Dragon Age

An unsolicited copy of Crysis 2 showed up at my door today (always a pleasant surprise when that happens) and I put about an hour into it. I've heard that the multiplayer demo available wasn't too well-received, but I never got around to checking it out and I never played the first Crysis either, so I was coming into the game basically as fresh as possible. First impressions of the campaign? Very positive.

A Rushed Waste of Time and Money

HIGH A brief (and fictitious) mid-game scene description from Varric.

LOW Everything else.

WTF The immense drop in quality was inconceivable until I saw it for myself.

So at this point, I'm about fifteen hours or so into Dragon Age II. I am going to be doing a full review so I won't go into a great amount of detail here, but I will say that if I wasn't going to be submitting a formal review, I would have already quit the game and traded it in for something else. Not even kidding a bit. In the interest of keeping things brief, here's a quick list of bullet points highlighting the issues I have with it.

I think I should start with the reason I placed the pre-order in the first place, which is that I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins a great deal. I didn't particularly care for the combat, which suffered from having continuous time and lousy AI. However, I thought the game had some interesting ideas hiding behind its surface pageantry of turgid Tolkienism, and the writing for some of the characters (Shale!) was really great. So, when I heard Dragon Age II was coming out I placed an order, and when I heard there was a demo, I downloaded it. Having thoroughly gone through the demo, however, I decided to cancel the pre-order.

I had originally planned on posting a rant about Dragon Age II tonight, but the day didn't quite unfold the way I thought it would. So, although I don't have enough time to do a full-on posting at the moment, my conscience is screaming out to me that I need to do something in order to warn people against buying it.

This is not the Witch you're Looking for

HIGH: Getting to make the choice I've wanted to make since Origins.

LOW: Enemies that float in midair after I kill them.

WTF: Why could this not have been part of Awakening, at the very least?

After finishing Conviction, I decided to clear the backlog and finally get around to the most recent Dragon Age: Origins DLCs—The Darkspawn Chronicles and Leliana’s Song. I was actually to go into detail about each one, but as I was writing, the effort felt more and more pointless. To make a long story short, both pieces of DLC were extremely shoddy and shallow, and not worth the money they cost. After finishing both and feeling taken advantage of afterwards, I started to wonder if the prospect of DLC for story-based RPGs is even tenable.

Many readers and staff on this site have praised BioWare's high fantasy epic Dragon Age: Origins for its compelling story, loveable characters, and nail-biting decisions. Truly, it is a great game, but no one has had the time or focus to closely examine each of the games major choices in an effort to discover what makes them so great. A closer examination reveals that not all of these choices are nearly as good as the others. This article aims to teach what makes story choices in a game compelling, and what makes them forgettable.

To start with, Dragon Age: Origins — Awakening was a pretty chunky amount of content for something called an "expansion". It may sound odd, but after going through it I kind of felt as though it might have worked better if it had been split up into its three main component parts and doled out one at a time, similar to the way Fallout 3 handled its five add-ons.