![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I intended to write this yesterday, but I really couldn't make any single thought line up with another, so you get it this morning instead. Lucky you. Anyway, Dragon Age II is the subject for today, and because it's a somewhat more substantial game then some that I've been mucking about with in my idle hours (like Lord of the Rings, which is fun but, like Fallout, mostly a series of very pretty fetch quests).
It's smoother and prettier then DA : Origins in that it's quite serviceable. The strength of the game is, I think, entirely based on its party dynamics. The main storyline isn't anything to write home about. It's in three parts, it's a little disjointed, and mostly serves to provide atmosphere and impress upon you how your characters station changes from being a broke refugee to someone who's a mover and shaker of the city you inhabit. Other then that, it's really just about party reactions, who you want to romance and how, and walking from place to place lighting monsters on fire.
If that sounds condemning, I don't want it to be. First of all, I really enjoyed the game. What that means is that I felt the party dynamics and each characters personal stories (including the main) really are the spotlight and the main plot is really just something in the background - almost a sidequest that you use to get Friendship or Rivalry points for members of your party. Each individual arc has a story that's solid, but I almost didn't realize that they didn't really hang together until after it was all over and I was listening to a Zero Punctuation mention that. So take that for how you will.
The game itself is pretty fun, and not terribly difficult. I went ahead and played it on Normal and I think that there might have been one fight that really gave me any real trouble the entire time. I'm pretty sure that my setup wasn't always optimal, but you can do pretty well with just putting one or two fighters in your party, one or two mages, and zero to one rogues. There. That's all you need to remember to succeed, except that it never hurts to have a lot of healing items just in case.
The end gets a little tough in spots, but honestly speaking, I had more trouble with something that appeared to be a random encounter then I had with the end bosses. Something to think about.
The power trees are fun and you get a decent number of characters to explore them with, but since they all come with a personalized specialization, they each have a default and that's the one you'll end up picking. There are lots of trees and equipment that say "If you come back to explore the other relationship options, here's some stuff that will make your game-play experience a little different." That's pretty thoughtful, anyhow.
I also enjoyed the more narrow story line and scope. The game makes a story about a single city about as epic in feel as the story of someone who saves an entire nation and to put a finer point on it, the city of Kirkwall feels roughly about as large as the entire kingdom of Fereldan. That's probably an issue with the technical capacity, but it feels like a populated city - especially the lower class districts, but overall that trend allows you to focus on the fate of somewhere your character actually lives and erases the weird feeling of having an unlimited amount of time to travel between towns in order to deal with an immediate threat.
There are some technical issues that I found to be mildly frustrating. First, I'm lead to understand that they rushed the release and it shows. Instead of cutting out large swaths of story, the dev team seemed to have taken the interesting approach of just reusing the same dungeons over and over again and blocking some of the places off. It has the weird effect of making you feel like people keep going to these places constantly, but changing the names. Even though it's plainly obvious, I don't really mind all that much. A cave is a cave is a cave, and at least once I get to know the ins and outs of this one, I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to remember where it goes.
Second, they made the decision to allow you to locate craft items while you're wandering around dungeons and once you've found one, it's always available. To craft items, you either go to the market or you go home and order them. This, I feel, is a pretty big step up for crafting, and I appreciate it but there are problems with it. First of all, if you miss some then you're out of luck for good because you can't go back. This is because of how they've modeled the dungeons and the biggest drawback to how they did it. I was faced with the option of crawling inch by inch through terrain I've already been through half a dozen times or just finishing my missions, and I picked the latter which meant that I could make exactly one of many different potions by the very end of the game.
So, nice try I guess. Luckily, like I said, the game isn't that hard and the potions and poisons just arn't that critical so if you want to blow it off like I did, you won't worry about it. Second is that there are a lot of vendors spread out. You can order potions and stuff from the comfort of your home but if you want to buy shit in the markets, you've got to brave wild load times in order to get them and you can only compare wares against people who are currently in your party. Better idea : you have a manservent starting in Act 2. Let him compile a list of wares, buy from that, and ignore load times. When in the item purchase screen, let it compare stuff to everyone all the time. Problem solved forever.
This is getting extremely long, so let me just say that I enjoyed the game again. The character dynamics are fun and the problems, even though extremely noticeable, rarely actually detract from what you're doing. I'm sure I'm going to come back and talk about a few other aspects of the game I'm interested in discussing in ways other then a review. I haven't played a huge number of RPGs and I know I'm late to this particular party, but I think that if you like fantasy and RPGs, then Dragon Age II has earned a spot on your shelf.
It's smoother and prettier then DA : Origins in that it's quite serviceable. The strength of the game is, I think, entirely based on its party dynamics. The main storyline isn't anything to write home about. It's in three parts, it's a little disjointed, and mostly serves to provide atmosphere and impress upon you how your characters station changes from being a broke refugee to someone who's a mover and shaker of the city you inhabit. Other then that, it's really just about party reactions, who you want to romance and how, and walking from place to place lighting monsters on fire.
If that sounds condemning, I don't want it to be. First of all, I really enjoyed the game. What that means is that I felt the party dynamics and each characters personal stories (including the main) really are the spotlight and the main plot is really just something in the background - almost a sidequest that you use to get Friendship or Rivalry points for members of your party. Each individual arc has a story that's solid, but I almost didn't realize that they didn't really hang together until after it was all over and I was listening to a Zero Punctuation mention that. So take that for how you will.
