Poll: Is Dragon Age 2 a bad game?

[Sonic Doctor]

The dialogue wheel is just a garbage tool to streamline the choice system (for consoles perhaps i dunno) and the one DA2 had was even worse. It went so far as to add little stupid symbols just in case the player was too stupid to figure out what the response was implying. So instead of choosing a dialogue based on the actual words, without knowing how the NPC will react, you choose based on which reaction you want from the NPC. Someone whom can't read a word of english could romance any of the NPCs by simply knowing what the heart symbol implied. That in my mind is weak.

Yeah no.

The Dialogue Wheel got rid of the archaic choice listing of old. The listing didn't give much variation for finding the dialogue choice I wanted for the response I wanted.

List example:

1.) You are a bad guy, I sorta don't like you.
2.) Not sure if you are a bad guy, I'm not sure if I like you.
3.) Look a bad guy, I'm more bad, but I still will do away with you.
4.) Questions to determine if bad guy is bad.
5.) Other questions.

That list is a gray area. You have a sort good choice but it is hard to tell, a puzzled rather that than a neutral, and something could be intended to be bad but sounds partially good. Then you get the questions, and some times those questions would change the conversation permanently so you couldn't go back.

Other times they would add more than just three answers to it and spread them even thinner on the ambiguous gray area. I would have to spend 3 to 5 minutes deciding which one would give me the outcome I might be looking for, and many times it didn't, I had to load and do the whole long conversation again. This eats up precious game playing time, and breaks the flow of the game and story.

With the Dialogue Wheel, if I want to be good, I always pick the top right dialogue answer, middle for smart-ass/neutral, and the bottom right for the forceful bad/evil opinion. The questions are delegated to start on the left and can enter a section that fills up five places on the ring and I get five questions that further the story and then I can always come back to the main alignment answer. A player can hit and see every question and dialogue piece that fits with his or her alignment. Players can immediately find the dialogue choices they want. Instead of studying the choices for minutes and sometimes having to end up restarting from the last save, players get what they want fast and be able to keep the story flowing and the game moving.

I have a four year English degree and I took many classes on storytelling. A writer shouldn't over complicate things with too many choices in thinking and confuse the reader with ambiguity. The faster the points are shown for the people reading and experiencing the story, the more enjoyable it is. Those were words to live by for a writer from my old creative writing professor.

The DA:O dialogue makes things ambiguous and makes things uncertain for the reader/viewer on what could happen. Such things can ruin stories. I know it mess up how I view stuff in that game. That is why I liked DA2's the storytelling better.

 

[Zhukov]

I would say it's well above average quality. But below the standard set by other Bioware games.

I mostly enjoyed it. Some of the characters were really good. The combat felt exactly like DA:O, that is to say, nice and tactical but a bit repetitive.

On the downside, the environments were mercilessly recycled, the sidequests were lacklustre and the overarching narrative was a bit of a mess.

 

[The Harkinator]

I actually prefer it to DA:O, the plot is more original and creative. The characters are much more interesting and combat makes me feel powerful and skilled. The Warden was supposed to be able to stop the blight in record time but when he fought enemies it looked like he didn't know how to use a sword so just stood there and hacked at his enemy for 5 mins.

Granted, Kirkwall should have been much bigger and maybe more open like a Bethesda game. I still loved it.

EDIT: But I hate the waves of enemies, they jump in off the rooftops! HOW? In lowtown some of the roofs mean that they would practically shatter on impact. In caves the waves of minions drop from the ceiling.

The loading menus suggest that in the chokepoint the warriors should block of the enemies so the ranged rouge and the mage can attack from a distance. Except this doesn't work because the second wave usually means enemies drop down at the other side of the chokepoint and kill your mage and Rogue.

Next time you want wave combat, don't just don't.

 

[amucha98]

.

