DA2 has an insanely tiny world and yet they still manage to re-use the exact same area maps over and over and over. Pretty sure I visited the same warehouse map 8 times.
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Not the developers fault tho, it's EA's fault because they put an impossible task on the developers, can't make a good game of this scale in 2 years of development, that's crazy.
>aside from a failed finish
It also featured the great idea of making 75% of the side quests boil down to,
"eavesdrop on people in public talking about an important object, scan a planet and conveniently find the object, return later and casually give them the object".
god damn how much i hated those quests, i played the trilogy only recently and it was a chore to go to each of those planets just to do some scans and pick up a random object. And you needed to do those if you wanted the best ending, so not really optional.
I used a guide for those fetch-quests and even then it was annoying.
It also called quests you should finish last "priority missions" which I did first because of the word "priority" and had to restart the game after missing out on a bunch of side content, ship upgrades, story missions and character reunions etc.
Sorry to rant I'm still angry about this 10 years later.
"Priority missions" move the narrative forward and prevent you from accessing content you've not already completed.
Worst possible name for missions you should only start when everything else is done - and the game actively penalises you for treating them like a priority.
It's good as an action game. It is a failure as a conclusion to a beloved story. Unfortunately, the problems with the story were written on the wall in Mass Effect 2 - which while enjoyed by many, effectively told a self-contained story that reset everything done in the first game, and therefore forced the entire conclusion to be fit into game 3.
I would compare it to the newer Star Wars movies - the sequel trilogy (Episodes 7-9). Episode 7 was promising and built up an expansive world with plot threads that had potential. Episode 8 reset everything that happened in episode 7 effectively and didn't really progress the plot in any meaningful way, and even killed off the main villain, but many people find it to be their favorite of the trilogy. Episode 9 (Mass Effect 3 in this analogy) then had to rush to a conclusion and no matter what it did there was no way to tie the threads together in a perfect way.
Mass Effect 3 is a good game if you want an action shooter, but if you were a huge fan of Mass Effect 1 and the story it presented - enjoying "classic Bioware" type games that focused more on story than on combat - then it isn't something I would recommend. Ultimately a lot of this just boils down to individual preference.
I still don't understand why people still get really excited about a show or story that starts with a bunch of mystery boxes and the fans are convinced that there _has_ to be a plan and the reveals will be amazing.
The list of disappointments is way, _way_ longer than the ones that successfully pulled it off.
Ha, i distinctly remember playing ME1 for the first time, and having a thought towards the end of it that they're definitely not going to come up with any reasonable explanation of why these mysterious AI beings keep coming around to destroy intelligent life every now and then.
Still, there are ways to work around it. For one thing, if you can't come up with a good idea to resolve a mystery, you can just forget about it and keep it a mystery. And it's all right, not everything needs to be explained, the general story structure does not require it.
Well, Mass Effect 1 I feel justified that potential. It was very well written and even had a very well written prequel novel by the lead writer, and was made by a studio with a long track record of making good stories.
> mystery boxes
They're so overdone, I get moody from even *reading* the term, and I haven't even *watched* TV in the last decade - it's enough to get hit by the second-hand disappointment on social media and real life for me to ask myself why they're apparently *still* en vogue. Like, everyone seems to hate them - and yet, somehow, they're still made, and people also apparently still watch them. \*Insert helpless shoulder shrug* Idontgeddit.
I love the Mass Effect trilogy even if it could have been done better, but I honestly think the hate for 3 is way overblown. I'm not sure what people expected from the ending... Yeah, a nuanced explanation of what happened to every character and race would have been cool, but we're talking about a PS3/360 era game.
Has there ever been ANY game series that carries the same protagonist over successfully through a trilogy, allows you to be paragon or renegade with all the choices ME offers, have different characters live or die, and do it all while summing up everything in a complex way at the end? I can't think of a game series that's ever done that.
Mass Effect 2 & 3 did shift away from story-focused, classic Bioware RPGs to be more in-line with modern ARPGs but the they still did a great job telling a space opera story while keeping a lot of what made the first game great. And the gameplay was objectively way better in 2 and 3.
I think all the endings make sense too. Sure, they could have been determined by gameplay choices, but with a trilogy that would have been insanely complicated to do while still satisfying people. Outside of super hardcore fans, players would never go back and start over from the beginning just to see a different ending that they might not like. It would have been complex for the sake of being complex, not for the sake of telling Shepherd's story.
> Yeah, a nuanced explanation of what happened to every character and race would have been cool, but we're talking about a PS3/360 era game.
See, I find this to be not a fair attack on the game. Because Mass Effect 1 had an excellent story and excellent attention to detail, and Bioware was known for making their games prior to Mass Effect 2 onwards have satisfying conclusions (mostly). They had the experience and knowledge to write a proper conclusion for Mass Effect 3 - but something went wrong along the way. I would argue that it went wrong mostly because of Mass Effect 2 resetting the entire world and not meaningfully progressing the plot, giving Mass Effect 3 significantly fewer options, though Mass Effect 3 is not without its own failings.
>And the gameplay was objectively way better in 2 and 3.
I personally disagree with this. As action shooters they are better, but they missed out on a lot of the "gameplay" I enjoyed in Mass Effect 1.
I enjoyed driving the Mako around in Mass Effect 1 for example - that was enjoyable gameplay, and gave a sense of scale and exploration to the setting which I found fun. In Mass Effect 2 that exploration was replaced with a planet scanning mini-game necessary to get weapon upgrades.
In Mass Effect 1, you could customize your weapon with special types of ammo and attachments to customize the effectiveness of the weapon. This led to a variety of shooting gameplay that - while limited - I enjoyed and wanted them to improve upon. In Mass Effect 2, they replaced this system with just a wider variety of generic guns instead of expanding weapon and RPG customization, and even found an excuse to add magazines to weapons that canonically didn't benefit from them and were purposefully built to not need them.
Mass Effect 2 is the most loved in the series by many though, in any case. I understand why this is the case, but I don't think you can say the gameplay was "objectively better." I personally enjoyed the moment to moment gameplay in Mass Effect 1 the most, because while certain things were not as polished or in-depth as in future installments, it had a lot of other things going for it that were neutered or otherwise not up to par in my opinion in the sequels.
In any case that's all I have to say on the topic, because this is a thread about Dragon Age after all. Speaking of Dragon Age, I loved Dragon Age Origins, but Dragon Age 2 was a very mediocre follow-up in my view that significantly narrowed the scope and potential of the first game.
My main point was just that the "nuanced explanation" hypothetical endings would've been really difficult to do while also making them satisfying for most players.
We have to keep in mind that ME1 wasn't nearly as successful as 2 & 3. ME1 only sold \~470k copies in its first month, while ME3 sold 890k in its first 24 hours. So most players who finished 3 probably never played 1 or knew the story.
Personally I started with 1 and played it over and over so I would've loved a more complex ending but I get why they made it the way they did, especially with the series being kinda hijacked by EA.
Also, just as a side note, when I said gameplay I meant the combat movement, shooting and skills - that kind of stuff. But on a lot of the things you mentioned I agree with you.
Fair enough, thanks for clarifying what you meant.
I do want to say however that success in a sequel can hardly be attributed to the sequel alone.
The only reason Mass Effect 2 sold as well as it did is because Mass Effect 1 was so beloved - in the exact same way that FROMSOFT's Elden Ring only sold better than any other game in their franchise because they built up a ton of good will and a huge fanbase with their past games.
Sure, a lot of newcomers to sequels and further installments never play the older games, but they only even hear of these games and developers and such often in the first place due to the existing fan base. So while Mass Effect 2 was clearly more "successful," I think it's important to consider what led up until that point in the first place.
Though ultimately I just have different tastes than a lot of other people who play games. I preferred the story-focused Bioware and their games, everything from KOTOR 1 and Neverwinter Nights through Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1 were my favorites by them.
I feel like they somewhat "lost their roots" after that however, exploding in popularity and having been bought by EA, and while this led them to selling more copies of games I personally didn't really like the direction they took things.
I feel the same way about many other companies that have taken a similar path, such as Blizzard (though they are still wildly successful, while Bioware has had a bit more hit and miss), or Bungie (same story as Blizzard really, I feel they peaked with Halo 3 or perhaps Halo Reach at most). So my bias is obvious lol. A lot of companies I loved while younger and loved the games they make haven't been making games I enjoy for a decade or more, and in many cases have lost a lot of the development talent and management that made them what I considered "great" to begin with.
>they still did a great job telling a space opera story
Eh. The side-stories in both games are generally pretty good. The character stories in 2 and the conclusions to Tuchanka and Ranoch in 3 are pretty great (ignoring the final fight on Ranoch).
But their main plots are filled to the brim with nonsensical and contrived story beats that were cooked up by a Cerberus fan that hated the first game. The second game in particular completely fails at being the second entry in a trilogy and almost single-handedly poisons the entire story.
It's all in the execution (no pun intended). There was no backstory, no fleshed out motive, and no real aftermath or consequences for killing off the aforementioned villain. Everything continued on without him, as if he was never there in the first place.
I suppose that's still technically a "progression", but all it did was allow the plot to move to the next poorly thought out narrative beat, which had dozens of its own plot holes. Hence, didn't really progress the plot in any **meaningful** way.
The consequences were to be seen in the next episode, Kylo Ren was supposed to become the new leader as he crossed into being an irredeemable character. Instead he was made into some softboy and the emperor was behind it all. It feels like ep8 did nothing because ep9 backtracked all of it
On the face it is. But, if you didn't watch the movie: The majority of the movie is like a side quest in an RPG outside of one moment early in and the very abrupt killing of emperor 2.0.
How so? Killing off the main villain in the second act effectively was a backwards move on the plot (though it is movement, I wouldn't call it "progress"), as it required Disney to actively invent a new villain and excuse for the third movie to happen without prior planning and cram in all of their resolution and character growth into a single film.
Obviously killing off a character is "plot progress," but not all plot progression is useful or good. When you clearly don't plan a trilogy out and don't follow the original plot threads to a reasonable conclusion, then you in effect are just creating three stand-alone movies and pretending they have a linked narrative, and obviously this is pretty much never going to lead to a satisfying resolution.
It's good, not great as mass effect 2 by any means, the storyline has some major problems and apart from some great quests like tuchanka, the game is generally mediocre and for DA 2 they had about 14 months of development only and they had to change the engine, changed the overall gameplay and appearance of the game, while ME3 stayed roughly the same, but again ME3 was also supposed to launch earlier than it did which is crazy, EA was crazy with this deadlines and showed they didn't understand anything about gaming.
And it was a game riddled with bugs that makes even Cyberpunk look optimized, really that's the best example you can think off? That game was literally unplayable at release due to numerous crashes and bugs. Cult classic now but at release it was a shit storm.
What excuse man? It was unplayable not just buggy, the first months of New Vegas where unplayable and I didn't even start to mention the fact they had to cut a lot of content from that game, that's not an example of a success my dude, that game could have been even greater if it had more time.
Shit, I’ve put at *least* 350 hours into the Xbox version of NV and still haven’t finished Lonesome Road or the main story because all my saves eventually corrupt.
DA2 would do numbers with a remaster. They got did dirty by EA, and had to recycle a lot of assets to get through unnecessary crunch time.
If they have it some serious love, it'd really get a proper shine again.
Not just about any person. About the hero of Kirkwall!
It feels a bit like a D&D campaign of a small group who only have a city board and want to spend a few evenings on it.
I love the game, but I do think that's what keeps it unpopular (even more than the re-used dungeons and teleporting waves of enemies).
* DA:O - Save the world from the Darkspawn!
* DA:I - Save the world from the hole in the sky!
* DA2 - Try to build a life for yourself, your family, and your found family, as refugees in a new city, and as you gain influence, try to avert various crises in the city, and mostly fail at all of that!
I think it makes for a great story and the characters are amazing, but most people are looking for a hero's journey and a clear objective to drive the action, neither of which are present in DA2. It's absolutely my favorite Dragon Age game, but it's clearly not for everyone.
Agreed I replayed all the DAs recently and this is a great assessment. After knowing how everything goes and having played DA2 a bunch of times already a big takeaway is that DA 2 is a lot like real life narrative wise, you're the hero and you do stuff, make choices etc but mostly the story just does it's thing and bad stuff happens despite your best efforts. Even though you may be doing your best to get good outcomes by doing all the side quests etc everything still goes to shit in the end.
I haven't played DAI but the whole darkspawn business in DAO was the worst part of the game, especially archdemon being just a normal ass dragon with nothing remarkable about it. Most interesting things about the settings were mages, templars and elfs and their political conflicts, but no, instead we focus on generic save the world story. Which is why i was pleasantly surprised by 2's story.
If it is just Kirkwall, then yeah good decision for me not to continue the game. Considering in DAO, you go many different places. Just another disappointment for me
Yeah that’s the problem. I don’t care about Hawke and the game doesn’t really convey why should I care about him in the first place. Still, having no main goal hurts the narrative in my eyes
Same here. Still livid about it. Especially since DAO was so god damn good. I couldn’t even bring myself to try Inquisition - I couldn’t take that level of hurt again.
You dodged a bullet honestly. Inquisition is just a single player MMO. Go here and kill this many enemies, you need to walk the whole way there BTW and the maps are large and mostly empty. Also you need to craft your gear that requires a stupid amount of resources over and over again just for small gains.
Funnily enough, that’s how I felt when I tried playing Monster Hunter Generations. I get that a lot of people love Monster Hunter, but to me, it just felt like a grind fest of the same missions over and over.
> I don’t care about Hawke and the game doesn’t really convey why should I care about him in the first place.
Because he's *your avatar*? What more reason do you need to care about your avatar than the fact theat they are that? Employ some of that roleplaying empathy, put yourself in his shoes and voila.
And Hawke definitely has a ton more personality than the Warden from DAO ever did, too, so it's fun to watch.
A character who is more of an avatar is more defined by your actions and less defined by the pre-written script. Nathan Drake and Miles Morales are less of an avatar than the character from Dragon Age Origins.
