I don’t think the gameplay’s too bad, I like the faster use of the talents, and the branching means that you can pick exactly which ones you want when you level up (on the whole, but some skill trees suck with the ‘must have 5 points’ thing). The jumping through time bit does annoy me, kinda like Fable 3 where you’ve got 120-something days before the invasion, you see a loading screen and then it’s the day before the invasion! It’s too much of a videogame for my liking, and although I’m glad they tried to make the classic fantasy of Origins more playable, they’ve gone too far in the other direction for my liking.
First sorry for wall of text. It seems I couldn´t point out my opinion on this game with fewer words and still sound a bit reasonable.
The last part of each paragraph are usually most important…
Well I bet the game an hour ago. While the basic mechanics and gameplay elements(like skill system, making choices, combat) were greatly improved in my opinion, I am sadly but truly VEEEERY disappointed by the story.
Reason:
[COLOR=‘Red’][spoiler]
DAO: You are a(or more precisely THE) grey warden, needed to protect a whole country from the possibly most wicked foe mankind could imagine: The Darkspawn. An archdemon leading a vast host into the land, aiming only for the fall of man. You need to rally any possible ally to overcome this thread.
DA2: (This is more my opinion than an actual report) Well you are the great mighty champion. You go along fighting dragons, goddamn dragons just because you can, you don´t have to, it´s just a good sport.
While doing all that, you go and earn some money, because there is apparently nothing better to do and wait for something big to happen.
Well then there come the qunari and ar all like: The Qun(kind of religion) demands to kill you all because you are weak. You are like: No way!..and kill all the Qunari(hey you can kill dragons, how could a filthy humanoid possibly harm you).
This are 2 thirds of the game. You are now the champion(for killing Qunari-Lord). You then do a little more sidequests and kill some more dragons, and then kill half the mage circle and templars while trying to safe the city in the final battle(trying to cut it short here). END
[COLOR=‘Red’]What I want to point out: In comparison to Dragon Age Origins you feel like you could do so much more, tear the biggest things the world would throw at you into tiny, bloddy shreds and just be awesome. The only thing is: There is nothing truly awesome to do, or in other words, nothing truly worth your skills(seen from story point of view).
The boss-enemies you expect to be the fiercest are battled for sidequests. While playing the whole game I thought there would be coming something evil, maybe something new and was, as said above, disappointed.
The whole existence of champion Hawke or at least the reason for you playing him/her lacked sense. Of course, always fighting big, bad things is boring but from a DAO sequel I expected to be somewhat more important than a local city hero… I find this confusing myself…
The game as a whole felt like there were 3 ideas that were totally different and put together with force. To even bring some sense into that storyline you have to suffer 3 time skips of in total 7 years to confront a totally different aspect of social mischief in each of the game chapters.
I admire the attempt to break the RPG-Clichee of fighting creatures or people which are for apparently no reason purely evil. But the conflicts Dragon Age 2 used(egoism of mankind, racism and stupid fear, price of freedom for everyone) seemed forced and not very believable.
I felt like only playing half the game even though I surely put some hours in it. It felt like there was something missing, like they made this game in great haste and forgot something to give all the different parts of the game a deeper meaning and a conclusion which reconsiles(?) the parts.
Also the story lacked drama and above all depth. Or maybe I just lost all my emotions since playing DAO.
Could someone explain the ending? It was like random group of people are searching the champion because they need him to clean up the mess he´s left? Extreme cliffhanger? DLC to actually finish the game all over you face?
[COLOR=‘Red’][/spoiler]
Also the game lacked a certain ingenuity. Remember in DAO in the deep roads where the tortured voice of a dwarven woman cried out the horrible things the darspawn do to women they find? She actually counted steps of that(or days) if I remember right. While stepping through this dark place with all these corrupted meat-like things everywhere you got a really good impression why the darkspawn was evil and why you should fight them. That moment was really genius. I missed moments like these in DA2.