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

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.

@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.

@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.

Dragon Age 2 is fine. There ya go.

@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.

@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.

@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.

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.

@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?

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.

@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.

@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: 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.

@Opus: But in Lord of the Rings there was a journey. In Origins you can go to the city where the final battle takes place, which is also where the main antagonist is hanging out, and dick around there for hours knocking on doors and tossing corpses down wells from nearly the start of the game .

The bulk of the game is in you recruiting armies and every single one of those recruitment quest branches could be cut from the game in their entirety and it wouldn't affect the overall story at all. They're all completely self contained and have no bearing on the main plot outside of which faceless units you hurl at the darkspawn in the end.

I agree that some of those missions could be entertaining but they're no more a part of the main plot than the recruitment and loyalty missions were in Mass Effect 2.

I liked Origins well enough, but I think DA2 made Origins look a lot better than it actually was. I actually quite liked Act 2 of DA2 (the Qunari stuff), but everything else storywise was awful. I found the combat strangely compelling. The group combo / gambit stuff has so much potential, but nobody has really nailed it yet.
 
Against my better judgement, I'm still interested in DA3.

@WarlordPayne: That's a crude way to sum up Origins, that's the equivalent of summarizing Lord of the Rings as "There are these guys that have to destroy this ring, but the place to destroy it is in hostile territory!" It's the journey, not the destination.

Everything that happened to your awkward group in Origins was far more memorable, what made those events memorable was the ability for player to decide the outcome and make it their own game. Too many of Dragon Age 2's critical plot points were predestined "nothing you did matters" moments. Presumably because it was much easier to write than keeping up with each person's morality, but it was also very lazy since they did it once before and had the gall to call this a sequel. The only time you could make decisions with variable outcomes were in side quests with throwaway characters that you never hear of before or after you've made your choice.

Dragon Age: Origins is like watching a Drama at the theatre, whereas Dragon Age 2 is watching a Michael Bay film at the theater.

Aveline wasn't just a redeeming character, she was the game's actual protagonist. She's the one who gets character development, and Hawke only gets involved because Aveline asks her to help out. I will not be at all surprised if Aveline is the one running Kirkwall in DA3.

I don't know why the fuck I haven't been following you, but I am now...for what it's worth, nothing basically. But I'm a 100% with you on this. I played through the entire game once, in hopes of it getting better, but the more I played the more I was disappointed. I tried re-playing it a month ago I think, played it for 30 minutes before I deleted it, again.

Awww... you didn't get to the point where you realize that Acts 2 & 3 are just repeats of the areas from Act 1. It doesn't really sink in until half-way through Act 2, and in Act 3 it will have you tearing your hair out. You also missed the chance to fully see how the story has pretty much no direction, as in Hawke is merely reacting to a lot of randoms stuff happening in Kirkwall while playing errand boy for 10 years, and that in the final act everyone decides to go batshit insane at the same time. Good stuff.

@AndrewB said:

And when you go back and play Origins, it just blows away the sequel in every regard, and that's a huge problem.

Oi, does it ever.

I also agree that Aveline was great, though in a non-romancable kind of way. Only redeeming character in the DA2 by my standards.

@WarlordPayne:

If anything, Dragon Age: Origins is a massive rip-off of George R. R. Martin's metaplot in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Or Game of Thrones for those who didn't read the books. All the way down to the Nights Watch being the only ones who can stop the Others, and everyone else is too busy fighting among themselves to care.

@Brodehouse said:

@mandude Well, you see there are two options to make a tough encounter; send waves against the party and try to grind them down, or just pack a room with 12 dudes. The problem with the second is that it creates huge difficulty spikes and snowball situations. If there are so many enemies in the room the party will either die immediately from pure overwhelming numbers, or they'll find an exploit and suddenly it's as faceroll as any other fight. It's the reason why Uncharted sends 3 teams of 5-6 dudes against Drake instead of sending 18 guys right off the start; the latter would be supremely frustrating. With all that said; yeah, the fights in both Dragon Age games range from monotonous to ridiculously cheap and difficult. I don't think either of them has really been able to nail down an even, strategic difficulty. Awakening has been the best Dragon Age campaign yet. Maybe DA3 will be more like that.

Both of those scenarios can be pretty bad, but if tough combat always came down to 2 shitty methods of execution, we'd stop putting combat in games. Case in point: the general consensus on Dragon Age: Origins was that it was a pretty good game.