The game itself is pretty fun, and not terribly difficult. I went ahead and played it on Normal and I think that there might have been one fight that really gave me any real trouble the entire time. I'm pretty sure that my setup wasn't always optimal, but you can do pretty well with just putting one or two fighters in your party, one or two mages, and zero to one rogues. There. That's all you need to remember to succeed, except that it never hurts to have a lot of healing items just in case.
The end gets a little tough in spots, but honestly speaking, I had more trouble with something that appeared to be a random encounter then I had with the end bosses. Something to think about.
The power trees are fun and you get a decent number of characters to explore them with, but since they all come with a personalized specialization, they each have a default and that's the one you'll end up picking. There are lots of trees and equipment that say "If you come back to explore the other relationship options, here's some stuff that will make your game-play experience a little different." That's pretty thoughtful, anyhow.
I also enjoyed the more narrow story line and scope. The game makes a story about a single city about as epic in feel as the story of someone who saves an entire nation and to put a finer point on it, the city of Kirkwall feels roughly about as large as the entire kingdom of Fereldan. That's probably an issue with the technical capacity, but it feels like a populated city - especially the lower class districts, but overall that trend allows you to focus on the fate of somewhere your character actually lives and erases the weird feeling of having an unlimited amount of time to travel between towns in order to deal with an immediate threat.
There are some technical issues that I found to be mildly frustrating. First, I'm lead to understand that they rushed the release and it shows. Instead of cutting out large swaths of story, the dev team seemed to have taken the interesting approach of just reusing the same dungeons over and over again and blocking some of the places off. It has the weird effect of making you feel like people keep going to these places constantly, but changing the names. Even though it's plainly obvious, I don't really mind all that much. A cave is a cave is a cave, and at least once I get to know the ins and outs of this one, I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to remember where it goes.
Second, they made the decision to allow you to locate craft items while you're wandering around dungeons and once you've found one, it's always available. To craft items, you either go to the market or you go home and order them. This, I feel, is a pretty big step up for crafting, and I appreciate it but there are problems with it. First of all, if you miss some then you're out of luck for good because you can't go back. This is because of how they've modeled the dungeons and the biggest drawback to how they did it. I was faced with the option of crawling inch by inch through terrain I've already been through half a dozen times or just finishing my missions, and I picked the latter which meant that I could make exactly one of many different potions by the very end of the game.
So, nice try I guess. Luckily, like I said, the game isn't that hard and the potions and poisons just arn't that critical so if you want to blow it off like I did, you won't worry about it. Second is that there are a lot of vendors spread out. You can order potions and stuff from the comfort of your home but if you want to buy shit in the markets, you've got to brave wild load times in order to get them and you can only compare wares against people who are currently in your party. Better idea : you have a manservent starting in Act 2. Let him compile a list of wares, buy from that, and ignore load times. When in the item purchase screen, let it compare stuff to everyone all the time. Problem solved forever.
This is getting extremely long, so let me just say that I enjoyed the game again. The character dynamics are fun and the problems, even though extremely noticeable, rarely actually detract from what you're doing. I'm sure I'm going to come back and talk about a few other aspects of the game I'm interested in discussing in ways other then a review. I haven't played a huge number of RPGs and I know I'm late to this particular party, but I think that if you like fantasy and RPGs, then Dragon Age II has earned a spot on your shelf.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
At character creation, you can pick your class and as time goes on, you can pick your skill tree, not to mention that every level you get to choose where your stat allocation goes, but that's it. It's significantly stripped down from even Origins where it was already pretty basic. You don't spend any time determining who has lock picking skills, who can make poisons or potions, or even how intimidating you are. Rogues lockpick, full stop, and it's a static value based on the Cunning stat. The more Cunning someone is, the better they dodge and the better the lock pick and that's that. That means you end up trying to split your party Rogue between being damaging in combat and the out of combat lock pick.
For my money, it's frustrating, but whatever. I ended up going with more damaging, so I lost out on just about every locked chest in the game, fwiw.
Equipment is very nearly the worst of all worlds. You can equip your character like normal and equipment is almost always just going to be the result of your skill tree. If you're not an archer, just never even bother because it's worthless to use a bow for example. You can equip yourself but you can't equip your companions which means that you end up discarding all the other cool pieces of equipment you find, hocking them for a fraction of what you'd be forced to buy them for.
You can equip weapons and jewelry though, which is frustrating. Each one is given a value between 0 and 5 in terms of use, but generally you just wait until you see something with a larger number then a previous one. You're not given an algorithm or even a good sense of what a stat means, so when I see something that says +15 attack as a bonus and another thing that says +20 attack, I know one is better but I have no way of knowing how much in real terms it actually is.
So, while you can customize things to a degree, it's already laid out for you. Each character has a specialization that's for them and a regular tree they've already started down. Just fill up those two in whatever order you like and you never have to worry about it again.
Results? Not fiddly enough to be interesting and too fiddly to be completely worry free. However, and this is what I like, every level you get a new ability for every character. Just like in D&D, you generally aren't as interested in increasing your skill in Use Rope as you are buying a new Feat or getting a new class ability. So at least there's that.
From:
no subject
This is why, although I think mage is the "canon" choice for DA2, I almost always play a rogue on my first playthrough. I hate having to cart someone else around to open chests.
From:
no subject