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You are Hawke...
I recognize that many other reviews have already been published for
this title, but I'm hoping to offer a more in-depth opinion than you
may have seen elsewhere. I have
played through the entire campaign twice, and progressed about halfway
through a third playthrough, and spent more than 150 hours in the city
of Kirkwall. This will not be a first-impressions type review, or an
uninformed look at nothing but the first few hours of gameplay. I
intend to offer something deeper, and more complete. As such, be
forewarned that an occasional spoiler or two may slip through, in the
interest of offering a more detailed view of the pitfalls and triumphs
of this epic RPG.
And epic it is! That word gets thrown around
frequently these days, but Bioware has captured the true
meaning in Dragon
Age II. The sweeping impact that your choices and actions have on this
world make it feel like a living, breathing thing, rather than just a
backdrop for spilling blood. And while this review may err on the side
of being critical of some features, the product as a whole is
exceedingly enjoyable.
In Dragon Age II, you are Hawke - a refugee from the Blight that rolled
across Ferelden during the events of Bioware's epic RPG, Dragon Age:
Origins. After a brief struggle to flee your Darkspawn-ravaged
homeland, you will find yourself embroiled in political intrigue,
assassination plots, and a hunt for ancient relics of unimaginable
evil. Although this is a sequel to Bioware's prior Dragon Age title,
the world you will watch unfold in Dragon Age II is different enough
that veterans of the original campaign will not feel bogged down with
familiarity, while newcomers will not feel overwhelmed with lore while
being introduced to the rich Tolkein-esque world of Thedas. While there
is an option to import your DA:O save game into DA2, the choices made
in the prior title do not have any direct impact on your new hero(ine),
and merely result in a few different dialogue options and side quests.
Cautions
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Lots of blood. Lots of gore. Lots of sexual innuendos and a few
scantily-clad demons and pirate wenches. This is not a game for
youngsters, and earns its "Mature 17+" rating. Despite its appearances
however, very little actual focus is given to these parts of the game.
They are just there, not shoved in your face for shock value.
I'd also like to offer a precaution for gamers that may be seeking a
more action-centric RPG. Although the combat in Dragon Age II is a
marked improvement over it's predecessor, the primary focus of this
game remains the plots and stories that will unfold. Combat is a means
to that end, and not the primary focus. You will need to do a lot of
reading/listening in order to get the most out of this game.
Gameplay - 87 / 100
point of a particular story, it nevertheless remains the glue that
holds it all together. Combat is the reason that you gain levels, the
reason you get better gear, and the reason you gather crafting
materials for better potions and runes. And whether you like it or not,
it is frequently the only solution to a problem in the world of Thedas.
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Combat maneuvers and skill trees have been revamped and overhauled in
fairly significant ways from DA:O resulting in a much more fluid and
brutal combat system. Bioware has been quoted as saying that they
wanted "something awesome to happen" every time the player pushes a
button. They mostly succeeded, but the result is horrifyingly vicious
combat that sees foes exploding in flesh shrapnel every few seconds. To
counteract this act of spontaneous enemy bloodsplosion, fights have
many more enemies, and most come in several waves. The result is
battles that feel the right length, but end up getting tedious as there
are never enough cooldowns and/or stamina available to execute those
"push button for awesome" maneuvers after the first few foes have had
their heads liquified. This frequently results in anti-climactic
battles that go out with a whimper instead of a bang, or are over
before you've even warmed up.
On top of this occasional disappointment, the skill trees themselves
are a bit lackluster. While more intuitive than the design present in
DA:O, it still remains very easy to create terrible builds that leave
your character and companion completely ill-prepared to face your
enemies in combat. To add to this, it is not possible to retrain
yourself in the basic version of the game, and players seeking to try
different builds or skills will either have to do a lot of saving and
reloading, or purchase the Black Emporium DLC (which comes with an item
that can be used to unspend all of your ability and stat points).
