#but like BioWare’s poor management has been an issue for at least a decade at this point lol I have hope for the game under new management

[avame]

personally I’m more interested in what this transfer means for BW as a whole - since anthem (and one could argue, since at least ME3), BW has shown consistent mismanagement in their dev cycles (and iirc a lot of upper management turnover?).

there’s an anthem post-mortem out there that discusses how BW’s main studio ignored BW Austin’s advice and experience regarding running a multiplayer game/creating an engaging endgame, and how it was EA that told BW to include mechanics like flying, one of the few things praised in the game. pair that with the news that DA4 went through, what, two restarts during development, tried to be a live-service game, and now may or may not utilize AI writing in place of human writers, the one thing BW has always been known for. I’ve heard that BW Montreal also didn’t receive the help they’d requested from Edmonton during ME:A’s dev cycle, but I’m not 100% certain of that. the studio’s probably on thin ice, and it’s kind of their own fault.

(whether EA is partially to blame is another topic. personally, I think BW is far more to blame than EA, since its problems all seem internal rather than imposed from the outside. a lot of criticism that should be leveled at BW gets passed over by fans as “EA sucks!” but like, there’s more to it than that, and BW has been coasting off that perception for too long.)

what I mean is: BW is in more danger than SWTOR is, and moving SWTOR to another studio under the EA umbrella might very well be a precautionary measure by EA to keep the game running in case BW (Edmonton especially) gets shut down, which will likely be determined by DA4, a game that looks more and more troubled as time passes.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: Dragon Age II

Dragon Age is a series very near and dear to my heart; ever since playing Origins back when I was in college, I have been inspired by the stories, characters, and lore. Hell, Origins alone is a huge inspiration to my writing, and why wouldn’t it be? It has great locations, deep lore, a core main party without a single weak link with each and every party member you have being unique and entertaining in their own right, and an epic story with all sorts of twists and turns. And it only has two really shitty segments in the whole game! It’s truly a great first entry in a series.

But despite my love for it, I put off playing the sequel for most of the decade, only playing it for the first time this year. And why is that? Because… the critics said it was bad… yes, unfortunately in my younger years I took what critics said without any grains of salt. Dragon Age II was not very popular back around the time it came out, mostly because of its radical departure from the style of the first game, with more hack-and-slash-esque combat, a much more simple and self-contained story, and a cast of characters far more divisive than the first time around. It’s only over time that people have started to give it the respect it deserves, but much like fellow fantasy series The Legend of Zelda it comes at the cost of the current game being bashed.

So how is this red headed stepchild of a sequel, anyway? Did the critics have a point, or is this really an underrated gem? Well, I’m happy to report that this is indeed a fun and fantastic game, and I heavily regret being kept apart from the lovely Merril for so long due to poor critical reception, but there are a lot of problems too. For everything it does really well, it kind of shits the bed in other areas, and a lot of that can be contributed to a rushed development cycle that got this game churned out just over a year after the first one, leading to things like all items lacking the detailed descriptions they would get in the first game, which doesn’t sound like much, but then you get an item called something like “Uncle Horky’s Spanking Rod” as a magic staff and there’s no explanation as to why it’s called that and you have to imagine up some ludicrous backstory for it.

The lack of flavor text is a minor gripe, though, compared to the obnoxiously repetitive environments of dungeons. Reusing and flipping dungeons around and reusing assets would be one thing, but here they literally just take a map, flip it a bit with no changes to the details of the level, and just block off doors that lead to areas they don’t want you going. The worst part is on your mini map you can see the blocked pathways you likely saw ten minutes ago in another dungeon, which just makes a lot of the missions feel bland and samey. It also doesn’t help that enemy types are rather paltry, so you’ll be fighting a lot of the same mooks in the same maps over and over as you grind for items, gold, and EXP.