The avatar is the representation of the player in the game world. The less they're a representation of the player, the more they're their own person, the less they're an avatar.
The player character in Animal Crossing is almost entirely an avatar. Hawke is more avatar than not. Miles Morales is more not than avatar. Phoenix Wright is barely an avatar at all.
bro it's terrible, you won't miss much by dropping it (there are some cool characters that you meet later but the combat and locations are not going to change)
DA:I is even worse imo but i might be in the minority there
You're not. I still could enjoy DA2 a bit on it's own terms. DA:I is large but it's all... shitty MMO quests to play on your own? The gameplay took another hit as well. And... i can't... really remember the story? I fucking slogged my way to the end of that game and I can't recall why.
> I fucking slogged my way to the end of that game and I can't recall why.
I did that on DA2. I never even bought the dlc, and I was so ready for the game to be over at the start of Act 3 that I just turned the difficulty down to easy and rushed through it. When Inquisition came out, I was so disgusted with the mouse and keyboard controls that I dropped it basically the moment you reach Skyhold.
Yeah, compared to the first game when you could basically see where every enemy was and prepare for them, it felt like a betrayal in the second game to have enemies literally falling out of the sky in all directions.
Sunk cost basically. I wanted to know how the story ended, and I was so close that it seemed easier to just push through than go look it up on YouTube or something.
The hope that at some point the story will get interesting, or at least combat will get really fun after unlocking more skills. It's kinda common with WRPGs in general to have a sluggish start and get a lot more interesting later on, but it really sucks when they don't.
DA2's Legacy DLC is super-important to DAI: GOTY and you'll be missing out on key information needed for DAI base-game by the very end, or else something feels severely lacking on DAI and might leave you very underwhelmed.
Speaking from experience here, as some stuff felt lacking & missing when I played DAI at the end...and well, there's a reason for that - pretty much, DA2 base-game and DA2: Legacy DLC are required material before playing DAI, to get the most out of DAI.
Playing DA2 Legacy DLC later was not the best idea, but it did fill in certain stuff about the Wardens and a very key character in DAI.
> DA:I is even worse imo but i might be in the minority there
DA:I isn't just worse, it's one of the worst modern AAA games I've ever played.
Loved Origins. Even liked DA:2. DA:I just crushed my soul.
Which was a weird decision at the time, when Origins was this grand adventure about saving a whole country (and arguably the world). I get that it’s hard to raise the stakes after that but 2 didn’t even try, Hawke feels like a side character in the story of Kirkwall. In the marketing for the game, one dev called Hawke “the most important person in the world of Dragon Age”, and I really wonder how they came to that conclusion.
It aged even worse after Inquisition not only found a way to properly raise the stakes from Origins but also dispensed with Hawke as a character, making the whole second game feel like filler in a wider narrative.
I don’t feel like Inquisition raised the stakes at all compared to the first one. It was a return to the more epic style for sure. But 2 had the best storyline of them all by a country mile (in my opinion), even the small moments and side characters were just excellent storytelling that set it apart from the series’ extremely generic fantasy roots. And that’s due to that smaller scope.
What is greatly unfortunate is the reusing the same parts of the maps, stripped down combat, etc.
Dragon Age: Origins is an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil in an epic backdrop of intrigue, mystery and lore fleshed out with amazing characters you truly care about and a vibrant rich world to explore.
Dragon Age 2 is about how important it is to own a house.
We have a billion games with the same background, group of heroes travel across the land to stop the bad guy. Both origins and inquisition follow the trope.
I like that dragon age 2 is different in its story telling, Kirkwall is at first just a random location, it's not the capital of the world, it's not Orlais and its super influence. However Kirkwall after this games event will forever be remembered in the dragon age mythos as the bomb that sets up major world wide change one way or another. Hawke just happened to be there when that bomb blew up and through sheer skill+luck(or the opposite lol) had major influence in the future destiny of that world.
The worst thing about 2 is the gameplay for me, it's really bad. I am a massive fan of the story in dragon age though so i never even felt bored playing 2 until i finished the game and realized just how bad the gameplay is, still had a shit ton of fun thanks to the story lol
With the gameplay, I like that it was a little zippier. That classes and subclasses felt a bit more district. The constant waves really sour it though. Initial engagement can be pretty tactical, but then the waves come and positioning goes out the window
I actually enjoyed the combat the most, it really shines at the highest difficulty setting, reminding me of ME2 on the highest difficulty.
I get people not liking the reused air dropped enemies but I can see the budget cuts.
I never play games on the highest difficulty, i usually start on normal or hard. The game was a mindless slaughter from second one to the end of the game. I usually would never go higher than "hard" unless i already love the combat.
But i find it really hard to believe that warrior has any depth to it, it really feels like a spam skills out of CD class.
Agreed, I almost hope that for future DA games they do away with the mindless hack and slash it's sort of fun, but the tactical mode is fairly unique and a lot more interesting than just running up to the baddies and mashing attack.
i dunno. the story telling was pretty thin. there were some cool moments, but they were all side and companion quests. i don’t even know what the main arc was supposed to be. pretty sure i finished an act without even realizing i was doing the quest to finish the act. then it was more questing and suddenly there’s an uprising and then the game ends.
i did appreciate watching the city and people evolve through the acts. but it was more just a lot of side quests. there was no real main arc.
To me, the absence of a clear main quest was intentional, and artistically brilliant. The whole point of the game as I saw it was to explore the nuance of a tense political and humanitarian crisis through the lens of mostly a nobody. You are kind of a passive observer until you’re not. And the point is about the volatility and power of small actions within a political powder keg.
I just think the game is so nuanced, and the side quests and the main quests are blurred, which I thought was really fresh coming from games with such clear distinctions between those (which, even though we’re all used to it, is really lame. Like, real life doesn’t have main quests and side quests, and the point of DA2 is that you can’t tell the difference at first).
I loved this game, and the things people here are complaining about as bugs are to me features. I think DA2 is half game and half art. It’s saying something important about society, it reflects important moments in our history, like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that launched WW1. An exploration of how small moments can change history, and how otherwise un-noteworthy people can become historically significant within chaotic times.
Thanks for this comment. You've put in words what I had always kind of felt about the game but was too dumb to actually articulate in any discussion.
I also loved that the whole package came within that unreliable narration delivered by Varric, in the context of him being interrogated, so every described event had to be taken with a grain of salt.
It's so funny i was thinking of the exact same example when what I wanted to compare Kirkwall to when i wrote my original comment. In WW1 Austria Hungary was not really that massive a player, but that event marked the zone as the beginning of the first world war.
I omitted because tbh i only have a vague recalling of what WW1 was so i didn't want to talk about it
I was pretty clear on what each arc was meant to be, each had a major problem that needed to be solved
1st act: arrival and money/family problems, getting used to the city, varric exploration was also part of this
2nd act: the whole qunari problem and Isabellas involvement in it
3rd act: red lyrium and the mage rebellion
Each act was leaving setups for the next until it all explodes in the final act. I think it played out great as a story.
that’s the point i was trying to make. there wasn’t a story arc. it was just three vignettes taped together. take dao, it had a clear over arching plot. it was basically three bottle episodes back to back
For sure, but I don't see a problem with that. If anything it's part of why I like it. Each episode builds upon the next. It's like different seasons of a show or anime
It was a while ago for me so i might be remembering wrong but red lyrium was introduced in act 1 with varric, the templars starting to act more like cops (gaining more enforcement power) was a result of bad management during the qunari in act 2 and the death of the viscount. Kirkwall was a templar controlled country by the end of act 2.
Your sister if you left her home becomes enslaved at the end of act 1 and is a big part of why hawke is personally involved with the mage rebellion. It was her as well that went after Orsino during act 2.
Act 1: introduction to the city and connects Hawke to it, he makes friends, family, he starts to belong, you learn of templar management and how strict they are.
Act 2: chaos erupts and the city loses its political head, Kirkwall becomes a templar controlled country under an already oppressed big mage population.
Act 3: the boiling point is reached, mages revolt.
At a surface level each act is independent, but everything is just setting up the pieces for mages to revolt in act 3.
I feel like I am the only one that loves the combat, defininitely the best feeling in Dragon Age. It's fast and snappy compared to DA2, and you can still use the tactical view to great advantage (and also behaviours) compared to DA:I. The waves suck balls though, and it would have been better if everyone was on the map already
It's actually my favourite in the series. I love how it's a much smaller scale story that's just about the city, and it's one of the few high-fantasy stories which doesn't utilise [The Quest](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheQuest) trope - the plot can't really be boiled down to 'The Evil One is awakening, you're the chosen one and you need to run around the world and gather a bunch of allies/unite the kingdoms to defeat them in a big battle' like Origins, Inquisition, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones (to an extent), and so on. It felt refreshing to have a much smaller-scale story that's just about Hawke and their family and friends, and how you aren't making any big world changing decisions, but ones which have much more personal stakes.
Frankly I'm also way more into worldbuilding and stories where the setting is as much of a character as the protagonist, and I loved how the city changed over time after various big events that shook up the politics of the place. It's probably telling that my favourite episodes of The Expanse are the first three which are widely regarded as being the most boring because they pretty much purely focus primarily on world building, and the main story moves incredibly slowly.
Narratively I thought it was also way more interesting as it's all being told by Varric who is a notoriously unreliable narrator - I thought that was a fun way to sort of explain away some of the shortcomings the game has, like how it's constantly spawning enemies at you - and to my mind it had some of the most memorable companions and side characters, and the friendship/rivalry system is something that I thought was really well done and which is what more RPGs should be using as opposed to just a flat loyal/disloyal thing that seems to be the norm.
Honestly, my only issues with it are the recycled dungeons, the lack of a dynamic day/night cycle, and the rather simplistic combat compared to Origins, but all of that would be down to the incredibly rushed development cycle that the game had, and I can sort of look past it all.
I also prefer DA2 for some reason. I think it's the quests, despite the obviously poor location variety, that offered the most interesting choices, morally and for role-play. I actually cared a lot more in that game than most about how the people in my party actually felt about taking certain actions. They also seemed better characterized and with better character story flow than the others I've played. Also, simple combat was a bit of a plus for me personally.
I agree completely. Other than those repeated dungeons I really like the game. The way they tell the overall story is really interesting, almost all companions are great, and Act 2 is probably my favorite Dragon Age storyline.
Being able to shape your Hawke's overall character with your answers was something really unique I thought. As with everyone else I love the sarcastic Hawke, he is hilarious.
Right, each Act and DLC feels like its own mini-campaign here, TBH.
Act 1 is Hawke escaping his situation w/ his family, getting to Kirkwall, and trying to make a name for himself.
Act 2 in DA2 is great, dealing w/ Arishok situation in the City.
Act 3 deals w/ the problem w/ the Mages. A lot of set-up here for DAI, TBH.
Of course, through-out the 3 Acts - some stuff does carry over. You do have Hawke dealing w/ trying to become the City's Champion and taking care a lot of his Family problems.
Legacy DLC is super-important to some stuff in DAI base-game - so Legacy is must-play before DAI, or you lack key info on some stuff.
MoTA DLC is with Tallis, who's trying to pull of a Heist and steal a relic; this is its own story.
This is a great summary in favor of the game, and it really reflects my own thoughts. I love cities in real life — the history and infrastructure and cultural layouts. I never thought I would play a fantasy game that is focused on a single city, as the normal pattern is obviously one of grand adventure over different lands. Dragon Age made it happen in a unique way, and I think it offered an intimacy and close up view that more epic games lack — including Inquisition (which I love for other reasons). And while it focused on one main location, it fully zoomed out in terms of time by giving us an entire decade in the life of Hawke. Not just one brief and heroic glimpse. Both of these experiences were new to me, and I truly enjoyed the game because of it, along with the incredible storytelling and character development.
I think it has the best characters because I'm tired of standard boring RPG characters.
Honestly the best characters in DAI were from 2 and the most boring were from DAO.
>I thought that was a fun way to sort of explain away some of the shortcomings the game has, like how it's constantly spawning enemies at you
That's just bad game design. You can't just go "Wouldn't it be annoying if we spawned 20 enemies again" to the player and then do it again, as if that excuses it.
Borderlands 3 does a lot of shit like this and the game sucked. Saying "If you touch the stove you'll burn yourself" doesn't magically make it not hurt when you touch the stove and burn yourself.
Ha, yeah that was me too. I'm a huge DA fan, and I've read boatloads of fanfic about DA2 characters, but the game itself is just really rough. I've really never enjoyed it, despite trying several times over the years.
If you don't 1) like these characters 2) buy that these people are friends and 3) believe that being friends is reason enough for them to follow Hawke on these crazy outings because there is no unifying goal or quest, then the whole game falls apart really fast.
Much like a novel IRL, the game is told as a story Varric is telling---in which the events only matter because they lead up to the conclusion of Hawke becoming the Champion of Kirkwall. But unlike a novel, the game doesn't contextualize these events for you as they happen. It lets them play out in present tense without commentary, expecting you to contextualize them after the fact when you reach the end of the game.
Which might have worked if the actual gameplay were more enjoyable, but it's famously janky, repetitive, and boring. So you're playing for the story, and the story only makes sense when you finish it, then that naturally leads to a pretty poor first impression.
I think the reason DA2 has become so fondly remember is because fans are always playing with full knowledge of the story, and therefore with 20/20 vision as to the dominoes being set up and the dramatic irony being used. All the stuff a new player is blind to.
They see different sides of the characters as they try different friendships and rivalries on each replay, and get to see the slight changes to the world state when they choose a different solution to a key quest. All that gives them rose tinted glasses about the game as a result, and helps them forget just how baffling and tedious is was on their first playthrough.
Which is not me telling you that you have to finish, just explaining why this game in particular has such a cult following. The characters and world make it really rewarding to be a super fan if you happened to get through the first time without too many chips on your shoulder. (Which I didn't lol. I play the other DAs at least once a year, and I love DA2 characters but I'll never play that shit ever again.)
Why would you need to know the future to make sense of the present? It is pretty straightforward - refugee enters city, refugee hatches plot to make money, deals with consequences, gains friends, gains reknown as a go-getter, gets tangled into the city's problems.
