Dragon Age 2 - More wrist cutting than a room full of emos

Here we are again, back to reviewing shitty games. For those not familiar with the first game its about picking an origin and then becoming a gray warden then eventually becoming the hero of Feraldan and saving the world from the blight. Dragon Age 2 takes place over a period of ten years. The game starts before the events of the first game and ends many years after the events of the first game. You're a completely different person. In the second game you start off as a human. You can only be a human and your romances can only be humans or elves because according to the lead writer, "dwarves are ugly and I don't like dwarves."

So the story basically starts off with you, your younger brother and sister and your mother running away from the darkspawn in Feraldan. And within five minutes of the game you notice they fucked up something. In the first game templars are chaste. But here you meet a warrior woman with a templar husband. Midway through the game you also help a templar find her daughter. Whatever, moving on we continue fighting darkspawn and then an ogre comes and kills either your sister Bethanny or brother Carver depending on your class. If you are a mage your sister dies and if your a warrior or rogue your brother dies. Like the first game I was a mage and so my sister got her face smashed in after speaking no more than two lines. I like to point out that you and your sister are closer and are more friendly while your brother looks at you as a rival who he can never be. He also has a deep inferiority complex and is extremely jealous of you. Unfortunately I have to keep Carver but the good thing is he disappears very early in the game to join the Templars. The warrior woman is called Aveline and is a companion throughout the game. Anyways she stabs her husband and he dies and you all move on. Then you become servants for either a group of thieves or mercenaries.

However as soon as that happens it goes "one year later" and you're suddenly walking around the town trying to get into a caravan into the deep roads. What? The game just skips through that shit? So basically the entire game takes place in the city of Kirkwall. In the ten years, all the npcs stand around in the same exact spots, say the same exact thing and wear the same exact clothes no matter what happens. While walking around you get assholes that jump out and try to kill you. Random thugs or slavers or people like that and you have to murder them all and leave their bodies to rot on the streets. The people at the side just walk around and continue talking like this is everyday shit and they don't give a flying fuck what just happened. This is probably the most annoying part of the game. I'm trying to get somewhere to turn in a stupid quest only to have assholes jump me at every corner. I don't want to fight them they do nothing but make it take longer to get to my destination. All creatures scale with your level so you don't need to level in this game. And even when you do level they grow with you so that basically offset whatever stats you gained. Basically the whole game takes place in about five maps. Lowtown, Hightown, Darktown, Gallows, Docks. Then they made it even more lazy by splitting the game into daytime and nighttime. The places are exactly the same daytime or nighttime but theres different quests and shit during the day or night and some quests require you to go to the docks at night or go to the gallows in the day. They add little mini dungeons which are about five minutes long for quests outside the city and there are "gather" spots where you can find stuff in dungeons. So say you want to brew some poison and potions you'll have to go out of your way into a random small dungeon and kill a bunch of stupid spiders and skeletons or whatever the shit is in your way grab like ONE FUCKING LEAF from a plant and it stops letting you harvest and you have to go to THREE OTHER DUNGEONS to grab more leaves. Finally you go back and make ONE FUCKING VIAL OF POISON. Why? Does this make the game more deep? You have to go out of your way to pick a leaf off a plant to brew a potion?

You might be thinking "Thats not so bad, games like the Witcher takes place in just a few area too and its a dark RPG." Yes but the Witcher the town actually grows and changes in each act. By the way the game is split into acts. The first act is after the first year of servitude. Each act has a goal with a clear antagonist. The first act is pretty simple your goal is to collect enough money to get into the caravan. To do that you must walk around town and talk to every asshole racist who hates Feraldans to do small quests for gold. During this time you can also start meeting your potential companions. For some odd reason, I failed to get Fenris the elf slave but its alright from what I hear he's bipolar because the writers fucked up. According to the developers, every companion and major character have their own writers. And the lead writer will fit it into the main story. From companion quests Fenris is apparently nice and friendly but during the main story he's an angsty mage-hating broken down husk of an elf. Then again I never gotten him so I don't know what he's like. For the most part the companions you can get are alright. Some of them you can romance like all Bioware games. The companions are generic. You always get the evil guy in your group, the pathetic chick with no common sense, the bro guy, the hero wannabe, guy with the tragic past, the slut. Seriously every companion you can get will fit into those. Of course the best written characters are the ones who can't be romanced. Which is a shame because if I could have a choice to romance them instead of the choices I had then I'd pick that. Whats funny is you don't even realize you've romanced them and all of a sudden the two of you are fucking in your bed. I'm like WHAT THE FUCK? So I kicked her out and shes all like "I'm gonna go" and leaves. The writing is bad, the voice acting is bad.

