Dragon Age II

Fifty sovereigns is a lot of money. It’s also the amount of money you’re asked to save up as your first main objective in Dragon Age II, and doing so will likely take you around ten hours, so you’d have the right to feel entitled to some kind of reward and recognition for managing it.

But no.

While your journal will tell you to take your 50 sovereigns to Bartrand the dwarf, your map won’t bother reminding you where he is. This is weird given that everything else of any importance at all is clearly marked in every other quest. At this point, you might sense that something isn’t quite right.

You persist, though, traipsing around the city for a while, trying to remember where it was you last spoke to Bartrand some ten or more hours ago, and eventually you find him. With an immense sense of expectation, not to mention some relief, you hand over your 50 big ones and Bartrand says, “Um… thanks. Now go away and do some other stuff.”

We’re paraphrasing, but he really is that vague and dismissive. Your heart sinks. All sense of purpose is lost. You’re not angry at Bartrand, though, really. You’re angry at BioWare. This is just bad game design, plain and simple.

It’s bad game design because it lies to you. It tells you that you need to save up money and find some maps in order to progress to the next major stage of the game, but the truth is that you have to do some other stuff as well. We don’t know exactly what because it’s never specified, and that’s precisely the problem. You realise, when Bartrand finally gets a map marker and the next chapter of the game begins, that you’ve mostly just been doing stuff for no particular reason other than that it was there to be done.

If this doesn’t sound much like the carefully crafted, intrigue-fuelled, meaningfully paced adventure you remember from Dragon Age: Origins – and pretty much any other BioWare game, for that matter – that’s because Dragon Age II is far inferior to its stablemates in terms of quest design and overall structure. Given that it’s in these departments that BioWare games traditionally excel, this is a major problem.

While the 50 sovereign lie is a glaring illustration of Dragon Age II’s flaws, it doesn’t represent them in their entirety. Had that ten hours of saving up been thoroughly enjoyable then such a design hiccup might not have been so aggrieving, but the truth is that we were, by that point, getting pretty flippin’ desperate to leave the city of Kirkwall and do something else, somewhere else.

It feels like all you’re doing for hours and hours is criss-crossing the city following map markers. Sometimes the marker is directing you to a fight, sometimes to a conversation, sometimes to a fight and a conversation, although not necessarily in that order. Your coin purse gets fatter, your character gets better, your party gets larger, but it still somehow feels as if you’re making almost no progress. Events do not feel as if they’re unfolding – you’re just doing the same things in the same places over and over again.

Even when you do finally get to leave Kirkwall, it’s only temporary. Some major narrative events take place, time spins forward a few years, then you’re back to where you started, only it’s a little bit different – but only a little bit. From this point on, your actions start to feel more consequential and there are some clever tie-ins to the first part of the game. But they’d be a whole lot cleverer if the first part of the game hadn’t be so boring, and you’re still mostly stuck back in the same, already far too familiar environments again. Yawn.

The repurposing of environments is utterly shameful, by the way. We’re not just talking a few samey houses or some dungeons made from the same basic building blocks. No, entire large-scale environments are doubled, sometimes tripled up. There are even two main plot missions in a row that use the exact same environment for what are supposed to be two different dungeons. The encounters are different and one of them has an additional exit, but other than that they are identical. It really is inexcusably cheap.

And while we’re still ranting, there are some awful, frustrating, unfair difficulty spikes. Situations in which even grinding isn’t an option because you’re locked into a long quest with few, if any, means to upgrade or alter your party. Sometimes you can fluke it or use some kind of tedious exploit to get by, but there’s no guarantee you won’t be forced to reload an hours old save. And that might be after an hour or two of trying and failing.

Now we’ve dealt with the demons that have corrupted Dragon Age’s once pure and noble being, let’s see if anything of merit can be salvaged from the husk. Good news: while the formulaic, clumsy game design is unquestionably damaging, glimmers of the talent on which BioWare’s reputation is built still shine through, and in some respects Dragon Age II is an improvement on Origins.

For a start, it’s technically much more proficient, although that isn’t saying much given what an eyesore Origins could be at times. It’s still not the best-looking game you’ll ever see, with bland textures, mechanical animations and shocking pop-up still showing up quite frequently, but the lighting and overall level of detail are generally much improved overall.

While they can still be a bit clunky, characters are certainly more animated, with more expressions and gestures on show during dialogue and fluid, much more elaborate moves seen in combat. The battle system isn’t far different to that of Origins, but there’s been a pretty strong shift in priorities to make it more spectacular and action-packed.

Whereas in Origins your party would mostly face off against small groups of just about evenly matched foes, enemies in Dragon Age II attack in large waves, and are individually much weaker than your characters. So instead of two small groups chipping away at each other, you get a small group making mincemeat of a large group, or even series of large groups.

It controls in almost the same way as it did in Origins – although you now tap your basic attack button to trigger each strike, rather than pressing it just once to put it on ‘auto’ – but it unfolds at a much more furious pace and you really feel like a powerful hero, even early in the game. Some might think that it feels dumbed down, but in terms of the decisions you’re making about what skills to use against which enemies and exactly when and where to trigger them, it’s just as tactical as Origins. There might be too many samey, run-of-the-mill battles in Dragon Age II, but at least they’re usually fun to play.

Decision-making outside of combat is another of Dragon Age II’s strengths. There are many situations in which you are forced to make difficult decisions, with no clear right or wrong option. The world of Thedas remains an impressively complex place that echoes the moral ambiguity of our own, with conflicts between various groups and cultures seldom representing clear-cut distinctions between good and evil.

Everyone has their motives and all are understandable to at least some degree, with the conflict between mages and Templars being a particularly strong example of this. You’re shown how dangerous mages can be, but you also see how inhumanely they’re treated by Templars, and you’re not given any easy answers as to the right way to deal with situations involving the two groups. There is no ‘right’, and it’s Dragon Age’s refusal to adopt the conventional ‘good vs evil’ narrative model that makes its case for sophistication and maturity, not its comically bad gore effects, tokenistic swearing or adolescent sexual content.

Even these strong narrative themes and the choice-driven gameplay that draws you to them is somewhat hamstrung, though, by a shaky script, some very bland voice acting and that familiar affliction whereby dialogue is interrupted by excessively long pauses, even when one character is supposed to be interrupting another. It’s an effort to engage with ideas when they’re being delivered in such a slow, monotonous way, but it is an effort worth making as Dragon Age II is a markedly better game if you really pay attention to what’s going on.

But no amount of effort on your part can make Dragon Age II a worthy successor to Dragon Age: Origins. However you slice it, this is a massive disappointment. Not a bad game in its own right, but one that completely fails to meet the entirely reasonable expectation that Dragon Age II will be like Dragon Age: Origins but with improved technical execution. It is more polished, but it really isn’t much like Origins at heart. Instead it’s formulaic, uninspired and surprisingly limited, with an overpowering whiff of filler about the whole experience. Not worth 50 sovereigns or, for that matter, pounds.