@WarlordPayne: I'd never thought of it like that, but you're right. They did drop the ball in integrating the satellite plots into the final confrontation in DA:O. Meanwhile DA2 dropped the ball on everything except some of the companion storylines.

@Hailinel Not saying you're wrong, but just to make sure: Are you the type of person that's determined to do all or most of the side quests? I kind of got the feeling that you were trying to grind through a lot of those boring side quests.

But, anyway, I still want to give this a whirl at some if only to see for myself why it's so divisive. I have played the demo (and it's boring) so I'm not going to mess with it until it's on sale for like two bucks, but I still want to see more of it than the demo.

@WarlordPayne said:

@Sergiy said:

@WarlordPayne said:

the story in DA2 is leagues better than what passed for a story in DA:O.

What? Please tell me you're joking.

Being a glorified delivery boy is not a great concept for a story.

The story in Dragon Age: Origins was as cliched, bland, and predictable as any fantasy game I have ever seen. There are orcs and you're the only one who can stop them! How revolutionary.

First of all, they're not orcs, they're darkspawn, there's a difference. There's a reason the darkspawn are in this world and it's linked to the mages, a civil war is in progress to add tension, there's an incredible world called the fade. You're forgetting all these amazing concepts, many of which, were ruined by the plotholes in DA2.

All these huge conflicts in the first game are just WAY better than "UPS the game".

Not to mention the first game actually had choices.

The only good part of DA2 was stabbing Anders in his stupid fucking face. What a shit character.

If they had built an entire game out of Act 2 and turned the stranded Qunari uprising into an all-out invasion like the Arishok (and Sten in DA:O) hinted at with Hawke caught in the middle it might have been interesting. Choosing between joining the Qunari or defending Kirwall would have been infinitely better than a meaningless choice between two uninteresting factions with asshole leaders.

@Hailinel said:

It's bad. I mean, really bad. The gameplay is decidedly Dragon Age (even though tthey apparently had to patch in the auto-attacking after release? What?), which is fine. I enjoyed the first Dragon Age. But god damn, I don't remember the fights in Origins being anywhere near this tedious.

Wait, how can you praise Origins and denounce II when they essentially have the same combat system? Heck, tediousness seems to be a staple of the combat in Dragon Age, but at least in II you didn't have to pause every few seconds to queue up a list of commands, and then proceed to make sure the character actually cast it instead of turning around and running away because they weren't "in range."

@Hailinel said:

For the most part, I played the game on the standard difficulty, and in the rare times it wasn't brain-dead easy, it suddenly spiked into "fuck you" territory. Like a room in a cave filled with spiders, undead, and a lich, all suddenly swarming out of nowhere. After playing that battle maybe seven times, I finally got out of it by the skin of my teeth with only Varric left alive, running through the halls and desperately holding on to those last few precious hit points long enough to be allowed another healing potion.

And that rock demon at the end of the Deep Roads can suck it.

Origins had this problem, too. Traveling the roads or in the first few dungeons, you were like "whatever, this is easy," then suddenly you get ambushed by darkspawn elite and your party gets wiped out. Again, this is odd that you're criticizing II for the exact same thing that was in Origins.

@Hailinel said:

And then there's the faults in the story. I understand that this is all being told in flashback from the recollection of an unreliable narrator (which will make it easy for Bioware to retcon by saying Varric was making shit up), but it just gets weird, especially toward the end of the Deep Roads, when oh, wait, Bethany is dead because Darkspawn. And yes, this is just oen possible outcome of that scene, but just the way it's handled, where it cuts in after five days of hiking through the Deep Roads only to suddenly reveal she's ill. It almost feels like a DM somewhere just expelled Bethany's player from the group and killed the character out of spite.

The whole act is nothing more than an elaborate set-up comprised of uninteresting bullshit with a character death thrown in at the end, because I don't know. It's not even so much that Bethany dies as much as it is the manner her death is depicted. It felt clumsy.

This, I guess, is more of a subjective matter. But really, I seriously could not care less about the Dwarven political race going on in Origins when I got to that section of the game. It was way too drawn out and felt like an absolutely terrible reason to go into the Deep Roads, especially considering the bigger picture that Darkspawn were destroying everything we considered precious.

Anyway, I think you let the hate of the game get to you before you even played it, and that's why you didn't enjoy it so much. Ah, well, what else were you going to do with that $17?

