The faults of DA II

[Darken12]

Everyone has talked about the bad to death. I'll try to rescue the good:

Perfectly egalitarian romances (until the introduction of the DLC character at least). While everyone cried "unrealism!" towards the fact that everyone was bi (or Hawke-sexual) and they did so with a straight face in a world where an 80-pound frail old lady can turn into a dragon weighing several tonnes and the laws of thermodynamics, conservation of matter and energy, entropy and gravity get beaten up more often than a punching bag at the gym, it was the only objectively good thing DAII ever did, and got 100% right. The romances themselves might have been anything from decent to terrible, but the effort towards equality should be recognised.

Beyond that, I thought the party banter was decent, and I liked the effort of making the characters feel like real people, regardless of how flawed it ended up being in the end.

Oh! And I really liked the architecture in Kirkwall. It was actually a pleasure to look at the more elegantly built fortresses and buildings.

I liked Aveline, Varric, and to a lesser degree, Isabella (but only when she was self-aware and witty). EDIT: I liked that Aveline got a love life outside Hawke (even if Hawke had to do all the legwork for her). Showing that characters have lives that don't revolve around the main character was a very good thing.

 

[an874]

Oh look, the rare and elusive "Bioware/Bioware game is shit" thread. Haven't seen one those in a while.

OT: There are certainly worse games than this, but it's true the plot doesn't work on the surface since it seems like the main plot changes 3 or 4 times, but really each act builds onto the next pretty well in my opinion. It felt like I was playing different episodes in Hawke's life, which I thought was interesting. The combat was improved over the previous game (although I still thought Origins was a better game overall), although some of the kill animations were a little too ridiculous (backstabs that cause explosions). All that said, however, the greatest strength of the first game was it characters, and unfortunately the characters in this game fell short.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I don't necessarily disagree with you as far as your criticisms of Awakening are concerned. Whether Anders was a well rounded or compelling character in the first place is debatable, I give you that. Having said that however, I personally liked him. And, quite frankly, I wouldn't have minded DAII's "Anders" all that much had he been a new, DAII specific, character.

I agree.. I didn't mind him in Awakening, I just felt that we never really learned much about him. He's a wisecracking Mage on the run from the Circle, that's really the sum total of his character. It's all kind of shallow, but that's not a bad thing (not like Oghren's appearance, which actually made me annoyed). He's a serviceable character and although I didn't play with him much because I don't tend to like wisecracking characters, he did the job.

But yeah.. they should not have carried him over if they were going to change that much (I would say not at all, but that's just me). They should have used a new character with a new backstory. What I don't understand is the people who think that doing so "ruined" the character or was the worst writing sin in the game.

On the subject of writing, his also strikes me as.. some of the weakest at times. The sense of his mounting desperation over the years doesn't really come across so it makes his actions at the end seem.. really fucking stupid. I don't think we as the player ever understood why he felt that was the only choice available to him, and that kind of sucked.

Also, little things like.. if you're male he hits on you a few hours at most after stabbing his ex boyfriend. It's one of those things which is alright if you don't think too hard about it, but as soon as you do it just becomes.. kind of creepy. Dude, give it some time.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Importing saves had little effect. Yes, I know there are things that are different depending on your choices, but after seeing how Mass Effect 2 handled importing saves, Dragon Age II just fell flat in comparison.

Actually, looking into this, I think that was a limit of Origins. I'm not really technically literate enough to understand this in any detail, but if you look at a gibbed save editor for Mass Effect, there's a huge number of values. Origins simply wasn't exporting very many values at all, only those related to the broadest plot decisions.

As I understand it from early interviews, the Dragon Age series was originally intended to be a bit like the parts of the Ultima series, in that rather than having this coherent story between games you'd be coming back to the world in very different places and times and the events of previous games would be like a historical background for the world as a whole. At some point (possibly when Origins was more successful than imagined) someone decided to scrap this and have the stories set very close together with cameos and recurring characters, but the save exporting system clearly wasn't built to support this so you end up with weird and incongruous things like Leliana showing up because Origins never actually kept track of whether or not she died.