 

[Fluffyz0r]

Pro:
+Combat is fast paced
+Resources for crafting are endless
+2H weapons made usefull by hitting all enemies around (there are few mods that enable this in DA:O)
thats pretty much it
Cons:
-Story is a real downfall from DA:O "savior of men" character
-Your decisions dont really affect anything
-You can only play as a human
-There is almost no preplanning for combat. In DA:O you had to have a rogue that could set up or defuse a few traps and make some poisons to win some of the tougher battles (AND THAT WAS AWESOME) in DA2 you could just runs in and stab everything in sight till you won...
-Almost no crafting ( i loved crafting in DA;O)
-Really hard to connect to your characters
-The emotion wheel (from mass effect) just doesnt work in DA



PS.THE SAME F***ING 3 map dungeons drove me mad

IMO DA2 was rushed to be made more accessible for the NON RPG lovers aswell and that is a shame

 

[Kevonovitch]

it has it's flaws, and was rushed, but, all in all, i think it turned out well.

 

[moretimethansense]

From what I've played and read of it, it's not a bad game, but it is an absolutely horrible sequel, even if it were an original IP it would still be very sub-par from what we've come to expect from Bioware.

They've really gone downhill lately

 

[Juggern4ut20]

Yeah no.

The Dialogue Wheel got rid of the archaic choice listing of old. The listing didn't give much variation for finding the dialogue choice I wanted for the response I wanted.

List example:

1.) You are a bad guy, I sorta don't like you.
2.) Not sure if you are a bad guy, I'm not sure if I like you.
3.) Look a bad guy, I'm more bad, but I still will do away with you.
4.) Questions to determine if bad guy is bad.
5.) Other questions.

That list is a gray area. You have a sort good choice but it is hard to tell, a puzzled rather that than a neutral, and something could be intended to be bad but sounds partially good. Then you get the questions, and some times those questions would change the conversation permanently so you couldn't go back.

Other times they would add more than just three answers to it and spread them even thinner on the ambiguous gray area. I would have to spend 3 to 5 minutes deciding which one would give me the outcome I might be looking for, and many times it didn't, I had to load and do the whole long conversation again. This eats up precious game playing time, and breaks the flow of the game and story.

With the Dialogue Wheel, if I want to be good, I always pick the top right dialogue answer, middle for smart-ass/neutral, and the bottom right for the forceful bad/evil opinion. The questions are delegated to start on the left and can enter a section that fills up five places on the ring and I get five questions that further the story and then I can always come back to the main alignment answer. A player can hit and see every question and dialogue piece that fits with his or her alignment. Players can immediately find the dialogue choices they want. Instead of studying the choices for minutes and sometimes having to end up restarting from the last save, players get what they want fast and be able to keep the story flowing and the game moving.

I have a four year English degree and I took many classes on storytelling. A writer shouldn't over complicate things with too many choices in thinking and confuse the reader with ambiguity. The faster the points are shown for the people reading and experiencing the story, the more enjoyable it is. Those were words to live by for a writer from my old creative writing professor.

The DA:O dialogue makes things ambiguous and makes things uncertain for the reader/viewer on what could happen. Such things can ruin stories. I know it mess up how I view stuff in that game. That is why I liked DA2's the storytelling better.

Yeah no?

First, having a four year English degree and 'many' classes on storytelling is irrelevant. What you explain is exactly why it is a bad system. The fact you spent 3 to 5 minutes figuring out what you want to select is a good thing. The fact that what you wanted to say and how the NPC took it is a good thing. That's called Role Playing. Sometimes you intend to be good and it does not come across as such. Sometimes, in real life, you want to say a compliment but it is interrupted as an insult. A game allowing you to role play a character, where what you intend is not always what happens, is a good thing. Simply picking a predetermined response based on good, sarcastic, or evil/forceful is garbage. It strips away all the role play value the game had by laying bare the exact implications each choice will have. That is weak. Also, you didn't have to spend three paragraph explaining the wheel system, its pretty common now.

