Final Thoughts on Dragon Age II

Towards the end of Dragon Age II, I was ready to post a pretty positive footnote to my previous review, saying that once you get knee deep into the game, the story, characters and gameplay really seem to overshadow the other flaws. I was going to briefly try out either a warrior or rogue to see if mages may just be more fun, and probably continue that through a slow second playthrough.

Then I got through the last chapters of the game. Free of spoilers, all I can say is that the story completely falls apart and the mechanics issues of the past come roaring back.

Spoilers ahead.

I didn't buy Anders. Not one bit
While I think the characters and plot of DA2 are still more two dimensional than Mass Effect 2, it was shaping up to be an interesting tale. I knew Anders was up to something, and it probably wasn't going to be the most peaceful thing in the world but ... blowing up the Chantry? What? It makes no sense, and only served to re-ignite open violence across the city. One could argue that the final ending might justify his actions, but Anders went from being a troubled mage trying to save lives to a cliche terrorist in about a heartbeat - with only a set of new shiny black robes as an explanation.

As soon as that moment hits, the plot stops making sense. It's way too black and white. Anders' actions are clearly out of bounds, but instead of anyone reacting to Anders - they just go off on a tear in whatever extreme they might have possibly been pointing at.

Speaking of - screw you Fenris
The worst of the lot, I think, is Fenris. I really wanted to like this character, but every time he managed to have a complex moment, it was punctuated with "all mages are evil." I had made every effort throughout the game to befriend and help the guy, but he uses Anders as an excuse to essentially swear an oath to kill me. The mages act as an odd reflection of racism in the game, and by the end Fenris proves himself to be the equivalent of a Neo-Nazi jackass who would stab a friend if he found out they were dating a black girl. At the end of the day, nothing matters to Fenris except who is or isn't a mage.

Blood mages, blood mages, everywhere there are blood mages
Course hating Fenris and even Meredith becomes problematic towards the end since apparently you are actually the only potential mage in the entire game not inclined to become a complete asshole (assuming you played one, otherwise there are none). Let's recap from my game: Merrill stubbornly seeks demonic advice, which ends up with us being party to slaughtering her whole tribe. After, let's see - her keeper decided to get possessed by a demon. We had to tranquil one kid because he might have become a powerful scourge on the world. In trying to help a group of apostate mages in the game, most of them try to kill me with blood magic - and the rest turn to blood magic to betray me later. Orsino, who should be making it his life goal to prove how mages aren't all evil, turns to blood magic and becomes an abomination ... resulting only in trying to kill his most trusted allies. And after Orsino's death, I keep running into not just circle mages using blood magic - but freaking templars.

The problem with wanting to hate Fenris and Meredith is that the game constantly tries to prove them right.

Those were some darn spammy boss fights.
Wanting to save the lovely Isabella, I got into a challenge with the Arishok. At first I wasn't sure how I could win with just myself. Then I realized I could run, zap, run, zap. Run. Zap. Run. Zap. Wash, rinse, repeat, oh ... about a thousand times. The guy never stood a chance statistically, provided I didn't die of boredom first.

Most of the boss fights ended up this way. There was no trick to beating Orsino or Meredith, just determined button mashing. And somehow, this seemed far less true of the standard battles I played out in the game.

And sadly, I ran into one battle I don't think was possible to win. Right after Anders goes all Al-Qaeda on you, you run into a series of fights with templars and blood mages. The last of these pits you against something like fifteen shades, a pride demon, a desire demon and the blood mage. By this time I had lost Fenris and Anders, which means I couldn't have two warriors and I was the only mage with healing. Every time, the shades just did way too much damage to the party, and there was no way my revival cooldown could keep things up to get past the two greater demons.

And whether this was winnable or not - the point is that it was off the scales more difficult than every other battle that followed. Including the end boss fights, which were cake walks. There's no way that is defendable as a well balanced game.

