Dragon Age 2
Well, I suppose that Bioware had to disappoint me some day.
I will be the first to say that I hated the combat in the first game. I was playing on the console, and goodness knows I was one of the people that wanted a button press to mean that I swung my daggers and hit something. I didn't want to wait for my turn or whatever. I really thought that DA2's "press a button and something awesome happens" idea was going to work out.
It probably should have worked out, but there are a few major barriers to the battle system being, y'know, fun - 1. The battles go on forever, with a bunch of trash enemies that take a couple of hits to destroy, but in wave after wave after wave, constantly spawning on top of your mages 2. There's such a long cooldown for most of your abilities that you find yourself using the basic attack for 90% of the fights, making "press a button and awesome happens" turn into "hoard your abilities because something bad might happen, hope you enjoy the default attacks!" and 3. There's no VARIETY. Remember the Revenants in Origins? Remember how incredibly hard they were to kill if you weren't prepared for them? Yeah, they're just basic enemies in the game. They're nothing special, and with the exception of one boss fight they've all been like that, default fights where I do the exact same thing over and over and over again.
But I've put up with bad combat systems before. Like I said, I wasn't a fan of the first Dragon Age's combat, and KOTOR/NWN were a slog every time I had to fight for long periods of time between the talky parts. Jade Empire and the Mass Effects had fun combat, but I don't need it from a Bioware game. What I want is a fun story with fun characters.
There's no friggin' story in Dragon Age 2. There's a bunch of "rising tension!!!" stuff, I suppose, but nothing is interesting enough to hold my attention. I like the Qunari, to a certain extent, but I don't really side with them particularly. I guess I like the mages more than templars, maybe, if they would stop summoning demons and murdering people? Seriously, there've been like two mages so far that haven't validated everyone's fear of them. STOP SUMMONING DEMONS, YOU IDIOTS, IT NEVER ENDS WELL. IDK. The trouble is, I can kind of see where Bioware was going. One city and a bit of its surroundings, you get attached to the city and its residents, you want to make it better or protect it or something. Problem is, you never really get attached to anything in the city. It's a pretty bland city, with bland architecture and bland little sidequests and bland, overused environments. Seriously, could they not have put a little effort into the bloody dungeons? I've gone through the same damn cave/sewer so many times! And it is literally the same map, with doors blocked off! Occasionally, they start me on the opposite end of the map, just for variety! Did they really think we weren't going to notice that? Damn it, Bioware, this is not a budget game. Put a little bit of effort into your designs.
About the only dungeon I liked at all was the Deep Roads, and those were like a fourth of the size of the ones in Origins. I was all excited to get to roam through a real, actual dungeon - goodness knows why I was, I should have known better than that - and we're stuck with, guess what, a lot of constantly spawning mobs and linear as hell maps. Beautiful scenery. Great place to visit. Great boss. And original! It's like certain parts of the game had a lot of attention put to them, and the rest of the game was completely ignored. There's one part that was really blatantly cut towards the beginning. You can side with the mercs or smugglers to earn your way into the city - and then poof! A year's gone by! The end! Hope you didn't want to actually see what your character did or anything. Nah, everyone will just tell you how awesome you are. That's just as good, right? NO BIOWARE IT IS NOT.
And the dialogue! Usually Bioware is at least halfway decent at dialogue! But this stuff was written by an idiot. An idiot who loved very poorly disguised pop culture references. "HA HA, 'I like big boats and I cannot lie', THAT'S SO CLEVER I'LL JUST BE IN MORE CORNER OVER HERE DYING OF CLEVERNESS OVERLOAD. The "funny" Hawke quips are terrible, all of them, and the only redeeming feature to them is having my party members tell me I'm a terrible person for mocking other people at painful moments.
Hawke in general is a huge step backward. I liked having control over my character's dialogue and motivation! Mass Effect works because of the way they've set up the story and because Shepherd is frankly entertaining to watch no matter how he/she is played. I liked my Origins characters. I liked Arietta the human noble who really wanted to be queen. I liked Melkor, aka the jerk elf mage who ruined everything for everyone. I loved the choices I could make! Decisions! Roleplaying! Now I get three choices - blandly nice, sort of rude, or the worst comedian in the world.
