Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Impressions on Dragon Age 2!

I’m normally loathe to write about a game like Dragon Age 2 before I’ve finished it. Sprawling epics like DA2 are more like novels than games in many regards, filled with reams and reams of dialogue with stories integral to the experience. But DA2 is such a strange beast, such a new creature, that even though I’m only a dozen or two hours in I find it hard to think about any other games. I’ve pushed off a write up on the single player experience of Dawn of War II’s latest expansion to write this piece. Because Dragon Age 2 is already the most polarizing game I’ve experienced this year.

I want to know who at Bioware decided that they should try to make their games more action-oriented. Because whoever made this decision missed out on both what Bioware’s good at doing and why I play Bioware games. I like their languid, meticulous combat, the planning required, the constant pausing, the tedious min-maxing and the constant item hunting. Dragon Age 2 has none of these things. The party-based, gear based combat system has been replaced. Where it once stood is an actiony click fest, one where it is far easier and indeed wiser to set ally behaviors tailored to your play style than issue them orders in the heat of combat. So much of combat is deciding how and when to use specific moves, timing your cooldowns so that they overlap and you can keep up a constant stream of damage. It’s less about picking targets carefully and more about weeding out the targets you’re beset with, the dozens and dozens of targets. Dragon Age had big battles too, don’t get me wrong, but not with the scale and frequency of Dragon Age 2. Every battle is against a respawning horde, it seems, and even random encounters on the city streets at night involve wading through dozens of enemy combatants. When the chaos of combat is over I feel less like I’ve conquered a remarkably tough foe and more like I’ve just swept a floor clean. Part of that is also the reward system, or rather the lack thereof. Each battle ends with an experience point update and a frenzied grab for the vendor trash that the various enemies have dropped. Gone are the encouraging experience-point bubbles over the heads of enemies or the pleasure of acquiring the blade that stood against you a few seconds earlier. Heck, you couldn’t even use it if you did acquire it, since weapon categories are now heavy segregated. Rogues can use daggers, and only daggers. Certain kinds of warriors can use certain kinds of swords and axes, depending on a few choices they’ve made in their skill tree. And mages can use their little mage staffs. Or is it staves? I can never get that right.

The end result is a combat system that feels hurried, stripped down. And it carries over to the character progression system, which has had its inelegant tables replaced with a Diablo 2 style series of truncated trees. The trees reward focus and specialization and make it much more difficult to compare various abilities, an unfortunate design choice given how crucial the placement of each precious point is. Comparing various abilities and possible progress paths involves moving in and out of tables, reading over dense tooltips and then backing out into another menu where you can survey your other options. It’s frustrating to gather information and encourages players to make hasty decisions based around which abilities and paths seem “coolest” rather than which ones best suit their play-style. The only saving grace for each of the tables is the relatively direct connection that the paths share with one another. They’re not always thematically contiguous as they could be, but for the most part the skill trees unfold logically, if not precisely the way you’d like them to. I’m still bummed out that Primal mages don’t get any kind of blizzard ability, but it’s still nowhere near my disappointment in how limited my customization options are and just how difficult they are to read. Even the specialization paths are difficult to discern, and while Dragon Age had me choosing between great options throughout the game each time I assigned a character a specialization I barely cared about closing off my additional options in Dragon Age 2.

Which brings me to another qualm with DA2: the lack of companion customization. Trinkets and weapons can be swapped around, assuming your hireling has the relevant attributes assigned, but armor is set. Which isn’t too big a deal, since the armor levels up with your companion, but it does make many of the items sloughed off of fallen foes feel kind of useless when they don’t match your class choice. It also places some severe limits on your ability to specialize your party members. You can’t make your sister into a frost mage who does damage to enemies all around her and shape your elf-friend into a healing machine the way you could in the first Dragon Age. Add this to the fact that specializations are gone from companion skill trees, replaced by companion specific trees that provide abilities ranging in usefulness from “profoundly’ to “non-existent.” You can make some choices, but the system of customization and management that Dragon Age originally presented for companions, itself a critical part of the old-school RPG genre and its micro-management friendliness, is missing.