Waves can work well in a game like Uncharted, but that's only because at no point does the game expect you to plan your strategy for battle. In the case of Dragon Age, however, you're expected to pause the game regularly and make decisions based on how the battle is progressing. The game expects me to make calls like "there are only three enemies left, so I wont be wanting for a health potion if I use my last one now." If, when I defeat my adversaries, more enemies literally claw their way out of the ground and keep the fight going, I can't make those informed decisions and my 'strategy' turns out to be nothing more than a big gamble.

Dragon Age Origins was unusual because no one makes games in that style any more. Dragon Age 2 is much more "typical". I'm not sure the story in either is defensible and I get the feeling Bioware agrees where they will ignore it and change direction on a whim.

@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.

Fun game, so much potential but this wasn't anything near what it should have been. But hey, why listen to gamers or make new IP's when we can fuck up old ones right?

Oh wait, so the game you were intent on disliking from even before release fulfills your expectations? Hmmm.

Dragon Age II has serious and evident issues. Does that stop me from proclaiming that I think it has one of the better supporting casts of a Bioware game and that the combat is still pretty good, enemies appearing out of thin air notwithstanding. Does that mean that it's a "good" game? Hell if I know. I think people would've been a lot less angry had they not straight up called it the sequel to Dragon Age Origins, despite the part where it takes place in a different part of the world, was clearly made in less than half the time that the first game was, and attempts to stretch 20 hours worth of assets into a 40 hour game.

@Animasta said:

Also the thing is when I had Carver (in my first playthrough), he never died since I never brought him, but instead he hated me and joined the templars. Good to know!

Not liking a game doesn't mean they are bad. DA2 has a lot of problems but it's not really bad.

No thought to bring the former grey warden in to the deep roads eh. Sarcastic hawke was my favorite hawke. Also you should meet the qunari before writing the game off. I enjoyed the faster combat and more focused story

Dragon Age 2 is fine. It's more Dragon Age. I had a lot of fun with it. I went back to play Origins to compare the two, and I don't see how Origins is all that superior. I've played worse sequels.

Just want to add, if the game had a five act structure it would be pretty much a Shakespearean tragedy. But I don't think people want to play a tragedy, they want to win at the end. Hamlet ends up with the protagonist dead, his enemy dead, the rival dead, the love interest dead, the comic relief dead, the protagonist's mother dead, everyone is fucking dead. And the kingdom gets taken over by a foreign power in the last three minutes. I don't think people want that. I think they want The Lion King, where Simba kills Scar and becomes King.

Just know that it only gets way worse from where you are.  Act 1 isn't even the dumb stuff.  They start laying all of these awful threads throughout Act 2 that just end up going nowhere or feeling meaningless.  Act 3 is the blood magic stupidity climax you already know about.
 
The combat feels like the misguided compromise of wanting to be 'bad ass' (enemies with almost no hp that explode when you touch them) with the reality of the console hardware (we can only have a few of these guys on screen at once so we need to spawn them continuously).
 
Oh, and the unreliable narrator was a cool idea that I was looking forward to, but they never really do anything with it.  One moment with Varric later and one clever throwaway at the very beginning of the game.  You're right, they will probably just use it as an easy out later.

@Brodehouse: Sitcom Hawke was pretty fantastic too. Everything she said was completely out of place and insane.

So, uhh..bad but in a good way?

@Hailinel said:

@Video_Game_King said:

Where are the pictures of your playthrough? You can't take @Mento's thing and not include the pictures. Hell, even a stick figure comic with a random JC Denton cameo would suffice.

I'm not aping his thing if I'm not doing those things, am I? :P

I still think he's gonna sue you for trademark infringement.

@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.

@Zajtalan: YUP

Dragon Age II is pretty good. Combat is not its strong suit. I really enjoyed the story, though, and the game at large.

Hey, guess what guys? DA II is a divisive game.

I've been playing through all three concurrently (origins, awakenings, and DA2) and that makes me more easily see the problems with each; by the end of awakenings I was so fucking bored with the combat that I couldn't take it, plus awakenings was way way too easy (hand of winter + elemental mastery + a bunch of cold improving armors made short work of just about anything) and origins had two of the most annoying dungeons I've ever played (fade + deep roads). I'm still in the collecting money phase too (I'm done with that, but I still have some errant quests I haven't done) and I certainly hate some parts of it, the fact that you can't equip armor to your party members annoys me so muchhhhh. Though I think your preconceived notions played a role in you not liking the game (I do the same thing so I realize I am being hypocritical, still)

Also the thing is when I had Carver (in my first playthrough), he never died since I never brought him, but instead he hated me and joined the templars. Good to know!