I keep getting summoned to this thread by reply notifications. Trademarking "A Brief Jaunt"? That would be kind of ironic, since I settled on that name because it was a non-litigious synonym of "Quick Look". Where will this madness end? Expeditious Ganders? Trivial Tours? Not-So-Deep Peeps?!

Though I'm aware @snide would start earlier, around the point of KOTOR (and I'm kind of with him in that dabbling in Lucas's domain has cost them dearly), I think Dragon Age 2 is pretty much the point where BioWare stopped really appealing to RPG fans, either deliberately or otherwise. It's rather telling that Mass Effect 3 decided to borrow DA2's utterly mindless "overhear a guy talking about his problems, find an item in the middle of nowhere, hand it back for a bemused acknowledgement" side-quests and interminable wave-based combat. I feel like Borderlands 2 has a lot more of the wave-based stuff than the last game had as well, but perhaps I'm just being paranoid. I used to like having a rough idea of how many enemies there were in an area and planning strategies around that, but I guess that's some old-fashioned thinking.

Wait, I digressed there. Where was I? Oh yeah, you stole "Brief Jaunt"! You'll be hearing from my imaginary internet lawyers.

@sthusby said:

@AndrewB: I fucking hate that you can't romance Aveline. She is the love of my life, and all I got was a little kiss. Bittersweet.

As much as I think Aveline is the only female in the game who is remotely interesting (Bigtits Mcgee is so stereotypical and Merill is held back by her "endearing" character trait of being constantly befuddled), the thrill of the chase makes the faux-mance all the better. Gives her even more character that she's not a blank slate for Hawke to swoop in on.

I swear, Aveline is the real main character of Dragon Age 2, because Hawke is fairly uninteresting and the only other cool character is Varric, but he's the narrator.

@Sergiy said:

@WarlordPayne said:

@Sergiy said:

@WarlordPayne said:

the story in DA2 is leagues better than what passed for a story in DA:O.

What? Please tell me you're joking.

Being a glorified delivery boy is not a great concept for a story.

The story in Dragon Age: Origins was as cliched, bland, and predictable as any fantasy game I have ever seen. There are orcs and you're the only one who can stop them! How revolutionary.

First of all, they're not orcs, they're darkspawn, there's a difference. There's a reason the darkspawn are in this world and it's linked to the mages, a civil war is in progress to add tension, there's an incredible world called the fade. You're forgetting all these amazing concepts, many of which, were ruined by the plotholes in DA2.

All these huge conflicts in the first game are just WAY better than "UPS the game".

Not to mention the first game actually had choices.

I disagree with literally every single thing you said.

@Brodehouse said:

@Hailinel I agree that there are more "I didn't really want to say that" moments in DA2 compared to the Mass Effect. The writing in general in ME is better than Dragon Age, when I think about it. I recommend you stop making the up-right choice and start making the down-right choice. I played my first Hawke as a mostly good girl, and I like her well enough but she's kind of a blank cipher. The diplomatic options really don't present her as a real character. But then when I played an aggro Hawke the game got so entertaining. It's so amusing to watch this unreasonable, perpetually angry and possibly violent man walk into every situation with a chip on his shoulder. It's like watching Don Draper in Middle-Earth. There's one scene where two people are arguing in your house and Hawke responds with the dominant personality; "What's going on? Can I help?" "Ooh, I hope there are seats left..!" and "Everybody shut up!" and of course the latter is hysterical. Just walk into a room and immediately you're angry. AggroHawke isn't necessarily fun to play as, but so fun to watch. "What do you call it when you kill someone and take all their stuff?" "Tuesday."

I enjoyed playing as snarky Hawke, since she got some great, great lines and the delivery from the voice actress is pretty good. It also makes for some powerful moments near the end of Act II.

Looks like the Duke...has fallen from grace.

Seriously, the Mark of the Assassin DLC with a snarky Hawke is something everyone needs to see.

Dragon Age 2 is fine. There ya go.

@believer258 said:

@Hailinel Not saying you're wrong, but just to make sure: Are you the type of person that's determined to do all or most of the side quests? I kind of got the feeling that you were trying to grind through a lot of those boring side quests.

