Dr.Faust
Liturgist
I know, I know another DA2 thread, but bear with me here.
My fellow codexians I've taken it upon myself to play this game at least seven times and compile a near perfect list of its flaws so you don't have to. So if you ever find yourself in a heated argument with a videogame pleb just quote this list for instant Kool Kreds.
SPOILER WARNING BROS, WOULDN'T WANT TO RUIN THIS MASTERPIECE FOR YOU.
1. Story
I think it's appropriate to start with this since it's the part that always gets lauded by faggots and faggot ass reviewers (no offense to real male cocklovers). This whole part can be summed up with "What story?". The plot is a jumbled mess with no coherent factor to carry you forward except to see how AWESOME Hawke gets after the next awful timeskip. Really it's like the slice-of-life anime of videogames. Anyone who has played the demo or watched the trailers will probably assume there's some big plot with Flemeth and Morrigan or the Qunari, but HAHA NO, these are all saved for the DLC! There's always a short-term goal for every section between the timeskips, but the problems and characters that are involved in these mini stories are almost always introduced in the very same gameplay section, so you never feel really involved in these tasks. In short, the main quests feel and play like side quests and the whole game seems like a skeleton ready for the meat that is DLC. Then there's of course the removal of any moral ambiguity and gray area choices. Every person Hawke faces is either good or bad except until the very end when the devs decided that there simply wasn't enough EPIC BOSS BATTLE in the finale and decided to go full retard with the first enchanter too. Any problems that arise can be solved by turning the offending party to strawberry jam by poking them with knives. A few good moments in the game, like Varric's personal quest, but they're hardly enough to stop the turd avalanche of everything else.
2. Characters
It'd be wrong for me to say that every single character in this game is a piece of fanservicing shit designed to cater to teenagers who have yet to feel the touch of a woman, since there are a handful that stand out like a bright torch of mediocrity illuminating just how deep the hole of shit design goes. Varric, for example, is actually pretty likable in a totally no-homo sort of way. He's the one and only true bro in the game. The rest of the cast is either really bland, annoying or just downright retarded.
Merrill? Ooh, this innocent little vixen might not be as innocent as you think. Yawn! Her personal quest is at least a little interesting, but her motivation is retarded and why does every dalish elf have to have the same "for my people!" -personality.
Anders is a fucking creep and I hope I'm not the only one who is disgusted by his sappy dialogue or else I might be turning in to a homophobe subconsciounsly. I blame Bioware if I find myself joining a bible study group just so I can find like-minded individuals to hate fags with.
Then there's of course Fenris. I don't even know where to start with this one. Brooding elf with amnesia and a tragic past, swings around a weapon the size of his own body despite being thinner than an anorectic stick insect. Really Bioware? Let's not forget the über cool looking physical "defect" that make him an outsider and stand out in a crowd: the lyrium tattoos which glow when he's all srs business! Personal quest dealing with vengeance so original jesus christ I'm jizzing all over.
3. Romances, this is the shit right here
Now you'd think with all the hype around these romances they would be something special or at least daring, but turns out that this aspect of the game sucks just like any other. Every romancable character starts a "lol wna romance??" dialogue with you at some point and of course being the lonely husk of a man that I am I answered positively to all of them. Makes me feel special. I was already sliding my hand down my pants waiting for some hot elven T'n'A when reality struck. The actual sex scenes contain no nudity! This is an outrage! I guess if you're in to mushy, pink, romance poop garbage dialogue and lovey dovey stories you're going to be all like "But man, that's not what the romances are about! Tell me about the dialogue! Surely at least the dialogue is touching?". Alright, you got it and I'm sorry to disappoint you with this. The actualy romances are a series of some five dialogues with your partner that contain some of the shittiest writing I've seen in a game. Absolutely worthless fanfiction level junk. You can hear the fat writers gushing ladyspunk through their various, lard covered orifices just from reading the Fenris (b)romance.