Sure, it's still a massive screw-up, but it seems to be more to do with the technical limitations of Origins than simply laziness on the part of the DA2 team.. and let's be totally honest, if they'd rolled with the original idea of unconnected stories, the fans who ended up getting way too into Origins would probably have flipped the fuck out.

That actually makes a lot of sense and would explain a lot about the story choices. As for Leliana showing up, I never had her die, so I didn't understand the problem at first. When it was explained to me--because I couldn't imagine letting her die so the thought never crossed my mind--I came up with this:
As far as I know, Leliana can only die in two places. One is in the village if you never recruit her. The game apparently just says she dies. I figure, you never see the body, so she just used that as a cover to escape from her past. The other spot is at the base of the most holy relic in all of Thedas. Who's to say that the Maker didn't come down and revive her after she was killed? I think that would be a fun little story twist, but I'm grasping at straws.

 

[deathbydeath]

It was really more like something Obsidian would have come up with, and I'm one of those suckers who's willing to overlook the major flaw that every Obsidian game has because the writing's always fantastic.

Now, again, everything kind of fell apart in the third act, but at least we'll always have the awesome look into Qunari culture and philosophy from Act II.

Sentence One: That's offensive towards everything Obsidian's done. Obsidian swings for the fence while putting proper production pipelines on the back burner. Bioware merely had no pre-production, and that makes the game better in no way at all.

Sentence Two: We also had Sten, which was basically that, except with less writing.

 

[ResonanceSD]

The Bad:

No strategic combat, with flawed and broken combat mechanics.

reusing of character assets from the first game to save cash (because EA are so poor, you see)

reusing of dungeon assets from the SAME game to pad out length.

reusing of dungeon assets from the SAME game to pad out length.

lack of a consistent plot after the first act

lack of an interesting plot after the first five minutes

rubbish characters, with horrible storylines in the paper-thin plot, random ass callouts to previous characters in the series.



The good: It stopped me from ever giving money to EA again.

 

[Hugh Wright]

Lost the original reply, so cliff notes
Main faults-
failure to live up to potential- personal story, family, seeing how your actions affect the city over a decade, framed narrative. all these were new or unusual in gaming, and could have made a compelling story and a great game, but none were used well, or over used to the point where you didn't care by the n'th time.
Different design philosophy to DAO- which was a spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate, and DA2 was a was not. If it had been marketed as a different type of game, rather than as a sequel to DAO it make have had it slightly easier
Kevin J Anderson writing- aka crowbarring and flanderising in plot elements from the original into teh sequel rather than comming up with something new.
Asset and map reuse

 

[Terminal Blue]

As far as I know, Leliana can only die in two places. One is in the village if you never recruit her. The game apparently just says she dies. I figure, you never see the body, so she just used that as a cover to escape from her past. The other spot is at the base of the most holy relic in all of Thedas. Who's to say that the Maker didn't come down and revive her after she was killed? I think that would be a fun little story twist, but I'm grasping at straws.

Yeah.. I suspect that's what they're going to go for.

The issue is that the game tracks whether you defiled the ashes, but not whether she was in the party at the time (if she isn't in the party when you defile the ashes, she just gets angry and leaves and you don't have to fight her - she can also become glitched so that she stays in the party and you never have that conversation) so the game can't actually tell whether she's alive or dead, only whether the Warden defiled the ashes.

The point which came up is that sometimes she'd die with the full on gory death animations and get decapitated or something. It might be easy to pull the "she got better" excuse if she just fell down, but once the Maker starts sewing her head back on it gets a bit silly.

The other thing is that it's going to be very difficult for them to fix this in game, because as mentioned.. there is no record. Even if she returns in DA3, the game isn't going to know exactly what happened to her in Origins, so she'll never really be able to explain it. Worse, because you'll probably be importing DA2 saves into DA3, it's not like they can even build some kind of special program which roots through the original save file.

Personally, I don't see it as any worse than the "Oghren retires happily to live with his new wife.. oh wait, no he doesn't, he becomes a grey warden and his personality has completely changed" thing in Awakening (not to mention the warden magically coming back to life if he died killing the Archdemon). But then, in case it's not obvious by now, I really didn't like Awakening.

We also had Sten, which was basically that, except with less writing.

