Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Dragon Age II post-mortem... and play Mass Effect 2 for free

7:41 PM / Games / Comments2 Comments

Games
Dragon Age II

I'm currently making my way through Bioware's recent DRAGON AGE II for the second time and am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it lacks anything in the way of replay value, even when playing a different character class and going out of my way to make different decisions regarding quests and storyline progression. If, like me, you played the game and are feeling rather let down by the whole thing, you might be interested in John Walker's "what went wrong" post-mortem over at Rock Paper Shotgun, where he does a great job of picking apart the game's myriad flaws and highlighting precisely where the biggest mistakes were made (not always an easy task when you have 25-40 hours of playable content).

In happier news, if you own a copy of DRAGON AGE II, you can now download the PC version of Bioware's previous game, MASS EFFECT 2, absolutely free. This strikes me as an absurdly good deal. Not only is the PC version the best available - in terms of graphics, controls and, if your machine has moderately decent specs, frame rate (a flat cap of 30 FPS on consoles vs. uncapped on the PC) - MASS EFFECT 2 is also a vastly superior game to DRAGON AGE II. In fact, I'd be inclined to suggest that both games started out with their respective development teams trying to accomplish the same goals - to deliver a character-driven, action-oriented RPG with a cinematic quality and meaningful decisions to be made - but where one got almost everything right, the other fell flat on its face. Obviously one is an epic space opera while the other is medieval fantasy, but comparisons are valid, not least because they show that the unpopular changes Bioware made between the original DRAGON AGE and DRAGON AGE II didn't necessarily have to be a damaging as they ended up being.

My review of DRAGON AGE II is here, by the way.

 
2 Comments

1. David S.H. said:

I just finished Mass Effect 1 the other day, it had been gathering dust on my shelf since the end of 2007 basically. I had played a few hours here and there, but not properly. ME is one of those games where casually dipping in and out just won't work.
But I had some free time, so decided to go at it full force. I started a new character and finished the game over about 3 or 4 days. Loved it.

I have ME2 ready to go, so I'll probably tackle it this week. I've heard its a big improvement over the first game so can't wait. Hopefully my ME1 character save will import over to ME2 without any problems....

I have the first Dragon Age, Origins, for the PS3. Decent enough but I lost interest. Might start from scratch again once I've completed ME2.

(Posted on Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 9:15 AM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

I'm inclined to think that DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS is severely crippled on consoles. That type of combat simply wasn't designed for gamepads, and likewise things like inventory management and setting up tactics must be a nightmare. Perhaps worst of all, the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions lack the overheard tactical camera of the Windows version, which makes battles much easier to micro-manage. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a console gamer, and in point of fact I find it very difficult to do ANYTHING with a gamepad, but I did briefly sample the 360 version of MASS EFFECT 2 and it was clear that that version of the game had been designed from the ground up to be intuitive for gamepad users.

MASS EFFECT 2 is definitely a great game and an improvement on its predecessor in a lot of ways. That said, there are a couple of areas where I feel it suffers from the same sort of dumbing down that occurred between DRAGON AGE and its sequel, albeit not to the same extreme extent: the item management system is incredibly basic in the sequel, and there's a lot more railroading, with the typical progression being "story sequence > linear combat map > story sequence > linear combat map etc."

(Posted on Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 10:32 AM)

 
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