mikemariano

Dragon Age II

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I think this is less of a problem for me because I view all RPGs as a potentially interesting storyline with potentially interesting characters, and I'll probably have to do some silly fighting and inventory management in between. DA2 is actually better in the latter departments for me than the original, because there's slightly less inventory management required and the fighting is flashier so it at least has some visual appeal this time.

So yeah, I agree that the linear "go fight some dudes and come back" stuff that makes up a lot of the game is dull and lazy, but I don't expect anything else and I certainly don't think the first game was any better. I don't think any RPG is any better, and in fact I don't think most games are any better. As always with BioWare, I enjoy the characters and the dialogue and seeing the branching paths, and I try to leave it at that.

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I'll post some somewhat sensible thoughts later when I can get my head aroud the ending

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I want Fenris to get rid of all the corpses in his mansion. It's been years!

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~5 hours in (well, more actually, but you don't want to know how much time I spent tweaking Hawke's face in character creation) and I think in general, the characterization of your companions is done much better than the first one although it feels like giving Hawke a voice has nothing to do with that.

Difficulty so far seems a bit lower, but I'm okay with that. And while I agree with some of the other criticisms of the game on an intellectual level, I'm not really bothered by them.

I'm a little meta-game weirded out by how the rival/friend thing works though. It seems in some instances you'll piss off a companion by taking on a quest, but I'm always going to choose to do the quest, because I won't necessarily be doing a second playthrough and I want to see as much content as possible. Is this a failing on my part or the game's?

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I don't really know if it's a failing at all given you never lose anything by having a companion become a rival. In fact you get a bonus for having them either with a high friendship or high rivalry rating. I actually prefer how they've set that up this time; in DA:O you could actually lose people from your party if they got too unhappy, I prefer this system whereby it just changes the tenor of your relationship rather than being a metric you have to try to stay ahead of.

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I don't really know if it's a failing at all given you never lose anything by having a companion become a rival. In fact you get a bonus for having them either with a high friendship or high rivalry rating. I actually prefer how they've set that up this time; in DA:O you could actually lose people from your party if they got too unhappy, I prefer this system whereby it just changes the tenor of your relationship rather than being a metric you have to try to stay ahead of.

Well until they leave you. And in fact that happens more in DA2 than it did in DA:O

TBH I miss the gift system as it would allow you to offset mistakes.

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I was wondering if Rivalry was just a higher chance of leaving. I'm glad to hear it just represents a strong relationship in another direction.

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TBH I miss the gift system as it would allow you to offset mistakes.

Fair point. There is a fair bit of vagueness and unpredictability in the choices in DA2, much as there is in the Mass Effect series. It's not always obvious who is going to approve/disapprove of your actions and it's definitely not obvious what the consequences are going to be. Sometimes I enjoy that, when it makes it feel like it's a complex world that I can't control but only affect, and sometimes I don't, when it makes it feel like it's a dialogue tree that wasn't quite described clearly enough.

Without overusing the dreaded "immersion" term, BioWare games in general have always hovered in an uneasy balance of metagaming versus interesting roleplaying choice for me, and DA2 is no different. I'm aware that I'm deliberately making choices "like they'd [the developers] want me to make for this sort of character" quite a lot, which is uncomfortable, but at other times I'm genuinely surprised and intrigued my the reactions of the characters and the world to my decisions.

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Corpses are the new boxes in Dragon Age 2!

To summarize my experience with the game. I did a quest where I had to get to a demon posessed idol for one of my companions. Lo and behold, there is her mother figure who took the demon into herself! A battle ensues that inevitably leads to the killing of said mother figure. A dramatic plea to the gods as her lifeless body lies on the gr-- Wait is she blinking? Yes... The corpse is blinking.

Dragon Age 2 is like a movie where the director failed to yell "Cut! Let's try that again..." too many times.

And can anyone explain to me why everyone explodes in a cloud of limbs and blood whenever I stab them?

I can't imagine the folks at Bioware being particularly pleased with this game. Treading the same place again and again... and again. These boring insipid quests where you give people back their stupid shit; useless filler, though I guess that Dwarf did really need that STONE TOE I FOUND ON THE STREET. So far, the repercussions of my choices have been some dudes I hardly remember taking revenge on me "3 years" later. I usually end up winning.

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On my second playthrough, and I'm still pre-deep roads but here's my experience with the replayability.

tO2Ln.png

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That's a shame. I've been thinking all the way through how different things could possibly be with other decisions, and have actually been making choices in such a way that I should have at least one other main path to follow. It'd be really disappointing to discover that the story will end up retreading mostly the same ground no matter what.

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I figured out what I don't like about the Dragon Age games. They removed the whole exploration part of RPGs.

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I figured out what I don't like about the Dragon Age games. They removed the whole exploration part of RPGs.

This, one thousand times this. Morrowind to Oblivion for example. On the path to the first town in Morrowind (well, the first 'hub' of sorts) you have three opportunities for a horrible and painful death. More, actually, but these are the essentially guaranteed ones.

One is a cave filled with ghosts, various undead and a minor lich-like creature. (Good luck having the required magical weapon/spell by this point to kill a ghost.)

One is a godsdamned shithole filled with bandits and assorted magical assholes who can basically one shot you. (Not the one directly outside Sedya Neen, which also qualifies.)

