What was wrong with Dragon Age 2, exactly?

[Seventh Actuality]

Okay, I'll get this out if the way first: The areas were all identical, spawning waves of baddies and bugs.

What else? And please no:"They changed the combat system" or any other fanboy BS about changes that are bad because they changed it.

The combat system is a legitimate complaint, and would be if DA2 was a standalone game. Sometimes it works, but the combat system and the enemies seem to have been designed for different games.

Apart from that...the story didn't work because not enough work went into making Kirkwall seem like a genuine place the player could like and care about, the characters were okay but sub-par for a BioWare game, the whole mage vs templar conflict with the Qunari just thrown in there is set up really weirdly, again leaving it rather uninvolving for the player...oh, and the elf redesign was pointless and looks terrible. The Qunari redesign was...pointless, but most inoffensive.

That, and western RPGs count a large number of whiny dipshits who take a sub-par game as a personal attack among their audiences.

 

[anthony87]

So you ask what people found wrong with the game but then state that we can't mention some of the things that were wrong with the game?

http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/12714/picardfacepalm.jpg

 

[CommanderL]

I did a very in-depth "Critique" of all I thought that was wrong with the game (and the very few things I thought that were right) right over here so I wouldn't have to write this up again every single time something like this pops up xD

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.271648-Dragon-Age-2-A-Review

a great review in my onion its that the fact that you just watched things unfold if you didnt save kirkwall it would been saved by anders who was a freaking grey warden and compared to thing he has fought the quanri would be push overn and the first enchanter could have stopped it was just a set up till dragon age 3 the only thing of any importance to the rest of thedas happens and the end and thats the mage-templer conflict

 

[PlasticTree]

So you ask what people found wrong with the game but then state that we can't mention some of the things that were wrong with the game?

He simply mentions that he already gets these issues (while implying that they are not enough for the huge amount of criticism this game had to endure), and wants to know what the other reasons-to-hate are.

As with a lot of other people, I personally hated the same environments all the time, but other than I really enjoyed it. In my opinion the battle system was a vast improvement (you could still use it as a strategic system if you wanted, but with more awesome) and the visual style was great. The characters and the story were of the same quality; the different 'exploring setup' of the first game seems more of a point of personal taste than of quality.

 

[Novander]

Dragon Age 2 wasn't a bad game, it was just a bad game by BioWare's standards. There were a lot of problems with it, such as the repeated maps and the re-spawning enemies but the one I had most issue with was simply that it was less epic. DA:O was a grand story, a tide of darkness sweeping across the land, a noble order of guardians betrayed and destroyed by those it sought to protect, all set in a world rich with history and atmosphere.

Dragon Age 2 was, for most of it, the story of one refugee family's struggle to adapt to the huge changes to the world that you, the player, made during the first game. It just couldn't compare.

 

[Arina Love]

Ok here is my list
1. Decision that don't do shit. you have absolutely NO power to change most of outcomes (story and characters).
2. awful and shameless reuse of same dungeons.
3. Lazy design. most armours and robes have same effing design ALL the time, even rare ones, with very VERY few exceptions, even i can draw different design for rare items, reusing and recolouring old equpment and calling it rare is LAZY and spoils whole loot thing. It suppose to be one of the carrots to drag you along through game but it fails miserably.

Said that i enjoyed combat,characters and was glad that i could romance Merrill with my FemHawke.

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

You couldn't be a Arcane Warrior anymore, there was no sense of accomplishment in the story and the combat system.

Actually, I saw the non-silent protagonist as a good sign, seeing as the warden is me, Hawke is Hawke.

 

[Sarmos]

Personally, I really liked DA2. I LOVED DA:Orgins, but DA2 was good in my opinion at least. Thats not to say that there isnt anything wrong with it. It just felt like it could've been made into something so so so much better.

I've played through DA:Orgins at LEAST twenty times, if not more. I've played through DA2 maybe three times? Most of the quests just didnt fill me on the fact that "Hey, this is important! This is interesting! This is... worth my time? I'm the goddamed Champion! Why should I worry about mediocre city concerns! I should be competing in some sort of grand tourney featuring Champions from every damed City state!"

