Dragon Age Dragon Age 2 was released ten years ago

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The last game I bought from Bioware was Dragon Age Origins. At least that game was primarily designed for pc. As early as around 2006-2010 we saw the focus shifting to console gaming and pc gamers start getting one bad port after the other. DA II was a terribad console port. And ever since we are getting crap console port after crap console port on pc and one start to wonder why you should even have a pc for gaming. Consoles ruined everything. These days we must be glad if we even get 5 pc exlcusive games in a timespan of a year.

The DA II game preview article featured Goldman the new jewish art director. He talked about "updating" and "enhancing" Dragon Age Origins.
He made a complete mess out of it.

Dragon Age 2 is shit on consoles too. BioWare couldn't seem to make up their minds on what kind of game they wanted to make, so on consoles you've got what feels like an action game with the worst hit detection a action game has ever had. It's a weird choice they made, because they very clearly wanted it to feel like an action game, and the whole awesome button thing in the marketing sure wanted to give the impression of an action game, but they also didn't really design like a sane person would design a action game.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

On a whim I reinstalled this a while back and started playing it again after only ever playing it once back around release, and oddly enough I'm looking at it more favorably now than I did then. The combat's still awful and the encounter design is non-existent with enemies raining from the sky but the few odd parts of DA2 I liked I still like. Namely the story being a little more personal and localized and having a few time jumps in it. I also like how your party members have houses/apartments in the city and you can go and visit 'em, different than the usual murderhobo gang of adventurers. Another thing I've noticed is how your character's responses get shifted a bit by how you play 'em, rather than having a good/evil/paragon/renegade system where it display it it seems it just tracks that behind the scenes and adjusts how your character says shits during the times you aren't picking an option. Not good for C&C but it's an interesting way of doing cinematic storyfaggotry.

All in all it's similar to Inquisition in that it's not satisfying for C&C and not enjoyable for combat but it has enough going on with the fluff that I haven't deleted it after starting a replay. Inquisition was interesting because "CRPG where you're the head of a big important organization" sounds interesting on paper but in practice it wasn't handled that well, and DA2's "CRPG where you're a minor noble clawing your family back" is still flawed but it's nice that a not insignificant amount of the time your character is meant to be loafing around and people come to you with jobs/emergencies/shit rather than invading every home in the city to look for distressed people with quests. In fact as much as I hate to say it (But I will because I must always bitch about Pillars of Eternity) it's kind of a shame that Obsidian went so fucking vanilla with PoE since DA2 and DAI's campaigns/stories are more interesting. I'll take PoE1 and 2 for gameplay any day of the week over DA2/DAI but if you could splice a localized "Big city and the surrounding lands" story into PoE RTWP combat you'd be better off. Hell, it's probably why Tyranny's cooler than PoE even though it's not as enjoyable mechanically. For all the flaws in that the setting's neat and there isn't much else like it out there.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

DA owed a lot to Game of Thrones (or ASOIAF) and it showed. That sort of fantasy had a brief boom and Bioware capitalized on it (to the point that DAO was almost like an ASOIAF fanfic). The way that story ended, though, I don't think we're getting another setting that's like it. I do agree that DA2's conflict feels more engaging, not because of you and your role on the land in particular, but because it feels urgent, and the stakes are high. It's quite literally a story about law and order in a lawless land. Things can and will go wrong if you end up in certain scenarios (like, Merril murdered fucking everyone in her tribe at the end of it) and of course there's the whole Anders thing. The game is still shit but I've thought about it more than any Mass Effect game. In fact I don't remember a single thing from the trilogy outside certain key scenes.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

The game is still shit but I've thought about it more than any Mass Effect game.

