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Personally I wouldn't go so far as saying that DA2 is a great game, or even a good game. It might be BioWare's most interesting game, but taken as a whole, I think it has to be judged a failure. It's a mess mechanically, its line-to-line writing is frequently bad, and its setting struggles for coherence. DA2 is not a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.
However, for those willing to sift through it, there is a lot there to like. Act two is easily the best part of it, with the qunari a fantastic depiction of the genuine appeal of fanatical religious asceticism. Sometimes I hear people wonder what drives people to support the Taliban, and the answer I want to give every time is, "play DA2". The Arishok and the qunari are deeply repulsive to liberal values. They preach strict conformity, obedience, and discipline. But they exist in a context where everything else is falling apart. In comparison to Kirkwall, they have solidarity with each other. They do not tear and bite at each other, as everyone else does. Each person works for the good of the whole, and each person is looked after. What hardship exists is shared, and when successes are achieved, they are also shared. The qunari have an aura of righteousness - they sit there above the strife, perhaps the only non-hypocritical faction in the city, issuing judgements of the degeneracy around them. They are an island of order in a sea of chaos and you can understand why people would choose them. You cannot choose them yourself, of course, but the Arishok's respect matters to me, and I care about winning it.
Unfortunately, most of the game does not reach that height. The mage/templar debate that dominates the third act is only engaged with on a surface level, and the game's final sequence feels unfinished (why do you fight Orsino if you side with the mages? it feels like it was intended that the final boss be either Orsino or Meredith depending on your choice, but instead they just both go insane?), and is too reliant on contrivances like the red lyrium idol.
And again a lot of the writing on a more immediate level is unimpressive. The doormat/jerk/clown dialogue options are unsatisfying, and Friendship/Rivalry, while an interesting idea, did not work in practice at all, never mind leading to inconsistent results by bundling together positions in unintuitive ways. (Suppose you're both anti-slavery and pro-mage - this leads to odd results with Fenris.)
I would not say that DA2 is a good game, but it's a bad game with enough good pieces that I wish it were better.
This is probably a better position to be in than Veilguard, which is bad and boring, but it is still, I think, a significant step down from the much superior Origins.
Origins to me struggled with dullness. I think the closest game to origins tonally is probably Pillars of Eternity, the first one, in part because it’s the only Obsidian game since Alpha Protocol to largely avoid the ‘zany Le CraZy 🤪’ “humor” that marred every other game they released from them onward. But like Pillars, I think Origins is flawed. The combat is MMO lite with limited strategic depth and very bad effects and animations, much of the dialogue is wooden and dull and feels more suited to a WoW quest text box than an interactive cutscene, and the voiceless protagonist (which I also felt fatally wounded BG3) works in a sandbox like Skyrim but not really in a BioWare game. I also thought the art style always came across as very cheap, like a “art assets pack - dark fantasy edition” you could pick up off the Unreal Store or something (I don’t know if it works like that, but I believe it does). The overall story, despite some good moments around Loghain, the excellent Deep Roads segment, and a couple of the companions, is also pretty generic and predictable.
2 really improves on every aspect of 1. The 10 (well, 7) year framing is grand and ambitious, and the game has a good sense of time passing given they didn’t even have the budget for different weather in each year. The story within a story bookend of Varric’s interrogation isn’t obtrusive but adds some intrigue. The companions are too the man and woman, with the possible exception of Fenris, great and have great stories and perspectives on the world in a way no other set of RPG companions in a AAA game have ever had. One might have more affection for the Normandy crew, but they’re not as interesting or multifaceted.
Kirkwall is magnificent. It’s a shame that putting the longtime franchise art director in charge of Veilguard allegedly ruined the creative direction of that game (according to Jason Schreier) because if he’d stuck to art he would have done great work. Byzantine-Brutalist Fantasy, heavy on the concrete and stone, hugely referential of 1840s gothic revival - you can see the Houses of Parliament and a solid part of Mayfair in the building design. It’s unlike anything else. The dull haze of the Wounded Coast, the brilliant mossy green of the mountain around the Dalish camp, the work in color alone is stunning, and each location is graded beautifully, such that the Deep Roads feel deeper and more mysterious in 2 than they do in any other game. Given the limitations of the age, I think a lot of the object work was also great, notably the Lyrium idol which of course became central to the franchise’s overall plot (and I love that, that ruining the world and causing the deaths of millions is arguably Hawke’s ultimate legacy). Hawke’s mansion is one of the coziest houses in RPGs, the hall, the decoration of the bedroom. With the exception of the “iconic” act 3 armor, the gear is dull but not mostly ugly, down to earth but not as unstylish as in Origins where you really have to mod to get anything not horrific.
