I finished Dragon Age II tonight. All my earlier thoughts still hold, although the pig-in-a-poke Gotcha! missions about which I complained became mercifully less common as the game progressed. (In their place came missions you were free to accept or decline, but still had to perform after declining: transporting a Qunari mage to his execution, helping Merrill reassemble her mirror, killing both Orsino and Meredith in turn regardless of which you backed in their big showdown. Not really an improvement.) In addition to these early impressions, there’s a big one to add from the perspective of completion: DA2 seems…short. Like a downloadable add-on rather than a full game in its own right.
That’s not entirely fair. I haven’t played a lot of console games, so I don’t yet have a good sense of how much play time your money normally buys, but DA2 seems at least comparable to most of the titles I’ve tried—Killzone, Borderlands and the multiple-award-winning Bioshock, for example. It is, however, much, much shorter than the original Dragon Age: Origins, which took me a lot more than three long, lonely Saturdays to complete.
The raw number of hours, however, don’t provide a complete picture of the subjective experience of play time. DA2 is divided into three acts that, despite foreshadowing, have virtually nothing to do with one another. In place of DA:O’s epic ten-to-fifteen-act storyline, building to an enormous climax, we get three standalone vignettes that fail to provide a sense of epic scope and feel, therefore, brief.
Combat, too, contributes to this sense of brevity, in two ways. First, a lot of it is disjoint from the mission(s) at hand. DA:O took place largely in caves and wilderness, and you might have to claw your way through one to four mapsful of intervening monsters to reach the climactic boss fight; DA2 takes place almost entirely in a single city, so you can walk directly to the mansion, basement, or back alley and get to work. To pad out the fight sequences, DA2 has you jumped by a lot of random street gangs who neither advance the plot nor lend it any sense of scale. Second, combat is a lot easier than it was in DA:O. Oh, there’s a few tricky fights, to be sure, but only a few, and they lie at the beginning of the game rather than the climax because, while your enemies keep pace with your growing hit points and raw damage, they don’t keep pace with your increasingly sophisticated tactical synergy. At standard difficulty, early fights are dangerous, but any basically competent weaving of tactics, by hand or even in the standing orders menu, makes later fights cake-walks. And because the fights go faster and easier as time passes, rather than becoming more dangerous, the game feels fast.
Top it all off with blatant recycling of maps, recycle content as “homage†to the original, and cut out individualized back stories, and the whole product feels like something of a rush job. A polished rush job, to be sure: the dialogue is at least as good as DA:O, the tactical dilemmas at high difficulty intriguing, the look and sound and feel of the game strong. But the short eighteen-month production schedule shows, possibly exacerbated by Bioware’s investment in the upcoming Star Wars MMO. Rather than cut corners on quality, they cut corners on size. A fair trade in my opinion, if it has to be one or the other. Fans who expected another vast epic may disagree.
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