Yeah....Dragon Age 2 was pretty bad. I don't think it is AS bad as people make it out to be but it's just a lazy, boring, ugly, repetitive and dumb game....so maybe it IS as bad as people make it out to be

Going into something readily wanting to dislike it, will usually end with you disliking it.

But yeah, DA 2 certainly disappoints. I liked the idea of the game trying to centre around a more common character and their ties to a specific city. I remember them talking about how the game would span over a decade and you'd see the city and characters change over those years.. but none of that actually seems to happen in the game, and while some of the characters are pretty interesting, the events feel pretty meaningless. I don't see how this needed to be "Dragon Age 2" or how the third game will connect to the story here at all. The pseudo moral choices annoyed me a lot too. They obviously tried to set up the Mages vs Templars thing as a moral gray, but failed by making the Templars outright evil assholes. Instead of there being any kind of complexity, you're left with the typical good vs evil choices.

Overall, the game just feels very rushed, with a lot of sloppy mechanics (enemy waves, copy & pasted dungeons, etc.) and it's very obvious that it started out as an expansion for Origins.

I like the mechanics of Dragon Age 2, it's the content that's the problem.

For me, Dragon Age 3 will be fine if they just provided a lot of varied, unique content on top of DA2's systems. No more of this one cave/house/warehouse bullshit.

@Video_Game_King said:

Where are the pictures of your playthrough? You can't take @Mento's thing and not include the pictures. Hell, even a stick figure comic with a random JC Denton cameo would suffice.

I'm not aping his thing if I'm not doing those things, am I? :P

@Brodehouse: After having played it, I can see how the wheel is not really all that different from the list, but I still have problems with it. The short phrases for each option don't do the best job of telling me the tone that Hawke is going to take, nor always be indicative of what she actually says. I ended up shying away from the sarcasm and aggressive responses most of the time because I couldn't tell from those brief snippets how Hawke was going to specifically respond and I didn't feel like upending any tables that much. The icons also just made me more likely to shy away from certain dialogue options. It actually came to a point where I wasn't even reading the options and just picking upper-right because I didn't trust that the tone of the other options would be what I actually wanted or expected.

Would have to disagree with you on pretty much every single point except copy pasta dungeons and the Rock Monster.

For me Bethany didn't die because I had Anders with me. Anders should be in everyones party because he's a healer but primarily because he's a mage.

Mages are the Swiss Army Knives in Dragon Age.

In DAO, I was a mage and rolled with both Wynne and Morrigan because mages are the best!

And yeah that stupid knickknack return item shit is fucking ridiculous. They had that shit in Dragon Age Origins and it was fucking ridiculous there too. Just about all the sort of tertiary quest stuff in every BioWare game is awful, they're just there to pad out the length because otherwise people would rattle their stupid chains because there's no stupid side missions. The only game that has had good tertiary missions was ME2.

Getting mad at the wheel is hysterical, because it's the same thing as the list. I've actually gone through the Origins conversation trees, and where they don't get stuck in infinite loops (theres a conversation with a dwarf named Filda that you can make loop forever unless you select one specific option) it progresses in the same straight lines, generally offering you 3 (sometimes 4!) ways to respond to someone. Most of these fall in nice, snarky, and asshole. Sometimes there are two versions of asshole. They still have the 'more information' options that return you to the progression choices, but they're not demarcated easily like Mass Effect. People who rage against the wheel and say "the list had way more options!" like straight up, no. Do the research. You can remake DAO and replace the list with the wheel and it'll fit in pretty easily (though sometimes there are 4 options, but then again, that happens in DA2 sometimes as well).

The biggest fuck you comes toward the end of the game, stop playing.

@Hailinel said:

...blood mages fucking everywhere...

That would make it a much more interesting game.

Nope, I'd agree with you. Dragon Age 2 was tolerable enough and is something I might play through again some day, but only because I feel like some of the character writing redeems an otherwise messy game. The part where enemies spawn out of nowhere is intolerable. In Origins and Bioware game previous, there was a layout of enemies which were often difficult, but you were able to strategize against them in order to win. In Dragon Age 2, it's a matter of holding back to unleash your abilities only when you'r on the brink of death from the 5th wave of enemies which appear before your very eyes. On top of being absurd, it doesn't make for a fun game.

And when you go back and play Origins, it just blows away the sequel in every regard, and that's a huge problem.

But man, Aveline. AVELINE. That woman has my female Hawke's heart, and mine.

You got farther than me in the game, and i didn't go into it expecting to hate it. Kudos to you man.