Dragon Age 2 - Here be spoilers.

[John Difool]

I really don't understand how so many people can seemingly believe that the Templar/Mage dynamic in Thedas came about simply because the Chantry wants to "keep the man down" so to speak. Does the Tevinter Imperium not ring a bell? When the mages were "free" they ended up enslaving (literally as in people being bought and sold as a commodity) the rest of Thedas. They ground almost the entirety of the Elvish civilization to dust. They did 'something' (whether or not you believe the Golden City line) that corrupted the Fade and produced the Darkspawn and thus the horrific Blights. It took a huge war, really more of a massive slave revolt, led by Joan of Arc Andraste to get most of the world out from under their thumb. How can the enormity of those crimes be simply dismissed? "Oh that was then and it wouldn't happen again and we'll be ever so much better this time 'round if you just let us do what we want and stop watching us. Scouts honor!" In the context of the history of Thedas is that something you as a 'man on the street' would buy?

[caladein]

Well, pretty much everyone is an easy hate figure or at least significantly flawed.  That's how this type of setting works.

If the next game is set in Tevinter or has wide-scale political aspects, then what happens there might have some barring on who I decide to punch.  Otherwise, you're sort of arguing to try and avert people being enslaved by supporting a regime that enslaves people.  Neither set-up is ideal, but at the end of the day though, it's a lot easier for me to be Professor X (or even Magneto) than it is to be Bolivar Trask.

Edit: Grammar.

[Bunk]

Hey, I supported the mages all through my game, because it made sense for the character - a somewhat self absorbed, "me and my family first" rogue, who's sister was a mage, and who ended up dating another mage. I the player knew how incredibly dumb it would be to let all the mages run wild.

[Tebonas]

When the dust settles, the game avoids letting any side look sympathetic to the main character. Maybe they tried to get complex groups with complex motivations, but they only succeeded in making me want to kill everyone involved, burn down the city, and salt the earth so that nothing can ever grow there again.

[Nonentity]

When the dust settles, the game avoids letting any side look sympathetic to the main character. Maybe they tried to get complex groups with complex motivations, but they only succeeded in making me want to kill everyone involved, burn down the city, and salt the earth so that nothing can ever grow there again.

This. I just beat the game last night, and I kind of played the middle ground the whole game, until the very end, when it was like NO MAKE A DECISION NOW. Both sides had dicks on them, but it appeared that the mages were being less dickish, so I picked them (that's not counting the second that the First Enchanter guy stubs his toe or whatever he's like "AHH WE'RE FUCKED BLOOD MAGIC GO").

I just ended up hating everyone by the end of the game. Kill everyone.

[Sjofn]

Hey, I supported the mages all through my game, because it made sense for the character - a somewhat self absorbed, "me and my family first" rogue, who's sister was a mage, and who ended up dating another mage. I the player knew how incredibly dumb it would be to let all the mages run wild.

It's why I keep ultimately supporting mages in the end (except for one playthrough I'm waiting on finishing because I am hoping the next patch fixes Anders' rivalry path wonkiness) even though I definitely, definitely think 100% freedom for mages would end horribly for anyone not a mage. For my Hawkes, what Meredith wants to do at the end is fucking stupid, for reasons obvious to anyone who has reached that point. Nearly none of my Hawkes are willing to go that far. They all have varying degrees of what they think should be done with mages (my favorite Hawke so far was pro-Circle rather than pro-Templar the way I played him, which drove Anders crazy. Well. Crazier. The rival path is sort of deliciously fucky for him.), but they can't do that last thing.

[Tannhauser]

My new play-through as a mage has me firmly in the Meredith camp.  Keep those unstable mages locked up!  Dabblers in blood magic!  The Circle is the final solution for mages.  Needless to say astounding hypocrisy from an apostate mage.    Anders hates my guts but Fenris is over the fucking moon. 