Here's a "tragic" death scene which happens barely five minutes into the game.

Click

Who gives a shit about someone you don't know? I swear half the people in the game you meet and talk to for five lines before dying by the hands of someone or getting their heads blown off by your fireball. But back to act 1 before I start getting off topic. After finishing act 1, it goes "three years later." Suddenly you're richer, you own a mansion, and people know your name as the refugee Feraldan who got rich. Now you walk out the mansion and start doing quests from the same people that gave you quests from act 1. Yes, they recycle characters and quest areas. Remember that mine you cleared the dragons from? Yeah they're back! Go back kill them again and collect your gold! Quests are marked as Main quests, Secondary quests, Companion quests, and Side quests. Clearing all the main quests finishes your act. Doing secondary quests open up main quests. Companion quests improves your relationship with companions, and side quests serves no purpose and theres very few of them. In other words, you have to do nearly every boring stupid quest to finish the act. It gets really repetitive. What I don't like is how they introduce the antagonist and then kill them right away. Theres no build up or suspense. In the first game you knew the antagonists from the start and when you finally catch up to him you heave a sigh of relief and go "finally I can smash his face for all the shit he's given me." But here you just walk around and the bad guy is like "rwar I'm the bad guy gonna attack!" then you fight and he dies you're like "oh he's dead oh well lets move on to the next act."

The story of Dragon Age 2 is all about your life as a refugee into the champion of the city. Theres no darkspawn, no blight, no gray wardens. How is this the same game as the first one? Each act is discontinued and feels like its been written by different people. Each act ends with solving every problem in that act except the final one. The ending is the biggest pile of shit ever. Lets just say the whole game you're waiting for the climax. You keep waiting and waiting and it never comes then it slaps you in the face and tells you "its over but the game will continue in Dragon Age 3." Yes the developers want you to play the third game to finish the story of the second game. Its pathetic. Why are games doing this so much nowadays? I can understand leaving it and letting people guess whats happening afterwards but this is like they have a story and cut it in half and put it into two different games so they can milk the most money. Thats exactly what this game is about. Milking money off people who liked Dragon Age. I didn't like the first one but this one is an insult to the first one. Even I feel ashamed to call it Dragon Age 2. Theres almost no one memorable in the game. No one you give a shit about. Infact the first game they wanted it to be a "dark RPG" but it failed. This time I think they knew they couldn't deliver so they changed it. Theres no BLOOD AND TITS marketing. I found the game to be very tame. Even WoW feels darker than Dragon Age 2. Which is fine. The story itself has a lot of potential they just tried to fit so much into one story that it crashed and burned. Thats like sending in twelve different trains into one area and praying they'll all miss each other but ends up in a pile.

The best part of the game is probably the companions. Well the best part is the credits because you can stop playing this shit. Your companions grow in the ten years. Some of them get married, some of them move on. Some of them ends in tragedy. But this is Dragon Age we're talking about so of course it just ends with no follow up after the climax.

"Varric, Garrus, Aveline, Wrex, Mordin, and Minsc ( and I think a few more BG characters? ) are all written by the same man.

Surprisingly, Bioware consider him on the lower end of their "writers" spectrum.

I think it says something about Biowares writing team that the guy who wrote all those characters, and was the lead writer for Jade Empire is someone nobody has ever heard of ( and is part of the Bioware C-Team ), while the guy who writes the romances and clingy terrible female love interests and the lovely stories like DA2 is LEAD WRITER OF ALL TIMES, DAVID GAIDER."

Funny thing Varric and Aveline were the two most well written characters of Dragon Age 2.