So in the end
Yeah, this obviously turned into a far more negative post than I had originally intended. In truth, I still liked the game overall - just very disappointed by the end. I compare it to Mass Effect 2, and it seems like a copycat from some company other than Bioware. I'm now a little concerned for Mass Effect 3, to be honest. It's not that Dragon Age II is a bad game, it's a good game. It just is far removed from a great game.

Game Play: Dragon Age II (and failed reviews in general)

I'm finding Dragon Age II a pretty fascinating game, and not just because of what comes on the disc, but also how it's turning into a somewhat controversial title. Not controversial like "Hot Coffee" controversy, but in that it seems to be causing a marked schism between industry reviewers and fans.

To recap from the original Dragon Age - the game was mashup of promising to deliver on the old Baldur's Gate PC games of the past and Bioware's usual character driven, branching conversation, see who can sleep with, style of gameplay. It was very highly reviewed, sold like crazy, and was in general a fan favorite.

However, while I enjoyed the game for the most part - many of Tanners know that I found the game to be wildly unbalanced. I won't even bore you with the link, rather just say that in follow up discussions I found everything from people who either ran into the exact same thing to people who never ran into a problem. The two main factors seemed to be whether people were playing it on a console and if they had been consulting wiki's and online guides to structure their play.

When I played the Dragon Age II demo, I almost got the impression that BioWare had actually read my blog post and made massive design decisions based on it. Since that's statistically impossible, I'll just assume my feedback wasn't a lone crazy voice in the woods. The short version is that the entire game has been re-tailored to be more console friendly and less dependent on micromanagement details (which I still say shouldn't be confused with tactics).

But have they gone too far?

First, let's note that I don't think I've read more negative opinion about a demo in a long while. I can't tell if that is because of the core mechanics or because, to be quite honest, the demo was something of a mess. You couldn't save, you couldn't access inventory, you couldn't modify anything about the character save for gender and class, and the story jumped around ... basically meaning you had to set aside a decent amount of time to get a clearly truncated experience.

But I gotta say - the demo kinda sold me on it. It felt more like Mass Effect than Dragon Age, which was exactly what I was looking for in the sequel. For an excellent counter-example, check out this Game Critic article from Brad Gallaway or this one from Sparky Clarkson.

Because I also gotta say, I can see where he is getting nearly all of those points. Except for the crashing one, though, I've been spending a decent number of hours in the game and haven't had a single glitch.

I think there's truth in the statement that if you loved the first one, you might want to be cautious of your expectations for this one. It really is a different experience in many ways, even if it does a great job of expanding the story. The skill trees are smaller, there are fewer character choices, the combat is simpler, etc. From my own perspective, however:

The Good
While I have had to try a few boss fights over a few times, I haven't once run to a wiki post to figure out why I can't get past a certain point. The combat is by no means flawless, but it certainly feels way more balanced to me. I don't think I'm going to get trapped in the Deep Roads at some point simply because I failed to train my rogue in how to make bombs correctly.It also means I'm not spending so much time bouncing around management screens. I can focus on actually playing the game.

And let's face it - this is still a BioWare game. I don't entirely agree with the Game Critics' take that the characters are poorly written ... I've found them quite entertaining and enjoy the conversation sets quite a bit.

The writing deserves some credit for brief moments of incredible cleverness too - the scenes where you play out Varric's tall tales, like in the beginning of the demo, are quite fun and you'll wish there were more of them.

The Not So Good
There are some side effects from the design changes, though, that aren't necessarily outright bad ... but they're certainly not improvements. The missions, for instance, feel disjointed and short. If you compare the design to either Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2, you get the impression that Hawke's story is less epic and important mostly because of all the time spent doing a series of quick and completely unrelated tasks. You're also likely to have several open quests at one time, and honestly you end up chasing down mission markers on the map with little regard as to what quest the marker is attached with ... you just kinda find out when you get there.

