Poll: Dragon Age 2 was it that bad?

[LokiArchetype]

I haven't finished playing yet as I got distracted by school work and other games, but the only thing I find bothersome so far are the repeated environments. (I'm at the beginning of the third act.)

I think another appropriate question, though, is was Dragon Age: Origins that good?

The way its brought up when DA2 is mentioned you'd think it was one of the best RPGs ever. The only thing that really stood out for me was the characters, though. I don't think the gameplay/story was all that remarkable. The game had plenty of its own issues.

-Mages were OP and if they spec'd Arcane Warrior and Blood Mage it was practically god mode.
-Dexterity modifiers weren't applied properly for Rogues so certain builds were broken.
-Party build was very restrictive as you essentially needed an offensive mage, healing mage, and your phys dps was going to be a rogue if you wanted to actually be able to get the loot from the dungeon. If you wanted to play a rogue or warrior then you had an especially limited choice in what party members you got to play with.

-There were no respec pots until Awakening so you were stuck with your and your companions initial stat/talent allocations.

-The whole silent protagonist deal made you the least interesting, least animated, and least characterized member of your group.

-The free choice of what place you want to go to after Lothering gives the illusion that order doesn't matter, except it does. If you do the Tower of the Magi before Redcliffe you could unknowingly eliminate one of the solutions for the latter's plotline.

-If you played as a human noble your intro plotline was just completely abandoned.

-The Fade, just, the Fade.


I'm expecting people to chime in that the PC version was the only -real- version and that fan made mods fixed some of these issues. That's like saying a book series should be more highly regarded because there's some really great fanfics that fix some of the unresolved issues.

 

[The Forces of Chaos]

I would Say that the new Legacy DLC has Saved Dragon Age 2. Highly recomended.

Yeah, that is just fantastic, forced to buy DLC in order to get the entire story. Let's talk about Neverwinter Nights 2, without Mask of the Betrayer expansion, the game was very poorly optimized and ran like shit on a good computer. Mask of the Betrayer made the game actually playable with decent framerates, but still everyone slams NWN2 as a terrible game due to the flaws of the original product.

So why does DA2 get a pass in this regard (or is it just trendy to slam anything and everything Obsidian has done)?

I?m not giving Dragon Age 2 a pass, I?m saying it's possible to make it suck less, I.e. have a more enjoyable experience with this dlc. They have more dialog and expand on why Kirkwall was slightly nuts. Also some decent boss fights. I would put this dlc on par with mass effect 2 lair of the shadow broker.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

I enjoyed it,but it didn't give me the epic feeling that Dragon Age Origins did.

And regarding the lenght(finished the game in 24h with all side quests),it really felt like an expansion rather than a full game.

 

[AlternatePFG]

I would Say that the new Legacy DLC has Saved Dragon Age 2. Highly recomended.

Yeah, that is just fantastic, forced to buy DLC in order to get the entire story. Let's talk about Neverwinter Nights 2, without Mask of the Betrayer expansion, the game was very poorly optimized and ran like shit on a good computer. Mask of the Betrayer made the game actually playable with decent framerates, but still everyone slams NWN2 as a terrible game due to the flaws of the original product.

So why does DA2 get a pass in this regard (or is it just trendy to slam anything and everything Obsidian has done)?

Well MotB was a full on expansion, when this is really just a short DLC. I really don't think a 3 hour DLC can save a game, especially if it's 10$.

 

[Gill Kaiser]

You need a "mediocre" option.

 

[satsugaikaze]

So why does DA2 get a pass in this regard (or is it just trendy to slam anything and everything Obsidian has done)?

If you read the internet, you'll know that DA2 has been far from getting a free pass.

Also, I've read a metric ton of comments that have always been talking about how the game would have been better if it was more like Origins, and I think it'd be a load of tosh if they did. It seemed to me that their main goal was to not make the same cookie-cutter RPG game that Origins was.


On a personal note, I have to admit that I hated Origins. Having loved Neverwinter Nights 2, it's really odd for me to dislike a game so eerily similar in some respects. But in the context in which I played it, I played it right after finishing Mass Effect (bought both in one purchase). Going back to the traditional pause-play stuff and especially the silent-protagonist deal just felt plain backward. The characters and dialogue were the only thing that really got me through the game, and II arguably had that in spades just as much as Origins did. In Origins, I managed to get up to Orzammar before being completely fed up with the tedium of the combat system. It just simply didn't feel visceral enough. Dragon Age II, I suppose, had what Egoraptor might call "game-feel". Sound effects, animations, color palette - in Dragon Age II they just felt like they had more of an impact.

As for the narrative structure itself, I could argue in its case about how the game was primarily exploring the shifts in paradigms about society's perception of what allies and enemies are, thus making the large time-jumps necessary, but I certainly agree that it could have been handled better.