Looking back on it though, Sten didn't really tell us much about the Qunari. He told us why he was Qunari, which is why the overriding impression of the Qun from Sten's description was overwhelmingly positive to the point of being Utopian.

DA2's portrayal of the Qunari and the Qun was completely different, and actually a lot more nuanced in places.

 

[deathbydeath]

We also had Sten, which was basically that, except with less writing.

Looking back on it though, Sten didn't really tell us much about the Qunari. He told us why he was Qunari, which is why the overriding impression of the Qun from Sten's description was overwhelmingly positive to the point of being Utopian.

DA2's portrayal of the Qunari and the Qun was completely different, and actually a lot more nuanced in places.

Probably, but from what I got to, it was thematically the same as the conversations I had with him in DAO, which was certainly more structure and Cliffs Notes of the Qun than actual examples, but from where I stood, it was nothing new, with the exception of the "Shepherding Wolves" subplot, which was neat but bugged me.

 

[Boogie Knight]

Now giving the party members their own distinct looks with the armor was a nice idea. In Origins, your gang all wore the same variations of brown as they got the samey gear until you finally got the two or three sets of top grade equipment. In Dragon Age II I could just sell what I couldn't use personally instead of making sure my allies were wearing the optimal pants for each pair of pants I wanted to sell.

Some of the stuff I didn't like in DAII had roots that go as far back as the Awakening expansion pack. Namely how you managed the good will of your allies through a handful of dialogue choices and almost entirely what you do in the plot. Yeah, Origins had the Urn of Sacred Ashes quest were you could permanently alienate a couple allies, but for the most part you could maintain a strong relationship with them even if you had different ideas on how to do things (This was how I Morrigan fell head over heals for my character in spite of him being a goody-goody).

Speeding up the combat in theory is a good idea, especially since playing like an offline MMO didn't really wow me. Yet, just throwing more enemies at the party was not that great an idea. This was especially silly when you would defeat a boss and reinforcements would show, when gamer sense says that the fight is over when the boss is beaten.

However, I think the biggest problems are the underwhelming final act and the player getting no idea on how their choices made a difference. The final act should have been about Hawke taking over the city and the player would have free range in determining how they reached that goal. Intertwining the mage/templar conflict and how Hawke resolves that with how he/she gets power would have been a solid idea, but what we get is a false dichotomy choosing between two sides with bad leaders and regardless of choice you fight the same bosses in the exact same order. Whether or not to make the deal with Morrigan was a big deal cause the player was able to forsee what could happen in the future from either choice, while choosing between Coke and Pepsi left me wondering why it mattered.

I wanted to bring up some of the points where Dragon Age became less obtuse and fine tuned, but I am surprised how caught up in the disappointing features I was. I'm just hoping that enough of the right people learned from the mistakes and Dragon Age III demonstrates that they thought out key issues better.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Probably, but from what I got to, it was thematically the same as the conversations I had with him in DAO, which was certainly more structure and Cliffs Notes of the Qun than actual examples, but from where I stood, it was nothing new, with the exception of the "Shepherding Wolves" subplot, which was neat but bugged me.

I think what was new was a sense of genuine menace.. Sten basically came across as highly disciplined and compassionate, his one big WTF moment was an act of fear and desperation which we never saw and which turned out to be kind of understandable considering that he had lost an item so significant he considered it to be a literal part of himself.

The Qunari in Kirkwall weren't lone warriors seeking a noble cause to redeem themselves, they were representatives of the Antaam, the conquering army which almost overran all of the Thedas. Sure, the Arishok came across as fair and honorable, but he was still down with converting the entirety of Kirkwall's nobility by the sword and executing those who refused. He still straight up decapitated Viscount Dumar just to send a message to others, despite the fact that he clearly understood that Dumar really wasn't his enemy.

The message was pretty clear, being guided by a code with absolutely no shade of grey, particularly when that code demands an entire group devote itself to nothing more than the wholesale destruction of other societies does make you brutal. There are things about the Qunari which you and I probably find admirable, and I think the game did a pretty good job of showing them off, but there's also a sheer ruthlessness to them which we never really saw in Sten. It's a society which demands everything of its citizens, it might demand them to kill or die or commit terrible atrocities irrespective of their own judgement. Sure, when Sten said "a life is too precious to be wasted on one man" it sounded like a nice sentiment, but the real implications of that statement are harsh. I think it was good to see some more hints of that.