And then there are some of the characters. The worst of the bunch are sadly two characters who are returning from the first game and its expansion Awakening – Anders and Isabela. Isabela is arguably worse, because she honestly seems rather fun and nice at first, if overly and aggressively flirty, but as the story goes on, it’s revealed that she is actually the cause behind some of the biggest issues in the first few acts, which she neglects to tell you until it is far too late and unless you decided to maximize your friendship with her, she will run off and never return to your party. I can’t deny that this completely soured me to her, and at the end of the quanari invasion of Kirkwall I was only upset I couldn’t find her in act three and kick her ass for what she did.

Then there is Anders. Poor, poor Anders. In Awakening, he was one of the most funny and charming characters, a nice little substitute for Alistair that I actually ended up liking for than the Weenie King of Ferelden. Here though? Anders can not go one fucking conversation without bringing up how oppressed mages are and how much the templars suck and blah blah blah. The worst part is I do agree with him, but he’s just so whiny and obnoxious about it I left him behind all the time, dooming my party to having no healer even as I fought high dragons, blood mages, and Corypheus. It was worth it to not hear Anders bitching about templars and insulting Merril and Fenris. Oh, and Anders nukes the chantry and sets off a civil war. Isabela may be a nasty bitch, but Anders definitely comes out looking like a huge cunt by the game’s end.

The entire endgame is kind of an utter mess too, seeing as no matter whose side you join you end up fighting the same two bosses, with one of them just not making any sense whatsoever. And then the game just sort of ends on a very unsatisfying cliffhanger. And as much as I just complained, all of this stings because really, the rest of the game is quite good, and the story is fun if scaled back from the epic tale of Origins.

Let’s get the obvious best part out of the way: Varric. Varric is literally the best part of the entire Dragon Age franchise. He’s a snarky, wisecracking surface dwarf with no beard who writes best-selling novels, constantly has his shirt open to show off his magnificent chest hair, and has a crossbow named Bianca that he is uncomfortably attached to. He is one of the greatest characters ever created, and there was not one single moment I left him out of my party, because he is a blast to have around, and what’s more, if there’s ever a situation where the dialogue wheel pops up and you can let him talk… you’ve won. This guy can talk his way out of any situation. There’s nothing bad you can say about Varric, and he is in fact the only companion in the game I can wholeheartedly stand behind as a paragon of great writing.

I love the other characters, don’t get me wrong, but they have their issues. Aveline and Fenris in particular, with Aveline being a bit too by-the-books at times to the point where she exacerbates the quanari conflict by demanding that elves who killed a guard who raped one of their own be turned over to her after they converted to the Qun. This is all despite her knowing full well that the poor elf girl would have otherwise gotten no justice seeing as how city elves in this setting are second class citizens at best. Still, she has a rather adorkable romance questline where you hook her up with one of the guards, and she’s not a bad person, just a touch misguided at times.

That last sentence can also apply to Fenris, but on a grander scale. He’s a cool, edgy, brooding elf who absolutely fucking hates magic with every fiber of his being. He is the Anti-Anders, though he’s far less annoying about it, and it’s hard to really blame him for being bitter seeing as he was a sex slave for an evil wizard for most of his life and then just had misfortune after misfortune piled on him. I really hated how mean he was to Merril, but otherwise I warmed to him and befriended him.

And that brings us to a very special girl, Merril. Merril is an adorable, klutzy, scatterbrained blood mage elf who is hated by her people due to the lengths she is going to repair an ancient artifact to bring a piece of her people’s heritage back. While she can be a bit arrogant and stubborn about the whole thing, it’s mostly due to how no one around her seems to believe in and support her; naturally, I believed in and supported her, and while things still managed to go south, she seemed at least to learn a little bit. Overall I found her to be an absolute sweetheart, and she never left my party, much like Varric; frankly, I was going in expecting not to like her and was going to romance Fenris instead, but as it turns out Merril won my heart immediately and my Hawke went lesbian this playthrough.

On that note, as much as I like how Merril, Fenris, Isabela, and Anders can be wooed by either gender in principle, I do kind of feel making everyone bisexual with no rhyme or reason kind of cheapens things. It’s weird for me, a bisexual myself, to be saying that, but it just feels off to be able to get together with everyone, with everyone being Schrodinger’s Bisexual until a romance is initiated. It’s nowhere near as bad as Skyrim, but I just feel it kinda cheapens the romance options. I prefer Origins and Inquisition in that regard, where you don’t have all the options but you do have some unique choices. But, hey, at the end of the day I’m hardly complaining that my Lady Hawke got to polish Merril’s Eluvian, if you know what I mean.

