Okay so wow quite a bit of hate goin on here (or at least some undertones of animosity)
I find it odd to have disliked some of the changes made to Mass Effect 2 and then completely do a face-heel turn on the same sort of drastic changes made to Dragon Age II in comparison to Origins. It does seem a bit silly, but hey lemme try and work this out onto this thread.
I’m just going to put it out there; I love this game to bits, and was eventually bored shitless by the combat in Origins to the point where I never managed to get to play Awakening. I’m not sure what brought this about, because I was pretty into both Neverwinter Nights games, etc. But I found myself really enjoying the changes they made to Dragon Age II, and while I do understand some of the cons that other fans of Origins are pointing out, I’m confused by some others.
Some of the points I’ve noticed from some of my friends include giving Hawke a voice, over-simplifying the inventory system, and so on leading up to the argument that the ‘role-playing’ idea is diminished in comparison to the first game. For example, I can certainly get what people are saying when Hawke isn’t their own character in comparison to Origins, it’s Bioware’s character – but that doesn’t necessarily mean playing as Hawke ‘isn’t role-playing’.
The combat, I think, is what is keeping me playing this game. Despite yes, there is tedium to the ho-hum send-shit-in-waves until they run out of peons routine, the underlying system is just so much… faster than the combat in Origins, especially the Rogue class. Dual-wield combat is just so dynamic from the get-go, in comparison to what it was in the first game. And hey, look, bows and arrows actually mean something.
I suppose in hindsight a lot of the mechanics in Origins are still inherent in Dragon Age II, particularly in the combat. In my opinion, it’s just that there’s a certain element of “hands-free” approach, where Backstab is a skill that automatically puts you behind the enemy rather than a latent thing that just happened when you forcibly moved your character behind them, and other sorts of things. But I don’t see anything wrong with that in particular. There’s such an ease to the spatial element in Rogue combat that makes everything faster, and I think that’s what I like over how it played in Origins.
It also comes down to the fact that I didn’t have the patience for the management of my characters in Origins aside from my own. Despite really loving the characters in my party and everything they had to say to each other, when it came down to leveling up and assigning the right points to the right skills, I eventually stopped giving a shit and auto-levelled everyone save for my own character I created. It felt like I had to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the library of options available for each class. The reason why I’m probably manually assigning points to stats in Dragon Age II as opposed to automatically doing everything (or more accurately, actually relishing the task rather than dreading it) is because there are some easy commonalities in the skill trees, understandings I can apply to all the characters of the same class, and specializations become only a fraction of what I have to know.
For lack of a better word, I thought the gameplay in Origins was fucking slow and plodding. Visually, it didn’t feel like there was a connection between what was being animated and the numbers in the actual attacks. There’s just more action in it, and while I do appreciate the purpose of Origins stylistically was to be a throwback to older RPG systems, I think I got over that sort of thing by the time I played RPGs like Mass Effect. Same goes for the voice-acting: I think once I got into the idea of the character having a voice via dialogue wheel, I never went back. Even if I loved the Neverwinter Nights series and everything about KotOR, it felt odd playing as Shepard, and then going back to my protagonist in Dragon Age who was the only mute in the whole world and communicated via a menu on the screen. I argue that it’s a different kind of role-playing, where you’re still immersing yourself into a role that might not be your own, but it’s still a role.
Dragon Age II is a huge departure from Origins. That’s basically the gist I get of the negativity from the fanbase. There were big changes, big ones that cater for a different kind of RPG gamer. But hey, that’s cool. People got different tastes. But personally I don’t appreciate the part of the community that cries out for blood when it knows about all these changes and still refuse to let it go after a year or two.
And I remember reading
this article and that just got me annoyed. Bioware changed the format of a ‘classic RPG’. God forbid they try to make changes to one of their IPs to cater for a different group after 12 years since Baldur’s Gate.
And button mashing and lack of decent pause-play combat? What a load of bullshit. On the PC version anyway. Which is, so I’m told, the only platform to play a cRPG on.
I digress. I don’t think the game is perfect: it’s not hard to see that environments are copy-pasted and recolored in different spots in an excuse for visual splendor. The characters are a far cry from the dynamics in Origins and Awakening. There have been changes to a few returning supporting characters that I think were put in hastily and without reason. And the Kirkwall period of “get 50 sovereigns to go to expedition” is quite obviously nothing more than a huge wad of padding and one big goddamn fetch quest. While I think the dialogue wheel and voice acting for Hawke is something I much prefer to the silent words spoken by the Grey Warden, the writing doesn’t have the same sort of zing to it. And almost everything picked up in barrels, chests, and boxes is useless crap to be sold, even the rarest of weapons and items unusable by Hawke. So yes, this game is chock-a-block full of issues.
But I think it’s far from the shitstain that the butthurt part of the fanbase are making it out to be.