But Dragon Age 2 has still been captivating me, despite my many qualms. And it’s not because of the game itself, the way that say Dead Rising 2 or Dawn of War 2 captivates me through play. It’s because of the things surrounding the play, the characters, the story and the art.

The art in DA2 is nothing short of gorgeous. Costume design, character design, architecture, lighting and spell effects, they’re all incredible. Sometimes character animation gets a little wonky, sure, and I have no idea why every Qunari suddenly grew horns but the game as a whole just looks so good, it’s a pleasure to play. And not in the digi-porn way that Killzone 3 looks good, in the “art design is excellent” way that seems to occur so much less frequently than it should in games. The subtle, slightly alien look that dwarves and elves have, the new, even more horrifying darkspawn models, the meticulously designed armor and uniforms seen every day on the streets of Kirkwall, they’re all fucking gorgeous and pitch perfect. It’s rare to see a game quite as well considered, visually, as Dragon Age 2.

And the characters that accompany this art don’t disappoint. There might be a time in the future when I find them frustrating or dull (I’m courting a party member right now who promises to be just that, a stodgy taciturn elf who is probably going to be a warmage with a dark past) but for the most part they’ve all been captivating, original takes on fantasy archetypes. Sure, Anders lost most of his humor somewhere between this game and the last one, and he’s a lot more out than he was previously, and your sister is a bit of a cipher as far as characters go, but for every middling character there’s a great one populating the party. The banter is better than it ever was, and even the characters who want to be traditional fantasy characters in a traditional fantasy world, people like Aveline for example, have little touches of originality that make them pop. Paired with strong writing, even for Bioware, featuring genuinely well constructed dialogue and humor, it’s the rare game that actually introduces a great cast of characters, not just one or two.

And these characters would be enough even without a story to tie them together. But Dragon Age 2 has a story, and a good one at that. At least, so far. The framing technique is a bit blah, but after being asked to save the world time and time again it’s actually quite refreshing to just be asked to find work and pay my way out of a shit life doing shit work for shit people. And, through the process of acquiring this work I’ve learned much of the world of Dragon Age, far more than I did in the first game.

And world building is a huge part of telling a story in a video game. It’s not enough to make things happen. To really make someone care you have to give them context, to let them know just why things in Orlais are the way they are and why things in the Free Marches are the way they are. Every little aside in Dragon Age 2 is a bit of an eye opener into the specific world of Theylas. Dragon Age offered some information on what Ferelden was like, sure, but it never provided a sense of daily life the way Dragon Age 2 does. Walking through city streets, engaging in mundane tasks, Dragon Age 2 hits all the right notes for constructing a world and letting us live in it. It beats all but the finest open world games at providing a sense of place and pace to its play.

And I credit this to its focus on keeping the story small, orienting it around characters and daily life rather than kings and queens and demons and the end of the world. That’s great sometimes, sure. But I can find any number of games that let me explore those nightmare scenarios. There are very few that are as willing to let me rest on the bottom of a fantasy world as Dragon Age 2 is.

It’s ironic, given the larger-than-life scale of the combat and the grandiose framing technique the game uses. But it’s a welcome change, and it ties together Dragon Age 2’s many disparate elements nicely. Dragon Age 2 is fundamentally a game about living in a new place, exploring it and making a name for yourself. It’s a game about meeting interesting characters, developing relationships with them, and not doing it in a right or wrong way. Most of all it’s about those characters, those people in these places triumphing over their challenges, whether it be the worries of daily life or the unpleasant and tone-deaf mechanics of the game itself. Regardless, Dragon Age 2 is a success, and while it might not be perfect it’s well worth the price of admission, as well as enduring the at times very unpleasant and chaotic game play.