Dragon Age: Origins has become one of my favorite fantasy RPGs of all time. Playing it reminded me of some of my other favorite games like Dungeon Siege or Baldur's Gate. It was downright amazing. Sure, there could've been a few improvements, as with any game. The combat seemed slow at times, there weren't any stamina potions, and sometimes it was simply too hard. It was just so damned expansive and fun that the small faults could be easily ignored, so it's one of the best RPGs ever. Now, Dragon Age 2 has come to save the day and fix the problems with the first game, and by god did they try.
Plot
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Dragon Age 2 is set during the events of Ferelden's blight from the first game. The hero, Hawke, lives in Lothering when Darkspawn start wrecking up the place. He and his family escape, making their way to Kirkwall. They come in as refugees and have to climb the tower of success, lest they always live in the slums, or with their uncle. The game takes place through a decade split into three separate acts, but you wouldn't notice if the cut scenes that tell you what you're doing in the meantime didn't exist.
Dragon Age 2, like Mass Effect 2, pushes the save game transfer aspect quite a bit. In Mass Effect 2, choices you made in Mass Effect 1 played a huge part in many encounters, and there were multiple allusions to past decisions you made. Here however, you play an entirely different character, so most of your choices don't really crop up in the story. Even when they do, they just go over your head and you don't notice or care about them. They did find a way to shoehorn you into a meeting with a character from the first game though. I'm pretty sure it did nothing for the plot too, so I suppose Bioware was just doing some fanservice.
The blight takes a backseat this time in the plot, in that it never really presents much of a problem besides causing you to move into Kirkwall. Darkspawn never threaten anything in the game, and you often don't see them. The blight is talked about every now and then, but it doesn't affect you after 5 minutes of playing the game.
The game's first failing in my mind, is that it decided to have some contrived plot point, which removed one of my characters for the entire game after the first act. One of my best characters too. I never got to play them again after that until the last battle. It sucked.
The second failing is that the game doesn't have a plot at all. It felt like all you were doing, the whole entire game, was side quests. I was waiting for a huge conflict to start, to give me a sense of what I will have to achieve in this game. It took 18 hours to pass until I figured out what they were leading up to. In Dragon Age: Origins there was the blight. You had to kill the leader of it, the Archdemon. You knew what the goal was from the beginning, so everything felt like it was done for a reason. All you were doing was working towards something. Helping the Dalish and Mages to get their support, saving Arl Eamon. You knew why you had to do the things you did. To fight the Darkspawn and kill the Archdemon. What about Dragon Age 2 though? There's no clear goal in this game. What is it all leading up to? Nothing. It doesn't lead up to anything. There is no straight road, no major plot. The first two acts feel like they could've been DLC for Origins, and it's not up until the third act that the major plot development happens. I didn't see it coming, and yet, I didn't care. I didn't feel what the game wanted me to feel.
After all was said and done, what could you do now? What was the epilogue? Nothing! Same thing happened after the end of Origins. All you could do was just stand in camp and wait for DLC to be released so you could leave. Why? What if I want to go walking around a bit? Can't do it. What if I wanted to beat up the gangs at night in Kirkwall? Nope. It seems a bit nit picky, but I don't see why they restrict you to the Estate in DA2 or the Camp in Origins.
Now that I'm done clamoring on about the stupid plot, or lack thereof, let's get on to the more game side of things.
Gameplay
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Right click to attack, move with WASD, and use spells by clicking on them or pressing a number. Sounds simple enough. The cool down times for everything is amazingly retarded though. 30 second cool down for a health potion? Really? As opposed to the last game, there's only one type of health potion, so you can't cheat by using a lesser health potion, and then a greater health potion, so you needn't worry about potion cool down messing you completely up. No more of that. One potion every 30 seconds. You can cast heal though! Oh wait, too bad it's a 40 sec cool down. What the hell happened? Group heal is all but gone too. Only one mage, Anders, can do it now. It used to be that all your mages could cast it. It's only Anders now though. Screw that guy. He's like Aeris without the whole dying part. To make you even more mad, you have to active a sustained spell, in which you can't cast any offensive magic, before you can cast group heal, or revive. So there's a 2 or 3 second window in which the starting animation for Pancea, the sustained spell, has to be finished until you can cast group heal. Then you have to deactivate it to attack with an offensive spell. In the time it takes to start up, you could be killed, which happened to me too often.
Maps are another weird thing that's happened to this game. I'm not sure about Origins, because it was never a problem, but maps go away once you leave the area in Dragon Age 2. In the game, you, no joke, revisit the same places hundreds of time. Each place is recycled for different quests, and each time, your map is blank until you explore the area. That's fine if the place was new, but you've been there HUNDREDS OF TIMES. Why take it away? The level design makes everything confusing, especially on the Wounded Coast, so you need the map to know where you're going. Since the map is reset each time you go there, you always get lost. It's really annoying.
Also new in this game, you can't use any armor you pick up for your companions. You can't mix and match stuff. You have to buy specific armor, or find a set on their 'companion quest'. There's only 5 upgrades to their armor, which really feels like the game is strangling me. It feels very restrictive, and is a huge setback. I like freedom, it's nice, but this game doesn't seem to agree.
Odd glitches would happen with the game too, like my characters would stop attacking the enemy and just idly stand by me with their weapons sheathed while I'm getting raped by a bunch of spiders. I figure that the glitches in the game will be resolved in later patches, but they were infuriating when they happened to me.
Graphics
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How the game looks at its best, I don't know. My good graphics card got blown up a month ago, so I couldn't run it in DirectX 11, but I can run it in DirectX 10 right? Nope! Only DX9 or DX11. Shit. So I could only keep it on medium, because high and very high is reserved for DX11 cards for some reason. So, I can't talk about how crap the graphics are, but I can talk about other graphical things.
Animations this time around actually became a lot more fluid and are really improved. Something that I do enjoy about this game is the fighting animations. It does feel smooth and faster paced than the last game. Mages would just slightly shake their staff at a problem in Origins, but here they actually do some kind of spinning/shoving their stick in the ground move. It looks decent enough and is indeed an improvement on the previous game. They did change a few things I was disappointed at, like making the spell 'Winter's Grasp' a projectile, rather than an instant attack it used to be. Now you have to wait a second or two for it to hit and freeze them, but uh, let's not get into gameplay again.
The text in this game is surprisingly one of the things that really makes me mad.
I'll admit, it looks interesting for awhile, but when you realize that all the text in this game looks like this or worse, it really makes me mad. Who thought it would be a good idea? Seriously? Some amateur came up with the design of the game, because everything just fails so hard.
And the User Interface, oh god the UI, I don't know where to start with it. Look at these pictures. Ignoring the graphics of the actual game, which UI looks better?
Origins:
DA2:
Sure, the change may have made it more functional, for consoles, but all the nice artwork that was present in Origins, the old medieval look, is just gone now. All the icons just look too futuristic to be in Dragon Age. The health and stamina/mana bars change size now as you upgrade it. Good, that's something that I can agree was stupid in Origins. Too bad it's just one improvement under a whole dump truck of failures.
I won't go on anymore about this game. I'm just so disappointed and sad. I truly felt that it had potential after the first one. Sadly, this just reeks of laziness.
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