And there's no getting around that Kirkwall feels like a cheap way to shove a lot of mission options in to very little space. You end up in the same small instance dungeons repeatedly - a stark contrast from Mass Effects 2' array of fully realized alien spaces. BioWare has gone from presenting you with the feeling of wandering a galaxy to wondering why they couldn't bother making a new four room dungeon for this particular quest.

The Bad
While I enjoy the combat in general, I agree the way that mobs respawn in the game is a bit bizarre. It's also a little frustrating when you use up the last of your mana and suddenly there's a new hoard the teleports in from behind you. And the game isn't shy about the fact that they pop in from nowhere ... it happens frequently right in front of your eyes. It's a serious distraction from immersion and combined with the reuse of maps in the game really reminds you that you're just playing a game.

And I have no idea who thought it was a good idea that only Hawke could equip armor. Your companions can get new weapons and trinkets, but you're stuck with whatever they're wearing at the time. While appreciate that this reduces the amount of team management I need to do - it gets kinda frustrating when you find this amazing suit of armor that does nothing for you. And I'm playing a mage ... so this happens quite a lot. In fact, all of the extra goodies I had stacked up prior to playing the game, by playing the Dead Space 2 and the demo, were useless to me. I can see some reasons why this might have been done, but it feels like BioWare should have added some kind of mechanic in place of it.

The Ugly
I don't have an ugly for this game. Rather, I think the negativity is being produced as a sum of all the small and medium things that are a) wrong with it and b) different from the first title. I think if you play the demo and hate the demo, you're probably right in not buying the game ... because the plays a lot like the demo with a few more annoyances tacked on.

Though I will say this: I do find it somewhat ugly that what I think is the final showdown is featured so prominently in promos, trailers and ads. Um - spoiler much?

Short version: I'm liking, but not loving the game. I wonder how much of that is because I'm playing a mage, which from some accounts is less spammy in the combat than the other two classes. I find it funny that the mage was my least favorite in the first game, and I'm quite enjoying it in the sequel. If it weren't for the disjointed mission structure, I'd consider a replay as another class to compare it with - but let's be honest ... there are too many awesome games coming out this year to have time for replays.

What's even more fascinating to me is the stark difference between some of the forum and blog posts about the game and the game. When last I looked, the metacritic review for the 360 version was 81/100. The player review average? 4 out of 10. Review sites have become too complacent with franchise titles, I think. I know I bitch and moan about it all the time, but take this quote from the 360 review of the New Vegas DLC Dead Money:

Typical of Fallout games, there are performance issues and game-breaking bugs that seriously detract from the experience.

-- Fallout: New Vegas -- Dead Money Review

The review is, in general, pretty reserved ... and only receives a 6.5/10 in the end. But, 6.5
is "Okay" by IGN standards. So IGN is saying, "Because this is Bethesda, it's OK to have game breaking bugs".

No. No it's not. It's never OK to have game breaking bugs. You know why? Because they're game breaking bugs. By definition, that means the game is broken. Until that bug is fixed, that content should never be rewarded with an above average rating. It simply defies logic. And as I've said before - if any review of Skyrim mentions lockups, crashes, or game breaking bugs ... I'll probably be done with that franchise forever. I don't care how highly rated it is...

OK, off soap box. That was a long post, and you deserve a cookie.

Game Play: Mass Effect 2 (PS3)

I played the first Mass Effect briefly on a friend's 360, and while saw that it was clearly polished wasn't entirely sure what the real appeal was about the extremely popular title.

That's because you can't play a Mass Effect title briefly and get the real appeal. In fact, if I have any real complaint about the recent PlayStation 3 port of Mass Effect 2, it's that they won't be porting the first one.

Mass Effect 2 is a Bioware RPG through and through, and so players familiar with Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic know the basic score: a streamlined experience tailored around gathering characters into your party and selecting a couple of them to bring along with you on missions. There's a morality scale, there's a grand story, there's a lot of memorable NPC's to meet and interact with.

Kindly, though, the morality scale is less black and white, less "save the kitten" or "kill the kitten" - and feels more like changes in the style of the player than really building "the ultimate hero" or "the ultimate villain.