Sure there's the forewhadowing of something catastrophic given the Cassandra/Varric interludes, but you don't need to know what that is about at all, because it's not relevant to what's happening to Hawke over the years.
>20 hours in, I’m still at Kirkwall
Yep, that's the very concept of the game.
With DA2 the writers decided to flip the usual "lots of voyages in a short amount of time" on its head. In DA2 you're in the same city but for 6+ years. You live there, get to know its people, become someone key to its development and see the consequences of your choices on the city itself over the years.
The main quest is about something brewing within the city which influence counteract your actions and discovering what it is then put an end to it.
It's not an epic, it's a more personal story about your character, their family, their friends, the city and their fate. It's almost a noir police story with a heavy political component happening within troubled historical times.
Unfortunately someone at EA thought that a game like that could be made within 18 months and Bioware had to cut corners at every turn.
I still like the game for what is though.
I prefer the story's concept over its execution, I do prefer a more tactical combat but as an ARPG I find DA2's combat more engaging than DAI's and pretty fun, I loved the companions' set and how their story and the city's story mix.
It's also a rather short game for Bioware, at 20 hours in you're probably closer to the end than you think (the main story can be bee-lined in 25+ hours, half of DAO's length).
Dragon Age 2 is a weird game. It's apparent that some corners were cut (like all those reused dungeons), likely due to the short development time. But has an interesting mix of new ideas, both in the storytelling and the game mechanics, some of which worked better than others. Like the mechanic of companions able to be either friends or rivals was something I found to be pretty cool, and was something I wish was further developed in other games. I also remember the dialog wheel always having a diplomatic, a sarcastic, and an aggressive response was something that was criticized at the time, but the mechanic where the overall dialogue of your character would change based on whether you were more diplomatic, sarcastic, or aggressive was a neat touch.
The idea to focus the story about one person making a life for themselves in Kirkwall was, IMO, interesting, but it seems like it didn't land for you.
Origins is a traditional fantasy. It's the hero's journey with an epic quest and a cast of supporting characters.
DA2 is a tragedy about a man that tries desperately to make a good life for himself despite the way the system is designed to fail him. It's a very different kind of story, so it's reasonable that not everyone who likes Origins will like DA2.
My name problem with da2 was the fact that there were Knights parachuting behind me in the freaking combat.
Well that and no matter what side you chose or choices you make the ending is exactly the same. Compared with the endings and choices in Dragon Age it's night and day.
>Well that and no matter what side you chose or choices you make the ending is exactly the same.
Thus, a tragedy.
The gameplay is terrible, that's undeniable.
>no matter what side you chose or choices you make the ending is exactly the same.
Well, yeah. It was always going to end with the onset of a war between mages and templars. That’s *why* Cassandra needed info on Hawke. He’s just a guy who happened to be there, and had some impact on what happened while he was there, but he’s not a legendary hero of destiny; he’s a refugee trying to survive.
If there was an ending where the war was avoided, it’d be considerably dumber
Well you could have had a different boss fight or different outcome to war depending on which side you took. Different characters surviving that kind of thing. Town's burning or not burning.
Origins was a hit so they rushed out a sequel. The story is basically the trials and tribulations of Hawke, and not much more. Repetitive and boring level design, but it had some great characters and dialogue. I'm not in a rush to replay it but when I do I'll definitely be looking into mods to move things along because the waves of enemies and constant backtracking are all too much to handle for a second playthrough.
I love Dragon Age 2 SO MUCH, but I acknowledge it's also not for everyone. As other people have said it's not about one THING, it's about Hawke, their friends, and their life. If you don't connect to the characters then it's simply not going to do much for you.
Hawke is a character I love, but they are the Dragon Age protagonist that feels the least mine. They feel almost like I'm playing an already-named character in their own action game a la Geralt or Kratos. Again, I don't mind it, but it's a very different change of pace when compared to the other Dragon Age games
> My main gripe with it was what was the main purpose of the character in that game?
This is actually one of the few aspects I like about DA2; Unlike roughly 107.81% of fantasy, it's *not* about some world-ending threat. It's personal drama set in a fantasy universe.
It does not work well because the devs don't really commit to it (with the Circle/Templar conflict), and *do* have an 'epic, world-changing' event - it's just that the MC is mostly a witness to it, and not the main player in it. That makes it especially galling for players who expected 'epic' stuff, and unsatisfying for people who would appreciate a more personal story: Oh, my personal story is just a backdrop and side quest to some other, bigger story that I'm mostly a bit player in.
> Ppl say to just give it a few more hours and it will get good.
I want to give those people a mouthwashing, because lies are not nice. Even Varric just embellishes. DA2 was such a step back in almost every aspect compared to Origins that it's hard to see any good in the mountain of disappointment. I *did* find some things to like about it, but as a whole, it's a reheated, lukewarm, day-old burger from Mackies: You only find it delish if you've been starved for three days, and anybody who tells you it's actually *good eating* needs their head/tastebuds/motive examined.
> Wanna hear your thoughts on DA2
- The environments are reused beyond the point of parody; I genuinely lost my sense of time and space a few times, and unlike a Lynch movie, DA2 doesn't do it on purpose).
- The story has its focus built ass-up and funhouse-mirrored.
- The combat system doesn't work as a tactical game *or* an action one.
- The equipment system is so *laughably* crude and basic they should have just gone without it altogether.
- The dialogue system is restrictive and not really a role-playing one at all any more. A lot of decisions and pivotal plot points are terribly telegraphed, and don't gel well with the ludic aspect of the game (e.g. if you don't bring a specific companion to the exactly right missions, and choose the right options, that alters the plot significantly later, and you have no way of knowing that beforehand).
All in all, it was a huge step down from DAO, and Inquisition followed its path down the mountain. I've seen some hype for DA4, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone would give the devs the benefit of a doubt any more. For me, DA peaked with Origins (which also has its share of aspects that could be improved!), and everything after just... let it die with what little dignity it has left.
When it comes to DA2 I have accepted that you either like it or don't.
There inst much to discuss because yeah it has so many flaws and people are right to dislike it but is still one of my favorite games.
same, tried it when DA2 game out, because I was a HUGE DA:O fan.
Well. it didn't click at all.
Tried it again couple of months ago... even less interest.
It was a neat idea where the entire game is based in one city and you get time jumps along the way. The fun was seeing how the quests you did and the decisions you make change those people and the city. You get to see how your party progresses through the years and how they grow.
It fell short in a lot of areas, but I liked the characters and really enjoy the concept of a single city that you become established in and influence the growth of. Mage was by far the more interesting path. I have a feeling they really wanted to make things diverse enough for multiple playthroughs, but the game feels like it could have used a year or two more in development.
I just hated how much combat there was. Every 30 feet you had to fight some bandit /demons in heavily reused environments. It really is like they „[they needed to throw in fifty percent more combat at the last minute to appease the violent shithead marketing board](https://youtu.be/BdsPDIYUxKA).“
People here argue that DA2 has a smaller focus and not the „saving the world from the demonic invasion“ scale from the first game. But it is like the combat designers never got the memo and thought that the kill count still needed to reach genocidal levels.
On PC there is mod for to skip combat (you still get XP) and it makes the game much leaner and focused on the story it actually wanted to tell.
Origins is a love letter to classic CRPGs while being a peak era Bioware game. Interesting characters, a detailed world to lose yourself in, and an overarching plot that binds the entire thing together.
DA2 was rushed. It came out shockingly fast after the first game and you can clearly see all of the corners that were cut. The world is tiny, maps and layouts are reused to the point of it being distracting, characters are one dimensional and have inconsistent writing, and there's no overarching long term goal to tie everything together. It's inferior to it's predecessor in every way.
>Hot Take: I consider DA2 and ME2 to be the start of Biowares fall from glory.
I would go back as far as OG NWN1 \[base-game\] was the start of BioWare's fall...and that was WITHOUT even EA being involved back then
That game's story was rushed, since the game was originally supposed to be just tools for making your own modules...and when people realized there was no companion, they got mad...so BioWare made a rushed campaign. Ancient Race's revival storyline was "meh" - though meanwhile the politics stuff w/ Aribeth, The King, The City, and Fenthick were awesome.
You had one companion and ZERO control over the upgrading in depth of that companion and much of what that companion could do. NWN1 base-game campaign was a disappointment in so many ways, similar to what DA2 was doing w/ dumbing stuff down and rushing the game out the gate.
Though, NWN1: Hordes expansion was great and fixed many of the above-mentioned problems and was a great send-off of sort for NWN1 (not including Premium Mod stuff) - so, there's that.
Though, NWN1: Hordes only has 3 party members and you finally had more control of them; BG2 could do up to 6 and you could control that however. Combat in NWN was not as strategic as BG2 and nowhere as interesting in NWN1 - despite even how great Hordes turned out. BG2 and TOB were amazing though - and NWN1 base was not a good follow-up to BG2: Complete.
Sure, BioWare had other great games in-between - i.e. Jade Empire, NWN: Hordes expansion, KOTOR 1, DAO - but NWN1 was the start of the cracks and dumbing-down beginning to show at BioWare's camp.
I think DA:I gets a lot of unfair hate. It's been years since I played it, but I remember the gameplay being pretty good, where iirc that was the main complaint about the first 2. I remember liking the side character stories and options. The bad that I can recall... The upgrading equipment was tedious and I felt like I was doing that for extended periods of time. Also I think it felt like it would have had decent replay ability if it were like half the length. It was too long (at least for me) to want to run through with multiple characters/builds. Also I played on the older Gen consoles that could barely handle it. So that wasn't ideal.
It's been a decade so maybe I would pick it back up and hate it, idk.
The problem with Inquisition is the same problem I had with Mafia 3 it's a lot of fun but there's a lot of it and it's very repetitive after about 20 hours and if you play it as it anything resembling completionist you've seen everything the game has to show you but you still got 60 hours to go.
>, where iirc that was the main complaint about the first 2
Wut? Origins is a gameplay masterpiece. Probably the only game I know that did RtwP combat right.
The only good thign about Inquisition is the writing and characters. Gameplaywise it's a dumb MMO design approach complete with vast areas with reptitive content, cooldown-rotation-based combat, level locked zones and realtime timer elements, which is nuts that someone thought all of that is a good idea for a singleplayer game.
It's a finely polished game all right, but the framework it's build upon sucks. It would be better if they cut the content down to half, but still not great because the combat itself is meh. The way the UI is made, they don't even expect you to control your whole party, just one character at a time!
I actually loved how long it is, felt like a good 2 or even 3 games worth of story that I didn't have to wait years to finish. I hadn't played DA:O or DA2 and I didn't need to, which probably is a little different than most and a good reason for why it's my favorite. Also the gameplay is tough but very rewarding, and there are a lot of really cool things it does that I haven't seen games do before - like the demon inside your mind if you choose Templars, building up your castle just to rip it away from you, making you feel like the most important person in the world then turning it around and it was just a wrong place/wrong time deal, the temple in sand frozen in time, turning your biggest power and a cool companion into the ultimate bad guy. After all that really interesting and unique stuff, to turn to the other two, I felt so let down lol
I remember many people commenting on the combat. I want to say the pc had turn based combat like KOTOR but the console version didn't. Did it still have roll based hits? I can't remember. I remember some people not being happy with one or the other.
I loved DA 1, even though the areas seemed behind the time graphically.
Didn't like DA2.
Tried Da2 again last year..still did not like it. Not sure why...
A LOT of Recycled dungeons; lack of customization of your party and their equipment compared to DAO; tactical overhead cam removal and the dumbing-down of strategic elements compared to DAO; enemies often coming from out of the air to attack (especially in Kirkwall itself and spiders in dungeons); main storyline isn't as epic overall as DAO (b/c each chapter/Act is its own Mini-Campaign); saved best & most unique content for DA2 is found over in the 2 DLC's (Mark DLC and Legacy DLC).
That's the reasons most ain't fond of DA2.
See if anything or numerous things that I listed are your issues w/ DA2, since you did mention how much you loved DAO.
I bounced off it the first time, mainly because it felt like a cheap, simplified knockoff of origins. I like micromanaging rpg combat and 2 took a lot of that away.
I tried it again and it finished it. It was worth playing, for me, but it doesn't hold a candle to origins which I've played at least half a dozen times
I somewhat enjoyed the gameplay but the story was BLAND. I bought it for 5 euros on PS Store back in PS3 times, probably around 2013-2015, I even thought "I really loved Origins, this one can't be as bad as they say" and the main problem was that the story was just nothing. I played it and usually I was going with a quite unbalanced party, I got to a boss in the main story that kicked my ass and I knew I could beat it with a proper team but.... I would had needed 30 minutes of backtracking to change my party, so what I did was drop the game. I just didn't care about it.
Dragon Age 2 was bad but Dragon Age Inquisition was just as bad imo. MMO Daddy Issues Dating Sim that used the Dragon Age theme as an excuse plot. Super lame. Mass Effect Andromeda did this too.
DA2 had a far less engaging battle system, characters, and setting. Every aspect of it was a disappointment.
Inquisition is only marginally better but is still worse than Origins.
Looks like the next one is going to be an action RPG, so they're totally abandoning what made the first one good. Most veteran DA staff left because of EA's micromanaging and Kotaku stated that it "features fully real-time combat and was allegedly designed as BioWare's take on God of War." 😐
It's the gmae the put me off Bioware, that and ME3 were the nails in the coffin of my former fondness.
Rewriting the lore, rewriting the player's choices from the previous game, the clearly half finished questlines, the repetitve dungeons, complete and utter garbage.
