Thoughts on Dragon Age 2 (Part #3) - Closing Remarks [ENDING]
6Dragon Age 2 is a good RPG. It's by no means an unqualified success in any particular area, and none of the changes made to the gameplay - dramatic as they initially may seem - are substantial or interesting enough to amount to a full-blown "paradigm shift" a la the genre-redefining Mass Effect 2. And although I'm not necessarily disappointed by the changes made to the gameplay established in DA:O, the absence of friendly fire on anything below the Nightmare difficulty is indeed a significant issue. Playing DA2 can still be a ton of fun, though, and even after having played for many hours I still enjoyed rushing into yet another combat sequence despite often knowing more or less what to expect.
While I have a certain degree of sympathy for the legion of users who have complained about DA2's combat, quest and level design, I won't stop defending the game's approach to storytelling, which is easily the single most compelling and innovative aspect of Dragon Age 2. While the character relationships and dialogue all work in reasonably similar ways compared to earlier Bioware games, the absence of a clearly defined villain and "main objective" as well as the dramatically reduced size of the game world are aspects of DA2 which made the narrative experience that much more enjoyable for me than DA:O ever was.
Lacking a central antagonist and not knowing early on what Hawke's story is really "about" might seem like genuine problems, and if DA2 was a movie or a novel I would readily agree. The thing is, DA2 is a *game* and as such is much better suited for a loose narrative framework which encourages methodical exploration, genuine immersion in a game world and gradual discovery of how all the various pieces fit together. Indeed, an unfortunate tendency in today's gaming community - exacerbated by titles such as Heavy Rain which limit player interactivity to a bare, fork-in-road-based minimum - is to expect a "cinematic" experience, which shoehorns this naturally limitless medium into a restrictive Hollywood blockbuster formula with rudimentary plot structures and intrusive scripting. As far as player motivation goes, all those small but not insignificant moral decisions and character interactions (including their interesting consequences in later acts) kept things fresh and interesting despite the initial lack of a clear end goal, and made me a lot more invested in the game than a zillions Blights and silly dragon-demons ever could.
Perhaps the best praise I can give Dragon Age 2 is to add that after having spent 60 hours methodically playing through the game on Hard, as soon as the end credits started rolling I felt a strong urge to create a new character and see how things would develop if I choose another class, took another approach to the main plot and, above all, chose to handle interactions with my party members in completely different ways. This genuine interest in the choices and consequences of DA2 was something I never felt with DA:O and it goes to show that, for all its noteworthy (though not game-breaking) issues, Dragon Age 2 stands as one of the most interesting and consistently worthwhile RPG experiences to have come around in a very long time.
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