If anything impressed me about Mass Effect 2, it was how it managed to avoid pitfalls similar titles fell into. Take Fallout 3 for example. Fallout 3 could also be considered an open ended RPG based heavily on decisions made by the player. Mass Effect 2 has one huge advantage over Fallout 3, however, which trumps any other comparison:

Mass Effect 2 does not consistently crash. In fact, I think it crashed once on my during my entire 45+ hours of gameplay. Once, Bethesda, once... which is technically one more than it probably should be two less than an average Fallout title might accomplish in a single night.

Outside of that, Mass Effect 2 requires less wandering - and oddly enough, felt more like a shooter hybrid than the Fallout 3 titles. I never once felt the need to forcibly pause Mass Effect 2's action (though it does pause to let you select new weapons and use powers).

More interesting to me is Mass Effect 2 was also far more enjoyable than Dragon Age - at least for myself. As I wrote in the past, Dragon Age has serious balance issues which more or less beg for you to refer to wiki articles on how to "correctly" play the title if you don't want to get stuck in a dwarven dungeon getting devoured by some monster boss (still a bit bitter about that one). I never had that instance with Mass Effect 2, never felt like I had to be cautious in where I went in the galaxy, I simply explored and adventured and upgraded my party.

So this is a game that had none of the technical issues of Fallout 3, or New Vegas ... and had none of the frustrations I found with Dragon Age. In short: it was freaking awesome. I'm considering a second playthrough before Mass Effect 3 hits the holidays, which I rarely take the time to do anymore (even with Demon's Souls - and some would argue that was the point of that game).

Highly, highly recommend.

Lament for Basic Dungeons & Dragons

As I flip through the beautiful hardcover books comprising D&D's 4th edition core rules set, I can't help but think back to that time in 1981 when my dad finally allowed me to pick up the D&D Basic Set--you know, the red box with the hot wizardess holding a glowing green orb, Keep on the Borderlands inside.... In any case, that purchase altered my life in ways that I could not, of course, describe then, but are clear now; any bit of imagination I possess, my literary interests, my gaming interests, you name it, are all on account of the old D&D--the pen and paper version.

Remember rolling characters with an intelligence of 6? remember when Elf was a class? Remember when a 1st level character's survival rate was 4.8%--less if you created a wizard or a thief? Well, I do, and I miss it. I also miss mapping--that was my favorite part. The DM says, "You open the door to a 20'X30' room with another door in the middle of the east wall." Ah, those were the days. Too, I didn't have to crunch 4,000 numbers before swinging a sword or shooting a bow. Roll the d20. Hit? Roll damage. We had so much fun, and could easily complete a module (remember how fantastic those were?) in a day-long session.

-- A Curmudgeons's Lament Regarding the Death of the Imagination

My brother and I used to spend whole days with nothing more than the old red box starter set - exactly the one described here: some paper, some dice, a set of rules and Keep On The Borderlands. Borderlands was essentially a mini campaign, a brilliantly designed area for simple exploration which we plundered over and over again.

I can see the rationale behind a D&D based board game, having enjoyed games like Doom: The Board Game and Zombies, not to mention older games like Talisman - but I can concur that a truly simplified RPG ruleset would and should have a place in the franchise's lineup.

I've been poking at a web-based RPG parody using dice (think Munchkin) and I was pulling up the code - thought this was a poignant thought for a Saturday morning.

Now That Is A Dungeon Master's Room

There are stained glass windows, faux dungeon walls, a metal portcullis, dragon statuettes and a rack of swords.

.

Via, with a couple more pics, Make (via boingboing).

First Play: Borderlands

"First play" is a bit misleading, I hopped onto Borderlands a bit ago after finally defeating and subsequently walking away from Dragon Age with mixed feelings and a serious need to shoot something.

