Dragon Age 2 is without a doubt the single biggest disappointment of the year so far. BioWare is in trouble.
To Bioware's credit, Dragon Age 2's graphics are greatly improved when compared to DA:O, though unfortunately they still are nowhere near the standard of most games these days. This is especially disappointing given the absolutely tiny scope of the game's areas; you would think BioWare could have made a game this small shine like a supernova. Still, the particle effects are fine, the color palette, while boring in its application to the environments, is actually pretty good when it comes to spells, abilities, and things of that nature, and the texture work is acceptable, though you should expect to run into objects that look like they were rendered for the PS1 from time to time. Overall the graphics do their job, but don't expect to be blown away. I did run into a few graphical glitches-invisible enemies, character stuck on draw weapon animation, etc.-which were irritating and actually required a restart of the system at least once. These aren't game breakers, but they are irritating when they occur and they occur a little too frequently to overlook.
The sound is also passable. The cacophony of battle is actually quite good and frequently makes fights sound a lot more epic than they really are. The voice acting is also fantastic for the most part, which is especially impressive due to the massive amount of voiced dialogue in the game. Even the weaker actors are far better than what we see in most games these days, and that is a major plus in a game like this since you will spend a lot of time talking and listening to others. I applaud BioWare for actually voicing your character this time - it really adds a lot to the experience. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is a letdown. Vast portions of it are recycled from Dragon Age Origins and I'm relatively sure at least one part of it is a variation of a menu theme in Mass Effect 2. The new bits are pretty good, but nothing mind blowing. The soundtrack really adds nothing to the experience, unfortunately, and that does the game a major disservice since a solid soundtrack can really liven up an RPG.
The story is, for the most part, pretty good despite its almost total lack of focus. It centers entirely on your character's rise to prominence (at least in the first 2 acts) in the city of Kirkwall, where you will spend the entire 40 hour campaign. Yes, you heard that right. You never leave Kirkwall and there are only 3 "wilderness" areas to go to. That means that there is tremendous pressure on the story to keep things interesting, and unfortunately I think this is its downfall. The strength of your party member characters does a lot to keep the narrative afloat, but despite their interesting quirks and interactions even BioWare's character creating genius can't save the game's story from itself. Characters like the revenge-driven Fenris or the sweet but dark Merrill do add a lot to the experience, but when they are placed into such a monotonous thread even they begin to lose their luster. All of them are well designed, even if some of them are a bit too over-the-top to be likeable. The interactions between the naughty female pirate captain Isabela and the naive Dalish Merrill are fantastically amusing, but the unique and well thought out personalities of the others also make for some good interactions and some highlights in the story. In fact, I had far more fun with the companion quests than with anything the main quest line offered, which is both a compliment to BioWare's character design and an insult to their main story design. It is disappointing, however, that many of these companion quests wind up being forgotten by the end of the game and just get left sort of dangling out there without any definite conclusion.
I can appreciate that BioWare wanted to tell a focused, defined narrative. I can even appreciate that it wanted to only focus on your character's development instead of some ambiguous dark evil like most RPGs. What I don't appreciate is that they tried too hard to incorporate multiple plots. The first act sees you collecting money as a poor refugee for an expedition to make you rich, the second act has you in the middle of a political entanglement between the Qunari and the city, and the third act places you between the mages and the Templars. Yes, these are all tied together extremely loosely in the name of character development, but the second or third act could have been a game all on its own. In fact, when I finished the second act I thought the game was over. It tied up the loose ends in the plot, it gave a relatively satisfying conclusion to the conflict it focused on, and it just generally felt ok. Imagine my surprise, then, when the third act came along and forced me to play through the equivalent of a completely separate story with the same characters in the same city. It actually felt like the dev team couldn't decide which way to go and thus tried to incorporate concepts for two completely different games into one over-long, tedious experience that far outstays its welcome. I literally had to force myself to finish the third act. Rarely do I wish a game would hurry up and end, but DA2 felt like work by about the 25 hour mark and that still left me 15 hours of slog until the end. Not enjoyable. BioWare should have focused on one or the other of these conflicts and built a more detailed, compelling game instead of going with the kitchen sink theory of storytelling and choosing quantity over quality.