4. Dragon Age lore
While it's generally agreed, by people other than Volourn, that the DA universe is mostly just ripped off from other, better settings I did feel like it worked well in origins. Here, however, the lore has received the mass effect treatment by going full retard in the sequel. I think the most glaring problem is the removal of any moral ambiguity that I already mentioned in the story section. For example in DAO we're told that there is nothing inherently wrong with blood magic. It's just an understandable taboo since converting life to power has a high potential for abuse. All of this is thrown out of the window in DA2 and all practitioners of blood magic are EVIL or INSANE and need to be cleansed. This is taken to such ridiculous lengths that even if Hawke is a maleficar herself she will still condemn it in the dialogue. Most of the problems with lore come from the inconsistency between gameplay and story. Another example: it is explained in DAO how teleportation is impossible even for a mage, yet in DA2 I had Merrill constantly teleport to my other teammates.
5. Combat
It seems to me that Bioware is very determined to make mocking this game as easy as possible. Just copypasta some critique from the previous title and remove the parts that are positive. Yeah remember that tedious filler combat? Ooh boy does it make an amazing return. Every single area is littered with what can be described in MMO terms as trash mobs. Behind every door you open and every corridor you you run through there's another mindless experience fodder encounter waiting to be tackled. It's no surprise that MMO terminology fits this game since the combat plays exactly like a world of warcraft instance with you or an average MMO player level artificial stupidity controlling every character. Difficulty ranges from button mashing (casual, normal) and button mashing with placement (hard) to tedious as fuck (nightmare). The main problem is the encounter design. Enemies spawn from thin air in locations that make no sense, like the way you just came or a dead end solid stone wall in cave. This combined with the fact that all enemy casters and assassins have a teleport or a stealth ability makes the battles feel more like a game of luck than skill on harder difficulties. Forget advanced and clever tactics. Any careful planning you might have done can be rendered null with an unlucky instagibbing assassin spawn behind your casters. Mindless AOE spam is the most effective tactic because of the amount of trash enemies and the fact that stealthed enemies also take damage and get revealed. This tactic is also fucking tedious since there is no top-down camera for easy AOE targeting. The ai tweaking tactics system is in again and it works as well as you'd expect it to, but since you can't tweak character placement with the system you're going to be micromanaging your entire squad all the time on harder difficulty anyway.
6. Graffix and visual design
Everybody knows this is the most important part of a game so pay attention. The game doesn't really look as bad in motion as you'd think from some of the screenshots posted here on the dex. Technical side is clearly limited because of consoles, but as long as you don't go staring at the non-interactive NPCs too hard your eyes will remain unscorched by ugly textures. The worst thing that comes comes from the console limitations is the lack of grand scale in the visuals. Kirkwall looks nice, even if its design is a little cartoony, but it doesn't feel like a large bustling city. Some NPC comments that the elven alienage is too packed with and they're running out of room, yet if you visit the alienage yourself there's a grand total of four NPCs standing around and your penniless friend lives in an apartment that could house five modern day art students. So while the technical side isn't as bad as people make it sound like the visual design itself is horrible. Everything has taken a leap toward cartoon fantasy land. DAOs pretense of reality is ditched to make room for AWESOME. The chanter's board is now a huge stone block, which seems really impractical for a bulletin board. Elves have now been given extra large eyes and weird bridgeless noses almost as if to cash in on a certain blockbuster movies success (paint a DA2 elf blue in photoshop, go ahead, try it) . It's a vicious cycle of ripping off. This cartoonifying can be seen everywhere. Armors, weapons, enviroments, animations, facial expressions even the default male Hawke is straight from a disney production with his spiky beard of coolness.
7. Audio
This is the part where the developer's laziness is most glaring. Voice acting is nowhere near Jennifer Hale levels, but I don't think it's as bad as the whine over this would imply. The male Hawke voice works pretty well for a diplomatic character and the female for the sarcastic wiseguy, wisegal, whatever. The angry Hawke, however, sounds very unconvincing and is once again miles away from renegade femshep. Most of the voices for the non-Hawke characters are horrible with Merrill winning the special earrape award. Special points for having an inconsistent unidentifiable accent. Music is completely underwhelming and boring. The only track that I paid attention to was the Blooming Rose brothel song with that cool flute shiznaz and the guitar. Sound effects are more recycled than a hippies' hemp clothing and while it might not have any effect on the gameplay itself to hear the same whizzing and banging in every cutscene and combat it does speak about the effort that has went in to making of this gem.
