to come to a close.
I just didn't find that to be good writing. It's sort of like the ending of DE: HR, a convenient machine that resolves the plot.
Lieju said:
But it's not about the war. It's about a person being stuck in a situation where the city is heading to a civil war, and having to choose a side. In the end you can't help it turning into a mess, and I appreciate the message. In real conflicts, one person can't just bring peace by slaying the baddie.
Right. But whatever you do, the situation is fucked in the exact same way. I'd accept that it is a message of "sometimes you just can't help it no matter what you do" if the paths of siding with the mages or templars were not identical. While you accept it as a message, I found it to be incredibly lazy and tiresome. I mean, if they wanted to convey that message, there were a million better ways to do it. For example, what if siding with the mages and leading them to victory would cause them to become the new oppressive regime, resulting in unnecessary death and chaos without anything being solved? That'd be more interesting and would still convey the same message.
I mean, I don't want a fantasy story where the good slays the evil. I want good writing.
Lieju said:
This is totally subjective. I liked the story, you didn't. Maybe you had different expectations.. You seem to have preferred an epic fantasy-story about a fight against a big bad. I found that to be the dullest part about Origins. The Darkspawn were dull, but it was how the humans responded to the threat that I liked and found enjoyable.
While the typical fantasy trope may be dull in of iteself, Origins handled it well. It wasn't solely about slaying the big baddie; it was just the framework. In the game, you have a majority of interesting decisions that impact the world. The anvil, the Urn, etc. etc. You got to experience several locations and scenarios, you got to experience Ferelden as a whole.
Like I said, I don't mind a personal story if it's handled well. But Hawke's wasn't.
Maybe that is subjective, but I stand 100% behind my claim that DA2's writing and therefore handling of the story was largely just bad.
Lieju said:
You have to do some retcons, I guess, since you can have many different choices made by the players. Leliana didn't die in any of my playthroughs. (Zevran did, though)
It was suggested she killed herself in one of the epilogues, but even then I had suspicions she faked it.
(As I've been suspecting from the beginning she had ulterior motives.)
No. You never have to do retcons. If you can't write a story without retconning your previous work, don't write it.
Besides, Leliana didn't even need to be in the game. It was just a cameo to appease the majority of the fans.
Leliana is in no way an integral part of the story; her part could have been played by anyone else.