The music in 2 is extraordinary. Inon Zur has a reputation as a workmanlike composer who churns out passable genre themes, but in 2 he’s at his most creative, he brings in new instruments, he’s inspired by Eastern Orthodox music, by middle eastern instruments. The sound of Kirkwall isn’t quite European but it’s not “Asiatic” or “African” or “Mayan” in the cringe way fantasy games are when they go to another biome. Rogue Heart, Mage Pride, the Wounded Coast theme (which had a brief play in Origins at the edge of the mage like), all timers.
I think 2’s dialogue is very good. There are cringe lines, but far fewer than anything by Larian or Obsidian in the last decade. And even widely praised Disco Elysium has mountains of unintentionally cringe dialogue where it’s like yes it’s nice you’ve read Baudrillard and yes it’s nice you’re commenting on what’s happened to European green parties since 1991 but also this just isn’t compelling or good writing. Anders is a really good depiction of an extremist, especially when you’re arguing with him (especially in a romance). Sebastian is an almost George W Bush type of figure tempered by a Presbyterian Scottishness and played magnificently. The regional accents are great. The acting is some of BioWare’s best across the board. The Qunari aren’t “reactionary” of course, they’re closer to communists. Unlike Disco Elysium they’re not a simple analogue for a faction at the second international or whatever. They’re not Islamists. They’re not China. They’re zealous egalitarians, central planners, ruled by a matriarchy, hate and afraid of magic, vaguely Buddhist maybe, but with a strong early church influence. They’re ideologically idiosyncratic in a fantastic way.
The gameplay is a mixed bag. I love 2’s combat and think returning to aspects of its rock-paper-scissors dynamic is one of the only good creative decisions Veilguard made. Chaining together combos, freezing, smashing, disorienting, it’s one of the best pure tab-targeting implementations ever. It might be the best RTwP combat of all time. The ability to chain together IFTT statements in the AI page for companions is also great, you can program relatively complex behaviors yourself.
You’re right about Friendship/Rivalry. I do think the whole game sets up mages/templars well - the Qunari are part of that, too, it’s central to their ongoing war with the northern humans; the game is pretty nuanced. The other Dragon Ages overwhelmingly sympathize with mages, 2 has tons of examples of psycho rapist murderer mages abusing their power and treating the muggle population awfully. 2 has a certain briskness, David Gaider has said most of the game was written and edited in one pass, essentially, no real review, you’d write a line of dialogue and production was so fast that nobody was really looking at it. I think that gives it a confidence that’s so rare in AAA games outside of Rockstar where they think they are (and are) above the critics. Made in a year, thoroughly compelling, and one of very few games made about politics by committed progressives that limits its preachiness to some extent and has a real ideological depth. We’ll never see anything else like it, although if and when AI generation gets good enough I’ll generate another 250 hours.
My main issue with DA2 is how it dropped the pretence, story-wise, of being anything else than a game with a strictly structured narrative.
Of course, games usually benefit from some kind of narrative structure, while real life typically doesn't have one, but good writing smoothes over the seams and makes the story still flow in a realistic way. Now Bioware, since their beginnings, have seen people enjoy when the writing in their games forces them to engage with difficult philosophical, ethical and moral questions with no obviously good answer. But up until ME2 and DA2, it still felt like those choices happened fairly organically. Sure, most storylines had them, but sometimes they were subtle, or the deeply held morality of the player made it so that the player would not even notice they were there. Up to that point, Bioware seemingly understood these moral questions were in the service of worldbuilding; it adds a layer of realism when the two sides of an issue are not saints vs comic book villains, when at least the comic book villains make a good point once in a while, or when perfect is the enemy of good.