The other characters aren't much better. Varric is awesome, I will give them that. Whoever wrote him should be proud. Aveline is pretty great too. The rest? ARGH. Probably it's not a coincidence that the two characters that are awesome are also NOT ROMANCE OPTIONS. Possibly Bioware should look at this more closely. Those two actually have good motivations why they're following you and why they're helping you. Why the heck is anyone else? I mean, I was nice to them, I guess, but Anders follows me into the bloody DEEP ROADS because I helped him kill his friend? Really? And Isabela has even less motivation to help you. Uh, I guess I killed some people with her once and listened to her godawful innuendo. The whole rivalry system just makes it worse. Oh, what is it, my emo elf acquaintances? You disagree with every decision I make? Then just leave already, damn. You don't need to keep following me around. I DID VERY LITTLE FOR YOU TO START WITH AND AM NOW ACTIVELY WORKING AGAINST YOU AND ALL YOUR DEEPEST BELIEFS, GO AWAY.
It's not a bad game, to be honest, but that's part of the problem. Origins was a good game that could have been made great with some tweaking and a few different design decisions. The team that made its sequel just seemed to randomly toss out whatever the hell they thought was bad in the first one without actually looking at what should be replaced and what should just be IMPROVED. You know, like sequels usually do. Assassin's Creed 2 didn't just toss out the whole system because of a few flaws, it improved on what was already pretty good. DA2 just says, "whelp, a few people didn't like the battle system, it must be irredeemably bad and there's no point in bothering with it again!" "Oh, people liked the choices in the old game and it sold a lot by just being a traditional RPG in a sea of hybrids? Well, you know what would make it sell even more? Make it a hybrid!"
I don't know, my expectations weren't even that high. I just expected Bioware to learn its lesson. Hey, incredibly long boring intro sections don't interest anyone (KOTOR), gamers will in fact notice that you've thrown us into the same dungeon a dozen times (Mass Effect)... come ON, Bioware.
tl;dr/spoiler-free version:
It's not really a terrible game, as much as I'm raging at it. It's just... an unnecessary one. One that ignores the good thing about the original. One that probably should have been in development for a little longer. One with quirks and poor design decisions I would have forgiven if it had been made by an indie publisher. One that undeniably fails to surpass the original in any way.
I will be the first to say that I hated the combat in the first game. I was playing on the console, and goodness knows I was one of the people that wanted a button press to mean that I swung my daggers and hit something. I didn't want to wait for my turn or whatever. I really thought that DA2's "press a button and something awesome happens" idea was going to work out.
It probably should have worked out, but there are a few major barriers to the battle system being, y'know, fun - 1. The battles go on forever, with a bunch of trash enemies that take a couple of hits to destroy, but in wave after wave after wave, constantly spawning on top of your mages 2. There's such a long cooldown for most of your abilities that you find yourself using the basic attack for 90% of the fights, making "press a button and awesome happens" turn into "hoard your abilities because something bad might happen, hope you enjoy the default attacks!" and 3. There's no VARIETY. Remember the Revenants in Origins? Remember how incredibly hard they were to kill if you weren't prepared for them? Yeah, they're just basic enemies in the game. They're nothing special, and with the exception of one boss fight they've all been like that, default fights where I do the exact same thing over and over and over again.
But I've put up with bad combat systems before. Like I said, I wasn't a fan of the first Dragon Age's combat, and KOTOR/NWN were a slog every time I had to fight for long periods of time between the talky parts. Jade Empire and the Mass Effects had fun combat, but I don't need it from a Bioware game. What I want is a fun story with fun characters.
There's no friggin' story in Dragon Age 2. There's a bunch of "rising tension!!!" stuff, I suppose, but nothing is interesting enough to hold my attention. I like the Qunari, to a certain extent, but I don't really side with them particularly. I guess I like the mages more than templars, maybe, if they would stop summoning demons and murdering people? Seriously, there've been like two mages so far that haven't validated everyone's fear of them. STOP SUMMONING DEMONS, YOU IDIOTS, IT NEVER ENDS WELL. IDK. The trouble is, I can kind of see where Bioware was going. One city and a bit of its surroundings, you get attached to the city and its residents, you want to make it better or protect it or something. Problem is, you never really get attached to anything in the city. It's a pretty bland city, with bland architecture and bland little sidequests and bland, overused environments. Seriously, could they not have put a little effort into the bloody dungeons? I've gone through the same damn cave/sewer so many times! And it is literally the same map, with doors blocked off! Occasionally, they start me on the opposite end of the map, just for variety! Did they really think we weren't going to notice that? Damn it, Bioware, this is not a budget game. Put a little bit of effort into your designs.
