Kvetching on Dragon Age II

Matt Barton seems to be on an editorial spree lately, and after offering us two top 10 lists (of the best and worst CRPGs respectively) he goes on to detail his thoughts on the much-discussed sequel to Dragon Age: Origins, and he seems to have actually enjoyed BioWare’s title:

So what about the combat? Well, the God of War stuff is definitely here. What I mean by that is an emphasis on spectacle; they really want you to feel powerful on the battlefield, obliterating enemies by being deft with your controller. Somewhat like WOW, though, is the cool down timers everywhere, so you’re moving about, clicking your default attack, and keeping an eye on the cooldown for your shield bash or whatever. Meanwhile, you’re trying to keep an eye on your companions, since they (as always) have a nice habit of getting cornered or surrounded and dying. No biggie if they do, of course; just a quick injury kit and they’re back up. My guess is that we’ll see a system similar to this in the upcoming Star Wars MMO. It’s just complex enough to make it possible to control with the standard-issue controller, though they seem to have a hit a wall–you can only six abilities close at hand without having to bring up a radial menu, which I always dislike. I don’t know how many abilities they’ll end up giving you in Star Wars, but I assume they’ll either need a way to display all the stuff on cooldown or find a way to give you another three abilities on standby. Or they could do what makes the most sense to me; put the stuff on cooldown off the controller by default, and let you select abilities to use for that button in the meantime. Perhaps a bit cumbersome, but what are you gonna do? It’s not like they have a keyboard to work with.

They’ve greatly reduced the usual emphasis on weapons and armor, so you aren’t spending time staring at charts and perhaps pulling up an Excel spreadsheet to work out the best stuff to wear. Indeed, you don’t even get to pick armor for your companions, and probably won’t mess with their weapons much either. Your character is a bit more interesting, since they do that old trick of giving you 4/5 pieces of a set and promising you a big bonus if you can get all 5 (I guess when we’re 80 our butts will be on a stool at some Vegas casino hoping for something similar).

The only thing I really hated about the game was the inventory system. I really don’t see how a system that clunky made it through the QA. You’re always having to stop the game to browse the items you’ve collected, checking and comparing them to see if anything is better for one of your characters. This is especially problematic if you find something that may be an upgrade for a character not currently in your party. I don’t see why games like this can’t just give you more gold that you can use to buy stuff at a store, where they could ostensibly make it easier to see at-a-glance what is better and what isn’t. At any given point I had enough belts, rings, and necklaces to open an accessories kiosk in the Kirkwall Mall. I guess they figure that the typical idiot is wetting his nappy over “lootz” or whatever, but give me a break. Either make the stuff easier to sort through and sell, or put in less junk and make sure every item you find is likely to be an upgrade for somebody. I never had a problem with the older CRPGs, where you only occasionally got an item from a pack of monsters. That was cool, but you were really after the gold you could spend at the stores.