 

[yoh]

[rk47]

This game tried to pull off Alpha Protocol's plot and faction intrigue, and failed miserably. The only redeeming feature is the party banter and such, but overall both factions sucked, the city is a pile of mess with a very crap resolution of plot near the end. They ran out of ideas and just hit the big red panic button to resolve everything that forces you to fight. As if it wasn't insulting enough, they wouldn't even let you pick whom you fight in the end, no matter which sides you anger and befriend you end up killing both factions leaders.

Wow, Bioware. Good job. I doubt anything about Kirkwall's state is canon at this point. All that matters is a Champion rose and he went to meet the Warden to do something about a new threat. The rest of Kirkwall can suck it.

[Khaldun]

If I'm a mage looking for ultimate uber power, I would think I'd be looking to be more powerful in magic, not to turn in to a lumbering "Hulk Smash!" idiot. I get that maybe some of them don't know what they are in for, but by the end of the game we've seen so many abominations, I find it hard to believe none of these mages have figured out what to expect.

Well, Merrill will chatter about how she's never seen an abomination even after she's personallly executed dozens of them, so apparently pretty much nobody can remember anything that happened when combat mode is turned on.

Yeah, that was a WTF moment.

I'm with the folks that ended up thinking Kirkwall was a revolting pustule of a city. If Anders had asked for the magical shit that would let him blow the whole thing up, I'd have been down with that.

I basically think this is what happens when genre-hack writers who'd previously been told, "Make a story where there are heroes and villains" are told "Make a story where it's all shades of grey and shit like that, cause that's adult". Whoever does character work in Bioware games does a great job, but the main plot and setting in this case ends up feeling as generically "ambiguous" as other RPGs might feel generically "Noble knight/wise wizard must fight the Dark Lord Foozle".

[Sjofn]

New patch out today, supposedly fixes a lot of quest related shit, plus fixes that god awful Isabela bug for real, etc.  Because they couldn't be bothered to list complete notes, this thread is keeping track of what actually has been fixed as far as we can tell.

[Ingmar]

And this one is tracking stuff for the next:

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/300/index/7048387&lf=8

[Strazos]

So do I need to remove that Isabella hotfix from my override folder?

[tmp]

Probably safe now, yeah.

[Tebonas]

Yeah, onwards to the second playthrough, new and improved with a Love interest! 

[Surlyboi]

Too bad the patch didn't fix the goddamn glitch that turns outdoor shadows green and all the smoke and haze opaque and yellow on my machine. =P

[UnSub]

I basically think this is what happens when genre-hack writers who'd previously been told, "Make a story where there are heroes and villains" are told "Make a story where it's all shades of grey and shit like that, cause that's adult". Whoever does character work in Bioware games does a great job, but the main plot and setting in this case ends up feeling as generically "ambiguous" as other RPGs might feel generically "Noble knight/wise wizard must fight the Dark Lord Foozle".

BioWare do great characterisation, but the overall narrative is ghost-written by Joseph Campbell.

[jakonovski]

I finished the game, and I'm going to forget it ever happened. I ended up switching to casual difficulty mid act 3 because it was getting so tedious. The ending itself was horrible railroaded shit, and I had already stopped caring about the plot because the actions of the npc's made no sense at all. They kept having so many personality changes that I was unable to follow the story. Many elements mentioned beforehand were ignored later, which was especially shit. Also, as a cherry on top of the shitpile, Merrill's quest bugged out on me and proceeded in wrong chronological order. I got the conclusion first, then the actual questing. WTF Bioware?

[jakonovski]

I have another thing I want to mention: why do the mechanics not reflect the story or the background? My warrior could become a Reaver and a Templar by just clicking on a talent button, and whenever I taunted, Abominations and Templars would put aside their differences to try and kill me, never fighting each other again even if they succeeded. Stupid MMO aggro system. Also, as mage, how come I can become an apostate blood mage killing half of Kirkwall and nobody gives a fuck?

 

 

[Khaldun]

The environment is 100% stupid when it comes to taking account of the PC's choices of character development. Which is so violating of the background story that it regularly breaks whatever minimal immersion you might be able to achieve.

[Surlyboi]

Just finished this thing too. (In time for Portal 2  )

It needed renegade interrupts so bad, I could taste them.