By now you're probably going "Well I read through all this shit and I still don't know what the hell the title is supposed to mean." But don't worry, we're there now. The biggest pile of shit in this game is how they ruined blood mages. In the first game blood magic was rare because the only way to learn it was to make a deal with a demon. Thus it leads to eventual corruption and transforming into an abomination. Now in the second game everyone is a fucking blood mage. If you meet a mage in the game theres a 90% chance he's a blood mage and he's going to die before the end of the quest. But now instead of making a contract with demon all you have to do is cut your wrists and then blood explodes out of your body and you can summon demons and explode people. Is it really necessary to ruin Dragon Age Origins? Blood magic is so common now and the funniest part is how they do it. They pull a knife out of nowhere hold out their wrist cut and its like a fucking explosion of blood that torrents out of their body. Yes Dragon Age is all about blood so of course they shower the fucking area in a rain of blood from a slit wrist. Its so over the top and embarrassing I can't believe they did this. The worst part is the final battle where the chick with the frostmourne controlling her brain starts jumping 50 feet into the air and landing onto the stone floor and stabs the sword into the ground with red lasers and then shooting lasers onto brass statues that come to life and fights you then when you break them they split into two and shoots cannons from their bodies and then the sword explodes and she turns into stone and you stand there looking like your tough shit and everyone stares at you as you walk off into the distance and then the credits roll. Oh if you haven't played the game theres spoilers.

Combat between the first game and the second game was changed and it was the only part of the game that I felt was improved since the first game. The first game has the most boring and ridiculous combat I have ever seen. I don't like to pause and issue orders and do all that shit. In the second game you can pretty much play it like if you were playing any mmorpg. You have three others going around smacking others while you spam all your magic. Like Mass Effect 2 they try to make it more "actiony" and over the top. And like Mass Effect they did the whole dialogue wheel with blue for nice, red for angry and purple for sarcastic. I don't like that change. It makes things really simple. Take a game like Witcher for example. Theres a ton of choices. Some don't show up until you talk a bit and others disappear if you ask too much. But basically you never know whats going to happen until you say something. And most of the time the decisions come back and bite you in the ass many acts later but usually only a little bit later. Everything you pick or choose is laid out for you in Dragon Age 2. I just keep picking the angry one and killing everyone that I could. Mindless really.

Overall, people who liked the first game didn't like this one. While Dragon Age 2 sucked it was a lot more polished than the first. It wasn't as choppy and combat/movement/character/cut scenes were much more fluid. The story line sucked bad, the world was a step backwards and the characters were less memorable. There wasn't enough time to develop them in the little time they had in the short acts. Its an alright RPG if you enjoy running around doing odd jobs. It does have a "save the world" theme though so its still there but you just have a ton of filler quests where you collect items or help nameless people that die within five minutes of meeting them.

Command and Conquer 4 and what it can teach us.

This post is, as usual with me, as late as your first date. But in that same way, it eventually showed up, grinning stupidly, oblivious to all its faults.

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So Command and Conquer 4 flopped like everyone predicted. Not a surprise. The game is bland, stank of foul betrayal, and is a momumental insult to fans of CNC and RTS gamers everywhere. I wrote about it here last year (ed: now 2 years ago).

I would like to take a moment to spit in the faces of every single person who tried to defend CNC4 pre-release. Every single EA fanboy who said "the new style needs a chance, shouldn't be written off", and every EA moderator (under contractual requirements) who said "don't judge the game before you've played it". Those flimsy veiled excuses don't hold up anymore now, eh? Too bad the bombardment of criticism might have actually curbed the game from ending up such a disaster, but no, instead, we had to not stomp on EA's pathetic marketing campaign for this abomination, only so that we could expose it for being a laughing stock later. Unfortunately, since now it's 'too little, too late', CNC fans got screwed out of a proper sequel (and conclusion) and EA's like 'herpy-derp, we couldn't have forseen this, lawl'. Except for the fact that if they listened to us, instead of hiring moderators to lock/close/hide threads of criticism on their forums, they wouldn't have gotten so badly reamed by every single reviewer. The true, loyal CNC fans did their part. It is EA, and the EA fanboys have no one else to blame but themselves.

However, I'm not here to relive every moment of the nightmare that is CNC4, but rather to educate you on its history, from which, we all may yet learn something. Perhaps this is indeed CNC4's only redeeming quality: it acts as a beacon of tragedies for others to beware.

