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So... Dragon Age 2...

Am I a terrible judge of games?


  • Total voters
    74

Dreaad

Arcane
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Apr 18, 2013
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Deep in your subconscious mind spreading lies.
I have a suspicious feeling I am going to be brutally attacked or even hunted down and killed in real life for this thread...but. Is there anyone here who thinks that dragon age 2 wasn't terrible?

Before people get the wrong idea, I know, I mean I fucking know, there are some absolutely horrific things about this game! Not limited to but including, repeating areas, very strange art design, terrible loot system, inconsistency with prequel or even with the lore in the game itself, very poor combat system and of course the worst of the lot... the enemies that spawn out of thin air right in front of you thus making all tactics completely irrelevant.

However I recently managed to actually finish this game, after trying for the 5th time. What I found out as I did finish it was that I actually enjoyed certain aspects of it far more than any game in quite a while. In my mind there are some ideas that are implemented extremely well or ideas that were very close to being excellent, which I honestly wish some people would try to recreate in a more palatable game engine.

The three main things that caught my attention were:
1.) The time frame and location. I don't mean the city of Kirkwall itself, but the way the game is set in one location over a period of time (where things happened and the situation changes). It could have been done much better I think, especially in the sense that the changes weren't all that dramatic. But if some used this formula and then over three or four chapters showed how a city/npc's change over time e.g. new districts go up, visually the people around you age and perhaps the political situation shifts around - reacting with your role-playing choices to some degree (even if only cosmetically). This is something I would actually enjoy a whole lot more I think than just another quest over a country side with little stops along the way.

2.) The story itself. By that I am talking about moving away from stories where the world gets saved or destroyed based on alignment *rolls eyes*. I have always enjoyed games far more when the task at hand is only very arbitrarily important, where the choices plus random situations along the way create an interesting world. Games like fallout 1/2/NV, planescape torment, icewind dale, gothic and a bunch of older games whose names I no longer recall...
In Dragon Age 2 I guess you could say that the story is mostly driven by the companions rather than anything else and I think it works relatively well.

3.) The idea of your character being tied into the game world. In this case the fact that you have a family which are more than just "Your mother tells you to go out and explore the world after giving $200, have fun dear!" crap. Obviously this doesn't have to be your family, it can be a clan, or caravan you are with...whatever. But something that just ties you into that world as more than a faceless traveler.

Obviously these things wouldn't work far all RPG's and in fact many people hate hard driven linear stories. There is however a group that do enjoy this type of thing and I think that Dragon Age 2 certainly made some steps in the right direction (I was also surprised at how much quite good content was hidden away in fairly sneaky side quests).
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
Developer
Joined
May 3, 2011
Messages
5,698
Dragon Age 2 sucked massive salty nuts as an actual videogame and piece of entertainment, and studying its failings should be a key exercise for any game designer, but it did have some good ideas. To respond to your points:
  1. The idea of an RPG where time passes and the world changes is cool. Problem is that almost nothing changes in Dragon Age 2, and all we learn is that over 5 years, it turns out nobody ages, or does jack fucking shit. It even takes Hawke 1 year to work off his/her debt even though he/she could easily brutalize the organization he/she owes money to in gameplay terms, yet the plot says otherwise. Anders does nothing for 3 years. Isabella does nothing the entire game. Fenris does nothing the entire game. The story is stagnant and none of the stretches of time feel in any way justified - at most you would need like 1 month in between the most significant events. There aren't even visual changes to the city years apart, which is just lazy. In the end what could have been a good idea is really just a shallow and awkward attempt to justify reusing the same levels over and over.
  2. The story is horrible. There are tons of issues here and there with character motivations as well as plot holes, and it's frustrating as hell that the only reason that you can't kill the bad guy early in the game is because the game simply won't let you. Never, ever show the player the character who is obviously the villain, and then deny them from taking action without providing a very, very good reason. It's triply worse when you are shown to be capable of badass-killing random people in cutscenes, and when in standard combat you can annihilate everything in your path with no effort and have a body count of 1000+ after living in a city for 1 year. However, and this is important, there is some genuinely good story C&C in places, characters react in interesting ways based on your influence with them, there are some mutually exclusive quests and questlines which evolve over time (some over the entire game), and the "moral choices" do not feel arbitrary and forced like they do in most BioWare games. For once it's no longer about good vs. evil or even paragon vs. renegade, but pragmatism and caution vs. respect for rights and autonomy (mages vs. templars, qunari vs. city)
  3. I don't think this is worth praising the game for. It's fairly rare to see RPGs now where your protagonist is a complete blank slate, and you only saw it in older games because you had to play as a user-created party, so backstory had to be something the player created. Dragon Age 2's "family" was badly developed, the game assumes you care about them because they are your mother/brother/uncle/etc., and what could have been somewhat interesting in better hands turns outright hilarious and awe-inspiringly stupid thanks to zombie mom.
 