8. Repetition, the game
I feel that this deserves it's own section just because of how much it's done in the game. The game honestly has like five different dungeon designs that are constantly recycled with very minor variation. A doorway that was open in another incarnation of the same shitty corridorfest dungeon now has a gray slab of stone blocking it or some rubble that looks like a toddler could crawl over it. This wouldn't be much of a problem if the game didn't feature an endless amount of "go there, kill enemies" -type of quests that always take place in the same goddamn warehouse. I was actually flabberghasted when a DLC featured a unique looking dungeon, but alas, on closer inspection it turned out to be the very same dungeon I had been in at least ten times with a new macabre decor.
9. Command & Conquer
If C&C is being praised as one of Bio's strong points after this game you might as well start calling me the poster boy for male virility. Most of the time, and this is in the big decisions, the game doesn't even try to create an illusion of choice. All three derpwheel options are "yes" paraphrased a little differently. In the decisions that don't seem to matter, the side quests, you're given the option to say "no", but like I said before the side quests are the main quest, so telling the quest giver to fuck off will only result in a "lol come talk when you ready with quest" and since you can't advance the plot without doing some of these retarded side quests you have no choice but to accept. Your sibling will leave the party no matter what you do, the qunari will leave and you will be hailed as the champion no matter what you do, the chantry will blow up no matter what you do. Any choices you have only affect the minor details of the story.
10. Catering to the lowest common denominator
It's jarring how hard Bio is trying to take the roleplaying game out of the the roleplaying game. This can be seen everywhere in the game in some of the most idiotic design decisions I've ever seen in a game. Removing the ability to edit your teammates' armor, because it was apparently "tedious" to change the armor with every minor improvement. Well here's an idea, make the item upgrades major! There is no real gameplay reason for every second chest, crate and body to contain boatloads of shitty armor and weapons. Finding a named "epic" magic item in DA2 feels like nothing because that trash you found in a crate or just bought from a shop is almost as good or even better than it! As it is it feels like equipment was just shoehorned in to their action game because, hey, RPGs have loot, right? Then there's that thrash loot system. Great idea to remove tedium in managing useless items if you have to have them, but then why add shitloads of loot that nobody in the world can use? Armor pieces with high dex and cunning requirements are just as useless as trash items if you happen to be playing a mage, since your party can't use them and you will never have the required stats for it because you're forced to dump everything in your two class stats.
TL;DR - It's shit, lol
My fellow codexians I've taken it upon myself to play this game at least seven times and compile a near perfect list of its flaws so you don't have to. So if you ever find yourself in a heated argument with a videogame pleb just quote this list for instant Kool Kreds.
SPOILER WARNING BROS, WOULDN'T WANT TO RUIN THIS MASTERPIECE FOR YOU.
1. Story
I think it's appropriate to start with this since it's the part that always gets lauded by faggots and faggot ass reviewers (no offense to real male cocklovers). This whole part can be summed up with "What story?". The plot is a jumbled mess with no coherent factor to carry you forward except to see how AWESOME Hawke gets after the next awful timeskip. Really it's like the slice-of-life anime of videogames. Anyone who has played the demo or watched the trailers will probably assume there's some big plot with Flemeth and Morrigan or the Qunari, but HAHA NO, these are all saved for the DLC! There's always a short-term goal for every section between the timeskips, but the problems and characters that are involved in these mini stories are almost always introduced in the very same gameplay section, so you never feel really involved in these tasks. In short, the main quests feel and play like side quests and the whole game seems like a skeleton ready for the meat that is DLC. Then there's of course the removal of any moral ambiguity and gray area choices. Every person Hawke faces is either good or bad except until the very end when the devs decided that there simply wasn't enough EPIC BOSS BATTLE in the finale and decided to go full retard with the first enchanter too. Any problems that arise can be solved by turning the offending party to strawberry jam by poking them with knives. A few good moments in the game, like Varric's personal quest, but they're hardly enough to stop the turd avalanche of everything else.
2. Characters
It'd be wrong for me to say that every single character in this game is a piece of fanservicing shit designed to cater to teenagers who have yet to feel the touch of a woman, since there are a handful that stand out like a bright torch of mediocrity illuminating just how deep the hole of shit design goes. Varric, for example, is actually pretty likable in a totally no-homo sort of way. He's the one and only true bro in the game. The rest of the cast is either really bland, annoying or just downright retarded.
Merrill? Ooh, this innocent little vixen might not be as innocent as you think. Yawn! Her personal quest is at least a little interesting, but her motivation is retarded and why does every dalish elf have to have the same "for my people!" -personality.