After CNC4 was released, it's review scores submitted, and it's initial wave of buyers suckered in (about ten people total), CNC4 developers, some of them now ex-employees, were freed from contractual stipulations and revealed the asinine development processes behind the game. In the following link, Greg Black, ex-EA, tells us some of the ugly truths behind CNC4 that fans were forbidden to know before the game's release date. Additionally, Sam Bass, lead designer of all EALA's CNC games, divulges more information about his own power struggle with EA management over the game's direction.

Since I don't expect you to want to sift through it all, I've summarized the major points for how it became such a disaster.

1. As CNC4 was nearing its release date, the number of remaining developers dwindled. EA was trying to cut costs for the project and removed non-essential staff from it's payrolls as the game neared a releasable state. It was also known well ahead of time that ALL of its developers would be terminated by release date. As you can imagine, this didn't promote company atmosphere or enthusiasm. The developers went to get their uninspired game out the door and collect their final paychecks, all while already looking for new employment elsewhere. It didn't help any that the release date was pushed forwards and that CNC4 was expected to be a rushed project since Starcraft 2 was creeping on the horizon.

2. CNC4 was originally designed as a multiplayer online browser game to be marketed in Asia, with very loose ties to the CNC universe, and no singleplayer inclusion, nor any plot advancement. Since it was a lightweight browser game, there was no base-building, macromanagement, nor harvesting of resources. EA management later decided that it would be wiser to repackage the game with a shoddy, cheap singleplayer and as an entire game, cramming a game that was never designed to fit the mold into something else. The designers didn't like it, but they didn't have a choice. Once the fans learned about it, they weren't satisfied either, but the damage was done and EA had no intention of reversing it.

3. In the backlash caused by the poor writing in both CNC3 and Kane's Wrath (CNC3's expansion), Sam Bass, somewhat tired of working on CNC, promised fans that the next main title in the franchise would be an epic conclusion to the story, and resolve most major plot holes and finally answer the fan's questions on the enigmatic Kane, the primary antagonist since the original Command and Conquer. This would release him from working on yet another title in the foreseeable future (up to this point, EA has forced EALA to produce a new CNC title every 6 months), and would allow him to appease the fans he's had to apologize publicly to so many times before. Unfortunately for Bass, EA's intervention demanded that a game that almost entirely contradicted the lore had to be bent and reshaped to fit back into the CNC universe. Worse, EA uncovered Bass' intention of concluding the main plot and revealing one of its greatest mysteries, and promptly forbade it. In the disagreement that followed, Bass retracted the original plot for CNC4, removed the information about Kane, and closed the saga leaving more questions and plot holes than before. At first, it seemed that Sam Bass had lied to the fans. With his admission post-release, Sam Bass has indisputably betrayed and misled fans with misinformation under stipulations of his contract. Even though EA drove the project into the wall, Bass is not entirely blameless for continually oiling the wheels.

4. Following the rather lackluster (but at least palatable) titles of Red Alert 3 and Kane's Wrath, the fans were issued public apologies and promises of better feedback methods pre-release as well as consistent patch support post-release. So for CNC4, they had an invitational pre-screening, gathering pros, prominent players and CNC-fansite reporters to a convention in Germany. The feedback was almost entirely negative, but the developers expected this for the reasons above (which at the time they couldn't disclose). Knowing that EA would never let them alter the game, they curbed the criticism with excuses, claiming that the product was still unfinished, and that it would be much more acceptable by release, even though the main criticisms were with the game fundamentals which were already set in stone. Following the pre-release convention, a multiplayer beta was issued, but as accurately confessed by Greg Black in the above interview, there was insufficient time to have a meaningful beta where feedback could be evaluated and used to further develop the game. Beta and release were practically the same, which is unsurprising, considering all EA betas are like this now. See: Need For Speed World, Medal of Honor, Dead Space 2 betas.

Overall, no one's surprised that EA released a terrible title. No one's surprised that EA management was at fault for leading the trainwreck either. At one point I thought EA had sensibly canceled Tiberium (the CNC FPS game), but then for them to promptly lead this project into disaster makes me think their judgment is spotty at best. EA is never going to learn from its mistakes, but other developers can. And while EA has a lot of buffer room when making such errors, others don't. Learn from EA. Don't be a shit stain on gaming.