In terms of gameplay, Dragon Age 2 is a massive shift away from the DA:O formula, and thus a shift away from what BioWare does best. Combat is now all in real time, a change that I initially favored because it seemed to add a little more player involvement to the battles. The new combat system's flaws quickly became apparent, however. Most of your abilities take an extremely long time to cool down, especially early on, and because the only combat option outside of abilities is the A button, you will be spending a lot, A LOT of time mashing A. Early in the game this isn't so bad since most enemies drop quickly, but just wait until you get to fight a large demon or a dragon and you will be begging for a "click once to attack" button. One fight in particular had me mashing A with only rare ability use for over 20 straight minutes to bring down a boss. It was literally so repetitive that it hurt my thumb, and that is not a good sign for a combat system. You will also find that even the small-time baddies begin to have huge HP pools by about the middle of the game, and it is at this stage that the combat begins to feel stale and boring despite its usually excellent animations and sounds. If the devs were going for a hack and slash, they should have included features designed to keep those games fresh like heavy attacks, blocks, and dodges in addition to the use-once-wait-to-cool-down abilities. By the end of the game I wished desperately to go back to DA:O's combat system, and I suspect many players will feel the same after 40 hours.
All of this is exacerbated by the endless area repetition. As I said before, there is only the city and the wilderness. The city consists of 10-12 main areas that can be visited at either day or night, though the time of day rarely has any impact on them and feels more like a way for the devs to make the game seem bigger than it really is (the day city and night city show up on your map as independent areas). There are a few sub-areas like dungeons or mansions mixed in here, but they are reused so often they begin to feel like a chore to visit. For instance, in one sewer dungeon located in Dark Town I faced a serial killer, confronted an uprising, hunted for potion ingredients, killed a blood mage, and probably completed several other tasks I can't remember all in the same 30x30 room. It is hard to feel immersed when you see supposedly significant events play out in identical settings over and over. I even unlocked an achievement for exploring 10 caves at one point and had to chuckle when I realized that all 10 had been the same cave during ten different quests. Opening doors and closing others does not constitute a new area, BioWare, and this is a downright lazy and third rate development decision. The devs should be ashamed of the lack of effort and creativity put into the areas here, and those of you looking to play this game should expect the boredom due to this decision to set in as early as 15 hours in. That means you will spend 25 more hours running through the exact same dungeons under different circumstances, It won't be fun, it will feel like work, and it will make you wonder what happened at BioWare that they thought this was ok.
The true tragedy here, though, is the fact that after you've spent all this time trudging through the mind melting repetition and coma inducing familiarity, you will come upon an ending that is, and there really is no other description for it, downright awful. You will have made dozens upon dozens of decisions, some small some big, you will have probably have romanced a party member, you will have tried to be the character you wanted to be. And what will you get for it? A generic, one-side-or-the-other ending that takes almost nothing but your very last decision (side with the mages or templars) into account and forgets or changes the rest of it. Literally, nearly no other choice you have made is even mentioned hinted at. Quest lines involving your companions are left completely unaddressed, so even if you finished all the quests for a companion the sense of closure you are looking for never comes. Really want to know what happens with such and such's story? Too bad, the game will never tell you. Then ending leaves a terrible number of loose ends both in the main plot and the sub-plots, and It feels as canned as the ending to most FPS games out there, and that's a very bad thing considering most people play RPGs to get away from the shallow drivel offered by mainstream games.
Case in point: in my ending, I was told that the only party member that stuck around was a female who I had never romanced, while my love who I had romanced fully, who lived with me, and who even walked around ina new outfit to show her devotion to me, apparently just left. Translation: "We don't like the decision you made and are therefore going to ignore it." Well played BioWare. The other party members, who you spend a great deal of time talking to, working with, and coming to care about, are hardly even mentioned except for a 2 second cop out that sounds like BioWare just couldn't be bothered to write out possibilities for them. As I mentioned before, this results in many, many loose ends and no real sense of closure. Coming from any studio, it was an enormously unsatisfying ending. Coming from BioWare, the studio that gave us KOTOR, Mass Effect 2, and DA:O, it is unforgivable. The conclusion succeeded only in making me feel like an idiot for devoting an entire work week's worth of time to get to it. I felt cheated instead of content, and that is not a good way for an RPG to end. Maybe there is an alternate ending that does a better job of closing things out, but I certainly won't be investing any more time to see it.
Overall, Dragon Age 2 is a colossal disappointment. It could have been great, but instead it is just mediocre and, at times, downright bad. The poorly designed and overly ambitious story, repetitive combat, bland and recycled environments, awful ending, and general lack of originality handicap the sequel to one of the best RPGs of our time. I won't be buying your next title, BioWare. You're dead to me until you prove that you still have the will and ability to create RPG masterpieces like KOTOR or DA:O.