If I were to suggest an improvement, I'd probably say add more Varric commentary! This is the exact same problem that Final Fantasy XIII had. The hindsight-laden commentary is a great way to frame the narrative, but Dragon Age II simply didn't use it enough. Aside from that one hilarious companion mission, Varric's storytelling really did seem to feel just like headnotes and footnotes.

 

[Da_Schwartz]

Compared to some of the RPG garbage thats been coming otu recently i thought it was pretty good. But rushed. To me the story took its time and played out well paced, then at the end its like go go go go go go annnnd stop. See ya @ the DLC suckers. Like the head dev was all of a sudden whoa whoa whoa, at this rate this game will become something epic, better end it here so we have something to sell as an add-on. -_- Pretty much i was upset to see it just end like that.

But still it's not as bad as people say it is. Some just like to hate it because it's popular, if you don't like it, don't play it.

 

[Therumancer]

Snip

The problem is that too many gamers these days have the mentality that the developers should be making the games exactly how they want them, that the developer shouldn't think about what other people might want, or even what the developer wants to create.

If BioWare has a problem it is that they both want to make the game they want to make and please all the rabid foaming at the mouth fans (not an exaggeration as seen from the seriously unfair user reviews on Metcritic) at the same time.

.

Much snipped, but it comes down to these points more or less.

The thing is that when it came to "Dragon Age 2", Bioware didn't annoy a small group of rabid fanboys, but the majority of the fanbase, there is a distinct differance. This is not to say that nobody liked "Dragon Age 2" but... well... the results speak for themselves. To someone who DID like the game the complaints on Metacritic were unfair and unwarrented, but not to the people making them, and the whole point is to collect the general range of opinions.

Yes there ARE Trolls out there, but they have always been out there, and they generally do not influance ratings since they are included in what we normally see. People who blame things like 4-Chan for "Metabombing" miss the point that they metabomb everything, people only complain about that when they don't like a score something is getting.

I'll also say that part of the point of a series is to produce "more of the same" so to speak. If you want to create an entirely new game, that plays in another way, then it should be a new series/product line, even if it's a spin off. Sort of like how they largely did "Ultima" as a top down RPG, and made the first person games set in the same universe an entirely differant series called "Ultima Underworld".

Beyond just generally being a shoddy game, which I guess we will have to agree to disagree on, I feel it went beyond just the recycled dungeons to pretty much everything except for the dialogue and cut scenes (guys jumping off roofs in medieval armor like they are ninjas irks me, not to mention the monsters spawning in waves on top of you, and there being little or no time for fight preparation since you can't see what's there until it attacks most of the time), the bottom line is that they never should have attached a "2" to the end of the name. They should have either launched a new RPG line if they wanted to experiment with these things, even if they wound up using the same general world setting.

In the end though the bottom line is the game got wrecked overall, and either Bioware learned from this or they didn't. It's not an isolated incident though, as I pointed out
they seem to have simply developed a bad attitude, and that feeds into the whole thing.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I hope you got your money back. Good luck trying the "lol its subjective" line with an editor or publisher.

I took and editing and publishing class as well. What do you think an editor is for? The editor is there to catch typos. But still, not everything will be caught, I have seen many books and magazines with typos.

Jay Leno would never have had any funny pieces for his headlines segment, and I would never have seen in my local paper, Pizza Hut's ad that they were hiring divers.

You think very much in black and white.

The problem is that the world is grey.

Yes, anyone with standards thinks in black and white. That must be it. There's no other reason they could look at that clip of DA2 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKbbGX4Wz0Y] and see bad writing!

(And my comment still stands. Good luck with trying to convince a editor, publisher, or customers that there's no such thing as bad writing.)

 

[Jennacide]

Didn't pick any of the options, as my opinion is a middle of the road "meh." The combat was well done, the acting good, and story well told until act 3. The problems of course out weighed a lot of this, particularly environment reusage, and one of the most idiotic plot shifts in history.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

I hope you got your money back. Good luck trying the "lol its subjective" line with an editor or publisher.

I took and editing and publishing class as well. What do you think an editor is for? The editor is there to catch typos. But still, not everything will be caught, I have seen many books and magazines with typos.

Jay Leno would never have had any funny pieces for his headlines segment, and I would never have seen in my local paper, Pizza Hut's ad that they were hiring divers.

You think very much in black and white.

The problem is that the world is grey.

Yes, anyone with standards thinks in black and white. That must be it. There's no other reason they could look at that clip of DA2 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKbbGX4Wz0Y] and see bad writing!

(And my comment still stands. Good luck with trying to convince a editor, publisher, or customers that there's no such thing as bad writing.)

