Dead Horses

Warning sign nine: Someone started a constructive criticism thread on the Bioware forums.  It's up to 72 pages already and it doesn't seem to be a flame war.  Listen up, Bioware: You took everything that made Dragon Age: Origins a good game and lobotomised it.  What's wrong with Dragon Age II is Dragon Age II.  If you want me to buy any of your games ever again (and I have almost everything you've ever produced up to now) you'll ditch Dragon Age II completely and pretend it never happened.  I'm not expecting a direct sequel to Origins - after all, I died at the end so that would be kind of a surprise - but I'm expecting something in the same spirit, not this dumbed-down tarted-up choiceless aimless plotless wasteland of human misery.

Sorry, I've been watching too much Zero Punctuation today.  But the point stands.  What's wrong with Dragon Age II is the entire game and you need to bury it and go back to Origins.  If you can't recapture the spirit of Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins, all games that you yes you produced without going to your customers and having them tell you your job then there's no hope for your company or indeed the RPG industry given the hilarious recent failure and collapse of Squenix.

Warning sign ten: They're giving away a free copy of Mass Effect 2 with every copy of Dragon Age II.  Mass Effect 2 (which I haven't played yet) is apparently a good game or at least well-received but I can get Mass Effect 1 and 2 on Steam for less than the price of Dragon Age II alone and that's exactly what I'd recommend anyone to do.  I'd do that myself except that I already have them both and even Australia's tough consumer protection laws don't let you return a game on the basis that the story is completely bloody stupid.

The bloke who wrote the critique of Dragon Age II on Rock, Paper, Shotgun also wrote a shorter but more focused "what I think" piece after the first few hours of gameplay, again confirming everything I experienced.  This is not a good game.  Don't buy it.  If you bought it, don't bother playing it.  Get your free copy of Mass Effect 2, or if you've already played that, all the old Infinity Engine games are available cheap on GOG.

If you still doubt me, check out the user reviews at Metacritic.  Given that in the obscenely skewed world of game review scores anything below 7.5 means that the program raped the reviewer's cat and burned down his house, an average of 4.3 and an outpouring of zeros and ones means that the fanbase is very, very, very ticked off.

This rant by Evis T is enormously nerdy but spot on:



As is his review:



And this, what he calls a catharsis (warning, it's long):

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:42 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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