can you say something nice about dragon age 2

[Izzy1320]

In my opinion, since this is an extremely opinionated thread, the biggest mistake that Bioware made when creating the game was calling it 'Dragon Age 2'. This essentially labeled it as a direct sequel to the first game, and I believe that that is what a lot of people were expecting. In fact, DA2 would have been served much better with a title along the lines of Dragon Age: Legends of Kirkwall, or something like that.

That being said, I appreciate what the studio tried to do, and in some cases, succeeded in doing. The game feels much more personal to the protagonist. Rather than making an entire country at risk, it focuses down to a single man/woman, and his/her fight to protect the new home that he/she has found. (Honestly, like other bioware series, I found preference in the female Hawke's voice acting.)The story has its weak points, but it is still better than a lot of people seem to give it credit for. Looking at the bigger picture of Dragon Age lore, the second game had a lot more to offer. It provides the spark that sends the mages and the templars to war.

As a game, I enjoyed it. It was developed much more heavily for consoles than its predecessor, with the simpler controls and action heavy combat, but there was never a part of it I found particularly 'bad'. It provides a solid bridge between the first and (hopefully) third iterations of the series and I am waiting for DA3, if and when it comes.

 

[LiberalSquirrel]

I rather loved Dragon Age 2 and it's baffled me to no end that I'm a minority in that. I won't defend the entire game, but there's one aspect no one ever seems to mention and that's the art direction.

You see, unlike Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2 actually has an art direction. Origins was a very bland looking world with little in the way of unique design. It all looked so stock. The elves were just shorter humans with point ears, the dwarves might as well have been Moria, and the environments were just stale. Dragon Age 2, however, is full of unique looks. It still manages to harken back to Origins, but it also presents its own style. The elves especially look different. While the environments are repetitive, yes, they also aren't as bland as Origins (though DA2 does have the same issue at times, especially in the dungeons.)

I'll second this. I thought the art direction was stronger than DA:O, and that's a good thing.

To get back on the general topic...

Sure, the game has problems. The feel and flow of the combat is different than what a lot of people were expecting (which would have been averted by not titling it "Dragon Age 2" and instead picking a new subtitle for the game to indicate a shift in creative direction...), there are repetitive dungeons, and you don't get the same huge world scope that you got in Dragon Age: Origins.

However, the story, while episodic and decidedly different from its predecessor's, was both interesting and good, in my opinion. It was more... personal. There was more nuance, in that there was no huge, overarching, pure-black-morality villain that you had to go kill in the end. There were plenty of antagonists in DA2, sure, but no one was the straight-up "bad guy," like the Archdemon in DA:O. I thought that change was very much for the better. I actually felt all of the characters were quite strong, as well. And yes, Anders turned into a bit of a ponce. But just because he was a bit of a ponce does not make him a bad character... I actually thought his story arc was really well done. (Doesn't mean I liked him. Just means I thought his part of the story was quite good.)

In conclusion to this lovely little mini-rant, I rather liked it. It's got flaws, sure. So does every game under the sun. But it's a good game, with different weaknesses and strengths from DA:O. That's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it. ...But then again, one should expect little else from someone with a DA2 avatar who is a member of the "Dragon Age 2 was a good game" user group.

 

[4RM3D]

The gameplay was more balanced and more challenging than that of its predecessor. It was still flawed, though.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

You know, I don't get this attitude. I don't know what difficulty any of you played on, but I have a feeling it wasn't on nightmare, because if that was the case, I'm fairly certain none of you would say there's little or no strategy involved. This is not to put any of you down, please don't take it that way, but I think it's unfair to call it an action game and/or button spammer, if you haven't beat the game on the highest difficulty.

I don't think it's unfair at all. The gameplay style reminded me of a hack-and-slash game. I don't have to have played it on Nightmare mode to think that; genre is separate from difficulty.

I mean, DAII really was in a different genre to DA:O, and I think the fact that it was marketed as a sequel to DA:O massively hurt its chances of getting a fair reception. It would have been better off going full-hog to the ARPG side and making something like God of War set in the Dragon Age universe; at least then I could enjoy it.