Also, who can forget how downright embarrassing the graphics got at times?
Every design decision screamed "rushed".

 

[Kahunaburger]

I hope you got your money back. Good luck trying the "lol its subjective" line with an editor or publisher.

I took and editing and publishing class as well. What do you think an editor is for? The editor is there to catch typos. But still, not everything will be caught, I have seen many books and magazines with typos.

Jay Leno would never have had any funny pieces for his headlines segment, and I would never have seen in my local paper, Pizza Hut's ad that they were hiring divers.

You think very much in black and white.

The problem is that the world is grey.

Yes, anyone with standards thinks in black and white. That must be it. There's no other reason they could look at that clip of DA2 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKbbGX4Wz0Y] and see bad writing!

(And my comment still stands. Good luck with trying to convince a editor, publisher, or customers that there's no such thing as bad writing.)

Also, who can forget how downright embarrassing the graphics got at times.
Every design decision screamed "rushed".

Truth.

Merrill's neck is

Spoiler: horrifying

.

 

[Shadowhawk77]

Honestly man, it's the best modern High fantasy game I've played, apart from Oblivion.

OBLIVION your my new best friend

 

[LordRoyal]

Wall of text alert.

Enjoyed every second of the game. Sure it had its faults, but DA:O also copy/pasted allot of different areas as well. I did pefure DA:O, but loved this game also.

Not anywhere NEAR the extend Dragon Age 2 did it.

Origins simply copied the interiors to a few buildings here and there, rearranged furniture, etc. Very seldom did it do this as you could see it had a lot of original interiors and exteriors.

Dragon Age 2 there were no original dungeons, outdoor areas or anything. You were just going through the exact same house, outdoor area, dungeon every time. Not to mention the game was unnecessarily padded for length.

Next comes the leveling up and ability sets. For a game that people boast as being incredibly open and customizable, it is very limiting on how abilities can be learned which ones can be put together on the same character. Learning them is too dependent on what stats the player has chosen to put stat points in each level. I know KotOR did the same thing, but there were way more stat points given out in that game and the stat cost of each level of an ability was much lower.

In Dragon Age Origins one can design a warrior that uses dual knives and can one hit kill enemies with ease. You can also design a Rogue that uses a sword and shield. It is only limiting based on what class you are.

From what I can remember Origins had attributes, which are present in most rpgs. For a game that was an attempt at rehashing Baldur's Gate the only thing Origins did wrong was that it hardly depended on them at all. Origins's combat gave you hundreds of points to put into these stats which made the game a bit too easy toward the end.

Then they had talents. Which were attacks or different things you could do in and out of combat. Like stealthing, potion making, healing magic, offensive magic etc. Pretty much copy and pasted from Kotor

Then they had skills, which were things like stealing, herbalism, persuade etc.

I still fail to see how confusing this is. You get attributes when you level up, You filter them appropriately, you decide on certain feats and spells to use etc. The only difficult part is not designing a broken character. Which is quite a lot easier in Dragon Age Origins then something like Baldur's Gate where you only get a handful of attributes and much less option for human error.

They fixed the combat entirely. When my abilities are recharging, I can get in 10 times the number of normal attacks before they recharge compared to Origins. The attack is as fast as I can press the button, so normal attacks are fast and each one probably only takes a split second to complete, so no noticeable hang time between each normal attack. On top of that, I have much much more control over my special abilities, I decide the area in which my special abilities will damage and they can hit more than the one person I am targeting. The combat is more fluid and enjoyable. In Origins I could tell that behind the scenes there was the virtual dice role on how my moves would damage, because of how slow combat was it felt slow and calculated. In DA2 the battles are ferocious, fast paced, and loud(actually sounding like a battle), it keeps the mind distracted and one doesn't notice the virtual dice rolls.

This is more a matter of opinion really then actual critiscm. With Dragon Age 2 the battles were a lot more faster but they lacked the same level of strategy and precision that Origins had. Because the enemies attacked in waves randomly it didn't have the same depth as say, stealing into a room, backstabbing the mage, leading the enemies back into your instant kill spot, rinse and repeat, jargon you got used to in Origins. It was just, run in, attack, use talents, rinse and repeat. This was better done in other games like Fable because that game didn't try and force too many rpg elements down your throat. Really the problem I had with the combat was that it couldn't decide whether or not it was an RPG or a hack and slash and instead became a hybrid.

When my special abilities were reloading, my guy should have ferociously swinging his sword, hit hit hit, not lazily, hit.......hit.......hit. The whole slow time to swing a sword, may, may, be "realistic" in reality, but it makes a game boring and tedious.