That pretty much sums up my feelings about Dragon Age entirely. Recently played the whole pile of Mass Effects due to the remaster and because I had never played the DLC for ME2 or any of ME3 and even though it was a fine enough experience I didn't enjoy it as much as the DA games. Which seems peculiar since some of what I dislike about ME where it feels like it's just mashing up sci-fi shit to make Cool Game Sci-Fi Setting Do Not Steal is true of DA and fantasy, particularly ASOIAF like you said and also a fairly heavy dose of Witcher since that's around when Witcher was slowly growing in popularity since it was a couple years after Witcher 1. And even though the fucking planet is called Thedas for "The Dragon Age Setting" which makes me gnash my teeth in impotent nerd rage every time I hear it I still have a better time than with ME.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

DA owed a lot to Game of Thrones (or ASOIAF) and it showed. That sort of fantasy had a brief boom and Bioware capitalized on it (to the point that DAO was almost like an ASOIAF fanfic). The way that story ended, though, I don't think we're getting another setting that's like it. I do agree that DA2's conflict feels more engaging, not because of you and your role on the land in particular, but because it feels urgent, and the stakes are high. It's quite literally a story about law and order in a lawless land. Things can and will go wrong if you end up in certain scenarios (like, Merril murdered fucking everyone in her tribe at the end of it) and of course there's the whole Anders thing. The game is still shit but I've thought about it more than any Mass Effect game. In fact I don't remember a single thing from the trilogy outside certain key scenes.

BioWare did the total opposite of capitalize on the Game of Thrones boom. In the eight years the original Game of Thrones series ran on HBO, BioWare released a grand total of one Dragon Age game. BioWare didn’t even take advantage of the darker, more violent and sex filled sensibility the Game of Thrones show made more mainstream either...and surely BioWare knew their audience wanted romance shit, but even with the popular Game of Thrones show telling them it was OK to go certain places BioWare held back like a bunch of little pussies. Instead the Witcher games did go there and ended up finding the kind of success BioWare and EA wished Dragon Age had.

Dragon Age 2 would come out the same year Game of Thrones started, but it was the month before.

You think about it it’s kind of funny. BioWare had a series going influenced by the Song of Fire and Ice books. A adaption of those books happens and becomes a popular hit tv show. And what BioWare does is they just sit on the series they have during that time and only do one game with it. Not only do they sit on it, but when they do make a game it’s like the limp dick bitch boy version. It’s like the dumbest fucking business move they could’ve possibly made. They released more Dragon Age game in the year before the show came out then in the eight years the show aired.

 

[9ted6]

Dragon Age has only one good game and two increasingly shit reboots.

 

[Ibn Sina]

DA2 will forever be a bad game due to the amount of cognitive dissonance that gets slapped in your face almost every moment in the game that you have to ignore. Especially when you play a mage. In the first 10 mins of the game you fight some mercs infront of the city guard raining fire on them and they let you in no fucks given or even adress your use of magic. This continues for the rest of the game were you talk to templars and have fight with infront of templars using magic and they still act like blind retards. This alone ruins the game, especially when the central premise is about you hiding your magic. It so stupid.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

DA2 will forever be a bad game due to the amount of cognitive dissonance that gets slapped in your face almost every moment in the game that you have to ignore. Especially when you play a mage. In the first 10 mins of the game you fight some mercs infront of the city guard raining fire on them and they let you in no fucks given or even adress your use of magic. This continues for the rest of the game were you talk to templars and have fight with infront of templars using magic and they still act like blind retards. This alone ruins the game, especially when the central premise is about you hiding your magic. It so stupid.

I think Gaider said they were thinking of introducing a system similar to BG2's where you couldn't use magic in big urban centers, and had to get a license, but it had to be discarded because it wasn't liked by playtesters, or something along those lines. Many good features die in the playtester realm.

 

[Roguey]

I think Gaider said they were thinking of introducing a system similar to BG2's where you couldn't use magic in big urban centers, and had to get a license, but it had to be discarded because it wasn't liked by playtesters, or something along those lines. Many good features die in the playtester realm.

Nah, they were going to do something acknowledging it, but it had to be cut for time (of which they had virtually none).