But, anyway, I still want to give this a whirl at some if only to see for myself why it's so divisive. I have played the demo (and it's boring) so I'm not going to mess with it until it's on sale for like two bucks, but I still want to see more of it than the demo.

It really depends on the game. I couldn't stop doing sidequests in Xenoblade because, despite their repetitive nature, there felt like there was meaning behind them in helping the townsfolk (not to mention that the combat and characters are better by a long shot). The problem with the quests in Dragon Age II, or part of the problem, is that you're required to go questing in the early game until you earn enough gold to move on. The game would have been better served in my estimation if instead there were a focused set of key quests related to preparing for the Deep Roads, rather than running random errands all over town and in the countryside for any reason but the expedition itself.

@LikeaSsur: Origins wasn't perfect, but from I recall, the combat was at least better by the fact that:

1. Auto-attack was there from the start and the game was more active in encouraging tactical thought.
2. Enemies, from what I recall, don't spawn out of thin air in waves.
3. There's greater customization of the party, which ultimately has an effect on combat.

I mean, there were still parts of the combat in Origins that are still rather fucked (the final battle against the Archdemon played out like a Benny Hill routine for me, for example), but it was still a much better experience than the combat in DA2. And yeah, the Deep Roads in Origins are way too long, though I didn't mind them as much as most people. The most offensive part of the original game for me was the Fade, which was just a long, nightmarish puzzle dungeon. Origins is by no means perfect, but DA2 was not an improvement in any sense, whether it be gameplay or narrative.

@Mento said:

I keep getting summoned to this thread by reply notifications. Trademarking "A Brief Jaunt"? That would be kind of ironic, since I settled on that name because it was a non-litigious synonym of "Quick Look". Where will this madness end? Expeditious Ganders? Trivial Tours? Not-So-Deep Peeps?!

Though I'm aware @snide would start earlier, around the point of KOTOR (and I'm kind of with him in that dabbling in Lucas's domain has cost them dearly), I think Dragon Age 2 is pretty much the point where BioWare stopped really appealing to RPG fans, either deliberately or otherwise. It's rather telling that Mass Effect 3 decided to borrow DA2's utterly mindless "overhear a guy talking about his problems, find an item in the middle of nowhere, hand it back for a bemused acknowledgement" side-quests and interminable wave-based combat. I feel like Borderlands 2 has a lot more of the wave-based stuff than the last game had as well, but perhaps I'm just being paranoid. I used to like having a rough idea of how many enemies there were in an area and planning strategies around that, but I guess that's some old-fashioned thinking.

Wait, I digressed there. Where was I? Oh yeah, you stole "Brief Jaunt"! You'll be hearing from my imaginary internet lawyers.

Yeah. It really is interesting to see how Bioware transitioned from making the older RPGs based on the D&D rules and lore before transitioning to KOTOR and everything after. It's like somewhere along the way, they became obsessed with a few key aspects and refined those to the detriment of everything else. It paritcularly shows in their development of SWTOR I think. I remember the marketing for that game being all about the voice acting and the story events, and not so much the very WoW-ish gameplay that they did little to reinvent.

But seeing as you're sicking your imaginary internet lawyers on me, I suppose I'll have to hire one of my own.

@familyphotoshoot: That sounds like it could have been an interesting idea. It's a shame that they didn't go in that direction. On the other hand, I don't know if I'd call the two factions that are the game's focus (mages/templars) uninteresting. They're just very poorly represented as two opposing extremes. I know that Bioware would like us to believe that there's a gray area in there somewhere, but it's hard to find when both sides are represented by extremists and zealots.

@Hailinel: Did you play Baldur's Gate II? DA2's first Act is a pretty naked attempt to recapture the appeal of Baldur's Gate II's second chapter. The problem was that BG2 had tons of world building in all those sidequests, while DA2's worldbuilding can be done, in full, in exactly five seconds (There used to be slaves here. It's still a shit town. Also Templars hate mages).

The reason why its hard to find the grey area in DA2 is because literally every mage in DA2 is a blood mage.

Hated that game so much. I sunk over 100 hours into DA:O and DA2 is such a massive train wreck. It's like a spit in the face to everyone who loved Origins. Boring combat, nonexistent story, total lack of progression and customization, boring companions, tedious world traveling, same areas over and over again. Ugh.

Man, I almost want you to finish the game so I can see you rant about the stupid lyrium sword.