Poll: Is Dragon Age 2 a bad game?

[BlackIvory]

How does the dialogue wheel make the ordering any less neat? If anything it's now a lot more clear what each dialogue option does, and with a quick glance at the icon you can see in which style the answer is presented.

Thats exactly the problem(!) You don't even have to read the lines, you can just look at the color(not even shape!) of the icon and the one you want it to be, instead of actualy reading and thinking about the meaning or consequences. Thats pretty much the definition of dumbed-down.

 

[Talin Silverbane]

It was a good game, but it could of been far better.

 

[Gill Kaiser]

And finally, the writing. The writing in DA2 was complete garbage. There really was no overarching plot with any meaning, it clearly suffered from the lack of a defined protagonist, and there was no conclusion to anything. The fact of the matter is, the whole game was a perfect example of the developer being either insanely rushed or lazy (I'm betting on the former). There was very little in the story that actually made sense and there was literally nothing tying the different acts together. The whole thing was just a mess.

Agreed. Although, I thought the writing for some of the individual quests was fine, and the dialogue for the companions was up to Bioware's usual standard, but the overall plot's writing was terrible.

 

[tzimize]

A lot of awful design decisions.

One of the biggest disappointments in recent gaming history.

 

[Agayek]

I loathed it, I found none of the characters to be interesting, the story was unengaging, the dialogue system limited my immersion and the locations were down-right bloody boring. Even before I went through them 3 times.

How the hell did you manage to see every zone in the game only three times?! By the end of Act 1, I had visited each (forwards and backwards) at least a dozen times.

Also, I agree with you on everything you said there, except for Varric. He was an interesting, likable character with a rather intriguing backstory. He's my #2 favorite character in any Dragon Age game/dlc/campaign/whatever, right behind Shale.

And though I won't wholly agree with you on the slideshow ending, I can understand where you're coming from and do agree that it probably was meant to be a throw back since the whole game felt as much (which was SO FUN to me, loved that kind of style. Even see it in Divinity 2).

Oh, and speaking of physical retcons, did you see what they did to the elves in DA2? What's with those noses?! The elves in DA:O were more like people with point ears. I don't know about you, but the design changes they made in DA2 just put me off from the get go. >: /

The character design retcons were a mixed bag, IMO. I really liked the new Qunari look, and it makes a lot more sense how Ogres come from Blighted Qunari.

The new elves look ridiculous though. They just need to fall into some blue paint and they could be the Na'vi. They were just fine in the first game, near-human, but different enough to be instantly differentiated. There was no reason to change them.

Also, I quite liked the slideshow ending in DA:O. It was a hell of a lot better than the "Well we killed the big bad, then we ran away. Then we split up and Hawke rode off into the sunset" we got with DA2. Varric couldn't even be bothered to deal with a god damn proper epilogue.

 

[AlternatePFG]

It was pretty mediocre. There were some good things about it, but it made some of the same mistakes ME2 made. The main plotline was a muddled mess, and the sidequests were not even memorable. There was so much potential for the game and they killed it. I enjoyed my first two playthroughs, but I never want to play it again.

My main problem with it is that the game reeks of laziness.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

*Snip*

Yeah no?

First, having a four year English degree and 'many' classes on storytelling is irrelevant. What you explain is exactly why it is a bad system. The fact you spent 3 to 5 minutes figuring out what you want to select is a good thing. The fact that what you wanted to say and how the NPC took it is a good thing. That's called Role Playing.

A good role playing experience comes from being able to quickly pick the response that comes closest to the aligned response that the person would say in real life, if the situation was actually happening to him or her.

In a non-scripted real life role play, if I am making a statement/answer after the last bit of conversation, I will give a straight answer with clear feelings, unless I feel neutral and give such a response, or I want to be bad and I give the forceful or evil response. I'm not going to give a response that one can't tell what is going on.

In role plays, I want to come the closest I can to real life, and having to sit for 3 to 5 minutes is wasting time.

Never in my life have I been given 3 to 5 minutes to blankly stare at somebody and make a decision. In schools the teachers will move on to the next person after 1 minute or less. When I'm talking to people I know, if I took that long, they would either tell me to hurry up, they'd change the subject, or they'd leave the room.

As the saying goes, time is money. Also, time is precious. I only get a certain amount of time a day to play games, 1 to 3 hours. I want my games to flow so I can easily pay attention to the story and not have to let thoughts linger. Plus, having to constantly load the game and redo conversations really eats away at that play time.

There is no reason for a game having multiple and clear choices to be deemed as not a good RPG; it is actually what makes a RPG good or even great.