Anders is a fucking creep and I hope I'm not the only one who is disgusted by his sappy dialogue or else I might be turning in to a homophobe subconsciounsly. I blame Bioware if I find myself joining a bible study group just so I can find like-minded individuals to hate fags with.
Then there's of course Fenris. I don't even know where to start with this one. Brooding elf with amnesia and a tragic past, swings around a weapon the size of his own body despite being thinner than an anorectic stick insect. Really Bioware? Let's not forget the über cool looking physical "defect" that make him an outsider and stand out in a crowd: the lyrium tattoos which glow when he's all srs business! Personal quest dealing with vengeance so original jesus christ I'm jizzing all over.
3. Romances, this is the shit right here
Now you'd think with all the hype around these romances they would be something special or at least daring, but turns out that this aspect of the game sucks just like any other. Every romancable character starts a "lol wna romance??" dialogue with you at some point and of course being the lonely husk of a man that I am I answered positively to all of them. Makes me feel special. I was already sliding my hand down my pants waiting for some hot elven T'n'A when reality struck. The actual sex scenes contain no nudity! This is an outrage! I guess if you're in to mushy, pink, romance poop garbage dialogue and lovey dovey stories you're going to be all like "But man, that's not what the romances are about! Tell me about the dialogue! Surely at least the dialogue is touching?". Alright, you got it and I'm sorry to disappoint you with this. The actualy romances are a series of some five dialogues with your partner that contain some of the shittiest writing I've seen in a game. Absolutely worthless fanfiction level junk. You can hear the fat writers gushing ladyspunk through their various, lard covered orifices just from reading the Fenris (b)romance.
4. Dragon Age lore
While it's generally agreed, by people other than Volourn, that the DA universe is mostly just ripped off from other, better settings I did feel like it worked well in origins. Here, however, the lore has received the mass effect treatment by going full retard in the sequel. I think the most glaring problem is the removal of any moral ambiguity that I already mentioned in the story section. For example in DAO we're told that there is nothing inherently wrong with blood magic. It's just an understandable taboo since converting life to power has a high potential for abuse. All of this is thrown out of the window in DA2 and all practitioners of blood magic are EVIL or INSANE and need to be cleansed. This is taken to such ridiculous lengths that even if Hawke is a maleficar herself she will still condemn it in the dialogue. Most of the problems with lore come from the inconsistency between gameplay and story. Another example: it is explained in DAO how teleportation is impossible even for a mage, yet in DA2 I had Merrill constantly teleport to my other teammates.
5. Combat
It seems to me that Bioware is very determined to make mocking this game as easy as possible. Just copypasta some critique from the previous title and remove the parts that are positive. Yeah remember that tedious filler combat? Ooh boy does it make an amazing return. Every single area is littered with what can be described in MMO terms as trash mobs. Behind every door you open and every corridor you you run through there's another mindless experience fodder encounter waiting to be tackled. It's no surprise that MMO terminology fits this game since the combat plays exactly like a world of warcraft instance with you or an average MMO player level artificial stupidity controlling every character. Difficulty ranges from button mashing (casual, normal) and button mashing with placement (hard) to tedious as fuck (nightmare). The main problem is the encounter design. Enemies spawn from thin air in locations that make no sense, like the way you just came or a dead end solid stone wall in cave. This combined with the fact that all enemy casters and assassins have a teleport or a stealth ability makes the battles feel more like a game of luck than skill on harder difficulties. Forget advanced and clever tactics. Any careful planning you might have done can be rendered null with an unlucky instagibbing assassin spawn behind your casters. Mindless AOE spam is the most effective tactic because of the amount of trash enemies and the fact that stealthed enemies also take damage and get revealed. This tactic is also fucking tedious since there is no top-down camera for easy AOE targeting. The ai tweaking tactics system is in again and it works as well as you'd expect it to, but since you can't tweak character placement with the system you're going to be micromanaging your entire squad all the time on harder difficulty anyway.