Also, how is the wave combat making the combat any less strategic? If anything, it adds more things to consider to every encounter, like repositioning and cooldown management. I have no idea how those two things removes strategic elements, rather than add them.

The wave combat made positioning or planning irrelevant. It didn't matter where you put anyone; in fifteen seconds another dozen dudes would spawn behind you like spiders jumping out of a clown car. You'd have street brawls where a hundred Carta thugs would leap from the rooftops, inexplicably avoid breaking their ankles, and backstab Merrill half to death before you even knew what was going on because the game also didn't let you pan out the perspective to give you any idea of what was going on. "Maintaining aggro" amounted to "hit Taunt whenever it's off cooldown."

It was dull, lazy, immersion-breaking and as tactically engaging as wack-a-mole.

 

[Jynthor]

Dragon Age 2 is pretty enjoyable, too bad it runs like crap on my pretty good machine.
Anyway, I absolutely love female Hawke's voice. Especially the humorous choices.

 

[Colt47]

Dragon Age 2 isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It was short and didn't have the scope of the original title and it reused dungeons when it shouldn't have. Beyond that, the dwarf bard is probably one of my favorite characters of all time, and the simple relationship advancement felt fairly natural and didn't feel forced (Persona 3 comes to mind). Combat reminded me a bit of a faster paced Final Fantasy XII, which pretty much sums up both Dragon Age 1 and 2 thanks to the macro system in place for the AI.

 

[The Lunatic]

It could have been a lot worse.

 

[Zeldias]

Characters I liked that felt like people instead of inert things that only activated when the main character approached.

Rival system allows me to act however the hell I want and still progress relationships as opposed to having to be a bootlicking douchebag like most games of that type (DA1 particularly; "Here bro, I got you some gifts. Do you like me yet?")

Combat was far and away more interesting than DA:O.

Sidequests feel meaty. Some of the sidequests in DA:O were just bounties from a sign that you can turn in. Nothing like that in DA2, which I liked.

There's actually a lot amount of things I like about DA2. I can't even bring myself to play Dragon Age 1 again after playing it because the only thing Dragon Age: Origins has going for it is the story being interesting.

What I really don't get is how people find DA:O to be so superior: once I hit like level 13 or so, the game become abysmally boring to me. I like the characters and the stories like I said, but actually playing the game is a chore and a half. It's hard for me to even see it as a BG successor because I remember being able to do a hell of a lot more with my characters in BG than I could in DA:O (although that might be me misremembering; I just recall having a lot of options).

 

[ArchBlade]

I think Dragon Age 2 got a lot more hate than it deserved, personally.

Okay, yes, I believe Origins is by far the superior game. But there was stuff about Dragon Age 2 that I genuinely liked.

The gameplay was alright, and at the very least the combat was a little more entertaining than Origins combat, in terms of speed, anyway.
The story and writing was pretty good. Once again, not on par with Origins, for the most part, but I still enjoyed it.
And I DID like Hawke. He was no Warden, but he's shown to be near on par with him in terms of skill.

Those are my opinions, anyway.

 

[BarbaricGoose]

I enjoy experiencing deja vu. So that was fun for me.

But seriously, if you can find it REAL cheap, sure. Honestly, I'd wait to see if DA3 is any good, because the only reason I would recommend DA2 is if you wanna catch up on the story in prep for DA3.

DA1, though, is great. Buy it if you haven't. Worth $60, but you can nab the ultimate edition for cheap now.

 

[ArchBlade]

-Snip-

I would say that as a Dragon Age game, every bit of hate it got was well deserved.

But as a game if you dont take its pedigree into account, then the bile is a bit much, but thats the risk you run when slapping a known and loved name on something.

It probably would have done much better if it wasn't called Dragon Age

I suppose I can agree with you there. As a followup to Origins, it was pretty weak.