A bad RPG is one that is full of ambiguity that slows down the player and flow of the story.

 

[Ian Caronia]

When writing a story there is no such thing as "it's about the journey, not where you end up". That's stupid and if an author even mentions that NEVER read their shit because they obviously don't care about the endings they write.

That is not how it works in the writing world these days, though I don't think it mainly worked that way in the past. Of course it is about the journey, without the journey(the majority of the book) you don't have a book.

I went to two universities and had four creative writing professors and the majority of the assignments if not all off them focused on writing the journey, since it is the bulk of stories and the most important part.
*SNIP*
But still on the end of DA2 I will say again, of course the ending isn't going to be complete or majorly intense, because the game isn't a wrap up of the series, it is just a part of the series that will continue. A true end won't come into play until either DA3 or until whatever game they are going to make the last and final one in the series.

Well firstly, mate, I'm glad to see you have such education and I hope you use it to write a novel I can keep on my bedstand one day (not being sarcastic, I really am happy to see when someone is blessed with a good literary education). However, I comepletely disagree that the journey is the most important part, as would many of my professors.

The journey and the ending are both equally important. How you end a story is how you close off the world you've created, and how you'll leave your reader afterward. Do you want them excited, or sad? What kind of conclusion does your story have? You see, there's no such thing as a "most important part", which is what the phrase "it's about the journey not where you end up" is saying, that the journey is more important than the ending.
If your journey is long and filled with adventure, but then ends suddenly and/or with nothing explained, you've failed as an author. Without a sense of closure, even if there are plans for a sequel to continue the overarching story(i.e. Harry Potter books, LOTR books, Narnia books, most books of a series, really) your journey is merely a beautiful, interesting and imaginative walk off a cliff.
Point in case: mass effect. Done also by Bioware but a different team, each ME game has a sense of closure to a degree, but also shows the grander plot is not over.

Which brings me to DA2's ending. Closure. There literally is none. In any regard. This makes it a failure, and makes failures of those who wrote it. It's a sick ploy to infect people with the all too well known urge to buy the next installment to see what happens, and it shows no love from the authors for the world or characters that they created. A story that ends badly is just as bad as one that plays out badly (which, in terms of playing out bad I will admit is a matter of opinion). But, it is fact that DA2 has a cliffhanger ending with no closure. That makes it a bad ending, which, in my opinion, makes the story of the game worthy of the hate of those gamers who beat it expecting more.

 

[JediMB]

First, the dialog wheel, while it has its pluses, did more harm than good to the game, IMO. It put what felt like more of a limit (even if it functionally did not) on what kind of responses and choices you could make, plus I didn't like the fact that you got shoehorned into "Snarky cynicist", "Paragon of Virture" or "Bloodthirsty Psychotic". In DAO I could at least pretend my character had said something with a different inflection or tone to more match what I was trying to say.

See, I don't get where people get the idea that they have to play "Nice Hawke", "Snarky Hawke" or "Violent Hawke".

Me? I crafted a basic personality for my Hawke while playing the prologue. I decided what her values were. She was overly protective of her little sister, she had both a sense of honor and a sense of humor, and she despised slavery and how the Circle treated mages.

And then I simply handpicked options from the dialogue wheel accordingly. She'd usually be nice and patient, she'd crack jokes when the situations weren't too dire for it to be appropriate (or simply when she was around Isabela), and on occasion she'd get angry or just let her greataxe do the talking.

That said, the wheel could stand deviating from having a good, a bad and a neutral response as the default. Mix it up a bit, by having multiple options of similar attitude available at the same time.

 

[Ch@Z]

The combat is awful. In DA:O you need to pause and plan your attack before each fight since there are so many different types of enemies,enemy spells, environments and traps. But in DA2, you just run in head first without planing anything.

The game also didn't have a real plot at all. No central conflict or anything.

 

[deshorty]

The gameplay is great fighting, RPG elements everything is good. But once you've killed your 10,000th blood mage who is summoning the same monster as the past 9,999 ones in the same cave, it gets a little old and once you defeat all the monsters in the room, guess what? You have even more of the same monsters to kill. The boss fights are exciting, but the problem with them is that the AI is unbelievably stupid. I was fighting a dragon and my AI mages just ran and started melee-ing the dragon. Anyway, the point is, DA 2 is only good if you play it in small installments and can micromanage the completely brain dead AI. I could so I enjoyed it, but didn't love it.

 

[Ian Caronia]

*snip*
Also, I quite liked the slideshow ending in DA:O. It was a hell of a lot better than the "Well we killed the big bad, then we ran away. Then we split up and Hawke rode off into the sunset" we got with DA2. Varric couldn't even be bothered to deal with a god damn proper epilogue.