Do you know how heavy a sword is? Or how much strength you require to actually pull a longbow that is as tall as you are. There's a lot of technique and precision required in using actual weaponry. In Dragon Age 2 everything felt like it was... an anime or a JRPG. Everything was over exaggerated and extremely unrealistic. How a character swings a sword taller then him like it's a toothpick, and how enemies react as if they were just slapped instead of impaled. While Origins probably didn't do the best with animations or speed, it made up for it greatly in that it was slow so you could plan your skirmishes out and think your way through a situation rather then just running in like an idiot.

Another messed up and boring factor was the dialogue. It just wasn't smooth. I remember what the silent protagonist dialogue choices were like back when BioWare did KotOR, and they dropped the ball on DA:Origins. There was new easy flow to tell what kind of response I might get out of the choice I make. The response I wanted could show up anywhere on the dialogue list, but many times it wasn't clear if the choice was right. For me RPGs are mostly about story, and it is hard to keep the story flowing when I have to sit for five minutes and decipher a choice on what could be the best thing to say, when I know the best thing but the game doesn't show it.

Origins's dialogue system was almost entirely copy and pasted from Kotor. I fail to see the complaint here besides the fact the game didn't hold your hand through conversations. In Origins much of the time there wasn't a "right" choice and really there was a "Make a lesser of two evils choice" In Kotor it was more "Lightside/darkside choice"

The dialogue is great. It is clean and to the point. Adding the awesome dialogue wheel was a very good decision on BioWare's part. I loved it when I played the Mass Effect games, it was a much needed change to fix the dialogue problem from Origins. It also didn't hurt that the protagonist finally had a voice of his own, instead of the person I'm playing in Origins being a mute-telepathic that mysteriously doesn't have a voice in conversations but has one when he yells things in battle. I think we can all agree that it would have made Origins ten times better if they had hired voice actors to do the voices of each of the six Grey Warden stories. Having the dialogue wheel makes the story flow because I know what kind of character I want to be playing and what I want to say. I wanted my Mage Hawke to be the grand good hero and being able to quickly separate the questions from the forwarding dialogue, being able to listen to all the questions and easily choosing the good/kind choice at the top right, help me keep the game moving forward and my attention kept on speakers of the story, and not the words of dialogue at the bottom fearing how I will respond next, that I might respond wrong.

The problem most fans had with Hawke was the same one they had with Shepard. In that very little of Shepard is your character. He is a Sphace Mahrine that fights the Reapers. All you choose is how witty he is, or whether he's a jerk or not. There's very little element of role playing beyond combat.

With the Warden you can choose to be a cunning rogue, a sociopath, a brute, a megalomaniac. There's hundreds of choices in terms of your personality down to the fact there's a lack of voice. Your supposed to imagine what voice your character has, not just be spoonfed what hero you have. It's the game trying to put the player in the story teller's seat instead of the audience for once.

On top of that, people comment on how great Origins stories are, but I couldn't get into it and the main reason is how hosed up the dialogue was. So in my book, the story of DA2 was better, the way the dialogue was, it was much more engaging.

Much of what made the Origin stories interesting was that you returned back to your origin later in the game, and saw how much had changed since then. It added replayability to the game and increased the depth of your character's backstory. It added to the roleplaying I mentioned earlier.

They are definitely different. I also can't stand how people trashed DA2 because, boohoo, they could play as there Warden, they had to play as a specific more fleshed out character, and oh no, he is human.

The only difference between the Warden and Hawke conceptually is that Hawke's storyline is set in stone, his personality is more defined and he has a voice.

Snip

More on Merrill, I would say that BioWare didn't know they were going to give her a bigger part when they created her for Origins, but when they did find they would use her, they changed her because the change was better suited for what they wanted,

So a character suddenly obtaining a new personality, voice actor, entire character concept and relationship status over to a new sequel without any clarification as to why is alright then?

Okay lets make a sequel to Mass Effect where Wrex turns into an angsty "poet" Krogan. Bioware obviously wanted to flesh out his character and give him a bigger part in the sequel.

but they couldn't create a new character for.

So changing an existing character to be the polar opposite of her previous personality equals = good writing. But not simply creating a new character to fulfill this role = lazy writing?

I think you need to flip those around.

OT: I personally enjoyed it. I felt the schizophrenic approach was justified actually, knowing how much of an unreliable narrator Varric is. The characterization was great, and everything made sense in context.

I think your giving the writers a bit too much credit.

 

[Aranialis]

All there is here, is a change of style, lets not say its better or worse, both of them worked equally good in my opinion. DA:O Had a slower more realistic look of combat (which I personally prefer being a pen and paper rper), which matched perfectly the more tactical side to it.

DA:O did not have realistic combat. In real life, medieval warriors would be able to swing a sword faster than my warrior did.

If swords are swung that slowly in real life, medieval combat scenes in movies and television would take twice as long, at least.