Hopefully Bioware breaks their recent pattern and Dragon Age III really drives it home...

 

[FoolKiller]

It was a pretty good little game. Lot of flaws but credit must be given for trying to make something new. it's biggest mistake was calling it dragon age. The truth is sequels are always a hard line to walk. People want it to be new and better than the original but still the same if you get my meaning.

As for saying something nice: it had a good story

 

[Sunrider]

I love DA2. I love Lady Hawke, I think she's great. Anders is a whiny ***** who had the potential of being one of the coolest characters ever, but the rest of them are pretty damn good IMO, and that's why I play Dragon Age games.

 

[BLAHwhatever]

combat looks nice. That is all

 

[Sp3ratus]

Well the very first fight with the Ogre comes to mind as one were Aveline won't survive unless you manually dodge out of the way. I actually died over and over on that fight wondering what I did wrong. I couldn't choose any party members at that point, I hadn't had an opportunity to select any talents and I haven't gotten any gear so I failed to see what I was doing wrong. I tried doing all sort of different tactics until I finally gave up and watched a youtube video. Then it occured to me, oh it's an action game now I get it.

I'll give you that, the first fight, before you had a chance to establish your party and pick out skills, the fights aren't great.

Holding aggro is moot when enemies spawn in random positions. Enemies often appear behind casters and one-shot them. Even the best tank can't be everywhere at once. I found that keeping the party together and just focus firing while backstepping worked best. Most of my attempts at a tactical approach was punished by the game. Positioning is pointless when the characters sprint around the map at random and get one-shotted. The wave system is less strategic because you can't plan for something that is random.

True, you can't plan for something that is random, but what you can do, is pause and reassess the situation and your strategy for how to deal with the new wave of enemies. It is Real Time with Pause(RTwP), after all. With regards to positioning and repositioning, I've written something about that, further down in the post. Your allies don't really have to sprint around the map, that can be changed in the tactics screen for each character.

Also, I'd argue that keeping the party together and focus firing is is a tactical approach to the combat situation. If it worked for you, which from the sound of it, it did, then that's a solution to how to beat a certain encounter. My approach was having the party spread out and reposition them, whenever a new wave spawned, which worked for me.

I do wonder how much DA2 varies between ports, because some of the descriptions I heard from others sounds like a completely different game to me. In my PC version the combat felt very broken.

Or maybe I just didn't get it, thats also a possibility. I often wondered what the intention with the gameplay was.

I wonder a bit about that too(the ports, that is). I played on PC, just for reference and I quite liked it. To me, the gameplay is all about facing a challenge and how to deal with it. This is where the strategy comes in, you set up a plan for how to deal with enemies, who goes down first, how do I protect my allies and so on. When the waves then come, you alter your strategy in order to deal with these new enemies, while still keeping your party alive.

I don't think it's unfair at all. The gameplay style reminded me of a hack-and-slash game. I don't have to have played it on Nightmare mode to think that; genre is separate from difficulty.

I mean, DAII really was in a different genre to DA:O, and I think the fact that it was marketed as a sequel to DA:O massively hurt its chances of getting a fair reception. It would have been better off going full-hog to the ARPG side and making something like God of War set in the Dragon Age universe; at least then I could enjoy it.

Indeed, genre is separate from difficulty, my intention wasn't to say it was, either. My point is that you can't just hack and slash your way through nightmare, on that difficulty you actually have to think about how to deal with the combat situation at hand. You have to set up how to deal with certain enemies, when to use what cooldown and where your people are standing and then you have to reevaluate that, every time a wave spawns.

The wave combat made positioning or planning irrelevant. It didn't matter where you put anyone; in fifteen seconds another dozen dudes would spawn behind you like spiders jumping out of a clown car. You'd have street brawls where a hundred Carta thugs would leap from the rooftops, inexplicably avoid breaking their ankles, and backstab Merrill half to death before you even knew what was going on because the game also didn't let you pan out the perspective to give you any idea of what was going on. "Maintaining aggro" amounted to "hit Taunt whenever it's off cooldown."