[Khaldun]

I always go back to Deus Ex and killing Anna Navarre aboard the plane after she kills the guy who has surrendered.

That was a completely natural emotional reaction for the protagonist, and I remember thinking, "Why wouldn't you kill her right now for that? But of course the game won't allow it". And then holy shit, it actually let me. I was totally blown away by that.

That should have been a primitive beginning of better branching narratives in RPGs and other games. Instead, it's still largely without comparisons. If you've become the Champion via defeating the qunari, why wouldn't you: a) have been able to simply assert your own vicountliness right there and then or at least b) been able to act unilaterally against Meredith or the First Enchanter?   Now you might set it up so that this exponentially made the player's life more difficult--say, without Meredith, that blood magery starts to run wild, the citzenry blames you and you're no longer the golden boy Champion but instead a hated usurper. Make the blood mages you encounter two or three times harder to beat also. Vice-versa, the same. So don't make that kind of snap reaction end up in making you even more god-like and beloved, but explore what happens to Kirkwall because you act impulsively. You can still even end up where the game finally ends (most of it)--it still makes perfect sense as a conclusion, but the journey would be more satisfying.

[Ingmar]

The real answer, sadly, is that doing that would probably have meant it would have taken another year for the game to come out. On the plus side that would have been more time for artists to make a few more maps.

[CmdrSlack]

Game Informer has a short interview with the lead designer in the May issue. They address this topic.

Many of the caves and building interiors are repeated, even though the locations are supposed to be different. What kind of limitations necessitated this decision?

In the balance of production, we realized that we had capacity to create and maintain more stories, content, and encounters than we could necessarily create unique levels for, so we made the call to re-use some of the caves and other levels in the interest of providing more sidequests and encounters.

So yeah. "We were in a hurry, so we'll claim that we gave you more content, albeit with less geographical diversity."

[tmp]

So yeah. "We were in a hurry, so we'll claim that we gave you more content, albeit with less geographical diversity."

"We've reused some caves" is like saying "some men have dicks". If i'm not mistaken the game has literally two caves models total.

[Lantyssa]

The real answer, sadly, is that doing that would probably have meant it would have taken another year for the game to come out. On the plus side that would have been more time for artists to make a few more maps.

There's this one company that takes years and years between games.  Everyone seems to love them.  I think a little extra time is fine, especially for RPGs where setting is important.

[Koyasha]

If I remember right, it doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference when you actually kill Anna Navarre in Deus Ex, since you have to kill her sooner or later (although I think there might be a trick to getting around that, the game as far as I recall doesn't actually recognize that you did - it assumes she's dead after a certain point).  So the plot of the game doesn't really change based on when you kill her.

On the other hand, killing Meredith early or getting the nobles to vote you in as Viscount early would significantly change the plot of DA2.  Not saying I wouldn't like that, and it would be nice to see more branching in some of these games, but it might be a little much to ask.

On the other hand, it would have been nice if some areas had changed over the years based on your decisions.  Fable 2 is a good example of this, where your decision in childhood determines Old Town, and your decisions before going to the Tattered Spire determine the fate of a few locations throughout the world.  The changes aren't truly major (although they seem that way from a certain viewpoint) and they don't seriously alter the storyline in any way, but they are noticeable changes based on your decisions.  DA2 could really have used a couple areas like that, where you can make a couple decisions in each act that result in (seemingly) major changes in subsequent acts.

[Job601]

If I remember right, it doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference when you actually kill Anna Navarre in Deus Ex, since you have to kill her sooner or later (although I think there might be a trick to getting around that, the game as far as I recall doesn't actually recognize that you did - it assumes she's dead after a certain point).  So the plot of the game doesn't really change based on when you kill her.

On the other hand, killing Meredith early or getting the nobles to vote you in as Viscount early would significantly change the plot of DA2.  Not saying I wouldn't like that, and it would be nice to see more branching in some of these games, but it might be a little much to ask.