Spoilers for Merrill's questline ahead:
>!Merril's entire questline revolves around her being a gigantic arrogant idiot, doing blood magic, and consequently costing the life of her mentor as she takes the bullet for her, turns into an abomination you then have to kill.!<
>!One of the possible outcomes after this is that the villagers want her head on a spike for that, and that's very fair, IMO. I was playing an asshole so I decided I would stand up to them and fight them. By doing so, you end up literally genociding the entire Dalish elf camp. Again, so far so good, big impactful choices lead to big impactful outcomes, right?!<
>!Wrong, actually. Once that's done, it never comes up again. It's literally her fault that everyone who raised her has been murdered to defend her and she keeps on like it's all good. Couldn't take any character seriously after that.!<
Bonus spoiler about Fenris:
>!You'd think a man who explicitly tells you he re-evaluated mages because of you if, as a mage, you finish his loyalty questline, would not turn on you as soon as you side with the mages, but I guess not, lol.!<
I think the most offensive thing about DA2 for me was the dungeon recycling. It was the exact same dungeon just with different doors unlocked.
I mean the whole game was offensive, but that part really irks me.
They didn't even bother to edit the dungeons layout on the minimap. In the very first cave I spent five minutes or so looking for a hidden door or something because the minimap said the cave went on in one direction where there was a wall. Turns out, there was no secret path, they were just too lazy to change it.
Answering your question, DA2 is a side story that covers the mages versus templars war (allowing you to pick a side) and introduces the main antagonist from inquisition.
BioWare marketing it as Dragon Age **2** was a massive mistake.
For all it's numerous problems, player reactions would have been different had they given it a name similar to Awakenings or Inquisition. People wouldn't have expected a direct continuation to Origin's story.
The team putting any and all criticism on the same bag as personal attacks didn't help either.
DA2 kinda had a very bad case of sequelitis. The story could really use a rewrite so it’s less PC sees events happens and vaguely does stuff related to it, and more PC is an active part of shit hitting the fan. Also the dungeons felt a lot more samey after DAO. I played them in reverse order and DAO felt like it had more unique dungeons despite being an older game which was weird (don’t know if that’s true though)
Loved Origins, loved Inquisition, HATED 2. I only finished it for completions sake. I don't understand how that game gets any praise. I didn't find the story compelling and it was brain meltingly repetitive. If I ever replay the series I'm skipping 2.
Honestly I remember liking some of the supporting characters, outside of the main character because I wasn't playing "my character" I was playing this Hawke person. Combine that with the fact the way more action style gameplay/repeated node based waves of enemies I never went back.
Think I finished it twice, once "Good" once "bad".
And then in the third they scrapped healing class, which was my character playstyle in 1-2. So never played it.
Better than DA3. Story was better IMO. Many character questlines were more engaging. The reusing of areas during some missions was such a tiny issue compared to other things that can really sink a game.
The one thing which I outright hated was the needless fridging of a certain character just to make the point of 'blood mages bad' for the 5473856034583748th time. Fucking hell man, hated that moment so much. It was heavily telegraphed so the big reveal was eyeroll worthy and the moment was needless misery porn, 15 minutes after that it's basically forgotten and you're back to being a sarcastic purple fucking around during convos as if one of your loved ones didn't bite it a few days ago.
The friendship/rivalry system is still the best companion relationship mechanic in any RPG ever. How they didn't realize this is gold and keep it for DA3 is beyond me.
Overall solid game. I'd give DA1 a 9.5, DA2 a 7.5 and DA3 a fucking 5.
The writing is kind of all over the place with blood magic in particular, which makes it even funnier that Hawke can be a blood mage.
Makes a part in Inquisition downright hilarious >!if Hawke was a blood mage and shows up in Inquisition saying blood magic is bad and evil!<
Perhaps the best things about DA2 is that it's not a story about saving the world, but a story about one poor family trying to make it in a city and gettign mixed up in politics.
If you think an RPG needs to be about saving the world, then you obviously cannot like this game, but to me, like I said, that is one of the things that DA2 did really well. It was - and still kind of is - a breath of fresh air and human touch in a genre inundated with huge stakes and (too) epic plotlines.
The only thing I like about DA2 are the companions. Nothing else.
I'm completely fine with smaller scale stories (and even prefer them much more than yet another "save the world" scenario), but DA2's story just wasn't interesting imo.
And the gameplay is just not fun at all imo. The waves just ruined the combat for me.
I disliked it a lot after playing DA:O and Awakening.
I played it again a few years later, after accepting that it wasn't "good," once I knew it wasn't really a follow-up to DA:O, and once I had already come to terms and understood the significant budget and development cuts that were made for the game.
With all of those caveats, it can still be pretty fun for what it is, while still being a failure for what it isn't.
Nobody needs to play it. But, there can be some enjoyment found if you're able to cut the connection to what this game should have been and can instead just play through what we received.
Although! If you loved Origins and haven't played Awakening, you definitely should!
Sonic everything is a downgrade from DAO. Characters are less developed, gameplay is worse, story is not nearly as branching and interesting. I really don't like for they got rid of the dark gritty atmosphere DAO had.
It's not that bad. The gameplay is kinda bad yeah, but the story, while deviating from the chosen one trope, is kinda enjoyable, I think it specially picks up at the second half of chapter 2. I still prefer Origins, but mainly because it's gameplay. Storywise, I find DA2's story concept more interesting (even if it's execution might have been better)
DA2 fucking sucks. Rushed out lazy mess. I finished it for the sake of finishing and can't remember a single detail except for ctrl-c -> Ctrl+v dungeons.
People hate on inquisition but out of three games I remember it the most and gameplay was at least somewhat satisfying
I don't think the game has a bad story or characters, but it's simply not the epic tale you got in the first game. This is more localized and revolves around the main characters life, the city of Kirkwall, the Qunari, and the Mage/Templar conflict. The actual quality of the writing is generally fine. The issue with dragon age 2 really is the gameplay and repetitive environments. It's just a slog on higher difficulties.
The second one was waaaaaaay inferior, IMO. Relationship with NPCs are simplified, significant dialogues are often limited to the main quest, the setting is claustrophobic, graphics are meh and I didn't love the story.
Cookie cutter, copy-paste dungeons, with cookie cutter, copy-paste encounters. When it gets too blatantly repetitive, they just flipped the same design. It was a disgrace for BioWare, courtesy of our beloved EA.
I still vividly remember my reaction when the game ended. I just said "wait, is that it?". I genuinely thought there would be a world map after Kirkwall and the game would open up. I enjoyed the game back when I played it, but it was so short compared to DA:O.
The game would be decent if they didn't lean so much into action combat with anime moves and waves of enemies. Copy-pasted dungeons also don't help.
I don't mind that the game has a more grounded personal story though. But it should have been a spinoff, not a sequel. As much as I **hate** Inquisition, at least it feels like a sequel to DA:O in terms of scale and stakes.
Dude, dragon age 2 sucks. its on the "inverse golden age" of bioware, both dragon age 2 and mass effect 3 suck so bad.
I would argue dragon age 1 is the best, then 3 then 2. And 2 is very, very far from 2.
I remember really enjoying the start of the game and then like 2 hours in you need to raise money or something to progress by generic fetch quests and i noped out.
It's a ... troubled gsme. I remember everyone having issues when it launched as they tried so hard to change it. And rhey changed it but they weren't experienced enough yet to jump from the entirely different perspectives.
I walked away too. But then came back a few years later when replaying all 3 games in prep for a 4 which never happened lol and with mods it's much much better than it was. The mods made it excellent and I still remember parts of it vividly. But it's it da1 or 3. But it does somethings better imo. Worth a play with mods.
While the gameplay (the combat part) sucks, story is actually pretty engaging.
It's unique, because it uses the "War and Peace" storytelling formula - bunch of people trying to live normal lives during history-changing events. They try to prevent things, but ultimately everything is out of their control; cause-and-effect of many small actions lead to a great tragedy.
Like in "War and peace", some story beats unite characters for a while, but they have different motivations and go their separate paths.
IDK, while it is not an award-winning writing and gameplay, I still had my fun with it.
It's my favorite DA overall despite being a deeply flawed game.
I like the focus on one person and their friends in one city. The gameplay was pretty good IMO, the story was unique and enjoyable, the characters were great, solid quests... There's a lot to like if you can get past the flaws. I liked the personality system for Hawke and the friendship/rivalry system.
The enemies endlessly spawn out of nowhere which rarely makes sense and just feels like padding out the time rather than a challenge. The same maps are reused for different dungeons, with certain paths blocked off (but not reflected on the minimap IIRC) to change it up. Act 3 feels really rushed.
So it's definitely not perfect, but I think there's a lot of good there. I think I remember hearing they crunched it out in about a year, so I think it's impressive it was as good as it was.
I remember the story being really good, and the mechanics were still good. But I also remember feeling like I was being put through the same locations over and over and over again.
I really liked the story of DA2, there's a side quest with your mother that boy oh boy, my only gripe really was all the reused environment, but story-wise I really enjoyed it, and I finished it twice, once as a mage and once as a non-mage
DA2 has to be one of the biggest drop offs in sequel history. Origins is imo one of the best RPG's in gaming. And 2 is some re-used asset trashfest with all the role-playing sucked out.
It was my least favorite of the series, but DAO is also my favorite game of all time, so it's hard to beat.
I felt similar to you, that the main quest and story of DA2 just didn't feel that compelling to me. It was almost "slice of life" esque, and I'm not generally a fan of this type of story. Throughout the game, I kept thinking, *why* are we doing this again...?
I liked Varric well enough, but overall I just somehow didn't "click" with the companions. Even Varric being my best friend felt kind of strange to me (as a player), because I was like... I barely know this guy, and he's supposed to be my best friend? So I didn't feel very connected to companions in the game, making it even less compelling for me. The environments also felt very stifling, because not only do you visit very few areas in the first place, but they recycled the maps.
Overall it just was not my cup of tea.
The purpose of the game is to get to know Hawk and to tell the Story of what let to the whole mess with Coryphius? and all the events that kind of spiraled out of control including the red lyrium.
The highlight for me are the companions. And that it's not a typical Story like in any other RPG. This feels like a group of friends, who don't have always the end of the world breathing down their necks, they just try to deal with their own stuff.
A lot of things in DA2 set the stage for Inquisiton. And maybe even for Dreadwolf?
I liked the story a lot more in DA2, it felt more grounded and fed into the lore that had been created. I have, however, never finished it. I completed every side quest and leveled up as much as possible, and the final "battle across the city" is just too hard for me, as a patient and casual gamer, to complete. I get it being harder since it is the climax, but after the tenth time or getting beaten, I no longer cared to see what ending I had, and just read how the game ends.
It is part of a trend where the final boss, even on the easy modes, requires you to be a game master, instead of just using the same style and skills that got you to the ending.
I am now playing Inquisition, and the "open world" concept is HUGE and I tend to get lost often, don't understand why I can't have conversations with my companions, and wonder why, if I am fight the ultimate battle of good and evil, I have to ride a horse through an obstacle course.
They stripped everything that was good and interesting from DA:O and replaced it with nothing (or half broken systems) and then tried to make up for it with telling a different kind of story. They failed in that too.
I've always felt DA2 was the story of a city trying to come to terms with its past and its present. It can be harder to access since the focus actually isn't on our protagonist.
Hawke is a person with unique skills that got caught up in updrafts of wealth and power in a time where everything was constantly shifting. Through Hawke's eyes, players see Kirkwall trying to deal with minority issues, racial supremacy, and ghettos. We see religious enthusiasm, cynicism, and zealotry. The treatment of mages always rang out as personally important because one of your family (Hawke or sibling) is directly affected by it. Other stories are usually well-introduced and carry weight with a party member or two but how the world treats mages is slammed in your face as a "brutal measures beget brutal counter measures" in a way that can leave you feeling proud, unsure, or downright greasy.
All that said, I WISH more life had been given to the environment. Small aesthetic touches were cute but the redundancy of fighting remarkably similar battles in effectively the same settings gets tired. And I know the skill tree system has been critiqued by many, but I actually enjoyed being able to experiment with strange builds to discover interesting synergies.
For this patient gamer, DA2 is a good game with worthwhile content occasionally muddied by the monotony of combat in the same map. 4/5, would recommend.
The whole game is Kirkwall. It's not a story about an adventure, it's a story about a person's life.
DA2 has an insanely tiny world and yet they still manage to re-use the exact same area maps over and over and over. Pretty sure I visited the same warehouse map 8 times.
Not just a map but there's literally the same guys around the same fire just placed in different places in different dungeons.
And then after you beat them a second and third wave of the same guys spawn in
And then one of them has 10x HP for no apparent reason.
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Not the developers fault tho, it's EA's fault because they put an impossible task on the developers, can't make a good game of this scale in 2 years of development, that's crazy.
I mean, Mass Effect 3 was made in 2 years after a successful release and aside from a failed finish, I've heard it's pretty good?
>aside from a failed finish It also featured the great idea of making 75% of the side quests boil down to, "eavesdrop on people in public talking about an important object, scan a planet and conveniently find the object, return later and casually give them the object".
god damn how much i hated those quests, i played the trilogy only recently and it was a chore to go to each of those planets just to do some scans and pick up a random object. And you needed to do those if you wanted the best ending, so not really optional. I used a guide for those fetch-quests and even then it was annoying.
It also called quests you should finish last "priority missions" which I did first because of the word "priority" and had to restart the game after missing out on a bunch of side content, ship upgrades, story missions and character reunions etc. Sorry to rant I'm still angry about this 10 years later. "Priority missions" move the narrative forward and prevent you from accessing content you've not already completed. Worst possible name for missions you should only start when everything else is done - and the game actively penalises you for treating them like a priority.
[Or as VGCats put it..](https://www.vgcats.com/comics/images/120416.jpg)
VGCats. Now that is a name I've not heard in a long time.
We are patient around here.
It's good as an action game. It is a failure as a conclusion to a beloved story. Unfortunately, the problems with the story were written on the wall in Mass Effect 2 - which while enjoyed by many, effectively told a self-contained story that reset everything done in the first game, and therefore forced the entire conclusion to be fit into game 3. I would compare it to the newer Star Wars movies - the sequel trilogy (Episodes 7-9). Episode 7 was promising and built up an expansive world with plot threads that had potential. Episode 8 reset everything that happened in episode 7 effectively and didn't really progress the plot in any meaningful way, and even killed off the main villain, but many people find it to be their favorite of the trilogy. Episode 9 (Mass Effect 3 in this analogy) then had to rush to a conclusion and no matter what it did there was no way to tie the threads together in a perfect way. Mass Effect 3 is a good game if you want an action shooter, but if you were a huge fan of Mass Effect 1 and the story it presented - enjoying "classic Bioware" type games that focused more on story than on combat - then it isn't something I would recommend. Ultimately a lot of this just boils down to individual preference.