And the third is taking a right instead of a left, and walking into the ashlands, where you immediately get mobbed to death by FUCKING CLIFF RACERS. (Fuck cliff racers, by the way.)

I'm not necessarily saying games should punish you like a mentally deficient person who got their hands on a rocket launcher, but let me poke about a bit and figure it all out myself, hey?

E: Oh, for comparison, you could walk into anywhere but a main quest dungeon in Oblivion (which were usually blocked anyway) at level 1 and fight nothing but rats. Bullshit.

Edited by Orvidos

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Very true. I only played half of the first Dragon Age. When I first started playing the game, I was excited and thought it was going to be a more modern RPG with strong Baldur's Gate influences. I don't care how similar the combat mechanisms are, that game is nothing like Baldur's Gate. I was holding out hope up until I reached the "big city" only to discover it consisted pretty much entirely of a small, lame marketplace, random street encounters, and the same boring quests. A far cry from the glory of Athkatla. Granted, I haven't played many RPGs in recent years, but the only one that I've played that's even come close to capturing that same atmosphere (and holding my attention long enough to complete) is The Witcher.

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They really cut costs on secondary locations. Walking through the same dungeons a couple of times is really a drag. Sure, some passages are blocked some times, and you may start from a different side. But it's quite a crappy move.

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They really cut costs on secondary locations. Walking through the same dungeons a couple of times is really a drag. Sure, some passages are blocked some times, and you may start from a different side. But it's quite a crappy move.

I wouldn't have been so peeved about this if they updated the minimap to account for the inaccessible areas, but they couldn't even be bothered to do that.

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dragonage2header530px.jpg

You know, I only JUST noticed all the other people in this image. That is all.

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I know y'all are sick of me posting links to Action Button but this negative review of Dragon Age II does a good job of explaining what turned me off about the demo.

Remember that deep combat system with tons of abilities to use and stats to manage that actually required some level of mastery because the game was difficult? Forget that shit, everyone’s teleporting all over the god damned screen and kobolds will explode into blood geysers by the wagonload. Remember how big a role careful tactical positioning played and how that could interact with the level design? Never mind that, every battle consists of at least three successive magically-appearing waves of enemies that come from 360 degrees around you so you can’t do anything but pound all your most powerful abilities as quickly as possible and hope your damage outpaces theirs.

Also, don't worry: it's not written by Tim Rogers, but I guess we have to beware the house style.

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dragonage2header530px.jpg

You know, I only JUST noticed all the other people in this image. That is all.

holy carp

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Completed the deep roads quest.

holy crap, that was a difficult boss-fight

. And now I'm back doing random quests. This game is seriously linear, and enormously simplified. You can barely call it a RPG. I found another flaw in their crappy simple dungeon system. I returned to the same cave for a different quest, and suddenly the "layout" was different.

The only great thing about DA2 is the "trash" inventory category.

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So I just finished last night ~38 hours on easy, doing pretty much everything.

The criticisms I've read are generally all valid and I still think it's strengths make it good enough that I don't regret the purchase or time spent playing it.

On top of the criticisms people have already mentioned, one thing that seems to have been skipped over is that I do miss the puzzles you had in the first one (both in the fade and as you were busting into the circle after it gets taken over). I know the fade is not everyone's favorite part of DAO, but I think it's important to have something to do other than beat stuff up.

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Late to the party here but here's a big black blob of spoiler tags for anyone thinking about the game:

Wow, how frustrating was that? The weird camera on PC compared to Origins was annoying, I got used to it but it proved to be a sign of things to come.

What was with all the quests into caves and crap that had EXACTLY THE SAME environments? Same with the town. I got so sick of fighting in exactly the same places.

Story-wise... I guess I understand that you can shag a rival as well as a friend, but why does Merrill go from hating you to wanting you in bed like the flick of a switch? Felt weird to me.

Anders... kind of an interesting idea and a nice set piece, wasn't sold on it completely but paid off a lot better than other stuff. Namely, Orsino's fall to blood magic (admittedly, I never read up on the codex... can all mages just suddenly do awesome blood magic stuff?) and Meredith's behaviour actually being all about the idol. That idol never really got me interested.

Same environments all the time, got very bored of the city, all these little load screen blurbs about the island the Qunari come from and the rest of the Free Marches do is make me want to go to those places!

And finally, man did I get sick of picking up cool equipment that was only fit for Hawke. Not entirely sure why your companions always have the same armour but I for one would have liked to have been outfitting them myself. Getting a cool mage robe when my character is a rogue was frustrating. It also made the DLC armour I got with the game useless.

Anyway, tried to keep it short!

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Regarding blood magic and mages... based on the first game, no mages can't just up and decide they're blood mages if they want to remain themselves. You can learn it by bargaining with demons and that sort of thing, but it's not an automatic thing. However, it's never entirely clear whether any preconditions need to be set to allow yourself to become an abomination of some sort. So maybe mages can instantly just shout out into the Fade "come give me power and I'll let you ride around in my fleshy bits!"

Regarding the endgame:

Whether Orsino became an abomination or had been holding some blood magic knowledge before the events or something else was never really explained. I don't know if it's a plot hole or if there is a justification that was just not really gone into for the sake of expediency.

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