ME2 and especially DA2 laid bare the narrative structure; the whole game world felt like a contrivance to push those toy moral puzzles rather than something that would have happened in a consistent, well-written world. It felt, to me at least, like the narrative equivalents of being told "You can defeat this asshole who is oppressing people, but it requires you to personally skin every puppy in Kirkwall with a potato peeler and roll them in salt, how do you feel about that, player? Huh?" or "You have a choice, do the right thing or not, but if you do all your family and friends will be raped, tortured and murdered". It feels like they created the story backwards from the dillema they wanted to push on the player, rather than build a coherent universe that has dillemas.
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I agree about the fantastic aesthetics, and wish we'd seen a Tevinter more inspired by Kirkwall than whatever it was Veilguard was trying to do. The music is solid though I think Inon Zur did better work on Origins, a game I would like to defend at length but won't attempt to do so tonight.
I think my main disagreement with you is about the writing. I agree that it's better than Larian or Obsidian's recent output, like The Outer Worlds, but I feel that's a pretty low bar. I'll agree that it's better than Disco Elysium, but I hated Disco Elysium, so I would consider almost anything better than sitting through another page of Disco Elysium trying to be clever.
It is worse, I think, than Origins, or Obsidian games like Fallout: New Vegas or Knights of the Old Republic II. I think the combination of a dialogue wheel and the three colour-coded personalities for Hawke really hurt the writing. I suppose one of my spicier opinions might be that the Mass Effect dialogue wheel has been a disaster for game writing. The three options are just never enough to express a nuanced opinion on anything, especially because they are always locked to the blue, purple, and red options. No matter what's going on, my options are always limited to a polite yes, an angry yes, and a 'funny' non sequitur.
I'm not sure I agree about mages, and in fact I think the Dragon Age fandom has distorted and flanderised mage issues. Origins presents the issue as genuinely complicated - the templars serve a necessary but unpleasant role, justified by the obvious threat of magical crime, but their ruthlessness makes them hard to like. Greagoir and Irving are colleagues who mostly work together well, but with a subtext of threat - Greagoir knows that Irving and his mages might be possessed or turn into monsters at any point, and Irving knows that Greagoir and his templars are their jailers and legally empowered to kill them, so there can never be complete trust between them. I feel that DA2 was a step back from that in favour of making both sides almost cartoonishly evil. Almost every single mage who slips the Circle becomes a blood mage or abomination, and meanwhile the templars have gone from necessarily ruthless to just plain abusive. Fortunately Inquisition dialled it back and instead showed a world where the breaking of the Circles has left both mages and templars in crisis, to the detriment of each order. It is obvious that mages are people who should not be abused or imprisoned; it is also obvious that either the templars or something like the templars are necessary because of the immense risk posed by magic. Inquisition generally refuses to demonise either group, and I also give it some credit for, in a move that surprised me, the templar sidequest being vastly better than the mage sidequest.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the BioWare fanbase is extremely progressive, identify heavily with mages, and have a flattened, 'All Templars are Bastards' level of understanding of the issues that the games evoke.
DA2 disappointed me because, well, the actual issue with mages is fairly straightforward. Mages are innocent people who are not responsible for their own powers; it doesn't seem like they deserve to be brutally oppressed. However, intensive training is necessary in order for mages to not be a threat to everyone around them, and magic is incredibly dangerous and a threat to everyone. Even leaving aside the everyday risks of possession, or the maddening influence of blood magic, one can hardly forget that magic were the ones who tainted the Golden City and unleash the Blights. It is very reasonable for the people of this world to want to control and regulate magic. So the question is - how should those concerns be balanced? How can magic be regulated, mages taught to use their powers constructively and punished if they go wrong, without threatening the rest of society? Unfortunately DA2 mostly flattens it to "do you like mages or do you hate mages?", and that's just the wrong question.
Interesting. I enjoy New Vegas but think it overrelies on zaniness and a certain kind of 1990s Mad Magazine humor, maybe almost Jim Goadesque, that has had its day and had had it long before that game was written. Knights 2 is good but so compromised by the development cycle, lack of voiced protagonist etc that it’s hard to evaluate. I like it as the most cogent criticism of Star Wars that is still, officially, Star Wars, but beyond that it’s more of a showcase that games Can Say Things than a great game, in my opinion. Maybe I just hate turn based games, which I do.