Balancing certain classes' stat point expenditures is a tedious process
as well. Mages are the only class that requires Willpower in order to
equip their armor, while this stat controls every class' pool of
available Mana/Stamina. The result is mages that are walking mana
pools, and rogues/warriors that can barely execute two back-to-back
maneuvers before being winded, unless they sacrifice stat points that
could be spent to get them into better equipment or increase their
damage output. And heaven forbid you go too heavy on sustained powers,
which further diminish your already-feeble energy reserves!
I appreciate the freedom of being able to specialize my character and
companions in ways of my choosing. But I feel like a better balance
could be struck between freedom of choice and ease of play.
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The new UI for sorting
your inventory is a welcomed improvement over DA:O
The skill trees are only part of a UI overhaul that was sorely needed.
Players familiar with DA:O are likely to weep with joy when they see
the updated inventory screen, even though managing your limited
inventory space is still a royal pain. Why a game puts such a
relatively low cap on your inventory space, then fills every nearby
barrel or crate with a bit of vendor trash, is beyond my abilities to
understand. It's a waste of time for no other reason than to waste your
time.
Before I move away from talking about the UI improvements, I feel
obliged to bring up the new crafting system. Although still a bit of
tedium to gather components, you will no longer find yourself hauling
around buckets of extra ingredients, and you no longer need to invest
skill points into these side projects. Instead, in DA2, once a resource
is "discovered" it can be used indefinitely, and any crafting station
in the game now offers you unlimited access to that particular
resource, and you simply spend your hard-won wages to pay to have the
items crafted for you. This updated crafting system wins a gold seal of
approval from me, since it streamlines the process without eliminating
the option of crafting, and still makes sense within the greater
context of the world. After all, I'm a hero, not a herbalist.
Beyond overhauled UIs and complicated combat mechanics, the bulk of the
game is actually spent interacting with the epic story that is
unfolding for Hawke and his/her companions in their new home of
Kirkwall. It starts slowly, and I found it difficult to bring myself to
care about much of the story early on in the game, since the focus is
so shallow (earn lots of money!). But then I came to realize that
didn't matter, because I did care about something -- my sister,
Bethany. We escaped the darkspawn horde, lost our brother, made a
bargain with a dragon, saved a handful of otherwise doomed refugees
including our own mother, and have stayed together through all of this.
Despite having no sympathy or interest in my goals during the first
"act" of this game, I still cared about my sister and mother, and
trying to make a better life for them.
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I think that's where the brilliance of this game's script lies... At
the core of the story, DA2 is still a fantasy epic on rails. But the
unique part here is that you get to choose every detail of the train
that takes you to that destination. This makes it feel less like you're
watching a plot unfold, and more like you're making it happen, even if
it happens to end the same way every time. Every Hawke ends Act 1 by
accompanying an expedition to the Deep Roads, but not every Hawke
brings his sister or brother along with him/her. And while this one
small choice will not affect the final outcome of the game, it will
have a profound effect on your personal journey to that destination,
one way or another.
The inclusion of so much voiced talent, and so many different options
to experience during your journey, has apparently taken its toll on the
inclusion of additional art assets. Throughout the hundreds
of quests you will experience in this game, all of the action
will take place in the same 20 or so maps, re-used in various ways by
blocking off passages or inserting new furniture. It got so bad on my
first playthrough that I honestly considered not completing a mission
simply because I knew that it would take place in the same cave system
I'd already explored dozens of times previously, and would likely
include some of the same enemies that I'd already slain a thousand
times prior. In the end, I was always glad that I completed these
missions, since they each offered more insight into the world I was
living in and more opportunity to listen to another brilliantly-written
script.
Graphics - 82 / 100
two different levels: Combat (seen from about 5-20 feet from your
character) and cutscenes (sometimes so close to a character's face that
you can count their individual freckles). To call this a challenge is a
bit of an understatement. And to be blunt, I don't think that the
execution of this duality was successful.