I have held replicas of blades used in such movies. They are of normal weight of the real thing used throughout medieval history, and I was able to swing faster than my warrior in DA:O, and keep it up for several minutes.

So combat in DA:O is not real.

Whoa there! One: I never said it was real, I said it felt more realistic, and compared to DA2 it does. (holding a two-handed sword and sliding through the floor doing a sweep attack isn't realistic, its anime like. Doing a jump attack and blasting off your enemies back with the mere impact of your sword on the ground isn't realistic or "real" as you put it, its anime like.)

Second: You are saying that combat scenes from movies and television are to be held as the example of what real is? ... huh... ok... I guess...

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

It improved the combat so much that it killed Origins for me forever. Other than that, everything in Origins was better. Story, characters, environments, the works. The combat and ability trees were extremely well done in DA2 though.

 

[LordRoyal]

All there is here, is a change of style, lets not say its better or worse, both of them worked equally good in my opinion. DA:O Had a slower more realistic look of combat (which I personally prefer being a pen and paper rper), which matched perfectly the more tactical side to it.

DA:O did not have realistic combat. In real life, medieval warriors would be able to swing a sword faster than my warrior did.

If swords are swung that slowly in real life, medieval combat scenes in movies and television would take twice as long, at least.

I have held replicas of blades used in such movies. They are of normal weight of the real thing used throughout medieval history, and I was able to swing faster than my warrior in DA:O, and keep it up for several minutes.

So combat in DA:O is not real.

So Dragon Age 2 having a guy swing a sword that's roughly the same size and weight as Cloud's Buster Sword equals = Ultimate immersion experience?

When your in a duel with someone you obviously have to swing your sword a lot differently then you would say at something else. When your in a duel with someone you also have to contend with the recoil of your sword hitting another sword. There are a LOT of factors to contend with. Hitting a human being is different then hitting air.

Not to mention in Origins your wearing about 100 pounds of steel armor that weighs you down. Which obviously creates fatigue and weight to your attacks.

Also on the whole awkwardness and weird way she acts about Hawke. It is the ever present occurrence that when a person falls in love or has a crush on a person, they become a totally different person. It may sound cliche, but it happens all the time in real life. The smart sturdy man that has everything together and is usually fearless, becomes a blubbering idiot when he is near or around a girl he likes, same for the ladies. I believe it is really only the one thing that can change a person. Who knows, something might have happened to Merrill in between Origins and DA2, and she isn't like she was, and she changes more when Hawke comes along.

It would have been perfectly alright for them to develop a character to a completely new personality, if it was explained.

It's like having another Star Wars film where Han Solo is suddenly an overzealous asshole character with no explanation as to why, and everyone treating him as such. If there was some actual explanation it would have been perfectly understandable. Otherwise it just looks like lazy writing.

One thing that stands me a part from the people that bash Dragon Age 2 is that I don't entirely, if at all, judge a game in a series based on what the other one was like.

Sequels have to live up to their prequels. It's been that way since the dawn of time.

Bioware was previously almost the Pixar of game developers. They rarely if at all produced a bad title. They obviously had a major reputation to live up to.

There are a lot of people who are obviously going to nitpicket on the new Deus Ex game for that reason. Just because you know a game is going to be guaranteed a lot of sales and popularity doesn't justify the developer to produce an overhyped half finished game.

I thoroughly enjoyed DA2. The story was a nice flowing stream of water that occasionally changed direction, going around a bend back where it came and then changing back and going on course.

The story of DA: Origins is a slow dripping broken bathroom faucet. You turn the knob and from reason nothing comes out. Then when you try and do something and try to make it work properly, you turn the knob and it goes crazy, spurting water in every direction and getting you all wet and miserable, and then it slows and goes to a slow occasional drop.

If anything DA2 has made me want to suffer through DA: Origins and all the DLC, so that I can understand DA2 more, and things that might come up in the third one to come.

I don't exactly understand how Origins's storyline could be described like that. Mind if you clarify? All I can gleam from that is you've just said Dragon Age 2 was really linear storytelling. Which it was really, the only reason the story progressed forward was because the game was so unnecessarily padded.

The problem is that too many gamers these days have the mentality that the developers should be making the games exactly how they want them, that the developer shouldn't think about what other people might want, or even what the developer wants to create.

If the previous game was marketed as a throwback to classic RPGs and featured strategic combat mixed with RPG elements, and the sequel is marketed as the exact same thing, except with "Faster combat" and all we get is a broken Hack and Slash with RPG elements that plays half finished. Then yes the developer is at fault.

That happens when the publisher orders a sequel to a popular game to get more sales from the console crowd.