The fact that you think that DA2 had good storytelling frightens me. The entire narrative felt jumbled, hastily constructed, and disjointed. The begin act had nothing to do with the middle act which had nothing to do with the ending act. The main antagonist was completely underdeveloped and forced into the end of the game instead of being introduced at the beginning, where they should have been. There were plot points that were introduced without any further explanation and the NPC characters did not seem to me to change throughout the events of the game. This game had about as good writing and role playing value as a choose your own destiny goosebumps book (that's a little extreme, but i felt like saying it for flare).

 

[Danglybits]

Very fun but mediocre. Not much of a story, and no environments to speak of. It felt a lot more like a test drive of new mechanics than a full game. I still enjoyed playing it though. I was just disappointed that it never really went anywhere.

I hate that dialogue wheel. I would like to know what I'm gonna say before I say it. I think Hawke is gonna say something mildly snarky and she ends up punching the guy. Just because it has a purple smiley face doesn't mean that its really a joke or is taken that way. Oh the text might look that way but that's not what the character says.

 

[Danglybits]

DBL post.

 

[Ian Caronia]

The ending to DA was half-assed, with everything pretty much being explained through static text blocks on a slide show. Fact.

Is this a joke? What you wrote there isn't a fact. The ending to DA was half-assed is an opinion. There was static text blocks on a slide show, yes, but that was the epilogue not the ending. And what do you mean "everything pretty much being explained"? Everything was explained before you got to the slide show. Since there was so many different endings to the game, you couldn't really create that much content for the aftermath after the defeat of the archdemon. Maybe if you explain yourself a little you wouldn't come across as a whiny 'bioware hater', who just discovered how to swear.

Also, DA2 was not bad because of the ending, it was bad because of the entire plot leading up to and including the ending.

Actually I was classifying myself as a Bioware hater. Well, not now, but if Bioware pulls an EA all over ME3 I will be since I very much dislike Bioware after what they did to DA with DA2.
But meh you're right on all accounts. I just got angry at something else and vented a bit with that post, hence the swearing. I guess I should apologize since you actually took the time to read my entire post and kept getting smacked with a vulgarity ever other second. So, sorry about that.
_Also, I'll fix that fact bit up since I meant that the ending of the game was a slide show was a fact, not that it was half-assed was a fact. And yeah, it was explained what happened to the characters...mostly. DA:O had an ending, but I was still shocked they actually closed off with a slide show explaining the events post gameplay ending (trying not to spoil),which is why I say it's half-assed. Couldn't be bothered to show me dwarves going about their lives sunder new management? Couldn't do a small pan over the dalish camp to show how they're doing? Ugh

And lol I said that the LPer said the game was great and the ending was crap. I personally think the entire thing was lazy down to the characters.
Oh, and to anyone wondering (for whatever reason) yes I liked DA:O despite my views on the ending. I had a crush on Morriggan...kinda. She was certainly my fave. Her and Sten, who thanks to the stupid horn retcon in DA2 probably looks like a green deer-man now with antlers coming out his head. Friggin... *grumble*

I say fuck DA now because I believe nothing from 1 will be settled correctly, thus making 1 a waste of my time (I want a real conclusion with Morriggan, but seeing the competence at work in DA2, I severely doubt it will result in anything good, if it results at all).

 

[Sonic Doctor]

When writing a story there is no such thing as "it's about the journey, not where you end up". That's stupid and if an author even mentions that NEVER read their shit because they obviously don't care about the endings they write.

That is not how it works in the writing world these days, though I don't think it mainly worked that way in the past. Of course it is about the journey, without the journey(the majority of the book) you don't have a book.

I went to two universities and had four creative writing professors and the majority of the assignments if not all off them focused on writing the journey, since it is the bulk of stories and the most important part.

With many story assignments, the professors would ask the class to bring in their work, it didn't have to be complete. They would say it could come from the beginning, middle, or the end. Though, they tended to give more praise and had less questions for people that brought in the beginning and middle sections. With the few people that brought in ends of their stories, the professors would grill them about the possible journeys that could come to this end. They looked on it as that the journey influences the end. The writer follows the journey to find out the end of the story. We were told that sometimes no matter how great the journey is, it can lead to unexpected and sometimes hated ends.

Though the good or badness of the an ending is subjective, some might love it and some might hate it.

