The faults of DA II

[Willinium]

Tag meine Kolleginnen Escapions. I have recently made another thread talking about DA II, and seeing the all the . . . faults or DA II I figure that we should discuss them. Yet one can not properly talk of the faults without talking about the good so here we go.

My first problem with DA II is that it feels like an obvious beta from the new art style( feels unfinished) the dullness of the quests(golden pantaloons) and the brat with the chip on his shoulder Carver. The Qunari threat is played up in both the trailers and the game yet is defeated in a single duel( way to easy to win). The Mage vs Templar war is rushed, Anders is a complete and utter DUMBASS (I liked him in the first game to ), and finally why the hell does Orisino turn into a Harvester.

The good: The combat is more fun than the first game( surprising I know), Mage and Rogue are very fun to play from raining down fire and lighnting from the sky to smite your enemies to disappearing from the otherside of the field and backstabbing an enemy on the other-side of the map (rogue has the most flashy basic fight animation) I like the different effects of the mages staffs, and the companions are (mostly) well written. My favorite quest is the one that involves your mothers death you see both Asmodeus Hawke(my character) and Gamlen(Jackass) both are very distraught and worried and both have very believable reactions at the end of the quest. I also like how the dialogue choices you choose affect your personality and thus modify everything(read in bold) you say in every conversation.

(cough) Welp these are what I think are the Good and Bad of DA II.

 

[Rawne1980]

The bad....

Boring characters .... All of them apart from Varric and Merill. Varric made me laugh and had an actual personality whereas Merril had a personality of sorts and had some quite amusing lines (do you want a drink? I have ..... water). The rest were as bland as could possibly be, especially Hawke (by fuck was he/she a dull character).

The plot was shit. No ifs, no buts it was just shit. It started off okay, make your fortune and work your way up from the bottom. Act 2 came along and it fell apart. The Qunari threat was about as well done as a blue steak. The final act was so full of nonsense I physically cringed my way through it.

The Mage V's Templars bollocks. All the way through we hear "Mages are good, Templars are bad" with plenty of Mages telling us why this is so. All the way through the game I had Mages trying to kill me (nearly every Mage I encountered happened to be a blood mage despite people telling me they were rare) and every Templar I met was polite and helpful .... That makes sense.... In fact, only 1 single Templar did anything remotely bad .... and that was at the very end .... because she was corrupted by "evil sword" .... made from metal Hawke found in the Deep Roads .... and after Anders had just blown up the Revered Mother .... OF COURSE MEREDITH WOULD BE PISSED, anybody in her position would be. I'd have ordered all the Mages there killed as well.

The re-use of areas, interiors and enemies. It was a half arsed game, end of story. No effort had been put into it and they wanted money from a game with the Dragon Age name. For a company like BioWare this was the laziest game design i've seen from them. It was pathetic.

The art. Badly textured scenery. Half finished character designs. Bland armour/weapons. Incredibly bad landscapes (what you see of them).

I didn't like the combat much. I like to micro manage like in Dragon Age and other RPG's. I find hack and slash combat far too simplistic and i'm not a fan.

Companions. As I said above, I like to micro manage. BioWare saw fit to remove changing companions gear because obviously new people to the series would be completely stumped by that ... lets make things so simple a brain damaged Wombat can understand it .... Like Casey Hudson.

The "What the fuck" moment in the last cut scene. leliana appeared in that scene .... in the save i'd carried over from Origins she was dead. There is Necromancy at work here.

It was an incredibly short game. Compared to the 30+ hours the first playthrough of Origins took me, this game took me 15 and the side quests were shit.


The Good.

It was an incredibly short game. Compared to the 30+ hours I spent enjoying Origins, thankfully this nightmare only lasted 15.

Varric and Merril. They saved the game for me. If it hadn't been for them I wouldn't have pushed through to the end.

In conclusion....

I did not like it.

I shouldn't have played it but I loved Origins and expected more of the same but it was completely different ... and not in a good way. I didn't like a single change they made.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well the word on the street is they told the team at the last minute their expansion will actually be turned into a full game... oddly enough we ended up with 1/4 of a Dragon Age game, horribly padded out and barely tied together.
But more then that this game was very obviously not made by the team from DA1, for the most part it felt like a JRPG dev was phoned in last minute.

"better combat" - that is an argument for the ages, if one wanted a non-tactical flashy meaningless spam fest then yes DA2 delivers, but if you aren't one with such desires the game is rather disappointing.

 

[Terminal Blue]

The really issue with this game is that, when we talk about "good" and "bad" we're automatically going to compare it Origins, which was an exceptionally good game.

..the brat with the chip on his shoulder Carver.

Actually, I think you've totally missed the mark by making Carver a major complaint. He's fantastically well written and I found him hugely believable, his motivations were solid and as someone who has done it in real life I felt he really captured the mixed emotions of having to deal with a troubled younger sibling.

