So... Dragon Age 2...

[pan]

Replaying DA:O to remember how bad it is... fuck, it is so bad...

I like how I get no recognition for my actions. So far I have performed the following deeds and received the following rewards.

Deed: donated 5 sovereigns to some church.
Reward: church nun gives a nonchalant thanks, the same thanks she would give had I donated 10 silvers. Companions don't mention anything, not even Lilliana a goody two shoes who used to work at the church.

Deed: returned some jewellery box to a widow.
Reward: same dialogue as if I had kept the box for myself, and no other recognition whatsoever.

Deed: kept all of the militia alive during the "defend redcliffe" quest.
Reward: there's a speech about how the battle 'cost' the town so much and talking to one of the survivors yields a response about how he watched as so many comrades died around him. No one mentions the fact that no one died, no reward, nothing.

Yeah this is some bullshit so far. At least I'm not at the shitty deepthroat roads.

 

[Lancehead]

Deed: kept all of the militia alive during the "defend redcliffe" quest.
Reward: there's a speech about how the battle 'cost' the town so much and talking to one of the survivors yields a response about how he watched as so many comrades died around him. No one mentions the fact that no one died, no reward, nothing.

Pretty sure someone died because that speech only happens if at least one died. If you no one dies, the speech does acknowledge that and you get a helmet or a shield or some reward. Perhaps someone died while you were fighting in another battle area.

 

[pan]

Wow, so some random guy dies while I'm not looking and the Lord, or "Bann," or whatever, decides that's enough to cheat me out of my reward.

What a Jew!

 

[Roguey]

Deed: donated 5 sovereigns to some church.
Reward: church nun gives a nonchalant thanks, the same thanks she would give had I donated 10 silvers. Companions don't mention anything, not even Lilliana a goody two shoes who used to work at the church.

Deed: returned some jewellery box to a widow.
Reward: same dialogue as if I had kept the box for myself, and no other recognition whatsoever.

DA:O trolls goody-goody characters a lot. Giving money to people or turning down rewards does fuck all for you. As it should.

Actually I'm being semi-facetious there. Compelling choices need choice agony and "this gives you a reward but you have to be mean to fictional people" and "this gives you nothing" has no such thing. Still, the whole doing-the-non-selfish-thing-gives-you-an-even-better-reward is worth trashing.

 

[pan]

It's not so much the lack of reward, but the lack of any sort of recognition at all. There is not a single line to distinguish those acts of extraordinary generosity from regular generosity. Even a negative consequence for those actions would be an improvement.

I know why these pointless choices are included though. It's because there are people out there who like them. Those people call these pointless choices "role playing," which translates to larping in Codex-speak. Those larpers are total idiots; that I can attest to, as I have had to suffer their idiocy as of late. They are unimaginative retards who're unable to think up their own fantasies, so they have to have fantasies fed to them via shitty bioware games and stuff. They are also emotionally similar to kids or dogs, in that they mindlessly yearn for company.

 

[Roguey]

TBH I don't think it's necessary to script different reactions to literally every different choice you can make. Ideally there'd be indirect reaction systems to make up for this, the lack of one is disappointing (well I guess all the friendship bars are this, but meh, gimme more and better).

And you were also wrong about receiving no reaction from donating to the church. Donating 30 silver/5 gold gives you a +2/+4 reaction from Leliana and it also lowers the persuasion check when it comes to freeing Sten.

 

[sea]

TBH I don't think it's necessary to script different reactions to literally every different choice you can make. Ideally there'd be indirect reaction systems to make up for this, the lack of one is disappointing.

This is mostly a limitation of dialogue budget. Because every line needs to be voiced, they can't go making 2-4 variations of every minor line.

Furthermore, you may notice, if you're the type to pay attention to dialogue trees, that conversations in Dragon Age are structured in very modular sort of ways - NPC says a few lines, player then gets to an investigate node, offering a few more lines, then the NPC keeps talking, then there's another investigate node, etc. The individual lines themselves will also tend towards being slightly ambiguous or vague in many situations, and they will often start with "connecting" words and phrases ("of course", "meanwhile", "in any case", "however"). This allows the developers to string together multiple lines in different ways while still keeping in budget.

