Paul's Dragon Age 2 rant thread

[RichardWhitely]

Story was ok but way too disjointed. Do a few missions, have several thousand cutscenes, oh look it's three years later. Yeaaah, ok then. Hmm, why do I still have the same amount of money in my purse that I had three years ago? Why hasn't the city changed at all? Why do we all look exactly the same, even a decade later? Nothing you ever did actually FELT like it was having an impact, at best people would just call you different titles as you walked passed them. Sometimes an older character would have risen in the ranks, but that still didn't change anything. Years later, everyone was still doing the same thing they were doing when you first met them. The whole "Mages vs Templars" bit was getting old at first... then you realise that the entire GAME is that. There was no epic quest like in DAO, just you caught in the middle between petty squabbles. Oh and the ending is a huge plate of bullshit and chips too. Expect the typical ME2-style million and one DLCs to be coming soon ... only, like ME2, expect 20 "armour!" DLCs for your party members and your dog before BioWhore finally release something that expands the story.

EPIC QUESTS LIKE:

1. Find gruesome and bloody remains, the hacked apart remnants of a Chantry Sister.
2. Magically know exactly who to inform of this discovery.
3. Collect the remains.
4. Deliver to some random guy in a random part of the city.
5. "I believe you lost this"
6. "Oh my, thank you! I never thought I'd see this again! Thank you for bringing it back to me"


EPIC [censored]ING STORY TELLING, AMIRITE GUYS?

Music was lacklustre, and sporadic, at best. Not a very memorable score at all. The voice work was great though, absolutely can't fault that - though I played as Female Hawke, so I can't comment on Male Hawke's voice. Sound effects? Egh, lots of clashing steel and explosions - nothing noteworthy.

Visuals were horrific. Seriously... this is 2011 and that's the BEST they could come up with? Shoddy textures, low-res FMVs with macroblocking up the wazoo, aliased edges all over the screen, stuttering and hitching all over the place - and constant "loading..." segments. The loading screens, of which there are an abundance, were..... urgh, words cannot adequately express how ABYSMAL they were. I often encountered loading screens up to almost 2 minutes in length, depending on the area being loaded.

The absolute biggest insult here was the retarded copy/paste for areas. Once you've hit the Bone Mines, you WILL have seen every area in the game -- all the houses are identical, all the caves are identical (oooh, we cut off this section so it MUST be different!), all the warehouses are identical, all the sewers.... urgh. Seriously, I have never EVER seen as much copy/paste horseshit in all my life. I've played Spectrum/C64 games that had a wider array of scenes. Shit, even Phantasy Star Online didn't have this many copy/paste areas. What, did BioWare just run out of money halfway through their six-month development cycle?

Gameplay depends largely on who you ask, to some it's a vast improvement over the first game, to others it's the very evidence of yet more streamlined bullshit to be shoved down our throats. I fall into the latter camp, because the only game I've ever played that is MORE streamlined than this, is Final Fantasy XIII. I kept playing because, as luck would have it, I'm generally rather partial to hack'n'slash titles -- so in the end I just played this like I'd play KoTOR or BG:Dark Alliance. Go into it expecting a deep, tactical, team-based RPG and you'll likely be disappointed greatly. Go into it expecting BG:Dark Alliance and you'll be ok. There's tons of quests (honestly, 30-40hrs worth) but in the end they're all just variations on "Go here, listen to them, kill them" or "Go here, kill them, bring back loot" It gets tiring after a while. The "choice" aspect of the game was hilarity of the highest order, typical par-for-the-course BioWare crap. NO choice you make has any meaningful impact (sorry if you consider that a spoiler, but you'll thank me in the end) as they're all designed to spit in your face anyhow. I likened it to being slapped, you can choose which hand slaps you - the left or the right - but in the end you're still going to get slapped like a little bitch. It's the classic "let's play on their emotions!" gambit that, in this case, fails miserably. Well, unless their plan was to play on the anger emotion, in which case they win because this cheap illusion of choice bullshit is just that; anger-inducing bullshit.

In the end, if you just want a mindless hack'n'slash with loads of blood, tits, exploshuns, gay sex (yes, you read that right, even say "Hi" to some mage you meet and hes up your poop chute before you say "I don't butter my bread on that side!") and a half-coherent story line .... you'll probably like DA2. It's certainly lengthy enough to keep you playing and it's not exactly the worst game ever made, but coming from Dragon Age:Origins? Jesus... You'd think a different company made it! And compared to games like Risen, Two Worlds II, Drakensang and Divinity 2? It's a huge let down.

In short it's for people that say: "DURRGON AGE LUKS FUN!1 I WANNA PLAY DAT TOO11 BUT I DUN WANNA DEAL WITH STATZ AND SHIT, ALL THAT [censored]ING NERD SHIT MAKEZ MY HED HURRT, LOLZ.   "



I GIVE IT 4 HAMSTERS OUT OF 15

[Arathrael]

In the end, if you just want a mindless hack'n'slash with loads of blood, tits, exploshuns, gay sex (yes, you read that right, even say "Hi" to some mage you meet and hes up your poop chute before you say "I don't butter my bread on that side!")

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20110314

[RichardWhitely]

In the end, if you just want a mindless hack'n'slash with loads of blood, tits, exploshuns, gay sex (yes, you read that right, even say "Hi" to some mage you meet and hes up your poop chute before you say "I don't butter my bread on that side!")

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20110314

PROOF!