Poll: Is Dragon Age 2 a bad game?

[tycho0042]

mediocrity, thy name is dragon age 2.
The pace for combat is sped up, which isn't bad. just different, it felt strange.
The characters are ok, though Anders got a little gay a LOT fast just because I have a problem with overbearing tyranny. Fenris, well. Since I have a problem with the oppressed mages the one character I thought was kind of cool looking hates me. With a passion.
Another thing that bothers me as a completionist is you CAN'T(that I know of...) beat the game with all of your party members intact. you WILL lose one or possibly more.
Like 90% of the characters will hook up with you, which makes the largest collection of bi-sexual characters in any game ever I think(not counting porn games).
The plot, well. I didn't like it that much. You spend half the time wondering what the plot is going to be about only to have it turned around on it's ear a bit over half way. I'm all for plot twists but the complete reversal is just strange to me. Another thing that gets me is there's no room for the grey area that reality usually encompasses. It just kills me that they don't allow for the option to just let the hero caught in the middle of the events to maintain the status quo or find an amiable solution that is beneficial to both. It's just fuck group A or fuck group B.
I suppose they might as well have gone back to the moral compass meter that bioware's old games used. Just label it Party A in red and Party B in blue and your choices slide it that much closer to the ending you're heading towards since you favor that side more.
The popularity meter with the party members is kind of nice since it no longer means, I hate you and will now leave or I'm a potential love interest now. Now, you can have them hate you and they still stay in the group! In fact there's just some characters that it's better for them to hate you since their bonuses are better(imho).
Final score for me:
55/100

 

[xXDeMoNiCXx]

A letdown compared to the first DA game but still good.

 

[nyysjan]

I find myself unable to truly say if it was a bad game as i never could bring myself play through the 3rd act, because, who knows, maybe it magically changed for the better.

However:
Combat was mediocre and boring, story started somewhat interesting but didn't stay that way beyond act 1 and characters were, with 2 exceptions (Varric was pure awesome, and Merrill was kinda interesting and funny at times), either boring or unlikeable, sometimes both.

Not to mention the constantly reused maps, pointless side quests (i found these pants inside a crate, now let's see if i can magically pinpoint their owner and get a reward), ugly UI (subjective opinion i admit), ugly armors (altough to be honest, mages had this issue in DA:O as well), and that i can walk around openly as an apostate mage and nobody bats an eyelid.

Really, only thing that kept me going past act 1 was Varrics and Merrills banter, but even that stopped motivating me after i hit act 3.

As a game, it was not a total disaster, there have been worse, lot worse, games out there.
But for a Biowarre game, and even more, a sequel to DA:O, it was a horrible dissapointment and so not worth the money i paid for it.

 

[Jakub324]

Yes, ambiguously so.

 

[Abedeus]

Didn't play it. I didn't play Dragon Age till end, combat was even harder than Last Remnant. And in Last Remnant you can spend 10 minutes being instakilled by a boss over and over, chipping his 0.5kk hp pool 20k hp at a time, just to be OBLITERATED by boss that joins after the instakilling one dise.

Why was it harder? Cause it's hardly turn-based... Simply too hard for a wRPG.

Dragon Age is easy... whut.

I'm not sure what part of "get attacked by 10 enemies as strong as you are, while you're playing anything but a caster" is easy.

 

[Chairman Miaow]

One thing I hate about it is how poor the decisions are. Like when

Spoiler

The qunari attack and there is no way to prevent it or side with them no matter what you do

or at the end when

Spoiler

you have to choose to fight on either the side of the templars or the mages and there is no reason at all for you to fight with the templars.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Didn't play it. I didn't play Dragon Age till end, combat was even harder than Last Remnant. And in Last Remnant you can spend 10 minutes being instakilled by a boss over and over, chipping his 0.5kk hp pool 20k hp at a time, just to be OBLITERATED by boss that joins after the instakilling one dise.