My friend, ANYTHING is better than a cliffhanger ending with no closure. It's a non-ending. It's stupid and made to make you buy the next game, which I refuse to do.

I miss my cute dalish elves V_V

 

[Joccaren]

I disliked it. If you didn't like DA:O and thought it should be faster paced and less RPG, more Hack'n'Slash, you'll like it. If you loved Origins and want the game to just expand on and improve the features it already had for a better RPG experience, you'll likely hate it. If you haven't played Origins, and like hack'n'slash styled games, you'll probably like it.\

Captcha: HLR.railyiT
It is just me or are these getting weirder and weirder?

 

[Sehnsucht Engel]

I've never played it

 

[Someone Depressing]

If it was a stand-alone game, it would be pretty good.

But, it's submissioned to be judged next to its prequel, which was infinetley times better.

And, hell. I enjoyed playing through it, mainly because I had barely playing Origins (Only played for the first 6-levels, and when I did stick it on, it always ended up crashing 'cause my PC's shit), and partly because I've always liked 3rd-person Tactical Action-RPGs.

 

[Juggern4ut20]

Snip

Thanks for the response being professional. Allow me to retort some of the points and concede some due to the late hour that i write.

For the dialogue wheel and the voiced protagonist, I think we'll have to agree to disagree (whatever that means) on those issues. But i do think i have a way to explain it using this quote from you.

A mute protagonist doesn't work very well in a modern, character driven RPG.

Times have changed. The style in which RPGs are created and written is different than it was. HOWEVER, my big argument is that dragon age: origins was a great game because it was created with the old school style in mind. While you do not feel that your character in DAO was as fleshed out as in DA2, i did and I think that they should have continued the style of the previous game instead of completely changing it to resemble another rpg series they are doing (mass effect). That is why i think the voiced protagonist and dialogue wheel did not work in the game.

As for the writing and plot, i will argue till I'm blue in the face about this. Dragon Age 2 did not have good writing. The excavation had little to do with the qunar and both had even less to do with the mage uprising. You might not have liked the 'cliched' simply plot of the first one, which is fine, but you have to realize why they used that simply plot. In the first game, they wanted to explain the entire world set to the player. They wanted to explain how magic worked, how it was treated, how elves were treated, how religion was viewed, how dwarfs lived, what the grey wardens were, and what the deep roads and blight was. In order to do that, they decided to keep the main plot VERY simple to not confuse the issue. That being said, i think that simple plot was done perfectly.

In dragon age 2, you are given a plot that is not good. What is the artifact that you found in the deep roads? I am still not entirely sure what it was or how it mattered to the game. They could have told the exact same story without ever finding it. That is bad writing. They present a plot point in finding this artifact thing and being betrayed, only to not really ever address what the artifact is and not really resolve the consequences of being betrayed (you got to tie it up in a short side quest at the end of the game). Poor writing. The qunar should not have been in this game. They did nothing but simply distracted from the overarching main plot, which i guess was with Anders and the Templars. I can go on and on. Meredith was introduced too late in the game. You could call the arch demon and Loghain, simple antagonists, but at least you were introduced to them in the beginning and were with them throughout the story. You don't even interact with Meredith till the very end of act 2.

That and the pacing sucked. In the first game, you are introduced to your character well before you become a gray warden. You get to see who your character was before their life went to hell. In DA2, you are just thrown in running away from darkspawn. How am i supposed to care about a 'home village' that was never introduced in the plot. Here is the best example that I can explain. At the beginning of the game in DA:O, you fight that ogre at the top of the tower in order to signal a charge to save the king. This boss fight against a single foe is probably one of the best boss fights i've played in a long while, because of the pacing of the game. You had played your character a good deal of hours before reaching that point to take on such a scary opponent. You fought through your origin, survived becoming a gray warden, and struggled to complete your task of lighting the tower. Once you kill the ogre there is a feeling of accomplishment that you had progressed and become stronger. That is good writing. In dragon age 2, you fight an ogre less than half an hour into game play, on top of a hill in the middle of no where. The accomplishment holds little value both in the plot and in gameplay, and there is no feeling of importance. This is how the writing is poor.

That and you can go into how the game just skips ahead years for no real reason other than convenience. How the game seems to think that it can just kill characters left and right to produce some sort of emotional investment in the game. I can overlook the combat, the voiced protagonist, the wheel, everything, if they just did a good job writing the plot.

 

[jonyboy13]

It's a disgrace to all rpgs out there.
Terrible story, maps, "choices" and combat.