I like the dialogue wheel, or rather I like what the dialogue wheel enabled, which is a fully voiced protagonist. Here is the hidden subtext of the unvoiced protagonist - you too often play yourself. Commander Shepard, Hawke, Geralt, V, they have to sound like someone else for you to be ripped out of the isekai thing. If Mask of the Betrayer had had a voiced protagonist with a good backstory it would probably be one of the best RPGs of all time but of course it couldn’t - it was too tied to the ‘choose your own adventure’ format pioneered in the 70s that I find deeply uncompelling. Give me a woman, a man, a story, an identity. The Witcher and Cyberpunk lack a wheel, but I don’t think it makes those games better.
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I appreciate that you made that emphasis of the appeal of ascetisim, because while I fully agree on how the Qunari present a coherent society that takes care of its own, the game also does a good job on letting you scratch a little deeper to see that, no, the Qunari are just as dysfunctional and failing a society as everyone else.'
The Qunari in DA2 are a shipwreck remnant because the supreme military authority of the state had to lead the pursuit for a relic-book, which in turn means the rest of the Qunari state is working without one of its three key leaders. The Qunari maintain a 100% non-defection rate by categorically re-categorizing all defectors as no-longer-Qunari, and thus not acknowledging or dealing with the issues driving the desertions. The Qunari, supposedly the most rational and scientific of all the peoples of the continent, are also the most primitive and superstitious when dealing with the subject of magic, indulging in superstitions such as cutting out the tongues of mages to prevent their words from spreading demonic possession, when everyone else inn the setting has known it doesn't work like that for millennia. Even in the penultimate act of Act 2, the takeover of the city, the Qunari variously are willing to walk away from the coup-that-could-cause-a-world-war if they get a book and a prisoner, or let their supreme leader fight a one-on-one duel to the death to decide.
The Qunari are interesting society, and they work well in part because they can point to how bad the rest of the setting is, but they're beyond fananticism and just stupid in their own right. But that contrast / pointing at the ills of the others really does demonstrate the appeal of ascetism, even if the proposed alternative is even worse.
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Can I add a description of the type of gameplay a person will be subjected to while playing DA2? Here it is: you walk through a town street and you are ambushed by the enemies. No worries, you have all your abilities ready and quickly dispatch them, BUT WAIT, there is a second wave incoming, literally teleporting behind your backline. Okay, you didn't want to have your mage/archer involved in melee but you can deal with this wave even if some abilities are on cooldown, BUT WAIT, we have another wave of enemies incoming..... You might ask what is going on with the teleporting enemies in the city, but the only real question you are going to ask yourself repeatedly is "surely there won't be a 4th wave, right?".
Yep...
It sounds interesting when you talk about themes and character, but man, it is a tedious pain in the ass to play through. For everything that works, there's some baffling design decision adjacent to it that lets it all down.
One positive element I forgot to mention earlier was the setting. Kirkwall in premise is a really interesting place. This free city built on top of what used to be a slaving outpost of a cruel empire, the City of Chains where you sail in past statues of broken slaves, is a really evocative setting, and the eventual revelation that this was the site of the Magisters' great sacrifice in order to breach the Fade, thousands of slaves slaughtered on bloody altars in a crime that still echoes through the heavens, just feels natural. Of course it was here. Of course.
And from a game design perspective, the idea of zooming in on a single location and watching it develop over time is a good one. The city of Baldur's Gate was under-used in BG1, but Athkatla was easily the best part of the Baldur's Gate series, and it had similar themes, getting to know this wealthy city built on injustice, with a lively underworld, gang war, ruthless magic police, and so on. DA:O was famously a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and I wouldn't be surprised if Dragon Age 2 started with someone saying, "What if we made an entire game about Athkatla?" It's not identical, and Kirkwall has deeper shadows, putting the themes of slavery and oppression more centre-stage (which is itself compatible with DA:O's dark tone and fascination with corruption and moral compromise), but I can see the evolution.
Every time I talk about DA2 I end up frustrated because I can see the good game you could make out of these parts.
It's just that DA2 itself is not that game. DA2 is broken and annoying to play and un-fun. I am glad that I played it and I will never play it again.
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