Saturday, April 2, 2011

Dragon Age 2 and Technorati

First and foremost, Technorati here is the claim verification: 93N9XFNJCMWA. So now my blog will be visible in a proper blog directory website. Now on to business.

Dragon Age 2, a review.

Now at the start of this I will begin to say that I have not completed the game, so far I have only been able to devote about 15 hours to it and I am very much so a completionist so am only partway through act 2. Now the very first impressions I got when playing the game were something along these lines, "Oooo its nice and shiny, and wow it has this mass effect dialogue system I really liked." However, I noticed that excitement started to dwindle quickly. Don't get me wrong they did a lot of things right, but since they still changed even more they made quite a few mistakes also. The game-play, at least from what I heard since I only played a mage, is incredibly different from 1 starting class to another. Thats good, it gives the game replay value, or at least some as that replay value gets destroyed by other "features." The quick paced battles were actually quite fun as a mage, bombarding people with fist of the maker, pulling them in and then launching a fireball into their faces. There was one incredibly glaring problem with the game-play though and that was the quests, there were more than enough quests, the game was actually overflowing with them which is good because it gives more play time right? Wrong, the actual size of the game world was so small that stuffing so many quests inside is just bad, they never really change anything about the game world and the few places that exist for only one quest are just copy-pasted other dungeons and in the end felt like they were just trying to stuff in everything they could.

The story, this here was where I felt the major let down. The story in a sense just meanders about for most of the game. At the beginning you were going for a deep roads expedition, and I am like "Wooo that should be awesome, slaughtering endless waves of dark spawn while I hunt for treasure for the main story line." Well, that did not exactly go the way I had hoped. Then in Act 2 the story is about an uprising, which still is not the main plot point, and finally Act 3 is a battle between Templar and Mages. This was the major weakness of the game, mostly due to its sequel status. It just did not have its own defined story. The first game had a great one, last the Grey Warden, and a Blight all your own. Dragon Age 2 on the other hand, had just going about doing nothing major and finishing the first games story of the Chantry against the Mages, although on a completely different continent so I don't see the connection there.

Overall, I see no proper replay value in the game. At first I thought it would have some, because people commented to me before I got it on how different the classes played, but it was completely overshadowed by the lacking story and over packed quests. I still enjoyed it though, it was a nice hack and slash, good graphics, and I personally liked the interface better than the first along with the ability trees. Even the armor system I found better, not having to really worry about your companions armor as they can't switch their main clothes and just concentrating on yourself freed up plenty of space in your backpack for carrying junk to sell. So in the end it was fun, but I most definitely won't be playing it a second time.

~ The Lurker