And if you need to shoot something, look no farther than Borderlands. One of the game's strengths is the unabashed mashup of RPG and FPS elements - but the shooter mechanics sit front and center. Deus Ex fans will feel like they're playing something familiar and yet not all together similar when it comes to the overarching design of the game. Walk, shoot, collect stuff, and in this case - earn XP and upgrade your character. Borderlands keeps things simple ... you don't manipulate stats or skills, you have a simple tree of passive bonuses which fall under a main active ability which is dependent on the character class you pick. It's refreshingly straightforward and one of those odd moments where simplicity just works really, really well.

Graphically, Borderlands has a combination of the unique and cliche, basically a cel-shaded Mad Max world with hints of futuristic decor here and there. Cliche-wise, even Borderlands can't resist the "sexy female voice whispering orders in your ear" routine, though the mystery lady only pokes up every now and then to push the overall story forward. There's actually not much real dialogue in the game, save for some introductory passages, quips from various characters and your own witty retorts. Character interaction is limited mostly to mission boards - which isn't much. Did I mention the RPG elements are very lightweight? Very lightweight.

My general dislike of random online people has kept me from trying this online so far, which is probably a shame since that is where most reviews say is where the game shines. This reason was why the game was last on my post-holiday list - but so far, it's been a very solid experience. Solo play suffers from two things - monotony and occasionally being stuck far away from a store. Enemies respawn in areas with some regularity in the game so you'll have a "been there, done that" feeling to areas quite often. This plays right into the problem of sometimes being out in the boondocks and realizing that everything behind you is respawning as you play. Thankfully the game scales some enemies - but not all, so your progress doesn't feel like all grind, yet you'll find new challenges in places as you level up.

So far, I'd say the game comes down to - how much do you like shooting skags? Skags are the de facto mutant doglike enemy in the game, and you'll spend a lot of time fending off groups of them. I'm a FPS fan, so the solid core mechanics with the RPG twist works pretty well for me, but I like shooting skags quite a lot. For players who wanted a deeper RPG experience, though, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Without factoring online play in, I give the game a soft recommendation based on the above. Look for more in the future, especially as I try online later.

My Complaint With Dragon Age: Origins

For the record, I did finish Knights of the Old Republic, so I at least thought I knew what I was getting into with Bioware's epic fantasy RPG Dragon Age.

And some spoilers here, but I'll try to keep it vague.

And Dragon Age is quite epic. It's riffs off of the general fantasy cliches pretty well, spins a pretty good story and manages to put the player into some interesting ethical and moral decisions along the way. I do, for the record, think that Dragon Age is a well done, solid game that offers a great deal to many players.

I also think there's this really odd underbelly to it that nobody is really talking about. And it is pretty core to the game mechanics.

And the basic problem is this: this is very difficult game to get right the first time through.

Why? Well, one is a basic constraint of interactive, non-linear story telling. Because you don't know where all the potential characters might potentially be ... it becomes difficult to map out your party makeup.

This wouldn't be that big of a deal ... but because NPC's auto-level unless they are in your party, by the time you find certain NPC's they may have a completely different makeup then what you need.

However, the number one cardinal sin you can do in this game is auto-level your own party. If you are own anything but Casual, you'll need to be leveling specifically to the needs of your party tactics, figuring what operations you need to manually control and adjusting the AI scripts for each character as you go.

And I tell you this - because ... nobody told me. I've auto-leveled constantly because I've only paid any attention to my own PC. And I haven't even done all that well on my own PC because I'll occasionally try out a skill or whatnot and realize it wasn't really what I needed. Or, as some people point out, you'll find an NPC eventually that can do it better. So my assassin/duelist rogue is something of crossbow firing, melee master and healer.

Which is actually still not all that bad. I'm actually not complaining here that Dragon Age has some annoying core mechanics because the game is hard. People - I've been playing games since you had to restart the game because you didn't have lives left.

Before save games. Castle of Wolfenstein hard. Get out your graph paper and map your own damn map hard. Get me? I know hard. You young ones of the Xbox generation do not get to come to me and lecture about hard.