 

[StriderShinryu]

I love it.. but it has some definite flaws.

The recycled quest areas, and lack of variety in actual gameplay quest objectives, are probably the most notable issues the game has. Even people who do love the game would be hard pressed to ignore those.

Otherwise, however, there isn't much to complain about beyond points of personal preference.

 

[Cowabungaa]

How does the dialogue wheel make the ordering any less neat? If anything it's now a lot more clear what each dialogue option does, and with a quick glance at the icon you can see in which style the answer is presented.

Thats exactly the problem(!) You don't even have to read the lines, you can just look at the color(not even shape!) of the icon and the one you want it to be, instead of actualy reading and thinking about the meaning or consequences. Thats pretty much the definition of dumbed-down.

There is no law in DA2 that bars you from doing just that. They just gave you the option to either decide on your gut or your brain. You can still read what the response is about and think about the consequences. I didn't because I made my character a rash guy. Lead to some fun things.

First, the dialog wheel, while it has its pluses, did more harm than good to the game, IMO. It put what felt like more of a limit (even if it functionally did not) on what kind of responses and choices you could make, plus I didn't like the fact that you got shoehorned into "Snarky cynicist", "Paragon of Virture" or "Bloodthirsty Psychotic". In DAO I could at least pretend my character had said something with a different inflection or tone to more match what I was trying to say.

Can't say the responses were that extreme, and in total there were quite a lot of them; caring and kind, discrete and compliant, ironic and snarky, charming, aggressive, direct and rude, flirty and letting a friend do the talking, at least that's the list in the manual, not counting certain things.

And honest I can't say they differ so much from DA:O's available options. They just made it clear at a glance what it's about. You only had to look a bit longer at DA:O's options to figure out what sort of option it was. DA2 just made it more clear.

The problem with the combat is almost entirely the way they designed encounters instead of the mechanics therein. The biggest problem with the mechanics was the fact that every single fight involved wave after wave after wave of mooks spawning, running up and getting one shot. The fact that they spawned all over the place, with no real rhyme or reason to it, robbed the combat of just about any semblance of strategy aside from "Get everyone in a big clump and kill everything that comes nearby". It was pathetically easy as well.

I can see your point there, can't really disagree with it. Though I have a feeling that if I'm going to play on Nightmare, even those small fights won't be that easy. But yeah, DA2 could've done with less trash.

And finally, the writing. The writing in DA2 was complete garbage. There really was no overarching plot with any meaning, it clearly suffered from the lack of a defined protagonist, and there was no conclusion to anything. The fact of the matter is, the whole game was a perfect example of the developer being either insanely rushed or lazy (I'm betting on the former). There was very little in the story that actually made sense and there was literally nothing tying the different acts together. The whole thing was just a mess.

Can't really recognise much of your issues. While certain sub-plots did feel a little unconcluded (Varric's bro for example, was he just left to rot in that asylum?) I felt that everything did flow into each other. in Act 1 you gained a name for yourself, drawing the attention of the 3 big powerful factions in the city (Viscount, Mages and Templars) while working yourself up in the world. In Act 2 you keep gaining influence with all 3 powers in Kirkwall with your newfound fame and finally in Act 3, after the removal of 1 power, your influence and fame forces you to decide the direction the Templar-Mage conflict is going to take.

Honestly, that seems rather coherent to me. There was most certainly an over-arching plot, and it was clear to me rather quickly; solve the Templar-Mage problem. Every Act told how Hawke (no clear-defined protagonist you say?) got himself into that position of power, basically becoming the 4th major power in Kirkwall.

Mind you, it wasn't without problems. Orsino suddenly becoming hostile (seriously dude, at least wait until the room is flooded with Templars before you do that) for example, or how Meredith got that piece of the idol, but overal it felt like a very coherent

 

[Joccaren]

A good role playing experience comes from being able to quickly pick the response that comes closest to the aligned response that the person would say in real life, if the situation was actually happening to him or her.

And yet you prefer the dialogue wheel? Being able to pick the response closest to what the character would say in real life is almost instantly ruined for me as soon as the responses are ordered by 'good' 'funny' and 'bad'. In DA:O I had picked the response I thought that my character would say based on their personality. In DA2 I usually picked whichever one was in the 'good' category because that usually was the answer the NPC was looking for. I had the same problem with the ME series, only worse due to the P/R thing.
In DA2, the reactions that the NPCs had towards my character was what I would end up choosing.
In DA:O I chose the reaction my character would have towards the NPC.
Both are roleplaying, your just playing a different side of the conversation.