Poll: Opinion Poll, which part of Dragon Age 2 do you think should have been concentrated on?

[Saviordd1]

I'm not here to start a flame war, I personally liked Dragon Age 2, some people didn't, oh well.

One thing that a lot of people agree on though is that the game was rather schizo with its main antagonist. At first it seemed like it was going to be those rock demons, then it seemed to be the qunari then it was the mage-templar war thing.

So I want to know, which antagonist or conflict do you think should have had more screen time to it?

 

[Kahunaburger]

The Qunari are actually interesting. The templar-mage thing comes off like David Gaider loves him some second X-Men movie.

 

[endtherapture]

The Rise to Power of Hawke should have been explored more. Having temporary antagonists is kinda cool, but Hawke "rising to power" by sitting around and killing a few people at the right time was eh.

 

[Saviordd1]

The Qunari are actually interesting. The templar-mage thing comes off like David Gaider loves him some second X-Men movie.

Not exactly sure where you get that.

The Rise to Power of Hawke should have been explored more. Having temporary antagonists is kinda cool, but Hawke "rising to power" by sitting around and killing a few people at the right time was eh.

Kind of agree, but to a certain extent some of the greatest people in history are so great for being in the right place at the right time

 

[Kahunaburger]

The Qunari are actually interesting. The templar-mage thing comes off like David Gaider loves him some second X-Men movie.

Not exactly sure where you get that.

The whole: "hey guise, I can totally use the persecution of a group of people with superhuman powers as a metaphor for IRL persecution, because that's totally an original/tasteful thing to do!"

 

[Kahunaburger]

The Rise to Power of Hawke should have been explored more. Having temporary antagonists is kinda cool, but Hawke "rising to power" by sitting around and killing a few people at the right time was eh.

Yeah, if the game was about being Machiavellian, playing politics, and building alliances, it would have been epic. Sadly, Bioware only knows how to tell one kind of story.

 

[DustyDrB]

I loved the Qunari storyline. They managed to make that race/culture interesting after Sten bored me to sleep in Origins. Magic needs more rules for it to be interesting to me. It needs limitations. Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear does this well. "Magic" in it is governed my a set of principles, and a sort of law of conservation. While there is a deeper, more powerful magic, it is so hard to master that only a very few can even muster a whisper of it.

Magic how it is often used is just an excuse for lazy writing, which is why it falls apart in Dragon Age (both games, I didn't like it in the first game either, but it wasn't always in your face the way it is in Dragon Age 2). There's also an incongruity with how some magic is perceived and how it shows itself in the gameplay. Blood Magic doesn't actually seem to make people more potent. Abominations are talked up like they are some superhuman terror, but they play out like a rather mediocre melee-focused enemy. I don't understand why people should fear them, other than them looking ugly and smelly.

But then crazy things happen such as Anders' big move at the end of DA2, and how? A magic bomb? "A wizard did it" is lazy, uncompelling writing. If they want to keep mages as a major story arch, they need to add more governance (in practice, not governance as in Templars) and consistency to its use. And don't make every god damn enemy mage a blood mage.

So yeah...I wish there was far less emphasis on magic as a whole in the series.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

I think one of the reasons people liked the Qunari storyline was that the Arishok was the only person in the whole game to point out how everybody in Kirkwall was a total jackass who deserved to die. He was more than content to let the idiots kill themselves off while he sat on his throne. Would have made his job a whole lot easier if the gas bomb from act 2 killed the whole city and then he just picked his way through the corpses to get the book back.

 

[endtherapture]

The Rise to Power of Hawke should have been explored more. Having temporary antagonists is kinda cool, but Hawke "rising to power" by sitting around and killing a few people at the right time was eh.

Yeah, if the game was about being Machiavellian, playing politics, and building alliances, it would have been epic. Sadly, Bioware only knows how to tell one kind of story.

You become the Champion for killing some people and hanging around the Viscount, it's so rubbish. Even Aveline holds more political power than Hawke.

 

[Mike-E]

I was sad that the Qunari part was in the middle, and the mage war was at the end, implying that it will be a big deal in future instalments. The Qunari actually seem to have not only a cool culture, but cool motivations, whereas Anders' 'magic-bomb' just seemed ridiculous.