Reviewed: Dragon Age 2
Blades, braids and skill upgrades…
To say Dragon Age 2 is BioWare at its best would be a high accolade indeed. It’s the proud parent of some of PC gaming’s greatest moments, vivid roleplaying worlds that we gamers exchange anecdotes from like the old folks trade war stories. It has set the benchmark high, and fans have set their expectations even higher for this, the sequel to 2009’s best RPG.
And with a story as complex and player-driven as Dragon Age: Origins, it’s a minefi eld trying to write a sequel that’ll engage new players and appease veterans, all the while maintaining that insane level of detail that we come to expect from the Dragon Age universe. With this in mind, there are some wholesale changes from the original.
This time around, there are no race-specific opening levels. In fact, there’s no choice in the player’s race at all. Character creation is a streamlined experience to say the least. There are but three classes to choose from- warrior, mage and rogue. There’s a default appearance to the main character that BioWare really wants you to choose. They’ve even gone to the extent of designing a custom character facial editor that generates nothing but alarmingly hideous faces. It’s a nod to the success of the Mass Effect series’ Shepard character, a predetermined, voice acted guy or gal with actual character, that rarest of traits in the videogame world of mute player-controlled morons.
So get used to that. You’re not an elven bard. You’re Hawke, a swaggering human with the darkspawn hot on his (or her) heels and a family to protect. Hawke might just be the first player-controlled character that this reviewer actually likes, thanks to some superlative writing and voice acting. Again, like Mass Effect, Hawke’s dialogue options offer a spectrum of human emotional responses, but as a rule each time someone talks to you, you can respond with the usual sickeningly earnest selfl ess hero babble, shoot off a bit of smart talk, or take a no-nonsense and rather violent tone. Somehow Shepard ended up sounding like a right square no matter what, but DA2 offers you three completely separate, larger than life characters to play with. Or one that’s hugely schizophrenic.
Character dev
That inspired character design doesn’t end with Hawke, not by a long shot. Every character that holds any sway to the main plot is intriguing, convincing, and visually varied, and that’s crucial to making the quests any fun. The mechanics of questing are just the same as any RPG since time immemorial; talk to him, go there, kill them, bring that back. Without any decent story to flesh out these tasks, you’re just orienteering. A miserable human packhorse of loot, trudging from one end of the map to another. But if you actually care about why you’re going between these places, if you can decide who to kill and you really care about the characters you’re dealing with, these orienteering courses become an entirely different experience. You forget the underlying mechanics for a bit, because there’s no way you’re letting the Viscount get away with THAT.
Most of the characters you’ll do business with inhabit the city of Kirkwall, a smothering metropolis tainted by a dark history, present day corruption and racial tensions sparked by an influx of refugees from the darkspawn invasion. It’s how David Cameron sees multicultural Britain, basically. As Ferelden asylum seekers, Hawke and his family are persona non grata in the city, and must suffer in bondage to work off a debt their silly old uncle accrued. Along the way you pick up a diverse band of tag alongs, who are – get this – probably the best party BioWare has created. From socially-awkward, Welsh, elven blood mage to criminally underdressed, female incarnation of Jack Sparrow, they’re all an absolute delight. Rather than paragons of good or dead eyed psychopaths, each party member is intensely human, and all the easier to find affection for. Crucially, Bioware has indulged fans of the original with cameos from old characters and plenty of nods to the events that preceded this game, but Bioware has still created a coherent and less daunting world for new players alike.
Enchantment!
Of course you’re not just running around talking to all the lovely people and looking at how lovely everything is. There’s all manner of disembowelling and beheading to be done too. Combat was one of Origins’ major flaws. All too often your party would form an orderly queue in a doorway, ignore all their tactical routines and wait patiently to be destroyed by an astonishingly tough enemy. Well it’s all sorted now. Doorway battles are obsolete, frustrating difficulty spikes are gone and tactic slots work perfectly. Both friendly and enemy AI seems much sharper and it makes fighting so much more fun.
Abilities and skills are represented by superb comic book-esque animations, and are gained through levelling up and choosing specialities, so though there are just three base classes there’s plenty of customisation. All classes have a smorgasbord of ways to perforate and lacerate foes though, and each is hugely gratifying.
API lovin’
There’s been a significant graphical overhaul on the game’s engine, which now supports DirectX 11 features. It is though still the basic Eclipse engine that Origins was built around. This is great news for scalability; the minimum specs are the same here as they were for Origins and you’ll get good frame rates out of mid-range systems with DX11 features disabled. Even updated though, the Eclipse engine doesn’t allow players the kind of free roaming they might expect from a role playing experience, and it’s only in this area that DA2 loses any ground to existing titles. I’m not talking the vast levels of exploration that Oblivion had to offer, but a jump key would be nice. Ultimately though, it’s a speck of dirt on an old master’s painting, and shouldn’t put anyone off this great gaming experience. After all, Dragon Age 2 is BioWare at its best.
Phil Iwaniuk
Posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 3:16 pm under PC Format Archive. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
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