Why did Shepherding Wolves bug you? Was it the lack of a final choice.. because I kind of liked that there was no final choice. I mean, what would it have said if you'd been able to change the Saarebas' mind?

 

[deathbydeath]

Why did Shepherding Wolves bug you? Was it the lack of a final choice.. because I kind of liked that there was no final choice. I mean, what would it have said if you'd been able to change the Saarebas' mind?

I never got that far, as I jumped ship a ways into Act 2, but I remember quite a bit of the ruthlessness you're talking about in Sten. Many of his comments and opinions were supportive of the "Closed Fist" philosophy, and he made very clear his opinion on an essentially all-powerful government, as well as the nonexistent leniency that made such a place possible.

About Shepherding Wolves, most of what bugged me were the plot holes, like how Saarebas was able to speak despite having his tongue removed and mouth sewn shut, and why he didn't kill himself earlier. I really liked the quest itself, mainly how it deals with the themes and didn't simply meet it halfway.

 

[Pandabearparade]

The problem is that it's not a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins, and shouldn't have been called "Dragon Age II". Out of the context of the Dragon Age series it's just a fairly low-end RPG. As a sequel to DAO it's a train wreck.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

Bad: Not a Dragon Age game.

Good: Would have been a decent ARPG if they hadn't marketed it as a Dragon Age game.

 

[Terminal Blue]

About Shepherding Wolves, most of what bugged me were the plot holes, like how Saarebas was able to speak despite having his tongue removed and mouth sewn shut, and why he didn't kill himself earlier.

Firstly, I'm pretty sure they retconned the thing about Saarebas having their tongues removed in favor of the binding rod. This is actually one of the lore changes I don't like, Qunari from DA2 onwards seem to be much more down with magic devices than was hinted at in Origins, even if they're against magic as a whole. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it seems to be a pretty clear direction now..

That said, the tongue thing was weird and incongruous, since Mages (even blood mages) have never been shown to require speech in order to use magic anyway.

I figured the reason he didn't kill himself earlier was that noone had told him to. As Saarebas, his purpose is to follow one who is worthy of following. That's the only function he's allowed. Saarebas don't seem to have the authority to determine their own actions or pass judgement on themselves, that falls to an Arvaarad, an officer specially responsible for dealing with mages. The Saarebas already knows the judgement will be death, but it's still not his judgement.

Existence is a choice, but that doesn't mean both choices are always equally correct.

 

[5ilver]

Perfectly egalitarian romances.

Ironically, this is my biggest complaint with DA2. I'm a heterosexual male and I haven't tried any other sides so maybe they're just as bad. But just judging from the number of romance options, it doesn't seem that way. 2 vs 3.
As far as quality, one has the mentality of a 12-year old while the other is a walking STD library. In short, not impressed.

 

[Darken12]

Perfectly egalitarian romances.

Ironically, this is my biggest complaint with DA2. I'm a heterosexual male and I haven't tried any other sides so maybe they're just as bad. But just judging from the number of romance options, it doesn't seem that way. 2 vs 3.
As far as quality, one has the mentality of a 12-year old while the other is a walking STD library. In short, not impressed.

I specifically mentioned "until the inclusion of the DLC character". Before Sebastian, the scales were perfectly balanced, with two males and two females, all of which were available for both genders. That is the most egalitarian setup you can have. Then they added a straight male and the balance went to hell.

I also specifically mentioned that I didn't give a crap about the romances' actual quality. The male options were just as bad, if not worse (Anders and Fenris are basically the same character, the tragic, broody, emotional, troubled anti-hero, only with perfectly opposite political views). I applaud merely the efforts towards equality.

 

[Abomination]

I loved Dragon Age II. I played it more than enough and enjoyed it far more than I would most other titles that I spent the same amount of money on.

It certainly had some flaws but they were nothing compared to what the game did well and the improvements it made over Dragon Age: Origins.

I do wish it had a longer development time, it could have flattened out a lot of the wrinkles in the design. The game just felt more exciting, the combat wasn't so... mechanical, movements were fluid and there weren't cases of my melee characters slowly plodding along after opponents.