The majority of your gameplay is spent listening to characters speak,
and responding to them. During these scenes, the camera is positioned
in very cinematic ways that highlight the speakers, sometimes zooming
in so close as to only show their mouths. Given that so much of the
game's rendering time is used to portray these close-up shots, it's
disappointing to see so many blatant flaws shine forth while
interacting with characters.
Hair is one of the biggest culprits, frequently clipping right through
characters' ears or neck when they speak. Clothing occasionally does
the same. This lack of detail is forgivable on the larger scale of
combat, but glaringly obvious when your entire screen is filled with
the visage of a man with a lock of hair sticking straight through his
ear.
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Lighting is another downfall of these intimate dialogue
scenes. Throughout every zone in this game, there is very little in the
way of dynamic or direct lighting. Every close-up scene in the game is
shot in a diffuse light that detracts from the potential impact these
scenes could have, and fails to highlight the subtle details that have
been added to character faces and gestures. While this may have been
done to maintain some sort of realism (real life is very rarely lit
well), it results in the lack of cinematic flare that the camera
angles, animations and dialogue attempt to portray.
Despite these faults, I must admit that the overall look and feel of
the graphics and animations of DA2 are indeed excellent. In particular,
the movement of characters' mouths in sync with their dialogue is an
unbelievable triumph in the world of RPGs, even capturing subtle tongue
motions of characters that speak with foreign accents. Fluid and
dramatic combat animations have changed combat from the occasional
drudgery that was seen in DA:O into sequences that look more like a
well-choreographed ballet, punctuated with exploding bodies and blood
splatter by the gallon. There is an occasional inconsistency
on various spell effects, though (e.g.: "Elemental Weapons"
looks like a last-minute texture hack job, while "Arcane Shield"
results in a complicated shimmering bubble effect that obscures and
warps the character's entire appearance) and Archery still lacks the
imaginative animations of other weapon types. But these are minor
gripes in an overall experience that looks and feels unified, fluid,
and breathtakingly epic.
A warning, however: As of this time, DX11 graphics suffer frequent
crashes and other failures. Despite making the game look even greater,
those improvements come at the heavy cost of stability. This
technological failure shouldn't be overlooked lightly, as many
bleeding-edge gamers take it as a personal insult when the software
they purchase fails to live up to their top-of-the-line hardware.
Sound - 97 / 100
hopefulness, to the visceral screech of a steel blade grinding through
armor and bone, Bioware has managed to portray a range of
sounds that are just as grounded in reality as they are otherworldly
and fantastic.
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The primary characters
are so well acted that I found myself thinking of them as real people...
The most noteworthy of the sounds of this game are the hundreds of
hours of voiced dialogue that is shared by every character and NPC.
Even random 'flavor' NPCs sprinkled around the city of Kirkwall will
occasionally interact with one another in ways that mean absolutely
nothing to the flow of the remainder of the game. They've been included
solely for the purpose of giving more life to the backdrop against
which the epic struggle of the main plot is set. And even though many
of the same voices are re-used by these unimportant characters, their
lack of importance makes it easy to overlook this point.
The primary actors - the male and female Hawkes, and all of the
companions - are all written and voiced so realistically and expertly
that I have found myself talking about these characters as if they are
real life acquaintances. When a fellow gamer of mine told me about how
the plot of one of these companions turns out if you make different
choices, I was honestly affected on an emotional level - I couldn't let
that happen to a friend of mine! Without such skilled voice acting, I
doubt I ever would have felt this connection to my party members. My
absolute favorite part of these voiceovers, are the ones that play out
seemingly at random while exploring Kirkwall and its surroundings, as
your companions begin to chat away with one another as if you're not
even there. As if they have a life all their own.