Why was it harder? Cause it's hardly turn-based... Simply too hard for a wRPG.

Dragon Age is easy... whut.

I'm not sure what part of "get attacked by 10 enemies as strong as you are, while you're playing anything but a caster" is easy.

Well you have a team you are supposed to use a tank and dps and a healer. On normal all of the fights go down pretty easy. Even more so on Dragon Age 2 where you can just play the main character and let the AI do the work. Are you trolling?

 

[MasterMongoose0]

I vehemently hated Dragon Age 2... for the first half of the game.

It significantly improved by the end with the combat opening up some. I traded it in, though, and I rarely trade games in. I figured that if I ever want to play Dragon Age, the first one will always be there (i wasn't even a huge fan of the first)

 

[=HCFS=Discoman]

it's adequate.
not BAD, but not great.
just same-y
it's a game that is best bought when it goes on sale.
not quite worth full price, but still worth SOMETHING.

 

[GeorgW]

I love it. But it has flaws, like the locations you travel to. All 4 of them.

ZING!

I love it. But it has flaws, like the locations you travel to. All 4 of them.

ZING!

I know you're new here, so I'm just going to tell you directly. In this forum we try to make sure every post has some kind of meaning and content, and to just say "ZING!" to someone else's post doesn't cut it. Next time, please contribute to the conversation. For more information, check the forum rules or simply ask me or another mod in a PM. Also, you have an edit button, if needed.

OT: It's fine on it's own, but as a successor to a very successful game it should have done a lot more.

 

[Saviordd1]

I'm sorry but didn't we put this case away months ago?

Simply put a good amount of people liked it but the people who hated it make themselves heard louder. Dragon age 2 was a good game but didn't have the same feel that makes me go back again and again to DAO.

 

[Gabriel Majeski]

I guess I'm In the rare group that thinks DA:O was pretty "meh." Don't get me wrong, I still liked it and played all of it several times, but It always seemed to me that it could never figure out what it wanted to be artistically and thematically. It seemed like a magnificent hodgepodge of high fantasy tropes we've all seen a billion times. And while the whole "Well, it used those tropes because they're proven to work!" argument is undeniable, it doesn't do what I REALLY like to see in games (ie. moving the genre forward, or innovating one's own identity within the genre).

Now, Dragon Age 2 did that, so by my criteria it is a better game. I definitely saw the francise developing it's own unique qualities and execution (artistically and thematically) in 2 far more than I saw in Origins. Other areas where I saw VAST improvement in 2 was the quickened combat, the less "spreadsheet-y" layout to different menu sectors, and most importantly the inclusion of a fully voiced protagonist. I can't tell you how important this bit is to my appreciation of the game. In origins, I always felt a lack of connection to my character. However in 2, I immediately started to give a shit and I can only attribute that to having the character being fully voiced.

So for me, Dragon Age 2 wins out because it finally establishes it's own genre busting, artistic and thematic identity, and creates a MUCH MUCH more immersive play experience. It moved the francise in the exact direction it needed to to keep me interested and engaged, and really made a game that pandered to my sensibilities.

Of coarse there are glaring flaws in the game. Most notably the "Re-used" dungeons concept, which I'll admit shouldn't of happened. It's sad really, because so much of the game is beautifully designed; to see those corners specifically cut is very disappointing. However, we've all seen this before (ie. planetary bases + outposts in Mass Effect 1) so stop being all aghast.

 

[kris40]

The game was clearly rushed. When it launched, it was crawling with bugs and a few of them literally made it impossible to progress. Even after the 1.01 patch, there are still serious bugs present.

And of course there is the recycling of dungeons. All of the dungeons are versions of one out of about four different maps, and they didn't even bother to obscure the areas that are inaccessible on the minimap.

I recall someone describing Dragon Age 2 as a "game about making tough decisions", but your choices doesn't really have much impact on the story as it will always find an excuse to continue on the same linear path no matter what you do, it just changes the dialogue a little.