Sorry. Got a bit carried away. (I'm a writer, it happens.) Anywho, point being, DA:2 just felt like you had your main quest (Act 1:survive, Act 2:Make it big, Act 3:Have it all go down the whole because of nothing you did.)

In the end, other then beat the big bad guy(Qunari), What did Hawke really accomplish? From a story standpoint it just could've been better. I liked some of the characters (god not Anders. He was so much better as the comic relief in DA:Awakaing) and the combat system was a big visual upgrade from DA:Orgins.

Thats my take. But then, I'm a big fan or the series, and this is just my opinion.

 

[Eldritch Warlord]

Yeah, and the fact that a wizard can walk openly in a city where wizards are forbidden.

Short of actually using magic nothing really distinguishes a mage from any other person. As long as they don't walk about conjuring random fires in front of everyone they should be safe enough from the Templars. Meridith also mentions that she "tolerates" Hawke living free of Kirkwall's Circle of Magi because of Hawke's service to the city.

 

[everythingbeeps]

You're dismissive of the two things you mentioned, TC, but they aren't small things. The game was small enough already in that you spent most of it in one city. Adding constantly copy/pasted environments (caves, etc.), and that just adds to the feeling that they cut too many corners.

As for the waves of bad guys...it just wasn't necessary. They could have had fewer enemies and made them tougher. That would have been a better solution. Instead, the battles were just tedious.

But there are other problems: throughout the game, there was no real sense of tension. There was no identifiable enemy. No clear story. Just characters getting caught up in seemingly petty squabbles, and you being sent here and there to act as some sort of violent diplomat. Maybe it's just me, I prefer a story that has a big menacing easily identifiable enemy. Not one where my main role is to observe two sides bickering, pick one side, and kill the other side.

One of the game's strengths was (some of) its characters.

More problems:

1. The companion gear thing. Hated it. Would have rather just been able to outfit them in whatever I wanted.

2. The "Junk" thing. At least in DA:O, most, if not all, of the stuff you found had some possible use somewhere in the world. In DA2, so much of what you find is trash and nothing more. Its whole purpose is to take up inventory space until you get around to selling it. Not necessary.

 

[Rayansaki]

Personally I liked DA2 a lot more than DA:O. Combat was fast paced and fun, instead of passive auto attack and wait for cooldowns, everything was more fluid, the main character was more detailed and had more personality (and that personality was affected by your decisions), at the expense of secondary characters which were more characterized in DA:O.

Dragon Age: Origins had quite a lot of flaws that were caused by how open it was to the player. The game had to make sense no matter what race you picked so your character had to be very bland (DA2 still suffers from this in terms of class choice, but that's 1 problem instead of 2), the game difficulty had a "from harder to easier" curve because you could chose the order you did the main quests in. Dragon Age 2 is more tightly packed and linear, but does not have any of these flaws.

 

[Avalanche91]

More then anything I found that it lacked scale. Dragon Age; Origins actually gave the feeling of a epic fantasy adventure, while keeping it fairly linear to allow smooth progression.

I found Dragon Age 2 by no means bad, but it fell very short compared to Origins

 

[Sehnsucht Engel]

The areas looked the same, but then again, you spent more than half of the game in the same city -_-

DA:O bored me to death. It was a boring game, with boring characters and a generic fantasy story which ending was painfully obvious.

Because of this, I didn't want to buy DA2, but I did eventually and I loved it. It's a fun game, with good characters and a story which kept me playing just to see what would happen next.

I'm glad I didn't waste money on the first one, played it at a friend's house, but because DA2 was so much better I'm looking forward to the next game.

 

[Virgilthepagan]

It wasn't enjoyable to play. The most of the characters were two-dimensional mouth pieces for one of the "causes" in the game. It cherry-picked which decisions were carried over and which were ignored and overwritten. Leliana and Zevran showing up even though they'd died previously weren't bugs, that was the developer saying you were wrong.