Sensuki

Arcane
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Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
wrong forum ?

Hated DA1, so avoided DA2 like the plague.
In fact I only saw the "awesome button" thing for the first time the other day in the RPGCodex vid
 

Dreaad

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Apr 18, 2013
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Deep in your subconscious mind spreading lies.
Well I never did say it was a good RPG, I implied it could be one. Mostly this stems from all the kick starter games that are going to recreate old classics... that's fine, but wouldn't it be better if they took new ideas and tried to actually make them work properly rather than rehashing what has already been done? Do you really want to play another BG2 just with different text bubbles? Yes yes I am over exaggerating but you see my point.
 

Volourn

Pretty Princess
Pretty Princess Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Mar 10, 2003
Messages
24,924
DA2 is better than most RPGs. It's definitely than BG, KOTOR, IWD, TOEE, DD, and other good games that the Codex sucks dick over. It also has more rpness in it than the vast majority of games. Sure, it has flaws, but I still its flaws than that overrrated KOTOR series.
 

Borelli

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2012
Messages
1,261
OP so basically what you are saying is that DA2 story is the least shitty part of the game.
I agree with this.
 

tuluse

Arcane
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11,400
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
1) Fallout incorporates the passage of time. The Super Mutants take over cities after enough time has passed. It does it in a superior way than DA2 because you have control over how long you take to do things.

3) This is almost always terrible. The player has no connection to the world and rarely any knowledge of how it works so tying the character he controls to the world only serves to break immersion and make the player feel even more lost.

You need a new option on your poll which is "I can't remember 15 years ago and am constantly impressed by anything new put in front of me".
 

Dreaad

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2013
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Deep in your subconscious mind spreading lies.
1) Fallout incorporates the passage of time. The Super Mutants take over cities after enough time has passed. It does it in a superior way than DA2 because you have control over how long you take to do things.

3) This is almost always terrible. The player has no connection to the world and rarely any knowledge of how it works so tying the character he controls to the world only serves to break immersion and make the player feel even more lost.

You need a new option on your poll which is "I can't remember 15 years ago and am constantly impressed by anything new put in front of me".

1 - I think I know what you mean but you phrased it horribly, if you mean that many RPG's would benefit from having a time limit to add to that atmosphere and tension... sure that is awesome by me (is this what you are talking about?). If on the other hand you mean that the world should only change when you want it to, under your control... that is bad. The world should go on without you there, that is what immersion is all about...

3 - Here you just talking about a totally different rpg experience, you are talking about the daggerfold/morrowind rpg where you are no one and the npc's just give fetch quests with no character. By no means a bad experience if you are willing to use your imagination. I am talking about rpg's that are story driven, if you are not invested in the characters or groups involved then it the game just becomes a corridor grind because of its overall linear nature. Two different things my friend.
 

doggfookker

Educated
Joined
Dec 8, 2012
Messages
54
Location
AMERICA
I kind of liked in the beginning that it was you and your mom and your sister/brother living in the slums and trying to survive. Granted, this lasted all of ten seconds in game, but it was a cool feeling at first, and I think a decent and refreshing RPG could be made out of trying to survive and provide for your family as a criminal/by any means necessary/try to uphold your ethical code when it becomes challenged by oppressive poverty.

