Dragon Age was a good game from a story perspective. And I liked the NPCs. However, some of the game mechanics drove me batty. The most annoying one was probably how each NPC might be happy or mad at you based on what you did on your quests. This was, in my view, a micro-management nightmare and an almighty pain in the ass. I have a character who would, if played to her role, do X. But if I do X, I get negative faction with half my party. So now I have to decide. Do I want to lose faction with my party over and over, or do I want to forgo playing my character “right” and “game the system?” Worse, you can work your ass off with a character only to gain +1 or +3 faction with them, and then make a seemingly innocent remark and lose -20. What the hell is THAT? IMO, the whole character faction system of DA was done almost as a way of the devs griefing the players.
Unfortunately, although much of the moment-to-moment gameplay of DA 2 is pretty good, and in many ways superior to DA 1, this theme of the devs seeming to do things to grief the players has been magnified to such an extreme that many nights, long before it’s time to turn off the Xbox and go to bed, I shut the game down in aggravation and annoyance. DA 2 has continued the annoying issues with the NPCs and even magnified them. But worse, you the game lets you completely, totally screw yourself over and doesn’t do a thing to stop you.
For example, you can lose one, and will lose another, party member for most of the latter part of the game. One character, for instance, was my dedicated healer. I had the character by 10th level fully tricked out for healing spells and healing equipment (at least as best as the game allows). I had a system down. All was good. And then 1/3 of the way through the game, that character is x’ed out of the party — and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it. Now, I had other mages, but not knowing this would happen, I had tricked THEM out for AOE damage and crowd control, not healing. They’re all 10th level too, and now half their skill points have been spent on non-healing options. So now I lose my healer, and for the next, oh, 6, 7 levels, I have to painfully add healing to a mage NOT set up for it, so that I can have some healing in the party. That is just poor. At a minimum, they needed to let me respec one of the mage’s or something. Or else wait to give me one mage until the other is x’ed out, and give him to me at level 10 but with all his skill points available, so I can spec him to replace the mage. After all I’d have the same problem if the x’ed one had been my AOE damage/cc character and the others were healers… I’d lose the AOE damage.
But the impression that the devs are trying to grief the players gets worse. There is a battle about mid-game, where you fight something highly mobile, that likes to basically teleport all over the battle field. At certain points in the battle (probably at certain hit-point bookmarks), the thing actually teleports onto a ridge that is physically inaccessible by the player character or any of the party NPCs — you CANNOT reach the bad guy (nor get close enough to shoot him). I tested this after the battle in the calm of non-combat… and there is no way to get near enough to strike a blow. And yet from this ridge, the bad guy can still shoot AOEs at your party, and does so several times (along with summoning a bunch of pets to attack you). Now I don’ t mind the pet summon so much — it’s a typical Bioware boss fight without him shooting me. But the guy being able to shoot my whole party while NONE of us can reach him to shoot or punch back is a violation of every fairness rule in RPGs (either computer or pen and paper) that I’ve ever played. I kept thinking as I dealt with this griefish encounter that, if this were an MMORPG and I, as a player, found a place like that from which to AOE the mobs, it would be considered an exploit. And here, in DA 2, they programmed their game to attack the player with what amounts to an MMO exploit. I can’t consider this to be anything else but the devs of the game griefing me.
Lots of other little to large elements of the game feel like griefing as well. I have my character as tricked out as I can make her (level 20 rogue) and yet, still, she can be one-shotted by almost any boss. One-shotted! She’s at full HP, and suddenly an SFX appears on screen (usually from something like a mage-based enemy), and she’s dead. In one hit. She has spirit resistance, fire resistance, nature resistance, frost resistance, almost as much armor as the tank and way more defense… and she gets one-shotted. And then we have the fact that stamina and mana are at a premium late in the game. Bad guys go from dying in one blow to taking literally hundreds upon hundreds of attacks to bring down. Fights include multiple bosses (or at least, guys that were considered bosses in the early game) and what I can only call an “elite” boss, with what can only be tens to hundreds of thousands of hit points (if the damage numbers I’m seeing on my screen relative to the pixels of health done are accurate), and yet in a few specials all my characters are down to zero stamina and default attacks. Sure you can use a potion to restore stamina, but in a few blows you are back to zero again, and have to wait 40 or 50 seconds to take another sip. This makes the battle end up just taking an obscenely long amount of time (one of them took almost 5 real time minutes, to kill ONE guy). Almost all of that time, you’re just hitting your default attack like a psychopath, click-click-click-click as fast as you can. Oh yes, that’s High Tactics.
And then there is the utter stupidity of your party’s AI. I cannot understand how the team that created such smart, almost genius level, AI companions in ME 1/2, can create ones that are so stupid that unless I go in and MANUALLY program them, can’t do anything right. The ME 2 AI is smart enough to take cover, target the right enemies, use specials the right way to take down shields, etc, and I almost never have to hit pause to tell them what to do. Why can’t the DA 2 NPCs do the same thing? I don’t mind being able to *edit* the default behavior, but just using it shouldn’t be the kiss of death. Yet I’ve tried it unedited, and the options are stupid and ineffective. For example, unless you program it, your NPCs will never, ever, use a healing potion. Duh.
So… I don’t know if the guys who designed DA 2 were stupid, or incompetent, or rushed, or what. But what it feels like to me, is that they’re a bunch of jerks who sat around cackling and trying to figure out the best way to piss off the players, and then the next best way, and the next, and pack as many frustrating elements and scenes into the game as they could. Then they compounded the error by making only a tiny handful of map areas and forcing me to re-experience them over and over again (because we all love repetition!), and making a story that has all the expansiveness and grandeur of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
And I have to say, quite honestly, that if these annoying elements make it into TOR… I will almost certainly not subscribe to it past the first free month. I can only hope that since it’s a totally different team, they didn’t do anything like this crap.