Meredith and the First Enchanter don't even appear as characters you can talk to until Act 3, so how could you kill her early?  I actually think it was a bizarre choice by Bioware to leave them out; you hear people talking about them, but you don't see them and you can't meet them until very close to the end of the game.  The mage tower should really have been an environment you could explore in acts 1 and 2.

I expected the game to branch based on the donation box in the Fereldan imports store, but I gave them the max amount of money and it didn't make any difference as far as I could tell.

[Ingmar]

The real answer, sadly, is that doing that would probably have meant it would have taken another year for the game to come out. On the plus side that would have been more time for artists to make a few more maps.

There's this one company that takes years and years between games.  Everyone seems to love them.  I think a little extra time is fine, especially for RPGs where setting is important.

Dragon Age: Origins took 5 years. I think if I had to wait 5 years for this one I would have strangled somebody.

Seriously, though, while a convoluted, truly branching RPG would be interesting, even, say, two major forks would be an *immense* increase in the writing load in a game. I'm not sure it would have been worth it, especially in this particular game where one of the central themes is how you can't stop bad things a lot of the time. It happens way too often to be anything but deliberate.

[Khaldun]

If I remember right, it doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference when you actually kill Anna Navarre in Deus Ex, since you have to kill her sooner or later (although I think there might be a trick to getting around that, the game as far as I recall doesn't actually recognize that you did - it assumes she's dead after a certain point).  So the plot of the game doesn't really change based on when you kill her.

On the other hand, killing Meredith early or getting the nobles to vote you in as Viscount early would significantly change the plot of DA2.  Not saying I wouldn't like that, and it would be nice to see more branching in some of these games, but it might be a little much to ask.

On the other hand, it would have been nice if some areas had changed over the years based on your decisions.  Fable 2 is a good example of this, where your decision in childhood determines Old Town, and your decisions before going to the Tattered Spire determine the fate of a few locations throughout the world.  The changes aren't truly major (although they seem that way from a certain viewpoint) and they don't seriously alter the storyline in any way, but they are noticeable changes based on your decisions.  DA2 could really have used a couple areas like that, where you can make a couple decisions in each act that result in (seemingly) major changes in subsequent acts.

Killing her does change a few things in terms of dialogue and so on later--what's his face, her lover, comes after you etc. But the important thing is that for once I was allowed to do something when it felt spontaneously right and emotionally strong, in a situation where gaming conventions normally don't allow you to do it because you're not supposed to kill a boss until it's time.

[Venkman]

Just finished it. Loved it overall, even if the ending was a bit projected. Given that this was a single story arc, and neither Meredith or Orisino were demonstrably "good guys", it was pretty obvious to me I'd need to fight both eventually. After doing so, I still think that stone gollem thing near the end of Act 1 (deep roads) was the toughest fight in the game, mostly in that until then, you could autopilot through every fight.

Turns out I was willing to forgive a lot (narrower options, repeating maps) just so my character had a freakin' voice :)

On the other hand, it would have been nice if some areas had changed over the years based on your decisions.  

Or at least that your characters recognized the area. Game spans 7(?) years in world so I'm ok with revisiting places that have been repurposed by new inhabitants. But it'd have been nice to put in some snark ("man, it's like all these mansion builders went to the same architect" or "what is it with this area of the island that rebels seem to like so much?!").

[Engels]

Am I a bad person for not finishing this? I have played two characters to the start of Act III and I just...can't...be...arsed. I do not care at all about the outcome :(

[Tarami]

Well, you're OK in my book. If I had stopped playing somewhere in the last two or three hours, I'm doubtful I'd would have picked it up again. As it were, it mostly happened out of momentum. I think my interest plummeted after the burning of the city. It just felt a bit... forced somehow. "MUST HAVE GRANDIOSE DRAMA!"

They should make an Eye of the Beholder-type RPG, with a small party and really let you get to know them. I'm sure the characters could be interesting enough for the game not to require an immense amount of plot. Because frankly, the plots are a bit wank anyway.

[Khaldun]

Combine the character work & party interactions in Bioware games with a looterific dungeon crawl = total win.

[Sjofn]