GB Feature: Dragon Age II Review

As promised, Steven has stepped away from the Dragon Age II walkthrough and databases we’ve been hammering away at over the past few weeks to bring you our review of BioWare’s sequel. After rounding up twenty waves of other critiques, here’s to hoping you still have some stamina to get through ours:

My first time through the campaign, I played on the default difficulty setting, and I found it to be much easier than the default setting in Origins. With little in the way of preparation or planning, I was able to blunder my way through the campaign only getting wiped out a handful of times. But then I started the campaign on the “hard” setting, and it seems much better balanced. Regular battles actually have a chance of defeating me, and I have to think more about when to use the abilities of my party. Unfortunately, the tougher battles also tend to expose the inadequacies of the interface — the camera is zoomed in so far that it only works well when you’re controlling a single character, and the party AI can’t be turned off easily, meaning you basically just have to leave it on and then grit your teeth when you order your characters to do something, and they ignore it and do their own thing.

The other focus of the engine involves dialogue. Despite Dragon Age II having the feel of an action role-playing game, its campaign is more what you’d see from a traditional role-playing game, with lots of conversations and associated quests. The big change with dialogue is that BioWare decided that the main character’s lines should be acted (unlike in Origins), but that put them in a quandary. They didn’t want players to read a line of dialogue and then listen to it being acted, and so instead they adopted a system close to what Obsidian used in Alpha Protocol.

Each time your character gets a chance to speak, instead of seeing the exact line of dialogue, you only see a summary of the words plus a stance (usually including the trio of “helpful,” “wry,” and “aggressive”). I know some people don’t like systems like this, but I thought it worked pretty well in Alpha Protocol and also works well here. Only a couple of times during the campaign did my character say something drastically different than what I intended, and that’s what the quickload key is for. Not knowing exactly what’s going to happen in conversations adds some mystery to the proceedings, and it also gives players a reason to play through the campaign a second time.