If BioWare has a problem it is that they both want to make the game they want to make and please all the rabid foaming at the mouth fans (not an exaggeration as seen from the seriously unfair user reviews on Metcritic) at the same time.

I do recall there was a petition online that a lot of players signed. They all wanted Hawke to have no voice. It's good to know Bioware listens to it's fans in this regard right?

If Bioware wants to release fantasy Mass Effect that's their business, but to release it half finished with only 4 areas reused constantly that's quite another.

They obviously wanted to do something different in the Dragon Age universe, to tell a different story in a different way. Their mistake was to ask fans what they what in another Dragon Age game, because with how fans usually are, they are unrefined and unmoving. The majority of them will blurt out something to the effect, "Ugh, more Origins, more Origins, we like Warden. Wooo, my Elf was awesome!! Dwarfs rock!!! What weirdo wants to play as a human." Truthfully, most fans don't want something that is new and refreshing, and even if certain things are broken in a game and in the past they use to complain about it, once the developer changes the game and creates a fresh story and fixes the problems of the previous game, the fans go all, "Everything from the last game was fine." And despite that BioWare for the most part work incredibly hard to bring something new and fresh, the "fans" get all angry because BioWare didn't make a game exactly like the first one, so they say, "BioWare was lazy".

Believe it or not doing something the fans don't like is usually a double edged sword. It would have been perfectly understandable, at least in my eyes if they marketed it as a one time spin off like "Dragon Age: Tactics" or something.

Also I don't get what you mean with the developer not wanting to listen to it's fans. CD Projekt RED listened to it's fans and gave them the Witcher 2 without DRM, and with free DLC. You know what they did? They didn't pirate the game.

Not listening to your fans and just bluntly making things for the sake of artistic integrity is not how the game industry works. Dragon Age 2 was designed to appeal to the Fable 3 crowd of gamers, the kind that only play hack and slash/rpgs on consoles. It was made to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make more money, not for the sake of artistic integrity.

The only problem in the game was the dungeons, and that wasn't because BioWare was lazy, that was because of EA rushing development. Besides not making a the sequel exactly like the first, isn't being lazy. They made something new, fixed broken mechanics, worked in much better graphics, and didn't create the same old story type from Origins. That is working one's ass off, not being lazy.

Potential doesn't cut it when you end up spending 60$ of your own hard earned money for a game that's half finished with the same 4 dungeons reused. Kotor 2 was half finished and had barely a year of development time, it had a 30+ hour campaign with a full story, even though a good quarter of the game was cut out and later reintegrated by the modding community.

Heck, I don't blame them for trying to pump their score. 95% of the flack they got from user reviews was unwarranted and uncalled for. I thought the game was at least a 9 out of 10 and I was going to give it a 9 on Metacritic, but when I saw how crazy people were acting, I gave it a 10 to do my part to help BioWare.

An Employee rating his own game a 10/10 and not even giving any critiscms is like a mayor asking his entire staff to vote for him in his election. It's not fair because ratings are meant to be done by consumers for consumers. Not by the distributor for the consumer.

It's like if all movie ratings were done by MGM and Paramount instead of actual movie watchers, like critics. An actual rating has to be done by someone who's impartial to the final outcome. Or in the case of say the Escapist people want a similar opinion to theirs.

But back to what I was saying, BioWare needs to forget fans. They need to just create the games they want to create, to tell the stories they want to tell.

So you propose Bioware not listen to the people that give them money so they could potentially produce a better product? Your treating the fanbase as if it's a bunch of cattle that need to be told what to like and what to say.

This whole fans vote on what femshep should look like is stupid. BioWare should just create one the team agrees on, and when the time comes in game, the player will choose what their femshep will look like.

Bioware letting the fanbase choose what default femshep they want is a surprisingly good marketing technique. It's very good advertising for the game and they don't need to produce any screenshots or trailers. It's all marketing really.

BioWare's plan wasn't for an entirely open story like Origins, the wanted to tell the story of a certain human. The difference comes from what you make him look like, if he/she is a mage, warrior, or rogue, and what the personality is like, nice, a wise cracking neutral, or forceful and mean person. An RPG like Dragon Age, really doesn't need 1 million character choices and the village well too be great. It is about the story BioWare wants to tell. If BioWare wants to start narrowing the choices on what can happen, that just means they have a plan that makes it so that only a few choices will work.

The term RPG means role playing game. Meaning it should allow the player to assume any role they want. Origins allowed you to play as whatever character you could think of. Dragon Age 2 had Hawke. He had a set personality and all you could decide was wether he was happy at the time, sarcastic or angry. There's very little choice in that regard. Dragon Age 2 wasn't a novel, it was a game designed to make money. There's a very big difference between someone who's trying to tell a story and attract people to it, then someone trying to sell entertainment and please others.