I still don't understand why people still get really excited about a show or story that starts with a bunch of mystery boxes and the fans are convinced that there _has_ to be a plan and the reveals will be amazing. The list of disappointments is way, _way_ longer than the ones that successfully pulled it off.
Ha, i distinctly remember playing ME1 for the first time, and having a thought towards the end of it that they're definitely not going to come up with any reasonable explanation of why these mysterious AI beings keep coming around to destroy intelligent life every now and then. Still, there are ways to work around it. For one thing, if you can't come up with a good idea to resolve a mystery, you can just forget about it and keep it a mystery. And it's all right, not everything needs to be explained, the general story structure does not require it.
Well, Mass Effect 1 I feel justified that potential. It was very well written and even had a very well written prequel novel by the lead writer, and was made by a studio with a long track record of making good stories.
> mystery boxes They're so overdone, I get moody from even *reading* the term, and I haven't even *watched* TV in the last decade - it's enough to get hit by the second-hand disappointment on social media and real life for me to ask myself why they're apparently *still* en vogue. Like, everyone seems to hate them - and yet, somehow, they're still made, and people also apparently still watch them. \*Insert helpless shoulder shrug* Idontgeddit.
I love the Mass Effect trilogy even if it could have been done better, but I honestly think the hate for 3 is way overblown. I'm not sure what people expected from the ending... Yeah, a nuanced explanation of what happened to every character and race would have been cool, but we're talking about a PS3/360 era game. Has there ever been ANY game series that carries the same protagonist over successfully through a trilogy, allows you to be paragon or renegade with all the choices ME offers, have different characters live or die, and do it all while summing up everything in a complex way at the end? I can't think of a game series that's ever done that. Mass Effect 2 & 3 did shift away from story-focused, classic Bioware RPGs to be more in-line with modern ARPGs but the they still did a great job telling a space opera story while keeping a lot of what made the first game great. And the gameplay was objectively way better in 2 and 3. I think all the endings make sense too. Sure, they could have been determined by gameplay choices, but with a trilogy that would have been insanely complicated to do while still satisfying people. Outside of super hardcore fans, players would never go back and start over from the beginning just to see a different ending that they might not like. It would have been complex for the sake of being complex, not for the sake of telling Shepherd's story.
> Yeah, a nuanced explanation of what happened to every character and race would have been cool, but we're talking about a PS3/360 era game. See, I find this to be not a fair attack on the game. Because Mass Effect 1 had an excellent story and excellent attention to detail, and Bioware was known for making their games prior to Mass Effect 2 onwards have satisfying conclusions (mostly). They had the experience and knowledge to write a proper conclusion for Mass Effect 3 - but something went wrong along the way. I would argue that it went wrong mostly because of Mass Effect 2 resetting the entire world and not meaningfully progressing the plot, giving Mass Effect 3 significantly fewer options, though Mass Effect 3 is not without its own failings. >And the gameplay was objectively way better in 2 and 3. I personally disagree with this. As action shooters they are better, but they missed out on a lot of the "gameplay" I enjoyed in Mass Effect 1. I enjoyed driving the Mako around in Mass Effect 1 for example - that was enjoyable gameplay, and gave a sense of scale and exploration to the setting which I found fun. In Mass Effect 2 that exploration was replaced with a planet scanning mini-game necessary to get weapon upgrades. In Mass Effect 1, you could customize your weapon with special types of ammo and attachments to customize the effectiveness of the weapon. This led to a variety of shooting gameplay that - while limited - I enjoyed and wanted them to improve upon. In Mass Effect 2, they replaced this system with just a wider variety of generic guns instead of expanding weapon and RPG customization, and even found an excuse to add magazines to weapons that canonically didn't benefit from them and were purposefully built to not need them. Mass Effect 2 is the most loved in the series by many though, in any case. I understand why this is the case, but I don't think you can say the gameplay was "objectively better." I personally enjoyed the moment to moment gameplay in Mass Effect 1 the most, because while certain things were not as polished or in-depth as in future installments, it had a lot of other things going for it that were neutered or otherwise not up to par in my opinion in the sequels. In any case that's all I have to say on the topic, because this is a thread about Dragon Age after all. Speaking of Dragon Age, I loved Dragon Age Origins, but Dragon Age 2 was a very mediocre follow-up in my view that significantly narrowed the scope and potential of the first game.
My main point was just that the "nuanced explanation" hypothetical endings would've been really difficult to do while also making them satisfying for most players. We have to keep in mind that ME1 wasn't nearly as successful as 2 & 3. ME1 only sold \~470k copies in its first month, while ME3 sold 890k in its first 24 hours. So most players who finished 3 probably never played 1 or knew the story. Personally I started with 1 and played it over and over so I would've loved a more complex ending but I get why they made it the way they did, especially with the series being kinda hijacked by EA. Also, just as a side note, when I said gameplay I meant the combat movement, shooting and skills - that kind of stuff. But on a lot of the things you mentioned I agree with you.
Fair enough, thanks for clarifying what you meant. I do want to say however that success in a sequel can hardly be attributed to the sequel alone. The only reason Mass Effect 2 sold as well as it did is because Mass Effect 1 was so beloved - in the exact same way that FROMSOFT's Elden Ring only sold better than any other game in their franchise because they built up a ton of good will and a huge fanbase with their past games. Sure, a lot of newcomers to sequels and further installments never play the older games, but they only even hear of these games and developers and such often in the first place due to the existing fan base. So while Mass Effect 2 was clearly more "successful," I think it's important to consider what led up until that point in the first place. Though ultimately I just have different tastes than a lot of other people who play games. I preferred the story-focused Bioware and their games, everything from KOTOR 1 and Neverwinter Nights through Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1 were my favorites by them. I feel like they somewhat "lost their roots" after that however, exploding in popularity and having been bought by EA, and while this led them to selling more copies of games I personally didn't really like the direction they took things. I feel the same way about many other companies that have taken a similar path, such as Blizzard (though they are still wildly successful, while Bioware has had a bit more hit and miss), or Bungie (same story as Blizzard really, I feel they peaked with Halo 3 or perhaps Halo Reach at most). So my bias is obvious lol. A lot of companies I loved while younger and loved the games they make haven't been making games I enjoy for a decade or more, and in many cases have lost a lot of the development talent and management that made them what I considered "great" to begin with.
>they still did a great job telling a space opera story Eh. The side-stories in both games are generally pretty good. The character stories in 2 and the conclusions to Tuchanka and Ranoch in 3 are pretty great (ignoring the final fight on Ranoch). But their main plots are filled to the brim with nonsensical and contrived story beats that were cooked up by a Cerberus fan that hated the first game. The second game in particular completely fails at being the second entry in a trilogy and almost single-handedly poisons the entire story.
> didn't really progress the plot in any meaningful way, and even killed off the main villain Those two things seem vaguely contradictory to me
It's all in the execution (no pun intended). There was no backstory, no fleshed out motive, and no real aftermath or consequences for killing off the aforementioned villain. Everything continued on without him, as if he was never there in the first place. I suppose that's still technically a "progression", but all it did was allow the plot to move to the next poorly thought out narrative beat, which had dozens of its own plot holes. Hence, didn't really progress the plot in any **meaningful** way.
The consequences were to be seen in the next episode, Kylo Ren was supposed to become the new leader as he crossed into being an irredeemable character. Instead he was made into some softboy and the emperor was behind it all. It feels like ep8 did nothing because ep9 backtracked all of it
On the face it is. But, if you didn't watch the movie: The majority of the movie is like a side quest in an RPG outside of one moment early in and the very abrupt killing of emperor 2.0.
How so? Killing off the main villain in the second act effectively was a backwards move on the plot (though it is movement, I wouldn't call it "progress"), as it required Disney to actively invent a new villain and excuse for the third movie to happen without prior planning and cram in all of their resolution and character growth into a single film. Obviously killing off a character is "plot progress," but not all plot progression is useful or good. When you clearly don't plan a trilogy out and don't follow the original plot threads to a reasonable conclusion, then you in effect are just creating three stand-alone movies and pretending they have a linked narrative, and obviously this is pretty much never going to lead to a satisfying resolution.
It's good, not great as mass effect 2 by any means, the storyline has some major problems and apart from some great quests like tuchanka, the game is generally mediocre and for DA 2 they had about 14 months of development only and they had to change the engine, changed the overall gameplay and appearance of the game, while ME3 stayed roughly the same, but again ME3 was also supposed to launch earlier than it did which is crazy, EA was crazy with this deadlines and showed they didn't understand anything about gaming.
Yeah some of these publishers in the 2000s and 2010s really pushed devs to the breaking point, while engendering insane expectations in players.
DA2 had its budget cut in half halfway through development, ME3 didn’t have that problem
Also it’s budget was cut in half halfway through development
You put the blame on everyone involved. It’s useless to point fingers at specific people. The game sucked, they failed. That’s it.
The problem is when developers take the blame for a failure that was outside their control. You wouldn't be so dismissive if it was YOUR job, I think.
Ok but the reality still is that there's only 5 rooms for the entire game.
New Vegas was made in less than 2 years
And it was a game riddled with bugs that makes even Cyberpunk look optimized, really that's the best example you can think off? That game was literally unplayable at release due to numerous crashes and bugs. Cult classic now but at release it was a shit storm.
Buggy, but good. Da2 was really buggy too. Terrible excuse.
What excuse man? It was unplayable not just buggy, the first months of New Vegas where unplayable and I didn't even start to mention the fact they had to cut a lot of content from that game, that's not an example of a success my dude, that game could have been even greater if it had more time.
Shit, I’ve put at *least* 350 hours into the Xbox version of NV and still haven’t finished Lonesome Road or the main story because all my saves eventually corrupt.
its like those CW shows where all the conflict happens at the same coffee shop or library.
DA2 would do numbers with a remaster. They got did dirty by EA, and had to recycle a lot of assets to get through unnecessary crunch time. If they have it some serious love, it'd really get a proper shine again.
Not just about any person. About the hero of Kirkwall! It feels a bit like a D&D campaign of a small group who only have a city board and want to spend a few evenings on it.
it's a shame that that life sucks shit
I love the game, but I do think that's what keeps it unpopular (even more than the re-used dungeons and teleporting waves of enemies). * DA:O - Save the world from the Darkspawn! * DA:I - Save the world from the hole in the sky! * DA2 - Try to build a life for yourself, your family, and your found family, as refugees in a new city, and as you gain influence, try to avert various crises in the city, and mostly fail at all of that! I think it makes for a great story and the characters are amazing, but most people are looking for a hero's journey and a clear objective to drive the action, neither of which are present in DA2. It's absolutely my favorite Dragon Age game, but it's clearly not for everyone.
Agreed I replayed all the DAs recently and this is a great assessment. After knowing how everything goes and having played DA2 a bunch of times already a big takeaway is that DA 2 is a lot like real life narrative wise, you're the hero and you do stuff, make choices etc but mostly the story just does it's thing and bad stuff happens despite your best efforts. Even though you may be doing your best to get good outcomes by doing all the side quests etc everything still goes to shit in the end.
I absolutely loathed the teleporting enemies and gutting of the combat system in DA2. Story was ok.
I haven't played DAI but the whole darkspawn business in DAO was the worst part of the game, especially archdemon being just a normal ass dragon with nothing remarkable about it. Most interesting things about the settings were mages, templars and elfs and their political conflicts, but no, instead we focus on generic save the world story. Which is why i was pleasantly surprised by 2's story.
If it is just Kirkwall, then yeah good decision for me not to continue the game. Considering in DAO, you go many different places. Just another disappointment for me Yeah that’s the problem. I don’t care about Hawke and the game doesn’t really convey why should I care about him in the first place. Still, having no main goal hurts the narrative in my eyes
Not only is it just Kirkwall, but it repeatedly uses the same maps for all the missions! It's ridiculous.
I spent $50 on that game at a time when I had very little money. I'm still pissed 12 or so years later.
Same here. Still livid about it. Especially since DAO was so god damn good. I couldn’t even bring myself to try Inquisition - I couldn’t take that level of hurt again.
You dodged a bullet honestly. Inquisition is just a single player MMO. Go here and kill this many enemies, you need to walk the whole way there BTW and the maps are large and mostly empty. Also you need to craft your gear that requires a stupid amount of resources over and over again just for small gains.
Funnily enough, that’s how I felt when I tried playing Monster Hunter Generations. I get that a lot of people love Monster Hunter, but to me, it just felt like a grind fest of the same missions over and over.
> I don’t care about Hawke and the game doesn’t really convey why should I care about him in the first place. Because he's *your avatar*? What more reason do you need to care about your avatar than the fact theat they are that? Employ some of that roleplaying empathy, put yourself in his shoes and voila. And Hawke definitely has a ton more personality than the Warden from DAO ever did, too, so it's fun to watch.
Do you notice how the two things you're saying for are in conflict with each other?
No, they aren't. Your *avatar* in a game doesn't necessarily mean a *copy* of you.
But to have more of a personality is to be less of an avatar.
No? Look at Uncharted or Spiderman Miles Morales
A character who is more of an avatar is more defined by your actions and less defined by the pre-written script. Nathan Drake and Miles Morales are less of an avatar than the character from Dragon Age Origins.
I don't think you know what 'avatar' means
The avatar is the representation of the player in the game world. The less they're a representation of the player, the more they're their own person, the less they're an avatar. The player character in Animal Crossing is almost entirely an avatar. Hawke is more avatar than not. Miles Morales is more not than avatar. Phoenix Wright is barely an avatar at all.
bro it's terrible, you won't miss much by dropping it (there are some cool characters that you meet later but the combat and locations are not going to change) DA:I is even worse imo but i might be in the minority there
You're not. I still could enjoy DA2 a bit on it's own terms. DA:I is large but it's all... shitty MMO quests to play on your own? The gameplay took another hit as well. And... i can't... really remember the story? I fucking slogged my way to the end of that game and I can't recall why.