Plus those professors brought in professional and successful writers from the area, as well as the school brought in writers from around the country, and not one of them had a high regard viewpoint on endings. More an author's story status as finish is also seen as subjective. Every poet that came told how truly a poem is never finish, a writer will always find something that can be changed or added. So these days, endings aren't going to be as important to writers as the journey.

It is the way things are.

But still on the end of DA2 I will say again, of course the ending isn't going to be complete or majorly intense, because the game isn't a wrap up of the series, it is just a part of the series that will continue. A true end won't come into play until either DA3 or until whatever game they are going to make the last and final one in the series.

 

[Juggern4ut20]

DA:O had an ending, but I was still shocked they actually closed off with a slide show explaining the events post gameplay ending (trying not to spoil),which is why I say it's half-assed. Couldn't be bothered to show me dwarves going about their lives sunder new management? Couldn't do a small pan over the dalish camp to show how they're doing? Ugh

I agree with the idea that if they do not make DA2 an exception, instead of the norm for the series, I will probably give up on it as well. I did not mean to jump down your throat, but you did come off as a little hostile. As for the DA:O ending, what you are talking about is a stylistic choice. They could have done that yes, but i think they wanted to have a 'throwback' feel to the game back to when RPGs did end with slide show-esque captions of what happened, the two series that come to mind are Baldur's gate and Fallout off the top of my head. I think that bioware's attempt to make an old school style RPG is what made Dragon Age: Origins great, so you might have to take the bad with the good on that one.

 

[Cowabungaa]

How on earth does a voiced protagonist and the conversation wheel make the game bad?

The conversation wheel doesn't really make it bad, but the format of how its built, with good>snarky but still good>bad options allways laid out the same way, with icons even to tell you which is what, that DOES feel dumbed down (and I'm not one to throw that around, I don't think the combat was dumbed down here, I just preffere the isometric view).
I would much rather have severall diaoulg options with a neat ordering so you dont even have to read them and think about their consequences

How does the dialogue wheel make the ordering any less neat? If anything it's now a lot more clear what each dialogue option does, and with a quick glance at the icon you can see in which style the answer is presented.

That's all there is to it. Dragon Age Origins had those nice/snarky/evil options as well, but just less clear presented. And as in Dragon Age Origins you still have to find out which response gives favour with each teammember. The dialogue system is, in essence, exactly the same as in DA:O, it's just presented in a less convulted way.

And as far as I know, you can still zoom out to an isometric view. I know I did a couple of times in really big battles.

voiced protagonist

Fair enough about Anders, he did play a very pivotal role. However, in the end it was the protagonist who decided how to deal with that catastrophe.

As for the restrictions in dialogue, I didn't notice they were there, they were just presented the available options in a streamlined fashion compared to DA:O. In DA:O you had all your dialogue lined out in a numerical list. In DA2 a lot of those dialogue options were hidden behind other headers, usually the one on the left that leads to further investigations. And even if there is less dialogue I wouldn't say that's a bad thing persee. A lot of the dialogue options in DA:O felt very redudant to me. And if you ask me, quality goes over quantity.

Thing is, DA2 is a lot more about characterisation than DA:O was. And if you ask me, a mute shows very little character. A mute protagonist doesn't work very well in a modern, character driven RPG. Can't say my dwarf in DA:O really had the feel of a no-nonsense killer about him, despite me picking those options. In DA2 your character actually reacted and behaved like you wanted him to behave, even outside of picked dialogue options.

dialogue wheel

Weak? No, it's meant to make the dialogue flow more smoothly. Instead of having tons of odd pauses making dialogues look even more weird and unnatural than that they already are (as happened loads of times in DA:O), a player can now quickly choose an option based on how they want their character to be.

As for invoking reactions out of other NPC's, this was no different in DA:O. It was just a little more difficult to find out thanks to the more convulted way of presenting dialogue, leading to awkward pauses in dialogue. But there were still 'evil', 'good' and even some neutral options that made certain NPC's happy and certain NPC's unhappy, exactly like in DA2.

writing and combat

I didn't think the writing was bad at all, not super stellar either but quite solid nonetheless. I prefered it over DA:O's clichéd "sole savior of the world" story actually.