The obvious downsides of this are mostly:

1. If writing is not sufficient to provide adequate recognition of player actions, the player can become suspicious of how much choice he/she really has, leading to the entire game being perceived as more limited and linear, even if it really isn't.
2. On replays, the player will notice that the conversation options actually have much less effect, and NPCs will often say the same thing even though the dialogue choices give the impression of many more directions the conversation can go.
3. Requirement to boil down choices to binary options between 2 or 3 outcomes, to minimize the differences in dialogue required to later acknowledge those choices; this can reduce the scope of player decisions.
4. Makes it harder to give the player more flavor dialogue and more ways to modify what are otherwise binary decisions (such as haggling an NPC to lower his/her price, or provide a better reward for a quest).
5. Less dialogue overall can be wasted, so writing style has to favor economy over detail and lengthy prose. This can in turn hurt characterization and puts more onus on the voice actors as well as supplementary material (codex entries) to fill out the game world or communicate subtleties and nuances, when it could otherwise provide deeper and more interesting conversations. Some feel that this brevity is more realistic, but it can also lead to the player not having enough autonomy in navigating conversations, or many characters feeling very samey or indistinct.

I agree that it's not really fair to expect the game to give you a unique dialogue line for even small outcomes. The game still has companions and other NPCs react in important situations (critical path stuff and major side quests). It also still does acknowledge the player's actions mechanically in the form of the approval system, which arguably is a fair trade-off if handled well (and it doesn't make much sense for companions to voice every single objection or admiration out loud). Of course, the approval system in Dragon Age is not used to its full potential or even nearly as well as in, say, Mask of the Betrayer, but that's not the fault of the writers in acknowledging player choices or not.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

But that's the thing. It's because Dragon Age 2 takes itself dead serious at all times that it's so hilariously bad.

But it doesn't? There's nothing serious about an opening gameplay segment where Bethany's bust has been grossly exaggerated or Sir Mix-a-Lot and Underpants Gnomes references or a quest where you kill wave after wave of enemies so your companion can have an uninterrupted date while possibly being completely oblivious to your own advances or Merrill being so thick she literally needs to walk around Kirkwall trailing a ball of string so she can find her way back home or Anders telling Isabela he's not going to cure her STDs anymore while she walks away giving you bedroom eyes and so on.

1. Hahaha, Varric is an unreliable narrator. The entire game can easily be retconned with a "lol nope, Varric lied". Why do we bother having a save file import for Dragon Age 3 again?
2. I didn't say the game didn't have some lighthearted bits and pieces here and there. BioWare has always loved memes and (poorly done) references. This falls under the category "standard BioWare suckyness" (or "suckiness" depending on who does the spelling).
3. Party banter. Comic relief. You've heard of this, I hope? It's in every BioWare game. Stick around and you'll also hear Anders flat out say how templars are sexually assaulting mages.

I really cannot think of Dragon Age 2 without thinking about one of the many ridiculously melodramatic scenes, starting with Aveline's husband succumbing to the darkspawn taint. I don't want to fucking list every sad fucking scene in the game. There's a lot of them.

 

[DraQ]

I really cannot think of Dragon Age 2 without thinking about one of the many ridiculously melodramatic scenes, starting with Aveline's husband succumbing to the darkspawn taint.

I have watched an unabridged vidya of the game up to this point. I fully expected him to explode in a hilarious geyser of blood and gibs like everything else in this game does when stabbed with a dagger caking Avelline with gore. Instinctively. It wasn't even conscious thought, simply everything to this point behaved in such way.

 

[Roguey]

DraQ the exploding bodies thing was a bug. It's only supposed to happen on special crits, much like all the Fallouts.

This is mostly a limitation of dialogue budget. Because every line needs to be voiced, they can't go making 2-4 variations of every minor line.

I've seen the same thing in games without full voice acting. There's the localization budget and time, in general, to consider as well.