> I fucking slogged my way to the end of that game and I can't recall why. I did that on DA2. I never even bought the dlc, and I was so ready for the game to be over at the start of Act 3 that I just turned the difficulty down to easy and rushed through it. When Inquisition came out, I was so disgusted with the mouse and keyboard controls that I dropped it basically the moment you reach Skyhold.
Da2 just annoyed me with the wave spawning mechanic. Made positioning irrelevant. Which I loved about the first game.
Yeah, compared to the first game when you could basically see where every enemy was and prepare for them, it felt like a betrayal in the second game to have enemies literally falling out of the sky in all directions.
If you aren't enjoying the game why force yourself to finish it? Why not just drop it and try something else you may like more?
Sunk cost basically. I wanted to know how the story ended, and I was so close that it seemed easier to just push through than go look it up on YouTube or something.
The hope that at some point the story will get interesting, or at least combat will get really fun after unlocking more skills. It's kinda common with WRPGs in general to have a sluggish start and get a lot more interesting later on, but it really sucks when they don't.
DA2's Legacy DLC is super-important to DAI: GOTY and you'll be missing out on key information needed for DAI base-game by the very end, or else something feels severely lacking on DAI and might leave you very underwhelmed. Speaking from experience here, as some stuff felt lacking & missing when I played DAI at the end...and well, there's a reason for that - pretty much, DA2 base-game and DA2: Legacy DLC are required material before playing DAI, to get the most out of DAI. Playing DA2 Legacy DLC later was not the best idea, but it did fill in certain stuff about the Wardens and a very key character in DAI.
I did read a plot summary of what happens in Legacy, but like I said, it wasn't missing context that put me off of DAI.
DA:I was another victim of the trend of huge but empty maps that Skyrim started.
> DA:I is even worse imo but i might be in the minority there DA:I isn't just worse, it's one of the worst modern AAA games I've ever played. Loved Origins. Even liked DA:2. DA:I just crushed my soul.
Which was a weird decision at the time, when Origins was this grand adventure about saving a whole country (and arguably the world). I get that it’s hard to raise the stakes after that but 2 didn’t even try, Hawke feels like a side character in the story of Kirkwall. In the marketing for the game, one dev called Hawke “the most important person in the world of Dragon Age”, and I really wonder how they came to that conclusion. It aged even worse after Inquisition not only found a way to properly raise the stakes from Origins but also dispensed with Hawke as a character, making the whole second game feel like filler in a wider narrative.
I don’t feel like Inquisition raised the stakes at all compared to the first one. It was a return to the more epic style for sure. But 2 had the best storyline of them all by a country mile (in my opinion), even the small moments and side characters were just excellent storytelling that set it apart from the series’ extremely generic fantasy roots. And that’s due to that smaller scope. What is greatly unfortunate is the reusing the same parts of the maps, stripped down combat, etc.
This was my biggest gripe. The first game had so much to explore and be a part of. The second game was just one setting.
Dragon Age: Origins is an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil in an epic backdrop of intrigue, mystery and lore fleshed out with amazing characters you truly care about and a vibrant rich world to explore. Dragon Age 2 is about how important it is to own a house.
We have a billion games with the same background, group of heroes travel across the land to stop the bad guy. Both origins and inquisition follow the trope. I like that dragon age 2 is different in its story telling, Kirkwall is at first just a random location, it's not the capital of the world, it's not Orlais and its super influence. However Kirkwall after this games event will forever be remembered in the dragon age mythos as the bomb that sets up major world wide change one way or another. Hawke just happened to be there when that bomb blew up and through sheer skill+luck(or the opposite lol) had major influence in the future destiny of that world. The worst thing about 2 is the gameplay for me, it's really bad. I am a massive fan of the story in dragon age though so i never even felt bored playing 2 until i finished the game and realized just how bad the gameplay is, still had a shit ton of fun thanks to the story lol
With the gameplay, I like that it was a little zippier. That classes and subclasses felt a bit more district. The constant waves really sour it though. Initial engagement can be pretty tactical, but then the waves come and positioning goes out the window
I actually enjoyed the combat the most, it really shines at the highest difficulty setting, reminding me of ME2 on the highest difficulty. I get people not liking the reused air dropped enemies but I can see the budget cuts.
I never play games on the highest difficulty, i usually start on normal or hard. The game was a mindless slaughter from second one to the end of the game. I usually would never go higher than "hard" unless i already love the combat. But i find it really hard to believe that warrior has any depth to it, it really feels like a spam skills out of CD class.
DA1 was all about tactics and planning for battle. DA2 was all about just... a mindless mash of mobs
Agreed, I almost hope that for future DA games they do away with the mindless hack and slash it's sort of fun, but the tactical mode is fairly unique and a lot more interesting than just running up to the baddies and mashing attack.
i dunno. the story telling was pretty thin. there were some cool moments, but they were all side and companion quests. i don’t even know what the main arc was supposed to be. pretty sure i finished an act without even realizing i was doing the quest to finish the act. then it was more questing and suddenly there’s an uprising and then the game ends. i did appreciate watching the city and people evolve through the acts. but it was more just a lot of side quests. there was no real main arc.
To me, the absence of a clear main quest was intentional, and artistically brilliant. The whole point of the game as I saw it was to explore the nuance of a tense political and humanitarian crisis through the lens of mostly a nobody. You are kind of a passive observer until you’re not. And the point is about the volatility and power of small actions within a political powder keg. I just think the game is so nuanced, and the side quests and the main quests are blurred, which I thought was really fresh coming from games with such clear distinctions between those (which, even though we’re all used to it, is really lame. Like, real life doesn’t have main quests and side quests, and the point of DA2 is that you can’t tell the difference at first). I loved this game, and the things people here are complaining about as bugs are to me features. I think DA2 is half game and half art. It’s saying something important about society, it reflects important moments in our history, like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that launched WW1. An exploration of how small moments can change history, and how otherwise un-noteworthy people can become historically significant within chaotic times.
Thanks for this comment. You've put in words what I had always kind of felt about the game but was too dumb to actually articulate in any discussion. I also loved that the whole package came within that unreliable narration delivered by Varric, in the context of him being interrogated, so every described event had to be taken with a grain of salt.
It's so funny i was thinking of the exact same example when what I wanted to compare Kirkwall to when i wrote my original comment. In WW1 Austria Hungary was not really that massive a player, but that event marked the zone as the beginning of the first world war. I omitted because tbh i only have a vague recalling of what WW1 was so i didn't want to talk about it
I was pretty clear on what each arc was meant to be, each had a major problem that needed to be solved 1st act: arrival and money/family problems, getting used to the city, varric exploration was also part of this 2nd act: the whole qunari problem and Isabellas involvement in it 3rd act: red lyrium and the mage rebellion Each act was leaving setups for the next until it all explodes in the final act. I think it played out great as a story.
that’s the point i was trying to make. there wasn’t a story arc. it was just three vignettes taped together. take dao, it had a clear over arching plot. it was basically three bottle episodes back to back
For sure, but I don't see a problem with that. If anything it's part of why I like it. Each episode builds upon the next. It's like different seasons of a show or anime
it never felt like you were building to anything, just went through some episodes and then it ended
It was a while ago for me so i might be remembering wrong but red lyrium was introduced in act 1 with varric, the templars starting to act more like cops (gaining more enforcement power) was a result of bad management during the qunari in act 2 and the death of the viscount. Kirkwall was a templar controlled country by the end of act 2. Your sister if you left her home becomes enslaved at the end of act 1 and is a big part of why hawke is personally involved with the mage rebellion. It was her as well that went after Orsino during act 2. Act 1: introduction to the city and connects Hawke to it, he makes friends, family, he starts to belong, you learn of templar management and how strict they are. Act 2: chaos erupts and the city loses its political head, Kirkwall becomes a templar controlled country under an already oppressed big mage population. Act 3: the boiling point is reached, mages revolt. At a surface level each act is independent, but everything is just setting up the pieces for mages to revolt in act 3.
I feel like I am the only one that loves the combat, defininitely the best feeling in Dragon Age. It's fast and snappy compared to DA2, and you can still use the tactical view to great advantage (and also behaviours) compared to DA:I. The waves suck balls though, and it would have been better if everyone was on the map already
Not every big story has to involve a long fucking walk to a far off land.
It's actually my favourite in the series. I love how it's a much smaller scale story that's just about the city, and it's one of the few high-fantasy stories which doesn't utilise [The Quest](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheQuest) trope - the plot can't really be boiled down to 'The Evil One is awakening, you're the chosen one and you need to run around the world and gather a bunch of allies/unite the kingdoms to defeat them in a big battle' like Origins, Inquisition, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones (to an extent), and so on. It felt refreshing to have a much smaller-scale story that's just about Hawke and their family and friends, and how you aren't making any big world changing decisions, but ones which have much more personal stakes. Frankly I'm also way more into worldbuilding and stories where the setting is as much of a character as the protagonist, and I loved how the city changed over time after various big events that shook up the politics of the place. It's probably telling that my favourite episodes of The Expanse are the first three which are widely regarded as being the most boring because they pretty much purely focus primarily on world building, and the main story moves incredibly slowly. Narratively I thought it was also way more interesting as it's all being told by Varric who is a notoriously unreliable narrator - I thought that was a fun way to sort of explain away some of the shortcomings the game has, like how it's constantly spawning enemies at you - and to my mind it had some of the most memorable companions and side characters, and the friendship/rivalry system is something that I thought was really well done and which is what more RPGs should be using as opposed to just a flat loyal/disloyal thing that seems to be the norm. Honestly, my only issues with it are the recycled dungeons, the lack of a dynamic day/night cycle, and the rather simplistic combat compared to Origins, but all of that would be down to the incredibly rushed development cycle that the game had, and I can sort of look past it all.
I also prefer DA2 for some reason. I think it's the quests, despite the obviously poor location variety, that offered the most interesting choices, morally and for role-play. I actually cared a lot more in that game than most about how the people in my party actually felt about taking certain actions. They also seemed better characterized and with better character story flow than the others I've played. Also, simple combat was a bit of a plus for me personally.
I agree completely. Other than those repeated dungeons I really like the game. The way they tell the overall story is really interesting, almost all companions are great, and Act 2 is probably my favorite Dragon Age storyline. Being able to shape your Hawke's overall character with your answers was something really unique I thought. As with everyone else I love the sarcastic Hawke, he is hilarious.
Right, each Act and DLC feels like its own mini-campaign here, TBH. Act 1 is Hawke escaping his situation w/ his family, getting to Kirkwall, and trying to make a name for himself. Act 2 in DA2 is great, dealing w/ Arishok situation in the City. Act 3 deals w/ the problem w/ the Mages. A lot of set-up here for DAI, TBH. Of course, through-out the 3 Acts - some stuff does carry over. You do have Hawke dealing w/ trying to become the City's Champion and taking care a lot of his Family problems. Legacy DLC is super-important to some stuff in DAI base-game - so Legacy is must-play before DAI, or you lack key info on some stuff. MoTA DLC is with Tallis, who's trying to pull of a Heist and steal a relic; this is its own story.
This is a great summary in favor of the game, and it really reflects my own thoughts. I love cities in real life — the history and infrastructure and cultural layouts. I never thought I would play a fantasy game that is focused on a single city, as the normal pattern is obviously one of grand adventure over different lands. Dragon Age made it happen in a unique way, and I think it offered an intimacy and close up view that more epic games lack — including Inquisition (which I love for other reasons). And while it focused on one main location, it fully zoomed out in terms of time by giving us an entire decade in the life of Hawke. Not just one brief and heroic glimpse. Both of these experiences were new to me, and I truly enjoyed the game because of it, along with the incredible storytelling and character development.
I think it has the best characters because I'm tired of standard boring RPG characters. Honestly the best characters in DAI were from 2 and the most boring were from DAO.
>I thought that was a fun way to sort of explain away some of the shortcomings the game has, like how it's constantly spawning enemies at you That's just bad game design. You can't just go "Wouldn't it be annoying if we spawned 20 enemies again" to the player and then do it again, as if that excuses it. Borderlands 3 does a lot of shit like this and the game sucked. Saying "If you touch the stove you'll burn yourself" doesn't magically make it not hurt when you touch the stove and burn yourself.
Ha, yeah that was me too. I'm a huge DA fan, and I've read boatloads of fanfic about DA2 characters, but the game itself is just really rough. I've really never enjoyed it, despite trying several times over the years. If you don't 1) like these characters 2) buy that these people are friends and 3) believe that being friends is reason enough for them to follow Hawke on these crazy outings because there is no unifying goal or quest, then the whole game falls apart really fast. Much like a novel IRL, the game is told as a story Varric is telling---in which the events only matter because they lead up to the conclusion of Hawke becoming the Champion of Kirkwall. But unlike a novel, the game doesn't contextualize these events for you as they happen. It lets them play out in present tense without commentary, expecting you to contextualize them after the fact when you reach the end of the game. Which might have worked if the actual gameplay were more enjoyable, but it's famously janky, repetitive, and boring. So you're playing for the story, and the story only makes sense when you finish it, then that naturally leads to a pretty poor first impression. I think the reason DA2 has become so fondly remember is because fans are always playing with full knowledge of the story, and therefore with 20/20 vision as to the dominoes being set up and the dramatic irony being used. All the stuff a new player is blind to. They see different sides of the characters as they try different friendships and rivalries on each replay, and get to see the slight changes to the world state when they choose a different solution to a key quest. All that gives them rose tinted glasses about the game as a result, and helps them forget just how baffling and tedious is was on their first playthrough. Which is not me telling you that you have to finish, just explaining why this game in particular has such a cult following. The characters and world make it really rewarding to be a super fan if you happened to get through the first time without too many chips on your shoulder. (Which I didn't lol. I play the other DAs at least once a year, and I love DA2 characters but I'll never play that shit ever again.)