DG: Part of that was, there was actually a plot in chapter one which got cut, which was if you were a mage, it specifically addressed that point. Not much we can do about that. Part of it is gameplay. One assumes that you're not walking around announcing to the world that you're a blood mage, or a mage for that matter. One assumes there are people who wear robes that aren't mages. You don't see that very much. So there's a little bit of a handwave there, I totally recognize that. The problem with the plot we cut is it wasn't working very well, it was very complicated, it involved going into the Fade and a few other things and we couldn't get it to work. Had we been a little smarter when we started we would have had some smaller reaction in the world, just recognizing who you were without a giant plot that required a lot of content. Going in the future I'd like to have more recognition of that. It is kind of funny, if you think about it too much there's a lot of things where gameplay and the story don't match up--

TUK: We really do think about it too much, we do know that, that's why we're here.

DG: Well, we think about it too. When we cut that plot I was like "Oh. All right, so...I guess nobody notices..." So I put a couple comments into Meredith's dialogue, she sort of comments "We knew who you were," and in a few other places. I think we should've put something into Cullen's dialogue. [laughter]

TUK: Poor Cullen. So oblivious.

DG: Jennifer wrote that plot, and afterwards, I forget what it was, someone said "You know, wouldn't Cullen happen to burst onto the scene and you're casting spells, wouldn't he say 'So you're a mage...'" It was too late for us to do anything about it and we decided that Cullen is just very oblivious.

 

[Hagashager]

I was in senior year of High School when Dragon Age II came out. That was one of the worst years of my life. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong: broken relationships, near-death hospitalization, major financial crisis, the angst of entering adulthood in a personal ball of rolling fire. Looking back on it now, it's morbidly funny how spectularly wrong that time was.

DAII represents, for me, my conscious removal from modern gaming. That felt like a gut-punch to my favorite hobby at the time and after the shit-storm that was my life at that point I no longer cared about gaming and its industry. I wasn't mad at DAII like others here, it was more just...this game is terrible and I don't even have the energy to explain why. I just knew, at that point, gaming was dying, it would get no better.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I think Gaider said they were thinking of introducing a system similar to BG2's where you couldn't use magic in big urban centers, and had to get a license, but it had to be discarded because it wasn't liked by playtesters, or something along those lines. Many good features die in the playtester realm.

Nah, they were going to do something acknowledging it, but it had to be cut for time (of which they had virtually none).

DG: Part of that was, there was actually a plot in chapter one which got cut, which was if you were a mage, it specifically addressed that point. Not much we can do about that. Part of it is gameplay. One assumes that you're not walking around announcing to the world that you're a blood mage, or a mage for that matter. One assumes there are people who wear robes that aren't mages. You don't see that very much. So there's a little bit of a handwave there, I totally recognize that. The problem with the plot we cut is it wasn't working very well, it was very complicated, it involved going into the Fade and a few other things and we couldn't get it to work. Had we been a little smarter when we started we would have had some smaller reaction in the world, just recognizing who you were without a giant plot that required a lot of content. Going in the future I'd like to have more recognition of that. It is kind of funny, if you think about it too much there's a lot of things where gameplay and the story don't match up--

TUK: We really do think about it too much, we do know that, that's why we're here.

DG: Well, we think about it too. When we cut that plot I was like "Oh. All right, so...I guess nobody notices..." So I put a couple comments into Meredith's dialogue, she sort of comments "We knew who you were," and in a few other places. I think we should've put something into Cullen's dialogue. [laughter]

TUK: Poor Cullen. So oblivious.

DG: Jennifer wrote that plot, and afterwards, I forget what it was, someone said "You know, wouldn't Cullen happen to burst onto the scene and you're casting spells, wouldn't he say 'So you're a mage...'" It was too late for us to do anything about it and we decided that Cullen is just very oblivious.

I always blame removal of good shit on playtesters, but yeah, this makes sense too.

I was in senior year of High School when Dragon Age II came out. That was one of the worst years of my life. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong: broken relationships, near-death hospitalization, major financial crisis, the angst of entering adulthood in a personal ball of rolling fire. Looking back on it now, it's morbidly funny how spectularly wrong that time was.