 

[DraQ]

DraQ the exploding bodies thing was a bug. It's only supposed to happen on special crits, much like all the Fallouts.

Yeh, a little, inconspicuous bug, that's all it was.


With such amount of blood at such pressure it's a wonder women in DA universe don't rocket up into space atop of humongous jets of presurrized blood when they have period.

 

[Roguey]

One of the reasons why I believe Josh Sawyer does not have autism is because he understands abstraction, unlike so many other autists.

 

[sea]

What does Josh Sawyer have to do with this discussion?

 

[DraQ]

One of the reasons why I believe Josh Sawyer does not have autism is because he understands abstraction, unlike so many other autists.

So, characters exploding in tens of gallons of blood is abstraction for what exactly?

I can get enemies gibbing when killed in old games running on very limited memory (so as not to clutter the memory with corpses), or with visual limitations like old crawlers where corpses could obscure important part of tile graphics with no way around that. The thing is that those games used pretty abstract presentation. Even newer, more realistic looking games (like Wizardry 8) weren't really straight faced enough. They also stopped at gibbing without the whole tomato-in-microwave shtick.

Like it or not but fairly realistic (even if still stylized) graphics combined with abstract aesthetics of people exploding for no adequate reason, plus copious amounts of blood and gore set the tone of the game.
This tone happens to be fully incompatible with excessive melodrama, as you expect the presentation to remain consistent and your tragic plot victim to splatter in hilariously gratuitous manner when his loved one stabs him with a dagger.

Choices and consequences.

 

[Roguey]

[Todd Howard's thoughts on violence]

Plus new games don't have problems with running on very limited memory?

 

[DraQ]

Plus new games don't have problems with running on very limited memory?

Yep, you're retarded.

 

[Roguey]

Pretty much all console game developers agree, there's not enough memory on the PS3 and XBox. Look at Sawyer's joy regarding the PS4: https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/304369066712383488

 

[DraQ]

Pretty much all console game developers agree, there's not enough memory on the PS3 and XBox. Look at Sawyer's joy regarding the PS4: https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/304369066712383488

Not enough for what? Complex expansive worlds AND managing lots of variables?
Yeah.

Storing location and type of a bunch of corpses while they are still in visual range?
Are we in fucking early-nineties?

 

[Roguey]

Disappearing corpses are the norm for console games. Have you been stuck in the late nineties?

 

[DraQ]

Disappearing corpses are the norm for console games.

Having to annihilate them right away, however isn't, and it's not as if DA2 keept the battlefield particularly clean - there is a lot of splatter left, so blowing enemies people is a purely aesthetic choice.
One that doesn't work with the supposed tone of the game.

 

[sea]

Because the first Dragon Age had so much trouble replacing corpses with low-poly skeleton or loot bag models when there were too many on screen.

Oh wait, that's exactly what it did. And in Dragon Age 2, with its gibbing and all that, they still do the same thing.

Hmm.

 

[DraQ]

Because the first Dragon Age had so much trouble replacing corpses with low-poly skeleton or loot bag models when there were too many on screen.

Oh wait, that's exactly what it did. And in Dragon Age 2, with its gibbing and all that, they still do the same thing.

Hmm.

Aliens.
Roguey.

 

[evdk]

 

[Roguey]

Disappearing corpses are the norm for console games.

Having to annihilate them right away, however isn't, and it's not as if DA2 keept the battlefield particularly clean - there is a lot of splatter left, so blowing enemies people is a purely aesthetic choice.

Did I ever say it wasn't?

One that doesn't work with the supposed tone of the game.

I disagree since I don't have autism.

I liked DA:O's special kill animations better though. I suspect the simplification has to do with time/memory-saving crap while wanting to preserve the EXPLODE INTO CHUNKS animation that dates back to BG.

 

[deuxhero]

what could have been somewhat interesting in better hands turns outright hilarious and awe-inspiringly stupid thanks to zombie mom.

Wait, you mean that was real? I have no doubts Bioware could be that bad at writing, but there was plenty of trolling at the time.

Video please?