And for the record, most of the complaints do not boil down to "change = bad" what it comes down to is that most of the changes they did make made it vastly inferior to it's predecessor.

Amen. I'd add to that development retconn with the total shift that happened to Anders' personality. His sharp change from funny and relatively deep in Awakening to Linken Park fan in DA II made so little sense (even with Justice) that I tried to avoid bringing him along.

I'd also add that while Bioware tried harder to characterize Hawke, they did so by reducing the number of choices you had. So instead of a list of text options, we got "saintly", "wanker", and "evil", and nothing else. And really now that I think about it wanker and evil sounded pretty similar at times. To me it just felt like they were pushing you down a specific path.

I'm not going to quibble with the art style, that really grew on me, and gripes about the combat aside, Hawke's story is more personal than "save the world", and had a lot of potential. It really just got squandered. DA II felt like it started in the right place and then got a little lost.

 

[Princess Rose]

Okay, I'll get this out if the way first: The areas were all identical, spawning waves of baddies and bugs.

What else? And please no:"They changed the combat system" or any other fanboy BS about changes that are bad because they changed it.

Nothing else. Bioware fans are really whiny for some reason.

Mostly, the complaint seems to be that Dragon Age 2 wasn't Dragon Age Origins. The loud minority of complainers don't seem to understand that the 2 at the end of the name means it's an entirely different game. If they wanted more Dragon Age Origins, then they should buy the DLC for that game.

Just like that very stupid thread about "will you forgive Bioware" thread about Mass Effect 3. There's nothing to forgive. It's just more fanboy moaning that Bioware might have had the audacity to change something between two different games.

Seriously folks, MOST games change significantly between installments. Get over it. If you like Origins more than 2, then play more Origins and stop whining about it.

 

[Michael Hirst]

It all got very samey very fast and I wasn't too keen on the characters either, they all seemed very 2 dimensional and poorly written by Bioware standards. The game isn't as terrible as some like to say it is but it's definitely not as good as the original.

 

[Christemo]

Every environment (not just the dungeons) was recycled about 5 times, including the city itself.

It was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO easy, compared to the manning-up difficulty (at least a decent level of challenge that DA:O gave you even on lower difficulty levels) that the original brought along.

Every character besides Fenris, Isabella and Varric were unlikeable wastes of development time. Even your siblings were talkings pieces of flesh with no purpose other than to die or dissapear for the 95% of the rest of the game.
these are my direct complaints about the other characters:

Anders: unlikeable, annoying and ungrateful douchebag through and through. Wish i could´ve killed him earlier.

Aveline: Stereotypical business lady who has shyed away from love-life because of her dead husband.

Siblings: see above.

Sebastian: He had absolutely zero purpose for the story. his rivalry/loyalty thingy was messed up/buggy (he would gain rivalry when you agreed with him), and his skillset was dreadful.

Merrill: unlike Leliana, who was likeable and naïve, Merrill is downright mentally challenged, had a skillset worse than Sebastian´s, and was just plain annoying as shit.

Hawke him/herself wasn´t especially likeable, being a terrible mix of Witty, helpful and douchebag mixed up.

Plot twists were few and far between, and when they appeared they were poorly written and predictable.

ending was a cliffhanger, although a less retarded one than most, it still bugged the hell out of me.

Act 3 was not only broken (entire side questline that didnt work for 2 months), but extremely poorly written (Im talking Witcher 1 DLC awful), and the main plotline left much to be desired.

Boss fights were unentertaining as all hell (Arishok was just chucking potions and running in circles, Meredith the NPC´s did all the work for you, Orsino was a chore and they re-used the dragon bosses from DA:O way too much).

New Gift system kind of sucked.

No proper exploring (no interesting hidden items, as you got pretty much all the best gear by just following the storyline).


i could go on, but i think you get my drift. Bioware even admitted several times that they lazied alot on the project and cut out alot of features.