To BioWare, forget the fan pleasing. Ignore the forums except for tech problems, and make the games you want to make. Some people will like them, some love, some indifferent, some hate. Haters don't mean you did something wrong, it just means you did something they didn't like. Pay attention to the people that still like what you make and the new fans, and when you do something that makes them mad, keep going and stick with the people that still like what you are doing and again the new comers.

I'm sure giving advice to Bioware not to listen to their fans is certainly going to make them listen to you.

 

[Wolfenbarg]

No, it wasn't THAT bad. However, if I had to use only one word to describe it, I would say it's arbitrary. In a story, if things suddenly start happening just because they need to to advance the plot, then you have some very serious issues. The first act of the game was a bit stale, but the second act was absolutely stellar. The power balance feels real, and it's quite appropriate when things go completely to hell. Act 3 however is when things start to get stupid. Seriously, the entire setup for the conclusion of the game is a sequence of things that only go wrong because the game demands them to go wrong. Every blood mage turns corrupt and is a baby killing abomination within two seconds of learning the craft, every mage you are sent down is actually a blood mage, and every stubbed toe is an excuse for an epic scale battle where you eliminate yet another faction that could have been used for a more satisfactory ending.

Here's an example of how it's arbitrary. Later in the game there is a reasonable faction that could solve the entire issue the game is centered on and prevent a full scale civil war. However, one blood mages decides to murder the leader in front of god and everybody, and the ENTIRE FUCKING CAMP joins her side and tries to murder you after that. Seriously, after second guessing the LEADER and killing him in cold blood in front of EVERYBODY, they all try to kill you. You are forced to wipe out the reasonable faction for no other reason than that it probably wasn't a good idea to write them into the game in the first place if the conflict was supposed to be inevitable.

None of the design portions feel half baked, but it's obvious that they rushed this into the production phase before it was written to a satisfactory level. Everyone knew it wasn't going to be a bit more of a hatchet job than Origins, but nobody realized just how tight the schedule really was.

 

[Psiboom]

Of course it's not going to be as good as what the people thought Origins was. For one, the changes to the overall game, changes to the things people liked. People were going to get mad about changes no matter what, because, well... That's what's been happening all the time.

Personally, I didn't really mind the changes, it's good to give other methods a try. Fixing what isn't broken isn't always the answer when what you have might not be the best option. Besides, if they didn't try something new, people would still complain, so may as well try to find something new and have some fun with it.

Another thing, compare how much time was spent on Origins compared to Dragon Age 2, Origins was first announced when? Back in 2004, and while there's a good chance, and I'm willing to doubt that this is true, that they worked on it all the time from then on. The game came out in 2009. The years spent on it shows in the general quality of the game. Whereas, Dragon Age 2 had very very little time spent on it in comparison. In other words, rushed.

Though despite being rushed, taken at face value, the game itself is actually fairly good. It's not even their most poorly received game, if people are even willing to count Sonic Chronicles. And was even met with fairly positive feedback something that the "WORST GAME EVAR, SLOPPY, TARRIBLE CHARACTERS, STUPID ANAMEE COMBAT, BUGS AND GLITCHES EVERYWHERE, AND THE STORY SUCKS" (Erh... Ahem) would find hard to achieve.

Then there's the whole, taking away the freedom to be someone you choose bit. And by that, people mean that you can't be who you really want to be. You want to be a dwarf? How about an elf or Qunari? Nope. But that's rather the point, it's the story of Hawke. The whole thing of your Father, Sister, and maybe even you being apostates is thrown out the window if you're a dwarf. Though to be perfectly honest, the only real noticeable differences were the lack of Origin Stories, and the indication of what kind of answer it was in DA2, smug, judging, charming, charitable, etc. Though, I'm not honestly surprised, Origins, as the name suggests generally refers the Origin stories themselves. If they were to keep that, it might as well be "Dragon Age: Origins II". The origin stories themselves were generally just jumping off points, getting some points of notice and closure at one of the points in the story for the most part. But otherwise, the same general things will happen.

Then there's the group mentality and exaggeration, people tend to be, oh man, people say it's bad so it must be true. So there is a decent portion that just don't have their own opinion and jump on the hatewagon, because you know, they have delicious cookies. People also tend to blow things out of proportion when things don't go as they thought, especially on things like a sequel of a game they really loved. Like the guy who listens to his favourite band, doesn't like the next song that comes on, and starts calling it the worst piece of crap ever, even if they did enjoy it, and will listen to it more than say, Friday. (Well, there goes that, making myself sound hypocritical and that jazz.)