But you're right about how the combat is a lot more streamlined, though I have to disagree about the console-part (people should so stop that). I played DA:O on the PC, and the difference in feeling wasn't so much in the controls (which haven't changed all that much) but pure in the speed and flow of it. But the way you give orders, decide on which tactics to use, place AoE's and glyphs all basically worked the same as in DA:O. It just flowed a lot better, felt less sluggish. That and they made the combat even more dynamic. All classes had a lot more options to choose from, and they only expanded on DA:O's skill-combo's.

You're right about the kill animations though. Shame they didn't put those in, but I have no idea how it's a 'major indication in the tone and direction they took'. The main difference it could show is gore, be it not that even without the special melee kill animations I still had bodyparts flying over the place. Thanks Merril!

 

[cystemic]

people were pissed that it wasn't a dragon age 1 clone so they started bitching about it. i applaud the bioware team for trying something different with the game genre, i though it was cool how they tried to make it a story that you dived in and out of but nobody cares about innovation, they want the same game over and over, that's why people keep buying fpses.

 

[ThePirateMan]

I loathed it, I found none of the characters to be interesting, the story was unengaging, the dialogue system limited my immersion and the locations were down-right bloody boring. Even before I went through them 3 times.

I'm not saying this as some "RPGs need to have a billion unecessesary stats and shit" guy, but as a "I want challenging gameplay that also allows me to plan ahead a bit" guy. But I also hated the combat.

As a whole, it felt like a clumsier, less interesting WoW in a single zone with a single quest hub with some options of choosing how some tithead named Hawke should act, voice-acting and a buncha uninteresting rotheads.

I might see everything as much worse than it is since the first game was so overwhelmingly great, but when I find the earlier games in a franchise to be better than the later ones, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

 

[Agayek]

It's mediocre at best. It's not bad, necessarily, but it's not good, either.

This guy said it perfectly. The whole game is a giant, steaming pile of bland. There's nothing about it that really stands out, for good or ill (aside from the all of 5 different dungeon maps). Everything about it is bland and forgettable.

The reason there was so much rage over it was because the original Dragon Age was one of the better games to come out in the last decade. To see it followed up with such derivative, soulless crap was more than a bit disheartening.

 

[Ian Caronia]

DA:O had an ending, but I was still shocked they actually closed off with a slide show explaining the events post gameplay ending (trying not to spoil),which is why I say it's half-assed. Couldn't be bothered to show me dwarves going about their lives sunder new management? Couldn't do a small pan over the dalish camp to show how they're doing? Ugh

I agree with the idea that if they do not make DA2 an exception, instead of the norm for the series, I will probably give up on it as well. I did not mean to jump down your throat, but you did come off as a little hostile. As for the DA:O ending, what you are talking about is a stylistic choice. They could have done that yes, but i think they wanted to have a 'throwback' feel to the game back to when RPGs did end with slide show-esque captions of what happened, the two series that come to mind are Baldur's gate and Fallout off the top of my head. I think that bioware's attempt to make an old school style RPG is what made Dragon Age: Origins great, so you might have to take the bad with the good on that one.

No harm done! I was kinda frothing at the mouth when I looked back, but thank you. : )
Also thanks for seeing what I mean about the franchise. If they brought back the style of DA:O I'd forgive the series instantly and jump back into Morriggan's-I MEAN, the game's arms. Yes. Of course. *clears throat*
XD

And though I won't wholly agree with you on the slideshow ending, I can understand where you're coming from and do agree that it probably was meant to be a throw back since the whole game felt as much (which was SO FUN to me, loved that kind of style. Even see it in Divinity 2).

Oh, and speaking of physical retcons, did you see what they did to the elves in DA2? What's with those noses?! The elves in DA:O were more like people with point ears. I don't know about you, but the design changes they made in DA2 just put me off from the get go. >: /