About the only dungeon I liked at all was the Deep Roads, and those were like a fourth of the size of the ones in Origins. I was all excited to get to roam through a real, actual dungeon - goodness knows why I was, I should have known better than that - and we're stuck with, guess what, a lot of constantly spawning mobs and linear as hell maps. Beautiful scenery. Great place to visit. Great boss. And original! It's like certain parts of the game had a lot of attention put to them, and the rest of the game was completely ignored. There's one part that was really blatantly cut towards the beginning. You can side with the mercs or smugglers to earn your way into the city - and then poof! A year's gone by! The end! Hope you didn't want to actually see what your character did or anything. Nah, everyone will just tell you how awesome you are. That's just as good, right? NO BIOWARE IT IS NOT.
And the dialogue! Usually Bioware is at least halfway decent at dialogue! But this stuff was written by an idiot. An idiot who loved very poorly disguised pop culture references. "HA HA, 'I like big boats and I cannot lie', THAT'S SO CLEVER I'LL JUST BE IN MORE CORNER OVER HERE DYING OF CLEVERNESS OVERLOAD. The "funny" Hawke quips are terrible, all of them, and the only redeeming feature to them is having my party members tell me I'm a terrible person for mocking other people at painful moments.
Hawke in general is a huge step backward. I liked having control over my character's dialogue and motivation! Mass Effect works because of the way they've set up the story and because Shepherd is frankly entertaining to watch no matter how he/she is played. I liked my Origins characters. I liked Arietta the human noble who really wanted to be queen. I liked Melkor, aka the jerk elf mage who ruined everything for everyone. I loved the choices I could make! Decisions! Roleplaying! Now I get three choices - blandly nice, sort of rude, or the worst comedian in the world.
The other characters aren't much better. Varric is awesome, I will give them that. Whoever wrote him should be proud. Aveline is pretty great too. The rest? ARGH. Probably it's not a coincidence that the two characters that are awesome are also NOT ROMANCE OPTIONS. Possibly Bioware should look at this more closely. Those two actually have good motivations why they're following you and why they're helping you. Why the heck is anyone else? I mean, I was nice to them, I guess, but Anders follows me into the bloody DEEP ROADS because I helped him kill his friend? Really? And Isabela has even less motivation to help you. Uh, I guess I killed some people with her once and listened to her godawful innuendo. The whole rivalry system just makes it worse. Oh, what is it, my emo elf acquaintances? You disagree with every decision I make? Then just leave already, damn. You don't need to keep following me around. I DID VERY LITTLE FOR YOU TO START WITH AND AM NOW ACTIVELY WORKING AGAINST YOU AND ALL YOUR DEEPEST BELIEFS, GO AWAY.
It's not a bad game, to be honest, but that's part of the problem. Origins was a good game that could have been made great with some tweaking and a few different design decisions. The team that made its sequel just seemed to randomly toss out whatever the hell they thought was bad in the first one without actually looking at what should be replaced and what should just be IMPROVED. You know, like sequels usually do. Assassin's Creed 2 didn't just toss out the whole system because of a few flaws, it improved on what was already pretty good. DA2 just says, "whelp, a few people didn't like the battle system, it must be irredeemably bad and there's no point in bothering with it again!" "Oh, people liked the choices in the old game and it sold a lot by just being a traditional RPG in a sea of hybrids? Well, you know what would make it sell even more? Make it a hybrid!"
I don't know, my expectations weren't even that high. I just expected Bioware to learn its lesson. Hey, incredibly long boring intro sections don't interest anyone (KOTOR), gamers will in fact notice that you've thrown us into the same dungeon a dozen times (Mass Effect)... come ON, Bioware.
tl;dr/spoiler-free version:
- They took a decent combat system and rather than improve on their work, chose to change it to something that, once again, is just a decent combat system and might be improved into something worthwhile in a future game. Assuming they don't just trash it again, too.
- Bland environments are turned from boring to annoying when they're reused constantly ("Hey, this mine looks awful familiar... maybe because it's apparently been teleporting around the world just for us to explore it for the dozenth time.")
- Awful writing. It's... it's just awful.
- Why even have a predefined character if you're just going to make him Lord/Lady Bland of Genericland? Just so you can brag about your fully-voiced game? To give us fewer options? To "surprise" us with what our character will actually say? Bah.
- The storyline is... experimental, I suppose, in the sense that they don't follow the Bioware four hub formula. Alas! The four hub formula works really well for them, in the sense that it forces them to have a plot. And interesting locations. And a sense of tension.
It's not really a terrible game, as much as I'm raging at it. It's just... an unnecessary one. One that ignores the good thing about the original. One that probably should have been in development for a little longer. One with quirks and poor design decisions I would have forgiven if it had been made by an indie publisher. One that undeniably fails to surpass the original in any way.