Dragon Age II Game Diary

Quarter to Three’s Adam Sensoy is keeping a diary of his playthrough of Dragon Age II, commenting indepth on features he likes or dislikes. No huge spoiler warnings necessary yet but they may come. Part one is one dual-wielding rogues, part two on the exaggerated female forms and part three on combat and playing it on hard.

Hard on Dragon Age II is not as difficult for the most part, but boss battles are harder. I can’t really see any appreciable change in tactics from one difficulty level to the other, though the AI might be slightly better at targeting your casters and weaker melee characters. It looks like the difference is mainly in the size of the health pools, which isn’t really a problem for the fodder enemies until you get deep into the second, and yes, the third wave. Nearly every battle involves two distinct waves of enemies. The first might be visible on the map as you engage them and you can orient yourself accordingly. But the second wave will spawn onto the map and swarm your party, so tactical facing and spacing is difficult without drawing everyone together after each wave and then reassigning targets and positions. It’s a minor nitpick, but one that is frequently aggravating for those of us who still hit space bar in between every second or third action.

The real difficulty on hard are the bosses, however. The increased health pool is exaggerated on the bosses, even the less important minor (story bosses) scattered throughout the game. That frequently leads to you chopping your way through two or three waves of enemies to finally combing your party’s strength against the boss. Then you attack, and wait, and wait, and attack, and let your cooldowns refresh, and juggle potions, and then attack some more. I’m exaggerating a little for effect. The boss battles to the point I have played are almost all fun, entertaining, and most of all challenging. However, there is going to be a subset of players who absolutely hate the way they play, at least on the harder difficulties, because the game does require you to spend a reasonable amount of time juggling cooldowns, potions, and running around to whittle down the health of these monsters. It never really bothered me, but I absolutely love the combat in Dragon Age II. If you are on the fence about it, the boss battles could be frustrating enough to sour your impressions on the combat as a whole. That would be a shame, because when you stop to pause and think about what you are doing, the combat is just as tactical as Dragon Age Origins, but considerably more fluid and exciting.