I don't really agree with that. Initial positioning might be as important as it was in DA:O, but the point I've been trying to make, with regards to the wave system is that repositioning is very important in DA2. When I play DA2, I pause immediately, whenever I see a new wave spawn, so that I can reposition my weakest allies as quickly as possible and get my tank in position to deal with the strongest of the newly spawned enemies.

As for holding aggro, there are several tools available to the warrior, such as increased aggro presence, if you will. When aggro wasn't possible to hold, there are other talents that make the warrior take some of the damage, that allies would otherwise have taken.

 

[Maeshone]

Yeah, no worries. Happens to me as well.

But anyways... You say that characters, the story and the combat were better. I'd just like to respond, since I am rather passionate about the first game.

Characters
-------------------

-First of all, companion quests and companion interactions were bad in comparison to Dragon Age Origins. You were not able to talk to your companions when you wished, and at the start of each chapter/act you would get a laundry list of things to do, such as companion quests.
In Origins, you could talk to companions when you wanted, and they would sometimes have some insight or opinions or stories about the location you were currently in, or about the memories the place or the events reminded them of. You also had to "find" companion quests; Instead of them being thrown into your face, they came up after extensive amounts of dialog and called back to something mentioned before. Receiving one felt like an honor and actually meant something.

Anders has one of the wackiest character arcs I can remember. His development, his major plot point is so batshit crazy that it made me hate the character.
Isable and Merrill I did not personally enjoy, but I can see why some people would like them.
Fenris, i did not like. He was a stereotype of a wounded, hateful emo; yet he never really got his moment of redemption and at no point did I feel like he had anything more into him than the emo elf thing.
I had Bethany. I thought she was fine.
Aveline and Varric I liked.

For characters, yeah, the fact that you couldn't talk to them anywhere was one of the things I thought was a step back as well, and hopefully that will be back for the third one. As for companion quests, I always kind of thought that since years passed between the acts, that all the relevant talking kind of happened off screen. Not optimal, but if they have to do timeskips then I'd prefer that the characters act like they actually spent time together during the timeskip as well rather than just jump in three years later and not have the relationships advanced at all. Preferably I'd see no timeskips though, it just messes with storytelling most of the time.

Anders was fine... During act one. Then he was just in the party until I could get Bethany back...
Isabela and Merrill I really liked, but as you say, that really is personal preference (as are most things I'm bringing up really)
First time I played I actually missed Fenris completely, but when I actually had him the second time around he didn't bother me that much. I have no strong feelings one way or another.
Bethany and Carver are both good, though they get way to little screentime to really shine, what with being gone for most of the game...
Aveline and Varric are good as well.

For Dragon Age characters, I enjoyed most of the characters as well, but they felt more like cliches to me. Not saying DAIIs characters aren't cliched, they just didn't scream cliche to me.
Alistar was the silly sidekick, Morrigan the mean witch with a heart of gold (Kind of...) Leliana came of as a bit of an crouching moron, hidden badass-kind of character, Wynne was the motherly one, Oghren the drunk dwarf. I will say that Zevran and Shale were ace though.

Story
---------

Dragon Age Origins had the traditional "save the world from ancient evil" plot, but it did it well. It served as a framework for your travels to the elves, mages, humans and dwarves. Each major location had a story of it's own which deviated from the "darkspawn are evil, must slay darkspawn" thing, and I found them really interesting.

Meanwhile in Dragon Age 2, the first act is just faffing about and setting up the story, in 2nd act the Qunari kick in... and it leads to nowhere. I actually liked the Qunari and would have liked them and their issues be the center of the game rather than the craptastic mages vs. templars argument which was absolutely ridiculous, especially in Act 3.

None of the sidequests really proved to be interesting. They were mostly just fetch quests or errand work. While Origins had it's fair share of fetch quests, I felt like they had better framework and actually felt important to the individual characters.