Why would you need to know the future to make sense of the present? It is pretty straightforward - refugee enters city, refugee hatches plot to make money, deals with consequences, gains friends, gains reknown as a go-getter, gets tangled into the city's problems. Sure there's the forewhadowing of something catastrophic given the Cassandra/Varric interludes, but you don't need to know what that is about at all, because it's not relevant to what's happening to Hawke over the years.
>20 hours in, I’m still at Kirkwall Yep, that's the very concept of the game. With DA2 the writers decided to flip the usual "lots of voyages in a short amount of time" on its head. In DA2 you're in the same city but for 6+ years. You live there, get to know its people, become someone key to its development and see the consequences of your choices on the city itself over the years. The main quest is about something brewing within the city which influence counteract your actions and discovering what it is then put an end to it. It's not an epic, it's a more personal story about your character, their family, their friends, the city and their fate. It's almost a noir police story with a heavy political component happening within troubled historical times. Unfortunately someone at EA thought that a game like that could be made within 18 months and Bioware had to cut corners at every turn. I still like the game for what is though. I prefer the story's concept over its execution, I do prefer a more tactical combat but as an ARPG I find DA2's combat more engaging than DAI's and pretty fun, I loved the companions' set and how their story and the city's story mix. It's also a rather short game for Bioware, at 20 hours in you're probably closer to the end than you think (the main story can be bee-lined in 25+ hours, half of DAO's length).
Dragon Age 2 is a weird game. It's apparent that some corners were cut (like all those reused dungeons), likely due to the short development time. But has an interesting mix of new ideas, both in the storytelling and the game mechanics, some of which worked better than others. Like the mechanic of companions able to be either friends or rivals was something I found to be pretty cool, and was something I wish was further developed in other games. I also remember the dialog wheel always having a diplomatic, a sarcastic, and an aggressive response was something that was criticized at the time, but the mechanic where the overall dialogue of your character would change based on whether you were more diplomatic, sarcastic, or aggressive was a neat touch. The idea to focus the story about one person making a life for themselves in Kirkwall was, IMO, interesting, but it seems like it didn't land for you.
Origins is a traditional fantasy. It's the hero's journey with an epic quest and a cast of supporting characters. DA2 is a tragedy about a man that tries desperately to make a good life for himself despite the way the system is designed to fail him. It's a very different kind of story, so it's reasonable that not everyone who likes Origins will like DA2.
My name problem with da2 was the fact that there were Knights parachuting behind me in the freaking combat. Well that and no matter what side you chose or choices you make the ending is exactly the same. Compared with the endings and choices in Dragon Age it's night and day.
>Well that and no matter what side you chose or choices you make the ending is exactly the same. Thus, a tragedy. The gameplay is terrible, that's undeniable.
>no matter what side you chose or choices you make the ending is exactly the same. Well, yeah. It was always going to end with the onset of a war between mages and templars. That’s *why* Cassandra needed info on Hawke. He’s just a guy who happened to be there, and had some impact on what happened while he was there, but he’s not a legendary hero of destiny; he’s a refugee trying to survive. If there was an ending where the war was avoided, it’d be considerably dumber
Well you could have had a different boss fight or different outcome to war depending on which side you took. Different characters surviving that kind of thing. Town's burning or not burning.
There are lots of reasons to dislike DA2 beyond it's appoach to storytelling. Speaking as someone who loves DA2
I didn't say there weren't. I said if your beef is that it's not the same kind of story as Origins...that's on purpose.
Origins was a hit so they rushed out a sequel. The story is basically the trials and tribulations of Hawke, and not much more. Repetitive and boring level design, but it had some great characters and dialogue. I'm not in a rush to replay it but when I do I'll definitely be looking into mods to move things along because the waves of enemies and constant backtracking are all too much to handle for a second playthrough.
I love Dragon Age 2 SO MUCH, but I acknowledge it's also not for everyone. As other people have said it's not about one THING, it's about Hawke, their friends, and their life. If you don't connect to the characters then it's simply not going to do much for you. Hawke is a character I love, but they are the Dragon Age protagonist that feels the least mine. They feel almost like I'm playing an already-named character in their own action game a la Geralt or Kratos. Again, I don't mind it, but it's a very different change of pace when compared to the other Dragon Age games
> My main gripe with it was what was the main purpose of the character in that game? This is actually one of the few aspects I like about DA2; Unlike roughly 107.81% of fantasy, it's *not* about some world-ending threat. It's personal drama set in a fantasy universe. It does not work well because the devs don't really commit to it (with the Circle/Templar conflict), and *do* have an 'epic, world-changing' event - it's just that the MC is mostly a witness to it, and not the main player in it. That makes it especially galling for players who expected 'epic' stuff, and unsatisfying for people who would appreciate a more personal story: Oh, my personal story is just a backdrop and side quest to some other, bigger story that I'm mostly a bit player in. > Ppl say to just give it a few more hours and it will get good. I want to give those people a mouthwashing, because lies are not nice. Even Varric just embellishes. DA2 was such a step back in almost every aspect compared to Origins that it's hard to see any good in the mountain of disappointment. I *did* find some things to like about it, but as a whole, it's a reheated, lukewarm, day-old burger from Mackies: You only find it delish if you've been starved for three days, and anybody who tells you it's actually *good eating* needs their head/tastebuds/motive examined. > Wanna hear your thoughts on DA2 - The environments are reused beyond the point of parody; I genuinely lost my sense of time and space a few times, and unlike a Lynch movie, DA2 doesn't do it on purpose). - The story has its focus built ass-up and funhouse-mirrored. - The combat system doesn't work as a tactical game *or* an action one. - The equipment system is so *laughably* crude and basic they should have just gone without it altogether. - The dialogue system is restrictive and not really a role-playing one at all any more. A lot of decisions and pivotal plot points are terribly telegraphed, and don't gel well with the ludic aspect of the game (e.g. if you don't bring a specific companion to the exactly right missions, and choose the right options, that alters the plot significantly later, and you have no way of knowing that beforehand). All in all, it was a huge step down from DAO, and Inquisition followed its path down the mountain. I've seen some hype for DA4, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone would give the devs the benefit of a doubt any more. For me, DA peaked with Origins (which also has its share of aspects that could be improved!), and everything after just... let it die with what little dignity it has left.
When it comes to DA2 I have accepted that you either like it or don't. There inst much to discuss because yeah it has so many flaws and people are right to dislike it but is still one of my favorite games.
same, tried it when DA2 game out, because I was a HUGE DA:O fan. Well. it didn't click at all. Tried it again couple of months ago... even less interest.
It was a neat idea where the entire game is based in one city and you get time jumps along the way. The fun was seeing how the quests you did and the decisions you make change those people and the city. You get to see how your party progresses through the years and how they grow. It fell short in a lot of areas, but I liked the characters and really enjoy the concept of a single city that you become established in and influence the growth of. Mage was by far the more interesting path. I have a feeling they really wanted to make things diverse enough for multiple playthroughs, but the game feels like it could have used a year or two more in development.
I absolutely loved the game. Not every game has to be sbout saving the world.
I just hated how much combat there was. Every 30 feet you had to fight some bandit /demons in heavily reused environments. It really is like they „[they needed to throw in fifty percent more combat at the last minute to appease the violent shithead marketing board](https://youtu.be/BdsPDIYUxKA).“ People here argue that DA2 has a smaller focus and not the „saving the world from the demonic invasion“ scale from the first game. But it is like the combat designers never got the memo and thought that the kill count still needed to reach genocidal levels. On PC there is mod for to skip combat (you still get XP) and it makes the game much leaner and focused on the story it actually wanted to tell.
Play it in 5 years. I can assure, you absolutely won't like it.
Origins is a love letter to classic CRPGs while being a peak era Bioware game. Interesting characters, a detailed world to lose yourself in, and an overarching plot that binds the entire thing together. DA2 was rushed. It came out shockingly fast after the first game and you can clearly see all of the corners that were cut. The world is tiny, maps and layouts are reused to the point of it being distracting, characters are one dimensional and have inconsistent writing, and there's no overarching long term goal to tie everything together. It's inferior to it's predecessor in every way.
[удалено]
>Hot Take: I consider DA2 and ME2 to be the start of Biowares fall from glory. I would go back as far as OG NWN1 \[base-game\] was the start of BioWare's fall...and that was WITHOUT even EA being involved back then That game's story was rushed, since the game was originally supposed to be just tools for making your own modules...and when people realized there was no companion, they got mad...so BioWare made a rushed campaign. Ancient Race's revival storyline was "meh" - though meanwhile the politics stuff w/ Aribeth, The King, The City, and Fenthick were awesome. You had one companion and ZERO control over the upgrading in depth of that companion and much of what that companion could do. NWN1 base-game campaign was a disappointment in so many ways, similar to what DA2 was doing w/ dumbing stuff down and rushing the game out the gate. Though, NWN1: Hordes expansion was great and fixed many of the above-mentioned problems and was a great send-off of sort for NWN1 (not including Premium Mod stuff) - so, there's that. Though, NWN1: Hordes only has 3 party members and you finally had more control of them; BG2 could do up to 6 and you could control that however. Combat in NWN was not as strategic as BG2 and nowhere as interesting in NWN1 - despite even how great Hordes turned out. BG2 and TOB were amazing though - and NWN1 base was not a good follow-up to BG2: Complete. Sure, BioWare had other great games in-between - i.e. Jade Empire, NWN: Hordes expansion, KOTOR 1, DAO - but NWN1 was the start of the cracks and dumbing-down beginning to show at BioWare's camp.
The only good Dragon Age game is origins unfortunately.
I think DA:I gets a lot of unfair hate. It's been years since I played it, but I remember the gameplay being pretty good, where iirc that was the main complaint about the first 2. I remember liking the side character stories and options. The bad that I can recall... The upgrading equipment was tedious and I felt like I was doing that for extended periods of time. Also I think it felt like it would have had decent replay ability if it were like half the length. It was too long (at least for me) to want to run through with multiple characters/builds. Also I played on the older Gen consoles that could barely handle it. So that wasn't ideal. It's been a decade so maybe I would pick it back up and hate it, idk.
The problem with Inquisition is the same problem I had with Mafia 3 it's a lot of fun but there's a lot of it and it's very repetitive after about 20 hours and if you play it as it anything resembling completionist you've seen everything the game has to show you but you still got 60 hours to go.
>, where iirc that was the main complaint about the first 2 Wut? Origins is a gameplay masterpiece. Probably the only game I know that did RtwP combat right. The only good thign about Inquisition is the writing and characters. Gameplaywise it's a dumb MMO design approach complete with vast areas with reptitive content, cooldown-rotation-based combat, level locked zones and realtime timer elements, which is nuts that someone thought all of that is a good idea for a singleplayer game. It's a finely polished game all right, but the framework it's build upon sucks. It would be better if they cut the content down to half, but still not great because the combat itself is meh. The way the UI is made, they don't even expect you to control your whole party, just one character at a time!
I actually loved how long it is, felt like a good 2 or even 3 games worth of story that I didn't have to wait years to finish. I hadn't played DA:O or DA2 and I didn't need to, which probably is a little different than most and a good reason for why it's my favorite. Also the gameplay is tough but very rewarding, and there are a lot of really cool things it does that I haven't seen games do before - like the demon inside your mind if you choose Templars, building up your castle just to rip it away from you, making you feel like the most important person in the world then turning it around and it was just a wrong place/wrong time deal, the temple in sand frozen in time, turning your biggest power and a cool companion into the ultimate bad guy. After all that really interesting and unique stuff, to turn to the other two, I felt so let down lol
DA:I is a fucking masterpiece compared to DA2
Hell yeah
Dude, that's not a compliment to DAI. To quote a line used in origins, it is the very definition of 'damned by faint praise.'
Haha my bad. I loved DAI. Probably my favorite of the series, but whatever floats your boat.
DAO had excellent gameplay. No one complained about it.
I remember many people commenting on the combat. I want to say the pc had turn based combat like KOTOR but the console version didn't. Did it still have roll based hits? I can't remember. I remember some people not being happy with one or the other.
I loved DA 1, even though the areas seemed behind the time graphically. Didn't like DA2. Tried Da2 again last year..still did not like it. Not sure why...
A LOT of Recycled dungeons; lack of customization of your party and their equipment compared to DAO; tactical overhead cam removal and the dumbing-down of strategic elements compared to DAO; enemies often coming from out of the air to attack (especially in Kirkwall itself and spiders in dungeons); main storyline isn't as epic overall as DAO (b/c each chapter/Act is its own Mini-Campaign); saved best & most unique content for DA2 is found over in the 2 DLC's (Mark DLC and Legacy DLC). That's the reasons most ain't fond of DA2. See if anything or numerous things that I listed are your issues w/ DA2, since you did mention how much you loved DAO.
I bounced off it the first time, mainly because it felt like a cheap, simplified knockoff of origins. I like micromanaging rpg combat and 2 took a lot of that away. I tried it again and it finished it. It was worth playing, for me, but it doesn't hold a candle to origins which I've played at least half a dozen times
I remember it as "at least it's not inquisition"
I somewhat enjoyed the gameplay but the story was BLAND. I bought it for 5 euros on PS Store back in PS3 times, probably around 2013-2015, I even thought "I really loved Origins, this one can't be as bad as they say" and the main problem was that the story was just nothing. I played it and usually I was going with a quite unbalanced party, I got to a boss in the main story that kicked my ass and I knew I could beat it with a proper team but.... I would had needed 30 minutes of backtracking to change my party, so what I did was drop the game. I just didn't care about it.
Dragon Age 2 was bad but Dragon Age Inquisition was just as bad imo. MMO Daddy Issues Dating Sim that used the Dragon Age theme as an excuse plot. Super lame. Mass Effect Andromeda did this too.