6. Graffix and visual design
Everybody knows this is the most important part of a game so pay attention. The game doesn't really look as bad in motion as you'd think from some of the screenshots posted here on the dex. Technical side is clearly limited because of consoles, but as long as you don't go staring at the non-interactive NPCs too hard your eyes will remain unscorched by ugly textures. The worst thing that comes comes from the console limitations is the lack of grand scale in the visuals. Kirkwall looks nice, even if its design is a little cartoony, but it doesn't feel like a large bustling city. Some NPC comments that the elven alienage is too packed with and they're running out of room, yet if you visit the alienage yourself there's a grand total of four NPCs standing around and your penniless friend lives in an apartment that could house five modern day art students. So while the technical side isn't as bad as people make it sound like the visual design itself is horrible. Everything has taken a leap toward cartoon fantasy land. DAOs pretense of reality is ditched to make room for AWESOME. The chanter's board is now a huge stone block, which seems really impractical for a bulletin board. Elves have now been given extra large eyes and weird bridgeless noses almost as if to cash in on a certain blockbuster movies success (paint a DA2 elf blue in photoshop, go ahead, try it) . It's a vicious cycle of ripping off. This cartoonifying can be seen everywhere. Armors, weapons, enviroments, animations, facial expressions even the default male Hawke is straight from a disney production with his spiky beard of coolness.
7. Audio
This is the part where the developer's laziness is most glaring. Voice acting is nowhere near Jennifer Hale levels, but I don't think it's as bad as the whine over this would imply. The male Hawke voice works pretty well for a diplomatic character and the female for the sarcastic wiseguy, wisegal, whatever. The angry Hawke, however, sounds very unconvincing and is once again miles away from renegade femshep. Most of the voices for the non-Hawke characters are horrible with Merrill winning the special earrape award. Special points for having an inconsistent unidentifiable accent. Music is completely underwhelming and boring. The only track that I paid attention to was the Blooming Rose brothel song with that cool flute shiznaz and the guitar. Sound effects are more recycled than a hippies' hemp clothing and while it might not have any effect on the gameplay itself to hear the same whizzing and banging in every cutscene and combat it does speak about the effort that has went in to making of this gem.
8. Repetition, the game
I feel that this deserves it's own section just because of how much it's done in the game. The game honestly has like five different dungeon designs that are constantly recycled with very minor variation. A doorway that was open in another incarnation of the same shitty corridorfest dungeon now has a gray slab of stone blocking it or some rubble that looks like a toddler could crawl over it. This wouldn't be much of a problem if the game didn't feature an endless amount of "go there, kill enemies" -type of quests that always take place in the same goddamn warehouse. I was actually flabberghasted when a DLC featured a unique looking dungeon, but alas, on closer inspection it turned out to be the very same dungeon I had been in at least ten times with a new macabre decor.
9. Command & Conquer
If C&C is being praised as one of Bio's strong points after this game you might as well start calling me the poster boy for male virility. Most of the time, and this is in the big decisions, the game doesn't even try to create an illusion of choice. All three derpwheel options are "yes" paraphrased a little differently. In the decisions that don't seem to matter, the side quests, you're given the option to say "no", but like I said before the side quests are the main quest, so telling the quest giver to fuck off will only result in a "lol come talk when you ready with quest" and since you can't advance the plot without doing some of these retarded side quests you have no choice but to accept. Your sibling will leave the party no matter what you do, the qunari will leave and you will be hailed as the champion no matter what you do, the chantry will blow up no matter what you do. Any choices you have only affect the minor details of the story.
10. Catering to the lowest common denominator
It's jarring how hard Bio is trying to take the roleplaying game out of the the roleplaying game. This can be seen everywhere in the game in some of the most idiotic design decisions I've ever seen in a game. Removing the ability to edit your teammates' armor, because it was apparently "tedious" to change the armor with every minor improvement. Well here's an idea, make the item upgrades major! There is no real gameplay reason for every second chest, crate and body to contain boatloads of shitty armor and weapons. Finding a named "epic" magic item in DA2 feels like nothing because that trash you found in a crate or just bought from a shop is almost as good or even better than it! As it is it feels like equipment was just shoehorned in to their action game because, hey, RPGs have loot, right? Then there's that thrash loot system. Great idea to remove tedium in managing useless items if you have to have them, but then why add shitloads of loot that nobody in the world can use? Armor pieces with high dex and cunning requirements are just as useless as trash items if you happen to be playing a mage, since your party can't use them and you will never have the required stats for it because you're forced to dump everything in your two class stats.
TL;DR - It's shit, lol
paul atreides is fukkinh 100% alfa male while bastian is whinnig faggot
