Dragon Age 2: A review - Part I

Let me start by saying that I *loved* Dragon Age: Origins, and Dragon Age: Awakenings. As such, I was incredibly psyched for Dragon Age 2. I even went so far as to pre-order it from Gamestop, a first for me. I didn't even do that for Fallout: New Vegas, another title I would have killed ten puppies to get my hands on the week before release.

This review is probably going to contain a lot of spoilers, so don't read it if you care about that sort of thing. I'll try to preface spoiler stuff with a warning, but I might get lazy.



First Impressions

I skipped the demo, so I was going into my first playthough blind. As many people have mentioned, the narrative is in the form of a boxed story, where the events of the game are being recounted to a rather irate interrogator by one of your companions. Apparently, some heavy shit went down, and she wants to know what really happened. At this point, you get to pick your class from the standard DA:O choices: Mage, Rogue, or Warrior. Unfortunately, this is the beginning of the scaled back choices that will be available to you through the game. Gone are the disparate and interesting origin stories for your protagonist. Instead, your only customization choice is male or female human.

You're then dropped into a "Force Unleashed" style tutorial mission, with your character powered up in your chosen class. I'm pretty sure this is what was included in the demo. You fight some darkspawn, get tips telling you how to activate your abilities, pretty standard stuff. This is also your first encounter with the new combat system. I have to say, this initially turned me off a lot. It's very pretty, but it's also quite button mashy. I ended up stomping on the attack button until my thumb hurt, as your character will just stand there if you don't. This is quite a departure from Origins, obviously meant to appeal to more action-type players. I eventually got used to this, but I kept thinking: "If you're going to make this an action game, there should at least be combos."

Getting Started

So, after you finish this sequence, it turns out that it was all bullshit. That is to say, you just played through your own legend. As the irate interrogator calls the dwarf on it, you're finally dropped into the character customization screen. Like any Bioware game, you can get pretty nosepicky customizing your character's look. There are a couple of non-editable presets that they provide, and a bunch of others that you can customize. I was pretty salty about this, as I wanted the Champion's haircut, but this is a pretty minor quibble, compared to what was to come later. If you're curious, I ended up with a mage who looked disturbingly like Rachel Leigh Cook - serious uncanny valley territory here.

You then play through what I presume are the actual events that got you out of Ferelden to Kirkwall, where the rest of the story takes place. You come out of this with two companions, and I'm pretty sure that your choice of class determines who you get.

--Spoiler, skip to the next section if you don't want to know--

It seems that one of your siblings is going to end up as a smear on the ground thanks to an Ogre. You either end up with your brother, Carver (a Warrior), if you're a mage or your Sister, Bethany (a Mage), if you're not. This is necessary to drive the plot along later.

Equipment, or how I learned to stop worrying and love my companion's outfits.

If you liked playing dress-up in the first Dragon Age, you're in for disappointment, as well as some confusion. If you didn't, why the hell are you playing an RPG? In Mass Effect 2, Bioware drastically simplified the inventory system by eliminating loot hunting, and having you level up your party's equipment as the game progressed. In Dragon Age 2, they split the difference. You still have to do fiddly inventory management for their weapons, rings, amulets, and even their fucking belts, but you can't equip them with any new armor. This was extremely frustrating for me, until I realized that everything I was picking up in my murderous rampage through Kirkwall had a character limitation: me. If you want to upgrade their armor, you end up having to hunt for upgrades in shops. If I had to guess, this was done so they could always re-use the same character models, rather than having to render whatever silly shit you decided they should be wearing.

Dragon Age: Origins had some issues with this kind of stuff. Did you ever put an elf in Templar armor? Wynne in one of the more revealing mage outfits (move over Helen Mirren!)?. At least they don't have to wear stupid hats anymore for the bonuses.

One nice change for DA2 is that non-functional, non-quest loot that you pick up goes straight to the trash category. Was I the only one that was carrying around a bunch of blank vellum?

On to Kirkwall, or I got seasick just watching the cutscene

So you and your party land as a refugees in the former Tervinter city of Kirkwall. After some initial roaming around, you find out that Ferelden refugees are about as popular as AOL CDs used to be. It turns out that to get in to the city, you pretty much have to go into indentured servitude for a year. I'll skip the details, cause Bioware did too. Although your choice here is referenced later, you don't actually play through it. Bizarre.

Eventually, you get in to Kirkwall. Yay! It really does have the feeling of being a city, much like the Sprawl in the Original Mass Effect. Good thing too, as this is where 90% of the game takes place. You get out a couple of times, but for the most part, I really hope you like this design, as you're going to be seeing it an awful lot. More asset conservation, I suspect.

If you like side quests, you're in for a treat, as the next major plot point requires you to scrape together 50, count 'em, 50 Sovereigns. Nothing like grinding to really endear a game to you.

Continued in part 2, if I find the motivation