Personally, at face value, the game was pretty good. I liked the characters, the gameplay, sure they had bugs and more than likely unfinished and unpolished dialogue and what not, it was still a fun ride. The only thing I found truly irritating was the repeating dungeons, oh and not to mention the changes to Anders and SIR POUNCE ALOT, WHYYYY

But overall, I generally had more fun with it. I found the approach taken for DA2 more fun than Origins. But that's like, just my opinion, man.

And now to look at the length of the post, and where it is. Damn, this ain't even gonna be noticed, and if it is, there's a good chance for tl;dr. Ah well, killed some time... I s'pose.

 

[satsugaikaze]

So Dragon Age 2 having a guy swing a sword that's roughly the same size and weight as Cloud's Buster Sword equals = Ultimate immersion experience?

When your in a duel with someone you obviously have to swing your sword a lot differently then you would say at something else. When your in a duel with someone you also have to contend with the recoil of your sword hitting another sword. There are a LOT of factors to contend with. Hitting a human being is different then hitting air.

Not to mention in Origins your wearing about 100 pounds of steel armor that weighs you down. Which obviously creates fatigue and weight to your attacks.

Unless there's evidence that either two games used proper reference such as motion-capture, I'd hesitate to claim anything of the two titles as "realistic".

Sequels have to live up to their prequels. It's been that way since the dawn of time.

Bioware was previously almost the Pixar of game developers. They rarely if at all produced a bad title. They obviously had a major reputation to live up to.

The Bioware fanbase were expecting more of the same when it was very clear from the beginning that they were making something different. It wasn't so much living up to the prequel as it was living up to what the fanbase were expecting.

That happens when the publisher orders a sequel to a popular game to get more sales from the console crowd.

You would think that if they were trying to get sales, they'd literally copy-paste the same game (and story) mechanics from Origins, hmm?

Clearly Origins sold well enough to make many more millions of units of the same thing as a sequel. It means a lot more that they didn't do that.

Not listening to your fans and just bluntly making things for the sake of artistic integrity is not how the game industry works. Dragon Age 2 was designed to appeal to the Fable 3 crowd of gamers, the kind that only play hack and slash/rpgs on consoles. It was made to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make more money, not for the sake of artistic integrity.

I fail to see how Dragon Age II wasn't designed to do both at the same time. And hell, if it's trying to expand their consumer base, good on them!
Also, please don't bring up any stigma against console gaming. That could be a potential argument we could do without.

The term RPG means role playing game. Meaning it should allow the player to assume any role they want. Origins allowed you to play as whatever character you could think of. Dragon Age 2 had Hawke. He had a set personality and all you could decide was wether he was happy at the time, sarcastic or angry. There's very little choice in that regard. Dragon Age 2 wasn't a novel, it was a game designed to make money. There's a very big difference between someone who's trying to tell a story and attract people to it, then someone trying to sell entertainment and please others.

Okay, I have to speak up against this.

I know there's been a ton of discussion about what defines "role playing". Personally, I don't think there's one single strict definition as to what is becoming of a role-playing game. You're playing a role in any character-driven game, right? How much customization do you need in a role-playing game before you can truly consider it roleplaying?

What makes role-playing, role-playing? I suppose if you really wanted to distill it into a single word, I guess that word could be "choice". Sure, comparing between Dragon Age II and Origins, there was less choice as to your character. But is the inability to "assume any role they want" making it any less of a role-playing game? You're still making (supposedly) significant plot decisions that affect the course of the game, at least. You're still changing your character to assume the appearance that you want. You're still experiencing your Hawke, just as much as you experienced your Grey Warden in Origins. Even though II was much more linear, (going back to the original topic) does that make it a "bad" RPG?

By the end of Origins, someone had to kill the Archdemon. Someone had to be the ruler of the kingdom. You as the player character had to save the day in the broad sense of the phrase. Speaking in hypotheticals, would you consider a game with greater choice than Origins a better one?

In your (imo) narrow definition of what a role-playing game is, yes. Dragon Age II was probably less of a role playing game than what Origins was. That doesn't make it not an RPG, and certainly doesn't automatically make it a bad game or even a mediocre game.
(You also seem to be the sort of person who considers jRPGs not-RPGs, but I'd rather not make too many assumptions and I'd rather it in a different thread just to prevent this going more off-topic)

Also, you should probably choose your words more wisely, as the majority of commercial release games are out to make money. Telling stories are an attempt at giving entertainment. And again, if they really wanted a quick cashgrab like you keep claiming it to be, why not just more Origins/Awakening DLC? The engine is right there for them to use. Why should they bother tweaking and upgrading an engine that they have at least 5 years of experience on?

Publishers like EA and developers like Bioware are looking for more than just sales for any game. They are looking for feedback. They're looking for Metacritic scores and looking at reviews. Sure, they're getting butthurt at negative ones, but most of all, they're being progressive with their IP.