But voices aren't the only authentic and immersive auditory treats
contained in this game. From the chest-shaking BOOM of a massive
fireball connecting with its target, to the rumble and crash of a
charging ogre smashing through your ranks, each sound has been crafted
with the same cinematic attention to detail that the dialogues have
been given. Armor even creaks and squeaks during dialogue scenes, if an
armored speaker is motioning with their hands or arms while they speak.
Surround sound and environmental effects have also been used to great
effect to help pull you even deeper into the game.
Value - 90 / 100
As mentioned earlier, I've already spent more than 100 hours in Dragon
Age II, enjoying the many stories that have been offered to my
characters. For the current price of $60.00 USD, I feel as though I've
gotten my money's worth.
However, not everyone is looking for the same type of game. DA2 is very
heavy on dialogue, and rewards players for exploring deeper into
conversations than appears immediately necessary. It takes between 30
and 40 hours to experience everything the primary campaign has to
offer, but it's likely possible to power through in as little as 15-20
if you don't like to explore side missions. Even still, with more than
75% of that time is spent listening to people talk and responding to
them, it's not a game for folks that are seeking combat and action on a
more regular and uninterrupted basis.
For me, an interactive cinematic fantasy epic sounds incredible. I'm
deeply pleased with my purchase, and it even came with a few unexpected
DLC bonuses (Black Emporium and Exiled Prince) to make it an even
better value.
Lasting Appeal - 70 / 100
any long-term appeal. And while Bioware has never shied away from
offering extensive DLC package choices for their RPG titles, each comes
with its own price tag that can range from a few dollars, to as much as
$20. The actual value that each adds to the overall gameplay experience
is debateable at best, but players generally react poorly to being
nickel-and-dimed to death by pack after pack of purchased content.
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The replay value is limited, although there are two primary roles that
Hawke may play that have a distinct impact on the way the story plays
out: Mage and Non-Mage. While most side quests don't acknowledge this
distinction, the core plotlines at least pay lip service to it if not
outright offering completely different outcomes based on this initial
choice. Only the most die-hard completist really needs to pursue these
however, as the ultimate results of these plots are all the same. It's
only the journey that changes, not the destination. It's up to each
player to determine which is more important to experience.
To assist with the replay experience, for players that want to
experience as many different nuances of different stories as possible,
DA2 offers players the opportunity to choose from 3 pre-made DA:O save
game "imports" in addition to importing your own original game. These
options change a few of the side quests offered in each playthrough, as
well as altering a few of the backstories of Hawke and his/her
companions in small ways. It's nothing major, but it's a nice touch
that hasn't previously been included in Bioware's RPGs.
Pros and Cons
- Incredibly rich story, even when it doesn't matter
- Top-notch voice acting
- Lip sync is impressively authentic
- Long hours of enjoyment
- Drastically improved UI over predecessor
- Sound effects and soundtrack have a perfect flavor
- Plenty of replay value for completists
- Lackluster lighting technology and graphical details
- DX11 support is spotty, frequent crashes
- Combat system and skill trees still unintuitive
- Excessive inventory management
- Unending re-use of maps and textures
- High price if you're not intending to replay
Conclusion
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ENCHANTMENT!
Playing through the depth and awe of such a fantastically crafted
series of stories and legends is a remarkable experience. But perhaps
not one that is meant for everyone. And despite the impressive scope
and craftsmanship of the story, DA2 suffers from a lack of polish on
various mechanics, ranging from UI implementation to graphics and
lighting.
There is no denying that this game is a stand-out product and another
definite milestone in the continued evolution of single-player RPG
epics. But to turn a blind eye to its blemishes simply because its
story and voice acting are such incredible work, would be a dis-service
to the industry, and to gamers. Calling them game-breakers, however,
would be inaccurate and insulting to the hard work of Bioware's
talented development staff. Sure, the game has its warts, but in the
end they are outshone by the sheer enjoyment that comes from playing
this title, and becoming the Champion of Kirkwall.
Overall 86/100 - Very Good
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