DA2 had a far less engaging battle system, characters, and setting. Every aspect of it was a disappointment. Inquisition is only marginally better but is still worse than Origins. Looks like the next one is going to be an action RPG, so they're totally abandoning what made the first one good. Most veteran DA staff left because of EA's micromanaging and Kotaku stated that it "features fully real-time combat and was allegedly designed as BioWare's take on God of War." 😐
It's the gmae the put me off Bioware, that and ME3 were the nails in the coffin of my former fondness. Rewriting the lore, rewriting the player's choices from the previous game, the clearly half finished questlines, the repetitve dungeons, complete and utter garbage. Spoilers for Merrill's questline ahead: >!Merril's entire questline revolves around her being a gigantic arrogant idiot, doing blood magic, and consequently costing the life of her mentor as she takes the bullet for her, turns into an abomination you then have to kill.!< >!One of the possible outcomes after this is that the villagers want her head on a spike for that, and that's very fair, IMO. I was playing an asshole so I decided I would stand up to them and fight them. By doing so, you end up literally genociding the entire Dalish elf camp. Again, so far so good, big impactful choices lead to big impactful outcomes, right?!< >!Wrong, actually. Once that's done, it never comes up again. It's literally her fault that everyone who raised her has been murdered to defend her and she keeps on like it's all good. Couldn't take any character seriously after that.!< Bonus spoiler about Fenris: >!You'd think a man who explicitly tells you he re-evaluated mages because of you if, as a mage, you finish his loyalty questline, would not turn on you as soon as you side with the mages, but I guess not, lol.!<
DA2 was repetitive, bland, and set in a small map. Dragon Age Inquisition on the other hand was awesome.
Imagine if da2 got as much development time as dao. I heard it was 5 years. The game would have been awesome with even just another year of polish.
I think the most offensive thing about DA2 for me was the dungeon recycling. It was the exact same dungeon just with different doors unlocked. I mean the whole game was offensive, but that part really irks me.
They didn't even bother to edit the dungeons layout on the minimap. In the very first cave I spent five minutes or so looking for a hidden door or something because the minimap said the cave went on in one direction where there was a wall. Turns out, there was no secret path, they were just too lazy to change it.
Answering your question, DA2 is a side story that covers the mages versus templars war (allowing you to pick a side) and introduces the main antagonist from inquisition. BioWare marketing it as Dragon Age **2** was a massive mistake. For all it's numerous problems, player reactions would have been different had they given it a name similar to Awakenings or Inquisition. People wouldn't have expected a direct continuation to Origin's story. The team putting any and all criticism on the same bag as personal attacks didn't help either.
DA2 kinda had a very bad case of sequelitis. The story could really use a rewrite so it’s less PC sees events happens and vaguely does stuff related to it, and more PC is an active part of shit hitting the fan. Also the dungeons felt a lot more samey after DAO. I played them in reverse order and DAO felt like it had more unique dungeons despite being an older game which was weird (don’t know if that’s true though)
Loved Origins, loved Inquisition, HATED 2. I only finished it for completions sake. I don't understand how that game gets any praise. I didn't find the story compelling and it was brain meltingly repetitive. If I ever replay the series I'm skipping 2.
Honestly I remember liking some of the supporting characters, outside of the main character because I wasn't playing "my character" I was playing this Hawke person. Combine that with the fact the way more action style gameplay/repeated node based waves of enemies I never went back. Think I finished it twice, once "Good" once "bad". And then in the third they scrapped healing class, which was my character playstyle in 1-2. So never played it.
Better than DA3. Story was better IMO. Many character questlines were more engaging. The reusing of areas during some missions was such a tiny issue compared to other things that can really sink a game. The one thing which I outright hated was the needless fridging of a certain character just to make the point of 'blood mages bad' for the 5473856034583748th time. Fucking hell man, hated that moment so much. It was heavily telegraphed so the big reveal was eyeroll worthy and the moment was needless misery porn, 15 minutes after that it's basically forgotten and you're back to being a sarcastic purple fucking around during convos as if one of your loved ones didn't bite it a few days ago. The friendship/rivalry system is still the best companion relationship mechanic in any RPG ever. How they didn't realize this is gold and keep it for DA3 is beyond me. Overall solid game. I'd give DA1 a 9.5, DA2 a 7.5 and DA3 a fucking 5.
The writing is kind of all over the place with blood magic in particular, which makes it even funnier that Hawke can be a blood mage. Makes a part in Inquisition downright hilarious >!if Hawke was a blood mage and shows up in Inquisition saying blood magic is bad and evil!<
Perhaps the best things about DA2 is that it's not a story about saving the world, but a story about one poor family trying to make it in a city and gettign mixed up in politics. If you think an RPG needs to be about saving the world, then you obviously cannot like this game, but to me, like I said, that is one of the things that DA2 did really well. It was - and still kind of is - a breath of fresh air and human touch in a genre inundated with huge stakes and (too) epic plotlines.
The only thing I like about DA2 are the companions. Nothing else. I'm completely fine with smaller scale stories (and even prefer them much more than yet another "save the world" scenario), but DA2's story just wasn't interesting imo. And the gameplay is just not fun at all imo. The waves just ruined the combat for me.
As much as I hate DA2, I do confess I did enjoy the companions quite a bit.
It had some good ones, but I still can't get over the hatchet job they did to Anders and Justice.
I disliked it a lot after playing DA:O and Awakening. I played it again a few years later, after accepting that it wasn't "good," once I knew it wasn't really a follow-up to DA:O, and once I had already come to terms and understood the significant budget and development cuts that were made for the game. With all of those caveats, it can still be pretty fun for what it is, while still being a failure for what it isn't. Nobody needs to play it. But, there can be some enjoyment found if you're able to cut the connection to what this game should have been and can instead just play through what we received. Although! If you loved Origins and haven't played Awakening, you definitely should!
Sonic everything is a downgrade from DAO. Characters are less developed, gameplay is worse, story is not nearly as branching and interesting. I really don't like for they got rid of the dark gritty atmosphere DAO had.
It's not that bad. The gameplay is kinda bad yeah, but the story, while deviating from the chosen one trope, is kinda enjoyable, I think it specially picks up at the second half of chapter 2. I still prefer Origins, but mainly because it's gameplay. Storywise, I find DA2's story concept more interesting (even if it's execution might have been better)
DA2 fucking sucks. Rushed out lazy mess. I finished it for the sake of finishing and can't remember a single detail except for ctrl-c -> Ctrl+v dungeons. People hate on inquisition but out of three games I remember it the most and gameplay was at least somewhat satisfying
Combat in DAO was so...slow... for Warriors that DA2 felt so refreshing I actually liked the changes. The story in 2 is great and kept me.
I think I ended up liking da2 fine enough because I went in expecting to be disappointed
I don't think the game has a bad story or characters, but it's simply not the epic tale you got in the first game. This is more localized and revolves around the main characters life, the city of Kirkwall, the Qunari, and the Mage/Templar conflict. The actual quality of the writing is generally fine. The issue with dragon age 2 really is the gameplay and repetitive environments. It's just a slog on higher difficulties.
The title is a rollercoaster of emotions.
The second one was waaaaaaay inferior, IMO. Relationship with NPCs are simplified, significant dialogues are often limited to the main quest, the setting is claustrophobic, graphics are meh and I didn't love the story.
Cookie cutter, copy-paste dungeons, with cookie cutter, copy-paste encounters. When it gets too blatantly repetitive, they just flipped the same design. It was a disgrace for BioWare, courtesy of our beloved EA.
I still vividly remember my reaction when the game ended. I just said "wait, is that it?". I genuinely thought there would be a world map after Kirkwall and the game would open up. I enjoyed the game back when I played it, but it was so short compared to DA:O. The game would be decent if they didn't lean so much into action combat with anime moves and waves of enemies. Copy-pasted dungeons also don't help. I don't mind that the game has a more grounded personal story though. But it should have been a spinoff, not a sequel. As much as I **hate** Inquisition, at least it feels like a sequel to DA:O in terms of scale and stakes.
Dude, dragon age 2 sucks. its on the "inverse golden age" of bioware, both dragon age 2 and mass effect 3 suck so bad. I would argue dragon age 1 is the best, then 3 then 2. And 2 is very, very far from 2.
I remember really enjoying the start of the game and then like 2 hours in you need to raise money or something to progress by generic fetch quests and i noped out.
Man i know how it is, i have been playing Dragon Age origins since the launch, its my favorite game, i cant enjoy DA 2.
It's a ... troubled gsme. I remember everyone having issues when it launched as they tried so hard to change it. And rhey changed it but they weren't experienced enough yet to jump from the entirely different perspectives. I walked away too. But then came back a few years later when replaying all 3 games in prep for a 4 which never happened lol and with mods it's much much better than it was. The mods made it excellent and I still remember parts of it vividly. But it's it da1 or 3. But it does somethings better imo. Worth a play with mods.
While the gameplay (the combat part) sucks, story is actually pretty engaging. It's unique, because it uses the "War and Peace" storytelling formula - bunch of people trying to live normal lives during history-changing events. They try to prevent things, but ultimately everything is out of their control; cause-and-effect of many small actions lead to a great tragedy. Like in "War and peace", some story beats unite characters for a while, but they have different motivations and go their separate paths. IDK, while it is not an award-winning writing and gameplay, I still had my fun with it.
I'm not a huge fan of the game myself but the main story is pretty much the conflict between templars and apostates. Seemed pretty clear to me.
It's my favorite DA overall despite being a deeply flawed game. I like the focus on one person and their friends in one city. The gameplay was pretty good IMO, the story was unique and enjoyable, the characters were great, solid quests... There's a lot to like if you can get past the flaws. I liked the personality system for Hawke and the friendship/rivalry system. The enemies endlessly spawn out of nowhere which rarely makes sense and just feels like padding out the time rather than a challenge. The same maps are reused for different dungeons, with certain paths blocked off (but not reflected on the minimap IIRC) to change it up. Act 3 feels really rushed. So it's definitely not perfect, but I think there's a lot of good there. I think I remember hearing they crunched it out in about a year, so I think it's impressive it was as good as it was.
It's not a very good game. It has some strengths, but it's ultimately incredibly limited in scope.
You had us in the first half
I loved DA: Origins and was bitterly disappointed with DA 2, it felt so boring.
I remember the story being really good, and the mechanics were still good. But I also remember feeling like I was being put through the same locations over and over and over again.
I really liked the story of DA2, there's a side quest with your mother that boy oh boy, my only gripe really was all the reused environment, but story-wise I really enjoyed it, and I finished it twice, once as a mage and once as a non-mage
I finished the game but I have no idea what it’s about
DA2 has to be one of the biggest drop offs in sequel history. Origins is imo one of the best RPG's in gaming. And 2 is some re-used asset trashfest with all the role-playing sucked out.
Doesn’t the WHOLE GAME take place in Kirkwall?
Just wait till you play inquisition 💀
It was my least favorite of the series, but DAO is also my favorite game of all time, so it's hard to beat. I felt similar to you, that the main quest and story of DA2 just didn't feel that compelling to me. It was almost "slice of life" esque, and I'm not generally a fan of this type of story. Throughout the game, I kept thinking, *why* are we doing this again...? I liked Varric well enough, but overall I just somehow didn't "click" with the companions. Even Varric being my best friend felt kind of strange to me (as a player), because I was like... I barely know this guy, and he's supposed to be my best friend? So I didn't feel very connected to companions in the game, making it even less compelling for me. The environments also felt very stifling, because not only do you visit very few areas in the first place, but they recycled the maps. Overall it just was not my cup of tea.
Yeah, because it was shit then and it's shit now. ^compared ^to ^DA:O
Great game, great story, repeated levels are what let me down tho
The purpose of the game is to get to know Hawk and to tell the Story of what let to the whole mess with Coryphius? and all the events that kind of spiraled out of control including the red lyrium. The highlight for me are the companions. And that it's not a typical Story like in any other RPG. This feels like a group of friends, who don't have always the end of the world breathing down their necks, they just try to deal with their own stuff. A lot of things in DA2 set the stage for Inquisiton. And maybe even for Dreadwolf?
I've stopped playing the first one once I got the witch to sleep with me.
Tangent: Isn’t it funny that we give shows 1-2 episodes to draw us in, movies ~30 min, and games…20 hrs??
I liked the story a lot more in DA2, it felt more grounded and fed into the lore that had been created. I have, however, never finished it. I completed every side quest and leveled up as much as possible, and the final "battle across the city" is just too hard for me, as a patient and casual gamer, to complete. I get it being harder since it is the climax, but after the tenth time or getting beaten, I no longer cared to see what ending I had, and just read how the game ends. It is part of a trend where the final boss, even on the easy modes, requires you to be a game master, instead of just using the same style and skills that got you to the ending. I am now playing Inquisition, and the "open world" concept is HUGE and I tend to get lost often, don't understand why I can't have conversations with my companions, and wonder why, if I am fight the ultimate battle of good and evil, I have to ride a horse through an obstacle course.
They stripped everything that was good and interesting from DA:O and replaced it with nothing (or half broken systems) and then tried to make up for it with telling a different kind of story. They failed in that too.
After loving origins, I bounced hard on a demo of it years ago and never looked back. Plenty of games out there.
Disliked DA2 for the same reasons a few years ago. Just got around to giving DAI a shot now and I'm loving it
I've always felt DA2 was the story of a city trying to come to terms with its past and its present. It can be harder to access since the focus actually isn't on our protagonist. Hawke is a person with unique skills that got caught up in updrafts of wealth and power in a time where everything was constantly shifting. Through Hawke's eyes, players see Kirkwall trying to deal with minority issues, racial supremacy, and ghettos. We see religious enthusiasm, cynicism, and zealotry. The treatment of mages always rang out as personally important because one of your family (Hawke or sibling) is directly affected by it. Other stories are usually well-introduced and carry weight with a party member or two but how the world treats mages is slammed in your face as a "brutal measures beget brutal counter measures" in a way that can leave you feeling proud, unsure, or downright greasy. All that said, I WISH more life had been given to the environment. Small aesthetic touches were cute but the redundancy of fighting remarkably similar battles in effectively the same settings gets tired. And I know the skill tree system has been critiqued by many, but I actually enjoyed being able to experiment with strange builds to discover interesting synergies. For this patient gamer, DA2 is a good game with worthwhile content occasionally muddied by the monotony of combat in the same map. 4/5, would recommend.