I can understand people who don't like the character. I don't think you're meant to. He has some admirable traits (which are much more obvious if you invest the time to mitigate his huge starting rivalry score before a certain event) and ultimately he does come through, but yeah.. he's a flawed douche. That doesn't mean he's not excellently written.

Sorry. It's a tiny thing and everyone's going to have their own opinion, I just don't think not liking a character equates to them being a bad character unless its unintentional.

Other things..

* The game is much better balanced. I guess that goes without saying as Origins was atrociously balanced, but it's true. It's a very well balanced game.
* There's actually a lot more legitimate character choice. Although there's fewer options available, they're all much more competitive and there's much less sense of a clear "optimal" build for each class.
* Mages and rogues have already been mentioned, but the real quantum leap is actually in the warrior class. By far the dullest class in origins, it's much more exciting here.
* Certain aspects of the story were actually really interesting. Considering Origins had a story so cliched it could have been written by a brain damaged monkey with a copy of Lord of the Rings, the idea of this kind of evolving story of a group of people slowly amassing influence in a city beset by various disasters is kind of unexpectedly original. The execution sucked, but hey..
* I really liked that your party members seemed to have their own lives. I found that made them much more believable, even when they weren't good characters. That idea that each of them had their own connection to the environment, their own living quarters and activities and so forth made them feel like more than just a schizophrenic hallucination your character was having.

I don't really feel the need to outline the bad. Everyone is capable of doing it. Overall, I agree it comes down to "rushed". The game's file size is a fraction that of Origins, and despite a lot of improvements its really clear that many areas were simply given the bare minimum required to push them out the door.

 

[Thoric485]

It wasn't the type of game BioWare set out to make with the Dragon Age series in 2004, namely a modern Baldur's Gate.

DA:O fell just short of the mark and given 3 years and creative freedom I'm sure BioWare would've made a very impressive sequel. Sadly that's not how it works when EA owns your ass.

 

[Sp3ratus]

I didn't like the combat much. I like to micro manage like in Dragon Age and other RPG's. I find hack and slash combat far too simplistic and i'm not a fan.

Well the word on the street is they told the team at the last minute their expansion will actually be turned into a full game... oddly enough we ended up with 1/4 of a Dragon Age game, horribly padded out and barely tied together.
But more then that this game was very obviously not made by the team from DA1, for the most part it felt like a JRPG dev was phoned in last minute.

"better combat" - that is an argument for the ages, if one wanted a non-tactical flashy meaningless spam fest then yes DA2 delivers, but if you aren't one with such desires the game is rather disappointing.

I've said it before, but on the higher difficulty the game isn't a pushover(on nightmare, anyway) and requires tactical considerations and readjustments during the fights. If you just set your team loose, you'll get a beatdown pretty quickly. I know a lot of people dislike the wave combat, but having to adjust to a new one on-the-fly and have cooldowns to use for later waves is part of what I'd call tactics for a given fight. Calling it a spamfest is slamming the game harder than it deserves, if it's not true for all difficulties.

Other than that, I agree with pretty much everything Rawne said, except I didn't really like Merill all that much. Oh, and a couple of other good things to add; the voice acting was pretty good, at least I thought so and the characters felt more alive, ie "leading their own lives", instead of just being static in one place.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Calling it a spamfest is slamming the game harder than it deserves, if it's not true for all difficulties.

Well I finished it on nightmare and in most battles I was reading emails whilst running around with my mage tanking all the melee guys, the game is set up for retarded play.

 

[CommanderL]

every thing about it is worse then dragon age 1 the characters I didn't care for except for varic they ruined ander's
the ending was forced and it didn't make much sense Kirk wall was a boring town it would have been better if they had included more towns from the free marches so there is more choices it should have been at least 3 times as long with the Mage act being built up the whole way through climaxing in an epic battle where all the friends and allies you have made show up to help you 'aka the battle of denhirm in dragon age 1'

more then one cave I was sick of seeing the same cave
Its was a let down in every way possible and the worst part is some of the idea's where good put its was all poorly excuted

 

[CommanderL]

The bad....

Boring characters .... All of them apart from Varric and Merill. Varric made me laugh and had an actual personality whereas Merril had a personality of sorts and had some quite amusing lines (do you want a drink? I have ..... water). The rest were as bland as could possibly be, especially Hawke (by fuck was he/she a dull character).

The plot was shit. No ifs, no buts it was just shit. It started off okay, make your fortune and work your way up from the bottom. Act 2 came along and it fell apart. The Qunari threat was about as well done as a blue steak. The final act was so full of nonsense I physically cringed my way through it.