DAII represents, for me, my conscious removal from modern gaming. That felt like a gut-punch to my favorite hobby at the time and after the shit-storm that was my life at that point I no longer cared about gaming and its industry. I wasn't mad at DAII like others here, it was more just...this game is terrible and I don't even have the energy to explain why. I just knew, at that point, gaming was dying, it would get no better.

I think this is interesting to consider. Dragon Age II came out in 2011. By then, gaming had been in an almost decade-long stream of general shittiness, with arguably no end in sight. Looking back, I'd say in the mid 10s games started to get better overall, but I think the impact Dragon Age II had in the gaming scene, and especially in the rpg landscape, made a lot of people feel the same than what you did. And Mass Effect 3's debacle hadn't even happened yet. Ironically, DA2 seemed to be something long forgotten even when ME3 released one year later. It's funny how fast things were happening back then, and how things would continue to change in the years after. There's something to be said about the release of DA2 and the release of TW3 and the kickstarter games. Call me optimistic, but I'd say gaming in 2023 is in a much more better shape than how it was in 2013.

 

[Semiurge]

DA2 will forever be a bad game due to the amount of cognitive dissonance that gets slapped in your face almost every moment in the game that you have to ignore. Especially when you play a mage. In the first 10 mins of the game you fight some mercs infront of the city guard raining fire on them and they let you in no fucks given or even adress your use of magic. This continues for the rest of the game were you talk to templars and have fight with infront of templars using magic and they still act like blind retards. This alone ruins the game, especially when the central premise is about you hiding your magic. It so stupid.

It is, but every DA game is designed around a warrior PC. Everything else is for NG+ and weirdoes who want to use magic instead of the shinies.

 

[Camel]

DA owed a lot to Game of Thrones (or ASOIAF) and it showed. That sort of fantasy had a brief boom and Bioware capitalized on it (to the point that DAO was almost like an ASOIAF fanfic). The way that story ended, though, I don't think we're getting another setting that's like it. I do agree that DA2's conflict feels more engaging, not because of you and your role on the land in particular, but because it feels urgent, and the stakes are high. It's quite literally a story about law and order in a lawless land. Things can and will go wrong if you end up in certain scenarios (like, Merril murdered fucking everyone in her tribe at the end of it) and of course there's the whole Anders thing. The game is still shit but I've thought about it more than any Mass Effect game. In fact I don't remember a single thing from the trilogy outside certain key scenes.

DA:O was released two years before the GoT but it was certainly influenced by GRRM.

BioWare did the total opposite of capitalize on the Game of Thrones boom. In the eight years the original Game of Thrones series ran on HBO, BioWare released a grand total of one Dragon Age game. BioWare didn’t even take advantage of the darker, more violent and sex filled sensibility the Game of Thrones show made more mainstream either...and surely BioWare knew their audience wanted romance shit, but even with the popular Game of Thrones show telling them it was OK to go certain places BioWare held back like a bunch of little pussies. Instead the Witcher games did go there and ended up finding the kind of success BioWare and EA wished Dragon Age had.

Dragon Age 2 would come out the same year Game of Thrones started, but it was the month before.

You think about it it’s kind of funny. BioWare had a series going influenced by the Song of Fire and Ice books. A adaption of those books happens and becomes a popular hit tv show. And what BioWare does is they just sit on the series they have during that time and only do one game with it. Not only do they sit on it, but when they do make a game it’s like the limp dick bitch boy version. It’s like the dumbest fucking business move they could’ve possibly made. They released more Dragon Age game in the year before the show came out then in the eight years the show aired.

DA:O had awkward sex scenes in underwear and ME1 had the sex scene with a hot Twi'lek Asari which caused Fox News butthurt(who never played it). But I think Bioware became woke and pozzed too fast and the Witcher's famous sex scenes both book and game series and GoT sex and nudity were "objectification" of women for them. I can also add that quality of Bioware romances deteriorated too. People still argue about Viconia and Jaheira romances today but not about romances in the latest Bioware slop.