Aside from the characters, I think the game’s real strength lies in its story, which is fitting since the entire game is framed as a story being told by no less a storyteller than our pal Varric. It has a three act structure, with each act detailing a different year in Hawke’s rise to become the Champion of the city of Kirkwall, which is a crime-ridden wretched hive of scum and villainy. The first act mainly has Hawke making a name for themselves, living in the slums with their uncle, doing dirty work to try and get back a little prestige, and recruiting all of their allies, with the act culminating with a trip to the Deep Roads, every DA fan’s favorite location. It’s a nice setup for a lot of twists and turns later in the story, and choices you make in certain dialogue options or quests actually can change what sort of quests you get later. Then again, this is Bioware, so this sort of “action have consequences” gameplay is expected.

Act two deals with just how Hawke becomes the Champion. Rich from the expedition into the Deep Roads, Hawke gets to do all sorts of fun things, such as track down a serial killer who ends up murdering their mom, being stabbed in the back by one of their friends, accidentally inciting a race war that nearly burns down the city, and having to duel the warrior leader of the qunari to the death in combat. Yeah, act two really piles it on to Hawke, but it does tie into the game’s themes of how no matter the level of success, great actions will also come with great consequences, even actions meant to better one’s lot in life, which also resonate in the personal quests of characters like Merril and Fenris, who despite ultimately achieving their goals in the third act feel hollow, lost, and even broken by the end, and that’s not even getting into what Anders does. However the conflict with the qunari is resolved, Hawke is declared the Champion, and things seem ok.

But then comes act three, and boy do things go wrong. Knight-Commander Meredith has gone cuckoo for Coco Puffs and conflict between templars and mages seems inevitable; this act is basically wrapping up hanging plot threads and companion quests until Anders finally nukes the chantry and all hell breaks loose, leading to the final battle. The ending here isn’t particularly happy, with Hawke ultimately ending up a fugitive in the epilogue, and things can get even worse if you make poor choices in Inquisition, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Here’s the thing: everything I just said? It could be entirely different from my playthrough depending on the choices you make. Sure, some things are inevitable, like Anders committing terrorist acts, Hawke’s mother dying, and Meredith going absolutely bonkers and making you fight statues, but depending on how you play, maybe you’ll like/romance Isabela, maybe you’ll resolve things with the Arishok differently, maybe you’ll side with the templars… the story ends the same but there are so many ways to make your story different. Throw in some great lore, some fun DLC that reveals some shocking truths about the lore, and the fun albeit simplified combat, and you’ve got a game here that has a lot of replay value if only to see where all the plot threads can lead.

I definitely think this is a good game, even a great one. It has its share of problems, but so did Origins, and frankly I’d sooner put up with the backstabbing pirate hooker and the pissy mage terrorist again then go through the fucking Fade and Deep Roads one more time. If you liked the first one, definitely give this a shot; you may end up liking or disliking some of the stuff I dislike and like. That’s the fun of these Bioware games, different aspects are going to appeal to different people. The question is, do I find it better than Origins?

In some respects, yes; I much prefer the simpler combat here, and I like the more down-to-earth story in this one, but at the same time Origins just had stronger characters overall and I’m a sucker for “save the world” fantasy tales. While Origins infamously had some real mind-numbing slogs in the form of the Fade sequence and the Deep Roads, while those environments were tedious at least they weren’t boring. But on the other hand… Origins didn’t have Varric.

 It’s really a tossup, frankly, and I love both games a lot. I think each of them has their place and each of them brings something interesting to the table for the series. It’s one you really need to play for yourself to get a good grasp on; don’t be like me and put it off for nearly ten years, give it a go right after your done with the first game and see how you feel. Your experience is going to be a lot different than mine, that’s for sure.