The Mage V's Templars bollocks. All the way through we hear "Mages are good, Templars are bad" with plenty of Mages telling us why this is so. All the way through the game I had Mages trying to kill me (nearly every Mage I encountered happened to be a blood mage despite people telling me they were rare) and every Templar I met was polite and helpful .... That makes sense.... In fact, only 1 single Templar did anything remotely bad .... and that was at the very end .... because she was corrupted by "evil sword" .... made from metal Hawke found in the Deep Roads .... and after Anders had just blown up the Revered Mother .... OF COURSE MEREDITH WOULD BE PISSED, anybody in her position would be. I'd have ordered all the Mages there killed as well.

The re-use of areas, interiors and enemies. It was a half arsed game, end of story. No effort had been put into it and they wanted money from a game with the Dragon Age name. For a company like BioWare this was the laziest game design i've seen from them. It was pathetic.

The art. Badly textured scenery. Half finished character designs. Bland armour/weapons. Incredibly bad landscapes (what you see of them).

I didn't like the combat much. I like to micro manage like in Dragon Age and other RPG's. I find hack and slash combat far too simplistic and i'm not a fan.

Companions. As I said above, I like to micro manage. BioWare saw fit to remove changing companions gear because obviously new people to the series would be completely stumped by that ... lets make things so simple a brain damaged Wombat can understand it .... Like Casey Hudson.

The "What the fuck" moment in the last cut scene. leliana appeared in that scene .... in the save i'd carried over from Origins she was dead. There is Necromancy at work here.

It was an incredibly short game. Compared to the 30+ hours the first playthrough of Origins took me, this game took me 15 and the side quests were shit.


The Good.

It was an incredibly short game. Compared to the 30+ hours I spent enjoying Origins, thankfully this nightmare only lasted 15.

Varric and Merril. They saved the game for me. If it hadn't been for them I wouldn't have pushed through to the end.

In conclusion....

I did not like it.

I shouldn't have played it but I loved Origins and expected more of the same but it was completely different ... and not in a good way. I didn't like a single change they made.

the worse thing is dragon age 1 showed a good reason with the mage's , the templers and you could feel for both sides but dragon age 2 ruined that by making every mage a blood mage

 

[gamernerdtg2]

The Good - I liked the characters, I thought the story was fine, the combat was alright, but it could have been better. It plays like a PC game for sure.

The bad - all of the story can be seen on YouTube without you even trying the game yourself. The options for romance, all of it can be seen on YouTube. I sold this game and Mass Effect 2 back because the point of playing DA 2 and ME 2 is the story, not the gameplay. If DA 2 played more like Dragon's Dogma, or Kingdoms of Amalur, then I'd still have it, and I'd say it was a great game. But the combat isn't "all that".

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Dragon Age 2 isn't a bad game. It's just a rushed game. It had something of a record setting short development cycle. I have no idea why they turned it around so fast...maybe EA was burning the office down and everyone had to finish up and run for their lives. Almost everything that goes wrong can be attributed to a lack of time.

1. Re-used environments. Classic sign of cut corners and a rushed development.
2. Plots that feel under-developed/rushed to their conclusion, causing strange pacing issues.
3. Characters that feel under-developed, are missing motivations, and/or are missing their arc.
4. Combat that is mechanically sound but is weighted down by lackluster or underdeveloped encounters.

And on and on. The sad thing is, there's actually the framework for a really GOOD game there. A better game than Origins, by far, and Origins was a solid (if somewhat over-praised) title. But you can't cut a game that close to the bone and expect to earn a lot of accolades. I actually think the staff should be commended for giving us something functional...this could easily have been Ultima IX bad. It could have been unplayable, riddled with ghastly bugs, or an utterly nonsensical story.

As DA3 is actually getting a sane development time, I'm hoping for a strong bounceback effort. As long as they can avoid cramming in any ghostly kids or absurd MacGuffins at the 11th hour, it should be the best Dragon Age to date, and a top notch RPG all around (if perhaps a bit streamlined for the 90's crowd). If it's not, we'll know that Bioware is well and truly dead, and transfer the last of our affections to a more worthy developer just in time for them to get purchased by EA too.

 

[God's Clown]

The Bad: They made it in one year.

The Good: It still turned out to be a decent game.

It's really quite that simple, you can't make a great game of Dragon Age caliber in one year. Had they taken two years, it would have been much better. The fact it came out as a playable game at all is a testament to skill of the general employees at Bioware.

 

[Apollo45]

The good: The combat is more fun than the first game( surprising I know), Mage and Rogue are very fun to play from raining down fire and lighnting from the sky to smite your enemies to disappearing from the otherside of the field and backstabbing an enemy on the other-side of the map (rogue has the most flashy basic fight animation) I like the different effects of the mages staffs, and the companions are (mostly) well written. My favorite quest is the one that involves your mothers death you see both Asmodeus Hawke(my character) and Gamlen(Jackass) both are very distraught and worried and both have very believable reactions at the end of the quest. I also like how the dialogue choices you choose affect your personality and thus modify everything(read in bold) you say in every conversation.

