Dragon Age 2

Dragon Age 2 was released last year and it received a bunch of negative criticism. Some even deemed it ol' trusty BioWare's first failure in their impressive line of great RPG titles. I was very skeptical about it, though. I mean, I had seen couple gameplay videos of it on YouTube and wasn't all that impressed. But it did look pretty much like Dragon Age: Origins to me. Where they could've gone so wrong that people found not liking it?

The game allows you to import your save from DA:O but you don't continue with the same character; the first game's events barely affect the sequel's story. Instead, you make a new character. Only human is available this time, which was maybe a disappointment to some. To me, it hardly mattered. I guess it made it feasible to add voice-acting to the main character. And that I do like. It made her seem much more lively when speaking to other characters.

Like in Mass Effect, your character is known by his/her last name for obvious reasons. However, in DA2 it's bit funny since your sibling(s) are with you and their family name is Hawke as well. I guess they're used to it. One of them also happens to die during the prologue.

If that was supposed to cause some reaction, I can say the attempt failed pretty badly. It happened way too soon for that -- there simply can be no emotional attachment so early into the game. Although, I didn't find myself caring all that much later on either when the family members continued kicking the bucket one by one.

I guess the caring issue was somewhat caused by the whole game -- the point of story seemed to be missing. I found myself asking the game why does it want to tell the story of this Hawke character. No epic world-saving plot was appearing, you just run around this Kirkwall city, doing the basic adventurer chores. And there's this weird thing of skipping time between the game's acts. "X years have passed". A pretty boring story if nothing is happening for several years, I think.

At the end of Act 2 (out of 3), the missing point finally appeared -- the game was apparently about mages' temptation for power via blood magic and summoning demons, and templars trying to prevent it by locking them up in one place. A typical topic for dark fantasy, but wasn't it already addressed in the first game?

The whole third act I was waiting the moment I get to choose my side. Or rather, I was trying to choose my side. But no matter what I said, the templars and mages were fighting, making conspiracies and whatnot. The moment came in the very last moments of the game, and even then it hardly mattered -- you get to fight all the same guys anyway.

It amused me how there was no single mage in the game with enough willpower to resist the temptation. They all succumbed to it sooner or later. Well, expect for Hawke's sister, but maybe she just died before it could happen. Regardless, to me it seems that neither side really had the right solution. The mages are clearly a threat, and the templar order is able to do very little to actually prevent anything happening.

In the epilogue, there's evidently a war or some sort of global disaster going on. Probably because of the mages rebelling. It was suggested that Orlesian Empire might try to conquer Ferelden, so maybe it's that. I just hope the next game (that is evidently coming) won't take place in Orlais; I can't stand the Orlesian (French) accent voice-acting. It's 'orrible.

Speaking of voice-acting, Dragon Age 2 certainly didn't have as impressive cast as Mass Effect 3 did. Pretty standard video game voice-actors the whole bunch. Even with the sort of British accent, female Hawke (Jo Wyatt) was hardly memorable. She was no where near Jennifer Hale's Shepard. Music was pretty standard fare as well. The Hawke Family Theme gave me Neverwinter Nights vibes, though. Odd that -- its score was composed by Jeremy Soule, not Inon Zur.

I think in gameplay DA2 improved much from the first game. In many things they took it to the direction of Mass Effect 2; the dialogue system (sadly no paragon/renegade actions) and like in how party members always wear the same armor, reducing the amount of gear hassle. The party inventory got filled up less often than in DA:O, largely thanks to the removal of crafting materials and most consumable drops. (Also probably because you're never far from a vendor.)

I question the point of having (literally) junk drops, though. Why not just have enemies drop money instead? I was bothered by the general unimpressiveness of loot as well. The best items were available from vendors and not from enemies. For a high price, of course.

The skill system was improved and moved from the boring table list to more interesting trees. The rogue seemed to have surprisingly many overlapping skills, though -- quite a few talents gave a bonus to critical hit chance yet most of the heavy hitting abilities had a 100% chance to crit anyway. Mages also had the odd thing with healing spells. It's not like DA:O had many, but DA2 only has one. (Anders doesn't count.)

However, the combat was evidently balanced for it (at least on Normal difficulty). I rarely found the need to use healing potions. Aveline, the tank character, was much more durable than Alistair in Origins. I runed her equipment with fire resistance (as well as Hawke's) and ended up duoing the game's only high dragon fight when my two mages had dropped early in the fight (they had no fire resistance). Otherwise the mages kept up quite well, though. Ranged characters had learned to flee from melee between the games, which very much improved their survivability.

Mostly the combat felt more dynamic. Friendly fire was moved to exist only on the hardest difficulty, and thus I was able to use elemental spells I avoided in the first game. I also very much liked how they added the thing I was most missing in the Origins rogue -- the ability to get behind the enemies quickly. Few skills simply teleport you to your target and when there was a short distance to the enemy, my rogue did sort of a force jump like in Knights of the Old Republic games. Animations had also been beefed up, but killing blow slow-motions had been cut out. Too bad that, they were rather cool.

I have a feeling they trusted the joy of the combat a bit too much, though. There's this very questionable mechanic of having enemies come in waves after you have killed all or most of the first group. And they don't always even arrive from a sensible place. In fact, more often than not, they appeared out of thin air. And it was quite an immersion breaker when they just kept coming even though their leader was usually the first one to fall, thanks to my rogue's Mark of Death - Vendetta - Assassinate - Twin Fangs combo.

The most unsettling feature of Dragon Age 2, however, was the most audacious recycling of areas I have ever seen. After the first act of the game, you have already visited every place the game has to offer. And all the dungeons and buildings are -- like in the first Mass Effect's side quests -- the same area with different exits blocked, boxes placed differently, used all over again. In Acts 2 and 3, you revisit all the same locations, which just have had their chests refilled with more useless junk.

Dragon Age 2 was pleasant to play, being a triple A title, but just continued with the same stuff in smaller scale; Origins at least had a save-the-world story arc. The setting of Dragon Age in general strikes me as quite uninspiring; it's the standard fantasy stuff with a slightly darker tint and without memorable characters. I feel BioWare was much better off with the Forgotten Realms license. We shall see how the third game turns out. I wouldn't expect too much from it.