Prime Junta
Guest
I fucking did it, I managed to slog through Dragon Age: Origins all the way to the finish. Finally. I have many thoughts on the franchise now, but here are a few of the topmost ones.
Moment-to-moment gameplay-wise they all stink, one worse than the other.
I would rate DA:O the worst and DA2 the least bad in that respect. The problem with DA:O is that it's stuck in a really uncomfortable place between being an adrenaline-packed cinematic aRPG and a RTwP party-based RPG, and consequently is really bad at both. The combat is too fast to be tactical and requires too much party micro to be enjoyable as action. It's also a giant clusterfuck of bad pathfinding, bad collision-detection, and generally bad. It is also a really fucking brutally hard game, and a lot of the time it's stupid hard rather than interesting hard. The random encounters while traveling for example are entirely unnecessarily brutal; I had more trouble with them than with the freaking dragons.
As systems go, DA:O is classic cargo cult design. It's an ungodly mishmash of the worst ideas from D&D combined with the worst ideas from MMOs. It's extremely spammy. It also communicates what it does really poorly, both moment to moment and with regards to the abilities, talents, and stats, which means that playing it is a matter of guessing what shit does -- not like D&D where you can read the rules and figure it out. So yeah, moment to moment it was not fun, and the character-building wasn't that much fun too. I will grant that there were a couple of pretty good boss fights, Broodmother for example.
But... it had hella good choice and consequence, a big, sprawling story that cohered well, and kept the cookie-cutter quests down to a relatively reasonable amount. The companions were rather one-note, I don't think I really liked any of them much, and the companion relationships were rather dull as well. And I have to say the worldbuilding has grown on me, transparent as the historical precedents are, and as undeveloped as the whole Fade/darkspawn thing is in DA:O. I very much doubt I'll be returning to this one, but I'll give it an A for effort, a B- for execution.
DA2 tried to address some of the worst problems with DA:O gameplay. At times it was almost enjoyable to go charging around the battlefield as a sword-and-board fighter. The simplified mechanics worked better; it wasn't trying to be a cut-rate D&D anymore but was rather doing its own thing. I especially liked that each companion had their own talent tree. The companions were more interesting and nuanced there too, as were the relationships you could build with them. And I really liked the idea of setting it in a single city over several years. Combat encounters were even more repetitive than in DA:O but I hated them less, probably because it was clearly more enjoyable to play as an aRPG. In my opinion the only really big flaw DA2 has is the name: if it had been marketed as a full-length expansion -- Mask of the Betrayer style -- the reception would have been completely different. As a sequel to a massive sprawling AAA cRPG it is bound to disappoint. Even so I think it's my favourite of the bunch.
DA:I ... well. It's several steps back in several important ways, notably the leveled loot is disastrous and the sheer mass of unwanted cookie-cutter fetch questing it throws at you is seriously off-putting; moment-to-moment gameplay wise it's somewhat worse than DA2 but still nowhere near as bad as DA:O. Other than the game part of the game, however, it is pretty good really -- the companions are now fully-fleshed-out complex characters with their own agendas, their dialogue flows beautifully and they're really well voice acted. It also keeps one of the things DA:O did well, namely, tying all the questing together with the main plot arc. This BioWare knew how to sell -- they really managed to minimise the typical dissonance of helping little old ladies get their cats out of trees while there's an existential threat to the world. Terrible, terrible bossfights though, mountains of hitpoints to chip through while juggling counters and spamming heals and what have you.
Overall, after finally playing through the whole thing, I feel a lot more positive about the franchise than I used to. There really aren't many AAA fantasy cRPG franchises out there; in a way it's between this and the Witchers, and of course the Witchers are proudly aRPG (and IMO much more enjoyable to actually play because they don't attempt to straddle the fence and there by get their balls stuck between the pickets).
But really, it's kinda depressing that Obsidian isn't a learning animal. They could have shamelessly lifted the good ideas from the DA franchise while avoiding the really bad ones -- which they actually did, whatever you think of the Pillars games, they are way better both mechanically and in moment-to-moment gameplay. It's just a shame that they have the one-note companions and they're unable to make the questing cohere with the main story arc.