(cough) Welp these are what I think are the Good and Bad of DA II.

See, I disagree with most of your good points there. The combat was flashy, sure, but as a Rogue (I could barely even play through the game once) all I did was jump 30 feet into the air and jam my knives into someone's eyes, then jump to another guy and do the same over and over while random "reinforcements" rained from the heavens (literally leaping to the ground from the clouds above) over and over. There was extremely little strategy to it - in fact, even on the hardest difficulty the only time I had to plan out where I was positioning my squad was during that fight with the big rock-golem-thing. Everything else I would try to set them up for some strategy and then they would be flanked by the second of five waves, thereby turning the whole thing into a giant melee. There wasn't any real strategy behind it, and the fun was extremely short lived once I had jumped to the thousandth guy in a row.

As for the characters, with the exceptions of Aveline and Varric, I found them to be extremely bland and uninteresting stereotypes of common Fantasy characters. Seriously, it's really difficult to come up with meaningful descriptors for most of the characters. Anders was a gay mage with the hots for you; that was his entire personality. Sure there was more to his character than that, but you say "gay mage" and that's what you get out of him. Bethany was a mage. Fenris was an Elf Slave, with a hint of JRPG to go along with it. Isabela was a pirate. Or a pirate whore, if you wanted to go there. Sebastian was a prince with a bow. Merrill had some more to her, but not much. She's a blood-mage elf with the personality of your stereotypical insecure teenage girl and not much more. They all can be boiled down to that, and if you've never played the game in your life you could be told those descriptors and you'd be able to guess essentially their entire personalities and stories from the get-go. That's not good writing.

Aveline and Varric stand out from that rather bland crop of characters. Aveline has conflict from the loss of her husband, her conflicts between your friendship/loyalty and the orders of her superiors, her own sense of moralities, and it shows when she argues with you or tries to stop you from doing things, but also when she decides to give in and go along with your plans. She's complicated, unlike the rest of them, and that goes a long way in making her a good character. Varric is a stubborn dwarf with a grudge, which tells you most of the things you need to know, but the combination of his voice actor and his development throughout the game give him an edge over the other characters.

The only really good part that I got from that game was that it had the potential to be spectacular. The ideas behind everything were excellent; the characters, the storylines, everything could have fit together well and made for an epic story. But it failed on so many levels, for me anyway, that I just can't say there's a single truly exceptional part about it. Maybe the leveling system and the abilities, which I liked more than DA:O, but that's really about it.

 

[Drauger]

Everything Rawne said:

The bad.... Snip

+ I would add the origins, godamit I hate hawke, why shepardize my main character damit !!!, I wanted to have choices as a origin, more than in DAO.

Then...... truth been told, I started playing DAO and after I reached Flemeth hut I felt the the story/battle system/ect. was great, but the graphics were absolutely and totaly shit, so i had to stop playing and dowload a fucking ton of mods to play the game, if the game couldn't be moded I prolly had lost interes cause well, it looked horribly.

 

[Janus Vesta]

The skills/abilities system in DA2 was better than DAO, not as varied sure, but you didn't end up with multiple versions of the same spell cluttering your menus.

Who wants Walking Bomb and Virulent Walking Bomb? Virulent should be an upgrade to the original spell.

Varric and Aveline were also good, and the scenes with Bethany/Carver were fine. Probably because Bioware wasn't concerned with trying to shoehorn in a romance subplot.

 

[Sexy Devil]

Well the word on the street is they told the team at the last minute their expansion will actually be turned into a full game... oddly enough we ended up with 1/4 of a Dragon Age game, horribly padded out and barely tied together.
But more then that this game was very obviously not made by the team from DA1, for the most part it felt like a JRPG dev was phoned in last minute.

"better combat" - that is an argument for the ages, if one wanted a non-tactical flashy meaningless spam fest then yes DA2 delivers, but if you aren't one with such desires the game is rather disappointing.

The only reason that tactics are meaningless is because of the spawning enemies ruining any plans you had. The mechanics themselves though are just plain better.

As for the "spam fest," I believe auto-attack was an option that had to be enabled for some dumb reason. Though I've barely touched the game since I finished it the first time so I could be wrong. It was a stupid idea to not make it the default but it's still there.

 

[ThriKreen]

Well the word on the street is they told the team at the last minute their expansion will actually be turned into a full game... oddly enough we ended up with 1/4 of a Dragon Age game, horribly padded out and barely tied together.

What was DA:Awakening then?

But more then that this game was very obviously not made by the team from DA1, for the most part it felt like a JRPG dev was phoned in last minute.

So did anyone actually check the credits and compared it to previous games?