My complaint is that Dragon Age is horribly, awfully, and rather inexcusably ... inconsistently hard. Case in point: I ransacked an entire tribe of werewolves without much problem. Then I got beset by a random gang of bandits which killed my entire party in seconds.

Or cleansing an entire mage tower with all it's demonkind. To then get ravaged outside of my camp by wolves. Oh sure, the entire battalion of darkspawn under the sloth demon's sway ... no problem. But wolves ... there's a problem. Excuse me?

See, I didn't want to read up on this game. I just wanted to play the game. And because of that, I've played it most of the way through doing many, many things wrong. And the game gave me absolutely no indication that I was doing anything wrong ... because I was winning every fight. Sure, I'd have to reload from time to time and my party - but I was accomplishing missions left and right.

So how was I supposed to know that I got 90% of the way through the underground of the Dwarven kingdom, making my way through legions of darkspawn only to get to a boss fight I could simply not mathematically defeat. At this point there was no recourse but to walk all the back out, recamp ... and try again.

Which also, did not work. And in reading up on the battle, I could see why. I hadn't invested in Area of Effect attacks. I didn't stock up on grenades. My strategy was largely melee, using my rogue to lure in groups of enemies where they'd get quickly dispatched by a wardog and a dwarf with a nasty disposition. And so when I get to a boss who can kill melee fighters with one kill and I don't have enough healing options to outlast my feeble missile options ... I was pretty much cooked.

Bioware was essentially punishing me for not showing up to a class, when I didn't even know there was a school in session. And it was really punishing. I spent hours trying to get through this fight on Normal, until I finally caved and just went to Casual. Many players may not have hit this point, just by making a few different key decisions.

The gap between casual and normal is oddly intense. There is no friendly fire (not that I cared - no AoE or grenades, remember?). You get a massive attack and defense bonus. Enemies are weaker. I've chewed through every battle since then. Sadly, it's almost boring. But since nobody at Bioware seemed to want to pay attention to pacing, to this idea that if you want to slap the player around ... rough them up a little bit before you really hit them hard - I don't think I have much choice. It's either that or restart, because this boss fight was so on the opposite end of entertainment that it was very nearly a shelf moment for me. If there was no casual mode, it would certainly have been.

And my follow up complaint is that I'm not entirely sure "micromanagement" equals "tactics". In fact, I'm pretty certain they don't. I applied many tactics during my course of playing the game - that was not my shortcoming. My shortcoming was not micromanaging nearly every aspect of every character. I wanted to a play an RPG - not one of those games where you control the roster of a soccer team.

There's a lot of great things about this game, and many other people have written about them. The uneven difficulty and the heavy emphasis of micromanagement (made even more painful in the console version) has been brought up on several smaller sites and blogs, some of the major reviews completely overlook this aspect. And it's a key flaw in the game.

So my advice to you - either read up on the game, extensively (there are even strong suggestions out there about the best order to play the area), before playing it - or suck it up and play it on casual - or at least be willing to change the difficulty before getting into a head-against-wall kind of situation that I found myself stuck in.

Good game. By far, not a great game. Actually, I'll have a whole other post on Dragon Age versus Demon's Souls which will really annoy the Dragon Age fanboys and girls of the world. But that's for a different day.

HoneyComb Engine On Edge Online

Props to Corvus on this column at Edge Online about the HoneyComb Engine:

The latest system finds a balance, creating rules that create the outcomes but don’t necessarily describe them. While the gamemaster, or storyteller prime, runs the session, she or he can pass the duty off to the other players – dubbed storytellers – at the table. Storytellers are expected to bring their own ideas to the session, to guide whether it’ll be funny, violent or tragic. And any genre should work: Elrod has led sessions in space, Dickens’ London, and the Buffy season eight storyline. At last month’s Penny Arcade Expo, he led a session with Dierdra Kiai and Travis Megill about four siblings who reunite at their father’s funeral.

-- Tell Us A Story [Edge Online]