But that's not a positive for DA2, since that isn't something that's in the game. Ten minutes of hanging out with your moms in the slums is only kind of cool for those ten minutes. For me, I would have been able to get past the click awesome button combat if--and I'll admit to having a bit of a soft spot for some of Bioware's games (I liked DA:O and am actually replaying it now for the fourth time (I'm really sorry; I know how unbro this makes me please don't judge too harshly))--the game's story had anything tying it together emotionally and narratively. It is just a clusterfuck of wut. Nothing that happens is relevant to anything else that happens and it's a series of random-ass ass-events that lead up to "oh yeah here's a villain to kill as a final boss yeah sorry I know she wasn't really around or important for the whole first third of a game but whatever we need a final boss and climax right?" It reminded me of a common thing in creative writing classes--something that's also obvious, from what I understand, in the Twilight novels everyone loves to hate--stuff happens and then more stuff happens and then the author realizes his or her story isn't actually a story and is going nowhere, and a climax just happens for no reason where some random person shows up to do some random evil thing and hooray the heroes win the end. It's a staple of people who fucking suck at narratives.

And that's the thing about Bioware, and a big problem I have with their shitty combat-heavy games: the meat of their games, the part that isn't super shitty (and I know shitheads would debate this, and I feel you bro) is the story. Bioware obviously want to tell stories, and I think they occasionally succeed to some degree. I just wish they didn't fill their games with such shitty, bullshit combat. Really, they should just make interactive movies. Or fucking cinematic adventure games or something. Cut out the combat gameplay all together. Some of y'all shitheads are probably going to give me a lot of shit for saying that anyone SHOULD make interactive movies, but I guess I think of it like this: that is what Bioware makes already, and if they just dropped the facade of their games being RPGs and embraced what they actually are, the world would be a better place. We could loathe Bioware's bullshit less and finally begin to let go of our trollrage when IGN or someone talks about Bioware leading innovation in the RPG genre. I don't know why they can't be "Cinematic Adventure Games" or some such bullshit. Who knows. They're not really RPGs. Calling them RPGs is true decline.


Also all the NPCs are bullshit masters with zero depth and I wanted to fucking annihilate fucking Fenris with my deep and violent cock hatred of his whiny, look-at-me-I'm-so-bad-ass-and-dangerous weeaboo bullshit fucking fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK.

Won't play that game again. Seriously.




And, oh man, Dragon Age 3 is supposed to be heavily influenced by Skyrim, what the fuck is that?

:declining:
 

Commissar Draco

Codexia Comrade Colonel Commissar
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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
DA2 was only Biowhorean game I didn't played 7 times finished so it was shity as shit goes.... Only demoed it cause it was 2011 and there was nothing else to play. For Comparison I finished DA0 4 times Jade Empire 2 and ME2 two times... and even completed my F... I wasted so much time on this I have to finish it in the name of Emprah! ME3 run. In conclusion DA2 is too shity even for my plebeian taste. Only thing remotely enjoyable was the Pirate Slut Tits Low level of story and Moral ambiguity... but both were executed in :retarded:way.
 

Cyberarmy

Love fool
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Smyrna - Scalanouva
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Let DA2 burn in depths of the Nine Hells... Only spare Varric, two things i enjoyed in that game, Varric's exaggerated story parts and being a force mage.
Maybe they had some neat ideas at first but they failed terribly hard to add them in game.

Edit: DA2 in a nutshell;

262187_10150236872916819_4601185_n.jpg


261468_10150237121001819_2808265_n.jpg
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Before people get the wrong idea, I know, I mean I fucking know, there are some absolutely horrific things about this game! Not limited to but including, repeating areas, very strange art design, terrible loot system, inconsistency with prequel or even with the lore in the game itself, very poor combat system and of course the worst of the lot... the enemies that spawn out of thin air right in front of you thus making all tactics completely irrelevant.


Dude, you already said everything that needed to be said... no need to seek reasons to like the game. It's just shitty, the shock phase is going to pass... it's okay, I know it was a hideous experience but it's going to pass... you will recover.
 

Tommy Wiseau

Arcane
Joined
Apr 7, 2012
Messages
9,424
The game does manage to give off a "I never want to play this game again" vibe though, after a while. More frustrating is the fact that this thing got so many good reviews. Only decent thing about it was the Mark of Assassin DLC. Never finished it, but at least they tried using some more unique environments and larger areas to explore.
 

Tytus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 9, 2011
Messages
3,596
Location
Mazovia
OP feels guilty about liking DA2 and wants to validate his faggotry by convincing others that the games wasn't so bad. Move on.
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
Stop. :lol: Please. :lol:
 

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