I felt that the first act was really good, in more of a world-building, character introduction sort of way, which I appreciate. Act 2 is the gem though, as the qunari are one of the most interesting parts of DA lore to me. Like you, I would have loved it if they were the primary antagonists through the game. Or that ***** Sister in the Chantry, god I hated her. Act three was... Well, let's just settle for saying it was a mess. It was all over the place. But it feels like that was because it was rushed. Like most of my problems, this could really have been solved with another year or two in developement.

As for the sidequests, I really didn't have a problem with "pick up random pair of trousers, magically know what dwarf they belong to, and find him in a giant city to get some money"-quests as it didn't feel like they cut into the proper sidequests and were more of a diversion to get som extra money. Again, proper stories for these could have been put in with more time, but alas, it was not to be... The real sidequests though I felt were really rather good, if a bit lacking in longer arcs.

Combat
------------

Dragon Age Origins had a fairly challenging combat in my opinion, at least on harder difficulty levels. You had to have a proper strategy in a battle, or you would get crushed. Most of the abilities also felt interesting to use.
It also had a SHITLOAD of optional challenges, like hard boss fights and the like which rewarded you with pieces of items or powerful artifacts. The revenants, dragons etc. I felt like the combat in Origins also required more creativity than the mess that was DA2.

DA2 had an "actiony" combat that wasn't really actiony. You just mashed shit to kill enemies and prayed to god more wouldn't drop out from the invisible blimp on the sky. It didn't have the same excitement Origins did.
DA2 also, at least on Hard where I played the game, forces certain characters on your team. Such as Anders. Anders was a powerful healer, and he was a necessity for most of the fights. He was an optimal pick for nearly any party, and you could not get away from him if you wanted to be confident you could face whatever would lie ahead.
DA2's difficulty was also extremely imbalanced at points, or so I felt playing on hard and normal. See: Ancient Rock Wraith, Qunari 1vs1 as a warrior.

I'm actually gonna be real honest and admit something I'm a bit ashamed of. I can't come to terms with Dragon Age combat. I just genuinely suck at it. There are only two game franchises that I've tried, where I have to go down to the easiest difficulty in order to play the game. Dragon Age and Kingdom Hearts. Give me Gears of War and I'll play it on insanity any day, or Human Revolution on Give me Deus Ex and Witcher 2 on Dark, but Dragon Age? Nope. Fucking wall, right there. So Anders was not a factor for me, which was good, because as above, he kind of sucks. But that also means I am far from an authority on combat on higher difficulties. And as I said, I would like it even better if the acually went even further towards a pure action game in the combat, kind of like Mass Effect 3. It's just a combat style I find way more enjoyment from.

I don't want Devil May Cry/God of War-style though, keep it grounded. Make enemies die in one or two hits, and the player as well. Make it not rely on dodge rolls as that got silly in the Witcher 2 after a while, instead make if focused on defence by blocks or parries, with dodges for the really big guys. No combat rolls though, that looks really silly in plate armor. I know a lot of people like Dragon Age Origins combat, and I'm definately not gonna ***** if that's what they'll use for DA3. I'll still play it for the story and lore.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

I can't say much nice about DA2, apart from Varric being reliable. I'd recommend reading this LP to showcase just how bad the game got.
http://gigglesquee.blogspot.ca/

If you want more hilarity, I would also look up the original thread for the LP at Something Awful. You just have to go into the Comedy Gas Chamber to find it, but some of the derails regarding Bioware were hilarious.

 

[teh_Canape]

Combat looks better
The characters are better overall
Sets up an awesome sequel
The idea was cool
Boss fights were better (mostly)

I think the combat thing is a bit... hit and miss
rogues and mages look pretty cool, but the warriors look rather off
like, in Origins, the sword+shield and double handed weapons looked heavy and powerful, in DA2 it looks like they're waving a light piece of wood around

also archery looks weird as well =P

aside from that, I really loved Isabela and Merrill, Varric was awesome, Sebastian was an uptight asswipe and when did Anders become such an ass
he was pretty cool in Awakening