Also, I recently noticed that there was some new DLC content available. There's a huge list of armor sets and weapons, some of which already exists in the game, only you can't get them until very late in the story. And they're selling most of these for no less than 240 ms points (3$), which, in my opinion is way too much to pay for something that took very little effort to make.

That said I enjoyed my first playthrough, even though I had to wait a whole month for a patch that let me finish the second half of it ("slo-mo hawke/thumbs up" bug). Overall I enjoyed the story (save the ending), the characters are well written and the gameplay was generally enjoyable. So I'd recommend buying it, but please do NOT buy any of the incredibly overpriced item set DLCs.

 

[icyneesan]

I liked it more then Dragon Age Origins.

 

[Orpheus III]

The conversation wheel turned interaction into one of the worst aspects of the game entirely. Before you used to shape your character by saying what your character would say. Now you just say "my character is good so I'll just click on the good speech choice".

If you just click on the "good" option all the time, your character is going to seem wishy-washy and unable to make up their mind, or manipulative and just telling everyone what they want to hear.

Neither of which make your character seem saintly.

 

[Shepard's Shadow]

I love it. But it has flaws, like the locations you travel to. All 4 of them.

4?????
First off I don't count Kirkwall as one location.

Spoiler: List spoiled for length.

Main places:

Hightown
Lowtown
Darktown
The Docks
The Gallows
Sundermount
The Wounded Coast
The Bone Pit
The Deep Roads

Sub-places:

The Hanged Man
The Blooming Rose
Viscount's Keep
The Chantry
The Arishok's area at the Docks
Under the Docks
The Templar/Circle area near the end.

Main houses:

Hawk's Lowtown house
Hawk's Hightown mansion
Merrill's house
Fenris's mansion

The dungeon/instance skins:
4 different caves
2 side section areas of the Wounded Coast
5 house types 3 Hightown, one Lowtown, one docks.
1 Docks instance
1 central alleyway
1 Darktown instance.
1 warehouse

If you just count the main places, yes there are just 9 locations. But once the rest is added there is a lot of stuff to see. Yeah it was bad that they had few dungeon/instance areas, but it wasn't that bad. For me it was enough that it didn't bother me. If it was just 4 dungeon/instances, I would have been pissed, but 15 with some clever placements of blocks to change paths was good enough for such a rushed game.

Besides, what people seem to forget is that this game wasn't meant to be of the same size scale when it comes to land and places. Dragon Age: Origins dealt with an entire country/continent, Feraldan. DA 2 only dealt with a small area of Thedas, and that small area was a small city-state section(Kirkwall and the surrounding area)of the Free Marches. So logically, one would expect that the game wouldn't have a vast amount of places to go.

For me the game was just the right size and length. I got 50 hours at least out of my first play-through and after I find the time to start and finish Mass Effect 2, I will go back and play-through at least twice more to go through it as a warrior and then a rogue.

Yeah, 4 was a joke. A bigger variety would have been better, you can't deny that. I understand it's taking place in a smaller area, but why do all bad guys decide to stay in similar looking cave?

 

[mrscott137]

The thing is, I enjoy it, but as per usual it suffers the problems of squeals- it can never be compared to how it does as a game, it's how good it was to it's predecessor (unless it's something out of sight out of mind, like fallout 3 compared to fallout 2). Like making it more streamlined with only 3 conversation paths given good point values (something I have been opposed too for a looooong time), but also having the combat quicker (good or bad, you decide) so all in all, I preferred DA:O because of successful development in combat and characters, but DA2 is still a very good game, just not *as* good as DAO.

 

[WonderWillard]

If Dragon Age II had come out all on its own, and not as a sequel to Origins, or if a company other than Bioware had made it, then it would be getting a lot more love right now. I thought it was a great game, but not as good as Origins.

 

[Meshakhad_v1legacy]

It's a great game. Sure, it has its flaws, but I don't think it sucks. It certainly crushes any non-BioWare RPG that I've ever played.