DA2 will forever be a bad game due to the amount of cognitive dissonance that gets slapped in your face almost every moment in the game that you have to ignore. Especially when you play a mage. In the first 10 mins of the game you fight some mercs infront of the city guard raining fire on them and they let you in no fucks given or even adress your use of magic. This continues for the rest of the game were you talk to templars and have fight with infront of templars using magic and they still act like blind retards. This alone ruins the game, especially when the central premise is about you hiding your magic. It so stupid.

Nah, they were going to do something acknowledging it, but it had to be cut for time (of which they had virtually none).

BG2 was developed in less than 2 years just like DA2 and it still has the game reactivity in the Cowled Wizards attacking the party for using magic. Both BG2 and DA2 used tried and tested game engine from a previous game. I still don't understand why Bioware wasted their extremely limited development time updating Eclipse engine used for blockbuster DA:O and then they used the updated engine for only one cursed game and were forced to use Frostbite by EA.

 

[Roguey]

BG2 was developed in less than 2 years just like DA2 and it still has the game reactivity in the Cowled Wizards attacking the party for using magic. Both BG2 and DA2 using tried and tested game engine. I still don't understand why Bioware wasted their extremely limited development time updating Eclipse engine used for a blockbuster DA:O and then they used the updated engine for only one cursed game and were forced to use Frostbite by EA.

BG2 had 18 months, DA2 only had 11. Opportunity costs everywhere.

 

[Hagashager]

Complexity also plays a role. BG2 had a short turn-around yes, but it's also a 2-D Isometric RPG with sprites and flat-backdrops.

DA II, even on a familiar engine, was still a 3rd-Person party RPG with new assets...really shitty assets, but new assets all the same. Artists gotta art.

 

[Volourn]

Da2 is underrated.

But, it sure has its flaws. No doubt about it. Better than the vast majority of rpgs, though.

 

[Gargaune]

BG2 had 18 months, DA2 only had 11. Opportunity costs everywhere.

A bit longer and it's no excuse regardless, Roguey, you yourself quoted Gaider that "More time was never in the cards. DA2 was originally planned as an expansion!" Wikipedia claims:

BioWare began the game's development during the production of Origins's expansion pack Awakening. EA gave them only 14 to 16 months to finish the game's development, thus forcing the team to crunch for an extended period and reuse assets. BioWare looked at players' feedback and reviews of Origins, and decided to improve its gameplay, making it more action-oriented. They improved the Eclipse Engine, renaming it Lycium, to enhance the game's visuals and lighting, and accommodate a new art style inspired by movies like Yojimbo and Conan.

That BioWare spent their limited time overhauling the tech and art direction instead of slapping some lipstick on Origins and developing actual content is their own fault. DA2 deserves every ounce of contempt it gets.

 

[Camel]

BG2 had 18 months, DA2 only had 11. Opportunity costs everywhere.

DA2 had 14-16 months or a year and half, not 11 months. No one forced Bioware to develop Lycium engine used for only one game then promptly ditched for Frostbite forced by EA across all it's subsidiary studios.

Dragon Age 2 released on March 8, 2011 – only about 16 months after the November 3, 2009 release of Dragon Age: Origins

 

[Roguey]

DA2 had 14-16 months or a year and half, not 11 months. No one forced Bioware to develop Lycium engine used for only one game then promptly ditched for Frostbite forced by EA across all it's subsidiary studios.

Tony Evans who worked on it said it was 11 months.

What was Dragon Age 2 development like? Was the decision to part ways with Bioware yours?

Dragon Age 2's development was very accelerated. It was the first BioWare game to my knowledge where the studio didn't have the luxury to take as long as they needed. The full game, start to finish was done in around 11 months. That's much like Obsidian's development of KoTOR 2, except Obsidian had around 2 dozen developers, while BioWare had about 180 (not including QA and Marketing).

