Oh god, I forgot to mention this part. What’s that? You like to plan out battles like this is some kind of RPG, you say? Well fuck you! I’m gonna have unknown numbers of additional guys just materialize all around you, or drop down from the ceiling rafters!
DA2 suuuuucks.
The original Mass Effect is still my favourite, in spite of it’s flaws.
However, Mass Effect 2 is better regarded, because it was still at least a good game, even if a somewhat different one. And it still had a good story.
DA2 betrayed the core of what Origins had been, on virtually every level. Whether it was because the game was rushed or not, is irrelevant to me. All I could do was play the finished product, and that product was garbage.
You liked the sprawling maps from the first game? Well now you get a small walled city, and incredibly linear, recycled sojourns outside of it. Eat shit, nerds.
Except in ME1, I was throwing people around the room with force powers, and in ME2 I was…shooting things with a gun. Because my force powers no longer affected anything, and even if they did, the shared cooldown meant there was no reason to use more than one. I deeply resent the changes to the combat in DA2, but it’d probably be fairly tolerable if they hadn’t had the horrible respawning waves of enemies (witness Inquisition, which has very similar combat, improved a bit, but no arbitrary waves.). I find ME2’s combat deeply tedious to a much greater degree.
To say nothing of the nearly complete removal of loot and equipment, the deeply reduced differentiation between companions, the weird retcons, the forced idiot plot…
Eh. I think they both have huge problems - DA2 breaks the gameplay less, though. And both games have plenty of good writing, but the main plot of DA2 is good for two thirds of the game, and the main plot of ME2 is good for zero of the game.
I would argue that ME2 is a greater betrayal, because it’s explicitly the same character in the second third of what was set out from the beginning to be a trilogy, but it makes massive changes to both gameplay and narrative context that are…not improvements. DA2 is another game in the Dragon Age setting. By Inquisition, they’ve started to really start to try to turn it into an overarching narrative, but 2 is someone else’s story, with its own scope, its own part of the world, and its own concerns. That doesn’t excuse a lot of the worst decisions they made, for certain, but it means less is owed.
I also really enjoyed DA2, more than 1 or 3. I loved how it took place over 10 years, so it made more sense how your relationships and the story progresses. The NPCs were also great. I liked it enough to finish it twice.
Nothing wrong with Da2. It was fine. Had some interesting systems and even some great combat.
Not sure though it was a Dragon age in the spirit of dragon age… I mean …they limited the rpg aspects a bit.
So was biowares thing back then to just limit customization, character creation, and etc to make the games simpler (both of their IPs) – while Bethesda had crazy mod/slash customization but their games weren’t very tight?
I think Bethesda won. For better or worse.
To me the gameplay in Origins mattered more, which is a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. It is a CRPG with similar real-time with pause party-based combat.
DA2 is not like that, and you can’t really play it at all the same way without wanting someone to throw a giant cinder block at your head because it would be so tedious. You’re better served controlling a single character, and letting your companions be AI controlled because the camera has to always be anchored to one character. This is more console friendly, but is totally different gameplay, which makes way for other undesirable elements in DA2. The random re-spawning enemies and fodder is also counter to Origins “hand-crafted” encounters. Someone designed every fight. The arrangement of the enemies, the enemy composition, etc. It is challenging (as long as you limit yourself to 1 mage), where as I slept through most fights in DA2 because they were usually just waves of auto-gib blood shower fodder and they didn’t matter.
Origins is the last game of this type BioWare has made. It’s old BioWare, with development starting well before the EA buy out.
Oh, I agree with all your complaints. But it doesn’t jettison loot, it tries to make levelling worthwhile and have meaningful choices there, it actually matters which companions you take, etc etc. It is a more intact and functional set of gameplay systems than the hollow shell at the heart of ME2. It’s perhaps fallen further from the heights of Origins than ME2 has from ME1, but I think it’s still landed higher, if only because Origins was brilliant (mechanically and in a design sense) in a way ME1 never quite managed.
rei
2037
With the exception of Anders, I liked all of the companions in DA2 more than DA1 or DA3/DAI.
Oh I forgot another joyous thing DA2 introduced that sucked - finding random side quest items while doing main missions, and having your character magically divine who the owner was (who always was in Kirkwall, naturally).
It was FedEx: The Game before Death Stranding!
So I don’t see much usefulness in this cross-franchise comparison of sequel betrayal, (who did it worse!) but this is perhaps, apt at least, minus the idea that DA2 might be any good. I don’t think so.
Clay
2040
My understanding is that the DA2 team bought wholly into the lure of procedural generation, believing it would enable infinite content and reduce art costs. It wasn’t until late in development that they realized the shortcomings and that they had, essentially, run straight into the “bowls of oatmeal*” problem. By that point, it was too expensive and late to fix.
*You can have an infinite number of procedurally generated bowls of oatmeal, but nobody cares they are different because they all basically look and taste the same. This is precisely one of the primary launch problems with No Man’s Sky. Nobody cared there were 19 quintillion planets because they all were so similar.
And that’s the attitude that bemuses me. There seems to be this notion that DA2 is an unmitigated disaster, and ME2…not. Despite both games making what I consider to be catastrophically poor decisions, and both games having some great writing and characters. I don’t even think either game is actively bad, as such. I found enough to like to persist in finishing both of them. They’re just so, so much worse than their predecessors. (And successors, TBH.)
The kicker is that it sounds like the Mass Effect Andromeda team also went down that same path years later, only to realize too late that it sucked.
So much for institutional knowledge.
I don’t remember procedural generation; I do remember entering caves in widely different places that had the exact same internal layout. After a while that got on my nerves.
That’s a strange thing to say, for two reasons: Andromeda has no procedurally generated content, and Andromeda most decidedly doesn’t suck.
They spent a whole lot of development time trying to make procedural generation work in Andromeda, though, before late in the process pivoting hard to what’s there now. I agree that Andromeda doesn’t suck, but it would probably have been a lot more successful if they’d never tried to make it procedural.
To my way of thinking, that’s kind of two different things. Andromeda no doubt could have been a lot better, but there’s this whole received knowledge thing at this point about how Andromeda is completely awful. It’s kind of absurd.
Clay
2047
I either saw a GDC talk about this a few years ago or read an article about it, shortly after DA2 came out. I can’t find the reference at the moment. Whether the final product was procedurally generated, I don’t know, but I do remember reading that the team hoped to provide unlimited variety to the dungeons using some type of procgen, only to have it not work out how they hoped and be repetitive.
I’m actually replaying Andromeda right now. It’s an okay game that got shit upon by the Internet hivemind and never recovered.
But, the development of the game left a lot to be wanting. They originally wanted a kind of No Man’s Sky procedural development that would allow for hundreds of worlds to visit.
https://gamerant.com/mass-effect-andromeda-no-mans-sky-planet/
They burned a huge amount of dev trying to make it work, and then abandoned it once they realized it was a mistake. And that contributed to some of the issues that plague the final product.
All right, I follow you. The game made some poor decisions and was released in an, uh, incomplete state let’s say. And any ambitions to procedural development along the way were probably not the best idea. Things could have gone a whole lot better. My YouTube page is full of people delivering their own take on a post mortem for the game and the whole “what went wrong” thing just because of my own search history, I need to figure out how to purge that crap.
Anyway now that I think about it, I don’t believe I even finished Inquisition. I can’t remember exactly where I left things off but I just kind of moved on to something else and didn’t come back. Not sure why it didn’t grab me, maybe I should give it a second chance.
