Tell me about Dragon Age

[Votan]

Certainly they made few changes for the better.

Graphically also the game just plain looks terrible. Even the design of the monsters they have is really poor. Last week I just happened to chance upon some Guild Wars 2 youtube clips and compared to Dragon Age 2 it looks a generation (as in a gaming platform generation of 5-6 years) ahead of it graphically, and the design of the creatures looks fantastic, whereas in Dragon Age most look pretty drab.

Yes. Dragon Age: Origins seemed to shine in the quality of the story (which was very, very high). DA2 lost a fair bit in story (so far, at least) and seems to be making poor use of the time jumps (which could have been very effective as a narrative technique and for explaining characters growing stronger).

It's also a bit of an odd story if you play as a mage as it rather assumes that many people (*cough*templars*cough*) are rather dim. Very different than the range of templars in DA:O (think of Cullen versus Alistair) and they seemed generally less competent. I also lost the sense of these groups as being intimidating.

Shouldn't have been a lack of monster variety to begin with, it just shows a lack of imagination. Even had a lot of the monsters been palette swopped versions of existing monsters then I might not have minded, but just far too samey.

I think Origins had maybe 25 non-humanoid enemies, some with variants in class (for humanoid enemies - which were themselves all basically the same).

By contrast a typical Final Fantasy game has about 75 different creature models with 3-4 variants of almost each monster.

Dragon Age 2 has 19 non-humanoid character models (and about 5-6 of those you only get to meet once!).

I certainly agree that there was no excuse for FEWER monsters. Again, the DA:O plot was Grey Warden focused so there was an argument for focusing on fighting Darkspawn. DA2 is not but it fails to import a diverse set of opponents, nor is there a clear story reason for there being so few options for enemies. The creatures in a particular mine, for example, seemed like a lack of imagination.