Prior to starting at BioWare, I had several chats and email exchanges with Mike Laidlaw (DA2's lead designer) where I gave him feedback and ideas as he formulated his plans for the game. Then, when I came to Edmonton in early January 2010, I was one of the first designers on the project, along with Mike Laidlaw and David Gaider (lead writer). I was involved in providing more feedback on the design direction and story. Early on, I concepted gameplay features that didn't make it into DA2 due to time constraints, but will likely be part of DA3. As the DA:O DLC's were wrapping up, more designers and other developers began trickling onto the project, and we quickly went into full production.

My main responsibilities on DA2 were pretty varied, which was unusual for BioWare. Most of their designers specialize in particular disciplines, while I'm more of a generalist, or a "polymath" as Mike Laidlaw called me. So I shifted between writing, level/technical design, creating the new map system, assisting with audio, and dabbling in cinematics.

After DA2 was done, I spent several months directing a small prototype team, and rapidly iterating on puzzles and other game modes to complement and extend DA2's core gameplay. Several of the things we prototyped were included in DA2's DLC, and some others will perhaps be part of DA3 (I couldn't say for sure).

At the end of May 2011, BioWare Edmonton had a "reduction in force" (which is fairly common practice at the end of a project). The layoffs included me and some other designers. They wouldn't give me any specific reasons why, but they did say it was absolutely not performance related. My assumption was that they chose to layoff people who were not as firmly rooted at BioWare Edmonton. There are a lot of people at the studio who've been there for many, many years, and several couples who work together. Since I'd only been at BioWare for 18 months, and I didn't have any family also working there, I was perhaps a bit more expendable.

Though I didn't choose to leave BioWare, they actually did me a favor. I'm far too eclectic to be content for long in a studio like BioWare Edmonton. Plus, the very generous severance they provided allowed me to take the summer off (my first break longer than 2 weeks since I started in the game industry in 1998). I got to spend ample time with my family, work on personal projects, create a couple apps, and study casual and social games - which I've been interested in working on for years.

I value my experience at BioWare. I learned a whole lot, and I really enjoyed meeting and working with many of the talented developers at the studio. I'm still friends with several of them (some of whom I'll be seeing this weekend at Calgary's Comic Expo).

Lycium was just an overhauled Eclipse which was an overhauled Aurora which was an overhauled Infinity Engine. Anthony Davis confirmed it.

 

[Butter]

As bad as KotOR 2 is, it's still better than DA 2, and it doesn't reek of cut corners everywhere you look. There's only so much you can blame the timetable.

 

[Camel]

Tony Evans who worked on it said it was 11 months.

Come on, Roguey. You're better than this and why are you defending this turd?

 

[Nano]

It is, but every DA game is designed around a warrior PC. Everything else is for NG+ and weirdoes who want to use magic instead of the shinies.

DAO's main story is clearly written for the Human Noble and DA2 for the warrior/rogue, but I'd argue Inquisition's most satisfying class plot-wise is the mage. Andraste's Herald being a mage adds some extra punch to the story, and in this game the MC isn't under any threat from the Templars.

 

[Delterius]

Tony Evans who worked on it said it was 11 months.

14-16 months

if the longer figure is from Gaider then maybe it's including development from his perspective? ie the writing and conceptual phase of the original expansion before stuff was thrown in the garbage and a new game was made in 11 months.

 

[Roguey]

As bad as KotOR 2 is, it's still better than DA 2, and it doesn't reek of cut corners everywhere you look.

Oh it absolutely does. The inferior lighting in the reused maps and the descent-into-incomprehensibility of the ending. DA2's ending may be dumb, but it doesn't suddenly drop half a dozen subplots.

Overall, Bioware's priorities were worse than Obsidian's, sure.

 

[Camel]

As bad as KotOR 2 is, it's still better than DA 2, and it doesn't reek of cut corners everywhere you look. There's only so much you can blame the timetable.

Right, empty rooms of Malachor 5 and a nonsensical ending of KotOR 2 just "doesn't reek of cut corners everywhere you look". Not even mentioning a cut droid planet.