But there you are. This marathon did shift me from "good riddance BioWare" to "eh, too bad, there would've been some life in the DA franchise yet."
Moment-to-moment gameplay-wise they all stink, one worse than the other.
I would rate DA:O the worst and DA2 the least bad in that respect. The problem with DA:O is that it's stuck in a really uncomfortable place between being an adrenaline-packed cinematic aRPG and a RTwP party-based RPG, and consequently is really bad at both. The combat is too fast to be tactical and requires too much party micro to be enjoyable as action. It's also a giant clusterfuck of bad pathfinding, bad collision-detection, and generally bad. It is also a really fucking brutally hard game, and a lot of the time it's stupid hard rather than interesting hard. The random encounters while traveling for example are entirely unnecessarily brutal; I had more trouble with them than with the freaking dragons.
As systems go, DA:O is classic cargo cult design. It's an ungodly mishmash of the worst ideas from D&D combined with the worst ideas from MMOs. It's extremely spammy. It also communicates what it does really poorly, both moment to moment and with regards to the abilities, talents, and stats, which means that playing it is a matter of guessing what shit does -- not like D&D where you can read the rules and figure it out. So yeah, moment to moment it was not fun, and the character-building wasn't that much fun too. I will grant that there were a couple of pretty good boss fights, Broodmother for example.
But... it had hella good choice and consequence, a big, sprawling story that cohered well, and kept the cookie-cutter quests down to a relatively reasonable amount. The companions were rather one-note, I don't think I really liked any of them much, and the companion relationships were rather dull as well. And I have to say the worldbuilding has grown on me, transparent as the historical precedents are, and as undeveloped as the whole Fade/darkspawn thing is in DA:O. I very much doubt I'll be returning to this one, but I'll give it an A for effort, a B- for execution.
DA2 tried to address some of the worst problems with DA:O gameplay. At times it was almost enjoyable to go charging around the battlefield as a sword-and-board fighter. The simplified mechanics worked better; it wasn't trying to be a cut-rate D&D anymore but was rather doing its own thing. I especially liked that each companion had their own talent tree. The companions were more interesting and nuanced there too, as were the relationships you could build with them. And I really liked the idea of setting it in a single city over several years. Combat encounters were even more repetitive than in DA:O but I hated them less, probably because it was clearly more enjoyable to play as an aRPG. In my opinion the only really big flaw DA2 has is the name: if it had been marketed as a full-length expansion -- Mask of the Betrayer style -- the reception would have been completely different. As a sequel to a massive sprawling AAA cRPG it is bound to disappoint. Even so I think it's my favourite of the bunch.
DA:I ... well. It's several steps back in several important ways, notably the leveled loot is disastrous and the sheer mass of unwanted cookie-cutter fetch questing it throws at you is seriously off-putting; moment-to-moment gameplay wise it's somewhat worse than DA2 but still nowhere near as bad as DA:O. Other than the game part of the game, however, it is pretty good really -- the companions are now fully-fleshed-out complex characters with their own agendas, their dialogue flows beautifully and they're really well voice acted. It also keeps one of the things DA:O did well, namely, tying all the questing together with the main plot arc. This BioWare knew how to sell -- they really managed to minimise the typical dissonance of helping little old ladies get their cats out of trees while there's an existential threat to the world. Terrible, terrible bossfights though, mountains of hitpoints to chip through while juggling counters and spamming heals and what have you.
Overall, after finally playing through the whole thing, I feel a lot more positive about the franchise than I used to. There really aren't many AAA fantasy cRPG franchises out there; in a way it's between this and the Witchers, and of course the Witchers are proudly aRPG (and IMO much more enjoyable to actually play because they don't attempt to straddle the fence and there by get their balls stuck between the pickets).
But really, it's kinda depressing that Obsidian isn't a learning animal. They could have shamelessly lifted the good ideas from the DA franchise while avoiding the really bad ones -- which they actually did, whatever you think of the Pillars games, they are way better both mechanically and in moment-to-moment gameplay. It's just a shame that they have the one-note companions and they're unable to make the questing cohere with the main story arc.
But there you are. This marathon did shift me from "good riddance BioWare" to "eh, too bad, there would've been some life in the DA franchise yet."
