Dragon Age 2

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: RPG; Sub-genre: Party-based

ESRB: M (gallons of blood, sex and nudity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 42/30

Developer: BioWare 

Wiki page

I wanted to give this game three stars because it hits so many marks. But then the problems start cropping up. I'm definitely not going to hate on it as much as the internet does, though. Especially the PC users. Although I did play on XBox, so I suppose they won't want to listen to me. Ha! In fact, I actually played the first one on PC, and then I heard this second one was going to have more attention towards being friendly to consoles. So I said: fuck it! I didn't really enjoy playing the game with a keyboard and mouse. I know some things were better designed around it, and I remember there being more abilities than buttons. But it wasn't necessary. This game allows you to pause and be tactical. I don't bother doing things in real time or using the automated features. Why would I? Those are for lazy people! Pausing replaces any need for a complicated "controller" such as a keyboard and mouse. And while this game isn't exactly new, it didn't come out 12 years ago. What I'm saying is that it isn't Baldur's Gate, people. I know there are similarities, but it isn't. Don't blame consoles for the invention of time.

If you want games to be exactly the same for 20 years I would recommend JRPG's.

Ugh, rambling about stupid things. Okay, so gameplay. Right. This one does feel easier than the first Dragon Age, at least in terms of how terrible the difficulty scaled. Basically the beginning was super hard because you had no healer, no gear, and no abilities. By the end of the game, you could tank pretty well and auto-kill any casters on the field. But even then I found that big ass dragons would knock my tank out pretty quick even with two healers. I kept wondering if I accidentally turned the difficulty up at the beginning. Still do wonder. Maybe I was just bad at it. But here the beginning is much more appropriately challenging. The most lethal thing in the second one would be casters. Man, they just cut right through your tank and will randomly destroy anyone on your team you're not paying attention to. I have noticed people complaining that this one was too easy. I think that can be rectified by turning up the difficulty. If you want a harder game, well, I don't think this was intended to be so damn unforgiving. Go play Demon's Souls if you want that. I do think some of the things said were exaggerated (I've heard people got through battles just auto-attacking and using no strategy) since this was no where near as easy as Kingdoms of Amalur. But the gameplay is at it's best when you use the terrain and pause and act tactically by examining the field and giving simultaneous commands. It's at it's worst when you replay the same dungeon a dozen times or are made to go back to the same area several times. RPG's generally offer a lot of exploration (IE Skyrim). I think having so much of the game take place in one city would have been fine since this story is so much more intimate if we weren't made to revisit the exact same areas over and over again.

BioWare flipped the map upside down and closed a door or two here. They didn't get away with it.

Speaking on the story, this was another element that was targeted for criticism from fans of the first one. I have to ask those people: did you play the first one? Because having to fight an evil that comes around every thousand years is incredibly cliche. In fact, it's the same plot as Mass Effect! In DA1, you are told about how Grey Wardens are meant to stop them and go through training and such. Nifty and fun, sure. But it wasn't exactly engrossing to me. So I'm like a Jedi? What makes me special? Oh, nothing that ever comes across in terms of in-game abilities? Uh, alright. And everything you came across felt so much like super crammed exposition. I mean, they were introducing this whole big world, I get that. I do end up having the same complaint that I have for Mass Effect 1 where it seems like the main character is some kind of moron who was born yesterday. So anyway, DA2. Why is this story hated? From what I remember hearing, people didn't like that it was "all" in one city and the "enemy" didn't show up until the third act. Huh? I get the one city part; people want to explore and see the same colorful RPG cliche zones they see in every RPG. People are stupid. But I can't accept that the story is worse. For one, the main character has a damn voice! That automatically makes it better for me. He/she now has a personality and (this is really huge) will actively participate in conversations instead of waiting for people to be done talking so the player can choose a chat option. I ended up loving this story because we get to see someone's life for about 7 years of it. A rise from a destroyed home to finding an important post, the random relations found and how they have a complete arc, and how the hero finds him or herself in the middle of an event that will affect how the world works socially. And with decisions! There was no decision to side with the demons in DA1. Why would you? They were just faceless bad guy fodder for good guys to kill. No emotion! DA2 was better! Watch a movie that's not a children's movie sometime! This is an absurd comparison, but ever see Citizen Kane? That was a life's journey that didn't need to end with Welles punching a primary antagonist. Stop thinking in terms of boss fights! Agh!

If you really have to watch a movie for children, I recommend Pixar stuff.

So what is the end result? BioWare cancelled all further DLC for DA2 and is moving into production on DA3, which I'm guessing will come out around the beginning of 2014 or something. Which really sucks because Hawke (the player character of DA2) clearly had more story left. Is DA3 supposed to be about him/her or a new character? I think either decision is unsatisfactory, unfortunately. I wanted an expansion for DA2 like DA1 had. You know, a big forty dollar behemoth instead of those bite sized ten dollar deals. The problem is that DA1's expansion, Awakening, was really bad. That's because the stupid story left no room for an expansion. So the player character just sorta did random crap that felt like the gameplay from an MMO. DA2's ending left room for more to happen. So it could have worked much better. At any rate, the real biggest problem this franchise suffers from is being rushed. DA2 came out something like 18 months after DA1. That's not how long video games take to make these days. Especially when they have a SHIT TON of voice acting and 40 hours of gameplay to offer. Just ask Blizzard. They made Starcraft 2 back in 2010 and still haven't released Heart of the Swarm as of this article's publish date. That's 3 years for a game that's essentially an expansion to an isometric view RTS. I mean, the level of scripting and level design is so much lower in terms of technical complexity. There's unit balance, sure, but.... whatever. I'm rambling.

Conclusion:

Just give BioWare your money. I don't care. They work hard, are ambitious, and get the job done even when under EA's very harsh thumb. Why people always so critical on BioWare, man? This ain't like Fable 3. Lazy bunch of nonsensical bullshit... rabble rabble...

And look what the Fable guys did with your money. THE HORROR!